The ocean and water pipeline of Disney's Moana

Abstract

Disney's Moana was the largest and most complex water project the studio had ever undertaken. Over 900 shots required ocean interaction, which included boat wakes, splashes, shorelines, walls of water, and highly art-directed sentient water. Our previous films' water techniques would not scale to address the complexity and volume of work required by Moana and staffing and time constraints necessitated automating large parts of the process. We redesigned our pipeline to provide a flexible authoring process for a lightweight implicit ocean representation. This new workflow allowed artists to visualize and edit specific parts of the water setup and easily share their updates with other departments.