“Choreography of Hair and Cloth in Disney’s “Moana 2″” by Kaur, Leo, Pujari and Bays
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- Choreography of Hair and Cloth in Disney’s "Moana 2"
Session/Category Title:
- Cloth and a Haircut: More Than 2 Bits
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Moderator(s):
Abstract:
In Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Moana 2”, the main characters undergo significant evolution and emotional growth from the original film. Given the film’s predominantly oceanic setting, characters interact dynamically with elements such as wind, water, and storm. The character team built upon artistic and technical approaches beyond the original film to evolve the performance of hair and cloth as crucial elements in conveying emotion and movement for storytelling. With a larger team than in prior productions, strategic planning was essential to maintain consistency and artistic clarity for the heavily art-directed performances. To this end, the technical animation team employed a multi-tiered approach focusing on Performance Categorization, Continuity through Visual Planning, and Iterative Refinement. Extensive Draw-overs at shot and sequence level, played a pivotal role in designing performances for cloth and hair that reacted naturally and consistently across different scenes. This strategy allowed us to front load the work through careful planning and collaboration, enabling the Technical Animation team to execute on the emphasized art direction of shots efficiently. We illustrate the overall approach with specifics for hair with Moana and Maui, and with Matangi for cloth.
References:
[1] Marc Thyng, Christopher Evart, Toby Jones, and Aleka McAdams. 2017. The Art and Technology of Hair Simulation in Disney’s Moana. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Talks (Los Angeles, California) (SIGGRAPH ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 25, 2 pages.
