Now we're going to change the subject
radically. You guys know what's coming next? Well, Brandon Jarratt
is a, how would we call him? He won a Academy Award, in animation for Zootopia. Cool huh?
How many of you have seen, or kids have seen Zootopia? It's a very cool movie, but
behind the scenes what you don't know, is that GIS was part of the game. So
Brandon, you're going to come out. Where are you? Someplace, maybe he's not? Here
he is! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Brandon! So now, I'd like to take you behind the
scenes to talk about how we built the city of Zootopia. At Walt Disney
Animation Studios, we strive to create compelling stories, set in believable
worlds and populated with appealing characters. Today I'm going to focus on
that middle part - creating believable worlds, and I don't necessarily mean
realistic worlds, after all a city full of talking animals wearing clothes and
using mobile phones is not exactly realistic, but believable in the sense
that you would believe the characters actually inhabit this world. In it the
geography and the scale and the style, complement the story that we're trying
to tell, and at Disney we've been creating believable worlds for our films
for nearly 80 years. In 1937 the Walt Disney Studios released its first fully
animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and with it pioneered a new
form of family entertainment. Nearly eight decades later, Walt Disney
Animation Studios continues to honor that heritage by creating films that
combine beautiful artistry, masterful storytelling, and groundbreaking
technology. And with all of our films we try to push the envelope and advance our
technical and artistic achievements and Zootopia was no exception.
Director Byron Howard spent several years thinking about the idea for the
world of Zootopia, what kind of animals would be there, what it would look like,
how society would function, and then he was joined by Clark and Rich to help
bring the story to life. Byron's initial pitch for the film
started with a very simple concept. We've seen animals acting like animals in the
natural world. We've seen animals acting like animals in the human world, and
we've even seen animals acting like humans in a human-like world. But what
we've never seen before is animals acting like animals in a modern world,
made by and for animals, a place where humans never existed. Now in order to
tell that story, to create a living, breathing city for this film to take
place, requires a great diversity of animal species. There are nearly 70 kinds
of animals in the film, all with varying scale, from the tallest giraffe down to
the tiniest shrew. And in order to accommodate all of these differently
sized animals we had to design and build a world that fit with all the animal
types and in most cases that took the form of something we call multi-scaling,
which you can see demonstrated in this early piece of concept art. So as the
look and feel of Zootopia started to take shape, we asked ourselves, how can we
build this on a city-sized scale? Are there ways we can be smart and maybe use
technology to make our lives easier and work under a tight production schedule,
instead of hand modeling and hand placing an entire city full of buildings? Well fortunately for us, we had some
experience with City Engine during the production of Big Hero 6. It was an
invaluable tool for us to achieve the kind of scale and complexity required
for the City of San Fransokyo in that film. San Fransokyo is based on the
actual geography of San Francisco, so for Big Hero 6 we started with real San
Francisco City data and plugged in our own building
distributions and custom Japanese inspired architecture on top of it. This
is just a quick breakdown of one shot from Big Hero 6 that used City Engine for
these kinds of city assets. There are over 83,000 buildings, 260 thousand trees,
and 215,000 street lights all exported from City Engine, and that was for just
one shot out of many in the film that used City Engine for these kinds of city
assets. Unfortunately, we can't just turn around and use the exact same thinking
and technique for Zootopia that we did on Big Hero 6, because of a couple of
fundamental differences. Number one, Big Hero 6 was based on real world geography
and city data. Zootopia is completely fictional, there
is no pre-existing data to go on. There are no maps, there are no surveys, all we
have is some artwork and maybe a couple of hand-painted terrain maps. And Number
2, Big Hero 6 was built at a consistent human size scale. Zootopia as I mentioned
before has to accommodate wildly varying animal sizes. So we might be placing
mouse buildings in-between regular-sized
buildings and our distribution is affected by that. So, we have to build a
completely fictional, brand new animal city from the ground up. Where do you
start? Well at Disney everything starts with research. The art directors began
with natural landscapes as inspiration. For example, these giant rocks in China
that look kind of like skyscrapers and they came up with skyscrapers that look
like giant rocks. All of the architecture in the film is informed by something in
the natural world and paintings like this one are crucial because they help
define the look and feel of the world and inspire all the visuals that end up
on screen. Now that concept of multi- scaling that I mentioned earlier, also
meant thinking about objects and vehicles that could accommodate animals
of different sizes. For example, there are larger and smaller trains, and each one
has many door sizes to fit the different animals. And this train ends up being
kind of important because as it turns out, the most effective way to take our
audience and our main character Judy Hopps through the city, is with a train
ride through the city and all of its districts. In addition to building a city
that would be comfortable for all sizes of animals, one of the main ideas was to
create each quarter of the city as its own ecosystem. After all how else could
you build a city where rabbits, camels, Jaguars, and polar bears all live
together? Creating distinct climates not only allows all of our animal residents
to be happy, it also lets us design each district with nature in mind. So to
fulfill the needs of the story and actually take us on the train ride
throughout the whole city, we had to fully build out each of these districts.
We needed an entire city layout complete with streets, residential and business
zones, and distinct construction all while keeping the principles of geo design in mind. We needed it all built with a very small team and we needed it
fast. So like any good city planner we started with a map. This is one of the
earliest maps of the city of Zootopia. You can see the beginnings of each
district as well as how it fits together into the whole.
And looking at this map, we had to ask ourselves a few questions. How are we
going to divide up the world based on this map? How can we connect neighboring
districts together in an organic way, and perhaps most importantly, how can we
distribute our buildings in each of these districts? So after looking at the
map and discussing among ourselves for a while, we came up with a plan that
started with a unified multi-layer map of each of the districts. So let's take a
closer look at one of those districts now. The first part of the city we
encounter on our train ride is Sahara Square. At the center of Sahara square is
the Ritzy Palm Hotel shaped like a giant palm tree. Everything in the district is
centered around the hotel and it's Oasis. The art directors wanted these jagged
Rocky's shapes to be very dense around the hotel and get sparser as you moved
away from the center. So this is what we came up with in City Engine. You can see
that circular gap in the middle there where the hotel and Oasis go. Here we use
City Engine's street generation tool with some custom parameters to throw
down some natural looking shapes that the art directors asked to see. We're
going for a blockier, rockier more honeycombed shape in keeping with the
harsh desert climate, and with the concept art and reference images given
to us by the art directors. So we also need to be able to quickly clear space,
remove buildings, or even adjust our terrain as our terrain map changes,
adjust our street layer on top of the terrain, whenever we get creative
feedback. And of course we can't just fill our city with great cubes, so we create a
small library of buildings to suite each district, including some accessory pieces
and walls for filling parcels and creating borders around
those parcel shapes. And the difficulty in using a relatively small number of
distinct buildings, is that if we repeat too many of these shapes across the
district, what you end up with is a city that doesn't look real, organic or
natural. So to combat this we use carefully calibrated distribution rules
to ensure a good mix of buildings on each of our parcels. And another way we
can achieve greater variation, is by constructing our buildings and our
material palettes in a way that lets us and match to procedurally increase the
number of possible variations. There are even modular wall pieces like I
mentioned before, that City Engine could combine and repeat to dynamically create
walls around these parcel shapes like in some of the reference images we were
given. This one is from Niger. So this image, this group of images shows
some early City Engine tests for parcel construction, building distribution and
the export and render process. The image on the left is in City Engine and the
red part is a map that represents our zoning area. So we encode district
information as attributes on the parcel shapes in City Engine. We calculate our
scopes and our setbacks, and our building choice based on the district that we're
in. The image on the top right is that same test block represented
interactively in one of our scene files and the image below that is the same
district, the same block again as a full-color render. So this is a
street-level test render of Sahara Square. Because each of our pieces is
hand modeled and designed to look good pretty close to camera, we can go all the
way down to this level and things still hold up pretty well. You can see the
building and color distribution, variation, as well as some of those
street furniture pieces and the walls that I mentioned earlier. If we zoom out
from here, we get a district that renders out like this.
Sahara Square is made up of over 61,000 parts and that might include buildings,
palm trees, walls, or any other things that we throw into the mix. So let's move
onto a different district. The art directors wanted a very specific
silhouette for the downtown core area at the center of Zootopia. One that ascended
higher as you went up the hill. You can see that in this early City Engine test,
where we have the smaller plaza buildings at the bottom of the hill and
the taller shapes growing as you go up. And because of City Engine's procedural
rules and the way we were constructing our building parts, we're able to hit
these tall shapes very easily just by dragging a slider or by painting a map.
This allows us to iterate on creative feedback very quickly, so we can show
something to the art directors, get some feedback, go play with
it and then show another version to them. The top image is my first attempt at
hitting that ramping silhouette like I mentioned before. All the green stuff is
buildings and trees that were exported from City Engine, and the image below
that is a paint over or sketch from one of the art directors showing what he
actually wanted it to look like. Having this kind of feedback is extremely
helpful and because of the flexibility of our City Engine workflow, I was able
to take those notes in from the art director, make another change to this,
re-export it and get it out the same afternoon. So this is another view of the
same downtown core area, with our city engine elements mixing in with our tall,
distinct, hand modeled skyscrapers in the center of the city there. Now in order to
export these city assets we first have to generate them using our procedural
rules. So let's take a quick look inside of City Engine and see how we do that.
We'll start in Sahara Square, you'll notice the Palm Hotel that I mentioned
earlier. So let's select a few parcels and generate some buildings with our
custom City Engine rules. Now if the art directors aren't happy with the
distribution here, all we have to do is update our seed and regenerate. We get a
different mix of buildings and street furniture and parts. We can do that for
the whole area or we can drill down to a single parcel and just iterate until
they're happy. This allows us to iterate on creative feedback very rapidly like I
mentioned before. So let's zoom out a little bit and move over to the Plaza
District. So the buildings in the plaza have a unique construction that allows
them to grow much taller than the buildings in the Sahara, and as I
mentioned before we're trying to hit that silhouette that goes taller as you
go up the hill, so when we generate our buildings you can see those very tall
shapes in the back, and the more normal sized buildings down near where the
train station is going to b. Because of City Engine's procedural rules we can
just adjust our height parameter and our buildings grow to match. So add it all
together and what do you get? This is a final frame from the film's train ride
sequence. There are tens of thousands of parts in each district and when we add
them all together there are over 300,000 city parts in this shot exported
from City Engine. Now let's go on that train ride through the city of Zootopia. Well it's my great pleasure to give you
the best animated feature award using GIS Brandon! Thank You Jack this is awesome. It's not
exactly like an Academy Award you know, it's our way. Thank you very much this is awesome. Oh! I'm about to be out of time! I'd like to thank the associated
producer on the film, Bradford Simonson for giving me a giant
Lego set to play with on this movie, I would like to thank the art directors
and Byron for creating this world, I'd like to thank Bret Acorn who spearheaded a
lot of our City Engine workflow back on Big Hero 6. Thank you to the folks at Esri
for their software and for helping us with getting it up and running. A big
shout out to Alan Corcoran my fellow TV and the set extension team on Zootopia
because I couldn't have done this all by myself. Also thank you to my wife
Savannah who is here in the audience with us today! Thank you very much. Thank you Brandon.
This presentation was rad. A whole new respect for Disney.
The whole GIS convention was pretty great! Anyone have a free link to all the streams and slideshows?
Pretty fascinating
This was an incredibly inspiring talk. They've done some wild stuff with City Engine.
They used CityEngine to make the city in Big Hero 6.
I wouldn't have realized the Disney animators used GIS software for creating Zootopia. Hindsights great!
City Engine is so cool. Anyone know of any useful guides/tutorials for CGA? I wanna try to make my own rules instead of using other people's.