Nature plays a major part in Disney/Pixar's The Good Dinosaur, and in order to make the world of the environment come alive we wanted to have it react to weather conditions, and with other characters' actions. Doing so required we choreograph and potentially simulate the motion of each piece of vegetation in the film - from flowers, grasses and shrubs to a multitude of trees and branches (modeled both geometrically and procedurally). Our goal was to have the world feel truly alive across a range of weather conditions, from calm to violent and all shades between, and encourage the other actors to move freely in, and interact with that world. We built a directable vegetation simulation engine that produced compelling motion in our assets, and developed techniques for generating a library of simulated motion, dressing that motion and allowing the characters and world to interact.
['Olivier Soares', 'Thomas Moser', 'Frank Aalbers']
Vegetation choreography in the good dinosaur