FMX 09, Day Four

Traditionally the last day of every fmx is the games day and this year I was prepared for it: Yes, I was wearing my Half-Life² t-shirt proudly in any Electronic Arts lecture I could get in. “They save the best for last”, as AIAS president Joseph Olin put it in the beginning. Yes, there was a lot to come. As always I just wish I had slept more.

Pipelines of War

Greg Mitchell ,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The day started even louder than the fat guy jumping down the stairs above my room at 6:45am: With Gears of War 2 (GoW2) and how Epic Games thought up streamlined their production pipeline for those. Greg Mitchell a big guy, well presenter and Cinematics Director at Epic worked twelve years in television before he switched gears (pun intended) and went into the game industry. He already worked on the cinematics of the first Gears of War (GoW) but wasn’t quite 100% happy with the outcome: Not all was motion captured and so sometimes the animation data had to be sped up or slowed down; e.g. a character walks with 70% speed of the captured motion but talks normal, it just looks weird.
So Epic Greg set himself the task of making everything better than in GoW, to stick to a consistent filmic ¹ style and look.
In GoW there was no pipeline, everything was done by the game artists more or less parallel to their tasks within the game. It worked, yes, but it could have been much better.

Greg laid out first of what the needed pipeline need to consist of in order to determine the scene scope and the needed assets. In the beginning there are audio plays (“radio plays”) and animatics for each scene. While art and level assets are being created the mo-cap recording starts with constant input from set- and level designers (e.g. with blocking diagrams) to give director and actors information about the environment the characters are in. On GoW2 Greg worked with real actors instead of having people “to pull away from their desks”, made enough rehersals before the capture and played back the edited soundtrack with the voice actors on set. All that led to a much higher and better quality and the production speed improved significantly.

After the recording the layouting process starts where the scene takes shape, gets a pace and the cameras are set. Although one might think that motion-captured data is pretty rigid to work with it is not. To get better angles for over-the-shoulder-shots the characters can change their positions a bit or some parts of the animation can be repeated between the shots, e.g. to use a walking sequence twice in succession to give the impression of a greater distance.

This reminds me of what I’ve learned from my mentor Fraser McLean who always told us that we can cheat if it helps the story. He’s currently working on a book about the history and role of layout in traditional animation vs. computer animation today. Because layouting is the most important step in every production I think you should get it once it’s out.

Once the layout gets locked, lighting and effects artists add atmosphere and mood to the scene while the audio department populates the soundtrack with effects and music that is specifically composed for key scenes. You need to bring in the game-designer(s) and producer(s) into the feedback loop as early as possible to keep the revisions to a minimum. Needless to say that there is a constant bugfixing and polishing going on; “With cinematics you’re never done. Never. But at one point you just have to say that it’s finished.” Greg ended.

The art behind making a game

Matt Aldrich,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Matt Aldrich, the Art Director of Lucasfilm Animation in Singapore, shot up a big image of the package design of the game he was working on. Star Wars Clone Wars for the Nintendo DS. It is sacrilegious to say that you’re sick of Star Wars? I just know that I really am. Nevertheless I tried to be as unbiased and open as possible. First off Matt showed excerpts from the design document which was really thorough and had everything plotted out very detailed. The level design was then outlined in Google SketchUp to visualize not only the key areas but also the players progression through a level. After approval of this very rough layout the art process is started: Based on the detail-lacking SketchUp renderings storyboards are drawn from the player’s perspective int he level and the key moments he or she’ll experience. This is mainly to point out issues before it is costly in time and hence money to make the necessary changes. So take your storyboards and discuss them with every member of the team. The engineering-guys for example will be interested in the amount of polygons simultaneously on screen, the character designers in how close we see the enemies and so on.

The next step was defining a color arc of the scenes in the level. In the level Matt was showing there was a progression from cold, steel-blue colors in the beginning to hot, orange colors at the level-boss fight scene. While it is possible to spend quite a long time drawing those, it is much faster to find reference images and color correct them in Photoshop or do quick paint overs until the colors are final. The focus also laid on key areas for these pictures because nobody has neither time nor manpower to have detailed concept art and paintings for all areas of a game. Once camera angle and perspective where also laid out and locked, concept paintings could bring in the color from the references and add details. In fact those images where so big, that they also became a source for textures for the game. The concept paintings also showed whether it was for the player easy to progress quickly enough through the level. And again, concept art is there to open the discussion and to make it easier to be specific: “The pylon on the left should point in the direction of the player’s goal” is much better than “give it a slant and make it look good”.

At any point it is important to always recall the limitations of the target system. The NDS has very small screens (256×192 pixels), the texture memory is very limited (so the use of vertex lighting was quite important and extensive) and it is a device you can carry around and play in every light situation. So the art department had to focus on good contrasts, very legible silhouettes and a clear level design.

It is incredible what those guys in Singapore did on the DS: The characters for the in-game cinematics have a quite sophisticated animation rig, so they can show facial expressions and talk in lip-sync. I was shocked and awed. But in a good way. Matt went on with how they expanded the Star Wars universe and developed parallel to the TV show for new planets and space ships. But let’s be honest guys: It looks pretty much like any fantastic sci-fi stuff, like all Orcs and Elves and Goblins look alike throughout the fantasy-genre. So I didn’t take any more notes in this presentation. I only know that I want to give some DS homebrew stuff a chance.

Nuke ‘em

I switched rooms and went to the heavily crowded lecture ambiguously titled “Stereo-3D Film Post Tools and Algorithms which turned out to be a presentation of what’s hot and steamy and in beta in Nuke 5.2 by at The Foundry. Surprisingly I got a seat in the second row and had a good view on Simon Robinson’s presentation. In fact it was all about fixing terribly shot stereo ². Simon, head of development at The Foundry, really knew what he was talking about and showed all tricks in Nuke rather than just running a PowerPoint visual hell presentation.

First of all he outlined how to work in Nuke with stereo imagery. You either can use the JoinView node on top of your tree after reading the different eyes ³ or have them already combined in a single EXR file. I asked Simon afterward which one was faster, but he said that it would depend on where you read your EXRs from, what type of CPU you use etc. So I make a wild guess and say that there’s practically no difference. Simon went on to tackle specific stereo problems that can occur in live-action shoots. “If everything was shot right in the first place, none of us would be in this room.” Well spoken.

• The O_VerticalAligner node can compensate for incorrect image alignment but obviously can’t deal if there’s a shift in parallaxes because of it.
• O_ColorMatch is another node that helps to match the images of the stereo-cameras together. Color discrepancies often occur when one eye was shot through a mirror in order to get a closer interocular distance ⁴. While this node does not a perfect job, it does a rather well job and makes it a lot better.
• Nuke can calculate a disparity ⁵-map from the two eyes via O_DisparityGenerator. The stringer the color, the stronger the disparity is. Currently this flickered a lot but “see me in a presentation in a couple of months and this will be much better”. They’re always improving.
• There’s also the possibility of setting a convergence point. The advantage is, that it can be done for any pixel in the image, so dragging a convergence point over a moving object can keep the focus on it.

At this point Simon switched to the anaglyph view in Nuke and I got a little upset. When entering, people were given a set of paper-polarization filters that have a distinct gray color ⁶. So on the appearance of a blue/red anagylph image on screen about 95% percent of the people I saw around me put on their filters, without even thinking about it. You just won’t see a 3d image in an blue/red anaglyph-image when wearing pol-filters on your nose. Some folks kept them on for as long as 30 seconds before realizing it. Sheesh! And here comes the kicker: Most of these people did it a second time with the next anaglyph image just a couple of minutes later. Some people just drive me nuts!

• A clever and time saving idea is the ReConverge node that pushes everything the artists did from one eye to the other, e.g. roto or paint. “It won’t match perfectly, still puts you more than half the way through. You only have to tweak it instead of recreate it.”
• O_InterocularShifter comes in handy when the interocular separation between the two eyes was shot too wide and you have to fix it. This node calculates a new set of stereo-cameras that are positioned between the original ones. Currently it took Simon’s notebook about 20 seconds to calculate a frame. “It’ll be faster next time” he promised. Still it is nothing to correct an entire movie with because there will be occluded objects in the right eye and occluded object in the left eye which can’t be magically thought up by the software, the disparity estimation won’t work then. So it’s more a tool of last means rather than a way of remastering your stereo IMAX movie for television. However it can assist CG pipelines.

So does stereo just keep making our lives harder? Yes, still some things work better. Like camera tracking because you have way more depth information which in turn results in a much more stable disparity map. from that you can pull a Z-map of your scene and add things like volumetric fog in post-production or correctly pulling the digital lens for some depth-of-field-effects. Another thing that will be coming along is that more and more metadata from the shoot will be used in the compositing process, eventually even autmated. Until now we had the pleasure of running around with clipboards, tape measures and constantly bugged the DOPs. At least I know I had.

What’s still in development are things like lens-distortions or how to deal with optical effects such as lens flares or blooms in stereo. What I have learned from last year is that you either have them in either both eyes or no eye. Further Simon talked a little about using more than two cameras to get even more information form a live scene, “The algorithms are there.”

Essentially this lecture was was a down-to-earth showcasing of The Foundry’s Ocula Plug-In set. If you want to bug the poor man even some more: Here’s his address sam@thefoundry.com.

Small is Beautiful

Richard Hilleman ,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

After the break gaming veteran Richard Hilleman from Electronic Arts held an inspiring lecture about the evolution in games. We all knew that in the early 1980s pretty much everybody with a computer, programming skills and a good idea could make a game and, eventually a lot of money. Fast forward 25 years: Today there are a handful of big players and about 50 teams (worldwide) that can pull off an AAA high-def game costing 25 million dollars ⁷. While all these big studies can’t afford to take any risks and have to please a very broad audience, the small designer can do whatever she or he wants because the stakes a lot lower. If four people get together, work on a browser game for a couple of months that did cost them, say $500 in total, and they make a profit of $10,000 that’s a huge profit margin. Yet $10,000 wouldn’t probably even cover EA’s monthly coffee bill.

So how do you make a great product then? It has much to do with yourself:

• Show passion not only in making the game but also for its content. Richard Hilleman has a passion for Football. So he created the first Madden NHL which was, as we all know, a success.
• Be versatile! Nobody’s going to hire the 8th shader engineer. But if you are a shader engineer who knows how to manage a group of people, about their tasks and see the bigger picture, your chances will improve drastically.
• So learn more than your base skill and get technical as well as leadership experience. You’ll learn much more when you have to lead a team that’s so big that you can’t do what’s missing in the end yourself.
• Be curious. Explore. Obtain knowledge. “Don’t accept the box they try to put you in”.
• Learn about money and how it works with your product. From start to finish. Internalize it. Understand the economics of your product. There’s just no way around it.
• Learn people. Because “Everything you learn technically will be gone in 7 to 10 years”.
  • People are your customers.
  • People are your team mates.
  • People are your means of expression.
  • People are you inspiration.

  Change people’s minds. Surprise them. Take them on a journey. Entertain them!

You won’t need a huge target group. The target group for games usually is between 14 and 20 years old and male. They have the time, their parents have the money. But you can’t experiment much inside that target group. On the other hand there’s Pogo where the average person plays for about 20 hours per week. “Would they consider themselves as gamers? No.”. This market for casual games is evolving. There still will be the audience for high-def games but don’t forget the long tail. Pogo’s average customer are 49yr old women, for example.

“Who do you rather want to be: Michael Bay who gets $250 million to shoot some producer’s movie or Robert Rodriguez with $5,000 shooting his own movie?”

The Tale of Framestore

Andy Lomas of Framestore CFC told the tale of an English post-production house that was famous for its commercials when it set itself the task of creating an animated feature film, namely The Tale of Derspereaux. The most interesting part of it was the way they mimicked the lighting on paintings from the old masters Bruegel, Vermeer but also Bosch; that they had to use mouse-scale cameras for the proper depth-of-field effects, used filmic dollies and technocranes and made the image deliberately imperfect by blocking the view or some jitter here and there, have even more flaring and blooming and so on. Nothing new, in fact. I’ll cover the cinematography of WALL·E below.
Personally this lecture didn’t intrigue me much. Yes, Framestore showed that they can pull off making a full CG movie in Europe by themselves but there was nothing striking to me. In my opinion even the look wasn’t that top notch but still waaay better than that horrible Back to Gaya.
Andy showed their tools such as asset and production data management and so on. He talked about the shift from an asset based workflow (“what stuff is needed?”) to a shot based workshot (“what’s the story here?”). Also Andy stressed the importance of layout and previz (nothing new, huh?) as means of a creative hub, bringing the costs under control and to lock down as much as possible as early as possible. Again, bring in the clients as early as possible in the feedback loop for their involvement is essential. In fact is the final feature nothing more but a very refined version of the layout.
In the end he showed some production tools Framestore had used such as their production asset management tool Shotgun or Pick a Prop that linked the Object ID pass in an EXR to the asset database and displays the name of the prop the pointer is hovering over. This was mainly to ensure a clear communication such as “What’s wrong with the shadow of cr_p_wooden_barrel_v54″ as opposed to “What’s wrong with the shadow of that brown thing in the background?”.

Let there be light

Danielle Feinberg,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

What followed was the lecture most of us were waiting for the whole week (the fmx folks really do save the best for last). Danielle Feinberg, who was one of the Pixar DOPs on Wall·E, explained how and why the feature got its distinctive look. As I already knew from last year’s Pixar presentation they really like to research extensively and try things out for themselves. And for Wall·E they found that their lighting model and camera code was outdated. Director Andrew Stanton’s vision was to show the abandoned earth through the lens of an 1970′s science-fiction-feature camera, with all the distortions and funny stuff going on. To test things out they filmed in the atrium live-scale models of Wall·E and Eve with test patterns all around and a grid on the floor on 70mm stock and with anamorphic lenses. Hey, they even got Dennis Muren to show them the ropes! So according to their tests their camera-code was adjusted. Also, they set themselves the limitations of having only a certain set of lenses (see box). Now Pixar operates a fully functional virtual 70mm camera with anamorphic lenses and all the artifacts that they bring (optical breathing, barrel distortions, lens flares with blue streaks, elliptic highlights and so on). If you don’t overdo it you get yourself a look.

To develop a look the folks at Pixar also researched extensively and came down to that 1970′s science-fiction-feature look. Orange, documentary, existing light is used and, just like Sharon Callahan said last year about Ratatouille, don’t be afraid of the dark i.e. let things go to complete darkness if it is justified. But again, Pixar failed on that. I guess they tend in general to over-light their features in some respect.

For the shading they came up with a new illumination model of energy conservation ⁸ that essentially comes down to three knobs: reflection, specularity and roughness. Basically the rougher a surface gets the less it reflects and the amount of reflected light is never higher than the light the surface received. The new shaders also are capable of ‘hot reflections’ and perform realistic fesnel falloffs themselves in the rendering.

The shading of Eve was much more complicated than anticipated because she is made up so many parts that should fit together seamlessly, yet has circuits and light on the inside and goes through quite a lot of transformations. On the other hand Wall·E’s eyes were also an important part for his performance so he wouldn’t look dead (too reflective eyes) or creepy (too little reflecting eyes). He got his final appearance by lighting the aperture blades inside so they would break out visually from the blackness of his eyes.

Because I was more concerned with the technical side of this lecture I don’t have any notes taken on the other topics that were touched, but I bet there’s an artbook already out where you see many of the beautiful drawings, silhouette and color studies and so on. Pixar artbooks are either way and obligatory possession and resource, even if you’re only on the outer rims of the industry.

Waltz with Michael

Michael Faust,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The lecture was just called “Waltz with Bashir” and the only thing I knew about the film was a 5-second clip I had seen many months ago which made me eager to see it. Unfortunately I missed seeing the film once again. But not this lecture featuring the stunning look the Bridgit Folman Gilm Gang hat achieved. With Adobe Flash! Michael explained that it was the first feature film of The Gang, nobody had worked on something that big before. In the course of the pitching they animated a scene using the cut-out technique in Flash by separating body parts and just moving them around until a new keyframe was needed to be drawn. At first the segments were rather large and soon they figured out that it wouldn’t look good enough. So more and more shapes were broken into their components until a face was nothing more than a flesh-colored blob with dozens of tiny black snippets that the animator used to animate the face.

The backgrounds often came from photo references that had been traced and painted over in Photoshop; some elements were completely thought up and yet they integrated perfectly into the realistic environment. Michael, who worked as an Illustrator and did some backgrounds said that it was hard for him at first to change his style he was used to from his oil painting to something so completely different.

When the animation work on the film could begin, the director already had the film finished, leaving out lots of black holes and studio reinactments of what needed to be animated in the final film. So the layout phase began. It was done mostly traditional and very sketchy with indicators of what needed to be a new keyframe that had to be drawn. The characters and poses were drawn by hand and then in Flash painted over, the backgrounds traced in Photoshop to match the very narrow color palette. Any effects had been done in After Effects such as trails of smoke. Michael brought some animatics for us to view (it still was odd watching him open .swf files of what ended up on real film stock) and they looked pretty much like uncleaned finals, their quality was just outstanding. Like the rest of the film. Because of the tight budget there was no room for motion capturing or painting every frame by hand. So this Flash-based cut-out technique, as tedious as it may seem, was still faster and cheaper than traditional animation.

What party?

There it was again: My lack of sleep kicked in hard and so I decided against watching the animations from the SIGGRAPH Asia which I regret bitterly. I went back to the hotel, slept some hours and woke up just in time to visit the closing party. But you know me: I don’t like parties because there’s nothing for me to enjoy: People are drunk and pushy, music is too loud to converse properly (also there’s not much to discuss with drunks) and the only people you meet are party people. So I stood in the hotel and tried to catch up some sleep for the journey home. I failed.

Traditionally the last day of every fmx is the games day and this year I was prepared for it: Yes, I was wearing my Half-Life² t-shirt proudly in any Electronic Arts lecture I could get in. "They save the best for last", as AIAS president Joseph Olin put it in the beginning. Yes, there ...

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