Now we're going to change the subject radically. You guys know what's coming next?
Well, Brandon Jarratt is a, how would we call him? He won a
Academy Award, in animation for Zootopia.
Cool huh? How many of you have seen, or kids have seen Zootopia?
It's a very cool movie, but behind the scenes what you don't know,
is that GIS was part of the game. So Brandon, you're going to come out. Where
are you? Someplace, maybe he's not? Here he is! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Brandon!
So now, I'd like to take you behind the scenes to talk about how we built the
city of Zootopia. At Walt Disney Animation Studios, we strive to create
compelling stories, set in believable worlds and populated with appealing
characters. Today I'm going to focus on that middle part - creating believable
worlds, and I don't necessarily mean realistic worlds, after all a city full
of talking animals wearing clothes and using mobile phones is not exactly
realistic, but believable in the sense that you would believe the characters
actually inhabit this world. In it the geography and the scale and the style,
complement the story that we're trying to tell, and at Disney we've been
creating believable worlds for our films for nearly 80 years. In 1937 the Walt
Disney Studios released its first fully animated feature film, Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs, and with it pioneered a new form of family entertainment. Nearly
eight decades later, Walt Disney Animation Studios continues to honor
that heritage by creating films that combine beautiful artistry, masterful
storytelling, and groundbreaking technology. And with all of our films we
try to push the envelope and advance our technical and artistic achievements and
Zootopia was no exception. Director Byron Howard spent several
years thinking about the idea for the world of Zootopia, what kind of animals
would be there, what it would look like, how society would function, and then he
was joined by Clark and Rich to help bring the story to life.
Byron's initial pitch for the film started with a very simple concept. We've
seen animals acting like animals in the natural world. We've seen animals acting
like animals in the human world, and we've even seen animals acting like
humans in a human-like world. But what we've never seen before is animals
acting like animals in a modern world, made by and for animals, a place where
humans never existed. Now in order to tell that story, to create a living,
breathing city for this film to take place, requires a great diversity of
animal species. There are nearly 70 kinds of animals in the film, all with varying
scale, from the tallest giraffe down to the tiniest shrew. And in order to
accommodate all of these differently sized animals we had to design and build
a world that fit with all the animal types and in most cases that took the
form of something we call multi-scaling, which you can see demonstrated in this
early piece of concept art. So as the look and feel of Zootopia started to
take shape, we asked ourselves, how can we build this on a city-sized scale? Are there
ways we can be smart and maybe use technology to make our lives easier and
work under a tight production schedule, instead of hand modeling and hand
placing an entire city full of buildings?
Well fortunately for us, we had some experience with City Engine during the
production of Big Hero 6. It was an invaluable tool for us to achieve the
kind of scale and complexity required for the City of San Fransokyo in that
film. San Fransokyo is based on the actual geography of San Francisco, so for
Big Hero 6 we started with real San Francisco City data
and plugged in our own building distributions and custom Japanese
inspired architecture on top of it. This is just a quick breakdown of one shot
from Big Hero 6 that used City Engine for these kinds of city assets. There are
over 83,000 buildings, 260 thousand trees, and 215,000 street lights all exported
from City Engine, and that was for just one shot out of many in the film that
used City Engine for these kinds of city assets. Unfortunately, we can't just turn
around and use the exact same thinking and technique for Zootopia that we did
on Big Hero 6, because of a couple of fundamental differences. Number one, Big
Hero 6 was based on real world geography and city data.
Zootopia is completely fictional, there is no pre-existing data to go on. There
are no maps, there are no surveys, all we have is some artwork and maybe a couple
of hand-painted terrain maps. And Number 2, Big Hero 6 was built at a consistent
human size scale. Zootopia as I mentioned before has to accommodate wildly varying
animal sizes. So we might be placing mouse buildings
in-between regular-sized buildings and our distribution is
affected by that. So, we have to build a completely fictional, brand new animal
city from the ground up. Where do you start? Well at Disney everything starts
with research. The art directors began with natural landscapes as inspiration.
For example, these giant rocks in China that look kind of like skyscrapers and
they came up with skyscrapers that look like giant rocks. All of the architecture
in the film is informed by something in the natural world and paintings like
this one are crucial because they help define the look and feel of the world
and inspire all the visuals that end up on screen. Now that concept of multi-
scaling that I mentioned earlier, also meant thinking about objects and
vehicles that could accommodate animals of different sizes. For example, there are
larger and smaller trains, and each one has many door sizes to fit the different
animals. And this train ends up being kind of important because as it turns
out, the most effective way to take our audience and our main character Judy
Hopps through the city, is with a train ride through the city and all of its
districts. In addition to building a city that would be comfortable for all sizes
of animals, one of the main ideas was to create each quarter of the city as its
own ecosystem. After all how else could you build a city where rabbits, camels,
Jaguars, and polar bears all live together? Creating distinct climates not
only allows all of our animal residents to be happy, it also lets us design each
district with nature in mind. So to fulfill the needs of the story and
actually take us on the train ride throughout the whole city, we had to
fully build out each of these districts. We needed an entire city layout complete
with streets, residential and business zones, and distinct construction all
while keeping the principles of geo design in mind. We needed it all built
with a very small team and we needed it fast. So like any good city planner we
started with a map. This is one of the earliest maps of the city of Zootopia.
You can see the beginnings of each district as well as how it fits together
into the whole. And looking at this map, we had to ask
ourselves a few questions. How are we going to divide up the world based on
this map? How can we connect neighboring districts together in an organic way, and
perhaps most importantly, how can we distribute our buildings in each of
these districts? So after looking at the map and discussing among ourselves for a
while, we came up with a plan that started with a unified multi-layer map
of each of the districts. So let's take a closer look at one of those districts now.
The first part of the city we encounter on our train ride is Sahara
Square. At the center of Sahara square is the Ritzy Palm Hotel shaped like a giant
palm tree. Everything in the district is centered around the hotel and it's Oasis.
The art directors wanted these jagged Rocky's shapes to be very dense around
the hotel and get sparser as you moved away from the center. So this is what we
came up with in City Engine. You can see that circular gap in the middle there
where the hotel and Oasis go. Here we use City Engine's street generation tool
with some custom parameters to throw down some natural looking shapes that
the art directors asked to see. We're going for a blockier, rockier more
honeycombed shape in keeping with the harsh desert climate, and with the
concept art and reference images given to us by the art directors. So we also
need to be able to quickly clear space, remove buildings, or even adjust our
terrain as our terrain map changes, adjust our street layer on top of the
terrain, whenever we get creative feedback. And of course we can't just fill
our city with great cubes, so we create a small library of buildings to suite each
district, including some accessory pieces and walls for filling parcels and
creating borders around those parcel shapes. And the difficulty
in using a relatively small number of distinct buildings, is that if we repeat
too many of these shapes across the district, what you end up with is a city
that doesn't look real, organic or natural. So to combat this we use
carefully calibrated distribution rules to ensure a good mix of buildings on
each of our parcels. And another way we can achieve greater variation, is by
constructing our buildings and our material palettes in a way that lets us
and match to procedurally increase the number of possible variations. There are
even modular wall pieces like I mentioned before, that City Engine could
combine and repeat to dynamically create walls around these parcel shapes like in
some of the reference images we were given. This one is from Niger.
So this image, this group of images shows some early City Engine tests for parcel
construction, building distribution and the export and render process. The image
on the left is in City Engine and the red part is a map that represents our
zoning area. So we encode district information as attributes on the parcel
shapes in City Engine. We calculate our scopes and our setbacks, and our building
choice based on the district that we're in. The image on the top right is that
same test block represented interactively in one of our scene files
and the image below that is the same district, the same block again as a
full-color render. So this is a street-level test render of Sahara
Square. Because each of our pieces is hand modeled and designed to look good
pretty close to camera, we can go all the way down to this level and things still
hold up pretty well. You can see the building and color distribution,
variation, as well as some of those street furniture pieces and the walls
that I mentioned earlier. If we zoom out from here, we get a district that renders
out like this. Sahara Square is made up of over 61,000
parts and that might include buildings, palm trees, walls, or any other things
that we throw into the mix. So let's move onto a different district. The art
directors wanted a very specific silhouette for the downtown core area at
the center of Zootopia. One that ascended higher as you went up the hill. You can
see that in this early City Engine test, where we have the smaller plaza
buildings at the bottom of the hill and the taller shapes growing as you go up.
And because of City Engine's procedural rules and the way we were constructing
our building parts, we're able to hit these tall shapes very easily just by
dragging a slider or by painting a map. This allows us to iterate on creative
feedback very quickly, so we can show something to the art
directors, get some feedback, go play with it and then show another version to them.
The top image is my first attempt at hitting that ramping silhouette like I
mentioned before. All the green stuff is buildings and trees that were exported
from City Engine, and the image below that is a paint over or sketch from one
of the art directors showing what he actually wanted it to look like. Having
this kind of feedback is extremely helpful and because of the flexibility
of our City Engine workflow, I was able to take those notes in from the
art director, make another change to this, re-export it and get it out the same
afternoon. So this is another view of the same downtown core area, with our city
engine elements mixing in with our tall, distinct, hand modeled skyscrapers in the
center of the city there. Now in order to export these city assets we first have
to generate them using our procedural rules. So let's take a quick look inside
of City Engine and see how we do that. We'll start in Sahara Square, you'll
notice the Palm Hotel that I mentioned earlier. So let's select a few parcels
and generate some buildings with our custom City Engine rules. Now if the art
directors aren't happy with the distribution here, all we have to do is
update our seed and regenerate. We get a different mix of buildings and street
furniture and parts. We can do that for the whole area or we can drill down to a
single parcel and just iterate until they're happy. This allows us to iterate
on creative feedback very rapidly like I mentioned before. So let's zoom out a
little bit and move over to the Plaza District. So the buildings in the plaza
have a unique construction that allows them to grow much taller than the
buildings in the Sahara, and as I mentioned before we're trying to hit
that silhouette that goes taller as you go up the hill, so when we generate our
buildings you can see those very tall shapes in the back, and the more normal
sized buildings down near where the train station is going to b. Because of
City Engine's procedural rules we can just adjust our height parameter and our
buildings grow to match. So add it all together and what do you get? This is a
final frame from the film's train ride sequence. There are tens of thousands of
parts in each district and when we add them all together there are over
300,000 city parts in this shot exported from City Engine. Now let's go on that
train ride through the city of Zootopia.
Well it's my great pleasure to give you the best animated feature award using
GIS Brandon!
Thank You Jack this is awesome. It's not exactly like an Academy Award you know,
it's our way. Thank you very much this is awesome. Oh! I'm about to be out of time!
I'd like to thank the associated producer on the film,
Bradford Simonson for giving me a giant Lego set to play with on this movie, I
would like to thank the art directors and Byron for creating this world, I'd like
to thank Bret Acorn who spearheaded a lot of our City Engine workflow back on
Big Hero 6. Thank you to the folks at Esri for their software and for helping us
with getting it up and running. A big shout out to Alan Corcoran my fellow TV
and the set extension team on Zootopia because I couldn't have done this all by
myself. Also thank you to my wife Savannah who is here in the audience with us today!
Thank you very much.
Thank you Brandon.