3D News World

Southpaw to unveil new Digital Asset Management Solution, TACTIC 3.0, at SIGGRAPH 2010.

2010-07-23T00:40:00.001-07:00

Southpaw Technology will unveil TACTIC 3.0 at SIGGRAPH 2010. The new version will provide studios with a more open, flexible solution for speeding the creation of digital assets across highly complex digital productions, like those found in feature film, visual effects, animation, and cinematics.

TACTIC is four solutions in one. It combines asset management, workflow management, project management and communication tools into one dynamic Web-based, cross-platform solution. Battled-tested in some of the most demanding environments, TACTIC enables vast teams of artists and animators to work with terabytes of digital assets the way they want to, rather than forcing them into a specific workflow.

TACTIC 3.0 features:
The main focus of TACTIC 3.0 is flexibility. Its features include:
- More intuitive and flexible interfaces that allow users to develop personalized screens to meet their unique workflow
- A powerful expression language that enables studios to mine and track production information from any internal system or application
- New and completely customizable reporting, scheduling and workflow features that transform mined data into useful, user friendly production information
- New integrations with the compositing application NUKE, the Adobe suite of creative tools, the Rush render queue system (beta) and IRIDAS FrameCycler (beta).

TACTIC 3.0 will be on display at Southpaw’s SIGGRAPH 2010 booth, #205.

Related links:
Southpaw Technologies

Illuminate Labs' Beast and Turtle technology to assist Autodesk in Maya and Max game development.

2010-07-23T00:39:00.003-07:00

Autodesk has bought Illuminate Labs, a privately held maker of lighting technology for game development. Illuminate Labs' Beast middleware solution and Turtle plug-in for Autodesk Maya software enable faster iteration on a game's creative intent, and more realistic in-game lighting. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

In welcoming Illuminate Labs customers and employees to Autodesk, Marc Stevens, VP Games, Autodesk Media & Entertainment said, "Technological progress is a mainstay of the games industry. Autodesk is committed to helping game developers be more competitive with modern pipelines. We want our customers to spend less time building workflows and solving redundant problems, and more time realizing their creative vision for the game."

Magnus Wennerholm, previously Illuminate Labs CEO, said, "In just a few years, Beast and Turtle have become production-proven technologies for in-game lighting. Leading game developers like Sony Computer Entertainment, Nintendo America and THQ/Heavy Iron rely on these tools to help deliver higher visual quality in their games. My team and I are excited about the technology development opportunities that Autodesk has to offer. I believe that this acquisition will benefit both Autodesk and Illuminate Labs customers." Wennerholm and the Illuminate Labs team are joining Autodesk Media & Entertainment."

Autodesk plans to develop and sell Illuminate Labs' technology and support Illuminate Labs customers. Autodesk anticipates that Beast middleware will continue to be licensed as a standalone product. Autodesk plans to incorporate Turtle into future offerings, and discontinue licensing it as a standalone product.

Related links:
Autodesk

Stan Winston family and Gnomon join forces to establish The Stan Winston School of Character Arts.

2010-07-23T00:39:00.001-07:00

The Gnomon School of Visual Effects, has revealed that it is partnering with the family of the late character creator and effects visionary, Stan Winston, to establish the Stan Winston School of Character Arts.

A true pioneer, Winston helped build the foundation for many of the creature effects techniques that fill today's blockbuster films. As a character development lead on films including "Terminator," "Aliens," "Predator," "Jurassic Park," "Iron Man," and "Avatar," Winston created cinematic icons that terrify, entertain and inspire, earning him four Academy Awards in a career spanning four decades.

Determined to realize Winston's vision for future generations of artists, his many protégés - themselves film industry leaders - will instruct students in the magic behind their legendary work. The first Stan Winston School lessons will be available January 2011, in both DVD and online streaming formats, in association with Gnomon School of Visual Effects. The Stan Winston School also plans to offer hands-on workshops with world-renowned character effects studios in conjunction with the training DVDs and online content.

"Thanks to the expertise of our partners at Gnomon School of Visual Effects, the Stan Winston School will be at the vanguard of visual arts education. Our lessons will cover the entire spectrum of character creation techniques, from practical to digital," said Matt Winston, son of the late Stan Winston, "Never before have my father's incredibly talented peers allowed such comprehensive access to the creative process, insights and methods they developed together. From day one, students will be transported to the alien, dinosaur, robot, and monster-filled worlds these master artists create."

At San Diego Comic Con 2010, creature and VFX luminaries will discuss Stan Winston's impact on the art of character creation on Saturday, July 24 from 5:30 - 6:30 p.m. in room 7AB. Featuring many of the film industry's leading character and creature artists, including Gnomon founder Alex Alvarez, The Winston Effect panel will also include messages about the Stan Winston School of Character Arts from James Cameron and Tim Burton.

"From 'Aliens' to 'Avatar,' few artists have shaped the film industry as Stan Winston has," noted Alvarez. "We're honored to partner with the Winston family to ensure his legacy can inspire another generation of artists to realize the incredible accomplishment of seeing the creatures born in your imagination take shape and become characters in a feature film."

The first set of training DVDs to launch January 2011 will include the following titles from leaders in the character creation industry:

   •   Practical/Digital Hybrid Characters with Stan Winston life-long collaborator and co-owner of Legacy Effects, John Rosengrant. 
   •   Script Breakdown for Character Creators with Academy Award Nominee and co-owner of Legacy Effects, Shane Mahan. 
   •   Directing Creature Characters with Academy Award Nominee and co-owner of Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc., Alec Gillis. 
   •   Creature Performance with Academy Award Winner and co-owner of Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc., Tom Woodruff, Jr. 
   •   Prosthetic Makeup with Academy Award Winner and co-owner of KNB EFX, Howard Berger.

Related links:
The Stan Winston School of Character Arts
The Gnomon School of Visual Effects

Autodesk today announces the launch of an online competition to find the best design visualisation talent in the UK.

2010-07-23T00:38:00.000-07:00

Are You a 3D Star? Time to Showcase Your Talent

Here at Autodesk, we all love to see see great 3D design and visualization work produced by talented individuals on the web. In fact, we love it so much, that we wantYOU to help us share it with the world – right here on our blog.

Win a Graphics Card Worth Over £1,000!

If you’re a designer, recent graduate, student or talented young gun, now is your chance to shine and bring your work to a wider audience, including experts at Autodesk. As part of our new competition, we’ll be supporting some of the best talent in UK design visualization, with the winner receiving a high-end graphics card worth over £1,000 from our friends at ATI.

There are also great runners-up prizes of ATI graphics cards for second and third places.

It’s easy to enter. Simply post a link to your 3D visualization or design visualization showreel in any format (i.e. YouTube video, Flickr slideshow, blog link, etc.) as a comment reply to this blog post, along with a description under 140 characters as to why you think you’re the hottest design visualization talent around.

There are 5 different areas we’ll be looking at for each entry: overall design, creative ability, technical ability, aesthetic appeal and the number of comment ‘Likes’. The ‘Like’ button is next to the comment box, so be sure to spread the word about your entry to encourage people to vote for your work. After four weeks, our judges will make a shortlist, before deciding the winners.

So what are you waiting for? Submit your entry now – and remember to tell your friends and colleagues to vote for you with a ‘Like’.

For full terms and conditions, please click here.

more here:http://www.autodeskshowcase.co.uk/are-you-a-3d-star-time-to-showcase-your-talent/

cmiVFX launches its latest Visual FX Training Video for the Foundry's Nuke Product line called Nuke Shading and Lighting FX.

2010-07-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

Nuke Shading and Lighting FX

This video was created to help compositors learn how to manage the current 3D Shading and Lighting system inside of the Nuke Compositing application. Built by user request, many Nuke users realized that procedural shading networks inside of Nuke have the capabilities of 3D shading systems found in traditional 3D Animation packages. This video will teach you how to use them!

more at:http://www.cmivfx.com/productpages/product.aspx?name=Nuke_Shading_and_Lighting_FX

Mackevision announces release of Picture Shooter, an online, photo-real, virtual-product ''photography'' service.

2010-07-23T00:35:00.000-07:00

https://ps.mackevision.de/picture_shooter_demo/

Shave and a Haircut 5.5

2010-07-23T00:27:00.001-07:00

Now Available for Maya 2009 2010 2011/ 32/64 Bit Linux / 32/64 Bit Windows and OSX 32/64

We currently support Mentalray, RMS, and Vray for Maya (NEW)
we also support dozens of renderman workalikes

300, Barnyard, Charlie's Angels II, Charlottes Web, Dr. Who, Dream Keepers, Exorcist: The Beginning, Halflife 2, Hellboy, Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, Into The West, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, King Kong, Moon Girl, Pirates of the Caribbean : World's End, Sin City, Space Chimps, Superman Returns, The Magic Roundabout, Ultraviolet, Underworld Evolutions, When Animals Attack, XMEN-2

"Overall, Shave and a Haircut 4 has been vastly improved and kicks Maya Fur in the metaphorical groin"

-Gary Noden
3D World July 2006 - rating 9/10

"We think your software is really cool. We can do incredible things with it that we wouldn't have dared to do before. Nice Work!"
-David Ostler
Weta Digital
"Shave is an excellent solution for very realistic hair"
-Darren Pattenden
Electronic Arts

”Shave is a breeze to use .. it's saved our skin several times.”
-Hugues Giboire
Just Add Monsters

“Shave and a Haircut 2 has made creating and rendering CG hair an absolute pleasure for us, both on past projects and our current show Hellboy . It's entire range of hair-based effects from scraggly beards to full length hair, come out looking beautiful with surprisingly minimal render times. Shave will remain an integral part of our digital double production pipeline for many projects to come.”
-Kevin Ballie
The Orphanage

“Shave did an awesome job in helping us create the hair for Mystique's transformations in X-Men 2. No other option came close to the realism and versatility of Shave and a Haircut. It's fast, powerful, and super easy to use”
-Erik Paynter
Kleiser/Walczak

“A work of genius” -3D World Magazine

“Trumps Alias's own fur solution” -Computer Graphics World

“I hate computers” -Matt Hendershott

more at:http://www.joealter.com/

SIGGRAPH App

2010-07-23T00:26:00.001-07:00

The official SIGGRAPH 2010 application provides a complete schedule of SIGGRAPH 2010 programs and events, plus all the detailed information you need to plan your week, day, or next hour at the conference: speakers, topics, locations, date, time, Computer Animation Festival screenings, exhibitor data, and more.

The best thing about this app is (if you have an iPod Touch or an iPhone to begin with), is that is does not need a WiFi network to operate at all. There are several extra that can be set go to the web, but with many international visitors using this in at the Los Angeles SIGGRAPH, there is no need to worry that a big scary bill is building for you when you get home. All the information is in the app. No Network required.

For those without an iPhone, (I know you're out there), there is also a Blog from a fellow with a selection of Google Calendar presets, available to download or subscribe to as XML, HTML or iCal formats. These are available as individual categories, including Courses, Panels, Papers, Talks, Special events or Birds of a Feather.

Links below!

Related links:

Smudgeproof SIGG App

Skitten GCal links

SIGGRAPH Parties

2010-07-20T21:49:00.000-07:00

The Unofficial CGTalk Meetup

Sunday July 25th, 6:30pm

Westin Bonaventure.

Bona Vista Room

The most unofficial get-together of them all.

No freebies but lots of people.

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The Foundry GeekFest

Monday 26th July, 2010.

from 5:00pm

[I think this one is full...]

This event is FREE, but places are limited and fill fast, so don't miss out REGISTER NOW.

MORE info.

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Houdini 11 Launch Event

COOPER DESIGN SPACE

860 South Los Angeles Street • Suite 900 • Los Angeles, California • 90014

July 27, 2010.

7:30PM - 8:00PM Registration

8:00PM - 9:30PM Presentation

9:30PM - 12:00AM Networking Event and Reception

The networking event will include live entertainment from Fire Groove, and DJ'd music with complimentary drinks and bites. Also, several studios will be recruiting for Houdini talent while you mingle.

MORE info.

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Siggraph After Party - 3D Production

July 27, 2010 5-8pm

ESPN Zone at L.A. Live

19th Hole Bar

1011 S. Figueroa St, Ste. B101

Los Angeles, CA 90015

Join us on for an exclusive SIGGRAPH after party. Isilon, Integrated Media Technologies (IMT), Atempo, and Southpaw present an evening of fun, food, and drinks with the creative minds behind some of today's hottest 3D Productions.

Guest speakers and topics will include:

• Wayne Miller, President and Chief Creative Officer of Action 3D – How he shot live concerts like Dave Matthews, Phish, and JayZ in 3D

• David Kenneth, Executive Producer of IE Effects – How his firm developed the 3D exhibit for the World Fair in China and the work they did on Michael Jackson's This Is It in 3D

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SIGGRAPH Reception

Wednesday 28th July, 8-10pm at the Westin Bonaventure Ballroom

Mingle with the movers and synergize with the shakers as the international computer graphics community gathers for its biggest social event of the year. Bring your business cards. SIGGRAPH 2010 provides food, beverages, and a legendary LA location: The Westin Bonaventure Hotel, which has starred in many feature films: “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”, “This is Spinal Tap”, “In the Line of Fire”, “Nick of Time”, “True Lies”, “Midnight Madness”, “Hard to Kill”, and “Chuck”. In “Escape From LA” and “Epicenter”, it was destroyed by visual effects.

...the same info.

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23rd Anniversary CG Show/SAKE Barrel Opening Party

6PM on Wednesday July, 28

JW Marriot, Salon C

MORE info.

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BLUR 2010 - The Ultimate SIGGRAPH Party

Wednesday July 28th 9pm-2am

Music Box Theater

Invite/Wristbands Only

It will be featuring a new dancing/performance act in between the DJ set and the Crystal Method gig.

Disney Animation Studio brings The Foundry's Mari to work with Paint 3D.

2010-07-20T21:48:00.000-07:00

The Foundry has entered into a unique relationship with Walt Disney Animation Studios to advance 3D texture painting techniques announced Bill Collis, CEO, The Foundry.

The Mari technology was originally developed at Weta Digital, and is the name behind ambitious VFX sequences in recent box office blockbusters such as Avatar, The Lovely Bones, District 9 and The Day The Earth Stood Still. In addition to incorporating elements of Disney’s internally developed Paint 3D technology into Mari, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ technology group will participate in a Mari steering committee, contributing to the future direction of the software. 

 Paint 3D offers some of the industry’s most advanced aspects of paint and texture creation technology. Paint 3D is also the original development ground and authoring tool for Ptex, Disney’s revolutionary open source texture mapping system that eliminates the need for UV mapping and efficiently stores hundreds of thousands of images in a single file. This represents the first time Walt Disney Animation Studios has commercially licensed its proprietary animation software to an outside company.  

 “The technology group at Walt Disney Animation Studios is proud to have created some of the most innovative software in the industry and we’re thrilled to be contributing technology to The Foundry to make these next generation tools available to everyone,” said Dan Candela, director of technology at Walt Disney Animation Studios. “We’re looking forward to expanding our relationship with The Foundry, using their technology to help create 3D paint and texture tools that leverage the best of our mutual technologies.”   

“The addition of Mari to the product portfolio earlier this year has launched us into a new market,” said Collis. “This agreement with Walt Disney Animation Studios provides access to their Paint 3D technology with its industry-proven toolset, powerful procedural paint and definitive Ptex paint infrastructure. It’s a natural complement to Mari and we’re very excited about producing new solutions.”   Paint 3D was first used on Disney’s 2005 animated feature, Chicken Little, and was widely deployed on Meet the Robinsons (2007), Bolt (2008), and all subsequent animated projects including the upcoming November release, Tangled.

Disney first used Ptex on the production of its animated short, Glago’s Guest, in late 2007, and went on to present it publicly for the first time at the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) in June 2008. (Its enthusiastic reception was followed in January 2010 by an announcement of the availability of the Ptex technology as open source.   The Mari technology was driven by the need to handle complex, high-resolution textures on 3D models. Mari was designed as a full 3D paint tool with a responsiveness and feature set that exceeds the best dedicated 2D paint systems. Mari is extremely scalable, coping easily with extremes level of detail – literally, thousands of textures, quickly and elegantly.

Related links:
Disney Animation Studios
The Foundry

Boomer Labs announces the release of their new production tool SuperMesher.

2010-07-20T21:45:00.000-07:00

SuperMesher is a 3DSMax plugin that allows you to cache animated geometry regardless of its topology and number of objects including pFlow particles. The cache is baked out to a separate file which can be loaded into any version of MAX 2009 or higher. No reference is held to the original objects so they can be deleted or modified without consequence. Because the result is one single mesh, SuperMesher automatically generates appropriate material IDs and Multi-Sub materials.

The plugin is available in both 32bit and 64bit versions for MAX 2009, 2010 and 2011.

SuperMesher is an indispensable production tool. Once you've used it in your project, you'll wonder how you managed without it!.

How is Supermesher useful?
SuperMesher has many unique uses that enhance the production pipeline. Here are a few examples.

Performance: Cache a complex and slow rig into a lightning fast and scrubbable sequence. Duplicate and offset the same cache for lots of variety with low overhead.

Compatibility: Load a SuperMesher cache file (.bmf) into any version of 3DSMax. Alternatively, load an OBJ sequence generated in another application such as Maya or Houdini. The OBJ sequence will be converted into a .bmf file for fast efficient playback inside 3DSMax.

Workflow: Cache complex effects into single meshes to simplify render scenes. If you're working on multiple shots, load fast caches into each shot instead of hundreds of interdependent objects and slow rigs. This makes for clean, fast render files.

Problem solving: Keep adding modifiers to SuperMesher caches - including world space modifiers. When you're happy with the look, collapse the stack again. All the animation will remain. You can even cache other SuperMesher meshes.

Retiming: Need to re-time or reverse an animation? With SuperMesher, you can easily animate time directly from the trackview.

Rendering: Because SuperMesher provides a free loader plugin, anybody can load or render SuperMesher files. If you've used commercial geometry plugins and need to render offsite, just cache all your render scenes and provide a copy of the free SuperMesher reader to the offsite renderfarm.

Protection: Provide your work to others without giving them the actual mesh.

More At:
http://www.boomerlabs.com/cart/product.php?productid=16&cat=6&page=1

SeaWorld

2010-07-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

Fusion CI Studios adopts Prime Focus Software's Krakatoa for SeaWorld TVC VFX.

In a new SeaWorld commercial, a young girl’s finger reaches toward the screen and, breaking the fourth wall, skims the liquid surface as beautiful ink-in-water effects ripple. The viewer is suddenly brought into a magical oceanic world where dolphins dance, elaborately costumed performers fly and birds sweep across the screen. Each of their motions are met with a flurry of colorful inky swirls, created by Los Angeles’ Fusion CI Studios using Prime Focus Software’s high-volume particle renderer, Krakatoa.

Fusion CI Studios, specializing exclusively in dynamics-driven VFX and fluid simulations, typically collaborates with other digital effects studios offering the services of a remote, advanced visual effects group doing R&D, look-development and/or visual effects. For the SeaWorld commercial, Santa Monica’s Ntropic reached out to Fusion CI Studios to handle the spot’s numerous fluid effects, including developing the look for the ink-type trails behind the characters.
Integral to the creation of the spot’s fluid effects was Krakatoa, Prime Focus’ production-proven volumetric particle rendering, manipulation and management toolkit that creates believable natural phenomena like dust, smoke, silt, ocean surface foam, plasma and even solid objects. Krakatoa integrates with Particle Flow, the built-in Event-Driven Particle System in Autodesk 3ds Max, and provides data exchange capabilities for sharing particles with other 3D and simulation applications.
Fusion CI Studios set up a straightforward Autodesk 3ds Max, FumeFX and Krakatoa pipeline, first creating FumeFX simulations around the animated dolphins, performers and birds, in which the FumeFX fluid interacted with each individual’s movements. Ink effects also streamed off selected parts of the characters’ geometry. For larger characters, Fusion CI Studios built rough FumeFX grids, but for smaller ones such as the birds, finer grids were used. For a number of characters, Fusion CI Studios also supplemented the object emission with fluid emission from RealFlow particles and Thinking Particles. After developing fluid behavior settings for turbulence, viscosity and dissipation, Fusion CI Studios’ artists generated fluid sims using Autodesk 3ds Max’s Pflow in combination with Krakatoa to automatically generate numerous versions of Krakatoa particle sets until the right level of detail and cloud density were achieved. Krakatoa was then used to render the particle sets.
The challenges in the SeaWorld spot’s production were intense. Shares Mark Stasiuk, Fusion’s Co-Founder and VFX Supervisor, “We had the huge task of doing a significant number of elaborate fluid elements over a commercial production timeframe, and making them look good at HD quality. When creating CG fluids that are moving non-turbulently, you have a lot more leeway with short timeframes because the level of fluid detail is relatively low. This isn’t the case for turbulent, volumetrically rendered fluid like ink in water or smoke. For these cases, it requires detail to sell the scale and level of turbulence - it’s literally the detail in the fluid that makes it realistic. If we tried to get the right detail level out of the pure fluid sim, whether using Maya fluids or FumeFX, we would have been in big trouble with sim times. Krakatoa allowed us to run fast fluid sims and then very quickly accumulate the detail as a post process and then render it very quickly. It took the job from very tough to straightforward!”
In addition to Krakatoa, Fusion CI Studios’ toolkit included Prime Focus Software’s render queue management software Deadline, which was used to distribute the generation of Krakatoa particle sets. Since completing the SeaWorld project, Fusion CI Studios has wrapped two other commercial projects using Krakatoa to render massive numbers of render-intensive water elements.

Related Links:Prime Focus Software
Fusion CI Studios
Ntropic

Win an Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite with 3DWorld in their latest contest.

2010-07-19T22:39:00.000-07:00

Win an Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite

Send us an original piece of artwork, that hasn't previously won any competitions or awards, to win a copy of Autodesk’s Entertainment Creation Suite

This issue, 3D World and Autodesk are offering you the chance to win a copy of either the 3ds Max or Maya version of Autodesk’s Entertainment Creation Suite, worth $4,995 (£4,600). All you have to do is send us an original piece of work that’s worthy of being showcased at Autodesk’s 3December event in London at the end of the year, where the winner will be announced.

The Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites give artists and production facilities access to a broad range of creative toolsets. The suites offer a choice of either Maya 2011 or 3ds Max 2011, and both versions include MotionBuilder 2011, the real-time character animation software, as well as Mudbox 2011 for digital sculpting and 3D painting.

We have one copy of either the 3ds Max or Maya version of Autodesk’s Entertainment Creation Suite to give away. To be in with a chance of winning this excellent prize, send us a rendered image created using any of Autodesk’s products. (You don’t have to use only Autodesk software, but a significant proportion of the work should be done with its tools.) There’s no subject or theme, so there are no limits to what you can create, although if you want to win, you should endeavour to keep it clean!

HOW TO ENTER
First, click on the link at the foot of this page to read Future Publishing’s standard contest terms and conditions. Please also note that the following specific terms and conditions apply:
1. This Competition is open to all worldwide residents of 16 years and over, except employees of Future Publishing Limited or any of its group of companies, or Autodesk.

2. By entering this Competition you grant Future Publishing Limited and its licensees (including the Competition sponsor: Autodesk) permission to republish your Competition entry; and

3. By entering this Competition, you acknowledge that Future Publishing Limited (including its employees, agents and subcontractors) is not responsible in any way for supplying the prizes to the winners of this Competition and your only recourse in respect of the prizes is against the Competition sponsor(s)

Once you have read and agreed to these terms, fill in your contact details below and press the Submit button.

NB: Entries which contain obscene content and/or copyright infringements will be disqualified.

Winners will be asked to provide scene files to verify the use of Autodesk products for the contest.

The winner will receive a full commercial licence of either Autodesk Maya Entertainment Creation Suite or Autodesk 3ds Max Entertainment Creation Suite, sold for $4,995 / £4,600.

Closing date: 19/11/2010

More at:https://www.futurecompetitions.com/TDW132autodesk/Default.asp?

Video Interview with Bob Whitehill – Stereoscopic Supervisor on Toy Story 3

2010-07-17T01:06:00.000-07:00

You may remember back in March, along with a group of other awesome bloggers and YouTubers from around the world, I got to visit Pixar, see a very early screening of Toy Story 3 and the short that sits before it, Day and Night and meet the creators of the phenomenal movie that is released in UK cinemas this Monday, 19th July. It’s been a long time coming but I can now finally show you the interviews that I collected while I was there. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting videos from the archives and interviews with Pixar Achivist, Christine Freeman, Stereoscopic Supervisor, Bob Whitehill, Supervising Animators, Bobby Podesta and Mike Venturini, Production Designer, Bob Pauley and the Director and Producer of Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich and Darla K. Anderson.

Today however I have the first interview and it’s with the Stereoscopic Supervisor, Bob Whitehill. When we met Bob, he described himself as the person who gives you a headache when you watch 3d movies. He then went onto explain that hopefully, if he’s done his job right, you shouldn’t be experiencing that headache when watching one of his movies.

Please note, some spoilers are mentioned during the interview plus news of Ratatouille, coming back in 3d.

SIGGRAPH 2010 Cheat Sheet

2010-07-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

SIGGRAPH promises production sessions, best CG short films, technology, and, of course, product demos galore.

The exhibition floor opens Tuesday morning and runs through Thursday afternoon. Look for announcements from all the major vendors in the days leading up to the show, and get hands-on experience at the show.

As Masson says. You have to go to get the hands-on, face to face experience. If you are short on coins, you can buy a one-day basic pass for only US$45 or a one-day computer animation festival pass for $50. Check the cheat sheet to pick your day/s. Meanwhile, here’s the rest of the 'damage.'

Registration Fees; [All US$]

Full: You get it all for $1220

Members: $1,170; Student Members: $495.
Full One Day: $475 buys it all for one day.

Members: $425; Student Members: $225

Basic Conference: $175; Members: $150

Basic One Day: $45

Exhibition, Art Gallery, Birds of a Feather, Emerging Technologies, Exhibitor Tech Talks, Keynote Speakers, International Resources, Job Fair, Posters, The Studio, The Sandbox, Posters, Research Challenge Results, Technical Papers Fast Forward, and Dailies!

Computer Animation Festival: $200; Members: $175; Student Members: $150

CAF One Day: $50

SIGGRAPH 2010 CHEAT SHEET

On Sunday July 25, 25,000 or so CG artists, scientists, technical wizards, product developers, and lookielous descend on the Los Angeles convention center ready to learn, interact, teach, people watch, play, buy and sell. This amazing digital art and technology circus continues until Thursday, and it’s packed with the most valuable, interesting, and incredible sessions you could wish for.

We cherry picked a few with a decided slant toward production. We didn’t sort through the technical papers – if you can read math, you’re already on the website checking them out. And we separated out most of the courses from everything else, because if you want in, you probably need to sign up . . . right . . . now. OK, here goes!

Geek Out! The Courses

Like all courses, this selection requires Full registration. Note that some are quarter-sessions, so afternoon classes that look like they conflict might not.

Introductory

Sunday afternoon: Build your own 3D display; Image statistics; Perceptually motivated graphics, visualization, and 3D displays; Processing for visual artists and designers.

Tuesday afternoon: 3D spatial interaction with videogame motion controllers.

Intermediate

Sunday: Physically-based shading models (afternoon)

Monday: Biomedical applications (morning); Stylized rendering for games (morning)Advances in real-time collision, proximity computations for games and SIMs (afternoon).

Tuesday: Color enhancement and rendering for film and games (morning); Importance sampling for production rendering (afternoon)

Wednesday: Advances in realtime rendering I (morning) and II (afternoon); Volumetric methods in visual effects (morning); Applications of visual analytics (afternoon); Use eye tracking to control virtual characters (afternoon).

Thursday: Realtime hair rendering and simulation (morning)Advanced.

Sunday: Spectral mesh processing (afternoon).

Thursday: Beyond Programmable Shading I (morning) and II (afternoon); Global illumination across industries (afternoon).

SIGGRAPH 2010 Day-by-Day Cheat Sheet

With an admitted emphasis on content for animation, games, and visual effects studios.

Key: (B = Basic; C = Computer Animation Festival; F = Full)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sunday

9:00 to 6:00 – Registration, Store

12:00 – 5:30:

Emerging Technologies (interact with the future). Room 152 (BF)
Geek Bar (comfy chairs, wifi, streaming content): Room 409 (F)
The Sandbox (play games) – outside Room 403AB (BF)
Posters (future CG on cardboard) – West Lobby (BF)
The Studio (make art) – Room 151 (BF)
Art Gallery (interact with sensual, sensory objects) – Room 150(BF)

2:00 – 2:30 – Screening: Commercials and Cinematics. Room 408B (CF)

2:00 – 3:30 – Avatar in Depth: Nine people who worked on the crew at Weta Digital plus two researchers from NVIDIA share their wit and wisdom. Very Techie. Room 515AB (F)

2:00 – 5:15 – Course: Physically-based shading models at Imageworks, ILM, and from game developers. Room 502B (F)

3:45 – 5:15 – Panel: Future directions in graphics research with Jessica Hodgins, James Foley, Pat Hanrahan and Donald P. Greenberg. If they don’t know, who does? Room 408AB (F)

Elemental, my dear CG artist: Fire bending at ILM, fire breathing at DreamWorks Animation, water bending at ILM, and earth-shattering at Double Negative. Room 515AB (F)

*6:00 – 8:00 – Technical Papers Fast Forward: Researchers compress their work down to a one-minute presentation. If you can’t get into the full conference, or you can’t read math, or you just love to see geeks on speed and want to know the most technically cool stuff, this is a don’t miss event.(BCF)

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Monday

8:30 – 6:00 – Registration, store.

9:00 – 5:30 – Emerging Technologies (interact with the future). Room 152 (BF)

Geek Bar (comfy chairs, wifi, streaming content): Room 409 (F)
The Sandbox (play games) – outside Room 403AB (BF)
Posters (future CG on cardboard) – West Lobby (BF)
The Studio (make art) – Room 151 (BF)
Art Gallery (interact with sensual, sensory objects) – Room 150 (BF)

9:00 – 10:30 – Rendering Intangibles: Fanciful filigree in Shrek (DreamWorks), fantasy for Alice in Wonderland (Imageworks), fast fur at Rhythm & Hues, and a photon density estimation for global illumination from UC Santa Cruz. Back to Room 515AB (F)

– All about Avatar: Lighting, rendering and compositing an alien planet and its blue-skinned inhabitants brought to you by several members of the crew at Weta Digital. West Hall B (F)

9:00 – 12:00 – Course: Stylized rendering in games. Go beyond realism in Room 502A. (F)

10:45 – 12:15 – Detailed Surfaces: Capture high-res skin displacement with Weta, search 3D shapes based on content, mix arbitrary meshes, weave polygonal meshes. Unwind later. Room 501B (F)

*11:00 – 12:45 – Award presentations and Keynote speaker: Don Marinelli, Carnegie Mellon professor of drama and arts management and executive producer of the Entertainment Technology Center, was co-creator of the Master of Arts Management Program, co-creator of the Master of Fine Arts in Acting degree program with the Moscow Art Theatre School in Russia, and co-founder (with Randy Pausch) of the Master of Entertainment Technology Degree Program. Take a deep breath and go to West Hall B (BCF)

2:00 - 3:30:

Avatar: The 10,000-foot-overview from Weta’s vfx supes Joe Letteri and Stephen Rosenbaum, and Lightstorm’s Richard Baneham. West Hall B (CF)

Award talks: Learn from the high achievers: Alexei Efros, Jessica Hodgins, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Kellogg S. Booth. Room 403AB (BF)

Panel: Biomed meets CG. Theater 411 (F)

Split Second Screen Space: Gamers at Black Rock/Disney, LucasArts, INRIA, and Eden push pixels pretty darn fast. Shadowing, lighting, rendering, motion blurring, and indirect illumination all in Room 408AB (F)
Volumes and Precipitation: stereo water in Avatar (Weta), snow in Prep and Landing (Disney), storm clouds in A-Team (R&H), and single scattering in heterogeneous participating media no less by Technicolor and MPC. Room 515AB (F)

3:45 – 5:15:

*Panel: CS 292: The Lost Lectures: Richard Chuang, co-founder of PDI, was a young engineer at Hewlett-Packard when he saw a video of a course taught at UC Berkeley by Jim Blinn, now manager of the CG research group at Microsoft, and Ed Catmull, now president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. Catmull and Chuang use video from the course to reflect on the evolution of computer graphics - from the genesis of Pixar and PDI to where we are today. Not to be missed. Room 515AB(F)

Screening: Long Shorts and Student Animation. Room 406B (CF)
Screening: Long Shorts and Short Shorts. (repeats Wednesday) Room 408B (CF)

*4:30 – 5:15 – Live Real-Time Demos: A juried selection of video games and real-time simulations demonstrated live on their actual platforms. West Hall B. (CF)

*6:00 – 8:00 – Electronic Theater: a juried selection of the best CG animated films, scientific visualizations, and visual effects this year. West Hall (CF)

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Tuesday

8:30 – 6:00 – Registration, store.

9:00 – 5:30:Emerging Technologies (interact with the future). Room 152 (BF)

Geek Bar (comfy chairs, wifi, streaming content): Room 409 (F)
The Sandbox (play games) – outside Room 403AB (BF)
Posters (future CG on cardboard) – West Lobby (BF)
The Studio (make art) – Room 151 (BF)
Art Gallery (interact with sensual, sensory objects) – Room 150 (B)

6:00

Exhibition: The best and newest CG products and services that you can buy. (BCF)
Job Fair: Check the postings, get tips, meet and greet and share your demo reel. (BCF)

9:00 - 10:30:

Iron Man 2: ILM’s Ben Snow, Marc Chu, and Doug Smythe show how to turn digital metal suits into believable superheroes. West Hall B (CF)
Course: Importance sampling for production rendering with technical staff from ImageMovers Digital, and the Moving Picture Company. Room 406AB (F)
Simulation in Production: Pixar talks trash, Disney tangles 70 feet of hair, DreamWorks fractures stuff, and Fido Film uses Houdini and GPUs to do SPH-based fluid sims. Room 515AB (F)

10:45 – 12:15 – Animation Blockbuster Breakdown: ILM’s Shawn Kelly moderates a panel of animators from Pixar, Disney, and Animation Mentor who break down shots from Toy Story 3, Up, Wall-E, Ratatouille, and The Princess and the Frog. Room 408AB (CF)

*11:00 – 12:30 – Keynote Speaker: Jim Morris, Pixar’s general manager/executive vice pesident Production, is currently producing Disney’s "John Carter of Mars." for release in 2012. He is the production executive on Pixar’s films, and produced "WALL•E" Prior to Pixar, he worked for Lucasfilm and its divisions for 17 years, serving as president of Lucas Digital for 11 years. He knows of what he speaks. West Hall B (BCF)

11:15 – 12:15 – AMD tech talk. Back of Hall H (BCF)

1:00 – 2:00 – Syd Mead at the Ballistic/NVArt booth#1101.

2:00 – 3:30:

*How to Train Your Dragon: Award-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and DreamWorks Animation’s creative team chat about live action filmmaking’s influence on this cutting-edge animated feature. West Hall B. (CF)

Reception: Art Gallery – Room 150 (BF)
Animation Clinic: Experienced animators offer expert advice. Room 406AB (CF)
Blowing $h!t Up: ILM bends rigid bodies for Avatar and breaks buildings for Transformers 2. Digital Domain destroys LA for 2012. Take your hard hat to 515AB (F)
Visualization for Art and Design: Bend your mind. That’s all I’m saying. You’ll see. Theater 411.(F)

2:15 – 3:15 – Intel SDK’s and other tech talk. Back of Hall H (BCF)

3:45 – 5:15:

Screening: Commercials and Cinematics. Room 408B (CF)
Pipelines and Asset Management: Weta, MPC, Pixar, and Disney. Nuff said. Room 515AB. (F)

*4:30 – 5:15 – Live Real-Time Demos: A juried selection of video games and real-time simulations demonstrated live on their actual platforms. West Hall B. (CF)

*6:00 – 8:00 – Electronic Theater: a juried selection of the best CG animated films, scientific visualizations, and visual effects this year. West Hall (CF)

*6:00 – 7:30 – Dailies!! A juried selection of 38 images and clips, each showing excellence in modeling, shading, animation, lighting, or effects, and presented by the production artist who created it. Each person has about 45 seconds to tell their story and show the work. J.D. Northrup at Pixar leads off with “Death by [Red] Monkeys.” (BCF)

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Wednesday

8:30 – 6:00 – Registration, store.

9:00 – 5:30: Emerging Technologies (interact with the future). Room 152 (BF)

9:30 – 6:00

Exhibition: The best and newest CG products, services, and books you can buy. (BCF)

Job Fair: Check the postings, get tips, meet and greet and share your demo reel. (BCF)

9:00 – 12:00 – Course: Volumetric methods in visual effects with techies from Rhythm & Hues, Side Effects Software, DreamWorks Animation, Double Negative, and Imageworks. Room 502B (F)

10:30 – The Last Airbender: Pablo Helman, Olivier Maury, and Daniel Pearson show big backgrounds and explain how ILM’s new lightning-fast GPU simulation/rendering engine created art-directed fire and other natural effects. West Hall B. (CF)

9:00 – 12:15 – Game Papers: Biometrics and physical controllers; the player experience. Room 406AB (F)

10:45 – 12:15 – Day & Night: Director Teddy Newton reveals the magic behind Pixar’s latest, extraordinarily imaginative short animated film. West Hall B (CF)

1:00 – 2:00 – Syd Mead at the Ballistic/NVArt booth#1101.

2:00-3:30 – Alice in Wonderland: Down the Rabbit Hole: Ken Ralston and a crew from Imageworks tumble into Tim Burton’s vision of the classic fairy tale. West Hall B (CF)

Animation Clinic: Experienced animators offer expert advice. Room 406AB (CF)

Research Challenge Results: Who wins? Square Enix’s immersive and dynamically modified haunted house? Hongik University’s "zero failure" physical therapy system? Gdansk University of Technology’s gaze-directed camera? Or, the MIT Media Lab’s datasets rendered as 3D physical shapes augmented with projected graphics? Theater 411. (BF)

3:45 – 5:15

Screening: Long Shorts and Short Shorts. Room 408B (CF)
X3D from the Web3D consortium. Back of Hall H (BCF)

*4:30 – 5:15 – Live Real-Time Demos: A juried selection of video games and real-time simulations demonstrated live on their actual platforms. West Hall B. (CF)

*6:00 – 8:00 – Electronic Theater: a juried selection of the best CG animated films, scientific visualizations, and visual effects this year. West Hall (CF)

*8:00 – 10:00 – Party! Party! The Siggraph Reception. If you don’t have a ticket to the ball, dive into the brewery on the 4th floor pool deck. Someone you want to meet might splash by. Westin Bonaventure Ballroom. (F)

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Thursday – Last Day.

8:30 – 3:30 – Registration, store.

9:00 – 1:00 – Emerging Technologies (interact with the future). Room 152 (BF)

Geek Bar (comfy chairs, wifi, streaming content): Room 409 (F)
The Sandbox (play games) – outside Room 403AB (BF)
The Studio (make art) – Room 151(BF)
Art Gallery (interact with sensual, sensory objects) – Room 150 (B)

9:30 – 3:30

Exhibition: The best and newest CG products and services that you can buy. (BCF)

Job Fair: Check the postings, get tips, meet and greet and share your demo reel. (BCF)

9:00 – 5:30 - Posters (future CG on cardboard) – West Lobby (BF)

9:00 – 5:00 – Lab Work: Researchers from top research labs and universities show technology for motion and emotion at 9:00, interaction at 10:45, and touchy-feely stuff at 3:45 in Room 411. (F)

9:00 – 10:30:

*Panel: Large steps toward open source with Rob Bredow (Imageworks), Andy Hendrickson (Disney), Florian Kainz (ILM), and Bill Polson (Pixar). This is a big deal. Perhaps, even, news-making. (F)

The Making of God of War III: The creative and technical team from SCEA detail the creative process behind the game's ground-breaking visuals. West Hall B. (CF)
Fun in Flatland: a strange collection of fun technology. Or is it a fun collection of strange technology? A dynamic noise primitive for 3D animation, immersive digital painting, GPU-based video up-scaling, image browsing. Room 406AB (F)

10:45 – 12:15 – TRON! Director Joseph Kosinski, producer Jeffrey Silver, vfx supe Eric Barba, and animation supe Steve Preeg tease us with visuals and answer questions from the audience. West Hall B. (CF)

2:00 – 3:30:

Screening: Chinese Student Animation. Room 408B. (CF)
Game Paper: Game design – serious, educational games. Room 406AB (F)

3:45 – 5:15 – Fur, feathers and trees: Tippett Studio’s creepy kitty, MPC’s wolfman and flying feathery mystical characters, and Disney’s animated trees. 408AB (F)

That’s All Folks! See you out there!!

Related links:

SIGGRAPH 2010

NVIDIA helped ILM create epic battle scenes in 'The Last Airbender'

2010-07-15T22:38:00.000-07:00

Paramount Pictures' latest film, 'The Last Airbender,' features extraordinary battle visual effects created by Industrial Light & Magic, with the help of NVIDIA Quadro pro graphics technology.

'The Last Airbender', released on July 2, features dramatic sequences in which characters are empowered to harness the four ancient elements of fire, air, water and earth and manipulate them as weapons in battle. Giant fireballs, tendrils of water, walls of earth and overwhelming air blasts are a few of the digital simulations created by ILM as part of the film's 485 visual-effects shots resulting in over an hour of screen time.

Central to achieving many of these sequences was the use of a tool created by ILM called Plume. Plume is both a fluid simulation system and a GPU-based renderer that utilizes the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture. ILM realized dramatic speed increases with Plume by running simulation renders on a 12-machine GPU-based render farm powered by NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 professional graphics solutions.

"As with everything in high-end visual effects, iteration was essential," said Olivier Maury, research and development engineer, ILM. "By working within an NVIDIA GPU-based framework, we saw up to eight iterations each day of complex fire, dust and air simulations. That represents speed improvements of 10-15x over CPU-based simulations. Access to CUDA and NVIDIA GPUs has entirely changed the way we approach a variety of complex visual effects challenges."

While Plume was initially designed for rendering computer-generated fire, its flexibility led it to also be employed in the creation of air-bending dynamics, ocean mist, smoke and the swirling of clouds. A particularly complex shot depicts the film's main character, Aang (played by actor Noah Ringer) fighting off hurled streams of fire with gusts of air that push aside the fire and sand particles. It was made possible by two Quadro GPU-driven Plume simulations of carefully directed air streams and fire, interacting with each other.

"Because Plume is accelerated by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, it's highly interactive and becomes a tool that relies more on the artist's eye rather than their technical knowledge," explained Craig Hammack, associate visual effects supervisor, ILM. "This means you don't have to understand the underlying algorithms or all of the fine details of how fluid solvers work to drive the detail of a simulation."

ILM's primary toolset on "The Last Airbender" included NVIDIA subsidiary mental image's mental ray software and Pixar's Renderman for rendering, Autodesk Maya for animation, The Foundry's Nuke for compositing, and proprietary tools Zeno and Saber for CG and effects creation. ILM plans to incorporate additional NVIDIA CUDA architecture-based tools into future project pipelines and continues to explore even more new ways to implement GPU-accelerated rendering into its visual effects workflows.

Related links:

NVIDIA

ILM

Di-O-Matic uncovers next-generation 3D facial animation solution, Maskarad.

2010-07-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

Automatic markerless facial performance capture software for Windows

Teaser

Intro to Maskarad

Whether you're creating games, or producing animation for TV or film, Maskarad lets you easily create expressive, realistic facial animations from video. In fact, Maskarad automatically converts the details and nuances of an actor’s video to animation data ready to be used in your favorite 3D package to easily animate your own character rig.

Maskarad uses state-of-the-art technology to automatically locates and tracks head motion as well as facial expressions and precise lips movements. No messy or cumbersome face markers setup, no expensive dedicated hardware and no need to outsource any part of your pipeline. Just a simple video file featuring an actor performance is all you need to create lifelike facial animations.

Maskarad not only analyzes video files, it also process the audio track and precisely detects the phonemes timing of the actor speech. Maskarad takes lips animation to the next level by using an intelligent phonetic engine to break down audio track cleanly. It automatically detect phonemes and has impressive language support that can handle almost any language including English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Italian and German.

Maskarad is a standalone Windows applications that can easily be integrated in any production pipeline. Select a video and Maskarad will quickly output facial animation data ready to be used in your favorite 3D applications including 3ds max, maya, softimage and motionbuilder.

Maskarad animation data works on just about any character rigs, from blend morph shapes to bones-based rig as well as complex custom rig, your character will have never feel so life-like that quickly.

Price : $1499 USD

ZBrush 4 announced for Windows And Mac OSX

2010-07-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

Z4 on 8-9-10

ZBrush 4
Windows and Mac
LAUNCH DATE 8-9-10

Also included:
Updated versions of all major plugins, and GoZBrush support
for Modo, Cinema 4D, 3DSMax and Maya for Windows and Mac systems.

More information about ZBrush 4.0 and its features will be presented closer to launch date.
See Z4 in action, SIGGRAPH 2010, July 27th-29th.
For a list of ZBrush presenters at SIGGRAPH, Click Here.

ZBrush 4 will be released as a free upgrade to all current registered ZBrush users,
and for those who purchase ZBrush before the release date.

More at:http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=089971

Real 3D or Fake 3D

2010-07-15T22:21:00.001-07:00

Many film studios are trying to cash in on moviegoers' craving for 3D films. However, many studios are "faking it" by converting 2D films into 3D post-production. Worse, the studios are not being upfront in their advertising, with some people feeling ripped-off after paying extra fees for the "3D Experience." This is no discredit to the actual graphic artists working on these conversions, but there's only so much that can be done post-production. If you only have one-eye's worth of content, you can't just make up the content for the second eye. It's not as simple as the re-colorization that happened to classic movies. (To learn more about the upconversion process, read Brian Palmer's article on Slate.)And so I present to you a handy list for separating the real 3D films that were shot/rendered natively in 3D from the fake ones that weren't. Happy watching! - Phil Dhingra PS. If you want to see my notes, go to View > Source in your browser for hidden HTML comments.
Real 3D 2012 Ice Age: Continental Drift Mad Max: Fury Road Men in Black III Spider-Man 4	Fake 3D 2012 Titanic ⁴
2011 Drive Angry Kung Fu Panda 2 Pirates Of The Caribbean 4 The Smurfs Tintin Transformers 3 Underworld 4 Yogi Bear	2011 Beauty and the Beast² Captain America Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 2 Priest Sucker Punch The Cabin in the Woods The Green Hornet Thor
2010 Despicable Me How to Train Your Dragon Jackass 3D Legend of the Guardians Megamind Resident Evil: Afterlife Sanctum Saw 3D (Saw VII) Shrek Forever After Space Chimps 2 Step up 3D StreetDance 3D Tangled The Mortician Toy Story 3 Tron Legacy	2010 Alice in Wonderland Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore Clash of the Titans Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1 Hubble 3D¹ Gulliver's Travels My Soul to Take Piranha 3-D The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader The Last Airbender
2009 A Christmas Carol Avatar Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Coraline Dawn of the Dead Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Journey to the Center of the Earth Monsters vs. Aliens My Bloody Valentine 3D The Final Destination The Hole Toy Story (re-release) Toy Story 2 (re-release) Up	2009 G-Force Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2008 Bolt Fly Me To the Moon Hannah Montana
2007 Beowulf Meet the Robinsons³ U2 3D	2007 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
2006 Monster House	2006 Superman Returns The Nightmare Before Christmas
2005 Chicken Little The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 2004 The Polar Express 2003 Spy Kids 3-D 1986 Captain EO 1983 Amityville 3-D Jaws 3-D 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon Dial M for Murder 1953 Hondo House of Wax
This has been brought to you by Philosophistry. If you have any additions or corrections, please email me with a link to your source. Right now, this list includes major releases in 2009 and after, notable releases in 2000-2008, and a handful of releases before 2000 for some historical context.^{1. "The IMAX 3D camera contained a mile of film, though this allowed for only 8 minutes 30 seconds of footage to be recorded." (wikipedia)} ^{2. Since new 3D models are being created to extrude the original 2D objects, this counts to me as new content, and so Beauty and the Beast will technically be "Fake 3D." However, Disney has all the original artwork saved in separate levels, so there may not be much "filling in the blanks" done by the new animators. Instead, the conversion may be more like the process used in Meet the Robinsons (see note 3) which I categorized as "Real 3D." Plus, unlike the other "Fake" films, Beastis neither live action nor 3D animation, and so moviegoers are not being sold an inauthentic experience.} ^{3. According to this YouTube they appear to have original 3D models. I also talked to a friend of some of the crewmembers, and apparently they projected the original 2D image onto the 3D models because it was faster than re-rendering with a second camera. This is why it appears like a longer conversion process in this article. If you have the original 3D geometry, that's real enough.} ^{4. James Cameron said, "It's never going to look as good as if you shot it in 3D. But think of it as a sort of 2.8D."}

SIGGRAPH Technical Papers

2010-07-14T21:10:00.002-07:00

One of the best things about SIGGRAPH is the sense, rightfully so, that you can discover the next new things in computer graphics, the trend, the technology that will become part of our lives in a few short years. This is most evident in the prestigious Technical Papers sessions.

“I recruited the papers committee with a goal of identifying the inspiring work that will drive the field forward,” says Tony DeRose, committee Chair. “I asked the tertiary reviewers to follow that lead and look for work that at first blush might seem wacky, but would inspire follow-on work. That’s my big hope.”

This has happened several times over at SIGGRAPH, and even though computer graphics is maturing, it still happens. “When the first papers on computational photography came out five or six years ago, it would have been easy to say, ‘this is image processing or analysis,’” DeRose says. “But, we accepted the papers. And now, it’s one of the most interesting and active areas in graphics.”   In fact, on Monday, from 9:00 to 10:30, if you have a Full conference pass, you can see examples of the “Frankencamera,” an architecture for programmable cameras implemented on a Nokia smart phone and an F2 camera, created by researchers at Stanford University, Universität Ulm, Nokia, UC Santa Barbara, and Disney Research Zurich. Also in that session Microsoft shows image deblurring using inertial measurement sensors, Columbia University has diffusion coded photography for extended depth of field, and a collaboration among scientists at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, The University of British Columbia, and Johannes Kepler Universität Linz offer coded aperture projection. What you get is what you see.

“The thing that strikes me most this year, though, is breadth,” DeRose says. “We have papers in traditional areas of research – global illumination, rendering, and computational photography. But, we also have some pretty unusual papers. One offers a system for projecting images on streams of water that are carefully controlled and timed so you get a two-layer display. Another, area of papers are on novel printing technologies to create not just 3D shapes, but also to print materials with any desired reflectance characteristics and deformation properties.”

DeRose found two other interesting trends. “One, potentially powerful trend is in the area of animation,” he says. “We’ve seen a lot of work in controlling two-legged, bipedal characters. In videogames, most of the run cycles for characters have been motion captured, so the characters can’t really respond well to unforeseen events such as a box thrown at them sideways. We have four or five papers that address the problem of building artificial intelligence agents that locomote in a plausible fashion and respond to environments, uneven terrains and unexpected obstacles. It seems to be a problem whose time has come in the academic research community, and it has almost immediate application.”

A second trend is in the area of geometric modeling. “This area, architectural geometry, started a couple years ago,” he says. “The reason that a lot of buildings are rectangular is because that’s a stable form of geometry. But, it turns out that there are other forms of geometry that allow you to construct freeform models that are stable, too. I think it could really change architecture. We will see fanciful buildings that wouldn’t have been possible before.”

One trend at SIGGRAPH that DeRose has changed, is the presentation of TOG (Transactions on Graphics) papers. “Until this year, we segregated TOG papers into a separate session,” DeRose says. “This year, we treat TOG and SIGGRAPH presentations symmetrically. The goal is to build conference sessions with coherent themes.” So whether the idea filtered through journal review process (TOG) or through the SIGGRAPH review process, if it relates to a similar topic, the researchers can present their papers in one session. That means people don’t have to invest time in running from one section of the building to another to hunt down information on topics they’re interested in.

Next up, the SIGGRAPH Cheat Sheets. Notebooks ready. We'll be asking questions after class...

Related links:
SIGGRAPH 2010

Southpaw Tech. works its DAM solution, Tactic alongside The Foundry's Nuke compositing app.

2010-07-14T21:10:00.000-07:00

Southpaw Tech. works its DAM solution, Tactic alongside The Foundry's Nuke compositing app.

Southpaw Technology will bring its DAM solution, Tactic and The Foundry’s compositing application, Nuke closer together. The integration will improve the workflow for compositors working with Nuke by alleviating many of the mundane tasks associated with file management.

With the Tactic-Nuke integration, compositing artists working in Tactic can instantly see what their tasks are for a specific shot, access their shot list, launch Nuke, load the most recent version (or older versions) of a shot, check in a file and more. This timesaving union of technologies frees compositors to focus on creating shots, rather than spending time on finding and securing files, or moving files through the production pipeline.

“Securing, tracking and versioning shots is a complete headache for most artists and most productions,” said Dr. Bill Collis, CEO of The Foundry. “As productions grow in size, the headaches will only get worse. We’re really excited about this new integration because it will not only solve many of the file management problems that slow productions down; it will boost the quality of composites by freeing artists to spend more time on shot creation.”

“Artists like to create, not manage the files they create,” said Gary Mundell, CEO of Southpaw Technology. “File management tasks waste a lot of time, and in productions, wasted time is wasted money. The Tactic-Nuke integration changes the game by getting rid of the time-consuming tasks and shifting the focus back to productivity, where it should be.”

The Tactic-Nuke integration is now available and will be on display at Southpaw’s SIGGRAPH 2010, booth #205.

Related links:
Southpaw Technologies
The Foundry [New site]

Animating a Blockbuster: How Pixar Built Toy Story 3

2010-07-14T21:08:00.000-07:00

Screenwriter William Goldman once famously declared that the most important fact of life in Hollywood is that “nobody knows anything.”

It was his way of describing a reality that continues to haunt the movie business: Studio executives have no idea which pictures will make money.

Unless, of course, those pictures are made by Pixar Animation Studios. Since 1995, when the first Toy Story was released, Pixar has made nine films, and every one has been a smashing success.

Pixar’s secret? Its unusual creative process. Most of the time, a studio assembles a cast of freelance professionals to work on a single project and cuts them loose when the picture is done. At Pixar, a staff of writers, directors, animators, and technicians move from project to project. As a result, the studio has built a team of moviemakers who know and trust one another in ways unimaginable on most sets.

Which explains how they can handle the constant critiques that are at the heart of Pixar’s relentless process. Animation days at the studio all begin the same way: The animators and director gather in a small screening room filled with comfy couches. They eat Cap’n Crunch and drink coffee. Then the team begins analyzing the few seconds of film animated the day before, as they ruthlessly “shred” each frame. Even the most junior staffers are encouraged to join in.

The upper echelons also subject themselves to megadoses of healthy criticism. Every few months, the director of each Pixar film meets with the brain trust, a group of senior creative staff. The purpose of the meeting is to offer comments on the work in progress, and that can lead to some major revisions. “It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up,” says Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3. “We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.”

The proof is in the product. The average international gross per Pixar film is more than $550 million, and the cartoons are critical darlings—the studio has collected 24 Academy Awards. Nobody in Hollywood knows anything. Pixar seems to know everything.

Inspiration

/ Day / 1
The first challenge: coming up with a great story. For inspiration, the creative team leaves the Pixar campus and heads to the Poet’s Loft, a cabin 50 miles north of San Francisco. They thought they already had a great start on the plot for Toy Story 3, but after 20 minutes, the whole thing is scrapped. By day two, a new idea emerges—how would the toys feel if Andy, their owner, left for college?

/ Day / 3
Working from a series of plot points, screenwriter Michael Arndt begins drafting the script. At the same time, director Lee Unkrich and the story artists start sketching storyboards for each scene. There is no animation yet, just drawn poses like in a comic book. But the storyboards allow the filmmakers to begin imagining the look and feel of each scene.

Presentation

/ Day / 36
So far, the characters exist only as digital illustrations. Character design has begun. Some are sculpted in clay and scanned. Others are drawn by hand. Later, visual textures—fur, fabric, hair—will be added to the form, a step known as simulation. “It’s a constant negotiation with the technical side,” says supervising animator Bobby Podesta. “Not everything we want is possible.”

/ Day / 123
The storyboards are turned into what’s called a story reel—a series of images that can be projected for an in-house audience like an elaborate flip book. The lines are prerecorded by Pixar employees. “This is a crucial moment for the film,” says Pixar president and cofounder Ed Catmull. “Watching along with an audience allows us to see what works and what doesn’t.”

Characterization

/ Day / 380
Actors start coming in to voice the script. Tom Hanks takes his turn at the Pixar recording studio to lay down his vocal tracks. Hanks reads every line dozens of times, varying his interpretations and emphasis. The sessions are also filmed, so animators can watch the actor’s expressions and use those as reference when they start animating the characters’ faces.

/ Day / 400
The shaders are responsible for adding color and texture to characters’ bodies and other surfaces. One issue is the fact that Woody and Buzz are made of plastic: Some plastics are slightly translucent, and they absorb light. So the shaders used a subsurface scattering algorithm to simulate this effect and make the toys look more believable.

Animation

/ Day / 533
The pictures are moving. Each character is defined by up to 1,000 avars—points of possible movement—that the animators can manipulate like strings on a puppet. Each morning, the team gathers to review the second or two of film from the day before. The frames are ripped apart as the team searches for ways to make the sequences more expressive.

/ Day / 806
The technical challenges start to pile up. (Simulating a wet bear is especially complex.) Good thing Steve Jobs insisted that the building’s essential facilities be centrally located. “Walking to the bathroom or getting a cup of coffee is often the most productive part of my day,” says producer Darla Anderson. “You bump into somebody by accident and then have a conversation that leads to a fix.”

/ Day / 898
The animators are working flat out. They stay late into the night in their highly personalized offices, which have been decorated in a variety of themes, from Polynesian tiki to ’70s-era love lounge. (“We let them do whatever they want,” Catmull says.) The animators even have their own working bars, complete with beer on tap and a collection of single-malt whiskeys.

/ Day / 907
Rendering—using computer algorithms to generate a final frame—is well under way. The average frame (a movie has 24 frames per second) takes about seven hours to render, although some can take nearly 39 hours of computing time. The Pixar building houses two massive render farms, each of which contains hundreds of servers running 24 hours a day.

Resolution

/ Day / 1,070
The movie is mostly done. The team has completed 25 of the film’s sequences and is just finishing an action scene that involves a runaway model train, smoke, dust clouds, force fields, lasers, mountainous terrain, and a massive bridge explosion. It has taken 27 technical artists four months to perfect the scene.

/ Day / 1,084
With only weeks to go before the film is released, the audio mixers at Skywalker Sound combine dialog, music, and sound effects. Every nuance is adjusted and re-adjusted. After a four-year production process, it can be hard to let go of Woody, Lotso, Buzz, and the rest of the characters. “We don’t ever finish a film,” Unkrich says. “I could keep on making it better. We’re just forced to release it.”

Building a Single Frame

From simple sketch to polished render.

1 / SKETCHES There are 49,516 of these sketches in the movie’s story reel, which is used as a kind of rough draft of the film. This frame captures the initial excitement of the toys as they arrive at Sunnyside Daycare, their new home.

2 / COLOR SCRIPTS It took art director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi one week to create this impressionistic digital version of the scene. The goal is to begin to define the style and lighting scheme of the frame. Concept art from past movies is on display in the Pixar art gallery.

3 / PROPS Toys are positioned in the 3-D “dressed set.” The TS3 team wanted the nursery to be alive with movement, so hundreds of characters are placed on the shelves. Now the director can fine-tune the camera’s movement to best capture the action.

4 / LAST DETAILS The amount of labor spent on each character depends on its prominence in the final shot. Background toys are given simple textures and basic movements, while Lotso and Woody—the stars of the scene—are lavished with attention.

5 / FINALE Surfaces—walls, clothing, faces—are fed through rendering software that simulates light and shadow. It also adds texture to Lotso’s fur, Barbie’s leggings, and the carpet. An average frame takes more than seven hours of computing time to render. A more complex frame like this one required eleven hours.

Eat3D DVD

2010-07-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

In this DVD instructor Adam Schuman walks you through the entire process of constructing a low resolution character worthy of any "next-generation" game. Follow him as he shows you his techniques in exporting the high-res model from ZBrush, reconstructing the low-res meshes, creating the UV's for all of the meshes, baking out all of the maps (3ds Max and xNormal), creating all of the textures, using real-time viewport shaders, and rendering out the final for your portfolio. This DVD is geared to improve your workflow by helping you understand what is expected of professionals in the field today.

About the Instructor:
Adam Schuman has been in the video game industry since graduating from the Art Institute of Dallas in 2002. He has always been passionate about high quality character creation and regularly competes in Dominance War and other character creation contests. Adam has worked at such studios as TKO, KingsIsle, Stalker Entertainment, Midway Games, and is currently a Senior Character Artist at Vigil Games.

Apps Used:

3ds Max 2011, Photoshop, ZBrush 3.5r3, CrazyBump, and xNormal

Duration:

4.5 Hours

Instructor:

Adam Schuman

DL Filesize:

Video Files: 951MB | Project Files: 472MB

Project Files:

The final 3ds Max lowres character files (2011 and 2010 versions). The final PSD textures. Obj files of the decimated highres and polypaint textures. Multi-Obj 3ds Max script and 3 point realtime lighting fx file.

More Info:

http://eat3d.com/character_lowres

Framestore CFC teamed up with Nokia for a Vfx competition.

2010-07-13T21:46:00.001-07:00

VFX ARTISTS INVITED TO CREATE EFFECT FOR

FRAMESTORE AND NOKIA'S NEW APP

London-based VFX house Framestore and Nokia have launched a competition inviting amateur animators and VFX enthusiasts to contribute ideas for a new special effect for their new project, FX Studio.

FX Studio is a mobile and web-based application that allows people to add a range of Hollywood-quality special effects to their home movies. Using 3D marker technology and external rendering processes, the application is poised to deliver startling results. It follows Framestore's Pocket VFX app for the iPhone.

FX Studio will feature a number of effects from a range of film genres. Entrants to the competition have been asked to submit an idea for the final Sci-Fi special effect, which will feature on both the web and mobile versions of the FX Studio application.

Framestore says that, rather than focusing on software skills, its animation team will determine the winner based on the originality and creativity of the submissions. The winner will work with Framestore to bring their idea to life, and both the winner and runners up will also receive a commercial copy of Autodesk Maya Entertainment Suite 2011 and a Nokia N8 mobile phone.

The competition is being hosted on Framestore's Facebook page.

In addition to the competition, the page will give aspiring animators access to Framestore staff including creative director Dadi Einarsson -- a member of the Oscar-winning The Golden Compass team -- and animation lead Anthony Gibbs. The team will post updates throughout the app's production, and field questions relating to all aspects of their creative process.

The FX Studio animation competition closes Sunday, August 1st, 2010.

Digital Arts Staff

For more information see the Nokia Web site.

For more information see the Framestore Web site.

SIGGRAPH Dailies!

2010-07-12T22:26:00.000-07:00

The Studio

Also returning to SIGGRAPH this year, bigger and better than ever is The Studio, once known as the 'Gorilla Studio.' The Studio, the Art Gallery – which features haptics devices this year – and Emerging Technologies, are all in one large open space. “We got the chairs of these three hand-on areas together to create an integrated experience,” Masson says. “They are all doing fantastic things.”

In the Studio alone, people with a Basic or Full conference ticked can take any of the 13 workshops in the new 15-person classroom. The workshops include animation, rendering, modeling with ZBrush. Studio presentations in The Studio range from descriptions of robots that touch; an introduction to Rhino; stop motion animation with Tom Gasek, formerly with Aardman and now in his own studio OOH, Inc.; DIY motion control and more. And, in the Studio’s Digital Artistry sessions, you can learn about camera calibration, a photo-imaging workflow, digital SLRs, video editing, 3D sculpting, printmaking – in fact, you could spend the entire show in The Studio. (Check the website for specific workshop, presentation and artistry session times.) But, if you did, you’d miss Emerging Technologies right next door.

“It’s pretty awesome,” says chair Mk Haley of the Emerging Technologies. “It’s something you need to experience. We have a display that uses bubbles as pixels. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s super low res, but it’s totally fun. We also have an eyeball that’s electromagnetically driven. It’s intended for use in animatronic exhibits; you can project video through the eye.” The latest hologram – a 360-degree autostereoscopic display in full color allows views from all angles. You don’t need 3D glasses to see this 3D image. Of the 120 submissions, the jury accepted 20-plus including robots, a variety of unusual human-computer interfaces – air typing on mobile devices, fluid-based haptics, and more, and a head-mounted, photometric stereo device for facial capture.

“The submissions came from industry, individuals, universities, and from all over the world,” Haley says. “The trend, though, is that things are being created with consumer-grade products. There’s a real science fair feeling. But, because of that, you could see some of these things on the market within a year or two.”

DAILIES!!!
Despite all the great sessions, courses, talks, screenings, papers, studio and more than SIGGRAPH offers, to Polson, a supervising technical director at Pixar, something has been missing. “A lot of people don’t have any place they can show off their work at SIGGRAPH,” he says. “If you’re an amazing shot lighter, you do awesome work, but how can you show that at SIGGRAPH? Your studio might have a ‘best of’ reel in the Electronic Theater, but you don’t get credited individually or have an opportunity to talk about your work.”
Last year, during dinner in New Orleans with Masson and animator Dana Boadway, he pitched the idea of giving animators or modelers or whomever a venue for a quick presentation. “You need only a minute or two to show an amazing model,” Polson says. “Dana said, ‘This sounds like dailies where someone brings a shot to the director, shows it quickly, gets notes and moves on.’ We all looked at each other and immediately said, ‘This is SIGGRAPH Dailies!’”

So, with that idea in mind, and using the Technical Papers Fast Forward session as a model, he crafted a call for submissions and received 100 entries, which the jury whittled down to 38. Each person presenting has about 90 seconds to tell their story and show their shot.

“We found that when we had an interesting personal story to go with the shot – something going on in the person’s life, something going on in the movie, something not obvious, the presentations just sang,” Polson says.   SIGGRAPH scheduled the Dailies without conflict, so you can see them without worrying about what else you might be missing. Any pass gets you into the show – Tuesday or Wednesday, 6:00 to 7:30. Just pick the night that you aren’t seeing the Electronic Theater.  For Polson, Dailies are just the first step in making SIGGRAPH more relevant to the production community. Look for an announcement sometime soon about something called “implementation papers.” “I received a proposal for a new track of technical papers called implementation papers,” Polson says. “If you look around here [Pixar], there are half a dozen serious researchers and then another 20 or 25 in the tools group or production who take their work and make it production-ready. They don’t have any place to present their work.” Implementation papers could make that possible.

“We’re just in the beginning stage of planning, but it could be the kind of things you could download, put into a code tree, and use in production,” Polson says. “They would have the bits and bobs and hooks to make something stand up and sing.”

Related links:
SIGGRAPH 2010
Emerging Technologies
Dailies

ILM's Elements for The Last Airbender

2010-07-12T22:22:00.001-07:00

or The Last Airbender, director M. Night Shyamalan turned to Industrial Light & Magic to create dynamic fighting scenes featuring elemental manipulation, as well as complex creatures and environments for the film. VFX supe Pablo Helman and associate VFX supervisor Craig Hammack take us through some of ILM's main technical challenges.

Creating 3D fire and other earthly elements

In the world of Airbender, each nation controls an element - Water, Air, Earth and Fire - under the supervision of the Avatar. When the Fire Nation seeks world domination, Young Avatar Aang, who can control all four elements, is charged with restoring the peace. Fire, in particular, was one of the elements ILM tackled early on, drawing on its previous work for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. "What we found in that movie," noted visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, "was that the fire looked great, but it was only projected onto 3D cards. ForAirbender we needed a real 3D volume fire. The fire events are coming towards camera and the camera was also moving around so much that we would need to be going through the volume itself."

Ultimately, ILM tweaked its pipeline so that fire could be simulated and rendered using Nvidia's GPU language Cuda as a complete 3D volume in hardware, rather than software. "I'm from a FX TD background and I've had to fake fire a few times," said associate visual effects supervisor Craig Hammack. "In the past, we've had to computationally through a simulation give you the proper temperature propagation and control. There's always a two-stage process where you're simulating massive amounts of data and you're visualising it in some GL diplays of points or vectors. Then there's the tuning of the render. They're coupled so tightly that as an effects artist it's really difficult to keep going through these hoops of simulation-render-refine, and then decide you don't have the right simulation and have to go back."

Rather than have artists visualise the simulation data, all of the fire sims went directly to a render which meant that iterations were essentially judged as the final product within ILM's proprietary Zeno package. "That ended up being a huge advantage to us," added Hammack. "The render gets passed down the line basically to a visual effects supervisor - several iterations a day - without having to ask them to extrapolate what they think the final look will be." Some practical fire elements were shot on set and used for the beginning and end of fire 'events', but in the end the fire bending sequences were realised entirely in CG. "We tried doing some of the fire as a special effect," said Helman, "but because of the behaviour of the fire, the camera moves and safety precautions, it couldn't really be done on set. We also played with the frame rates - some of it was shot at 96 frames per second or some 24 frames per second. Even if the performance was real-time sometimes we wanted the fire to feel like it was in slow motion."

For Earth effects, ILM relied on technology developed for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and other shows for shots of the ground shattering and fracturing. There was also development of the tools used for Water and Air effects. "We leveraged the fire pipeline for some of the water and air shots," said Hammack, "and early on we did development to build up our smoke tools because we knew it would take some form of vapour. We built an up-res pipeline to get a tremendously more rich look to our smoke."

One particular sequence featuring Aang battling Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation in a storage room took advantage of the fact that ILM's airbending pipeline shared a core simulation with the fire pipeline. The sequence was filmed using some practical fire at Zuko's feet and interactive lighting on set. ILM blocked in the animation of the fire and air with simple animated tentacles or spheres to judge the timing. "The shots sometimes ramped into slow motion," said Hammack, "which really highlighted the effects, and because the fire and air share the base fluid simulation we were able to really see how they integrate together and see all the nice flowlines as one starts to impact the other."

Artists relied on Nuke to integrate the water, air, earth and fire elements into live action plates. "We go to the trouble of match-animating to the elements quite closely," said Hammack, "so that then we can get decent hold-outs from it. For the water we can project the live action elements to get the refraction and reflection in a true three-dimensional space. We also got a true valid alpha out of the fire, so it's very easy to deal with in compositing. We build in the true geometrical depths into the renders and you get a very clean, very valid image to comp with. In the case of the storage room shots, there was quite a large amount of comp work to get across the idea that the fire is illuminating all of the air. The thing with the airbending is that the visual part of it is drawn from the elements that are around Aang at the time. In the dusty storeroom you get a beautiful scattered glow through the air and in slow motion you can watch it all resolve as it floats away."

Long shots

ILM's air, water, earth and fire effects also had to stand up to long shots planned by director M. Night Shyamalan. "In the storyboards and previs, I could see that here was a movie where there weren't going to be lots of cuts, even in the action sequences," recalled Helman. "The director would envision one shot in which the camera connects the characters and is revealing things in that one shot. So in the end, an average shot for us ended being between about 250 and 300 frames, which are really long!"

One particularly long shot - more than 1000 frames or 40 seconds - follows Aang as he fights six soldiers, zooming in and out of the action, and all with CG elements added by ILM. "In the shot," explains Hammack, "Aang is able to use half a dozen techniques to fight the solders. In one he does a flip-over and melts the ground underneath the soldiers. In another he pulls a slab of ice out from the ground underneath the soldiers' feet and launches them in the air. And in another he pulls water out of the ground and freezes a soldier against the wall. There are probably five or six beats to that one scene where we follow him. It ramps in and out of slow motion and ends up being a beautiful shot."

DP Andrew Lesnie filmed the scene with two cameras side by side with different lenses, one long 160mm lens and one wide 24mm lens, at 96 frames per second. The nested lenses allowed ILM to later zoom in and out of the action to focus attention on certain areas, then go back to a wide shot of the whole battle. Apart from adding in simulations of the element effects, other challenges of the shot included match-animating and rotoscoping all of the obstacles and interaction from both cameras and dealing with a multi-axis waist rig worn by the actor and stunt performer. Added Helman: "We also changed the background so that it was a market scene as opposed to a regular fight terrain and then we put snow throughout the shot - the whole thing took about 8 months!"

Fur, water and digital doubles

CG creatures feature heavily in The Last Airbender, including a 16 feet tall furry Sky Bison named Appa who has six legs and is also capable of flying. "Design-wise, Appa was a challenge because he's so big and hairy and needs to express in his face," explained Hammack. "Being an actor's director, Night wanted to feel every emotion on screen. In the scene where we find him, he's in this ice crater and the shots are framed so that he's so large that on a wide shot where the actors are quite small, he's still big. Then when you go in tight on an actor, you're seeing a very small part of him. He's basically all hair and it all has to resolve in the wide and the tight shots."

ILM's fur pipeline was re-purposed so that the existing hair interpolation scheme moved to a node graph-based system, allowing artists access to the data at any point in the process of interpolation. "We were able to extract data from that," said Hammack, "and insert data such as particles so that we could bury snow and ice chunks into his fur which had previously been somewhat impossible for our hair pipeline. We found that really helped sell Appa's size on screen."

In one shot, Appa tires from flying and resolves to swimming in the ocean with children riding on his back. Plates for the swimming scenes, which also feature large icebergs, were shot in Greenland. "We replaced all the water first of all so that we were driving the fluid sims," said Hammack. "Appa's motion is generating quite a large wake and we were able to derive a water line from that to get a matte and merge between two sims, before we got to the interpolation. We used the water line to drive the tufting that goes on as the hair gets wet and turns into tight tufts. We were also able to accurately drip water off the hair because we had knowledge in the hair graph of where the tips of the hair were. Then you do this kind of flight history to use the water line to fade off after time as the hair comes out of the water. It remains tufted and wet and then fades off after time."

ILM took a new approach to digital doubles seen in the film, including for the children seen on Appa's back and mostly for shots of Aang fighting or doing stunt work. "For digital double work it's becoming more and more important to have the actor much bigger on the screen," noted Helman. "Once you do that and you start transitioning between real and digital by hand, you sometimes start making up the shapes and you can actually start to lose the actor from one static pose to another."

To avoid this problem, Helman and animation supervisor Tim Harrington, working with ILM's R&D group, developed a proprietary face system based on motion capture sessions and camera reference of the real actors. "We brought in the actors and had six monitors around them in which we would play a specific shot where we needed to replace the face, say. We had six HD cameras and another little camera in front of the face of the actor. The actor would look at a looped shot and do the performance over and over until we felt we had got it. Then later on, we basically decoded that performance and put it into the shot, as opposed to developing shapes for transitions. That meant we had a digital likeness of the actor right from the beginning as opposed to us trying to find transitions between one expression and another one and then losing the actor in between."

CGWorkshops: Jon Rush and Rob Chang!

2010-07-12T22:21:00.000-07:00

COURSE OVERVIEW

This workshop is an updated version of Jon’s previous Modern Game Character Creation workshop. Updates include; full figure massing, hair sculpting, streamlined baking process, introduction and instruction with Topogun (students get a 20% discount per license), and an introduction to the Marmoset real-time viewing app. Jon will take you under the hood of the 'character art hot rod' and guide you through the 'ins & outs' of successfully creating video game characters within a studio mind-set. Through this intense eight-week class, students will learn by doing! Not only will you learn the successive phases of character creation based on a simulated game studio pipeline, you will also have your own unique creation to show off as part of your folio.

More info:http://beta.workshops.cgsociety.org/courseinfo.php?id=39

COURSE OVERVIEW

In this Becoming A Better Artist CGWorkshop, art director, illustrator, d'artiste author Robert Chang will be sharing his most valued knowledge and techniques that he has acquired over his career as an artist in illustration, comic books, video games and animation. This workshop is specifically designed for students who wish to take their work to the next level but feel lost or lack confidence in their pursuit to become a better artist. The course will focus on the most crucial knowledge, techniques and creative approaches, break bad habits and dispel common misinformation, and map out the most effective and fulfilling path for students to excel as artists.

More info:http://beta.workshops.cgsociety.org/courseinfo.php?id=40

Related Links:
http://beta.workshops.cgsociety.org

OptiTrack's Insight VCS brings an 'Avatar' virtual camera to any studio.

2010-07-12T22:17:00.000-07:00

Optical Virtual Camera System brings live-action camera Work for CG filmmaking at a lower price, compatible with all Optical Motion Capture Systems.

James Cameron revolutionized digital cinematography with his innovative control of the virtual camera using motion capture. This 'Virtual Verite' technology is now being offered for a fraction of the cost, with OptiTrack's Insight VCS.

Developed in close collaboration with Los Angeles-based previsualization company Halon Entertainment, the Insight VCS is the ideal virtual camera solution for a broad range of applications ranging from film and commercial previsualization to digital filmmaking. Throughout the development process Halon tested design iterations in the field, utilizing pre-production versions of the Insight VCS to create content for high profile projects and directors.

To ensure complete compatibility with a variety of production pipelines, the Insight VCS has been engineered for interoperability with any existing optical motion capture system - including OptiTrack, Vicon and Motion Analysis - that can track marker-based rigid bodies and stream data to Autodesk MotionBuilder or Autodesk Maya.

The Insight VCS is a two-part system, consisting of a hardware camera rig and software interface. As the hardware rig is tracked throughout the motion capture volume, absolute 6 DOF position and orientation data is streamed live via the software plug-in to either MotionBuilder or Maya to drive the virtual camera within the 3D application. Real-time reference video is streamed out of MotionBuilder or Maya back to the VCS display, creating a low-latency visual feedback loop, akin to the viewfinder in an actual digital camera.

Different versions of both the hardware rig and software plug-in are available to fit a variety of existing pipelines and production requirements.

Components include Virtual Camera Rigs: The Insight VCS offers two different hardware rigs for controlling the virtual camera:
The VCS:Pro
            Designed for professional production work, the VCS:Pro replicates the organic cinematographer's experience with exceptional fidelity. The professional model includes a 1280x768 HD LCD display for real-time feedback, mappable buttons and joysticks for extensive camera control, and a robust Redrock Micro shoulder mount kit. Markers and posts are included for a variety of marker configurations.
The VCS:Mini
            The VCS:Mini provides low cost, lightweight and highly flexible access to the virtual camera pipeline. The kit includes an anodized aluminum mount preinstalled on a wireless Xbox 360 game pad, as well as markers and posts.

    The Software Plug-ins: Comprehensive, customizable plug-ins are available for camera work in MotionBuilder and Maya for control over scripts, button mapping, scaling and camera properties. Universal versions of each plug-in are also available for use with non-OptiTrack motion capture systems.

Demonstrations of the Insight VCS will be available at SIGGRAPH 2010 at the OptiTrack booth #701.

The Insight VCS will ship late summer 2010 with prices ranging from US$199 to US$5,000. Software plug-ins to MotionBuilder and Maya for OptiTrack systems are US$1,000.

Related links:
OptiTrack
Natural Point
Halon Entertainment

SIGGRAPH in LA

2010-07-11T22:20:00.000-07:00

Now that SIGGRAPH is less than two weeks away, it’s time to pull out that slick little mobile digital calendar and get ready to meet, greet, learn, play, buy, sell and party at the biggest computer graphics conference in the world. This year, the legendary show lands in Los Angeles, home of Hollywood, digital multi-mega-media, games, aerospace engineering, and all things weird and wacky. And that means even more connections than usual for people involved in or interested in digital art, media and entertainment.

As anyone who has read the artist profiles on this site knows, the connections people make at SIGGRAPH often launch new careers and invigorate those already on a career path. It’s one thing to read about computer graphics. Quite another to shake the hand of the scientist who invented it, the technical director who put it to use, and the artist who made it beautiful.

“We’ve packed every minute of every day with uncompromising excellence,” says Terrence Masson, conference chair. “There’s not a single minute of weak content. We could have put on two SIGGRAPHs with the amount of amazing content that was submitted.”

For people involved in production, that might be especially true this year. “I tried really hard to get the conference mission and the jury instructions in line with Terrence’s goal of making SIGGRAPH more relevant to the production community,” says Bill Polson, director of production communities. “SIGGRAPH tends to favor cutting edge techniques and research. But in production, we focus on quality, excellence, issues of scale – applying a technique to 1000 shots. So, I wanted to make sure that in the panels, talks, and courses, we paid attention to excellence and interest as much as novelty.” 

Masson anticipates attendance will be around 25,000, and emphasizes that this is the reason to be there in person. “You can download more and more of the content before, during, after,” he says. “But you have to go there physically to experience all the face to face fun with colleagues, luminaries, and the people who make the content.”

In fact, the theme of the conference this year is 'the people behind the pixels.' “It won’t be obvious from reading descriptions of the talks and courses,” Masson says, “but they all have a personal angle. It’s something we really wanted to emphasize. The curated material, the call for presentations, all centered on making content more accessible, maybe more informal, and hopefully a lot more fun. Fun is going to be a big part of this.”  One bit of fun that won’t be happening this year, though, is Fjorge!, the competition in which teams of animators competed to create the best short animated film during the show. “It was too expensive in terms of hard costs,” says Masson. “People don’t realize this is a nonprofit conference and we rely heavily on donations from major studios and hardware and software vendors. Their generosity allows us to put the conference on. Every computer, monitor, light is donated. Fjorge! was a massive draw on that donation pool and when we have a limited number of donations, they have to go to our core programs.”
At the Movies

 Included in the fun, though, is the prestigious Electronic Theater, which showcases the best CG eye candy during the past year. After experimenting with various formats during the last couple of SIGGRAPHS, the committee this year returned to the ET everyone remembers in which all the content is wrapped into one two-hour show that repeats on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Three students at Filmakademie Baden Württemberg, Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck, and Csaba Letay, took Best in Show honors for their film, “Loom,” the story of a drowning moth. The award qualifies the film for Oscar consideration. Winning the Jury Award is “Poppy,” an independent film by James Cunningham from New Zealand, which uses motion capture and facial animation to help animate an emotional story of two soldiers and a baby in France during World War I. The best student film prize went to “The Wonder Hospital,” a short animated film by Beomsik Shimbe Shim of the California Institute of the Arts.

The Electronic Theater also honors visual effects with clips from “Tron: Legacy” (Disney / Digital Domain), “2012” (Digital Domain, Scanline), “Alice in Wonderland” (Sony Pictures Imageworks), “Avatar” (Weta Digital) “Iron Man 2” and “The Last Airbender” from Industrial Light & Magic, “Prince of Persia” and “Sherlock Holmes” from Framestore all making the cut. Also featured are commercials, more fabulous short films, scientific visualizations, and selections from videogames. It’s a juried and curated selection of the best in CG. There’s nothing else like it . . . except . . . the other screenings: Commercials and Cinematics on Sunday and Tuesday, more Short Films on Monday and Wednesday, and Chinese Student Animation on Thursday. You need a Full conference ticket or a Computer Animation Festival ticket to get a seat.

Related links:
SIGGRAPH 2010