Artists at Walt Disney Animation Studios have been constantly seeking to improve the physical depiction of an increasingly wider range of skin tones with each subsequent film. “Strange World” presented a great opportunity to improve on how we portray a wide range of skin types. The changes we implemented included: creating a new skin material from the ground up, changing the testing light rig to better evaluate materials, and implementing lighting strategies to better represent the skin properties of each character. What resulted was character skin that improved on our depiction of a wider range of skin types while maintaining a level of stylization in line with the art direction of the film.

Paper in the ACM Digital Library