Personal thoughts/notes from working on Zootopia 2

This article is full of so many interesting details. E.g. I found this passage on the technological progress in rendering snow from Frozen (2013) to Zootopia 2 fascinating:

"To give an example of the amazing amount of detail in Zootopia 2: at one point during production, our rendering team noticed some shots that had incredibly detailed snow with tons of tiny glints, so out of curiosity we opened up the shots to see how the artists had shaded the snow, and we found that they had constructed the snow out of zillions upon zillions of individual ice crystals. We were completely blown away; constructing snow this way was an idea that Disney Research had explored shortly after the first Frozen movie was made in 2013, but at the time it was purely a theoretical research idea, and a decade later our artists were just going ahead and actually doing it. The result in the final film looks absolutely amazing, and on top of that, instead of needing a specialized technology solution to make this approach feasible, in the past decade both our renderer and computers in general have gotten so much faster and our artists have improved their workflows so much that a brute-force solution was good enough to achieve this effect without much trouble at all."

The showcase of frames at the end really broke something through for me. It's easy to simply sit in a theater or on your couch and watch the movie as a movie. But while the theater screen is large, you don't get to pause it. So nearly all of the incredible detail gets blurred in a way that makes it easy to be immersed in the movement and story, but also forget the art of visuals. Seeing those specific frames laid out, each one of those would be an incredible art piece on their own! They would all be extremely difficult to create for an individual and take so so much time. I always wondered what those 1000+ people in the credits were actually doing, now i know! I never realized the incredibly depth and thought and time and art that goes into every frame of an animated movie.

Hair, water, and wind - its crazy how those elements are the things that continue to have levels of improvement for these animated films yet for my eyes i keep thinking "well thats looks pretty solid to me" only to be outdone by the next movie and go "oh yeah that looks better somehow".

This is so cool, I’m glad the company allowed the author to release this to the public. People like myself with knowledge of some of the art and technology involved but that stand outside the industry can get a little bit of a sense how the SOTA of animation evolves.

Secondly the bit about the evolution catching the unnamed studio, likely Pixar in production capability as of the first Zootopia certainly shows up on screen.

Wow these frames of forests are absolutely stunning - It’s like Princesses Monoke vibes met Disney rendering technology. I wish I knew about all the techniques mentioned in this article, it’s super cool how basically everything is backed up by really low level physical simulations.

Always love it when a company can have strong technical chops even when their main product/industry isn't necessarily the tech itself.

Sometimes I miss working in the animation industry. This was already one of those mornings.

Very interesting and so many throwaway lines that could easily be entire blog posts by themselves!

I wonder how hamstrung Disney is by their chosen animation style (wide-eyed cutesy characters, rounded edges, bright colours). Given the technical prowess on display here, what could they create if they gave their artists free rein to experiment like in Love, Death, and Robots? Or is it more that these constraints provide structure to work inside?

What I like about this piece is how it shows the technical prowess underpinning the visual outputs in a film like what Disney puts out.

I only wish it went further! There are a ton of lessons those of us outside films/games could learn from working in that kind of deadline-consttrained innovative landscape. Tell about how you fought against the rendering deadlines and sped up the snowscape frames by 30% to get it in under the wire!

I wonder if there’s any collaboration between the technical side and writing side?

Specifically, I see incredible effort and time getting tiny details right on the technical side, but the storyline and dialog seems to not have had the same level of effort applied to it.

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This here sums up modern day America. A bunch of brilliant people working day and night to churn out absolute slop.