March/April 2013 • Vol. 36 • Number 3
Innovations in visual computing for DCC professionals
Features Wizardry in the Land of Oz Visual effects artists create a fantastical landscape and two digital characters
10 for Oz the Great and Powerful . By Barbara Robertson
Console Wars Redux
16 players heating up the competition.
Next-generation Next-gen eration game systems will begin rolling out this year, with new By Karen Moltenbrey
Staying on the Grid
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Nvidia’s Project Shield game controller, the new kid on the gaming block . By Jon Peddie
COVER STORY
Growing a Giant Fantasy
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Departments Editor’s Note
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Going Green
For a while now, visual effects creators have been struggling to stay afloat as facilities have been forced to close their doors. Sadly, Rhythm & Hues had to file for bankruptcy protection just days before receiving an Oscar for Life of Pi . How did the situation across the industry erode so quickly? And, what can be done to rectify this situation for facilities and artists?
Spotlight
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Products OptiT OptiTrack’s rack’s Motive. The Foundry’s HieroPlayer. NewTek’s LightWave 11.5. Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 9.1. nPower’s PowerSurfacing. Nvidia’s Quadro K4000, K2000, K2000D, K600.
Viewpoint
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No Production Pipe Dream.
Review
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Maxon’s Cinema 4D R14.
Back Products
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Software and hardware releases.
For Jack For Jack the Giant Slayer , VFX studios had a big undertaking: developing giant characters and growing a giant beanstalk. By Barbara Robertson
Also: 30 Digital Specimens 32 Crood Awakening 36 Games to Film and Around Again 42 Adobe After Effects Turns 20
SEE IT IN
• Audio post team at Universal talks about Cinemax’s Banshee . • Interview with A Good Day to Die Hard director John Moor. • Oscar-nominated director David O. Russell talks Silver Linings Playbook.
ON THE COVER Some giant leaps in technology were required by Digital Domain to create the CG giants in the live-action film Jack the Giant Slayer , including the cook, pictured on the cover. Further developments from MPC were needed to grow the beanstalk. See page 24. March/April 2013
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Editor’sNote Editor’s Note
Going Green
The Magazine for Digital Content Professionals Professionals
EDITORIAL KAREN MOLTENBREY
A
s I write this, St. Patrick’s Day is nearly upon us, and everyone is thinking green. Green shirts, green beer, green hair…. Green is also on the minds of those in the visual eects community, albeit for a completely dierent (and less festive) reason. Immediately after the Academy Awards, digital eects practitioners and their supporters began substituting their Facebook prole pictures with wit h a bri bright ght-gr -green een square square to signify signify their support support for the VFX industry industry that that is going through a nancial crisis and the hundreds of artists from Rhythm & Hues (R&H) and elsewhere who more recently were seeing a dierent color, pink, as in pink slips. During his acceptance speech after winning the visual eects Oscar for R&H’s work on Life of Pi , VFX Supervisor Bill Westenhofer began addressing the crisis in the industry that led to the facility ling for Chapter 11 protection just days before the Academy Awards and discussing the protest by R&H artists and supporters just hours before the event. But before he could get more than a sentence delivered, his voice was drowned out by the J the Jaws aws theme signifying time was up (rather ironic, huh?). Westenhofer was ab able le to con contin tinue ue his com commen ments ts bac backst kstage age,, as did An Angg Lee aft after er receiving his Oscar for best director director.. But what he had to say was hardly supportive. What Wh at Wes este tenh nhof ofer er ha had d to sa sayy on st stag agee and and ba back ckst stag agee ae aect cted ed nea nearl rlyy eve every ryon onee sitsitting in that theater, whether they are part of a VFX-heavy movie or a live-action ick that relies on digital eects, invisible or not. And this is not a situation unique to R&H. Nearly all US visual eects facilities are suering, as well as some abroad. And the Oscars provided a perfect setting to bring this to light – and that is what former ILM GM and DD Founder Scott Ross believed. So he sent a Tweet early in the day: “I had a dream, 500 VFX artists near the Dolby (Kodak) theater on Oscar day waving signs that say “I want a piece of the Pi too.” People responded. After all, how could artists spend close to a year producing Academy Award-winning work, only to nd themselves without a paycheck immediately after? e thought was incredulous. What Happened? Studios are having to close their doors because they have been forced to take on work for much lower prices – often breakeven or worse – just so they can keep the lights on and retain sta. at can only go on for so long. As a result, VFX artists have turned into migrant workers, chasing jobs across the country and abroad. Additionally, they are doing so without health benets or consistent benets that follow them from job to job. When they are employed, they are required to work very long hours on a production, often without overtime pay. e facilities, like R&H, value their employees and their skills. ey just do not seem to have a choice anymore. How did the situation degrade so fast? It has been a problem brewing in our industry for the past several years but has now reached epic proportions. Turn back the clock, and starting in the mid-1980s, US visual eects studios provoked envy across the globe. For the most part, these studios studio s were formed based on the passion and vision of artists and technical gurus. ey achieved things that had never been done before in visual eects: TRON, Jurassic Park, Star Wars …. …. Later, we began to see more and more work on major movie productions being done outside of Hollywood. Little by little, pixel by pixel, work was sent around the globe. Today, London (particularly Soho) boasts a bustling digital production region wher wh eree yo you u ca can n n nd d bi bigg na name mess and and bi bigg tal talen ent: t: Ci Cine nesi site te,, Fra rame mest stor ore, e, Do Doub uble le Neg egat ativ ive, e, e Moving Picture Company, e Mill, and more. Meanwhile, Weta established continued on page 47 2
March/April 2013
Chief Editor
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OptiTrack’s ‘Motive’ to Simplify the Motion-Capture Process otion-capture provider OptiTrack has launched Motive, a unied sotware platorm or eliminating the complexities historically associated with motioncapture workfows. Motive delivers cleaner motion data, enables larger capture volumes, and can be tailored to meet a range o needs. With an easy-to-navigate interace, Motive helps solve data management and processing issues as well as skeleton solving. When customized with the Motive Body Module add-on, the system delivers simultaneous ull body and nger tracking, even in very large capture areas. Motive contains a 64-bit, multi-threaded architecture that acilitates the tracking o more objects and actors, longer recordings, and support or hundreds o cameras per system. A new shot management system allows drag-and-drop asset selection. Moreover, setup and calibration is ast. The Body Module add-on provides one-click subject calibration, precision nger tracking (with Flex 13 or Prime cameras), and kinematic labeling or clean real-time output. Overall system setup has been simplied to reduce prep time by 75 percent and can be handled by a single operator. Motive costs $999, and the Body Module add-on sells or $1,499. Existing OptiTrack customers with current sotware licenses can upgrade to Motive or ree.
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The Foundry Forges HieroPlayer he Foundry has launched HieroPlayer, a VFX review and playback tool or artists. It gives Nuke users the power to play back every shot on the VFX timeline in context on their own workstation. This tool is priced at approximately $300 including one year’s maintenance. A Nuke user with a HieroPlayer can export the shot or sequence that they are working on in Nuke, then play it back and review it in context with ull audio on HieroPlayer’s VFX timeline. They will also have easy access to multiple versions o their shots. HieroPlayer also complements Hiero, The Foundry’s shot management, conorm, and review tool set. With HieroPlayer, Nuke users get access to a ull Hiero project on their VFX workstation.
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NewTek Turns on LightWave 11.5 he LightWave 3D Group, a division o NewTek, is oering LightWave 11.5, the newest version o its 3D modeling, animation, and rendering sotware or artists and designers at no charge or all registered LightWave 11 customers. The upgrade includes new eatures and unctionality that enhance creativity and streamline productivity, including the Genoma instant character-rigging system with modular presets, making it easy to rig a simple biped or quadruped or animation without the need or specialized rigging tools. The release also contains predator and prey focking capabilities, per-object instancing control, and sot-body bullet dynamics with support or FiberFX. Also included are interchange tools supporting Adobe Ater Eects cameras and Pixologic’s Zbrush, stereoscopic and depth-o-eld motion blur in the Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR), and more. LightWave 11.5 costs $1,495. LightWave 11 customers can upgrade to 11.5 ree. Educational and other upgrade pricing are also available. A ree 60-day, ull-eature trial o LightWave 11.5 is available at www.lightwave3d.com/try.
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Cinema 4D R14 Now with all new, fully integrated sculpting system, new camera matching functionality, exchange plugins and more. Available in four flavors tailored to your needs: Prime, Visualize, Broadcast, and Studio. Academic pricing and many upgrade options available.
Adobe® Creative Suite® 6 Production Premium High-performance toolset with everything you need to create productions for virtually any screen. Log, edit, design, animate, composite, and refine audio and color. Now with Adobe Prelude™ and SpeedGrade™. Bundle with Wacom tablets or NVIDIA cards and save. Free ground shipping.
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mocha Pro v3.1 Intelligent Planar Tracking utility for post production and VFX professionals that combines advanced tools for: roto, motion tracking, object removal, insert, stabilization and 3D camera solve into a single desktop application. Seamless integration with industry popular editing, compositing, 3D animation/conversion pipelines.
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L A N O I T A N R E T N I
Blackmagic Shines with DaVinci Resolve 9.1
nPower Empowers SolidWorks
lackmagic Design has unveiled a major release o DaVinci Resolve 9.1, the latest update to its advanced color-correction tool that contains Apple support. DaVinci Resolve 9.1 now enables customers to use Resolve with Apple’s Macbook Retina technology. DaVinci Resolve 9.1 also supports FCP X Audition, enabling stack and scroll through multiple shots in a single location in a timeline or easily transerring les between the two systems. Improvements in mixed rame-rate XML integration also will allow better workfow between Resolve, FCP X, and Final Cut Pro 7 projects. DaVinci Resolve 9.1 supports improvements or Avid AAF, Sony XAVC, and AVC-Intra les, and a number o audio and perormance improvements. DaVinci Resolve 9.1 or Mac, Windows, and Linux is now available or download rom the Blackmagic Design website ree o charge or all existing ull-eature DaVinci Resolve customers. DaVinci Resolve Lite 9.1 public beta is available or both Mac OS X and Windows, and is ree to all users.
nPower
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Sotware has revealed Power Suracing, an industrial design plug-in or SolidWorks 3D sotware that makes the design process or modeling Class-A organic, reeorm suraces in SolidWorks more intuitive. A shape designed with Power Suracing is a single, unied object, which can be modied in subtle and signicant ways without pulling apart the resulting NURBS suraces. Once converted into a native SolidWorks part, those sub-D models are treated as i they had been created with traditional SolidWorks tools, so that SolidWorks eatures, like Booleans, llets, shells, and so orth, can be applied. For design changes, Power Suracing users can go back to the original sub-D orm and modiy the surace shape, and downstream eatures will be reapplied. Power Suracing can quickly and accurately convert virtually any sub-D model (even sub-D models that have some triangles) into the precise NURBS representation. It also creates high-quality suraces, which accurately interpolate the vertices o the original sub-D mesh.
Nvidia Releases New Kepler-based Quadros vidia has rolled out a range o Quadro proessional graphics products that oer much greater workstation perormance and capabilities. Built on the ecient processing power o the Nvidia Kepler GPU architecture, the new lineup includes: Quadro K4000 – A high-end card that delivers blazing-ast perormance or graphics-intensive applications. It has 3GB o onboard memory, multi-monitor support, and stereo capability in a single-slot conguration. It costs $1,269. Quadro K2000 – A mid-range card that oers outstanding perormance with a broad range o proessional applications. It
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comes with 2gb o onboard memory to hold large models and multi-monitor support or enhanced desktop productivity. It is priced at $599. Quadro K2000D – A variant o the Quadro K2000, with native support or two dual-link DVI display connectors or interacing with ultra-high-resolution medical imaging displays. This is also priced at $599. Quadro K600 – An entry-level card with great perormance and certications or leading proessional applications. It is equipped with 1gb o onboard memory, comes in a low-prole design or maximum usage fexibility, and is priced at $199.
By VINCENT BRISEBOIS
Data Files
No Production Pipe Dream Simplifying 5K 48 frames per second workflows – in a flash
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ith lms lie Te Hobbit creating worldwide excitement total data, as Weta Digital discovered while creating Avatar. around new technologies and techniques lie 3D, 4k, and Just by shooting in 5k instead o 4k, the amount o data created is high rame rates, the blocbuster bar has been raised once increased by 150 percent – or 600 percent when compared to 2k. I you again. Directors seeing to wow an audience will begin to demand big- add higher rame rates, lie 48 rames per second (ps), that amount o ger, better, and bolder movies than ever beore. As Hollywood (and Wellywood) pioneers continue to adopt new technologies to tell better stories on screen, the amount o data created in modern lmmaing will only continue to increase. For many, this might seem lie a great opportunity to test new ideas, but some studios and independent artists may be worried about how they can meet deadlines while still delivering eects that sell movie ticets. Tis balance between creativity and capability has always been a challenge in digital production. Te distance between the two always threatens to grow wider as technology advances. oday, many are nding that they can bridge the gap with fash memory acceleration or their worstations. With fash, even the independent contractor can manipulate 5k content in a Vincent Brisebois o Fusion-io (let) acknowledges that working with today’s huge les can be dicult and world without proxies. time-consuming. However, fash memory acceleration oers a viable solution. Hollywood’s Petabyte Era Te amount o data that is processed during the production o your average blocbuster has been a growing problem or years. Te era o the terabyte is long gone. oday’s lms are reaching into petabytes o
Vincent Brisebois is director of visual computing at Fusion-io, a computer hardware and software systems company based in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, that designs and manufactures memory technology. He has designed technology solutions for 2D and 3D production in the visual effects, video game, and design industries for over 15 years.
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data is doubled. Add 3D to the mix and it doubles again. Ten, with multiple camera angles and taes, it becomes enormous. Tat means a lm lie Te Hobbit can generate 24 times the data per second when compared with a 2k lm – and this is beore any visual eects are added to the mix. o wor around these huge le sizes, studios oten use proxies in order to wor on movies more easily. However, in 3D compositing, editing, and digital intermediates (DI), where every pixel counts, many eects must be wored on and reviewed in ull resolution, meaning proxies are out o the question. Te perormance requirements can quicly bring an unprepared studio to a screeching halt, or require corners to be cut in order to meet deadlines. The Effect of VFX on Data As i the amount o raw data in a lm wasn’t enough to satisy the appetite, special eects add layers and layers o pixelated data to pipelines,
further bottlenecking the production process. And this is before the lm even gets to color grading. e data added by modern special effects can easily dwarf a lm’s raw footage. e layered footage created by digital artists is so data-intensive, it usually has to be uploaded to a massive array, and then reviewed in a centralized location with enough throughput to eectively composite footage into one semi-nal product. Flash memory, the same memory that powers smartphones and tablets, is now helping digital artists accelerate their pipelines by providing the power and throughput needed to work on 2, 4, and 5 content interactively from their workstations, even in full resolution. With the ability to achieve reads up to 6/ sec – as in gigabytes, not gigabits – ash is more than capable of delivering the performance needed to manipulate 5 content. And as more lms begin to jump on the 48 fps bandwagon, the industry will need to shift to new solutions, like ash application acceleration, to meet deadlines. e beauty of ash-based solutions is that digital artists won’t have to change the way they
acceleration just means that artists will spend a lot less time sitting around, waiting for applications to load les and process changes. It will also mean artists can edit stereoscopic content in real time, so they won’t have to upload shots to a shared storage appliance to be viewed in a review room. Your own machine can now have the power to process even the most data-intensive tasks. ere was a time when it was too costly for independent artists to incorporate powerful solutions like this into their home studios, let alone for larger facilities to deploy application acceleration across the studio. Today, solutions can be aordably incorporated to allow any device – even a tablet – with a PCIe or underbolt connection to gain the throughput needed to work in 5. Making great movies is about telling better stories. With powerful ash memory platforms, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit showed us the next artists can focus on the most important part of evolution in filmmaking: shooting at 5 K, in 3D, their job, instead of worrying whether their sysat 48 frames per second, resulting in a plethora tems can keep up with their creativity. As a lifeof data that can create production bottlenecks long fan of VFX blockbusters and the creativity of epic proportion. of our industry’s artists, I can’t wait to see what do anything. Flash visual magic is unleashed by the power of ash. ■
A SMALL SELECTION OF VFS ANIMATION & VISUAL EFFECTS ALUMNI CREDITS INCLUDE The Amazing Spider Man Amy Lu, Senior Animator | Cedric Lo, Senior Animator | Cobal Yu, Digital Artist | Laurie Powers, Compositor | Marco Leone, Stereo Compositor Matt Wheeler, Lighting TD | Mike Dhamey, Senior Animator | Argo Geoffrey Hancock , Visual Effects Superviso r | Jamie Bowers, Texture Artist | Jose Yapor, Visual Effects Artist Assassins Creed III Dan Vargas, Senior Artist | Magdalena Dadela, Senior Character Artist The Avengers Aaron Gilman, Animation Supervisor | Stephen King, Lead Animator | Cedric Lo, Lead Animator | Scott Jones, Creature TD | Daphne de Jesus, Senior Digital Paint Artist | Nicholas Markel, Previsualization Supervisor The Bourne Legacy Emanuele Bignone, Generalist TD | Jose Julian Karam Lopez, Compositor | Saptarshi Chakraborty, Compositor | Gia Sadhwani, Visual Effects Artist | Pietro Ponti, CG Sequence Lead Brave Bill Watral, Effects Artist | Justine Codron, Lighting TD Cars 2 Stephen King, Animator | Sherrie Law, Digital Painter Cloud Atlas Kyeyong Peck, Senior Modeler/Texture Artist | Geoffrey Hancock, Visual Effects Supervisor Jamie Bowers, Texture Artist | Jose Yapor, Visual Effects Artist | Ian Sorensen, Lead Modeler | Alberto Landeros, Digital Compositor Lisa Nolan, Visual Effects Artist Conan the Barbarian Giancarlo Derchie, Lead Compositor | Tim Chou, Stereoscopic Conversion Compositor | Giacomo Cavalletti, Environment Modeler The Dark Knight Rises Dean Mangion, Matchmove Artist Frederik Lillelund, Lighting TD Dead Rising 2 Fredrick Fassé, Animator Dead Space 2 Wayne Gonsalves, Environment Art Lead Deus Ex: Human Revolution Ryan Nickell, Senior Animator Diablo III John Miller, Environment Artist | Alvaro Buendia, Cinematic Artist Steven Chen, Cinematic Artist District 9 Neill Blomkamp, Director/Co-Writer | Shawn Walsh, Visual Effects Executive Producer Robert Bourgeault, Lighting Lead | Paul Copeland, Character TD | James Stewart, Creature Supervisor Dragon Age II Nathan Zufelt, Senior Cinematic Animator Family Guy Michael Loya, Storyboard Artist Fast Five Rommel Shamoun, Compositor | Anthony Di Ninno, Animator FIFA 13 Jason McNamar, Associate Modeler Futurama Claudia Keene, Prop Designer Halo 4 Steve Dyck, Lead Animator | Mark Tanner, Senior Animator | Kolby Jukes, Senior Character Artist | Andrew Bosold, 3D Environment Artist Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 Henry South, CG Modeler | Joshua Herrig, Lead Lighting Artist | Jozef van Eenbergen, Pipeline Developer | Nuno Nisa Pereira, Visual Effects TD The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Adam Bradley, Senior Digital Paint Artist | Louis Cox, Camera TD | Michael Cozens, Senior Animator | Aaron Gilman, Senior Animator | Tamir Diab, Lighting TD | Cesar Rodriguez Bautista, Senior Paint Artist Hotel Transylvania Chad Ellis, Senior Animator | Eva Fan, Animator | Will McCrate, Digital Artist Hugo Geeta Basantani, Lead Compositor Ice Age: Continental Drift Borae Cho, Pipeline TD | Graham Silva, Animator Scott Lemmer, Animator | Thom Roberts, Animator Life of Pi Alex Berson, Roto/Paint Artist | Andrew Juano, Roto/Prep Artist | Diego Piccinato, Digital Compositor | Jason McKeeman, Lead Creature FX TD | Kirk Chantraine, Pipeline Software Engineer | Oded Granot, Compositing TD | Richard Sur, Lighting TD | Ryan B. Clarke, Senior Compositor | Teh-wei Yeh, Lighting TD Mass Effect 3 Nathan Zufelt, Cinematic Animator | Bartek Kujbida, Cinematic Animator Men in Black 3 Juan Carlos Mendoza, Digital Compositor | John Iskandar, Lighting and Compositing TD | Raphael Santos, Roto Artist | Ricardo Gomez, CG Artist My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Jayson Thiessen, Supervising Director | James Wootton, Director Prometheus Gerard Van Ommen Kloeke, Character Rigging Supervisor | Chrystia Siolkowsky, Roto Artist | Giancarlo D’erchie, Digital Compositor | Louis Cox, Camera TD Resident Evil: Retribution Corey Coates, Compositor | Juan Carlos Mendoza, Digital Compositor | Diego Piccinato, Digital Compositor | Ricardo Gomez, CG Artist | Arthur Logo, Digital Compositor | Karan Awasthi, Digital Compositor Rise of the Planet of the Apes Carolyn Wong, Creature TD | Richard Sur, Lighting TD | Chrystia Siolkowsky, Motion Editor Sleeping Dogs Andrew Poon, Cinematics Animator | Corey Kleim, Lead World Artist | Hani Abu-Ghazaleh, Art Director | Rob Starr, Lighting Artist | Sota Yuyama, Gameplay Animator | Terence Wong, Character Artist Smurfs Jeff Struthers, Character Animator Michael Dharney, Senior Animator SpongeBob SquarePants Andrew Overtoom, Animation Director Supernatural Christopher Richardson, Compositor/Lead Artist | Sebastian Fernandez Hyde, Digital Compositor | Werner ten Hoeve, Compositor Thor Daphne De Jesus, Roto/Paint Artist | Eric Petey, Animation Supervisor | Rex Fang, Animator Toy Story 3 Daniel Holland, Sets Artist
Tristan Ikuta, Simulation & Effects Artist Transformers: Dark of the Moon Serguei Kalentchouk, Lead Character TD | Jooyong Lee, Digital Artist The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 Abel Vargas, Paint/Roto Artist | Arthur Lobo, Digital Compositor Corey Coates, Compositor | Frank Akrong, Digital Compositor | Giorgio Bertolone, Senior Rigger | Karan Awasthi, Digital Compositor Marcela A. Silva, Paint/Roto Artist Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception Mike Yosh, Lead Gameplay Animator | Jason Richmond, Game Director Wreck-It Ralph Andrew Lawson, Animator | Justin Hammond, Senior Lighting Artist | John Wong, Animator Zero Dark Thirty Shivas Thilak Anthikkat, Paint/Roto Artist | Jessica Wan, Compositor | Chun-Ping Chao, Digital Compositor TO NAME A FEW
VFS STUDENT WORK BY CHASE WALLER
March/April 2013
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VFX•Stereo 3D
efore the wizard of Oz became wonderful, he, too, needed to leave black-and-white Kansas, follow a yellow brick road, determine who was good and evil, and discover greatness within himself. In Oz the Great and Powerful, an imagined prequel to the Wizard of Oz, the would-be wizard is a cunning magician, Oscar Diggs (played by James Franco), in a small-time circus. A tornado (of course) sucks his hot-air balloon inside, and he emerges from the vortex in the colorful but threatened Land of Oz. Can he save it from the wicked witch? Or, is his magic only an illusion? e biggest illusions in the lm, however, are the Land of Oz itself and Oz’s traveling companions: the monkey Finley voiced by Zach Bra, and a tiny China Girl voiced by Joey King. Sam Raimi, known for Darkman
Artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks created all the fantastical landscapes for Oz the Great and Powerful as well as China Girl (top) and the monkey Finley (not pictured).
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and the Spider-Man trilogy, directed the Walt Disney Pictures production. A crew at Sony Pictures Imageworks provided a majority of the visual eects, as they had done for Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy and, perhaps more akin to this lm, Alice in Wonderland. Visual Eects Supervisor Scott Stokdyk, who won an Oscar for the visual eects in Spider- Man 2 and Oscar nominations for Spider-Man and Hollow Man, was overall supervisor for the lm’s approximately 1,500 shots. Imageworks took on between 1,000 and 1,100 shots, including the main digital characters and most of the environments. Artists at Luma created the tornado and a ying action scene between two witches at the end. Digiscope, Evil Eye, and Method artists handled much of the 2D compositing work.
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“On this movie, we art-directed every single All along the way, the Land of Oz is a fabri- and not be in a sea of blue. To a large extent, thing with an eye to consistent detail,” cated world. though, this is a traveling movie, so once you Stokdyk says. “And along the way, there “ere was no location photography,” Stok- go 200 or 300 feet from one environment to was a massive amount of hand-done, art- dyk says. “is lm is very art-designed, very, another, it didn’t make sense to build a set. directed work. We had massive environments very sculpted. Sam Raimi, Robert Stromberg And we couldn’t build a set for only one shot. and a massive amount of animation.” [production designer], and Peter Deming So we ended up having probably ve to 10 all At Imageworks, a crew of approximately [director of photography] wanted a stage- blue environments.” 300 created the eects, including 50 anima- based look. A classic Hollywood look. So, they tors at peak who performed the two digital decided to shoot it all on stages.” Landscape Design stars that appear in the lm: the little China e production team chose shooting on Including the set extensions, the crew at Girl and the ying monkey Finley. Because stages to create a style based on 1920s lms. Image works built approximately 50 environthese characters appear with Oz throughout ey wanted to harken back to the 1900 ments – interiors, exteriors, the Emerald City, the lm, and for consistency, it made sense to publication of Frank Baum’s book e Won- the witch Glinda’s courtyard, and many others have Imageworks handle the environments. derful Wizard of Oz, and the 1902 stage play in a variety of shapes and forms. “is is a traveling buddy movie,” says Digi- rather than the famous 1939 lm. “We tried “We start in Kansas during the Dust Bowl,” tal Eects Supervisor Francisco De Jesus. “Oz to build sets for as much as we could and use Stokdyk. “I’m familiar with the landscape – starts in one place and walks to the Emerald bluescreens, our modernized version of back- I grew up in Kansas – so to add interest, we City on the yellow brick road, and all this time drops,” Stokdyk says. “Our goal was to be gave Kansas rolling hills like the Flint Hills you see all the way to the horizon in daylight.” stage-based. We fought to get on-set builds [in eastern Kansas]. en, we go into a fan-
Visual effects artists create a fantastic landscape and two digital actors for Oz the Great and Powerful
©2013 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
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Oz was flmed entirely on stage. There were no exterior locations. Most o the landscapes were hybrids with a set piece in
the oreground, CG set extensions in the mid-ground and background, and matte paintings in the ar background.
tastical landscape, a land o jagged peaks and wateralls, and into a lush area. All through the movie, we explore dierent corners o Oz.” Production Designer Robert Stromberg, who won Oscars or the art direction on Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, created the concept art or the lm. o urther guide the postproduction crew, he painted over dailies shot on the elaborate sets. “Robert married the concept art with the set,” says De Jesus. “Because his paint-overs would have gone through Sam [Raimi], they gave us the rst solid approved look o a scene or a shot. We paid very, very close attention to those paint-overs. He provided lighting cues in addition to what they built.” On set, the Imageworks team scanned and photographed each set and collected HDRIs at two heights or each lighting setup. “We had almost 1,000 HDRI pairs at the end o the shoot,” Stokdyk says. “We could ully reconstruct what Deming lit or any set. But, you always art-direct a bit away rom that or put special lighting in to make it look more artistically beautiul. On set, the DP is concerned with making a shot look beautiul. Real is automatic. But in visual eects, we have a dual challenge. We have to make the shot look beautiul and look real. I we cheat the lighting and put a rim light around our monkey, he is lit more beautiully even though the lighting isn’t ‘real.’ So, it’s something we have to weigh constantly. Tis is a antasy movie with a ying monkey in a antastic world. We wanted it to 12
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look real, but also antastically beautiul.” meeting layout’s requirements.” Te nal layMost o those antastic environments were out with the shot ully set-dressed with uphybrids: A set or the near-ground, CG exten- graded models would happen ater animation. sions or the mid-ground to background, and digital matte paintings in the ar background. Flowers and Trees Working rom Stromberg’s paint-overs, a team Modelers built all the props to work rom at Imageworks mapped out the assets the crew any angle so the assets could be re-used, and they made the set extensions rom scans o the would need to build. Te rst step was matchmoving. Layout sets so that the digital replicas would perectly artists positioned the stereo virtual cameras in match. “We always tried to be efcient and the same position as the on-set camera, albeit build only to camera, but the reality is that this inside a digital environment that matched the is the director’s playground and directors like outlines o the set. “Layout worked in [stereo] to move around,” De Jesus says. “Although 3D all the time,” De Jesus says. “Tis lm many models could be re-used, the texture and Spider-Man were our rst native shows. painting was done more to camera. I we had Because we had native stereo rom day one shots only rom a particular angle, we’d paint and had the [digital] stereo cameras rom the only those assets in high detail.” o link the unique landscapes, the visual matchmove, there was no reason not to look at stereo in layout and in animation – sometimes eects artists populated areas in each with even in eects as early as possible to get a sense similar assets, and used a similar layout or the ground cover. o where to play up the stereo.” “We’d mix and match the assets, but they Ten the layout department looked at the previs or each shot and the images that were the thread that takes us rom start to Stromberg had painted over the dailies. “We end,” Stokdyk says. “For example, we might had to reconcile how they cheated with what have a corneld next to the yellow brick road, we could do,” De Jesus says. “For example, with a unique lighting, layout, and eel. But, they might have used orced perspective, but the owers in the oreground would appear in when we had to create the shot in stereo, it three or our other places, as would the ence posts along the yellow brick road.” would break.” Te cloth and hair teams created the Next, the layout artists set the stage or the animators, and ordered assets. “Our layout ground cover, the grass, and owers. Te and model departments worked hand-in- layout team managed the trees, with eects hand,” De Jesus says. “Ordering props was adding dynamics. By the end o the lm, the an ongoing process: Modeling was constantly teams had created a orest library with 500
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unique trees modeled, textured, and ried. the volumes. “We worked out a way to turn that is, rom elements inserted into the at“We explored usin L-systems and more any eometric model into a cloud volume,” mosphere. “Every scene has an atmospheric procedural or dedicated sotware or the trees, De Jesus says. “Te layout team could place theme,” Stokdyk says. “In Kansas, we had ut our modelers and texture painters are very the shape and it would turn into a ull-on straw and dust lowin throuh the oreparticular aout the spans and how they want volumetric.” round, which ave us texture and allowed us the UVs laid out,” De Jesus says. “It proved to Te ules were spheres deormed y the to art-direct throuh the [stereo] depth. And, e as much work to chane an out-o-the-ox characters inside when they pushed aainst throuhout the movie, we have snow, clouds, tree model as to do one rom scratch. Most the surace with their hands and eet. “Glinda dandelion pufs, and sparks. We had the 3D o our trees were eometry, ut or the distant is eleant and poised, so her ule has that photoraphy and the concept artwork, ut ones, we used textures on at cards. We kept character,” De Jesus says. “Oz stumles and there are still a lot o art-direction decisions we our renders as ecient as we possily could.” ounces around inside his ule.” can make in visual efects. Where to put trees rees not on at cards had animation cycles De Jesus considers these scenes with char- to dapple shadows. Where to position a matte that could e scaled up or down in intensity or acters inside ules to e one o the techni- paintin or the sky and have clouds that comspeed to help rin the landscape alive. “De- cal achievements on the lm. For reerence, plement the oreround. And we made dozens pendin on the shot, the lihtin team could ad- the crew took stills and videos o iant soap and dozens o depth choices. It was a reat cre just the movement with a slider,” De Jesus says. ules several eet across in various lihtin ative outlet.” Why the lihtin team? “Tere’s a simple conditions. “On past shows, we used our volact that any director can comment on certain ume renderer SVEA and we had to do a lot o China Town details only when a shot is close to comple- cheats. Sometimes efects Ds would liht the wo o the most creative innovations devised tion,” De Jesus says. “Te director miht have volumes and the compositors tried to alance y the crew solved the prolem o ivin reviewed a shot 10 or 20 times or animation the passes to create a look. But aout two or James Franco a way to interact on set with his and have the character perormance he wants. three years ao, we incorporated SVEA into small CG uddies: China Girl and Finley, the But only ater lihtin and compositin can Arnold, our loal illumination renderer, and monkey. Oz discovers China Girl when he stumles he consider the whole alance o the rame. that did away with holdouts and lihtin isSomethin on the riht miht distract rom a sues. It means, or example, i we have smoke across her destroyed villae. On set, James character in rame let.” Havin the sets lessened the amount o uildin the Imaeworks crew needed to do, ut it also made their work harder. “When you have an all-CG shot, it’s a really well-understood pipeline these days,” Stokdyk says. “You track the actors on luescreen, track the camera, rotomate to cast shadows. But when you have set extensions, you have to make sure you match-move 100 percent in every part o the rame. You have to ure out where to split the lines and lend the two, especially in [stereo] 3D. I the lihtin in part o the set is too hot or out o the sweet spot o lihtin, i there’s an errant shadow, you have to replace that part o the set. I somethin accidentally covers the set, you have to remove it. Te more you uild o a set, the more challenes there are. You trade the The bubbles moving across Oz were geometric spheres deformed by the characters inside and then eauty o ettin somethin in camera with the converted into volumes. technical challenes in post.” next to a red wall, the smoke automatically Franco crouched down and peered into a ets the red ounce. All these sutle thins small-scale set uilt y a crew at New Deal. Flighty Bubbles take a scene to the next level. It makes it look “We had New Deal, which is a miniature Durin one sequence, Oz, the ood witch real and, in some cases, look eautiul.” company, uild the sets or this little world,” Glinda (Michelle Williams), China Girl, and Tus, or Oz, the artists could liht the Stokdyk says. “But we shot it as one-to-one Finley travel inside enormous ules across entire environment and render the scene to- scale. It has iant teapots, which are the homes a landscape. “Te ule voyae eins at ether with the volumetrics. “Te shadowin, or China Girl, her amily, and her villae. Indawn,” says De Jesus. “Tey are runnin rom loal illumination, and ounce liht all work side the teapots is miniature-scale urniture.” the ad witch, jump of a precipice into the out o the render,” De Jesus says. “Our render On set, Franco could hold a China Girl clouds, and when they emere, they are in the servers have 24gb o RAM, so we piled on de- puppet in his hand, ut 99 percent o the time ules. Tey travel on ules to her castle, tails until we hit that limit, and then we were China Girl is CG. Her size, only 18 inches tall, oin around, throuh, aove, and elow done. You can never have enouh detail; the made it dicult to ive him useul eyelines CG clouds.” complexity is what makes the scenes look real and interaction. A tennis all on a stick or a With clouds desined to mimic the land- and interestin.” laser pointer could provide an eyeline, ut not scape elow, the crew needed to art-direct Some o that complexity came rom efects – the interaction, and she was too short to have March/April 2013
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surace like old china, and we wanted that denitive texture. So, we worked with Scott [Stokdyk] to minimize the eshiness without making her look old and haggard.” o have emotions play across her ace in a scene without breaking the eeling that she was made o porcelain, the animators devised a unique solution. “Her expressions had to be readable, so when they change within a shot, we tried to hide the change in the gross movement o her head,” Saliba says. “Or, we’d cut away to James Franco. When we cut back, the expression was there. We didn’t modulate. Tat limitation sometimes made our job dicult. But, it was exciting. Usually we ght a tendency to rely on ormula. Tis time, we couldn’t pull rom our old bags o tricks. China Doll eels like a character you don’t usually see. I think she’s endearing. Te scene when you rst meet her in Chinatown is heart-wrenching.”
At top, the china village was a miniature set built at New Deal Studios. On set, a puppeteer perormed China Girl, but in the flm, she was computer-generated 99 percent o the time. At bottom, the monkey Finley was always digital.
young voice actor Joey King play the doll’s part on set. “We couldn’t squeeze Joey King down into a corner,” Stokdyk says. “So, we had a marionette version o China Girl on set and a master puppeteer, Philip Huber, who has been doing this or 40 years. He was able to get great nuances out o a simple model, even though he could only open and close its eyes. In post, we painted out the puppet and Philip when he was in rame, and replaced the puppet with the CG version. Easy to say, but time-consuming and tedious or the painters. “It was painul or all involved,” De Jesus says. “Te puppeteer was in a blue suit in the scene, casting a shadow, crossing in ront o the actor. So, the amount o paint work we had to do was staggering. It took a long time to get there. Ater we nished the animation and renders, we waited another three weeks or the paint work. When it was done, though, the shots actually did work.” On set, as James Franco acted with the marionette, he wore ear buds to hear King – who watched rom a nearby booth – perorm China Girl’s voice. “Sam [Raimi] directed the perormances, so later we had this great source material to draw rom,” Stokdyk says. “ory Salida, our 14
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animation supervisor, could pick and choose with Sam how much to take rom the puppet perormance and how much rom Joey.” Modelers created the CG character with ball and socket joints like the real puppet. Ater the marionette had appeared on set and in dailies or ve months, the puppeteered version had become the China Doll character in people’s minds. “Philip’s [Huber] instincts were good,” Saliba says. “Te perormance was simple, subtle, and poignant. And because o the puppet’s limitations, his China Girl had quirky things we wouldn’t have invented as we animated. Whether we used the surreal and awkward puppet or Joey, the little girl, depended on which Sam ell in love with. But even when he leaned toward Joey, we’d go toward the surreal puppet.” Te big challenge or the animators was in perorming the ace o the porcelain doll. Despite her brittle ace, China Girl needed to be a living, breathing character. “We didn’t want her to move her mouth like a ventriloquist’s dummy,” Saliba says. “We needed to eel that she was speaking, and we wanted that sweet little girl ace. But, we didn’t want her ace to eel like rubber. Her ace has that crackled
Monkey Business Like China Girl, the CG monkey Finley’s on-set presence was a challenge, but the challenge was distinct. Finley stands three eet rather than 18 inches tall, so in scenes when the monkey is on a rock or a tree stump, Franco could have been at eye level with Zach Braf, who was the digital character’s voice. But not when Oz (Franco) walked and talked with Finley at his side. And, the monkey ies. “When Oz is walking on the yellow brick road, you want the CG monkey to interact with him,” Stokdyk says. “We wanted that interaction between James [Franco] and Zach [Braf].” Rather than using a marionette or the monkey as they had or China Girl, though, the crew devised a unique solution. “We had a puppeteer in a blue suit with a monitor on a pole,” Stokdyk says. “We called it ‘puppet cam.’ ” In addition to the small monitor, the puppet cam pole had a lipstick camera, all covered in blue neoprene. Te puppet cam operators were rom the KNB EFX Group, which provided special efects. On set, Franco and Braf would rehearse scenes and block out action, and then Braf would move to a soundproo booth equipped with two monitors. Te main camera ed the ootage the DP shot to one monitor. Te other monitor showed ootage rom the lipstick camera on the puppet cam pole; in other words, rom the monkey’s point o view, the view Braf would have had i he were on set rather than in the booth. Also in the booth was a camera aimed at
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Bra’s ace that ed images to the monitor on the puppet cam pole. Tus, Franco could see Bra’s ace on the small monitor on the pole. And, Bra could see Franco’s ace. In addition, both actors had ear buds so they could hear each other. “Te puppet cam operator would put the monitor and lipstick camera where the monkey’s head was supposed to be, so James al ways had a live actor’s ace and eyeline,” Saliba says. “I the monkey was on the ground, the operator had a three-oot rope, so he knew where the monkey’s head would be. He could move the stick up and down with a lever, and he had a joystick to swivel the monitor on the end o the stick, like a little head. I don’t know i anyone expected this, but it gave the thing a little personality as well.” Certainly more personality than a tennis ball on a stick and a laser pointer. “It ended up working very well,” Saliba says. “It’s a big stretch or an actor to visualize a character when we have a personal assistant reading lines o camera and a tennis ball on set. Zach
and James could play o each other, and we got a much more tactile perormance rom James on stage. Even when they brought back Zach post-shoot to change a line, it was worth it because James Franco’s perormance was so vibrant.” Animators had reerence rom the rehearsal to see how Bra gestured, ootage rom Bra in the booth or acial expressions and lip sync, and ootage o monkeys. “I the monkey was doing something physical, we leaned toward reerence o the animal behavior,” Saliba says. “I he was acting, we tended to rely more on the videotape o Zach.” Tere was no reerence, however, that showed how a three-oot-tall monkey would y. “He couldn’t y like a bird,” Saliba says. “He was a monkey with wings. We didn’t have a benchmark. We had to fgure out how the physics would work.”
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Once the animators had created a ight o motion capture or, in the case o butteries, cycle that elt right or Finley given his weight bits o animation.” As the animators worked, the director and and shape, they realized the same physics wouldn’t produce a good image when he hov- Editor Bob Murawski took notes. “Tey ered. “He could propel himsel with the per- would ask why we didn’t have a particular perect amount o agility, but when he hovered, son working on a character,” Saliba says. “Tey his head bobbed up and down, which didn’t were very conscientious. Tey’d see things they work or conversation or with the eyeline,” liked and note who did it. I’ve never experiSaliba says. “We had to fgure out a way to enced that beore. Sam had done Spider-Man, make his physics believable without having o course. But, this was the frst movie or them in which the two main characters who him bob. It took trial and error.” Finley is small and cute, and has bird-like emote and carry chunks o the flm are com wings with eathers. Te baboons in the mov- pletely digital. Tey worried about whether ie, which y in hoards, have one purpose: kill. they could carry the perormance.” In the 1939 flm Te Wizard of Oz, the “Te baboons have big, boney bat wings,” Saliba says. “We had to experiment. We used main character Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) all the reerence we could fnd rom nature, had three buddies, three actors wearing suits, any o which would have been eligible or Osbut nothing that big ies.” car nominations. Filmmaking magic has adDigital Actors ventured a long way since then: In this movie, In addition to the two main characters, the the main character travels with two digital animators created swarms o butteries, digi- buddies. tal doubles or the main characters, and put We can trace the frst digital companions thousands o people in the Emerald City. back to the dragon created 17 years ago at
At let, animators cut between dramatic changes in acial expression to give China Girl expressions without turning her ace rubbery. At right, a monitor on a stick allowed Oz (actor James Franco) to interact on set with actor Zach Bra, who provided Finley the fying monkey’s voice.
“When James Franco ran into a big vista, ILM or the 1996 DragonHeart , and Imageonce he got to a certain distance, our digi- works’ own Stuart Little in the 1999 flm o doubles took over,” Saliba says. “We had vol- the same name – both o which received Oscar unteers run up ramps on a motion-capture nominations or Best Visual Eects. Indeed, stage calculated to match the environments. early this year, two o the fve flms nominated So, with a bit o adapting in the computer, or visual eects had main digital characters we could continue having the actor run into with dialog – Te Avengers and Te Hobbit – a vast land.” and all fve nominees had realistic, believable Te crew also used motion capture or the digital characters. crowds o characters in the Emerald city. “We Perhaps someday we’ll see an Oscar award scanned all the hero extras on set and photo- or best digital actor in a supporting role. It’s graphed the rest o the extras or weeks,” Saliba time to pull back the curtain and ully honor says. “Ten, once we got back to Imageworks, the great and powerul wizards in the wonder we captured artists and volunteers rom our ul world o visual eects. n team doing actions needed or the citizens, like cheering and loading carts or battle. When Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a the crowds got really big, we had help rom the contributing editor for Computer Graphics World . She can guys in our Massive department who used bits be reached at
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Gaming
2013 is the year when the Big Three face off again, but expect some unexpected competition By Karen Moltenbrey
The Ouya is an inexpensive console that runs a revised version of the Android operating system.
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ost of us probably do not remember the rst generation of video game consoles, or the second for that matter. In all likelihood, the third generation (the Nintendo Entertainment System) kicked o console video gaming for the majority of us in the mid-1980s, introducing us to Mario, Luigi, Zelda, Donkey Kong, and other fun, beloved, pixelated characters. A few years later came the fourth-generation consoles, and approximately ve years after that, the fth generation, which included the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64. e sixth-generation game consoles – surprise – rolled out nearly ve years later (notice a trend?). ese are the systems that helped dene a totally new era in gaming, starting with Sega’s Dreamcast, followed a year later by Sony’s PlayStation 2, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s GameCube. With this hardware, and with the seventh-generation systems (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) a halfdecade later, gameplay moved into a whole new realm thanks to highdenition CGI delivering amazing eects, realistic, emotive characters, and jaw-dropping environments. Nintendo, however, took a dierent route, as the Wii focused less on gaming realism and more on fun via motion tracking and sensing. It’s now been seven years since we have seen a major upgrade in terms of gaming hardware. But, the time has now arrived and we are seeing the rst embers of the next round of console wars, which will be heating up in the coming months.
The Big Three First to market in the eighth-generation console war was Nintendo, with its Wii U in late 2012, although some do not consider the Wii U part of this next generation. e Wii U is the rst Nintendo console to support highdenition graphics (so seventh generation) capable of producing video output up to 1080p. It also sports 2 of RAM, with half of that dedicated to the console’s operating system. e Wii U ships in two versions: one with 8 of internal ash storage, and another with 32. e system’s Wii U GamePad controller contains an embedded touch screen for gameplay when the television is o. e system also connects to the Nintendo Network – Nintendo’s network infrastructure answer to the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft Xbox Live (again, so last generation, but a necessary catch-up to the last-gen consoles).
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The portable Razer Edge Tablet is a high-end gaming system packed into a tablet.
long-term vision to make most PS4 games playable on PS Vita, so you can bring your favorite games from the big-screen TV to your PS Vita over Wi-Fi,” he noted of the Remote Play feature. Also on tap is a PlayStation app for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices that acts as a second screen, “allowing for unique gameplay possibilities, such as viewing maps during an adventure game or remotely watching friends play during an epic battle – right from a smartphone or tablet,” wrote Tretton. In terms of specs, the PS4 will have an eight-core 64-bit x86 Jaguar CPU from AMD, with a next-gen Radeon-based GPU comprising 18 “compute units” capable of handling 1.84 teraops. Moreover, the machine will have full-3D support with 4/2 compatibility. It will also support 3D Bluray. So, what is the price of the PS4? at is still unannounced.
Without question, the feature that is getting the most attention is Wii U’s touch-screen controller. e 6.2-inch screen throw down the gauntlet rst and reveal deis about the size of a tablet computer. How- tails about their oering? e answer: Sony. ever, that is where the comparison to a tablet In a press conference at the end of February, ends, as the screen in no way functions like Sony revealed plans to roll out the next gena tablet computer. e display on the Wii U eration, indeed called PlayStation 4, in time controller, though, can work in a few dier- for the holiday shopping season. “It redenes ent ways. It can be used to add extra infor- rich and immersive gameplay with powermation or control options to a game that is ful graphics and speed, intelligent personbeing played on a television screen; it also alization, deeply integrated social capabilican display the same information shown on ties, and innovative second-screen features,” the TV. And, it can serve as the only gaming stated Jack Tretton, president and CEO of screen in use when the system is in “O TV Sony, in a recent blog. “When we designed New Kids on the Block Play” mode. PlayStation 4, we focused on building an ar- All eyes are not solely on Nintendo, Micro Alas, the system did not meet with the chitecture that will allow the greatest game soft, and Sony. ere are new contenders fanfare that the original Wii did back in developers in the industry to push boundar- vying for attention – and a piece of this lu2006, when many shoppers were lured by ies and dig deep within their imaginations to crative market. Expected this summer is an the unique gameplay of the system and its create the most immersive and unique games inexpensive console from Ouya that runs lower price in comparison to the PlayStation for you to enjoy.” a revised version of the Android operating 3, released in the same timeframe. Tretton promises that the PS4 will change system. e system boasts 8 internal ash e Wii U may have gotten an early jump the way gamers interact when playing with memory and 1 RAM. e Ouya also will in 2012, but it appears that 2013 is gearing friends. Embracing the social media phe- oer users access to the OnLive streaming up to be the big start of the next-generation nomenon, PlayStation 4 will let players inrollout. And, in all likelihood, there will be stantly share images and videos of their faThe GameStick is an Android-based “console” some new players in both the console and vorite gameplay moments on Facebook with that connects directly into a TV’s HDMI slot. handheld sectors. To this end, expect E3 to be a single press on the DualShock 4 controla very busy place, as companies unveil their ler’s “share” button; they can also broadcast plans and provide a look at their new wares. while playing in real time through Use market is ripe with talk of Microsoft’s tream, so friends can comment or jump next-generation Xbox console, expected into the game in new ways. “Leveraging sometime this year. Details, as you would ex- PlayStation Network with Gaikai pect, are slim – well, practically non-existent. technology, PS4 will make e same holds true for Sony’s PlayStation 4, it easier for you to also estimated for a late-2013 release. Specu- play your favorite lation on whether either system will have 3D games and access stereo capability has been rampant but un- content wherever substantiated. you are. We see PS With few hard facts, the industry has been Vita as the ultimate anxious to learn more about Sony’s or Micro- companion device soft’s new gaming vision. Which one would for PS4, and it’s our March/April 2013
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Gaming
veiled Steam, a diital distriution, diital rihts manaement, multiplayer, and communications platorm. In essence, Steam is used to distriute ames and related media online, and last year, it started includin non-amin sot ware, as well. Steam was initially developed or use on Microsot Windows, ut has expanded to OS X and Linux (pulic eta), with limited unctionality on the PlayStation 3 console and iOS and Android moile devices. With such solid inrastructure in place (servin an estimated 50 million users), the next step seems almost ovious: uildin a ame console. And that is exactly what Valve has planned. Dued “Steam Box” y the industry, the concept is a hyrid PC/ame console. Tis unique hardware would e tuned to run Game development for the PS4 is already under way for some, including Sucker Punch Productions’ Steam – and, in turn, the ames and media Infamous: Second Son title. already availale throuh the roust service. ame service and to an Ouya store or ame open, and portale V ames console ever All indication is that Valve will oer three purchases. Another i attraction, aside rom created. At $79, GameStick oers the most a- tiers, or versions, o the ox: ood, etter, est. its $99 price ta, is the aility to easily access ordale route to playin ames on your V.” Tese will e priced accordinly ased on the the hardware or ame development, without Basically, the company is ollowin the suc- components and eared or the casual amer, havin to pay or developer kits. cessul model o its casual ames usiness with the typical amer, and the hard-core amer, Is an inexpensive, independent system its use o open platorms via Android. As a re- respectively. While the operatin system is still ready to take on the Bi Tree? Only time will sult, developers would e ale to create ames anyone’s uess at this point, there is speculatell, ut many are ettin on the Ouya, which aster and cheaper, and this would open up tion that it will run Linux and would e ale was the rainchild o Julie Uhrman o Boxer8 ame development opportunities or studios o to handle Windows. and unded via Kickstarter. In act, the und- all sizes. raisin oal o $8 million to spur development Te GameStick has an Amloic 8726-MX Portables on the Rise was achieved in less than eiht hours. processor with 1gb DDR3 memory and 8gb Meanwhile, the portales are experiencin an Another new and rather unique “console” fash memory, and contains a content down- update, as well. More than a year ao, Sony expected this year is called GameStick, also load manaer with cloud storae system or released the PlayStation Vita, with ront and an Android-ased, crowd-unded project via ames. It also supports ull 1080p HD video. rear cameras or aumented-reality experiKickstarter rom PlayJam, a casual ames ›› See a Q&A with PlayJam CMO Anthony John- ences, and a touch screen. Te device is also company. Te new device will connect directly son about GameStick, accessible under “Extras” in cross-platorm compatile with the PlayStainto a television via the HDMI slot and run the March-April 2013 issue box on CGW.com. tion 3, so ames can e started on one system, Android ames. It also ships with a Bluetooth Who knows more aout amin than a saved, and continued on the other. However, controller. For amin on the o, the Game- ame developer? Nearly a decade ao, Valve sales o the Vita (oriinally priced at $249 and Stick slides sideways into the controller or Corporation (Half-Life, Team Fortress 2) un- $299 or a Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi/3G version, reportaility to a new location, where the player just plus the GameStick into a V and the console is connected and ready to o. Aain, the pulic supported this venture, as well, providin more than six times the requested $100,000 Kickstarter undin oal, and that oriinal oal was otained within 30 hours. o aument the GameStick, UK-ased PlayJam will utilize its smart V technoloy, allowin players to download content and net work with GameStick users. A quote rom the GameStick Kickstarter pae sums up why this system has potential: “Tere are over 1,416,338,245 Vs in the world ut less than 1 percent o them are used to play ames! Crazy. We think that’s ecause traditional ames consoles and content are too expensive. So 12 months ao, we set out to Nintendo rolled out its next-gen game system, the Wii U, in 2012. The Wii U GamePad controller sports an challene that y makin the most aordale, embedded touch screen, enabling users to play a game while the TV is turned off. 18
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the amepad controller, the talet unctions as a moile PC ame device, with the uttons and joysticks on the side o the amepad used to control the PC ame action. Te dockin station connects to a desktop display and peripherals or hooks up to an HDV or larerpicture amin. Without question, the device is extremely versatile. But, it carries a hih price ta. Te standard Razer Ede with an Intel Core i5 processor and 4gb o DDR3 RAM will sell or $999, while a Core i7 version with 8gb o RAM will carry a $1,299 price. The WikiPad controller Another entry into the moile amin contains a detachable tablet that funcmarket is Nvidia’s Project Shield, an Android tions as an Android tablet computer. era ame device with an attached ve-inch, spectively) were dismal durin its rst year on the stick and uttons on the sides o the Wiki- 720p display. For open platorms, Project the market. As a result, industry pundits ex- pad device to control ameplay, as opposed to Shield is an Android portale ame player. pect the price to e reduced this year. usin a talet-like swipin motion. Conversely, And, like many o the newcomers, it has an Te PS Vita competes aainst the Nin- most Android ames were developed or touch- additional unction – here, it is a wireless client tendo 3DS, which was released in the sprin screen input and do not support typical console to a GeForce GX PC. (For an in-depth look o 2011. A successor to the popular Nintendo controllers (joystick, uttons). Nevertheless, at Nvidia’s Project Shield and what it means DS, the 3DS rins the novelty o autostereo there are a numer o moile titles that, in act, or Nvidia and the industry, see “Stayin on to the screen – meanin no 3D lasses or other do support ame controllers. And, the Wikipad the Grid,” pae 20.) devices are needed or the 3D eects. Te 3DS runs Sony titles developed or the PlayStation Without question, 2013 will e a hue year has three cameras: one in the ront that cap- moile platorm – that is, the PS Vita. or amin – machines, titles, and player expetures standard 2D imaes, and two rear-acin Another talet device that is expected to de- rience. Expect Sony and Microsot to up the cameras on the ack that can e used to cap- ut this year is the Razer Ede alet, which ante, ut also expect the rise o the Android ture 3D imaes. Apparently many were not ready to pay $249 or stereo on a handheld, and less than six months ater its release, the price was slashed to $169 in liht o anemic sales. Last July, Nintendo released an updated version, the 3DS XL, which sports much larer screens and loner attery lie – and a larer price ta ($200). What some were hopin would result rom the Wii U controller – that it could e used independently o the Wii U console itsel, as its own amin device – can e ound in the Wikipad amin talet. A newcomer on the scene, the Wikipad is larer than the Wii U GamePad controller, thouh it oasts similar ameplay eatures that include an analo stick controller and control unction/input uttons to the side o the screen. However, the talet is The Witness, an open-world puzzle game for next-gen gaming, will be rolled out for the PS4 only, taking advantage of Sony’s new console technology. detachale rom the controller ase, automatically ecomin a seven-inch Android talet. will run Windows 8. Purported to e a hih- and open systems to expand ame developFurthermore, when the talet is attached to end amin system packed into a talet, it is ment into studios that could never et a seat at the controller ase, it can still unction as a powered y Intel Core processors and Nvidia the exclusive development kit tale. Once the talet computer. GeForce raphics cards with Optimus, and domain o simplistic-lookin casual ames, Te talet, attached or detached, contains oasts 8gb DDR3 RAM plus a 10.1-inch HD the Android operatin system is on the vere an Nvidia era 3 processor and 16gb o multi-touch display. o revolutionizin the industry or even the fash memory, and runs Goole’s open-source Razer descries the device as a talet that most serious amer. Also, the cloud is helpin Android operatin system. So, rather than de- is also a ull-feded moile amin PC. In- to lihten the load or new consoles and descried as a ame controller that unctions as a deed, the Ede is a ull-unctionin Windows vices, makin them more powerul and more talet, the Wikipad is etter descried as a ta- 8 talet that is compatile with Windows 8 portale than ever eore. n let computer that can also act as a ame control- applications and ames. When the talet is atler. Well, sort o. tached to a keyoard dock, the device ecomes Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Most o the riple-A console ames require a noteook-style PC. When it is attached to Graphics World. March/April 2013
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Is the new project shield disruptive technology or just a Grid peripheral? By Jon Peddie
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roject Shield, Nvidia’s Android egra game controller with a screen, is striking when frst seen. However, the confguration is not novel. Game controllers that hold a mobile phone or a tablet have been available or a while. Project Shield consists o a console-like game controller with a dedicated and permanently attached fve-inch, 720p multi-touch display, powered by Nvidia’s latest ARM-based processor, egra 4, running Google’s Jellybean version o Android. It is an appealing product and irresistible to pick up. But is that enough to make it disruptive? Mobile phones certainly existed beore Apple introduced the iPhone, yet not many would dispute that it was a transormational and disruptive product – but was it? In Clayton M. Christensen’s 1997 best-selling book Te Innovator’s Dilemma , he separates new technology into two categories: sustaining and disruptive. Disruptive technology lacks refnement, oten has perormance problems because it is new, appeals to a limited audience, and may not yet have a proven practical application. Te description o “disruptive” hardly fts Nvidia’s Project Shield, or the iPhone or that matter. It is doubtul that Project Shield will have many, i any, perormance problems any more than any new product does, including the iPhone. It may have a limited audience, namely game players, but there are about 30 million o them (hard-core gamers or all platorms approach 300 million), and so it is a matter o scale when making the determination o “limited.” In addition, the iPhone and Project Shield certainly have proven practical applications.
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A Grid Peripheral? Announced at Nvidia’s 2012 GPU echnology Conerence, Grid is the company’s approach to an on-demand gaming service. Nvidia claims it will provide advantages over traditional console gaming systems. In addition, it is an “any-device” gaming service, and according to Nvidia, it ofers high-quality, low-latency gaming on a PC, Mac, tablet, smartphone, or V. Nvidia has combined its development o running a game on an x86-based PC with a GeForce graphics add-in board (AIB) and streaming the game to a non-x86 device. Tat technique uses the non-x86 device as a thin client (C), allowing the C to send commands as well as display the streamed results. Except or the latency, which is a unction o the network, the user’s experience is as i the powerul AIB was in his or her local device – be it a smartphone or tablet. Nvidia has schematized the concept in the Diagram on page 22. What is not shown in the diagram is a picture o the equipment that comprises the (green cloud-like) Grid in the middle. Tat presumably will be a generic server with an Nvidia GeForce AIB and Nvidia’s lowlatency encoder and ast rame bufer capture technology. According to Nvidia’s calculations, Grid will be able to deliver the same throughput and latency as a console. Added to list o devices that can connect to Nvidia is rolling out Project Shield, an Android Tegra-based gaming device that will run titles such as the Grid is the new Project Shield. Further- Dead Trigger 2 (top) and Real Boxing 2013 (bottom). more, through its HDMI output, Project Shield can also drive a large-screen V as its Android devices…. Te reason why I built Shield as an Android device player. display, making it even more console-like. this device is because only we can build this Assuming the content distribution part o device.” the equation can be worked out – and I have A Disruption? I only Nvidia can build the device, and no doubt it will be i it hasn’t already been – But, is any o this disruptive? I think not. i the device only runs rom an Nvidia Grid Nvidia wouldn’t have made these announceInteresting, yes. Clever, yes. Well executed, server, and only on an Nvidia egra pro- ments with an empty gun, and the adoption time will tell. But Nvidia’s track record sug- cessor, then Nvidia has built a proprietary, o Project Shield becomes one o economics. gests it will be. closed garden o sorts. I other services, such Huang has indicated he is not interested in Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s charismat- as Amazon, Google, Steam, or Origin, take the hardware-subsided game console model, ic president and ounder, said he up the Grid, then it will be more catholic. nor should he be since he does not own any built Project Shield because no However, until other providers embrace content. Tereore, Project Shield has to sell one else was going to make Grid, the perormance on Project Shield may or cost-o-goods (COG) plus margin, and a mobile device like it. be less than stellar, or Nvidia will have to be- Nvidia has plenty o pressure rom investors He told GamesBeat, come a streaming game service like Micro- about maintaining margin. By my reckoning, “We’re not trying sot, Sony, and others. Tat could be a licens- the COG o Project Shield is about $175. to build a console. ing nightmare and suck enormous resources Tereore, to allow some margin or dis We’re trying to rom the company – not something Huang tributors and resellers, the unit will probably build an Android will undertake lightly. sell or $250 to $300, which is about twice as digital device in the Nvidia thinks it is a bit o a stretch to much as an add-on controller device like the same way that Nexus 7 compare Project Shield to closed-garden MOGA, but almost the same as the Phone[users] enjoy books, magazines, consoles. Although Grid is a component Joy’s expected price. and movies. Tis is an Android device or in the marketing o Project Shield, it is not Smartphones with 5.3-plus-inch, 1280x768 enjoying games. It’s part o your collection o the main component. Nvidia sees Project screens will challenge Project Shield’s 5-inch, March/April 2013
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units, not to mention the marketing costs. However, Nvidia already has all those parts in place and has had them or a while. ake note – Nvidia sells mid-range Nvidiabranded AIBs in the retail channels like Best Buy. It sells end-user consumer products, like 3D Vision, all sorts o paraphernalia, like caps, -shirts, and jackets, and even remarkets other companies’ products, like Jambox and FinePix cameras. As or support, it has had a support team almost since day one – ever hear o thing called a driver?
Adventurer or Aggregator?
Nvidia’s concept of the Grid: A central green cloud communicating with a range of devices.
Project Shield couldn’t be done by a start-up, no matter how well unded. An existing consumer supplier like HP or Microsot probably can’t do it, either. Nvidia has pulled together all the stu it has done elsewhere in the company and brought those technologies, inrastructure, and talents to make Project Shield. Once the company decided to do it, it didn’t take very long to produce it. Nvidia’s ocus with Project Shield is raising the bar or native Android gaming, and allowing PC gamers to extend their gaming experience to anywhere in their house. Project Shield, Nvidia emphasizes, is a “stock Android [device],” with access to all the Google apps and ecosystem. Why is this important? Te company surveyed its customers and ound that 82 percent o them play games on multiple platorms.
1280x720 screen. And whereas Haung says looking or someone to build and market it, Project Shield will be “part o your collection i nothing else. o Android devices,” a lightweight controller that your phone can snap into might be a bet- One Tiny Thin Mint? ter choice. Moreover, smartphones can drive In an old (1983) movie, Monty Python’s Te an HDV, too. Meaning of Life , a large diner, Mr. Creosote, explodes ater eating a tiny thin mint. Nvidia Disruptive to Nvidia’s Business? may think Project Shield is such a small device By introducing Project Shield, Nvidia has put in price and size that it would not bother its itsel in competition with its customers. Nvid- partners. Yet, it may be more explosive than ia would argue that there is nothing quite like Nvidia thinks. It is also surprising that loyal Project Shield; it’s unlikely that Nvidia’s cus- partner Asus would not have taken on such tomers will see it that way. Sony, one o those a product. customers, will certainly see the competition Te act is none o or console and handheld players. Nvidia Nvidia’s partners have Estimate of Nvidia’s Shield costs might argue that Sony only oers games or the reach into the techSony handhelds and consoles, whereas Project nology – and the gamer Controller assembly, speakers, and mic $15 Shield is an Android game player. Tereore, ecosystem – that Nvidia Hi-res 5.4-inch LCD panel $50 Project Shield only enhances the competition does. Remember, Nvidia Touch screen $18 to Sony rom Android. got started serving the Circuit board, semis, batteries, charger $90 In addition, Lenovo, one o Nvidia’s part- gamer community, and ners, has certainly noticed Project Shield. although it has expanded Total $173 Peter Hortensius, president o Lenovo’s and brought out lots o Gross Proft $80 product group, told CNE, “I don’t think it other products, it has Retail price $253 should surprise anybody that people are try- never lost its relationship ing things.... I [Nvidia] gets a lot o success to the gamer market. In and wants to move into our space, OK, we’ll act, the game market is the second-highest “Gamers” are called that because they like to play compete with them. But people look at be- revenue producer or the company. games. And they will play games on various deing in the device business, and there’s a lot vices, in various situations (home, on a bus, in a more to this business than they realize. We’ll The Other Stuff waiting room, and so orth). Just as we use diersee how many o them are still around doing I you’re new to Nvidia and think o it as being ent devices or listening to music or watching a that in a ew years.” Tat sounds like throw- a semiconductor supplier, an end-user prod- video depending where we are, game playing reing down the gauntlet to me. It also sounds uct like Project Shield may seem like a strange, quires (needs) devices suited to the environment like Lenovo may have a phone controller o distractive, and maybe even dangerous prod- the users fnd themselves in. n uct diversion. I Nvidia were only a semiits own in the works. It also is surprising to hear that Nvidia did conductor supplier, it would be strange, and Jon Peddie is president of Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon, not pre-brie Hortensius on Project Shield. I dangerous. For one thing, you need a serious CA-based consultancy specializing in graphics and multi would have imagined Nvidia showed, i not dedicated support team or end-user devices to media that also publishes JPR’s “TechWatch.” He can be the device, the plans or it to all its partners, take calls, oer help, receive, repair, and return reached at
[email protected]. 22
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Despite wicked business machinations grinding in the background, Digital Domain artists produced all the lm’s airy-tale giants – 15 unique characters, o which eight, including the two-headed monster, had starring roles with dialog. From those, the crew created a crowd that sometimes included as many as 100 giants and provided them with costumes, complete with cloth simulations. Te Moving Picture Company (MPC) artists grew the beanstalk, a giant creature that rockets out o a armhouse in one sequence and out the belly o a giant in another. Each o these studios developed new technology and new techniques to accomplish the work. For Digital Domain, an evolution o the virtual production system used on Real Steel, new skin shading techniques, and HDR imaging. For MPC, tricks or rendering a behemoth beanstalk.
Pre-cap At Digital Domain, Visual Efects Supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum brought his experience working on Avatar to the crews located in Venice, Caliornia, and Vancouver, Canada. On-set Supervisor Swen Gilberg brought his experience at Digital Domain on Real Steel to virtual production. “I came on as principal photography started,” Gilberg says. “While Stephen ran things on the West Coast, I spent ve months in England working with Hoyt Yeatman [overall visual efects supervisor] on set. Te idea was similar to what we did or Real Steel, but more rushed. Do mocap rst, put that into a blocking previs. Ten, put that in a virtual space that matches where you would later shoot. We did the ‘pre-cap’ in two weeks beore principal photography.” o do the pre-cap, Giant Studios and Digital Domain shipped their equipment and crews to England, where principal photography would take place. Te Giant Studios crew handled the body capture and virtual camera, while at the same time, the Digital Domain crew used a proprietary system dubbed Beatrice to capture acial expressions or the actors playing the CG giants: Bill Nighy as the main General Fallon head and John Kassir as General Fallon’s small head, Cornell John as Fee, Andrew Brooke as Fye, Ben Daniels as Fumm, and Philip Philmar as the giant cook. “We used our cameras to capture the aces,” Rosenbaum says, “two cameras on either side, which gave us true 3D inormation. We could see the jaw line, see how the lips curled out with certain words. Te thing I’m most proud o in this show is that the actors’ perormances came through.” Te animation team, led by Jan Philip Cramer, worked with a new acial rigging system to create the digital perormances. “We did a FACs session using OnLive’s Mova system,” Rosenbaum says. “Mova gave us a dynamic mesh during every expression so the modelers could see the ace deormed in specic
At ar let, new subsurace scattering algorithms helped Digital Domain create multi-layered lighting or the giants. Above, HDRI images captured on set (right) helped MPC insert a beanstalk with correct lighting in the fnal image (let).
poses on a 3D model. Te new acial rigging system had between 1,500 to 2,000 ace shapes because we needed that level o control to get the subtleties in the actors’ perormances. [Principal Engineer] Nick Apostolof developed a new solving algorithm that greatly improved the accuracy o the data rom the perormances that drove the ace shapes.” o perorm the two heads on one body, Nighy and Kassir stood next to each other. “We would do real-time solves o the perormances to see the characters through the virtual camera,” Rosenbaum says. “Not the aces. Tose were static.” During the capture, Singer could direct the actors and see simple CG versions o the giants mimicking their actions. “We had previs-style backgrounds that accurately matched the geometry o the location, so he could properly rame the shot,” Gilberg says. “Normally, we do a capture session, then Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
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(Top) Actor John Kassir, who played General Fallon’s little head, stood next to Bill Nighy, who performed the General Fallon giant, during motion capture. (Bottom) Giant Studios handled body capture on set while, at the same time, Digital Domain managed the facial capture.
a virtual camera session. Tis was rushed, so we did them together.” Te virtual camera was a tablet with characteristics that mimicked the cameras that the production crew would use later on set. “Bryan and om Sigel [Newton Tomas Sigel], the DP, could compose shots while the actors perormed on the motion-capture stage,” Rosenbaum says. “At any time, we could capture up to 10 or 12 actors, depending on the action.” Te captured motion rom the actors and the virtual camera went to Digital Domain and to Te Tird Floor. At Te Tird Floor, previs artists refned the camera and tightened the edit in preparation or principal photography. During flming, the CG giants appeared in camera as i they were on location. On Set
Tis virtual production technique proved especially important or a sequence during which Fallon drags a mace (a ball on a chain) through the Norwich Cathedral. A camera on a crane ollows the mace and then booms 24 eet up Fallon’s body and settles on his ace as he turns into the camera or a close-up. “We wouldn’t have been able to create this shot without SimulCam,” Rosenbaum says. 26
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“Te odds o guessing where the CG character was in that space would be slim.” Prior to flming in the cathedral, a Digital Domain crew had surveyed the location to produce an accurate previs environment. During the pre-cap motion-capture session, Nighy and Kassir, who played two-headed Fallon, had perormed in that replicated environment, and data captured rom them had been transerred onto the CG giant.
Te CG character then moved into the SimulCam system or flming. “Giant Studios put motion-capture markers on the live-action camera and composited the virtual character into the environment being flmed in real time,” Rosenbaum explains. Tus, the DP and camera operator could look through the eyepiece and see Fallon in the cathedral. “Our character was just like an actor,” Gilberg says. “A 24-oot actor. Te camera operator could look at him or not; the giant stayed in his own world space.” Te crews used the same type o system or sequences flmed outdoors. “Tey flmed the show in stereo using 3ality’s Epic rigs,” Gilberg says. “Te stereo rig is so heavy it always ends up being on a crane, which means there isn’t as much reedom moving the camera. Tat one drawback, especially or virtual production, is also a plus. On the plus side, we had Giant Studios encode the crane, which we hadn’t done beore. On Real Steel, we had active markers and a motion-capture volume or the cameras.” Even without the hindrance o heavy cameras, the crew might have used the crane anyway. “It was too windy to put up a truss or motion-capture cameras,” Gilberg says. “So, we used old-school encoding with realtime playback through [Autodesk’s] MotionBuilder. Te plus was that we ended up with a much smaller ootprint than i we would have used a truss and 30 or 40 cameras.” CG Giants
Te audience frst sees a giant during a chase sequence. Te character Crawe (actor Eddie Marsan) has climbed the beanstalk to the land o the giants and discovered Fee. “Crawe hides behind a tree,” Rosenbaum says. “Fee comes up behind him and rips the tree out o
Fallon Under Water During one sequence in the flm, the two-headed giant Fallon swims underwater, through a moat. “With specialized motion like this, the question is, Do you keyrame it or what do you do?” says Digital Domain Visual Eects Supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum. “The shot continued rom where Bill Nighy and John Kassir were acting on the motion-capture stage, so both actors were there. You could hook keyrame to the subtle [captured] acting. But, we developed a technique in Avatar that I exploited here. I took the back o a rolling ofce chair, had Bill Nighy lie across it, and I pulled it across the motioncapture volume while he mimed the action. It looked silly and it raised a lot o eyebrows. But it works. It gave us his distinct motion, and we didn’t have to keyrame that later.” – Barbara Robertson
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the ground, and Crawe runs. Bryan [Singer] wanted the giant to loo at Crawe as i he were an ant running away. He waits. One, two, three beats. Ten smacs him to the ground. Because it is the introduction to the giants, the camera goes rom ar away right up into his ace and ocuses on an eye. It’s raining. He has wet hair. And water runs o his sin surace. We had to push our texture maps to 32k on close-ups and shit bac dynamically so we could see pore detail and detail in the eye. We added hairs on the sin to add subtle details. And had water dripping o.” It was one o many shots in which the camera moves close to a giant’s ace. “Teir aces are 40 eet across,” Rosenbaum says. “We had to be diligent about how we handled the sin shading and eye development.”
tech papers written over the last several years On location, HDRIs and light probes on sin shading,” he says. “We developed a helped the team match the light when the ginew approach that handles multiple layers o ants were in live-action scenes. “Most o the translucent materials.” big scenes, though, were digitally created enRosenbaum explains that usually subsur- vironments,” Rosenbaum says. “So we would ace scattering utilizes a single-layer approach. tae the HDRI rom the previous scene, adLight hits the suraces, diuses uniormly, and just it slightly or the time-o-day shit, and produces a homogenous loo on the sin sur- use that.” ace. “Tat’s why sin oten loos lie silicon Digital Eects Supervisor Paul Lambert or honey or mil,” he says. “But sin is more spent time beore principal photography macomplex. It has multiple layers. Dermis, epi- ing sure the HDRIs captured on set matched dermis, at, muscle. All that aects light di- the Red Epic camera. “It was one o the frst erently, so you need to build multiple layers shows to use that camera,” Lambert says. o the scattering algorithm to account or the “Everything was brand new at the time. So, photoreal loo.” we would shoot with the Epic camera and For rendering, the crew settled on Arnold with our Canon 1Ds, which we use with the (Solid Angle) in combination with Katana HDRIs, to mae sure everything calibrated.” (Te Foundry) rather than RenderMan (Pixar). Lambert also discovered a way to mae sure that when the camera moved into the sun, they had the correct values. “When you go to all the trouble o getting a physically correct renderer, you want the correct values,” he says. “Up to now, when we captured an outside HDRI, the camera couldn’t go ar enough to capture the exposure o the sun, so we new it would be clipped and we would compensate or it. Paul Debevec came up with a technique to put a flter in the bac o the lens to capture the sun, but on set we don’t have time to change lenses.” So, the Digital Domain on-set crew used two cameras. One captured environment HDRIs. Another was a 150mm camera that was stopped down with a massive flter. “We would point it at the sun, get the exposure, tae it into [the Foundry’s] Nue to correct or charThe only live-action element in this scene is the actor, barely visible, inside the cage. Digital Domain artists acteristics we had wored out, and then put created the CG giants and the digital environment. the sun value into the HDRI,” Lambert says. “It meant we had to move to 32-bit EXR – Te conceit was that an evil ing had “RenderMan 16 wasn’t out yet,” Rosenbaum in a lot o shots, the sun value was 80,000 and ormed the giants rom earthen materials. In says. “Te big advantage with Arnold was that 16-bit EXR only goes to 65,000 – so we had early designs, the giants looed lie mud men. it was a true global illumination solution with bigger fles.” o determine those characteristics, Lambert In later designs, they became more humanoid, a real raytracer, so we could get precise lighting but with dirt, straw, bits o grass, and other representations on the characters, including the spent time on a rootop with the fltered camearthly materials embedded in their sin. eyes. Te eyes were really ey on this movie be- era. “I too a picture o the sun every hour,” “One thing that made the show dicult cause they were our times the size o a human’s he says. “I got a good amount o data and a was that each o the principal giants had a eye and oten close up. Previously, we had to sunburn.” But, it was worth it: “Knowing we unique loo,” Rosenbaum said. “We couldn’t cheat the shape or shading purposes, but we had the correct values meant we could tune steal or borrow rom other characters. We didn’t have to cheat now. We reconfgured the shaders nowing they would be correct. You wipe out a lot o cycles o trying to interpret.” could start with a base-level sin shader, but eye to be anatomically correct.” beyond that, we had to start each character Tere were disadvantages, though, too. rom scratch. Tey had dierent textures and “Te disadvantage is that raytracers are slow,” And the Beanstalk dierent earthen materials embedded in their Rosenbaum says. “We had ewer iterations, In several shots, Digital Domain’s giants sin. And, they’re 24 eet tall, so they had a lot but each render too longer. Te other draw- interact with a giant beanstal created at MPC. o surace area. We had to get the shading on bac was with displacement. Tere were quite Te giants’ weight aected the beanstal, and their sin and eyes right.” a ew instances where we needed to displace the movement o the beanstal aected their Realizing the team would need to develop the surace, so we had to come up with a clever perormance. “It too a tight collaboration,” a new technique, Rosenbaum plunged into a approach. In RenderMan, we would have got- Rosenbaum says. “What made it wor was the relationship with Greg Butler [visual research project. “I pulled out a bunch o the ten micropolygon displacement or ree.” March/April 2013
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CG Characters
(Top) A new volumetric tool kit helped artists at MPC create clouds behind their digital beanstalk. (Bottom) Modelers and animators used the same rig to build the beanstalk section by section and control the movement.
eects supervisor] and Matt Welord [on-set his team, and with Animation Lead Jeremy supervisor] in Vancouver.” Mesana, to dene the sections and determine Modelers at MPC matched and extended how they would t and how the rig would a 30-oot-tall practical set that had 12 pieces read them in. exture Lead Erik Groneldt did on moveable bases. “One o the challenges was look development. “And nally, when we got to design, build, animate, and render a model it up and running and ound out how heavy that shoots upward through the armhouse it was, Mark Williams, our lead R&D techniinto the sky,” Butler says. “On any given shot, cal director, wrote a system that broke it into it could be a mile high.” pieces so animators could work with lightTe animators would need to move the weight scenes,” Butler says. “We had outsmartpieces to grow the enormous plant and, later, ed ourselves. As the beanstalk grew, our probto give it lie. So, modelers and riggers worked lems grew, and we had to nd our way out. By together to design and build sections that the end o the movie, we had a good system. It could t together and a rig that could con- was denitely a technical evolution.” nect the pieces, “like boxcars,” Butler says. One way in which they had outsmarted “We could dene a master curve and populate themselves was by treating the beanstalk as it with beanstalk assets, leaves, and connect- a creature. Even though it was organic, they ing vines. We based the modeling tool kit on realized only later that some techniques used an animation rig. Te modelers would pose or hard-surace modeling might have been curves, convert the curves to geometry, then more ecient. reeze and lock them. At rst, this seemed “We’re so used to doing creatures, where like overkill when it came to modeling, but skinning involves hand painting,” Butler says. the animators needed to move pieces around “Te complexity o the beanstalk, though, and the modelers could go into a scene and came rom design and shading. We realized use the rig to tweak the model. We kept it live too late that we could do all the skinning at the whole time.” runtime because it was just dening how the Lead Rigger Devon Mussato designed geometry ollows a joint. With robots and the system. Head o Modeling Chris Uyede hard-surace models, we have always done that worked with Lead Modeler Ryan Lim and in the renderer to save calculations. We had 28
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thought o the beanstalk as a fexible object with stretching and twisting, when so much o the time it was more like a hard-surace model.” However, the process the team went through to create the beanstalk led to an important discovery. “We realized we needed to work with R&D earlier, especially given the high complexity o projects,” Butler says. “R&D can abstract and nd ways to accelerate parts o the process. Te partnership we ormed has led to an ongoing collaboration.” Jack also marked the studio’s rst use o a new volumetric tool kit developed during the past ew years. “We used it or clouds,” Butler says. “Particularly when the camera looks o into the cloud shape. “We would model simple geometry to lay out the size and overall shape, and then we layered algorithms onto it to give it edges. Whether it was at and puy or small and stretched out, we could describe the clouds through procedural operations and have ull volumetric clouds. We started o experimenting, and by the end o the show, we had the render times down. We have a great relationship with Pixar, and every couple months we get urther into the new eatures they’re adding to RenderMan, integrating more o our eects technology into it.” Even though Digital Domain rendered with Arnold and MPC with RenderMan, deep compositing, developed at Weta Digital and implemented in Nuke, made sharing shots easier. “We’d give them approved blocking and a simple beanstalk rig they could pull around and approved blocking,” Butler says. “Teir giants could interact with and aect the beanstalk. Tey got approval on the beanstalk and giant animation, and locked that o. And then both sides added only secondary animation. And what saved us in the nishing stage was deep compositing.” When MPC delivered renders to Digital Domain or vice versa, the renders came with deep passes. “We’d comp each other’s work, and it turned out to be as simple as that sounds,” Butler says. “Deep compositing wasn’t invented or that reason, but it’s been a boon or sharing between acilities.” Although it’s unlikely we’ll see another lm with a giant beanstalk and earthy-skinned giants, the techniques and technologies that people in these studios created will likely see their way into uture lms. Lie in visual eects may not be a airy tale these days, but it is oten antastic. n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World . She can be reached at
[email protected].
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Digitizing
Idaho Virtualization Laboratory uses 3D imaging to put natural history in the hands of the world
Specimens hether intentional or not, the study of natural history has almost always been exclusionary, limited to those who have access to the rare specimens collected by museums and research institutions. But what if researchers, teachers, and students could use remote computers to closely examine rare species and artifacts?
Democratizing and Demystifying Since 2003, the Idaho Virtualization Laboratory (IVL) in Pocatello, Idaho, has been facilitating exactly these types of learning and research opportunities. Under the guidance of Lab Director Dr. Herb Maschner, IVL’s mission is to apply 3D imaging for the benet of science and education. In large part, this means working to democratize science. “We want to take this closed world and open it up, put it in the hands of everyone,” says Lab Manager Robert Schlader. “Demystify it. Play with it.” IVL’s expanding 3D imaging capa bilities are advancing research, improving collaboration, encouraging education and outreach, and helping archivists better preserve history collections. With IVL’s help, museums, researchers, and scientists can easily archive and share accurate virtual 3D copies of valuable collections for easy retrieval, teaching purposes, research, and posterity, all
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Scan technician Jesse Pruitt surfaces a Helicoprion specimen (IMNH-37899) using Geomagic Studio. the while preserving the often-fragile Menagerie of Artifacts original artifacts. In its laboratory space on the Idaho State UniIVL has made the collection of the Idaho versity campus, IVL houses seven laser surMuseum of Natural History available to face scanners and Geomagic Studio software, anyone with a computer anywhere in the which allow researchers to sample and process world. Maschner and his team also have an digital shapes rapidly and eciently without agreement with the Smithsonian Institution sacricing accuracy. The 3D technological tool set is used to to help capture whale skeletons and other artifacts and convert them into 3D images. scan a vast range of skeletal remains into
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Aligned scan data created in Geomagic Studio by the Idaho Visualization Lab of a fossilized Hagerman horse head. The skeletal remains were found in Idaho in 1928. Hagerman horses lived in American plains and grasslands three million years ago.
most computers to process within a reasonable timeframe. Geomagic Studio enables technicians to subdivide the low-resolution image and su perimpose it onto the full-resolution image. The result is a clean topological surface and a exible le that can be displayed in one of Capturing Fine Details Te job o creating 3D models o each bone several layers of resolution depending on the 3D – birds, walruses, sea lions, otters, bears, alls on the lab’s regular our-technician staf. capabilities of the user’s computer. camels, even a prehistoric helicorpion – Te efort is led by Schlader, one o the region’s Finally, technicians use the photographs along with artifacts, such as arrowheads and most skilled 3D technicians and a sel-pro- taken in the opening stage to overlay a tex primitive tools. claimed “computer guy” who helped to build ture map and color data onto each 3D model. It’s all part of a project that Maschner has the lab rom the ground up. This nal version is rendered into a U3D le championed for the past decade, starting At this point, the team has developed a that is then converted into a PDF le. with his 3D Virtual Zooarchaeology of the streamlined 3D scanning process that begins The resultant PDF is viewable via Adobe Arctic Project (VZAP). Beyond VZAP, the with data compilation and photography of Acrobat and allows users to take measureIdaho Virtualization Laboratory’s projects each specimen. The photographs become ments, view in full 3D, and conduct comparinclude the Virtual Museum of Idaho, Vir- part of the IVL’s archive and aid in the digi- isons. IVL also makes the Euclidian geomtual Museum of the Arctic, and Whales of tal modeling process. the World, all of which can be accessed at After photography, deIVL’s website (ivl.imnh.isu.edu). pending on the article to “VZAP has been a real help training stu- be scanned – its size, dedents in basic sorting and identication of tail and morphology – the faunal specimens,” says Dr. Anne Jensen, team selects from a range the general manager and senior scientist at of scanners, including UIC Science in Barrow, Alaska. two FARO Technologies Jensen, an arctic archaeologist, works Edge scanners and one with local high school and junior college FARO Focus3D, Minolta students who have no prior experience in VIVID 9i, NextEngine faunal analysis. Her students use VZAP’s 3D scanner HD, Cyberimages in lieu of short-term, cumbersome ware Model Shop, and physical collections to classify the speci- Cyberware Desktop. Each object is scanned A 3D surface model of “Kruzof,” the four-year-old whale (SSSC-2011008) mens they unearth. “Recently,” Jensen adds, “we have been in several positions to that washed ashore in Sitka, Alaska, in 2011. SSSC-2011008 was recovered, processed, and scanned under NOAA Fisheries MMHSRP Permit 932-1905. using it to narrow the range of species that capture a complete 3D we need to compare specimens with, both model. Scanning small specimens, such as etry of the image available, so it is possible to target loan requests better and to make birds, can be particularly challenging. IVL’s to extrapolate dimensional data required for sure we take the appropriate specimens to team has gotten creative to overcome some casting, machining, or rapid prototyping. of the challenges, often dusting specimens the repository.” with talcum powder. Because the grains are Teachers and Researchers smaller than the scanner resolution, talcum By bridging the real and virtual worlds, IVL Tale of the Sitka Whale One o the lab’s more ambitious assign- helps the scanner pick up the surfaces, and it is ullling its mission to democratize science ments came about ater a juvenile orca whale doesn’t damage the specimen. one scan at a time. It’s a sometimes painstak-
washed ashore on Kruzo Island near Sitka, Alaska, in 2011. Ater the University o Alaska scientists nished processing the whale skeleton, the IVL team journeyed to Sitka to digitize the remains. Where typical jobs involve 3D scanning only certain animal bones, the Kruzof whale skeleton had to be completely digitized. In the course of a seven-day process, IVL technicians scanned skeletal data into Geomagic Studio to rapidly create quality 3D images. In only the second undertaking of its kind, scientists were able to take the captured 3D data, build 3D models, and articulate an intricate, entire skeleton in digital space.
From Real to Virtual IVL technicians use Geomagic Studio or the preliminary editing o the resultant polygon meshes to remove any unnecessary artiacts rom the scan. Te sotware automates the process o lling remaining holes, removing intersecting polygons, and clearing vertex color data. Using Geomagic Studio, technicians create two 3D model les: one at full resolution and one at roughly 1,000-polygon resolution. The two les are needed because full-resolution 3D models often contain anywhere from several hundred thousand to several million polygons – too large for
ing process, but a challenge that the IVL staf undertakes contentedly, knowing that its work is helping students and researchers in countries throughout the globe. “Biologists teaching high school kids in Alaska, teachers of faunal analysis of skeletal material, osteology researchers and teachers, and professors studying human and VZAP material,” says Schlader, “they’re all using our images to do it.” n
Josh O’Dell is a content creator for Geomagic, whose scanning and design software solutions are used to capture and model 3D content from physical objects, organically sculpt complex shapes, and prepare products for manufacturing.
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CG Animation
The latest animated feature film from DreamWorks Animation sends a naïve but energetic family on a survival quest during prehistoric times
Was a family road trip ever as prehistoric as the one forced upon Grug (Nicolas Cage) and his family in e Croods? Written and directed by Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders, the DreamWorks Animation comedy shakes up a world of fun and danger as the Crood family members discover life in a big, wide, wonderful (mostly) world. On the way, the accidental travelers discover that the most important changes are hap pening within the family. In addition to Cage, the lm stars the voice talent of Emma Stone as Grug’s adventurous
daughter Eep, Catherine Keener as good wife Ugga, Clark Duke as the meathead son unk, Cloris Leachman as irascible mother-in-law Gran, and Ryan Reynolds as the charming, inventive Guy, who is not a member of the caveman family. Before e Croods, Kirk DeMicco was writer/director for Vanguard Animation’s Space Chimps and the writer for Alligator Planet’s Here Comes Peter Cottontail: e Movie, Alcon Entertainment’s Racing Stripes, and Warner Bros.’ Quest for Camelot.
©2013 DreamWorks Animation LLC.
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At left, the Crood family confront unexpected internal and external fears when they follow Guy (in pants and body paint) out of their cave and into the larger world. Above, Director Chris Sanders’ version of a saber-toothed tiger provides a constant threat.
Croods fellow writer/director Sanders pre- Chris came over rom Disney. We kept a probably closer to Flintstones, but they are viously received two Oscar nominations for similar theme but wrote a dierent story – CG cavemen. Tey have beautiul shapes, Best Animated Feature for DreamWorks’ How one without the technical limitations o but radical. to rain Your Dragon (2011) and Disney’s stop motion. Tis eature needed CG to tell Grug is like a gorilla. Gran, an alligator. Lilo & Stitch (2003). Also, while at Disney, the story. Eep has a swimmer’s body but her moveSanders was a writer and story supervisor for ments are based on a tiger. Guy is more like Mulan, writer and production designer for Why did you need to use CG to tell the you and me; he has a dierent physiology. Te Lion King , writer for Aladdin, writer story? I the Croods want to keep Guy around, DeMicco: and visual development artist for Beauty and It’s a road trip movie; the there’s no way he can get away. Tey are the Beast (Oscar nomination for Best Picture), world’s rst amily road trip. So clearly one many times stronger. Tere’s a scene where and a character designer, storyboard artist, and reason is the number o sets. Stop motion Eep grabs Guy by the neck and picks him visual development artist for Te Rescuers is slightly domestic. We wanted big, epic up with one arm. Down Under. landscapes. A world larger than lie in the We talked with DeMicco and Sanders a few ‘Croodacious’ period. Tat’s something CG How does the relationship between the weeks before Te Croods released. is perect or. In stop motion, you have more Croods and Guy drive the story? Sanders: Guy, who is a lone male, needs o a village with character interaction. Tere Why cavemen? aren’t as many sets. And certainly not as the Croods. And, the Croods need Guy. DeMicco: We wanted to talk about the many explosions. Tere’s a sweet, simple romance between ear o change. In that day and age, what Eep and Guy. She’s drawn to him; he rep would be the biggest ear? You could expect Why does the family leave the cave? resents everything she’s dreamed o. He is Sanders: that they would ear re and new technolEep [the daughter] sees re- the world’s rst imagination. But, re is the ogy. But, the biggest ear or Grug was losing light outside at night. Te biggest amily rule more important thing. I they keep Guy his daughter and amily, and the story grew is that they can’t go out o the cave, but when around, they’ll have his re and can survive she sees the equivalent o a little sun, she outdoors. On the downside, Guy inects the out o that. At the beginning o the movie, Sanders: sneaks out and chases the relight through Croods with ideas o the uture, tomorrow, Grug has one job as ather o the amily. the canyon. Guy, who is human being 2.0, hope, adventure. And, Grug just wants to Tere are no hospitals. No police. No neigh- is carrying the re. Grug goes to look or her nd a cave. bors. He has to rely solely on himsel. So in and the amily comes outside the cave. Ten, When they do nd a cave at the end o this world, his hardest job would be keeping there’s an earthquake. the lm, they don’t t. Tey’ve grown. Teir the amily alive. His solution to that probimaginations have been sparked. So Grug lem is to keep them inside the cave. Tey What were your design goals for the has to make a big decision. He has to an will stay alive i they stay inside. Tis movie Croods’ and Guy’s CG models? swer the question raised by his daughter Sanders: is ultimately about hope versus risk. We built the Croods to sur- at the beginning: What are we doing this vive believably in the world the live in. It or? When he decides, he decides in a really How long did you work on the story? was un to build cavemen rom scratch. big way. DeMicco: Te story originated rst with As ar as movies are concerned, at one end John Cleese here in 2004. It was originally we have the cavemen in Quest for Fire who Where do the Croods go once they leave intended to be made in stop motion with are like people, but they can’t speak. At the the cave? Sanders: Te interesting thing about Aardman. But Aardman went to Sony other end are the Flintstones, who have cars, in 2005, and the movie sat around. Ten photographs, trafc signals. Our Croods are writing this movie and what made it so diMarch/April 2013
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What danger does the amily encounter? DeMicco: All sorts. Te world is changing underoot. Tat’s the big danger chasing them. Tere are the menacing piranhakeets and another danger, the macawnibor. Sanders: Te villain in this movie is change, and the embodiment o that is the collapsing continent pursuing the characters. So we try to do that in resh ways. Rits, vents, lava, shock waves that chase the Croods. But, that’s a aceless threat. We wanted an identiable ace and character that would chase them. So I designed DreamWorks’ CG crowds department referenced swallows to create dynamics for the deadly piranha birds. Chunky, the death cat. He’s our take on a sabertoothed tiger. He’s like the crocodile in Peter Pan. cult is that there weren’t specic destinations Did you ever use motion capture? He catches Grug’s scent almost immediately and DeMicco: We did something sort o cool. they needed to arrive at. Te most important ollows him all the way through the lm. things going on are changes happening within We started with storyboards, but the animathe amily. Te adventures they go through are tors did motion capture to help block the Were there any particularly interesting apinterchangeable. Te challenge or Kirk and scenes. So when the layout artists started, plications o computer graphics in the flm? Sanders: One o the problems was creme and the story crew was to get the right bal- they knew where the animators wanted ating tar. Te [CG crew] did a brilliant job. ance o action and emotional moment during interaction. the journey. We discarded a lot o sequences Tere’s a sequence where Grug is trying to Tey got the consistency we hoped or. It was because others worked better. o some extent, keep re away rom the amily. It’s a physical actually a cloth simulation that they adapted. the places they go are meaningless other than sequence and the motion capture gave us great One o the guys said something interesting: sparking reactions among the Croods. reerence ootage. It’s light and quick or the We can do anything, but we can’t do everyanimators to do motion capture. Tey can thing. CG has come to a point where they can How did you divide the work between the show it to us and ask, ‘What do you think?’ make it. But there’s a limit to how much. DeMicco: Te crowds department was run two o you? Sanders: For the most part, we had two Did animators always block scenes beore by one guy, Spencer Knapp. You’ll see something sets o eyes on everything. Te one thing we layout? very interesting in the piranha bird sequence. DeMicco: Not beore every scene, but it divided was the writing. One o the most imHe ashioned it ater the swallows in Northern portant things with co-directors is that you was an opportunity to be downstairs with the Europe and tried to replicate their graceul naneed similar sensibilities, and Kirk and I have phones o, and sit with production design, ture with these birds. It was in the dynamics; he similar sensibilities. We’d sit across rom each animation, and layout in the room at the same was constantly looking at the dynamics. When other and divide the sequences up or writ- time. It helped us get together and talk about they rst take o, it’s beautiul. Inspiring. Lovely ing. Ten, we’d trade pages and comment a scene, what was the important part, what to watch. Ten they turn deadly. Everyone was and change each other’s pages. As long as the scenes plugged into the outline we had worked on together, it worked. Tat was the one thing that was collaborative. Did you have any particular technical challenges in making the flm? Sanders: Te gigantic challenge was building the world. Tere are no man-made eatures. No buildings or things like that. Every thing in our movie is an exterior. Even the inside o the cave is natural. So that was a large problem. We also employed matte paintings to ll out the world; we have some eects that are giant Grug’s daughter Eep’s curiosity caused the family to leave the cave. Modelers referenced swimmers to create the CG character. matte paintings. DeMicco: Te other thing was the characters. Usually there are crowds o extras in a CG lm. we were looking to say. With storyboards, the taken by the birds story-wise, but also or the Tis lm has a low population o characters, but artists might work hard on blocking a scene animation, the way the dynamics move. Te the characters are on screen all the time. It’s an or the two characters talking, but the ve be- fuidity, the poetry was amazing. n ensemble comedy; everyone is a lead. Tere are hind might be round circles, and that might seven main characters plus 21 creatures. So, cho- not be helpul to the animators. It also helped Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a reographing the comedy and the action was an production design. We could talk about i we contributing editor for Computer Graphics World . She can be reached at
[email protected]. interesting challenge or the animators. really needed to go to that side. 34
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movies using high-end renderers like Pixar’s RenderMan, which generally take much longer but result in much higher quality. Te boundaries that dene this dierence are even starting to blur, with many games also incorporating non-real-time rendered cinematic sequences into their products or story exposition, and technological advances dramatically increasing the quality o real-time rendered visuals. I am an animator who has been ortunate enough to work in both these exciting industries since 2001. Originally rom the UK, I have worked at some o the most respected lm and game development studios in the world, including Ubisot Montreal, Industrial Light & Magic, DreamWorks Animation, and currently Valve Corporation in Bellevue, Washington. As such, I can oer insight into the similarities animators can expect in their day-to-day experiences in either o these mediums.
Animation Knowledge Animation is driven by the same set o core guidelines regardless o what the animation is being created or, so the skill set required when you look at animation purely as an art orm is the same across both games and movies. Understanding what specialized animation knowledge to apply to a situation and how to best execute that or the product comes with experience. It’s important to not get too swept up in technology and remember that a group o men gured this stu out in the early 1930s, Despite the visual dierence between the appearance o Valve’s DOTA 2 and an animated eature flm, many and their discoveries have laid the oundation o the technical processes used to create the animation content are very similar, or created by artists who or hours upon hours o successul storytelling. utilize a common knowledge across both media. It is true that video games, in particular, expose Converging Course game developers and hobbyist animators the and oten exploit these apparent advances in Despite the act that movie production had an ability to use sotware that had, until that technology, but the role an animator plays on a almost 100-year head start over video games, point, only really been accessible by the movie production is the same across these two elds: the two have nally started to dramatically special eects industry. to compel the audience to want to see more. converge when we speak specically about oday, the process o creating a character In a movie, that is done by selecting acting animation and the methods used to create animation or a mainstream 3D game is al- choices which make the characters believable, it. With the development o new types o most identical to that o a 3D character or allowing the audience to trust what they are 3D games – notably starting with Doom in a multimillion-dollar movie production – watching and to empathize with those charac1993, and then soon ater with polygonal- the only dierence being the visual delity. ters. In a video game, the animation needs to based true 3D games such as Quake in 1996 – Te articulation o a character via the rigging be unobtrusive and reactive to the player’s inmainstream video game development quickly process is oten done using identical sotware – put, allowing the person to become immersed migrated rom using 2D paint packages and this holds true or the animation itsel, as well. in the experience, yet at the same time, it must sprite strips to 3D content creation packages, In act, the advancements in 3D computer perorm the same storytelling unction that such as 3D Studio Max (the Discreet prede- graphics sotware, such as Autodesk Maya would be expected rom a movie. Many games cessor o Autodesk’s 3ds Max). and 3ds Max, has allowed authoring o almost now are trying to create more opportunity or Strangely enough, despite advances as early every visual element in both lm and game animators to create these compelling experias the late-’70s, it took until 1993, with the in- content; modeling, shading, lighting, and pro- ences by entering the player into scenarios credibly successul Jurassic Park , to convert the cedural eects can all be generated on these wherein they can see characters act and behave movie business to using 3D computer graph- platorms. in a similar delity as they would in an aniics or authoring the majority o character and One o the key dierences at this time is the mated movie, bridging the kind o animation VFX-based animation. Largely attributed to method used to render images to the screen, created by artists even closer together. this advancement was the availability o rela- with games generally using real-time techTe release o DreamWorks Animation’s tively cheap computer systems that aorded nology and generating visuals on the fy, and Madagascar 3 this past summer included a 38
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An im at io n•Car eer
new character named Gia that I led throughout the production. Working with Gia was very satisying and incredibly challenging. In a movie ramework, the animator needs to understand the role o the character in the story and how to best express that through animation. It’s also equally important to make the character entertaining while successully portraying its arc progression. Tat meant a lot o groundwork with early shots, getting eedback rom the directors, and trying to create a mutual understanding about who she was and how she would act in certain circumstances. Tese were oten done with video reerence that I would act in mysel and then record, and later show during the dailies as part o the blocking process. Te key thing we were trying to accomplish was a character that the audience could relate to, but at the same time, give her a bit o spice and keep her unique. Back in 2008 when I worked on Turok or the Xbox 360, I had a similar challenge with the enemy Raptor characters, but the requirements and execution were quite dierent. We needed the player to really be araid o these things and be satised when they were able to kill one. A lot o dierent animations were tested or the same idea, such as alternate versions o the same attack and multiple deaths. Tere was also an extensive collaboration with engineering to gure out exactly how a player could shoot a Raptor so we could have dierent animations to show reactions rom dierent weapons or rom dierent directions. Tere were no direct dailies sessions to review the work that was done; rather, it was play-tested as much as possible by dierent people. We really just wanted to have the Raptors be clearly identiable and the player excited and challenged each time he or she met one. However, you couldn’t say there was any real story arc that we tried to create or them via the animation. Despite using similar or identical sotware, such as Maya, across many animation studios and game developers, there is still a strong existence o proprietary systems, particularly at some o the older eature animation studios, including Pixar’s Menv (Marionette) and Dream Works’ Emo. Tese systems generally exist to support specialized character rigging pipelines that were developed beore the mainstream availability o commercial sotware, but also to support proprietary unctionality and to provide ownership over the authoring sotware or the companies in question. Tese systems are relatively rare, however, and well-established companies, such as ILM and Weta Digital, use Maya to author the majority o their character rigs and animation with notable success.
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My time at ILM was made considerably be dramatically complex, yet they are continumore successul because I had been using ally emerging and change considerably based Maya or approximately seven years or game on the kind o game being created and the development beore I started at the studio. It kind o animation required or the game. was a natural transition rom game development because the essential workfow o Maya, Animation as a Career its interace, and its programming language With the immense popularity o animation were still the same. Essentially, the require- training available today, there are more and ments o the work at ILM were vastly dier- more animators entering the job market and ent rom previous game work, but I knew the looking directly to lm and game developmethods that were needed to produce them. ment or their careers. Both seem to oer Following ILM, I was ortunate to use Dream- wonderul opportunity to the new animator. Te games business has become well known Works’ Emo on a number o eature animation productions. Emo sotware required an entire- or employing multiple teams o animators ly dierent execution o my animation knowl- on permanent contract positions to ll the edge, leaning more toward a traditional 2D requirements o the project. raditionally, drawing-based approach to animating. Tis game animation has served as a good way or switch in technique was somewhat a symptom inexperienced animators to quickly progress o the requirement to show progression o a their skill set, as the products generally tend shot to a director, but was very closely tied to to call or manageable cyclic animation that the working ramework o the Emo sotware. allows the artist to concentrate on the artistic
While animating the character Gia in DreamWorks’ Madagascar 3 , Cameron Fielding strived to keep her interesting and unique. To understand her better, he would act out scenes for video references that were later shown during the dailies as part of the blocking process.
I strongly believe that Emo taught me how to undamentals and get good at what really matthink through a shot, and made me a much ters early on. Being active in an environment stronger animator. where animation technology is developing Where the game industry tends to dier exponentially also exposes animators to diersubstantially rom eature-lm production is ent approaches to creating content and vastly with delivery o the animated content – in- dierent requirements or that content, which tegrating that content into a game. Tis is would rarely be encountered in traditional eausually done through proprietary systems and ture animation context. changes substantially rom studio to studio. Positions or lm and visual eects anima Animators are usually required to set up move tors generally have been considered harder to trees that describe how animations blend rom secure because o a perceived need or expeone to the other based on circumstances in rience with acting scenarios or complex chothe game or player input, but also they have reography sequences. Due to the nature o to contend with ar more complex congu- character animation in movies and the need rations, such as attributing elements that are or acting, this is generally true; however, there controlled dynamically by the game engine, are also clearly ewer seats available in the including cloth or inverse-kinematic control- eature-lm industry compared to the games lers. On the whole, these systems tend not to business. It is also important to mention that March/April 2013
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the movie business and VFX industry tend to be clustered in the western US, particularly in Caliornia, which is contrary to the games industry, which oers more opportunity across the US and in Europe. I started my career at a small game development studio in Manchester, England, and have since worked in Canada and the US. I was lucky to have landed a good job right out o university. I had received a degree in graphic design, which I was terrible at, but I had managed to somehow create a short animated lm that won a national competition as part o my course. Tat helped me a great deal with getting started in the business. Going straight into games was perect, as I could develop my basic understanding o animation and also had plenty o opportunity to expand my technical knowledge o Maya’s programming language. Aterward, I worked in Canada or a number o years and then was driven by a desire to work on visual eects or animated eatures in the US. It took a good ew years to get the experience to animate to a level o delity required or the big screen, a lot o which I had to do in my own time, but it was established by a strong ooting in the principles o animation and a solid technical knowledge I had acquired rom the gaming industry over the years. What appears to be common in both industries is a tendency to specialize in either lm or video game development, despite the bridging o the two by many commonalities regard40
March/April 2013
Game animation has come a long way in recent years, closely paralleling flm animation, as is the case in Splinter Cell Blacklist, created using Autodesk tools.
ing the practice o animation. Tis could be attributed on an obvious level to the notion that people merely choose the career path they preer, or possibly by the kind o skills learned in one industry not necessarily translating efciently to the other. Generally speaking, animators working in the video game industry start o their careers in that industry and have decided to stay; and likewise, with eature animation, many animators either come rom a 2D background or are part o the new wave o talent hired right out o the online animation schools. Obtaining considerable working experience in both these proessions is uncommon. Tere are many reasons or this, both rom a proessional standpoint and a personal one. My dream, since I was young, was to animate movies, and starting in the games business was a great way to realize that. I eel that eature studios can have a hard time reviewing and appreciating the kind o animation that is created or games, so it can be tough to break into the movie industry without thinking strategically about what you choose to work on or complete as a personal project at home. Because o this, there are probably many good and perectly able animators who want to work in lm but simply don’t have the suitable content needed or their demos. However, as mentioned beore, there are many
actors (like types o employment oered to animators) that can dramatically aect longterm decisions – the games business is airly notorious or paying respectable salaries or ull-time, permanent positions. Conversely, the eature animation and VFX industry oten oers work on a contract basis that can place a huge question mark on the availability o uture work. Schedules and the amount o time required or a project also vary between the two, despite the act that both industries will inevitably have their “crunch” times. Even so, it is commonly accepted that the movie industry is more demanding in this area due to the sheer quantity o work expected in considerably short time rames. echnical hurdles perceived by eature or VFX animators considering a switch to video game development are also big deterrents. Viva la Difference
Te quality o animation across these two industries is also converging at a notable rate. As modern console and PC gamers start to ask or more and more depth rom their gaming experiences, it is becoming less successul or developers to commit to simple game characters, like Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog, to deliver their audience’s experience. Modern games more requently require the illustration o rich back-stories and detailed character in-
An im at io n•Car eer
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teractions, such as those in the Mass Efect series or similarly with the recent release o Max Payne 3. Tis is less o a problem within the handheld and mobile sectors o the game market (at least or now), where gamers generally are not looking or the detailed play experience, but rather something to occupy a short time span, while more traditional games accommodate this very successully. People, particularly students, oten ask me which industry is harder to animate or. It’s a valid question with game animation becoming richer over the last decade, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to give a reasonable argument either way. Te general notion is that eature animation is harder because o the delity required, and it is true that the bar is set very high indeed. But on the ip side, that kind o animation is a lot more predictable and generally an easier medium in which to solve problems. You could say animation is like riding a bike: It takes a long time to gure it out, but eventually it becomes second nature, and you then have the bigger problem o guring out where you should go. For eature animation, that gets reected by how you decide on your acting choices, your understanding o the story, and how to better the movie with each shot you do – not to mention the persistent backand-orth iteration and change that is a key part o the animator/director relationship. On the other hand, game animation is a
Feature-flm animation is considered more difcult than game animation because o the fdelity required. Life of Pi contained memorable animated sequences, such as this one.
right, particularly when you never know what are the protagonist, you make the choices, and so the criteria required to immerse the player angle people will see it rom. When discussing the approaches to ani- in the story are very dierent. When it comes mation in games and lm, it might be worth to making video games that have a need or reminding ourselves that they are two very story exposition, using cut-scenes is a risky separate industries, both creating very dier- way to do this, since you are not playing a ent types o product. It has long been a goal game at that point but are instead watching o the game development business to create a movie. Some o the most successul games o all the true “interactive movie” that we all think we would love to play, yet it has never been time embrace the act that they are not trying achieved, and there have been many horric to deliver a movie experience. Look at Tetris ailures. I think it would be an amazing ex- or Portal to see a stripping back to basic game perience to play a movie, but when I think play and simplicity that is, in act, what draws about what that really means, I catch mysel the player urther in. I do think there is a valid ©Paramount Pictures.
Animating characters or flms can be difcult, but animating objects, such as this airplane or Flight, contains its own unique challenges.
place or games with a cinematic tone to their delivery, but i more developers understood constant case o shiting goal posts. Every and realize that, as a matter o act, the beauty that they don’t necessarily blend as well as we project is so dramatically dierent, and not o movies is that we don’t actually have to do would like them to, we may make more prog just artistically, but technically too, and it takes anything at all. Te audience sits back and en- ress in the kinds o good games that actually considerable eort to gure out how to get an joys the ride. Can you imagine how rustrat- make it to the consumer. animation in the game to eel satisying and ing it would be i you were watching Indiana We are trying to make both games and rewarding to the player without the person re- Jones and every now and again you had to movies the best they can be, not turn one into ally noticing that it’s an “animation” and pull- solve a puzzle or kill a bad guy just to see what the other. n ing them out o the experience. happens next? I also am a strong believer that a good cycle, Movies are all about experiencing the story Cameron Fielding works at Valve Corporation, helping to be it a walk-run, laugh, teleport, or whatever, through empathy with the characters. Games nurture the next generation of interactive entertainment can be one o the most difcult things to get are almost the opposite o movies in that you while spending his free time with his family. March/April 2013
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Trends & Technologies
Tis article contains excerpts from the abridged version of “CoSA Lives” (the afterword of Chris and rish Meyer’s Creating Motion Graphics with Ater Eects). uring the past 20 years, the visual eects industry has evolved dra- The Beginning: CoSA matically. From classic monster movies to action thrillers, visual wenty years ago, our young and ambitious Brown University gradueects and motion graphics have added magic to lmmaking and ates – Greg Deocampo, David Foster, David Herbstman, and I, David the viewer experience. Simons – sat down with lawyers to incorporate Te Company o SciIt’s been quite a journey or lm technology, with constantly ence and Art (CoSA), a small start-up in Providence, Rhode Island. changing ormats, a rapid hardware release cycle, and a turbulent busiTe master plan was or CoSA to become a world-class content ness climate, but one tool has weathered the change and has evolved provider or the new electronic age. Te basic premise o CoSA’s busiinto a staple o creativity in postproduction: Adobe Ater Eects. ness plan was to have artists and programmers working side-by-side Te evolution o Ater Eects has mirrored the progress o the to produce multimedia content. CD-ROM production was the rst rapidly expanding visual eects industry, inspiring many movie cre- task. Since Macintosh computers were the most advanced multimedia ators and catapulting careers o those working in visual eects, motion platorm at the time, we planned out a system or authoring electronic graphics, and animation. Ater Eects is used by Hollywood’s elite VFX magazines using Apple’s HyperCard and custom plug-ins. Microsot artists, including Rob Legato, Ben Grossman, Stephen Lawes, Andrew Word RF documents with hyperlink inormation were “fowed” into Kramer, Paul Gra, and many others. a multipage, multicolumn layout, with space or in-line advertisements. Tis year, Ater Eects celebrates its 20th anniversary. Every anniver We decided to display our rst CD-ROM, Connections: Te CoSA sary provides an opportunity to look back and refect on accomplish- Journal, at MacWorld Expo in Boston in order to showcase what the ments and to make bold plans or years to come. o this end, David sotware could do. However, Connections was not a big success. As we Simons will help us take a look back at the developments in visual e- later discovered, its abysmal perormance was mainly caused by a cerects, while Steve Forde makes predictions about where he envisions the tain extremely slow brand o CD-ROM drive we happened to use. Tis industry is heading. turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the slowness o the animations
D
After Effects was used for the animated adaptation of Graham Chapman’s memoir, Monty Python: A Liar’s Autobiography – Monkeys video, animated by Mrs. & Mrs.
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March/April 2013
Left Brain: Detailed Information
Right Brain: Artistic-Driven Features
Which one are you? The July/August (SIGGRAPH) issue of Computer Graphics World will highlight the latest trends and technologies in our industry, including a supplement on Education and Training, as well as a special section focused on the VFX and animation presented in this summer’s blockbusters. You will learn and be informed. You will be entertained and impressed.
SIGGRAPH is where the left-brainers and right-brainers come together. Which one are you? Either way, CGW has you covered. Ad Reservations: June 17 • e-mail
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Trends & Technologies
was the impetus or us to write PACo, the PICS Animation Compiler. PACo enabled platormindependent, low-bandwidth streaming animation playback with synced sound. While we were busy working on PACo, Apple Computer was secretly working on a new technology called Quickime. Tis new development orced us to change the plan once again.
Beginnings of After Effects Te ront-running ideas or CoSA’s next big thing were a ull-media indexer – similar to ull-text indexing and retrieval but with After Effects’ two-man technical team Justin Weyers and Andy Hay reviewing A Liar’s Autobiography. extended capacity or images, sounds, and movies – and some type o animated eects program. In the end, the animated eects idea wave o creativity and bring motion pictures video editing: rom greenscreen work, to digital looked like it had the most promise. matte painting as backgrounds to special eects, to new heights. Te new product – code-named Lort ater In June 1993, an action-adventure flm to title sequences. Many o these technical adthe team’s avorite entrée at nearby restaurant about dinosaurs roaming the earth trans- vances have been centered on transitioning rom Apsara – was designed to have the ability to ormed the flm industry. Jurassic Park ’s plot- the idea to a result instantly, then allowing fner process any type o media in any way, any- line was not the only element rom the flm detail to ollow on. Great examples o this have thing rom MIDI musical data to a word- that was revolutionary – so were the visual e- been in the art o ootage stabilization, camera processing document, all o it time-based. ects. Te special eects used in Jurassic Park tracking, and 3D object insertion. Te idea sounded promising, but because o transported viewers to a prehistoric land with What used to require huge investments in its complexity, CoSA could have gone out o a thrilling reality. Dinosaurs, vegetation, and set design, location, and construction can now be entirely virtualized within a compositor like business beore being even hal-fnished. We the gory scenes became a reality or viewers. decided to gut the Lort design, leaving only Scott Billups rom Electric Sandbox used Ater Eects. the most crucial elements in order to ship the Ater Eects to combine aspects o 3D diproduct in six months. Otherwise, the team nosaurs and 2D sketches to virtually preview …and in the next 20 years eared, it would have been all over. movie scenes. Billups used Ater Eects be- Many o us on the Ater Eects team believe Te next item on Apsara’s menu was Egg cause it was the only application that allowed we are only “hal” done. Our ocus remains Roll, so, ollowing the tradition, we named him to combine all the 2D and 3D elements the same as it was the past 20 years, and that the new product Egg. Although the name Egg created to pre-visualize the scenes. Ater E- is to allow creativity to uel the quality o con was growing on us, we decided to give the sot- ects was used during the creation process or a tent – and not in expensive technology. Artists ware a real name. op contenders were Video scene where a cartoon Dennis Nedry’s (Wayne bend, break, and push Ater Eects with every Banana, Moviewist, and Eecstacy. However, Knight) arm and fnger moved back and orth release, and this, in turn, uels our creativity none stuck like Ater Eects. Te initial re- on a computer screen, taunting Ray Arnold to provide technology that can accommodate lease o Ater Eects was January 1993. Ater (Samuel L. Jackson) or not knowing the these demands. In tandem, the world is very dierent than Eects 1.0 was incredibly simple: no time- “magic word.” line window, one eect per layer, no transer In part, the use o Ater Eects contributed it was when Egg made its debut. Devices you modes, no motion blur, and only one mask to Jurassic Park ’s visual eects success. In 1994, can carry in your pocket are dramatically per layer. the 66th Academy Awards gave Jurassic Park changing how people consume, interact with, With companies like Apple promoting the the prize or Best Visual Eects, Best Sound and create compelling content. Media that moves has never been in higher demand, and digital video feld, larger sotware companies Mixing, and Best Sound Editing. became more interested in CoSA and its newly Te technology used in Jurassic Park set the the ability to quickly create outstanding expereleased product. In 1993, CoSA was acquired bar high or the visual eects industry. Since riences puts Ater Eects at center stage more by Aldus Corporation, and less than a year a- then, directors have demanded new technolo- than ever beore. Although all o us who created Ater Eects ter the acquisition, the team moved to Seattle gies in order to create new realities or view just as Aldus merged into Adobe Systems. ers. Filmmakers realized that new technology believe the last 20 years have been nothing enabled the transport o viewers into dierent short o amazing, it’s rankly the next 20 years Jurassic Park: The Catalyst worlds and realms, which put the digital visual that has us most inspired. In act, it will be Beore Ater Eects’ debut in 1993, digital eects industry in high demand. interesting to see how the next generation o motion-picture special eects were mainly crestorytellers shape devices, virtual 3D models, ated through proprietary sotware applications From Then to Now… and photorealistic compositing in the Jurassic developed by production houses and studios, From Jurassic Park to Te Avengers , the visual ed- Park or Star Wars flms o tomorrow. n and were run on very expensive computer iting industry has progressed with technological hardware. However, once Ater Eects became advancements that have catapulted flms to new David Simons is principal scientist and Steve Forde is available, flmmakers were able to unleash a levels. Advances have been made in all aspects o product manager at Adobe Systems, Incorporated. 44
March/April 2013
Review
By DAVID BALSUTO
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Maxon Cinema 4D R14
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hen I took over the animation program at San Marino High School, I was certain o two things: I wanted to teach the kids the basics o Adobe Ater Eects, and I wanted to teach them a 3D program that was easy to learn, and consistently getting easier to use. As I look back at my decision to go with Maxon Cinema 4D, I now know I really made the right choice. Not only did most students “just get it,” but they were creating amazing models and animations. Also, seeing Maxon’s progress at trade shows, such as NAB, and watching its progression with the product has created a lielong learner in me. I just love how creative I can be using it. In the latest release, Release 14, Release 14 of Maxon’s Cinema 4D contains a number of new features, including fully integrated sculpting tools. Maxon is oering a new sculpting system (a personal ave that I will explore more this review), camera matching, the ability to send C4D into Ado- am having a heck o a time exploring this creative unction. be Photoshop Extended, and a plethora o UI and workow enhance As we move more and more into photorealism with 3D models, it ments, as well. I tested it out on my MacBook Pro. is important to play nice with Adobe Photoshop. Import your C4D fle eortlessly into Photoshop Extended and change geometry, textures, lights, and cameras, too. Want to keep your textures as is? Bake them A Closer Look Cinema 4D R14’s new ully integrated digital sculpting tools alone are in Cinema 4D frst. Te ability to integrate with Photoshop Extended reason enough to buy this version. Te level o detail you can sculpt is really opens the oodgates to proessionals who want to sell their phoamazing. Subdivide your model up to 12 levels and millions o poly- torealistic hard work. gons. Pull, smooth, atten, and grab the areas you want to eortlessly. Lights, Camera, Placement It truly eels like playing with virtual clay! As a Wacom tablet user, I loved the ability to tweak settings o my pen A rock-star new addition to the application is the new Camera Calibrain the Eector Setting menu. Tis really nailed tilt, pressure, and direc- tor. I have to say it’s always been a bit o a struggle to align 3D images tion to my liking. A nice addition. on an object without camera trackers. In Ater Eects CS6 it’s a breeze, Also, now available in the sculpting mode is the ability to use but not in some other 3D programs I have used. Cinema 4D’s Camera stamps and stencils. While I have yet to put it to real-world use, I Calibrator makes it extremely simple to speciy vanishing point, ocal length, rotation, and 3D coordinates, allowing you to place your object accurately in the scene. Te Camera Calibrator is tremendously useul or previs mock-ups Maxon Cinema 4D R14 Studio and designers who want to present their creations. I can now grab a Cinema 4D R14 Studio $3,695 still rom a video I have shot, import that still into Cinema 4D, use the Cinema 4D Prime R14 starts at $995 Camera Calibrator, and work on that set extension or the addition o a www.maxon.net spaceship .. .or, well, you get the idea. Very orward thinking. March/April 2013
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Review
Maxon spared very little in this version. e improved dynamics is a lot of fun to use. I can play God by manipulating wind, turbulence, rotation, and gravity just by enabling and changing the properties in the AeroDynamics mode. e ability to create more realistic ying or breaking is easier to do. Cinema 4D R14 now has seamless integration with e Foundry’s Nuke compositor. Since a lot of industry folks have made the move to Nuke, this is a huge plus. e only real negative I found was there is no node-based texturing. Artists who are used to this function will want it. I am hopeful Maxon will listen and add it in the future.
Final Thoughts With over 200 enhancements and new abilities, like the sculpting tool set, the Camera Calibrator, and Photoshop integration, this a must-have upgrade for the Cinema 4D user. New users will enjoy its ease of use and amazing tool box. I have already put in a request with my boss to allow us to upgrade because I truly feel the sculpting tools will open minds to a new levels of creativity. ■
CLASSIFIEDS RESOURCE DIRECTORY LISTING By including the Resource Directory Listing in your media plan, you will be reaching key decision members within the digital content creation profession. These professionals use this section as a day-to-day resource when shopping in the industry. Contact us today for pricing and upcoming special issues.
Laura Kalave P: 818.2 91.1162
[email protected]
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March/April 2013
For additional product news and information, visit CGW.com
HARDWARE INPUT DEVICE
Feeling Good
Wacom has unveiled the Bamboo Stylus feel, new to the Bamboo Stylus family that features two digital pens with Wacom’s patented EMR (Electro-Magnetic Resonance) technology for tablets that integrate Wacom feel IT into their designs, such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. These pressure-sensitive pens offer users a natural-feeling experience while taking notes, sketching, and navigating mobile devices. The Bamboo Stylus feel delivers a combination of “active” pen and sensor technology for a digital pen experience that emulates the feel of a traditional ballpoint pen or pencil. The pen sells for $39.95, while a carbon-fiber version costs $79.95. Wacom; www.wacom.com 3D PRINTERS
Print Like a Pro
3D Systems has released eight new ProJet 3500 professional 3D printers that are equipped with its latest remote tablet controls for the production of functional plastic parts and investment casting wax patterns for professional-grade design and manufacturing applications. The new ProJet 3500 series incorporates 3D Systems’ recently introduced ProJet HD MAX and CPX MAX technology platform, including its patented Multi-Jet Modeling (MJM) print technology, its production-grade printhead, advanced material management, tablet-like touch-screen controls, and remote tablet and smartphone connectivity. ProJet 3500 series printers are compatible with 3D Systems’ VisiJet print materials that cover a wide array of applications. 3D Systems; www.3dsystems.com DISPLAYS
Commercial Grade
NEC Display Solutions of America has rolled out its next-generation, 32-inch, commercial-grade LCD display. NEC has also launched the V322-AVT and V322bundles with an integrated tuner and singleboard computer, respectively. The V322 features an Open Pluggable Specification
(OPS)-compliant expansion slot for easily adding accessories and components. It also simplifies the installation, maintenance, and use of digital signage in a variety of environments. The display features 1366x768 highdefinition native resolution and a 3000:1 contrast ratio. The V322, V322-AVT, and V322-PC are priced at $619, $719, and $1479, respectively. NEC Display Solutions of America;www.necdisplay.com
SOFTWARE LIGHTING CROWDS
By Golaem!
Golaem has released Golaem Crowd 2.2 for facilitating distributed rendering and supporting Solid Angle’s Arnold. The software encapsulates all Golaem Crowd rendering proxies in a single installation package for easier deployment on renderfarms. Procedural rendering plug-ins and proxies are still free to use on an unlimited number of rendering nodes. Golaem Crowd 2.2 also includes new procedural shaders for automatic diversity generation in crowds. They are available for Arnold, Mental Ray, RenderMan, and V-Ray. Golaem; www.golaem.com ROTO/PAINT
Painting New Picture
SilhouetteFX LLC has released Silhouette V5, its largest upgrade in the product’s history. Silhouette has been enhanced by a raster/vector hybrid paint system, semiautomatic 2D-to-3D conversion, a fresh look at shape-based warping and morphing, and the inclusion of planar tracking technology from Imagineer Systems’ mocha Pro. Among Version 5’s upgrades and new features are: Auto Paint, an optional S3D node incorporating RealityTools technology from 3D Impact Media (for an added cost of $3,995) to facilitate 2D-to-3D conversion and stereoscopic processing, the Silhouette Morph node for producing film-resolution warps in a few milliseconds (in its draft mode), and more. New licenses of V5 are priced at $1,495. SilhouetteFX; www.silhouettefx.com
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© T w e n t i e t h C e n t u r y F o x C o r p .
Editor’sNote continued from page 2
New Zealand as a thriving VFX hot spot, with Australia and Canada well known for producing outstanding work as well, while India, Singapore, and a number of other countries are now proving their mettle. Indeed, VFX has become a global business, and the color of green (money) has become the driving factor – as it is for other businesses. However, VFX is a business that does not have a level playing eld. e studios in California are hard-pressed to compete with studios elsewhere. Not for lack of talent, as this area is still the epicenter of VFX, but rather because “elsewhere” provides subsidies so their studios can bid lower on projects. e end result is that US studios in non-subsidized locales must either discount their prices to subsidy levels in order to compete for work, or they have to maintain their prices (so they can turn a small prot) and hope that work is not given to the lowest bidder. Neither is a long-term, viable strategy. So, one by one, giants in the industry have begun to fall – and continue to do so. So, what is the solution? Unfortunately, no one at this time has a simple answer. e industry, especially in the US, is asking for a ban on subsidies – to create the level playing eld. However, why would a studio that is being subsidized forgo that advantage? After all, despite this being an artist-driven industry, it’s still a businessdriven industry. Sometimes, though, the cheapest is not always the best. Moreover, we already have certain areas “out-subsidizing” one another. Vancouver built quite a VFX nest recently, only to see business now being lured east to Montreal. en there is the matter of the artists securing better working conditions. Some see the answer (not a simple one) in the formation of unions, others do not. But how do you rank the workers? ey are artists, not factory workers doing the exact same job. Immediately after the Oscars, the VES – the industry’s global honorary society – issued a call to action, pressing upon California’s governor and state legislature to “immediately expand its tax incentive program for the entertainment industry and to include a focused approach concentrated on the visual eects and postproduction sectors of the industry.” e VES also plans to hold an international Congress with the
The artistry created by those working in visual effects is not always apparent on a live-action film, but is easily visible in this shot from Life of Pi.
goal of determining follow-up actions. Solutions are needed, and needed now. e industry is in crisis. (Just after the R&H situation, news broke that at DreamWorks, about 350 people will lose their jobs by year end, this coming on the heels of a big nancial loss on the movie Rise of the Guardians .) Most likely after this issue prints, there will be others looking at a similar fate. What does this mean for the movie industry, which relies heavily on VFX? One of the popular images in circulation illustrates the value of the work using versions of a still from Life of Pi . Without R&H’s work, the still depicts Pi in the boat oating in a water tank against a bluescreen backdrop, while the nal contains the tiger, the shimmering ocean, and a beautiful sky. Another uses the shot with Pi stroking the tiger in his lap – both the gorgeous nished scene by R&H and one containing a blue stuy tiger in the pre-R&H scene. Best of all is the blood-spattered shot showing what would have happen had a real tiger been used instead of the realistic CG animal created at R&H. e point is well made. VFX practitioners – individuals and studios alike – have had enough. ey want, no, they need, this situation rectied. Many served the VFX and movie industry well over the past decades. Many have missed birthdays and holidays working to make deadline. ey enjoy what they do, and they are good at it. It’s time the movie industry gives them the respect they deserve. Twitter and Facebook activity continues with words of anger from those suering and words of support from those sympathetic to the cause. Signs carried during the protests read: “Respect VFX.” “Oscar nominated work, bankrupt studios?”
“is is the rst time I’ve been outside in 3 months.” “is sign was added in post.” “I want a piece of the Pi too, stop subsidies.” “Give US VFX workers healthcare stability and their fair share.” What Others Think
One person wrote to us pointing out that in Prague, VFX artists are paid far less than those in the US. “With artists who will work for next to nothing, it is easy for international companies to compete with the US. I don’t think tax breaks will cut it.” Jay Roth, former 3D Division president at NewTek and current partner at EverWitt Productions, noted that the situation outlined in the grievances has been endemic and pervasive, and was present when he started in the business in 1980. “e plight of the VFX community is real; they are on the bottom of the totem pole and clearly not appreciated by the ‘glitterati’ or the producers and studios who treat them as lucky to have a job. VFX people have been funding Hollywood since Jaws.” As he pointed out, most of the top 10 lms on anyone’s list contains lms reliant on VFX (in some cases, heavily so, such as Life of Pi ). “Actors on these lms are paid in the millions for their on-set performances, back-end royalties, along with licensing and merchandising revenues. No one begrudges them their due; however, the VFX teams are often just as responsible for the success of the lm as the performance of the actors. But you would never know it from their compensation, benets, and the like,” Roth said. He added that the VFX community is very motivated, activated, and, thanks to social media, fully connected now. “e stories of abuse are worldwide. Hopefully posiMarch/April 2013
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Editor’sNote tive change will result from those who still practice their art and science in the business, though I fear not.” Jenny Fulle, founder of e CreativeCartel, pointed out that the VFX industry has been changing a lot in the past ve to 10 years, becoming more global, with tax subsidies more common. “It is becoming increasingly impossible for companies in non-subsidized areas to be competitive at this point. When a government is oering a 30 percent to 59 percent tax incentive or tax credit, you cannot compete with that if subsidizes are not oered in your area too,” she said. “I don’t know if you can end the subsidies, but we need to somehow neutralize the eect they are having. All the subsidies are creating a false economy, and until we end the false economy, it will be dicult to address the other problems such as compensation, benets, work schedule, overtime, and so forth.” While state subsidies within the US are present, Fulle noted that it is the international subsidies that are having the greatest impact. She recalled two decades ago when UK studios got their start, thanks to subsidies. It took years for the UK visual eects community to hit its stride in terms of quality. e same has happened in Vancouver now, and you have a strong, experienced community of VFX artists and companies taking root. “In both these cities, you now have visual eects artistry that can stand on its own. Granted, without subsidies, there would likely be a considerable consolidation of companies, with only the most healthy and talented surviving.” e bottom line: A lot of the work we do can be done in a number of places around the world. “But, if the industry continues to chase subsidies, then the new pockets of VFX expertise are never going to have the time to grow and the work will dumb down a bit,” said Fulle. A level playing eld is key, but there is
no easy solution to achieving that. A bandaid is needed now to stop the bleeding (and that could mean a tax incentive program in California) until a more permanent solution can be made at the global level. Until then, companies likely will take chances on studios in areas with subsidies for artist-driven work, thus dilute the artistry of VFX because you are chasing the dollar savings and not making your decisions based strictly on the artistry, said Fulle. “Right now, there is too much supply, and that is causing a rumbling through the industry. ere is not enough work to go around. And chasing subsidies is a dicult business model, which isn’t benecial or healthy for the VFX community.” Bobby Beck, CEO/co-founder of Animation Mentor and former Pixar animator, said that despite the current situation in VFX, the industry does indeed have work to oer artists. “We are in an exciting time, as this issue has existed for a long time and it seems like there is visibility and momentum in the right direction to truly solve it.” Beck and his AM team are ingrained within the industry: co-founders Shawn Kelly and Carlos Baena are working as animators at ILM and Paramount Pictures, respectively. And all are deeply concerned, but not exactly surprised. As Beck pointed out, the industry has been changing for a long time, and there are diametrically opposed forces working against each other to solve this issue. One, big lm studios want lower prices. Two, the quality of work the VFX studios are doing is getting more challenging and, as a result, more costly. Beck believes that the current situation with VFX is one that can be solved by the big lm studios themselves if they are willing to support the VFX industry that continues to drive their most protable lms – the point of the “going green” movement on the social media channels. ›› See a Q&A with Beck about how this may aect schools, accessible under “Extras” in the March-April 2013 issue box on CGW.com.
Scott Ross actually summed up the situation nicely in a radio interview he did shortly after the Oscars. He was visibly upset. “When I was running ILM, this was a cottage industry populated by technologists and creative artists. ere was a quote back then by George Lucas that if you feed those ILM people enough beer and pizza, they will do anything. Now it’s a lot of business, and the size of budgets have gone up tremendously,” Ross said. He noted that on movies like Batman, Avatar, and so forth, VFX can cost $100 million and is by far the biggest line item in the budget. However, studios are actively trying to drive the price down to get the work. “We are architects of building stu that has never been built before and we do it on a xed price. at, combined with tax subsidies around the work, and the prot margins are 3 to 4 percent in a good year.” Consider what occurred on the Twilight movies, Ross said. British Columbia was oering a 35 percent tax rebate, so studios had to do the job in Vancouver. Studios spent $1 million to open there, and then the workers were imported to the facilities. “So now we have a population of migrant digital artists in New Zealand, Vancouver, Mumbai….” VFX appears to be the future of lmmaking, Ross notes. And a trade association has to go into eect and a cohesive voice needs to say to the studios that the business model does not work, and if it does, “you are shooting the goose that lays the golden egg. Motion picture studios are doing what they can to get the best work for the least amount of money. at is business. We then say we will do anything [to get the work.] We have not taken ours seriously and not realized our value, and now we have to go back to the studio and say, ‘this is the way it needs to be done,’ and come up with a new business model.” ■
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