SIGGRAPH in LA

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.

Oscars open visual-effects prize to 5 nominees

LOS ANGELES — The visual-effects category has gotten an upgrade at the next Academy Awards ceremony.

The board of governors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences increased the number of nominees to five, up from three, at the 83rd awards show next Feb. 27.

The switch brings more awards attention to visual effects, which play a bigger role in Hollywood blockbusters as digital-animation technology continues to advance.

Since 1996, the visual-effects category has featured only three nominees, including last year's winner, the science-fiction blockbuster "Avatar."

'Despicable' filmmakers like their villains to be redeemable

Anyone who has ever told a story to a group of children knows it's the good, well-behaved ones who always sit up front and listen attentively, beatific smiles on their faces.

But at least one new animation company is telling tales for the spitball-throwing troublemakers in the back row.

Despicable Me, a comedy with a super-villain as the leading man, opens Friday and is the first film from Illumination Entertainment, a Universal Picturescompany founded by former Fox animation chief Chris Meledandri (Ice Age, Robots).

Shut Up Fool, This is the A-team!

Director Joe Carnahan's re-imagining of the popular 1980s TV series The A-Team sees the renegade soldiers taking on a more modern mission. Overall visual effects supervisor James E. Price looked to both practical and digital means to achieve the characteristically crazy and high action stunts made famous by the series. We drill down on some of the major FX sequences from the film. 

Meet the A-Team

An early sequence shows Hannibal (Liam Neeson) and B.A. Baracus (Quinton Jackson) coming to the rescue of Face (Bradley Cooper) with the aid of the iconic GMC Vandura. Shots of the van launching were achieved by special effects supervisor Mike Vezina. "The director wanted the van to be quite iconic and come up almost like the rising sun and be backlit. So we dug in a 30 foot ramp that we could adjust in height and then used a very powerful 10 foot ratchet to get the speed of the van from 0 to 45 km/h. As it lands, the stunt guy took over and slid the van out." 

After recruiting helicopter pilot Murdoch (Sharlto Copley), the A-Team is then pursued in a dramatic helicopter

Jellyfish Transitions for History Channel

America: The Story of Us is one of the History Channel's most popular series, telling the story of how the United States was invented. To help showcase many years of history in only a 12 part series, Jellyfish Pictures realised several sweeping 'transition' shots to link stories together. We talk to Jellyfish creative director Phil Dobree and visual effects supervisor Hasraf Dulull. 

fxg: What was the overall philosophy behind the narrative device of these sweeping transition shots?

Phil Dobree: This show is quite different to anything we've been asked to do before. What the TV documentary guys are trying to do is find a new way of showcasing history. They're trying to get away from doing the doco-drama approach, which can sometimes have cheesy historical reconstructions with lots of commentary. In this series there was a mixture between talking heads with celebrities. They're trying to give some more mass appeal. Then they would take these very key moments in the history of the US and link them. The technique we had to come up with was to take the story and link it to the next story. You've got these global views that involve traveling across the country in time and space to the next story. 

The reason they came to us, I think, was that we've got a good reputation for coming up with creative solutions to those tricky problems. We just don't take visual effects shots and deliver them - we've have quite a lot of say in the whole creative approach. They didn't really the budget to do these sequences entirely photoreal. It just wouldn't have been feasible to go from big close-ups to these wide travelling shots to global views and back up and down again. So we came up with some creative solutions and ways of doing those shots in a more stylised look.


fxg: Can you give me an example of one of the transition shots?

Isaac Kerlow is the SIGGRAPH 2010 Computer Animation Festival Director. He hails from The Earth Observatory of Singapore/NTU ADM.

"The 2010 Computer Animation Festival continues the tradition of showcasing the best in computer animation and visual effects," says Kerlow. "This year we have formalized the submission categories to bring the Computer Animation Festival more in line with other top international film festivals and to make the jury process a bit easier. We have a Student Projects category, for example, among the new submission categories, so that computer-animated works produced to satisfy a school, coursework, and/or graduation requirement are to be submitted under this category."

Image Metrics acquires Character-FX avatar development company. John Riggs joins the team.

Image Metrics has acquired avatar technology company Character-FX, founded by 3D animation pioneer John Riggs.

Character-FX is an integrated facial rigging tool-set created by Riggs for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max. The technology helps to create character facial rigs using a proprietary automated weighting transfer system that rapidly shifts a character's facial motion for incredibly life-like movements. It can be applied to any character, at any quality level, whether based on joints, blend-shapes, or a combination of the two. This technology has been used in a wide set of production environments and has proven its broad applicability to a variety of project needs.

Platige Image shows work on the Polish Grunwald battle anniversary campaign.

Platige Image has just finished work on two live-action spots for the Grunwald battle anniversary campaign – “Grunwald - Battle of the Sescentenary”. They were created for 600th anniversary of one of the most important battles of Medieval Europe.

eyeon software reveals Fusion 6.1, its newest compositing application which includes OpenCL GPU acceleration.

Exploiting the power of low cost GPU graphics cards with hundreds of cores, coupled with an expanded feature set, this release is much more productive. The need for network rendering becomes greatly reduced, keeping the studio's infrastructure manageable and cost effective.

3D scene importing via FBX has been greatly expanded, streamlining the process between 3D animation and rendering to directly have the same assets working in Fusion. Produce passes and layers on the fly directly on the GPU at breath-taking speed. Cutting reliance on other applications and departments simplifies the production process. 

Bunkspeed launches NVIDIA Quadro GPU-based Bunkspeed SHOT 3D rendering software with iray.

Bunkspeed has announced the release of Bunkspeed SHOT, a completely redesigned 'interactive photograph for 3D data' software application.

After Bunkspeed was first to bring interactive ray tracing to the market in 2007, they revolutionized rendering by empowering anyone to create photographic-quality images using only the CPU. The new Bunkspeed SHOT™ leverages the power of NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) and is built on the massively parallel computing architecture of NVIDIA CUDA™ to dramatically accelerate the user’s workflow. Even the most complex scenes render interactively, and in real-time.

SIGGRAPH 2010 Announces Computer Animation Festival Winners

SIGGRAPH announces the Computer Animation Festival's Best in Show, Jury Award, and Best Student Project recipients for SIGGRAPH 2010 to be held in Los Angeles this July. Nominees were chosen from 750 submissions from around the globe, presented by both professional studios and students alike.

"It was difficult to narrow the pool of submissions because of the high level of quality and technical expertise," said Isaac Kerlow, Computer Animation Festival Director from The Earth Observatory of Singapore/NTU ADM. "Attendees will experience an endorphin rush as they watch the screenings of independent and commercial films, and will get a behind-the-scenes perspective from the planned Production Sessions featuring the visionaries behind some of this year's most successful Hollywood films. Whether you are an industry veteran or someone who just enjoys quality visual effects and animation, there is something for everyone this year."