Art-directing Disney's Tangled procedural trees
Arthur Shek, Dylan Lacewell, Andrew P. Selle, Daniel Teece, Tom Thompson · 2010
Creating stylized trees with hundreds of thousands of leaves is typically a painstaking task that requires hours of artist time. In Walt Disney's animated feature film Tangled, we faced the challenge of populating dense forests with animated trees on which artists could quickly iterate to meet an art-directed look. We designed a system of authoring trees based around a language of hierarchical curves. Our system lets artists interactively sketch out a base skeleton representation of a tree and grow procedural twigs and leaves out to a canopy shell by tweaking a limited number of parameters.