Hypertextural Garments on Pixar’s Soul

The art direction of Soul’s version of New York City sought a highly detailed ”hypertextural” style to contrast the ethereal volumetric world our characters visit later in the film. Many New York City shots were extreme closeups of main characters playing various instruments. This meant extreme closeups of our main characters’ various garments. The Soul characters team identified that increasing the detail of our garment assets heightened the separation between the two worlds. To help establish this highly detailed look, the team developed a render-time deformation pipeline for geometric thread detail.