Populating the World of Kumandra: Animation at Scale for Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon”

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 59th film “Raya and the Last Dragon” takes place in the fantasy world of Kumandra. We look at the challenges of casting and choreographing diverse people, creatures, and props to bring a varied spectrum of cultures and scenes to life: tense gatherings, intimate palace interiors, bustling floating markets with integrated boat traffic, panicked crowds, everyday life, and magical movements of dragons. The sheer diversity of characters presented a new set of obstacles that inspired us to extend our crowd system to efficiently address our increasingly diverse needs. Using production examples and results, we look at how our existing workflows and pipeline were leveraged and augmented to support these efforts. We discuss solutions for art-directed, simulated, and procedural approaches using our in-house Houdini-based system called Skeleton Library [El-Ali et al. 2016].