Other worldly crowds in Coco

Coco, Pixar's largest human-based crowds film to date, was ambitious both visually and technically. Over a third of the film contains crowd scenes, ranging from a mansion-filled dance party to thousands of skeleton families journeying across a bridge, to a colossal cheering stadium. This complexity required vast amounts of both animation specificity and look variation in our characters. Asset management, animation directability, and rendering would have been extremely difficult with our previous pipeline for human crowds at this scale. An array of techniques were developed to tackle these challenges, including crowd asset and workflow improvements; a new skeletal rigging and posing system to procedurally control animation; more automated, aggressive shading and geometric level of detail; and optimized geometry unrolling in Katana to significantly reduce scene processing time and file IO.