Rigging the oceans of Disney's "Moana"

Disney's "Moana" was set in an environment inspired by the Pacific Islands, which made the ocean a prominent setting throughout the film. For much of the film, we found it necessary to treat our oceans like we would our hero characters, and so we developed three ocean rigs that formed the basis of all our ocean variants. Using a unified workflow that our artists were already familiar with, these rigs gave them the ability to easily portray and dial in a wide variety of ocean types such as open seas, calm seas, stormy seas, lagoons, shorelines, and wide ocean vistas, some which spanned hundreds of kilometers out to the horizon. This paper describes the techniques we used and some of the challenges we faced in developing these ocean rigs.