Racing to the finish line: effects challenges on Cars 3

Abstract

The world of Disney Pixar's Cars 3 finds our hero Lightning McQueen on a journey to reconnect to the roots of "real" racing as he struggles to stage a comeback in a sport which is quickly evolving past him. Over the course of the film, our characters race on beaches alongside lapping waves, in abandoned ghost tracks, through winding mountain forests, and even in a raucus, muddy demolition derby. Providing a sense of believable interaction between our characters and these varied environments in over 600 shots was one of the key responsibilities of our FX team on Cars 3. In order to achieve the scope and scale of this work efficiently, we built on sequence-wide workflows and independent "clustered" simulations presented last year in (Reisch et al. 2016), extending these strategies to effects unique to the show. Creating a common shared core to our simulation and effects-asset rigs provided artists with a familiar starting point regardless of whether they were working on volumetric dust, rigid-body debris, point-based dynamics sand, or even viscous mud simulations. A focus on stability, artist experience, and optimized workflows which scaled to take advantage of our render farm, allowed our team to achieve visually consistent, high quality results on an accelerated schedule.