Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
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CONTROLLING THE ELEMENTS It's not as though Disney had never put cold weather into its previous films, but for the fully CG version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, more than a few flurries and snowballs would be necessary. "Until [Frozen], most snow was done with a character sinking into a surface a bit and then kicking up some little snowy chunks," says the film's Head of Effects Animation Marlon West. "But for scenes where people were buried deep in the snow, the technique that had served our studios [in the past] just wasn't going to cut it." Using Material Point Method (a way to combine points into a grid to mimic behavior that doesn't conform to a single state, such as honey, lava, or snow), new simulation tools like Disney's Matterhorn allowed the effects animators to capture the interaction of characters with snow more realistically. The software worked so well that the team tackled even more complicated shots like Anna pelting the snow monster. "It felt really great to have this kind of big technical jump that allowed us to make all this beautiful imagery," West says. As OpenVDB led to the dramatic improvement of rendering speeds, it contributed to software used for more dynamic lighting and visual effects. For Moana (2016), the bulk of the movie takes place on the ocean, which serves as both an environment and a character, demanding numerous effects shots. "One of the key elements was to caricature the water so that it's an exaggerated version of what a viewer may be familiar with," says the film's Director of Cinematography, Lighting Adolph Lusinsky. "Our memory tends to remember things in a way that's grander than what it actually was—a way that is romanticized." To achieve this required various tricks, such as moving the reflections off the water as it came closer to the camera. His team also used technology to play up the jewel-like caustics—the bright, fractal light pattern seen at the bottom of a pool or on the side of a boat. left: With water playing a dominant role in Moana, effects technology allowed it to become its own character whose "communication" contributed to the storytelling. The use of Material Point Method gave Disney artists and animators on Frozen the ability to work with the varying consistencies of snow, from non-sticky snowballs to sticky snowballs. F E AT U R E Images courtesy of Walt Disney Animation Studios 40 KEYFRAME