Walt Disney Animation Studios' 2016 hit, Moana, was a CGI-feat in terms of bringing environment and surrounding atmosphere to life in a new way, and because of this they are releasing two major production assets for use by the public. These assets are protected under the CC (Creative Commons) Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 U.S. License which will allow any form of adaptation or copying of these assets, even for commercial use, so long as it's also filed under the same license. The hope from Disney is that these assets can help other developers with computer graphics research, software development, or even for education.
The first asset package includes data on clouds, and also holds a vast information on volume rendering research specifically for them.
The second asset package holds all data used to construct the entirety of Motunui, the main island featured in Moana. This package includes all the textures from the coral, to the flowers and trees, as well as the ocean just to name a few. The sheer size of the rendering process of the entire island is what will most-likely be appealing for developers to use, as well queueing in the research problems and challenges they faced with rendering certain objects into the scenes, one being the sheer number of light sources used at times. On some bases and frames, there are as many as 20 different elements working together at once. This can equate to around 15 billion primitives per frame (a 'primitive' is the smallest unit of processing--akin to characters in an essay).
The goal from Disney is to help smaller development teams without the means to bigger budgets be able to strip away and learn, and maybe even use parts of their research and data, to help continue to push animation in the same direction, albeit for film and television or gaming.
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