Embroidery and Cloth Fiber Workflows on Disney’s ”Encanto”

ABSTRACT

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ ”Encanto” tells the tale of an extraordinary family, the Madrigals, who live in the hidden mountains of Colombia. The garments are an important aspect of the characters’ design and express their individual personalities. Accurate cloth looks have been difficult to achieve with our traditional look development workflow. We present the techniques utilized to create the varied and complex fiber-level cloth features in the film. In order to produce the desired level of geometric detail, we developed a new workflow that procedurally models each cloth fiber in Houdini and then binds the resulting curves to the clothing geometry via Disney’s XGen. We also extended our embroidery workflow to support a wide variety of embroidery types and styles which are exemplified by Mirabel’s outfit and include needle paint, knot, and rope stitching.

References

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