Disney and Pixar’s “Turning Red” introduces Mei Lee, a confident, dorky 13-year-old torn between staying her mother’s dutiful daughter and the chaos of adolescence. Her protective, if not slightly overbearing mother, Ming, is never far from her daughter—an unfortunate reality for the teenager. And as if changes to her interests, relationships and body weren’t enough, whenever she gets too excited (which is practically ALWAYS), she “poofs” into a giant red panda!
In Turning Red (2022), Red Panda Mei required an exceptionally complex fur system to achieve her soft, expressive look. Pixar relied on Hair Guides, using around 12,000 guide hairs to define the overall flow and structure of her coat. These guides were then used to generate approximately 2 million render hairs, creating a dense, believable groom that responded naturally to movement and emotion. This innovation allowed Mei’s fur to feel both stylized and richly detailed, perfectly supporting her energetic and expressive personality.
At Pixar, hair and fur grooms are set up in the Presto animation system where artists can shape guide hairs as well as view the full set of render hairs interactively. Animators start by introducing style guides as an auxiliary representation for hair sculpting that coarsens guide hairs (Hair Style Guide). They then develop a new method for transferring deformations from this coarse resolution back onto the dense hair set (Hair Style Mover). In addition, they propose a user interface for managing and selecting hairs layers efficiently (Hair Picker).
