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"Age of Sail" tells the story of William Avery, an old sailor adrift and alone in the North Atlantic. When Avery rescues Lara, who has mysteriously fallen overboard, he finds redemption and hope in his darkest hours. In this production talk we'll go behind the scenes in the making of this multi-platform immersive animated short. Some of the unique challenges we'll discuss: bringing a 2D illustrated style to life in the medium of 6DoF VR with new non-photorealistic rendering techniques; immersing the viewer in a storm-tossed ocean without making them seasick; adapting a single story to multiple mediums (desktop/mobile VR, 360° video, and 2D film); creating a better sounding and more responsive sound mix with multiple surround formats and a new spatialization model; and optimizing it all to run at 60fps on a mobile phone.

In the most important match of his life, the once mighty, masked luchador, "Son of Jaguar", faces his legacy, his family, and what it means to be a part of something bigger than himself.

Three unique VR production teams come together in this high-energy session to discuss their innovative approaches to immersive visuals, audio, and user experience, many of which are being presented publicly for the first time. For "Son of Jaguar," "Sonaria," and "Dear Angelica," brand new tools and production pipelines were created to bring these intricate and immersive stories to life. Google Spotlight Stories, Oculus, and Reel FX will present the techniques and storytelling strategies that have earned them reputations as world leaders in the realm of virtual reality and interactive mediums.

Pearl is a short VR film directed by Patrick Osborne, winner of the 2015 Academy Award for his animated short film Feast. Our challenge: create a 360° non-linear streaming interactive animated film with a strongly art-directed non-photorealistic look, with naturalistic character animation tightly synchronized to an original song, and a story that collapses decades into minutes through montage, and make it run in real time on a wide range of devices, from mobile phones to VR headgear. No problem!

We present a kinematic system for creating art-directed wrinkles on costumes for CG characters. This system employs a curve-based method for creating wrinkles on reference poses, which are incorporated into a weighted matching algorithm that generates wrinkle deformations on an animated character. The wrinkle creation tool is intuitive to use and accommodates art direction. The user can easily transfer wrinkle patterns to different characters, costumes, and body types. The algorithm for evaluating wrinkles measures the local stress of a surface and creates weights that are used to interpolate between the reference wrinkle patterns during movement. This algorithm is robust and efficient, and fits well into a large-scale feature-film production environment.