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Embroidery and Cloth Fiber Workflows on Disney's Encanto
Jose Velasquez, Alexander Alvarado, Ying Liu, Maryann Simmons
Procedural Houdini workflow modeling individual cloth fibers and binding them to clothing geometry via XGen, supporting embroidery styles for Encanto costumes.
Abstract
Walt Disney Animation Studios’ ”Encanto” tells the tale of an extraordinary family, the Madrigals, who live in the hidden mountains of Colombia. The garments are an important aspect of the characters’ design and express their individual personalities. Accurate cloth looks have been difficult to achieve with our traditional look development workflow. We present the techniques utilized to create the varied and complex fiber-level cloth features in the film. In order to produce the desired level of geometric detail, we developed a new workflow that procedurally models each cloth fiber in Houdini and then binds the resulting curves to the clothing geometry via Disney’s XGen. We also extended our embroidery workflow to support a wide variety of embroidery types and styles which are exemplified by Mirabel’s outfit and include needle paint, knot, and rope stitching.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / workflow breakdown (fiber-level cloth)
- Contributions
- A new workflow that procedurally models each cloth fiber in Houdini and binds the resulting curves to clothing geometry via Disney's XGen
- Extends an embroidery workflow to support varied types and styles including needle paint, knot, and rope stitching
- Demonstrates fiber-level cloth detail on Encanto costumes such as Mirabel's outfit
- Context
- A production look-development pipeline for Walt Disney Animation Studios' Encanto, relating to the studio's cloth and groom tooling lineage (e.g., Tamstorf et al.'s Smoothed Aggregation Multigrid for Cloth Simulation).Builds on: Smoothed Aggregation Multigrid for Cloth Simulation
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on a shipped film, so takeaways are pipeline recipes rather than benchmarked claims, and generality beyond Disney's Houdini/XGen toolset is not asserted.
- Clarity
- Accessible and example-driven; a single read conveys the workflow without heavy formalism.
- How to read it
- Read once for the procedural-fiber and embroidery approach; focus on how curves are bound to garment geometry and which stitch types map to which techniques rather than expecting algorithms.
Builds on
Built upon by
Related work
- Creating the Art-Directed Groom for Legend in Disney's Strange World 2023 / SIGGRAPH
- XGen: Arbitrary Primitive Generator 2003 / SIGGRAPH
- Hair and Fur in an Evolving Pipeline 2020 / SIGGRAPH
- Creating Curve-Based Garments with Custom Weave Patterns 2023 / SIGGRAPH
Keywords
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