Animation collaboration with depth compositing

In this talk, we describe the use of depth based compositing to accelerate collaboration between multiple artists on single shots. This workflow allows for increasingly complex shots to be finished in shorter timelines, even when dealing with large numbers of hero characters. SplitComp is a workflow for artists using depth compositing. It was originally developed for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, but has since been used on every Sony Pictures Imageworks animated feature by animators and the cloth simulation team. It saves several hours of production time per artist every day of production. Over the course of a single feature film, it saves teams entire weeks worth of time. Older collaboration systems required artists to export their geometry so that it may be imported into other scene files, which is both time consuming and required artists to make a conscious effort. SplitComp, however, only requires playblasts which are a natural product of the artists workflow. This allows for significantly less effort from the artists and more frequent updates.