The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Narrator: See how these trees sway like one single blob
in Disney's "Chicken Little"?
Compare that to this tree in "Encanto,"
where each individual leaf
moves realistically on its own.
In fact, zoom out on "Chicken Little,"
and you'll see just how little detail is in the background
compared to Disney's newer features.
"Chicken Little" was Disney's first foray
into full 3D animation.
So the worlds the studio could create were a lot simpler.
But animated worlds have evolved a lot since 2005.
And one film in particular kicked off
a whole new era of realistic environments:
"Tangled."
Steve: "Tangled" really represented to me
the film where we achieved
the promise of taking the artistry
that existed at Disney Animation Studios
and applied that to the medium of CG.
Narrator: To create the world of "Tangled,"
or any 3D-animated world,
Disney has a dedicated environments team,
whose job is to model and develop the movie's backdrop
based on the concept designs.
The studio then uses software programs
to automatically simulate the behavior of world elements,
like plants, water,
and lighting that illuminates it all.
To fill up the whimsical forests of "Tangled,"
Disney developed special tree-modeling tools
to help the environments team
lay down the geometry for lots of trees,
all with a specific fairy-tale look
that echoed the flowing shapes
of hand-drawn animation and painting.
These new tree tools included a program called Skeletor,
which let artists hand-model 3D geometry
on certain hero trees,
like this one that Rapunzel swings from.
They also built a new software called Dendro,
which let them art-direct the growth of the whimsical trees
and program the direction and amplitude of wind
in the trees' branches and leaves.
Dendro also helped calculate how branches should grow
according to environmental factors
like gravity, light, and natural obstacles.
The storybook trees for "Frozen"
were even more stylized than "Tangled,"
inspired by the unusual tree design in "Sleeping Beauty."
To create these highly specific shapes
and branching structures,
Disney developed a full vegetation generator
to replace Dendro, called Bonsai.
With Bonsai, the studio could build a wide library
of trees, bushes, plants, and foliage
that could be shared and reused
across other Disney productions, like "Big Hero 6."
Bonsai came in handy for animated vegetation like this
in the film's setting of San Fransokyo.
The main challenge was its fully urban landscape,
which stood apart from the organic environments
seen in earlier films,
involving many more layers of objects, movement,
and, above all, lights.
Disney needed a way to render complex lighting environments.
Luckily, Disney engineers were hard at work
on a powerful new renderer called Hyperion,
which could produce densely packed scenes
with light bouncing around in every direction,
handling several million rays at a time.
This allowed the team to build a vibrant city,
lit in some shots
by hundreds of thousands of sources,
from streetlamps to car headlights.
That was a big leap in terms of complexity,
in terms of the number of individual assets
that we can actually render in one scene.
Narrator: It also helped the filmmakers on "Moana"
capture the fanciful sense of scale they wanted.
The name of Moana's fictional home
means, literally, "big island."
And thanks to Hyperion,
the team could produce sunlit shots of the beach
where water simulations with full surface reflections
extended a quarter mile into the distance
and village shots with about 10 times
the geometric complexity of San Fransokyo.
The renderer also powered over 100 shots
of the monster Te Kā,
illuminated by bright streams of lava
permeating through massive smoke plumes.
To shape the behavior of the molten lava,
Disney updated its physically based simulator Matterhorn,
originally developed for the snow in "Frozen."
Disney now expanded the software
to handle the more viscous substance of lava,
along with other natural island materials
like sand, mud, and foam.
A scouting trip to Tahiti helped Larry,
the head of environments for "Moana,"
determine how each of the film's
over 60 species of vegetation
should move with the wind.
Every minute, everything was moving.
So we knew we had to do that in our movie.
Narrator: Like the fact that coconut trees' leaflets
and bows should sway with the breeze
while the trunks themselves remain still.
For more dramatic vegetation movement
in the Te Fiti healing sequence,
the effects team created spreading texture maps
of plant growth.
You could almost claim that "Moana" is probably
the real progenesis of when we started to do
really complex animated vegetation at the studio.
Narrator: Of course, the star of this world was water,
present in nearly every shot
and in much more complex forms
than Disney had ever produced,
including waves of all sizes
breaking in specific patterns on the sand and reef.
So Disney developed a new engine called Splash,
which could simulate waves running,
crashing, and breaking
and create secondary effects like boat wakes.
But while the water in "Moana" looks warm,
crystal-clear, and inviting,
the Dark Sea in "Frozen II"
had to be rough, dark, and stormy
to convey the threats facing Elsa
as she embarks on her quest.
And I feel like we just continually
stand on our own shoulders
with the films that come before us.
So, creating the waves in "Frozen II,"
that would've been a whole different adventure for us
if "Moana" hadn't come before that.
Narrator: So the team shot reference footage
in parts of the Southern California coast
where the waves break especially hard.
They then used a set of equations
to model the motion of the Dark Sea waves,
experimenting with different values
for variables like amplitude and ocean-floor depth
until they got waves
that were three to four times Elsa's size.
The artists then added more foam
and spindrift mist to capture the rough,
churned-up nature of the Dark Sea.
But the Dark Sea only marks one stage in Elsa's quest.
Most of the film takes place
in another entirely new setting,
the Enchanted Forest, far from Arendelle.
Just as the waves had to tower over Elsa,
making her look small,
many of the shots in the forest are framed extra-wide
to emphasize the characters' isolation,
which also puts more of the world on display.
And since the characters spend so much time
in this setting, Disney had to take
its forest-population capabilities up a notch.
So it developed a new vegetation-placement tool, Droplet.
Designed as an interactive brush,
Droplet let artists paint down, scale,
and reposition vegetation in an art-directed way,
giving them control over the flow
and style of the forest as a whole.
The artists had to paint not only the canopy,
but also the ground cover
in the saturated colors of autumn
in contrast to the snow-blanketed grounds
of the first movie.
Luckily, they could use Bonsai from "Frozen I"
to manipulate the color of the leaves on the forest floor
and to make the forest look striking
not just in overhead shots, but from every angle.
This forest is beautiful.
Narrator: Since the snow has melted in Arendelle,
the team had to render its buildings
in much higher detail,
increasing the texture resolution.
This visual richness was equally necessary
for the forest dam,
where surface textures helped tell the backstory.
The filmmakers decided that King Runeard's workers
would have to cut the stone
from the surrounding fjord walls
and assemble each block by hand.
To reinforce this idea,
artists sculpted in high-level detail
little imperfections on all the surfaces
and used texturing software
to create subtle material variation,
like these uniquely rotated cut marks on each block.
And to show that 34 years had passed since its construction,
artists used Droplet to paint hundreds of thousands
of iterations of moss, grass, and mulch.
Disney continued to improve that vegetation pipeline
for "Raya and the Last Dragon."
But the major focus was this:
the atmospherics of the Southeast Asian settings.
These regions tend to be dense with water and moisture,
so the environments called for
a lot of volume-based elements,
like morning mist and ground fog.
Traditionally, that work would fall
on the effects department, but in "Raya,"
instead of having the effects department
create atmospheric elements on a per-shot basis,
Disney created these elements in preproduction
and put them into an extensive library.
Later, as lighting artists were lighting a shot,
they could pull from that library
and compose the atmospherics into it
without having to request new assets
from the effects department every time.
This gave the lighters more flexibility
over complex atmospheric setups
and more freedom to express
the emotional story in each scene.
Dust and smoke signified moments of conflict and misgivings,
while trusting moments between characters
were heavier on water elements like mist and steam.
Just as "Raya"'s Southeast Asian setting
defined its world elements,
"Encanto"'s Colombian setting called for a lush jungle
surrounding the Madrigals' village.
And this environment had to be in motion,
like we'd see more of later on with "Strange World,"
which was in production at the same time as "Encanto."
Specifically, Isabela's song is brought to life
by the whole animated environment,
with these flowering plants
growing in sync with the music.
But that dynamic environment work was done mostly by hand.
Ben: Each artist had to go into each and every shot
of that sequence, which was a beautiful sequence,
and bring in custom rigs that allowed them
to do the growth for those plants.
Narrator: Disney had to figure out a way
to do that work in advance for "Strange World,"
which, more than any other Disney animated environment,
featured a lot of moving parts, literally.
Oh, wow.
It's beautiful!
Narrator: Elements like these plants
acted as background characters
and part of the environment at the same time.
To set the whole landscape in motion,
the studio created an entirely new role,
animated-environments supervisor.
Ben: That role has me interacting
with almost every department in the studio,
certainly with the production environments team,
to ensure that the assets that they're building
will be animatable,
and then that would move towards
effects and character animation
to provide animation for those plants,
kind of ferrying the moving plants
through the whole pipeline one shot at a time.
Narrator: Disney also adjusted its pipeline
so that Ben's team could fine-tune
the environments' movement earlier on in the process.
Ben: New to this show was the opportunity to say,
"That plant right there is moving a little too much,"
or, "It's just a little too crazy,"
to make sure that we were handing off
the plants and the environment in its best state
before it hit the really render-intensive departments
such as effects and lighting,
where things start to get a little bit harder to change.
So we would do the growing in advance,
and then when shots came,
we would place that animation in.
So all of the work was front-loaded for "Strange World,"
which allowed us to do many hundreds more shots
than "Encanto" did.
Narrator: The environments in this movie
weren't just dynamic. They were some of the largest
ever created at Disney Animation,
with some stretching 2 ½ miles wide,
so large that the team needed to expand its computing power.
Ben: At the peak, I think there was a shot
with 20 or 30 million blades of alien grass.
Narrator: To convey the Strange World's vastness,
the lighting team made heavy use
of atmospheric elements, like those used for "Raya,"
adding clouds and ground fog
to create a sense of depth and scale.
These expansive sets
lent themselves to wider camera lenses.
The camera and layout team
could use controls to adjust the lens distortion.
So whenever they wanted a shot
to feel off-kilter and, well, strange,
they could dial up the distortion effect,
a decision always driven by the story context of the scene.
It all comes together with editing,
which gives the audience space
to take in the environment,
and sound design, which helps communicate
the character of the space.
[buzzing and crackling]
Sarah: Because, you know, it doesn't have a face,
it can't communicate that way,
but it can communicate through sound.
It's squishy, it breathes.
I make sure that there's an intentional personality
behind every little sound that the plants make
as they breathe in or breathe out or undulate.
Narrator: Now that Disney's built such a powerful tool set
for living, breathing worlds,
the team has to step it back sometimes,
especially since, unlike live-action-film makers,
they're creating these worlds from the ground up.
In feature animation, sort of the sky's the limit,
and you can easily put more in than you need.
You're looking for that perfect blend
of organic, fascinating texture in the background,
not so much that it's going to take away
from what the characters are doing,
what the characters are saying.
Narrator: After all, Disney builds worlds
to service the story, not the other way around.
For the same reason,
it doesn't stick to any house style for world design,
instead tailoring each world to its story needs.
Just contrast the details of the castles
in "Tangled" and "Frozen."
Steve: Rapunzel's tower, the wooden beams,
there isn't a straight beam anywhere.
Everything's handcrafted, hand-hewn,
everything's got a slight twist
and an organic feel to it,
riffing off of the design principles
that applied to "Snow White" and "Pinocchio."
When you look at the interiors of the castle in "Frozen,"
we do have a lot of very straight, rigid lines,
and that's, of course, all done to support
what we're saying about those environments.
Oh, this is for royalty.
OK, they were getting the best craftsmen,
who could make the straightest line.
And really everything needs to go through
that level of rigor and discussion.
Narrator: Those decisions on "Strange World"
struck a balance between making the landscape
feel imaginative and unexpected
while retaining the story-first principle
that made the classic Disney movies so beloved.