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Personal thoughts/notes from working on Zootopia 2
- brcmthrowaway 9mo ago[flagged]
- 542354234235 9mo agoDid you see the movie and not like it or are you just trying for some edgy hot take?
- brcmthrowaway 9mo agoNot watching a movie under 8 on imdb
- mrkpdl 9mo agoYou are missing out on a lot of good movies
- 542354234235 9mo agoHalf of the last 4 Best Picture Oscar winners are below 8 on IMDB. So edgy hot take, got it.
- MisterTea 9mo agoI like how you are trying to appear sophisticated by hanging your film taste off someone else's opinions. What other great things have people told you to like?
- i80and 9mo agoIMDB stars are probably one of the worst SNR filters you could use for film, to be honest.
- DrawTR 9mo agoI liked the film.
- effnorwood 9mo agoThis is amazing. Great work and movie thanks!
- xfour 9mo agoThis is so cool, I’m glad the company allowed the author to release this to the public. People like myself with knowledge of some of the art and technology involved but that stand outside the industry can get a little bit of a sense how the SOTA of animation evolves. Secondly the bit about the evolution catching the unnamed studio, likely Pixar in production capability as of the first Zootopia certainly shows up on screen.
- WorldMaker 9mo agoYeah, I often cite Big Hero 6 (from 2014) as the place where as an animation fan I felt Hyperion (Disney's renderer) very visibly in the end product out-paced Renderman (Pixar's more mature renderer). Big Hero 6's wide shots get truly wide and the scale of its San Fransokyo is almost palpable in many sequences, showing off especially Hyperion's focus on being able to do dynamic crowd work and large crowd scenes and plenty of architecture surrounding that. (Zootopia in 2016 further cemented that Hyperion was great at crowd work.) It was one of my complaints with Pixar's Soul in 2020 that its New Orleans felt almost claustrophobic and isolated, no truly wide establishing shots, no real crowds to speak of, mostly just shots of one or two characters in close up on city streets that in the real world New Orleans would be bustling and busy. Real New Orleans has a different kind of claustrophia from big crowds and never feels isolating or as lonely. Some of that may have been the intended vibe for that particular movie, but some of that seems technical at this point from the different focuses Hyperion and Renderman have been given and how much I think Hyperion shows technical improvement and mastery of somethings that Renderman cannot seem to do. It somewhat suggests that Disney is correct in having the two studios compete in renderers rather than share one (even as they unify other parts of the process, such as this article mentions moving to Pixar's Presto tool as one of the things that happened in Zootopia 2's production).
- ykl 9mo agoHi! Original post author here. When I first started at Disney Animation, at one point I asked Ed Catmull what the rationale was for staffing two separate rendering teams, and he had an interesting answer. His answer was that it turns out that even when Disney Animation was using RenderMan, the high end needs of the studio still required enough rendering developers/TDs that in terms of cost it was essentially no different than staffing a team to build an in-house renderer, and from that perspective he liked the idea of having two separate teams with different focuses/perspectives so that for hard problems the wider company got two attempts at coming up with good solutions instead of one. To this day the Hyperion and RenderMan teams work pretty closely together and share a lot of learnings/tech/R&D. The focuses are pretty different between the two renderers, and that’s actually been pretty beneficial to both. The story with Presto is both a bit different and kind of similar. The two studios are now unified in using Presto, but Disney Animation now has an in-house Presto development team that co-develops Presto with Pixar. The two dev teams focus on the needs of their respective studios but move Presto forward together.
- dswalter 9mo agoWhat I like about this piece is how it shows the technical prowess underpinning the visual outputs in a film like what Disney puts out. I only wish it went further! There are a ton of lessons those of us outside films/games could learn from working in that kind of deadline-consttrained innovative landscape. Tell about how you fought against the rendering deadlines and sped up the snowscape frames by 30% to get it in under the wire!
- bzzzt 9mo agoThere have been quite a few publications about Disney's renderer called 'Hyperion', for instance https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3182159 https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3182159
- ykl 9mo agoHi! Author of the original post here. Please see: https://disneyanimation.com/publications/ https://disneyanimation.com/publications/ Or, for a continuously updated list of publications specifically about Disney’s Hyperion Renderer: https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2019/07/hyperion-papers.html https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2019/07/hyperion-papers.html
- Scaevolus 9mo agoMost companies doing CGI work, both in games and movies, are quite open about their technical details. The whole industry relies on pooled research and development. While the actual code is typically confidential, publishing information serves multiple purposes for the work's publicity, the advancement of the field, the happiness of employees, and company prestige for recruiting people.
- lvspiff 9mo agoHair, water, and wind - its crazy how those elements are the things that continue to have levels of improvement for these animated films yet for my eyes i keep thinking "well thats looks pretty solid to me" only to be outdone by the next movie and go "oh yeah that looks better somehow".
- maherbeg 9mo agoI totally agree. I love watching a small set of animated films over the holidays in time order to really see the technical progress. It's especially fun to go from something nostalgic I loved as a kid, to something I can really see the technical underpinnings of today.
- bicepjai 9mo agoLearning about these improvements gives incredible respect and appreciation for our eyes evolved over millennia.
- zeroonetwothree 9mo agoIt doesn’t seem to matter much for my enjoyment of the films though. Makes you wonder why we are investing in it.
- gpderetta 9mo agoFor the art I suppose.
- al_borland 9mo ago20 years ago I was saying this about video games. However, when I go back and look at video games from 20 years ago, I now see why they kept pushing things forward. Graphics were serviceable, but they're so much better now. That said, the game (or movie) still needs to be the most important thing. When a studio tries to lean on graphics as the selling point, it always ends up poorly.
- Loughla 9mo ago>That said, the game (or movie) still needs to be the most important thing. When a studio tries to lean on graphics as the selling point, it always ends up poorly. Counterpoint: Avatar. I have never heard someone say they loved that movie because of the amazing story. They like it because it's very, very, very pretty to look at.
- marzchipane 9mo agoVery interesting and so many throwaway lines that could easily be entire blog posts by themselves! I wonder how hamstrung Disney is by their chosen animation style (wide-eyed cutesy characters, rounded edges, bright colours). Given the technical prowess on display here, what could they create if they gave their artists free rein to experiment like in Love, Death, and Robots? Or is it more that these constraints provide structure to work inside?
- Fazebooking 9mo agoPeople are already working for years on Zootopia 2 and every one of their technolical advances were driven by that movie. These inventions are represented at Siggraph and are often also research paper and land in the whole ecosystem (in software like hudini). LDR live from their ideas and stories and experiments with styles. I don't think its relevant for technology it would just be a tech demo.
- gpderetta 9mo agoconstraints breed creativity.
- ambicapter 9mo agoAlways love it when a company can have strong technical chops even when their main product/industry isn't necessarily the tech itself.
- Fazebooking 9mo agoI always say "most companies today are IT companies, they just don't know it". I would argue that Disney is definitily a big IT company and relies a lot on that tech. Perfect storytelling might need flaweless execution to not distract. cirque du soleil for example are also experts in every single aspect relevant to their show/business. Check out the YT video from their sound manager " Inside the Sound of Cirque du Soleil: Drawn to Life" this is so crazy but it explains so much especially how they control the audiance clapping.
- al_borland 9mo agoFor me, being an "IT Company" or "Tech Company" means the tech is what drives the business decisions. Where I work, it's a b2b service company. We've had CIOs get up and say we're a tech company, but when push comes to shove, the IT org always loses to "the business". The business solutions are what are being sold, they really don't care what the tech is under the hood... even if the tech enables every product to exist at this point.
- mjevans 9mo agoThis. In the same way that Pre 2000s Boeing was an Engineering company, driven by making a good product 'the right way'. Rather than a business company that happens to rely on engineering.
- treesknees 9mo agoWhen I worked at an insurance company I heard this all the time, that we were “an IT company selling insurance”. They had 3k IT staff, more staff than any other department. We were also still operating T1s, lotus notes, windows xp in 2014. So I always took it with a grain of salt.
- 9mo ago
- wholinator2 9mo agoThe showcase of frames at the end really broke something through for me. It's easy to simply sit in a theater or on your couch and watch the movie as a movie. But while the theater screen is large, you don't get to pause it. So nearly all of the incredible detail gets blurred in a way that makes it easy to be immersed in the movement and story, but also forget the art of visuals. Seeing those specific frames laid out, each one of those would be an incredible art piece on their own! They would all be extremely difficult to create for an individual and take so so much time. I always wondered what those 1000+ people in the credits were actually doing, now i know! I never realized the incredibly depth and thought and time and art that goes into every frame of an animated movie.
- NikolaNovak 9mo agoFor me it's also the style of animation. For some reason, if I don't think about it, instinctually I would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming example) and Zootopia as "simple" graphics. My mind recalls big swathes of primary colours in relatively flat yet cheerful lighting, rounded/smoothed shapes, relatively little complex texturing or surface detail. It's when I pause overwatch that I start realizing 1. how much detail there is, and 2. How quickly and flawlessly it's rendered on relatively slow computers. And then I start truly appreciating the relentless optimizing work to make it "seem simple and fast" :). Same thing with Zootopia - I've enjoyed the movies (doesn't hurt that I have two young kids), but they would not come to mind if I were asked to name breakthrough or particularly well animated movies. Yet the detail and work is clearly there once you pause and examine :)
- munificent 9mo ago> I would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming example) and Zootopia as "simple" graphics. I think an art director would describe them as "readable". When there's a lot of detail and quick motion, it's important that the audience can very quickly recognize what they're looking at and what's happen. Otherwise, it just turns into a big jumble of chaos that the viewer can't follow, like in Michael Bay's Transformer movies. A big part of the art of movie making is telegraphic a sense of rich realism and complexity while still having everything clearly visually parsable. Doing that when cuts and action are fast is quite difficult. Doing it well affects every level of the production: the colors assigned to characters so they are separated from the background, wardrobe choices to also keep characters distinct, lighting, set design, texture, animation, focus, the way the camera moves. It all works together to produce one coherent readable scene.
- ungreased0675 9mo agoI wonder if there’s any collaboration between the technical side and writing side? Specifically, I see incredible effort and time getting tiny details right on the technical side, but the storyline and dialog seems to not have had the same level of effort applied to it.
- nadis 9mo agoThis article is full of so many interesting details. E.g. I found this passage on the technological progress in rendering snow from Frozen (2013) to Zootopia 2 fascinating: "To give an example of the amazing amount of detail in Zootopia 2: at one point during production, our rendering team noticed some shots that had incredibly detailed snow with tons of tiny glints, so out of curiosity we opened up the shots to see how the artists had shaded the snow, and we found that they had constructed the snow out of zillions upon zillions of individual ice crystals. We were completely blown away; constructing snow this way was an idea that Disney Research had explored shortly after the first Frozen movie was made in 2013, but at the time it was purely a theoretical research idea, and a decade later our artists were just going ahead and actually doing it. The result in the final film looks absolutely amazing, and on top of that, instead of needing a specialized technology solution to make this approach feasible, in the past decade both our renderer and computers in general have gotten so much faster and our artists have improved their workflows so much that a brute-force solution was good enough to achieve this effect without much trouble at all."
- mroche 9mo agoA similar approach was taken by Pixar when making the beach environment for the Piper short that was previewed with Finding Dory. It was absolutely mind-blowing. https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-1-piper-daring-to-be-different/ https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-1-... Related but unlinked Part 2 on other aspects of Finding Dory: https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-2-finding-dory-making-waves/ https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-2-...
- a_e_k 9mo agoI was on the RenderMan team at the top and remember thinking it really neat that our system could stand up to that. I remember find it mind blowing when I learned that in Brave, the artists weren't just using a texture/displacement mapped surface for the clothing and armor. They were using tori primitives for the chain mail, and curve primitives for the clothing. (I.e., the clothing actually woven out of curve primitives for the threads.)
- egypturnash 9mo agoSometimes I miss working in the animation industry. This was already one of those mornings.
- s5300 9mo ago[dead]
- buildbot 9mo agoWow these frames of forests are absolutely stunning - It’s like Princesses Monoke vibes met Disney rendering technology. I wish I knew about all the techniques mentioned in this article, it’s super cool how basically everything is backed up by really low level physical simulations.