Final Fantasy’s hyperreal animation was achieved by Honolulu-based Square USA, using Maya for animation authoring and RenderMan for rendering.

Square animators used four Silicon Graphics M 2000 series servers, four Silicon Graphics Onyx2 visualization systems, and 167 Octane workstations.

Special challenges — realistic flowing hair and follicles, the physics of how cloth wrinkles and drapes as the body wearing the fabric moves, the fluidity of human movement, and facial movement — were achieved with custom Maya plug-ins.