Animex! - Zach Parrish

Zach Parrish Head of Animation, Walt Disney Animation Studios

Zach discusses the process the animation department underwent from the beginning of Big Hero 6 to the production of shots including; pre-production, visual development, modelling, rigging, posing, and character exploration. He will focus on the challenges of the film including the large cast of main characters, the city of San Fransokyo, filling it with crowds, and the variety of animation needed for the film from subtle to action to Baymax.

So to start off his talk, Zach Parrish talked about some of the software that was used to create the film. The first being a 3D clothing simulation for Maya called Marvelous Designer. Which look bloody fantastic.

So this software is derivative of Clo3D which was made for fashion designers, on that piece of software you can have a wider range of stitches, and can also measure the avatars like a tailor would, from my understanding of reading up on the two pieces of software, I believe marvellous clothing drapes more realistically for animation and entertainment purposes. I was amazed by the list of clients and how all the bigwigs use this software from Dreamworks, to Disney, to Illumanati, to Ubisoft... it goes on!!!

The next piece of software he talked about that I had never heard of was Tonic. Tonic is a combination of algorithm's and simulations developed at Disney Animation Studio's to create multiple single strands of hair that move. It was first used in Frozen. 

Basically Hiro's hair is done in the same way as Elsa's (only shorter and darker). He showed us really cool diagrams of how the hair is split up into compartments, and then this Tonic runs a simulation and fills it with tubes. In Elsa's hair there over 400,000 tubes (just to put that into perspective there was on 140,000 in Rapunzel's hair.

What I also found interesting during Zach's talk is how rigorous the process is at Disney Studio's. I didn't realise just quite how much they treat time as money. As so as all the keyframes are done, they "Lock them down" and they aren't allowed to change any of them after that stage, and then it the same with the inbetweens and the earlier stages of the process. He made it seem very intense.

One cute thing he did sneakily let us see were the test walks for Baymax, and we found out that Baymax's walk is inspired by that of a Penguin waddles, so here's a cute video of a penguin:

Another test the animators had to do which hasn't been released, is they had to take a bouncy ball and represent the character in the ball, the way it bounced informed most of the walk cycles. So simple yet effective!

He also talked about the crowd simulation they came up with in the city, but I was too engrossed in Zach Parrish's animated to public speaking to write many notes.

The only other thing he talked about was there apprenticeship program,
What makes an animation show reel stand out are the eyes and soul in character because the mechanics can all be taught! Such good news! I don't think anyone could ever have a bad thing to say about this man he was such a lovely and down to earth guy, really wasn't what I was expecting, a real pleasure to meet him, I hope our paths cross again one day.

http://www.zapmyshorts.com/site/zap/1/

https://twitter.com/Laaazzzeeerrr


Elsa's hair infor: http://technologybehindmagic.tumblr.com/