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a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 1 c g w 9 An Adventure in Worldbuilding Raya and the Last Dragon is large in scope and complexity. Each land in Kumandra is unique, with its own physical characteristics, geography, geology, topology, climate, and even structures. And, each world has its own light design – for instance, the desert land of Tail, where the sun is especially strong, has the harshest light, along with a lot of dust elements and heat distortion. "We have a world made up of five different lands," explains Shurer. "That's like designing five movies. They have five different natural environments, materials they build with, different colors the locals wear, different shape languages that are meaningful to them." Despite the disparities, the lands are uni- fied by two particular elements: the dragon and water. Heart is Raya's home, a prosperous land filled with peace and magic. Here, the connection to the dragon – which itself is connected to water – is strong, and the buildings and rooms are round to resem- ble a drop of water. Tail, meanwhile, is a far-flung desert land that is becoming in- creasingly isolated as the water recedes. In the water-surrounded land of Fang, power is a driving force, so the structures are over- scaled, with straight lines and sharp edges. Talon, the crossroads of the five lands, is a floating, bustling marketplace that's overfilled with food and goods of all kinds – a thriving environment for pickpockets. Spine, an insular and remote land high in the mountains, can best be described as a frozen forest that's home to fearsome warriors distrustful of outsiders. To build these virtual lands, the artists used Autodesk's Maya for modeling and in-house tools for procedural set dress- ing, along with in-house tools for texturing, including Paint 3D for painting and propri- etary soware for material creation. Ren- dering was done using Hyperion, Disney's proprietary renderer. For the large-scale environment in each land, the crew leaned heavily on the Set Extension team to help build out the landscapes. This team combined model- ing, look, and compositing skills to create these lands using the following tool sets: Maya; Adobe's Photoshop, Aer Effects, Substance Designer, and Substance Painter; Pixololgic's ZBrush; SideFX's Houdini; and Disney's in-house Paint 3D. The environment asset artists would build out an environment to a certain distance so the characters could interact with it. Beyond that, generalist art- ists would then build models, texture them, shade them, light them, and then paint over them "to make it feel like the worlds are fully created and you can move through them," says Odermatt. The filmmakers wanted to bring the set extensions as close to the camera as possi- ble, resulting in fully realized worlds beyond the extent of the set, making the sets seem much bigger than would have been possible through conventional means. "They are epic and entirely convincing, and work fully well in the stereo conversions of our movies be- cause they are renderable with dimension. So even when heavily painted, there is some dimensional aspect to the set extension," Odermatt says. "All the set extensions have to be stereo-compliant, so the artists created just enough geometry to support the parallax that was needed for the stereo process. Then they painted in an incredible amount over top that." As Odermatt points out, there are a lot of atmospherics in this part of the world be- cause there is so much water, inspiring the artists to apply those atmospheric effects to the film. "Traditionally, that would be the work of the effects department. But that gets very difficult when you think of all the other big challenges in this film, including the Druun, which was a monumental challenge for the effects department," he says. Instead, the lighting and effects depart- ments worked with the technical team to generate an extensive library of volumetric elements, such as morning mist, ground fog, and so forth. And then when the lighters lit a master shot or an individual shot, they could compose these moving, simulated effects elements into their shots. This helped evoke more of a Southeast Asia setting. Says Odermatt, "This was a big upgrade for us, because in the past, we would have had the effects department create those [elements] on a per-shot basis. Here, they were created in preproduction and available to any lighting artist to add into a scene." This enabled the effects department to focus on the really big, dynamic VFX in the film – the Druun character and the effects related to the dragon magic. "We knew they would be completely full of those big story point effects and would not have a lot of excess capacity to do environmental effects and things like that, to make this feel more like a real place, and we wanted those effects in the film," adds Odermatt. "It was a Artists filled Talon with food and goods in this bustling marketplace.