Denizen: How Disney Populated San Fransokyo with Citizens … and Animators 

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(November 7, 2014), Walt Disney Animation Studios introduced a lot of new technology to make it happen: importing real world data from San Francisco’s county assessor’s office; creating a new rendering system called Hyperion (also used for

) to handle how light is handled; and creating Denizen, a piece of software to populate San Fransokyo with citizens (and tourists).

Rather than have to design and animate thousands of locals individually, Walt Disney Animation Studios created Denizen, a proprietary system created that revolutionizes how artists create and animate crowds.

‘In order to create and maintain those characters, we needed to find a way to generate them procedurally so they could evolve as the show evolved and be created on the fly when needed,’ notes John Kahwaty, character rigging supervisor. Described as a character asset pipeline wrapped up into one small package, Denizen ‘ingests a small number of characters that define the style for the show and analyzes and compares them. It then provides a character designer a way to see all the pieces we create up front and blend them together to create a final model, rig, cloth rig, hair rig, and look that can be immediately inserted into a shot, animated and rendered.’

All totaled, 670 unique characters were generated by Denizen — compared to 270 in

— but each character can have up to 32 different clothing look combinations, not to mention 32 different hair and skin tones. That means filmmakers could invite 686,080 unique characters into San Fransokyo party before having to duplicate any. In addition, Denizen does allow for customization, so about 200 Walt Disney Studios Animation employees ‘appear’ in

Information compiled from materials provided by Walt Disney Studios.

Denizen: How Disney Populated San Fransokyo with Citizens … and Animators

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