Tangled: the forest chase
The forest chase sequence was one of my first lighting sequences at Disney and it did not go according to plan. I was new to Disney, the pipeline was new, and everything upstream was a similar state. All of this is pretty familiar and understandable for a studio that was rebuilding and wasn't rolling in that Frozen money yet.
"snap zoom" of doom:
Apologies to the render farm 🙁
When I first reviewed the animatic for this seqence I assumed this would end up as a simple zoom. Nope, that's a really fast dolly. This meant every visable object in the scene needed to be in memory to calculate the motion blur and since there is a lot of subtle parallax rendering in layers and recompositing was problematic. The assets in the forest set were very heavy weren't set up with this one-off shot in mind. So no fancy LODs, volumetric culling, or other such magic. Just hours of optimizing assets by hand and frame by frame RenderMan tweaks.
Not that anyone would ever notice:
You again?!?
In every movie (even animated) there are errors that end up in the finished film. Sometimes there are happy accidents that get left in the final product on purpose other times... oops. This is the worst kind of error: It was fixed in a previous version and somehow this version made it's way in the film. What you're seeing is the simulated tree-shake coming out of FX with the original non-animated branch.
Hand crafted lighting:
when in doubt roto it out.
Sometimes in computer graphics you push a button and a beautiful array of technologies synergistically simulates a perfectly styleized, yet believable world. Other times humans have to step in and slog frame-by-frame animating shaders, hand painting in detail and employing fancy compositing tricks. As a lighting artist you shoot for automation and settle manual tweaks, but some of my favor work from other lighting artists was accomplished by a lot of work by hand.