ENCANTO
My primary contributions on Encanto were environmental look development for Antonio’s Room and Isabella’s Room.
Antonio’s Room
In Encanto, each child of the family Madrigal is gifted a magical bedroom that corresponds with their unique gift and personality. Antonio’s room was envisioned as a juxtaposition of a magical rain forest with elements of a typical bedroom, complete with every child’s dream of a treehouse, slide, and swinging bridge. The rainforests from the Choco region were the primary inspirations for Antonio’s room. There are many different types of rainforest in South America, but we wanted it to feel specific to that region - so we reviewed all of the vegetation that exists in these areas, and made sure we were be truthful to those biomes.
In Antonio’s room we ended up with 6 different species of flora, and over 30,000+ unique instance. We had 24 different species of trees, and roughly 10,000 placed with our procedural tool droplet throughout the environment.
I used the Disney proprietary software Bonsai to generate a handful of simple vegetation elements. Bonsai is a really powerful tool for creating vegetation with procedural rule sets using the language SeExpr. Once I created these bonsai elements, I then scattered these onto the geometry using our instancing software xgen.
Isabella’s Room - “What Else Can I Do?”
Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Encanto” called for many dazzling musical numbers with special effects. Isabela’s song “What Else Can I Do?” was one of the most technically challenging. In this sequence, Isabela finds freedom from the pressure and constraints of society’s expectations, and lets her true self shine. Throughout this musical number, her environment represents her emotional transformation through the colorful, expressive, and hypnotizing flower patterns that appear on the walls of her bedroom. This effect required hundreds of thousands of flowers to change colors and move in kaleidoscopic patterns. I was responsible for handling the procedural geometry generation and look development of this effect for this musical sequence.
