Wrapped Clothing on Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon

This talk outlines novel techniques used to create the complex wrapped clothing on Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Raya and the Last Dragon.  Inspired by traditional Southeast Asian designs, these wrapped garments are formed by deftly folding long panels of cloth, with little to no reliance on seams to hold the structure. This departure from a standard pattern-based pipeline made the construction and performance of these specialized garments in CG a very challenging task. Using the sampot, dhoti, and bust-wrap garments as production examples, we describe their real-world counterpart designs and construction, discuss what makes them challenging to create in CG, and then outline how we extrapolated their designs and realized them for the stylistic needs and performances of the characters on the film.