SIGGRAPH 2024

For Disney’s Wish, in addition to the challenges of a stylized look, Asha's hairstyle comprises a full head of tightly braided locks which was far more complex than previous braid grooms. To art-direct Asha's stylized braids' performance, advancements were made in tools and workflows for grooming, simulation, and stylization techniques.

The look of characters in Wish is inspired by the storybook style of earlier Disney classics. Details in appearance, shading, and streamlined geometric shapes of models and grooms provide the foundation for the stylization and art-directed performance. A final compositing treatment produces the painterly watercolor look with hand-drawn influenced linework.

The wishes of Rosas are a central story device in Disney’s Wish. The art direction and narrative required that wishes react to external story events, interact with characters, and be artistically choreographed en masse. The breadth of these requirements drove the development of our unified wish asset and shot pipeline.

In this talk, we introduce a new asset structure that helps to (1) streamline and decouple asset authorship and shot consumption, (2) enable new authoring workflows that better take advantage of USD’s multi-stage model, and (3) open the door for shot-focused, asset-based optimizations.

Based on real production examples, this Universal Scene Description (USD) course will expand upon previously presented best practices for pipeline infrastructure and integration. Presenters will walk through how they are more powerfully leveraging USD, building flexible, context-driven workflows, while balancing optimizations for consumer and author performance.

Disney’s Wish utilized advancements in Volumetric Neural Style Transfer in order to uniquely stylize 3D volume simulations with hand-drawn 2D textures and shapes. This technology helped inform and accelerate the visual development process, increase the reuse and efficiency of assets, and achieve styles with previously unachievable details.

Join the discussion with the developers and users of Universal Scene Description (USD), Hydra and OpenSubdiv, along with many other vendors and practitioners who will showcase the work done in the past year and the plans ahead.

Disney Animation’s Wish called for a watercolor style, requiring novel dynamic screen space textures to achieve a unique illustrative look. Our textures are able to track animation and camera movement while maintaining screen space qualities, avoiding issues encountered with traditional screen space textures.

We present a stylization pipeline that provided all upstream departments automatically stylized renders representative of the final look of the film, the ability to iterate closely with lighting to when stylization changes were needed, and a centralized area for lighting to manage sweeping stylization changes across the show.