“Wrangling Lighting and Rendering Data at Disney Feature Animation” by McLaughlin, Lohmar, Petti, Wakeland and Springfield

The amount of data that can comprise a shot in an animated CG feature film is tremendous. All of this data must be assembled into a scene by our Shot Finaling department, where lighting and final rendering takes place. The data arrives in many formats and at different stages of completion, necessitating a system that can assemble new scenes and update existing scenes easily. In addition, the intricate manner in which various parts of the scene relate to each other varies with the action being performed and must be tracked. We present a user-friendly system for wrangling scene data and relationships, which serves as the foundation for our internal lighting package, Lumiere, currently in use in production on Chicken Little.