Frozen 2: Effects Vegetation Pipeline

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ ”Frozen 2” takes place in the Enchanted Forest, which is full of vegetation (e.g. distinctive leaves and foliage) that is manipulated by other characters, including the wind character, Gale. ”Frozen 2” also has multiple scenes where a large portion of the forest is on fire. The quantity and scale of vegetation effects in ”Frozen 2” presented a challenge to our Effects department. We developed two workflows, the Vegetation Asset workflow and the Fire Tree workflow, to help us achieve high quality artistic performance of procedural tree animation and fire tree simulations on ”Frozen 2”. Using the new workflows we not only saw an order of magnitude improvement in the work efficiency of our Effects artists, but also saw an increase in work satisfaction and overall artistic quality since the workflows handled the data management of various assets in the shot, allowing artists to concentrate more on their craft.