Cooking Southeast Asia-inspired Soup in Animated film

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Raya and the Last Dragon” is an animated film inspired by the people and culture of Southeast Asia. In “Raya and the Last Dragon”, we created a soup inspired by Thailand’s Tom Yum soup to help represent the food cultural richness of that region. Our goal was a more believable and authentic representation of food than we have previously achieved, which required a novel approach, especially on how to simulate the motion of the chili oil on top of the soup and multiple representative ingredients. This talk will describe the collaborative process of designing, simulating and creating materials to achieve the final look of the soup. Figure 1 shows three renders under different camera angles.