Post is Prep

My Access Pass,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Still a bit drowsy I planted my ass in the front row of the König-Karl Halle and knew I wouldn’t be getting up for a long time, not even for Pixar’s Career Gears (they don’t need compositors, I got the message last years). So at 11 a.m. “The Role of Visualization in the VFX Production” by Kevin Todd Haug, VFX Designer at FX Cartel and Ron Frankel, president of Proof Inc. begun.

And it began with some heavy, uncommented statements right in the beginning that made me gulp a little and sit there a bit shocked and concerned.

• Post is Prep.
• Compositing is dead.
• Avatar cheated.

The speakers started off with describing the status quo, that currently everything except the production itself happens in a purely digital environment, although the direction towards a fully digital approach is present also in the day-to-day life of the film-making process on set. Yet this reality asks for a paradigm shift towards the non-linear workflow of pre-production on set as well.

“All the steps from pre-production towards the reality of the live-action set are a question of creative communication.”

There have always been paradigm shifts within the VFX industry, such as the switch from analogue to digital in post production in the past twenty years. Now we are headed towards having the virtual reality (VR) of the feature not only available in pre-production and post production but also in the production itself.

Some prominent features already have arrived at that step. Whereas James Cameron used these previsualization techniques to see the virtual set through the camera while shooting, Tim Burton was offered a similar approach on the stage of Alice, yet “he just turned the screen away and preferred looking at the green-screen footage.”

“Doing an animation paradigm doesn’t solve the problem, doesn’t treat the actors in a respectful way. The question is how to bring everything into a virtual world. And what does that mean for us VFX people? [...] Most things belong in post, you shouldn’t do matte paintings afterward, they need to be known by the director before the principal [shoot], so it needs to happen in prep.” In fact quite a lot of assets get worked on (and finished) in preproduction, not only matte-paintings, but also models, textures, characters and so on. So why not use everything that’s already there on set?

Tod and Ron then showed a hands-on example of Conan or as they jokingly put it: “The adventures in Low-Budget-Land”. It was a shoot of a sci-fi-esque sequence set in the Prohodna Cave, an enormous cave near Karlukovo village in Bulgaria. “This cave is hundreds of miles away from your local anything“, so shooting directly on location would’ve been way too expensive. So instead of wasting loads of money bringing the set to the cave they brought the cave to the set. The cave was recreated in VR and could be used as a virtual set.

To make this work, position and settings of the live action camera needed to be tracked in real time. Looking through the camera means looking at your actors and a replacement of the green screen with the virtual set. This allows the DP to set light, angles & composition of the live action parts much better because s/he always has a near-final background when looking through the lens without the need of eventual re-lighting in post.

“It’s there to enable a creative dialog instead of people just guessing what to do and how to do it. It’s all about the discussion, not about the technical tools itself. So DP and CG artists can work together in both prep and on-set and eventually all boundaries collapse into one united effort from the beginning.”

Then the statements of before flashed across the big screen again, but this time with remarks that evaporated my concerns.

Post is Prep

Entrance Hall,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The amount of work in post has no business in being in this environment. The whole point of being a Big Company assumes that you will bring a mass of problems from set to make them solve them — for a price. And that will change. The decisions will be made on set, hopefully diminishing a lot of problems. So post production will be much about “making it look nice” instead of “doing somebody else’s dirty laundry” as I like to express it.

Compositing is dead

Boy, that was a downer to me the first time I read it. Not so much a downer as “No, you won’t get a pony!”, it was much more like “There is no spoon.” Luckily Tod and Ron cleared it up what they inferred by that bold expression.

“Fixing a problem by ‘painting something out’ is not an option anymore. Since there’s an unstoppable shift towards stereoscopic features happening you have to make everything to work in stereo. And that makes a big difference when setting up a pipeline. Instead of everybody being a tiny cogwheel in the machinery, you will have more high-level artists working on shots from start to finish. And those shots will be cool!”

Avatar cheated

“Avatar isn’t really film-making. Rather it’s an animated movie with people who aren’t animators in funny suits. Essentially it is an animated movie with some live action in between.”

Wow.

Somebody really said it. But since there was all this pro-Avatar bias in the media and the industry I got a first glimpse of how the tremendous efforts of the making of Avatar where kind of equalized by the statements of some speakers.

“Everything on [Avatar ] was really expensive and if you do it again you get another Toy Story. And Pixar is way more efficient than Cameron. That paradigm just won’t work again.” And it is true: Everything on the set of Avatar only works in that particular stage and location. But in the day-to-day life of making movies (especially cost-effective) you need your equipment robust enough to travel. “The longer you stay in one location, the more you fuck it up [because] film crews really have a tendency to use up locations.”

I used the term “virtual set” quite a lot so far but Ron stressed that there is no such thing as a virtual set. “Since it is built somewhere it is real. In the end everything that’s being recorded is virtual. The bottom line is what’s on screen in the end and that’s what everybody’s there for.”

Personally I didn’t see anything strikingly new to this, although the quality and speed of displaying the virtual set though the video-playout improved over the years. But what was really impressive to me was employing (rather) simple camera projections onto simple geometry to make it possible to wander through concept art and matte paintings literally in one’s office.

And I even learned that there is a Society of Previsualization out there. Who knew?

The New Art of Virtual MoneyMoviemaking

Without much time in between Maurice Patel from Autodesk continued the previs-morning of that day. Maurice started of stressing that it is the tools you need to enable interactivity such as real-time motion capture, real-time processing and real-time playback. Since teams need to work closer together and need to collaborate bringing everything together is of key importance, since “communication is the most powerful in visualization”.

In today’s digital production there is a wide range of different elements that need to work together like art, mo-cap, previs, CGI, rendering and what you get from the practical production on location. Not until post you start putting everything together. And we all know by now that making changes in stereo is difficult if possible at all.

There’s a lot I didn’t note down what followed because in the end it was just an ad-laden lecture of Autodesk technologies and previs-services, probably nothing one wouldn’t find out by browsing their website.

What I understood the bottom-line was “Build the technology. Or buy it from Autodesk. Then work with different departments to implement it.”

Still: I see that there is a trend evolving in the industry to get things right from the beginning by employing various previs-techniques just to minimize the workload of “fixing it in post”.

Abyss to Avatar

The Slide,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Director and VFX legend John Bruno was talking about his role in the industry and being more or less the right hand of James Cameron in a number of films such as The Abyss, True Lies, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and last but definitely not least Avatar. In the talk he showed clips from each of the movies and explained some of the techniques they used. The face made of water from The Abyss for example was composited optically, in the original render it resembled a chrome-tentacle instead of being seemingly (and rather convincingly) made out of water.

Unfortunately this was another lecture where I wasn’t allowed to take some pictures so you have to endue the rather boring title slide I photographed. My apologies.

Disney’s Tools

The next lecture by Disney’s Andy Hendrickson was titled a bit clunk “Blend (Art+Science) = Technology at Disney” but had some interesting aspects.

Andy presented in the beginning a typical Disney concept art in a purplely-brown and uplifting tone, depicting a stone tower and trees with a brook in the foreground, a waterfall and very picturesque rock-formations behind it for the upcoming feature Tangled, formerly known as Rapunzel. You can see the original artwork by clicking here.

The following hour Andy broke down the painting into several details such as the waterfall or the lighting which were created part by part to match the concept art as closely as possible. “At Disney it’s not so much about rendering something photo-real, it’s more about staying true to the artwork. And for that we need different technologies.”

Now check the concept art from above with the final CG-version which can be seen right in the beginning of this teaser right here on YouTube. Pretty darn close, huh?

“Our concept artist boasted that he could paint these artworks in the evening after having a six-pack in one or two hours, which would take us weeks to figure out on how to recreate them digitally.” Andy added with a smile.

Disney uses a combination of xGen (whatever this is), RenderMan and IRender. They also plan to release their old classics in stereo and have developed a technology that more or less automatically produces usable depth maps, however they also employ 3d-models to project the 2d imagery on.

Personally I am not so much a fan of Disney’s policies, economic decisions and certain aspects in their style, yet they decided to release some of their technology with open source, so that’s something new to the whole proprietary-focused industry.

So I recommend taking a look at Disney’s Open Source site for the Ptex texture mapping system that doesn’t need UVs (That’s a bingo!), and I strongly recommend browsing through Disney’s publications on that site as well.

You are not welcome here

Being a big fan of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 and knowing that the movie’s VFX were comparably low-budget made me stay for the next presentation by Dan Kaufman’s “Inside District 9″.

So there was not much money for the VFX, yet their quality and integration into the wild live-action plates is stunning and seamless.

The design process went through many iterations, at first the shape and physiology of the aliens would allow a guy in a suit to double for an alien but this turned out to take out a lot of the anticipated realism because the audience would always be able to tell that, well, it was a guy in a suit, even if his face would have been fully CG. So the early marquettes defined the overall style. The final appearance of the aliens featured a more rigid exoskeleton even on the face, yet these overlapping scales were attached to the underlying geometry and animating facial expressions was not that big of a challenge.

A lot of tests of various animals were made for the appearance of the eyes, in the end the team settled on a human pupil and iris but on a black eyeball.

The main part of the characters was performed with Maya. In order to minimize cloth simulations their garments were applied very tight-fitting on the characters so that only certain bits needed to be simulated as dangling on the hero characters. Further they had stickers and make-up applied as an additional pass which all helped in diversifying the aliens while keeping them least troublesome in post.

The compositing was done in Nuke and required a lot roto’n'paint as well as 3d-tracking and projections: Most of the shots in the movie were hand-held and had actors as stand-ins for the aliens to help the other actors as well as the cinematographer to know what was going on and where. Later, the stand-ins needed to be removed from the wild plates by geometry projections, sometimes requiring exhausting and complicated paint work.

And there’s one slide of the presentation I recorded, in my opinion the most important one:

Staying On Schedule And On Budget

Use the simplest approach that will achieve the goal. Plan the entire pipeline

• Build in flexibility
• Make it as foolproof as possible
• Assume things will go wrong and have alternate strategies
• Keep communication flowing

Work closely with director/production

• Discuss trade-offs
• Come up with alternatives that still achieve artistic/story intent

Now that’s what I am talking about!

Rolling Shutter?

Ben Grossmann,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Ben Grossmann from CafeFX jumped right into talking about the VFX on Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island”. I really liked the fact that many applied techniques were more traditional thanks to his way of movie making, nevertheless he was very open to new approaches in it. In the end there was a lot of forced perspective and model-work in the feature, composited either even in-camera or in Nuke.

There’s an excellent interview with Matthew Gratzner and Ben on fxguide that I recommend to you if you are interested in the whole making-of stuff behind Shutter Island, because the lecture itself was nothing more than a narrated feature, although there is one technique described that wasn’t in the interview:

Details and “tiles” of the sea crashing against New-England-shore-rocks were filmed from a crane on a location that “looked just right”. This location was shot from all angles, starting from looking directly down onto the shore until up to sky, producing what Ben called “salad bowls” of tiles that could be re-timed to match each other and be projected onto a semi-sphere in Nuke and be used in/for matte paintings.

When asked about the work with Martin Scorsese Ben told that it was incredibly exhausting but totally worth it, because everybody knew that he was a legendary director and knew exactly what he was doing. In the end, so Ben said, “Marty got 200% of the VFX he asked for. For free.” Incredible, how being a legend helps in keeping the costs down in some way.

Crosseyed Avatar

Before getting his grip on Nuke Christian Kaestner was first outlining the situation of the current trend with stereoscopic pictures: They are box-office hits (e.g. Avatar) and, what’s probably most important to the industry, limits piracy because you can’t download a feature in stereo and enjoy it at home as you would in the theater (yet!). So, like it or not, it’s here to stay.

But stereo is expensive. Not so much if you are dealing only with a live-action film totally shot in stereo, or a full CGI film in stereo, no, the spending gets out of proportions when you mix live-action and CGI. For example, match moving takes three and a half times as long as in a traditional show, compositing (especially scene salvage) gets at least twice as long and, alas, annoying.

The on-set experience of Avatar was extraordinary for it was being in production for more than four years. The set itself was more like a full studio with all its custom-developed technology for and by James Cameron. But he needed the time to plan for single shot in detail, and also in stereo depth because you can’t afford mistakes at that scale. The previsualizations he approved became “the Bible” for how shots needed to be carried out, not even minor differences between previz and final in, say, distant mountain in the matte-painting were allowed (“and Jim got quite a temper!”). So quality control passes needed to be reviewed and green-lighted as well which essentially were the keyed live-action shots with un-shaded geometry but a 100% correct and tight track for each eye.
Most of the shots were composited in Nuke and rendered with Pixar’s RenderMan. Because so many studios were working with the same assets, which also partly existed as animatronics on set, all of them needed to be matched in appearance. The most complex shot in Avatar was hg016_0065, Jake Sully rolling out of the carrier after arriving on Pandora with a bypassing mech: 250,000 files needed to be rendered and were comped in a Nuke script with over 3,500 nodes. “Yet it rendered on our farm in about ten minutes. Nuke is incredibly performant!”

Let’s get physical!

It is often (if not always) the case that even matched lenses and cameras differ in their color fidelity and lens warping. So what needs to be done in the first place is to get rid of the lens distortion by a lens correction node. Then the problems in color can be addressed which is the tricky part: Some areas in the image match, some don’t and in the making of Avatar “a group of skilled people was locked into a room without windows for many weeks to match those kind of shots by hand”.

At this point in the presentation Ben from The Foundry took over and showed some nodes of Ocula 2.1 to tackle exactly this kind of problems. Despite some of them not even being in beta, everything worked out just fine for the presentation.

First Ben showed how to create a disparity map by connecting a DisparityGenerate to a O_Solver node; nothing new here: The result still is an image whose pixel values in the first two channels describe how the pixels from image A need to be transformed to become image B. Ben then set the analyzer to a single frame and added a keyframe. One can now generate image B from image A and check it against the actual image B for errors and mis-alignments; although moving objects (such as actors) should be left out.
So if you can build a better image out of it, it works. The node even offers two options, “Normal” intended for motion and “Severe” which checks the edges, and I think it was in the O_newView or TuneDisparity node (provided the latter one even exists). The image generated from the disparity can be written to an EXR and then color matched with the “real” image from the other eye.

Unfortunately some flickering in can be observed, but there is a way to multisample the ColorMatcher by frame-blending the disparity for a couple of frames and/or by applying five or more ColorMatchers, each with slightly different block-sizes. Then merging them with each other by Plus, multiplying the result together and removing the original image. The result may appear a bit blocky, but it can be blurred and combined with the footage. The blurriness is almost invisible, yet this approach only works for footage and areas with low self-occlusions of the object. The Ocula 2.1 node, however, has now a multisampling-option for exactly that kind of merging a number of ColorMatchers together.

A similar approach can be made to perform depth grading, generating new virtual cameras that lie between the recorded eye-positions. Lastly there is also a DisparityViewer which shows the disparity vectors. Ideally they have the same length, are horizontal and have an offset by 180° in their angle.

Haus der Wirtschaft,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I was eager to first see The Foundry‘s presentations on Mari, their programming approach and a tech demonstration of the recently acquired Katana, I was so excited about last year in Sony’s presentation, but had no exact clue what it really was.

Paint that dinosaur!

Once arrived I got me a seat pretty close up front and was ready for their presentations to begin. Jack Greasley, who worked at Weta Digital on King Kong and Avatar and Zoe Lord, Senior Texture Artist on Avatar, presented Foundry’s upcoming texturing tool Mari.

Zoe, Jack, Bruno & Andy,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Weta needed a decent and perfomant tool because handling the characters of King Kong for Peter Jackson’s movie was a challenge itself. The monkey was huge and complicated and worked more like a complete set than just a character. And after learning about the tedious process, everyone at Weta knew, that Avatar would become just as exhausting and complicated like Kong — only multiplied hundreds of times.

The first version of Mari was took 16 months to develop and once it was running, it was constantly in production and used by the artists in production until up the current version. Although Mari is now internally in version five, for its public release Mari will launch as v1.0

Essentially Mari is intended as middleware between sculpting and animation, and effectively completely replacing Photoshop for a texture artist. Since this tool has been developed at Weta Digital for a couple of years now, the workflow in Mari is rather straight forward: You import hundreds of still images that can be manipulated inside the software and applied directly to the model you’re working on. You can perform 2D operations to your references such as cropping, color correcting but also warping or pinning. The performance is outstanding, the software handles well over a 100 2k-maps in realtime on a multi-million poly model, and here’s the best part, Mari can read and play back .obj-sequences of an animation so an artist can correct ugly stretching errors in the texture on the fly. this performance allows the artist to load and work on whole sets with moving objects and to create seamless textures across objects more easily. Did I mention that you can, of course, animate your textures when needed?
Mari is also capable of rendering occlusion-passes which can not just be multiplied to the color-maps with blending modes like in Photoshop, you can also use them as masks to paint dirtmaps.

“We realized that with other tools the artists were much more data wranglers than working creatively, setting up map-channels, importing files and shading networks and so on.” Mari offers the artist various tools and guides to work effectively and to avoid mistakes such as a protection system for edges or the possibility to use channels as masks.

I wanted to know about the exporting capabilities of the tool, like whether it was possible to export your shading network from Mari straight into Maya’s hypershade. “Unfortunately not, you will need to export your maps as separate TIFs, but the SDK is very open so you can have scripts in your pipeline that do that for you.”

Also displacement maps are currently only previewed in Mari as bump, yet The Foundry works closely with nVidia and ATI to add certain features.

And you’ll need at least a gig of free video memory to allow Mari to unfurl its glory.

6.1

Simon Robinson,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Simon Robinson continued with what’s new and cool with Nuke 6.1, such as the refined camera tracker or “stuff that’s not really rocket-science but still needed to be done like moving a camera while looking though it”; “GeoSelect” to select points of a point cloud; the modeler node that less you create geometry between points of a point cloud, which works a bit like in Boujou, but with the advantage of refining the corner over time yourself and have Nuke fix the track cleverly. This seems to be the way to go in terms of scene salvage in steroscopic productions, where you project your paintwork on such geometry in your scene. The WriteGeo node now also lets you export .fbx files, not only load them.

Nuke 6.1 features,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Another thing totally interesting is baseline camera correction, which I didn’t really grasp in the short presentation, but it appeared to let you stitch panoramas together and create 3d-vistas out of them, kinda like photogrammetry.

And in addition to Keylite and Primatte, Nuke will also support the Ultimatte keyer, so Nuke will have all three industry standard keyers available.

Simon also provided an outlook of further Nuke releases, mainly improvements in stereo roto & paint. When asked in what Nuke version this or that will be available he would just answer with a shrewd smile: “In Nuke 6.n, with n bigger than one.”

The Foundry is planning to release Nuke 6.2 this summer and expects another release at the end of this year, most likely featuring the first helping of adopted technology from Katana.

Making it faster!

Bruno Nicoletti on RIP,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

This was the title of the following presentation by Bruno Nicoletti, CTO and co-fonder of The Foundry. He stressed that there has always been the problem of any software nothing is ever fast enough and before continuing made a disclaimer: “It’s going to be very technical” before he continues to get to heart of the problem’s possible solution, the GPU. “Many people are obsessed about the GPU and we are not taking quite the advantages of it as we could.”

GPUs are really good at image processing and programming them is easy. But getting peak speed is hard for programming GPUs is different, and there are lots of new and interesting technologies like CUDA or OpenCL. Simple tasks such as blur and color correction pose no problem, but graining or motion estimation is quite hard to do, even with CUDA it still is complicated.

Bruno Nicoletti,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The Foundry codes everything in C++ and less OpenGL. If any OpenGL code is needed (like for Mari) it is handcrafted and different for every application because “We want the best performance on all devices” Bruno boasts.

So what are the problems? The first problem is that GPU code isn’t as fat as it could; then everything has to work exactly the same on all devices. For basic stuff that’s easy, but producing the exact same results for two completely different code-streams (C++ and CUDA) is hard and almost impossible to manage. Manually optimizing code is a complex specialist task and works differently for every device, makes the code much less legible, is tedious and slows down delivery profoundly. Or what happens when new hardware gets out? Then every bit of code needs to be adjusted to deliver the same results, manually again, which makes the product prone to bugs and, again, the process is painful and expensive.

So the task was to produce code only once, that needed to be clear, fast, legible and easy to port. The Foundry came up with what they call “Blink“: A programmer writes abstract C++ kernels to process images. The code for a certain device can be translated from the original code automatically for various devices such as CPU or GPU, taking the advantages of either. Bruno was showing a demo of this with the Kronos re-timer, running on a GPU via CUDA. “But this is only the start”, Foundry want to continue with SSE and OpenCL and yet more as well, clever processing graphs and run-time code generation.

The upcoming versions of Nuke will also incorporate these changes over time. Since Nuke needs scanlines whereas the GPUs work with tiles these changes will be additions, because “Nuke will always be processing processing scanlines” Bruno assured the audience, “but we will be implementing this into some realtime nodes, so sections of Nuke may be redesigned to work with tiles”.

As the demo showed, the GPU is surprisingly faster than the CPU with Kronos, although it is highly dependent on the chip itself. Yet it is possible to mix GPU and CPU calls for an overall higher performance. Since motion estimation already works this way, it can be expected that this will show up sooner or later in the Furnace and Ocula plug-in sets. “And it is even possible to run it via a host application”, so I guess that’s good news for all of you After Effects and/or Final Cut users.

I Want A Pony!

Andy Lomas on Katana,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Andy Lomas continued the Foundry session talking about Katana. Since I first heard some squishy descriptions a year ago I wondered what Katana actually is. Now there’s a press release and a FAQ on it on The Foundry’s website.

As we all know, Katana was developed in-house at Sony Pictures Imageworks for the past years as heavy-duty lighting and compositing package. But that was about it. If I had seen this article on fxguide, I would have already known. I strongly suggest you should read up on it, because I won’t repeat here in my clumsy words what has already been put to hypertext already.

However, I will quickly sum it up to the lazy among you: Katana is Sony Pictures Imageworks proprietary node-based tool for lighting, compositing and distributing render-jobs. It is asset-based where you can load your assets from your favorite 3d package and manipulate every little detail, when you want to also on a per shot basis. Katana sits on top of the assets, so it’s totally non-destructive and rule-based when through it overrides are performed.

This allows the artists to start lighting a shot, when the assets are still in production, for example, and to develop a look early on. Thanks to clever versioning it is easily possible to produce a number of suggestions and to get back to the right one easily.

Sony has developed its own format for Katana, one which handles assets as assembled components in a hierarchical structure, e.g. a city is composed of various blocks, which consist of various buildings and each building has a roof and so on. Katana won’t lode the full scene graph until the artist exposes it. Only what gets expanded in the hierarchy will appear visible in the viewer.

An interesting thing is that Katana is, according to Andy’s slides, render-agnostic which means you can set up your render passes in Katana and decide there for a renderer such as Arnold or Renderman, you can even easily plug your own renderer into Katana: When your renderer understands the concept of a shader, Katana can work with it. A huge advantage of this is, that you have a consistent interface from lighting to finish, and work in one environment all the time.

Katana’s GUI,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

In Katana you can choose what attributes you want to expose and/or modify to the renderer. The full assets with high-res-geometry and textures only get loaded via the renderer, so you only deal with what’s important and don’t get lost by a cluttered scene: What Katana can defer, it will defer. Also in Katana you can trace why something is rendered the way it is, like where an asset gets its specular map from and so on. For example, a Ds tag means that the value is the default from a shader, whereas Ls indicated that the value was set locally from a node within Katana, so an artist can always “debug” shading and lighting issues.

If you want to get your hands dirty with Katana yourself, you can: There’s an API for your own company’s C++ plug-ins and, of course, Python support. The scripting language in Katana itself is CEL which can be used to select certain nodes, e.g. to apply a certain material to all geometry nodes that have a certain name match, certain tags or attribute matches but also by a collections. This allows to override parts that do not exist at the time but will get modified once they are ready. There are a lot of further options to use CEL to override multiple object, like only turning on the specularity of a whole scene — bang! — you just made a specularity pass.

Now let’s have a closer look on the user interface and the workflow with Katana. Andy showed the audience what instantly sold it to me, namely the “I Want A Pony” menu option, which creates a pony-shaped node in the graph view. “This is actually one of the horses of Beowulf, so it’s technically not a pony. But we use it as a primitive here in Katana. And it might even succeed the Utah Teapot” he added jokingly. The further now one drills down on the asset, the more parameters get passed on to Katana until you arrive at the vertex-level. In theory you could make whole 3d-animations and models in Katana.

Compositions look like trees with roots: On the top you load (and/or) group your assets and materials (like branches and leaves), assign nodes that perform certain changes and in the end you have multiple renderers and render-passes (like roots). And the interface is, of course, very customizable and panels can be docked or torn off.

Materials can be stacked together into one stack which has only on input and output connection to the outside to keep the complexity low where it is not needed. Everything can be inherited to child nodes, even transformations, if you want to. So for example making a wet material can be just done by creating a child node that inherits everything from its parent but diffuse and specular values.

The gaffer-node is a “one-stop-shop-node”, as Andy put it, to execute a macro and to create lights with the most common attributes already exposed.

Katana composition can be references or, by using the KatanaSdtBake-node, be baked for other artists to use, have live groups in a macro or share real Katana scene graphs (i.e. the compositing-scripts) via a library.

In the end, Andy announced that Katana won’t probably ever ship as a single product by The Foundry. If it ever will, then probably with its 2D capabilities stripped out of it which will in turn be used in a new Nuke version. Katana features in Nuke will probably show up still in 2010. There is potential in Katana as a re-lighting engine, “but that’s quite far down the line at the moment” Andy concluded.

35 Years of Slapping your own back

Lynwen Brennan,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Lynwen Brennan’s lecture on ILM‘s past 35 years was as mundane as it was boring, but it was no surprise hearing that from the President and General Manager at Industrial Light & Magic. At least her presentation had many pictures in it (in the 70′s, every guy had an impressive beard), tables and schematics of why ILM is the most successful company there is; that ILM invented digital editing; that John Knoll and his brother came up with Photoshop; that the first shot featuring digital compositing (and not a mere optical one) was in The Abyss — so it was a nice blend between appearing all corporate and fun facts. Lynwen was reading her hour-long presentation that left no questions open, partly because of the fact that it contained nothing that you wouldn’t find on Wikipedia. The primary message was that ILM tries to raise the bar, keeps the costs in check and wants to define new standards.

ILM panel discussion,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

What followed was a panel discussion about the global production at ILM, since ILM has also a studio in Singapore (that’s where the Clone Wars series gets produced, including the Nintendo DS game, see last year’s fmx coverage), and works closely with other post-houses such as Pixomondo.

My lack of journalistic skill now really shows because I didn’t get the name of the moderator — my apologies!

The panelists were Dennis Cooper, Lucasfilm’s Director of Global External Production; Gretchen Libby, executive in charge of external production at ILM; Mohen Leo, ILM’s Singapore Studio Supervisor and Thilo Kuttner, CEO of Pixomondo whose biggest contribution to the discussion was the fact that he held his microphone like an umbrella all the time and appeared overall subsequently rather faint (see photo below).

The first question asked to the panelists was a basic one: Why global? In ILM’s opinion it’s a good way to keep the cost down and to maintain quality by having many options. For Pixomondo (who have offices in Babelsberg, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, London, Shanghai and most recently Los Angeles¹) being global is not only to leverage the global talent but also a way to keep everybody busy.

Since communication is one of the strongest factors in collaboration it neither ends for Pixomondo nor for ILM at simple email exchange. Thilo strongly proposed also understanding the different mindsets and cultures instead of forcing your own ways upon your collaborators. To ILM it is important that every bit has to be as clear as possible, “It’s not only about being clear in what you say, it’s also considering what the other one hears”. Mohen further stated that for the artists in Singapore it is important to have direct access to their respective supervisors in the US. “The better you know a person, the better you know what he or she means when saying something. The simple act of having lunch together can help a great deal in that respect” Gretchen Libby added.
The diverging mentalities really do put international communication to a test, in Singapore, for example, direct yes or no answers are avoided so different strategies needed to be sought. “It’s important to know that when you ask ‘Can you do the shots till Monday’ and you get ‘We do everything we can to have them on Monday’ it actually means ‘No’.”
Pixomondo even introduced a command-list to get the most urgent and most important communication dead-right, independently of the culture. “At ILM we know we are all in a very visual field, so we draw a lot of pictures.”

Thilo Kuttner,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

To ensure a continuity in production ILM is a big proponent of creative leadership and development of long-term relationships. “You don’t produce where it’s cheapest, you go where you get the best ratio between quality and price.” In terms of production pipelines Pixomondo orient themselves on ILM, who are really fond of their proprietary stuff, yet they insist that they are open to change.

The process of going global (or not) starts very early on for ILM, when they look through the script. Based on this script they assign different tasks to different studios all over the world, studios with strengths in certain areas, although “we look for synergies as well.” And ILM goes “where we can find capability and punctuality”, both equally important in any big production.

“But is working together with other studios not like training your competitors?” the moderator asked with a wink. But the folks of ILM stayed relaxed. “Talent and competition are both everywhere [..] we rather look for people who want to work for us”, to them everything is about building long-term relationships with their partners. “Also our clients want and need to know where their material is being worked on”. For Pixomondo working with ILM was also a long-term strategy as Thilo added, “not least because it’s an honor to work with ILM.”

In the VFX business (especially with big players such as ILM) security is a hot topic. The process of evaluating the security standards of a potential partner begins very early on, “basically with the first phone call”. They need to fill out a questionnaire on who has access to their premises, to their data, what kind of passwords they use and so on. “And site visits. Lots and lots.” The material they get to work on is watermarked, data transfer is password protected and so on.

So what about the future? Thilo concluded that the business will continue to go more global (big surprise), and also ILM only wanted a “continuation of where we are now”, perhaps with a 24-hour feedback cycle; an attempt to work with the time-zones instead of against them.

The usual colors

Tim Sarnoff,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The visitors in the König-Karl-Halle had thinned out a bit for the upcoming lecture by Technicolor’s Tim Sarnoff on “Working Across the Globe”. Maybe I was a bit tired by the previous presentations or the lecture really lacked much structure and in the end there were even less people in the audience. In the end it was just a company presentation of Technicolor with the occasional buzzwords thrown in, mixed with some commonplace information such as “You remove a certain degree of risk when going global; One has an unlimited talent-base when being global; Being a global company needs work and consciousness” and from the Technicolor promo video I noted down “It’s a business of passion enabled by technology”. I was glad when it was over.

On the plus side I swapped business cards with a German screen writer who had her degree from the prestigious Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and for lack of job opportunities in Germany (“I hate German drama!”) she resigned to writing a novel for the moment. Networking on the fmx was as easy as always.

Down the rabbit hole

David Cohen,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The last lecture of Tuesday was by Ken Ralson and David Schaub from Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI) and all about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in which they lined out some of the production process. “First thing we learned was that Tim [Burton] hates storyboards. So we started with gathering a load of reference material with our starting point being the 1922 Alice in Wonderland movie. In theory they wanted to establish a style and then shoot which in practice didn’t really work out, in the end changes needed to be made until the last minute.

For the pre-production they found an artist at the portfolio section of the CG society² they liked and gave him a little piece as a test. They liked the result and hired the guy from Germany. “I bet the CG society will get a lot of new members as soon as this lecture is over” I thought to myself.
The concept artists painted a lot of designs and suggestions until Tim Burton would eventually say “This feels right” and the artist could ponder about what it was that felt right to Tim and develop it.

What SPI did in the beginning was also a test of enlarging Johnny Depp’s eyes in a shot from Burton’s great film Ed Wood. The result was hilarious and “when we showed it to Tim and Jonny they both cracked up so we knew it would work. [...] and after a while working with it, Johnny’s real eyes seem always a bit too small.”

The principal green-screen shoot was incredibly tight so everything needed to be planned and considered in advance. “It wasn’t an easy task considering there was so much that needed to be CG, like Crispin Glover whose whole body needed to be replaced, or Alice changing between three different sizes throughout the film”. All shots with extras or supporting characters were shot separately.

Since the set was, apart from the occasional set pieces, totally green, the team of SPI even installed a pre-vis system on set for Tim Burton to watch. “He looked at it, then grabbed the monitor and turned it away. Tim preferred looking at the raw greenscreen play-out³ but that’s okay.”.

The raw footage from the greenscreen stage they presented looked, truth be told, incredibly silly: Mia Wasikowska running on a green treadmill for her life or riding on a green upper half of the Bandersnatch that was shaken by some grips to a click-track; Johnny Depp standing heroically in a crazy costume with weird makeup; Anne Hathaway in an extravagant costume riding on a green vaulting horse carried by three guys acting all horsey in green; there was Matt Lucas plus stand-in in a green pear-shaped costume with tracking markers all over as the Tweedles; Crispin Glover in green shoulder-pads every quarterback would kill for walking on stilts, trying to act all normal while two guys in green were always walking next to him, ever alert to catch Crispin in case he would trip. Yes, it looks absolutely retarded. If it wasn’t a multi-million dollar production you would just laugh, then weep and then facepalm.

In order to realize the big head of the Red Queen, the shots with Helena Bonham Carter where were shot in 4k resolution and everything but her head scaled down 50%. In the scene introducing the Red Queen she wipes a drop of jam from one of the frogs’ faces and sticks the finger in her mouth. To realize this interaction her hand needed to be painted out of the plate with her head, a terribly challenging piece of paintwork. And thanks to my contributions to Ninja Assassin I know what I am talking about.
Another demanding paintwork was Stayne’s hair: All the concept paintings of him showed a knight with big shoulder pads, so for the greenscreen shoot Crispin Glover was put in a green costume with said shoulder pads, yet in the end Tim Burton made up his mind and went for an armor without shoulder pads. Needless to say that the missing hair needed to be painted back into the shots.

Another thing about Stayne was his height. As stated above, Crispin was walking on stilts on the set but capturing his movements on set resulted in an awkward animation and looked much like it looked on set: Like a guy walking on stilts. So the animators resorted to good old manual keyframe animation for Stayne while keeping the essence of the movement on set for him. This reminded me of a quote from Pete Travers on The Making of Dr. Manhattan at last year’s fmx: “If you have developed the best tracking system in the world but it hinders the actors you end up making perfect tracks of bad performances. Which are totally useless”.

The appearance of the Cheshire Cat was easier in contrast. The animators started out with a very cat-like animation but Tim dialed them down until the cat was almost not moving at all. And to achieve the terribly wide grin, the cat’s jaws needed to transform as well.

Since the feature was in stereo ⁴ (and what isn’t nowadays anymore?) but shot with only one camera, the stereo-conversion of the live-action footage was done in post, by rotoscoping and/or projecting the live-action cards on 3d-geometry within the scene.

After this refreshingly interesting and engaging lecture it was also this year the time of Shelly’s Eye Candy Show.

Sweets for your eyes

Also this year Shelly Page from Dreamworks Animation assembled 50 minutes of animations she considered highly worth watching. Some would also get screen during the International Festival of Animated Film I also attended after the fmx was over, but more on that later.

The screened films this year were:

• Mobile by Verena Fels, a cute little animation about stuffed animals hanging on a mobile with a funny pacing and rewarding pay-off in the end.
• Stylo, animation by Passion Pictures, the Gorillaz music clip featuring an amusingly smug Bruce Willis and artful integration of cartoon characters in live-action footage. “Stylo is directed by Jamie Hewlett and produced by Cara Speller for Zombie Flesh Eaters, with live action through HSI Productions in Los Angeles, and animation by Passion Pictures in London”⁵
• Log Jam Series by Alexey Alexeev, the first clip formerly known as KJFG No5 ⁶. This hilarious little animation was also in Shelly’s reel last year but a producer urged Alexey to make make more, for a series. So he continued with some more, all equally pointless yet entertaining. Be sure to watch them all, they are called “The Rain”, “The Snake”, “The Moon” and “The Log”.
• Anchored by Lindsey Olivares, her senior thesis film made at Ringling College of Art and Design after Romans 15:13. I enjoyed the style of flowing watercolors much, although the topic wasn’t so much my thing.
• Inka Bola by students at Gobelins, an entertaining piece about a spoiled toddler and his guard. The animation is superb (but frankly I don’t expect anything else from Gobelins) and the whole piece has the speed and style of a Disney or Dreamworks short. Very enjoyable.
• Evian Babies animation by MPC, a weird trip to the outskirts of the Uncanny Valley: “Michael Gracey has directed Evian’s latest commercial Skating Babies a multi-national campaign bringing together choreographed roller-skating babies and the re-mixed street sound of The Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight. Created by the agency BETC Euro RSCG, the spot was produced by Fabrice Brovelli, Head of TV at BETC and Jaques Etienne Stein at Partizan. MPC created fully CG baby bodies and carried out extensive live action head replacement and compositing as well as large scale digital matte paintings to extend the park environment for the TV and online campaigns.”⁷
• 5alive Dodo animation by Passion Pictures, a TV commercial with funny character animation of a dodo dancing to I’m Alive by Don Fardon.
• LowLow Cheese animation by MPC, another TV commercial with a photo-real mouse avoiding a crapload of mouse traps. Yes, we’ve come a long way from Stuart Little.
• RockBand Beatles intro by Passion Pictures, also this year the RockBand series has yet another stunning intro to worship. In just two and a half minutes the intro tells the story of The Beatles’ success in something I just call “masterfully art-directed pictures” (and sound!) and is highly enjoyable to watch. I even found a short behind-the-scenes talk about it on YouTube!
• The Little Boy and the Beast by Studio Soi. Oh, I just love that one, it’s about a boy with a depressed mother and how he deals with the situation. This is not only a tough topic for children, it is also skillfully executed and designed, from the plot to the final playout. It also ran on the children’s section at the International Festival of Animated Film and the kids loved it. To me it was the best short on Shelly’s reel.
• Lost and Found by Studio AKA, a 25-minute short of a boy confronted with the sudden friendship of a penguin. It was nicely done, though there was a lot that bothered me such as the narrator off-screen that not even commented what was going on but only repeated what the pictures showed; the sequence out on the rough sea which lasted waaay too long and the water itself that was too photo-realistic to fit convincingly into the style. It was nice, yes, but about ten minutes too long and nothing spectacular — sorry.

Phew! What a day! You see now why it took me so long to get this from my head to my blog, there was just so much knowledge to chew and digest. I hope you stay tuned for the upcoming reports of the following days. Hopefully not as lengthy, though.

Feel free to check it out yourself here, where you can also see the sneak peek of it. Now I gotta get some some sleep, just came back from holding a live tutorial on the FH Salzburg. Exhausting, but fun!

There’s quite a bit I have planned for in 2010. First and foremost I’ll get busy on some new AEtuts+ video tutorials introducing Nuke to the After Effectors among you all and something I have in mind for quite a while now, working title: “The Art and Science of Rotoscoping”. (Everything’s “art” and “science” in visual effects, if you read the books.)

There’s a new series for flickr that I have in mind by the name of “Austrian Details”. There are so many things I encounter that are so typically Austrian in some way and that people from other places probably wonder about when they see it. When it launches I’ll tell you here.

I’ll also be holding Tutorials on the Salzburg University of Applies Sciences again, this year with a main focus on compositing, color grading and VFX.

In May the fmx/10 in Stuttgart will be held again and yours truly is looking forward to cover the whole event on this blog like the years before for those of you who can’t attend.

So I’m getting all educational it seems. And creative. I’ll try to post somewhere something creative I did every week. Since I’m an aggressively creative person that shouldn’t pose any problems to me.

Life’s incredible again! Stay productive and wise! Any single ladies out there, btw?

But I can’t change that fact and don’t get your hopes up, I won’t post the video here for free. I just want to get that point straight. It was a lot of work and I spent days polishing it.

I want the next tutorial to be really worth your money, so as soon as I have some more time on my hands I’m happy to post a new one. One that makes you feel really good about investing $9/month in the tuts+ service.

So feel free to post your ideas and suggestions right here. What’s cool? What do you want to see? Drop some inspiration on me, folks, and write me some comments!

After enjoying the breakfast a little too long I was rushing down Königsstraße in my car so I would make it to Pixar’s RenderMan presentation. I already knew what it was going to be considering last year (“The Über-Sprite”, the rocket, the fast-rendering motion blur) but Pixar is rather generous in handing out posters and presents and I wanted me to get another teapot for my collection ¹. I was too late, the room bursting with people. Obviously, word had spread that you get presents. People can be so greedy. I asked if I could make a reservation for the afternoon but it was in vain.

There I was standing, lacking a teapot and a clue of what I wanted to see instead. I headed to the biggest hall and ended up in “PhotoReal Facial Animation” by Patrick Davenport and Steve Caulkin of Image Metrics. They showed the sample clips I already knew so it was no surprise to me that… (click “show” to view spoiler) [spoiler]…Emily’s head was CG.[/spoiler]

You can find the clips also at YouTube if you’re interested.

The crazy stuff Imagemetrics does is providing face tracking with only the use of a video camera. The tracked regions of the face are then moved on a CG model. Tweak the keyframes and you’re done. It’s that easy! Well, it’s not. Steve Caulkin laid out the long way to their Emily demo which occurred to me as not really time saving: Apart from photographing the actress’s face for the texture, there also had to make a cast of her teeth but the molded teeth wouldn’t necessarily fit correctly so you end up taking x-rays to learn how to place the teeth correctly. And that’s only the beginning.
When scanning the different expressions of the actress the data was anything but coherent so somebody had to clean up all the meshes (about 55) and get the details out: Pores and such can only be done with a bump or displacement map. It would be just too much for the statistics-based tracking algorithm.

Steve Caulkin owes me a venti Caramel Macchiato. His presentation was in-depth and very interesting but, alas, Steve is more a guy you put in front of a C++ compiler than in front of an audience and it was hard to follow his low pace.

So I ended up at Starbucks with an iced caramel macchiato before making another attempt at getting into one of Pixar’s presentations. I queued up 20 mins and before they opened the doors there was already not much oxygen left. And I felt the urge for another caramel macchiato.

Pixar’s Carreer Gears was a again a valuable information on how to apply and how to put your reel together for Pixar. Right in the beginning the panelists ² asked the audience to raise their hands of what position at Pixar they’re interested in. To sum things up: Two thirds were character animators, many wanted to become story artists and only a few people were interested in the other stuff. And I bet I was the only compositor in the whole room. Here’s what’s strange: Last year I was told that Pixar doesn’t really do compositing which I thought was a joke or they wanted to pull my leg. Today they also didn’t say anything about job openings or positions in compositing. Very strange.

The panelists talked about their experiences at Pixar and how they got their job and spread the usual tales of people who were hired right off the college. Then they took questions. I must have dozed off somewhere in between but it was mostly asked on the process of applying and what Pixar is looking for. Here’s the stuff I remember:

• Don’t send in a reel when you have nothing to show.
• Put your name on everything.
• Have the DVD region-code free and tested to play on a standard set-top DVD player (NTSC and PAL both are fine).
• Apply for a certain job instead of just applying for the database.
• Send every 8 to 12 months an updated reel to show how you progressed.
• Don’t send every week new reels.
• Write a decent cover letter. They’ll read them.
• Don’t forget the all-important shot-breakdown. Preferably even on screen.
• Don’t chase the ostriches on the front lawn (I guess that’s where I dozed off).

Interestingly I gradually lost my interest and my caffeine addiction kicked in hard after an hour so I left for a chili dog and a precious cup of coffee. At Starbucks they either love me or hate me.

For lack of motivation to look for the right screening room for “Analog Artifacts in CGI” I went with the crowd to witness “Skin & Lighting Research” by Christophe Héry of ILM whom I already know from last year.

Holy moly! In his presentation I saw more formulas than in my whole college education ³ In fact he told nothing new about subdermal distribution and the models on how to calculate them (although I didn’t understand much of the math). So far, so good. But what If you can’t afford raytracing because, say, your artists produced more vertices than the final rendering will have pixels (see Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest)? You’ll have to have an point cloud based approach to dodge memory demanding raytracing. And when you don’t have raytracing going on RenderMan really does the trick fast and good.

Cute as a Button

That lecture served as the perfect introduction to what we all have been waiting for: The Curious Case of Photoreal Head Replacement.

Jonathan Litt had a huge presentation explaining the lighting, rendering and compositing of that huge task. How do you start? They started with a artfully crafted latex-maquette of Brad Pitt’s face made old, for it had a really realistic appeal in subsurface scattering and served as most valuable reference when comparing renderings of the CG head to it.

The head itself was done in Mudbox (yay!) and in it’s highest resolution had about 4.5 million polygons. This high level of detail was preserved by using displacement maps, that further were driven by curves so wrinkles would get stronger or weaker depending on the facial expression. The eyes were modeled and textured anatomically correct (I’ll just throw some expressions at you of what they considered: caruncle, meniscus, conjunctiva, sclera, cornea). As further reference they had a extreme-high-res photograph of Brad Bitt that you could see the micro-wrinkles between his pores. “That’s thousand dollar pores!” Jon joked.

But this perfect model also needed to be lit in perfect coherence to the on-set instruments and light sources. So additionally to the high res long-lat-HDRs that were taken on set, there were extensive survey data on each shot of all the light sources and scene geometry so that the HDRI could be mapped back in Maya onto this surveyed geometry.

The maquette of the head was photographed in LightStage with light from all possible directions (separately). A script then made it possible to color and blend these separate light-passes together based on the information of the on-set HDRIs. Why the hassle? Because the renderings were put next to this near perfect reference and the artists could check on how close they got.

The next obstacle was to choose the right approach on how the HDR sampling should be done, either Inside-Out (I-O) or Outside-In (O-I) from the HDR. The I-O approach is usually used to sample the environment for Global Illumination. You have to fire a lot of rays to cover correctly bright light sources. So you need to find hot spots and treat them as emissions. I-O works well with spheres but with other geometry you get shadow bending ⁴. The solution to this problem was to scatter the origin of the emission-positions during rendering (see the paper of Kollig & Keller, 2003).
probably guess that it didn’t simplify things that the head was moving through the scene.

The solution to all this blocking and head-movement was to reposition the HRDIs on every frame on the position of the body-double’s head. Because there was enough tracking data of the head moving through the scene the mapped HDRI in Maya was rendered in Nuke to match the position of the head which was much easier than doing it from scratch.

What comes now is really sexy: To single out light sources the direct practicals and instruments visible in the HDR were blocked or painted out in Nuke resulting in an HDR image of the ambient lighting. The missing “hero lights” were then positioned as area lights in Maya and given a HDRI texture. This was also very important for the eye-lights.

Still there had to be adjustments made for the eye sockets and eye-lights because on set the lighting was done on the body actors.

I really realized that I want to work at Digital Domain: They value Maya, Mental Ray and, most important Nuke. Adopt me!

Blogging,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The last presentation I saw before going to my car for some sleep was by Steve Preeg on the Animation and Performance of Benjamin Button. The big issue was on how to capture the performance of Brad Pit and have it applied to the digital head. And because the show was a $ 150 million Fincher/Pitt movie there was no room for error. If you’d mess it up, they would mess you up.
To get all the muscles in Brad Pitt’s face right Preeg thought about CAT scanning him but his manager just told Steve to think of something different. And so he did. Initially Digital Domain got the guys from Mobile who had developed a volumetric capturing system and captured various key poses of Brad Pitts face as basis for the blend shapes in Maya. When everything was tested and worked on they needed to capture the actual performance by Brad for the digital head.
They had him watch the clips from the movie with the body actor so he knew what was going on around the him. During his performance his face was filmed from four different positions, his cues were given brad via in-ear monitoring. In fact, Digital Domain even tried Imagemetrics but the result was too ‘dead’ to them, however it helped much in timing the animation which was all done by hand. Thus it was guaranteed to keep the intent of the performance rather than applying it with strange results. “Sometimes is just a millimeter more or less on one of the eyelids between creepy and cute”.

What I have learned today:

• That Steve from Imagemetrics probably wouldn’t pass a Turing test.
• That you can capture the facial performance of actors during motion capture by having them wear head-mounted camera-rigs with a light source both pointed at their faces.
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering the resolution of the buffers matters a lot (bigger = better).
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering you should keep the buffers separate, meaning that nothing that’s not part of the skin may cast shadows inside the skin.
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering won’t let you have your precious raytracing. So nobody does it anymore.
• That you best take texture photographs of skin by having polarization filters on your lights and one (90° out of phase) on your camera. Thus you block out the specular highlights and only get the diffuse light. Still you need to paint out shadows. Use 6 soft lights when you don’t have the luxury of having a Light Stage.
• A big deal in believability in CG skin are oil layer and peach fuzz. If you can’t nail it down why something doesn’t feel right then it’s usually one of those things.
• That working on 64 bit machines with 16 gigs of RAM really saved Digital Domain’s ass in producing Benjamin Button.
• That the UV-Space in Nuke (if kept in the EXRs) can save much time for last minute changes on textures.

What surprised me today:

• That you can talk passionately about human emotion without showing any.
• That Image Metrics also use Eurostile as their house font. Like me. And they’re not the only ones so I really should think of a new font then…
• That relatively few people who want to work at Pixar are interested in lighting, shading, layouting, rendering, controlling, software engineering or cinematography. They all want to become animators, character designers or, cough, directors.
• That I used working with z-buffered renders a lot in the hey-days of the late 90′s. I feel old.
• That not a single CG spotlight was used for the lighting of Benjamin Button.
• That Brad Pitt’s teeth were too white to pass as a 70-year old. For the digital head Steve Preegs teeth-color was used. That’s why he quit smoking on the show.
• That it was the first time that I read ‘LOL’ in a presentation. It is 2009 and netspeak finally conquers offline-speech.

Along with some peers we came just in time to the Metropol theater where the screening of the stop-motion adaption of Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline was rolling. In stereo. The film remained quite close to the book and featured some very inspired and inspiring designs (keep your eyes open in the garden scene — lovely!). In my opinion the film still got a little too American but hey, it’s a big production after all. The animators did a tremendous job: The cat really moved like a cat and Coraline was most convincingly animated in the top-shot when she creeps into her parents’ empty bed. Further I’m thinking about buying the soundtrack. So if you consider yourself only a minor Gaiman fan and are not following him on Twitter ¹: Go for it, it doesn’t hurt your brains.

Back at the convention center Chris Williams of Disney was talking about story telling in his short Glago’s Guest that I already knew from yesterday. At least that’s what the schedule said. After seeing the short again Chris showed us the final storyboards first, then what story ideas were thrown away along the way of improving it until it worked. He went on to the designs, the color script and the overall style of the film until he showed it one more time. One thing that still bugged me personally is the action of taking out the garbage because it is such a deep rooted American suburbian tradition that it felt really off in the setting of Siberia in 1924. And the garbage can itself was as American as Uncle Sam on 4th of July reciting the Bill of Rights. I will finish my nitpicking on this one by stating that this lecture didn’t really deal with story telling that much.

Richard Edlund ,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

After the lunch break where I enjoyed a chili hot dog, Eric Roth, chairman of the VFX society talked to VFX legend Richard Edlund about his work in the early days of visual effects in movies such as Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Poltergeist and also Die Hard and Ghost. Nowadays when everything is so easy and every 16-year old with a computer can make stunning VFX, one forgets that in those old days visual effects were as complicated as they were time consuming. The imploding house in Poltergeist took an artist eight months to rotoscope. Hell! To my regrets this interesting panel passed way too fast.

Syd Mead,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Syd Mead, the one and only, held his presentation (the same he gave on the Siggraph Asia before) about his rise from early childhood scribbles to the latest designs. His childhood images already showcased his early fascination with cars. It was incredible to see his futuristic visions of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s with car designs that look familiar with today’s eyes. Syd really knows what he’s doing and has a story for every of his paintings. In a near photorealistic rendering of his Hypervan he points to a chrome-like disk somewhere on the outskirts of the painting “This is the security droid in this marina”. Every painting he showed us had a story and he could talk in detail about every detail. Except for the bathroom design for Blade Runner. “Do you know what this is? I don’t either. It just looks like it belongs in this bathroom.” He has funny explanations for anything, not only in his paintings. “Do you know what Gouache means? It’s French for ‘bitchy medium’.”

Habib Zargapour,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Habib Zargapour was in the unfortunate position to speak after Syd Mead still he pulled it off quite well. From his experience, coming from films to games, he outlined the similarities and differences between designing for games and designing for movies. Still, a lot of principles are alike, yet the biggest uncertainty factor is that you can’t control the camera, so you have to control the environment and make sure it works from every angle. Further you can’t work on a shot-by-shot basis.

“Visual Storytelling in Computer Graphics” by Harrison Ellenshaw had the charm of one of Fraser McLean’s seminars: He talked passionately about the principles, underlining them by showing clips of great movies including ancient Disney features. The films that he showed to the audience (Ryan’s Daughter, Cinderella, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) he commented with such a passion and enthusiasm that you couldn’t help but feeling it yourself: Wow, movies are the greatest and purest thing mankind has ever produced.

Again, this year Shelly Page from Dreamworks brought the fat of the land (mostly France though) of animation to us in the last hour in her “Shelly’s Eye Candy” presentation. Here’s a complete list of all the presented films:

• Yankee Gal, the moments in the life of a WW II pilot in a crashing airplane.
• French Roast, very funny, very French animation about an unappealing protagonist. I love those kind! And the coughing clochard!
• Steel Life, so very abstract and visually strong, like a remake or homage of Koyaanisqatsi would look like. And, no surprise, the music really drives it home. I mean *really*! Composer was Mathieu Alvado.
• Carver Audi Commercial by Framestore CFC. As usual visually very strong and makes you wonder before the payoff.
• Avatar Coca Cola Commercial, also Framestore CFC. The connection to the product itself was totally random, I guess somebody just loved the idea of populating the world with avatars.
• Stork Monster commercial, another Framestore CFC thingie. Very good idea, very well executed. As always.
• Flap Flap, German short about two ravens. If you’re into toilet humour you’ll laugh. In my opinion: crappy (pun intended). Found no link, sorry!
• They Will Come To Town, as seen yesterday. As impressive as yesterday.
• Guerre Naïve, very French with nanoloop musics and, yes, F-Zero countdown sounds about a racing boy. Strange. The French try to imitate the Japanese and vice versa ² in animation. I guess they have a crush on each other — cute!
• For Sock’s Sake, a Calarts graduation animation about a lost sock and his family of other clothes trying to find him. A very fresh idea and witty, expressive animation.
• Ex-E.T., about an alien child that’s just not in sync with his environment. Very good payoff. You’re gonna like this one (or at least the end).
• Dix, about a neurotic’s torment to overcome his compulsion. Very gory and disturbing at many points. Top notch!

Again, I had troubles keeping my eyes open and my mind sharp but I succeeded. Still I had to spend the rest of the evening in my car, sleeping, before paying an fmx party (‘Echtzeitparty’) event a visit with some of my peers. I really don’t like going out. Today I got reminded of that fact yet again.

What I have learned today:

• That it is impossible to find a parking garage that’s more expensive than the one I use.
• That creative argument is the best you can ask for. Any idea only gets better when creative people keep chewing on it.
• That it often helps to get new ideas by drawing without constantly thinking about what you’re drawing.
• That cuts that don’t cut into action are very in your face. If you want it that way, then have the audio have the same harsh cuts.
• That story is about change.
• That you shouldn’t overdraw your storyboards. Only draw what is necessary to the understanding. Then break that down into the least amount of images possible.
• That chroma keying on a chemical basis is like sumo wrestling: You have this huge opponent and you just want him out of the ring.
• That production wise VFX are a tightrope between the producer and the director.
• That you should trust your instincts once you get better.
• That when you draw people in long robes you don’t have to worry about drawing their feet.
• That you got to have a story behind/in your painting, no matter how unimportant it might seem.
• That you get interesting designs when using cliché for you audience to instantly recognize where you are going to take them, then add a new unusual wave to it.
• That constraints help good design.
• That ‘weenies’ in environment design basically are landmarks: They help you navigate the environment.
• That in first person shooters you tell a story basically by how you lay it out.
• That (in games) “story means action” (Habib Zargarpour).
• That ‘Divided Highways‘ is a good book on architecture and, indirectly on level design. So are ‘Learning from Las Vegas‘ and ‘Carchitecture‘.
• That concept art is what helps people to agree on something — thus saves money and time in the end.
• That television is a sales medium. You want people to get involved so they’ll watch the commercials.
• That you should tell as much as possible visually.
• That “action is character”, it is defining the character(s) — (Harrison Ellenshaw)
• That when you move the camera, everything moves. Does your story really wants you to move everything? If not: Keep the cam rigid.
• That “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” really is scary stuff for actors, but so was “Cinderella”. But…
• …CGI is just another tool that won’t replace real actors or real humans operating those tools.

What surprised me today:

• That George Lucas is said to be rather introverted. Just like his chin suggests.
• That short films by the big studios don’t make any money. In fact, they only cost the production a lot.
• That all the helicopters in Die Hard were added in post. All of them!
• That the movie “Ryan’s Daughter” has absolutely great pictures.

Hotel Hottmann,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

When roaming the Stuttgart streets again it didn’t feel as nice as last year. It was cold, it was foggy and some drunk junk was shouting profanities and bugging people on the Schloßplatz. A sharp turn took me to Starbucks where a friendly caramel macchiato was waiting for me and where I decided today’s program amidst men in fancy suits and a flock of girls skipping school.

I was among the first few visitors who showed up at 9:30 to view the introductory selection of short films from the Filmakademie Ludwigsburg featuring Urs, Something’s Coming, Lebensader, a short for the Cartoon Forum and finally the long version of the fmx’s visual jingle, Frequency Morphogenesis. Conference chair Thomas Haegele bade us welcome and without a transition the first presentation started: “Previsualizing 9/11″ about the previz process of Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

John Scheele and Ron Frankel talked about the long and thorough previz on that film because there was no room for stylization because we all know the disturbing pictures by heart; “Documentary footage becomes the iconic reference of an event”. The previz they created was used by all departments throughout the production phase and was like puzzling together what was happening on a grand scale and what the real survivors experienced. “It was understanding what really happened vs. what the two survivors thought they saw”.

It was not possible to shoot on the real Ground Zero for all the terrible memories the scenes would evoke, so the production needed to pursue a different approach. High resolution HDRI photographs were taken from the surroundings so they could be used to populate the digital recreation of the site. The film was entirely shot in Los Angels, partly on Lebanon Street, the only street that looked somewha Broadway-ish.

The previz was divided into a practical previz for the different departments e.g. what the camera crew needed to know, the set decorators and so on, and into a post-viz meaning where buildings needed to placed correctly after the shoot was done. Ron Frankel re-created a large part of Lower manhattan in XSI up to the details needed for getting the big picture as well as what the survivors saw — they believed until their rescue that a bomb went off in the garage.

My ticket,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I skipped “A Global Production Pipeline” Xavier Nicolas from Lucasfilm Animation for some more java at Starbucks before returning just in time to Sony Imageworks’ “Animation and VFX” by Bob Osher from Sony Imageworks. His presentation felt at first like its target audience was potential shareholders and the emphasis on “Innovation in Support of the Filmmakers” sounded as cliché as does the slogan “The Future — Now!” ¹. Thing got a little more interesting when the Arnold renderer was briefly touched, although a little too sketchy but what really blew me away was when Bob introduced Sony Imageworks’ inhouse post-production tool Katana ² which I understood as an optimization tool that interconnects 3d and compositing back and forth and saves big amounts of time and, effectively, money. In the course of the presentation I saw a the node tree of the wide shot in Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan blows up, well, Manhattan that was also done with Katana. Speaking as a Nuke compositor I have to admit that it made me kinda frisky.

Generally speaking: Sony has a lot of sophisticated in-house tools to help the artists and is very proud of their upcoming feature Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Bob showed us the Jell-O scene and after 30 seconds he won us all for it. Can’t wait to see it in “mouthwatering 3D”.

Now we all were hungry so I got me a nice hot tomato soup with bread for lunch and roamed the stretching shopping boulevard, eager to find some place where I could by a shaver and some eyeliner.

After the break followed a little panel titled “I Got A Job Abroad… Now What?”
hosted by Jan Sjovall and featuring thee more Germans who made it abroad. The room was already full when I arrived so I was cramped into the back and sat rather uncomfortably close to the floor and the informational value of the panel was scarce. Still they dropped a few things to consider when working abroad like that you only realize in comparison how different your own cultural background is.

Over the day I met some folks of rise fx where I spent last summer four months as part of my internship. It was fun chatting a little and so I decided to see their presentation that was part of a broader presentation of the VFX and animation facilities in Berlin-Brandenburg. I already struggled a little with my sleepiness — four hours definitely are too little.

Watch ‘em

Haus der Wirtschaft,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I went up to witness the last minutes of Alex McDowell’s lecture on the Production Design for Watchmen that was followed by John ‘DJ’ Desjardin’s presentation “The VFX of Watchmen”. Those guys are crazy!
I kept fighting against dozing away and luckily I won mostly because “Making of Dr. Manhattan” by Pete Travers from Sony Imageworks was very intriguing: From start to finish it took about nine months to develop the character visually as well as technically while keeping the VFX footprint on set as low as possible.

“If you have developed the best tracking system in the world but it hinders the actors you end up making perfect tracks of bad performances. Which are totally useless.” Pete said.

The actor playing Dr. Manhattan was wearing a suit covered in blue LEDs and tracking patterns and so he became not only source for video motion capturing but was also a very prominent practical light source on set. The tracking was done by triangulating images from the film camera and two Sony HD video cameras that captured the action from two more angles. The biggest problem in this approach was to sync the shutter phases of both the video cameras and the film camera to make tracking possible.

Another problem was the hue falloff of the LEDs: Close they where cyan, further away their light color became indigo. Hence the actor in the suit needed to be painted out on a frame per frame basis it became a huge amount of paint-work because he was a light source and every frame had to be painted separately instead of having a clean plate. So talk about painting hell.

While most of the people went directly to the Metropol theater to see Watchmen I really needed a break from all the highlevel-VFX and stayed for the “Animation Show of Shows”, introduced by Ron Diamond of AWN. I can get Watchmen on bluray at any store but might won’t be able to see some of this great animated films again. So here’s the list. I hope I didn’t mess up with the French titles.

• Keith Reynolds Can’t Make It Tonight, a witty stickman Flash animation that shares a lot with xkcd both visually and narratively.
• La maison en petits cubes, a hand drawn animation that tells the story of an old man rediscovering his past. A Japanese animation that looks totally French.
• KUDAN, a very abstract CGI animation about the relationship of a father to his child. Japanese. Weird. Breathtaking.
• La Queue de la Souris, a short minimalist tale of a mouse trapped by a lion. French. Witty.
• I slept with cookie monster, an analog animation drawn with pastels that tells the story of the animator that was abused by her lover and how she dealt with it.
• Franz Kafka: Ein Landarzt, probably one of the weirdest animations I’ve seen lately. Truly, the Kafka-esque spirit was captured very well in this short film.
• Glago’s Guest, Disney’s computer animated short of Russian guard Glago watching over endless Siberian snowfields.
• Hot Seat, The Office meets children’s cartoons. Funny yet true.
• Presto, a Pixar short I won’t get into because all of you know it already.
• Skhizein, my favorite today. The story of a man who is always 91cm besides himself.
• KJFG No.5, a very short animation where you’ll go “wtf?” at first. It is about a band jamming together that gets disturbed by a hunter. Great ending!

That was my day.

What I have learned today

• That foamcore models still are a big part of previz as are low-res interactive environments that every department can access.
• That it probably was a bad idea to jokingly refer to my new styling as “racoony” once — the word spread.
• That on very documentary films it is necessary to make sun and moon studies.
• That Sony’s Katana is da shit!
• That at Sony they deliberately decided against a house style and that they “challenge every assumption”.
• That Germans only realize how German they are if they work abroad.
• That you should start with 3d as early as possible in your previz for any shots that are not static.
• That a good way to ensure consistency in applying tracking-dots on an actors face is to make a plastic mask from his face, drill holes accordingly into it and then have him put on the mask: Make the dots through the holes and you’re done!
• That your VFX tricks on set should do anything but hinder the performance.
• That the scanning of skin textures should be done when the skin is anything but perfect or else you get the typical too-perfect-to-be-true CG-look.
• That eye moisture helps a great deal in the believability of a CG character.
• That instead of simulating rimlights in your shader (I consider that a no-no anyway!) you need to take the extra mile of adding peach-fuzz to your digital character. It renders longer, but looks much more convincing.
• That I really have to get my sleep cycle straight before attending the fmx.

What surprised me today

• That Oliver Stone looks like a chubby Albert Speer. Creepy!
• That my geekiness in terms of comic books is way below what’s common in the industry.
• That Zach Snyder draws really good.
• That I can sleep rather well on the floor of my car.

1. Locate your User directory of After Effects:
   • C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\8.0
2. Now delete your preferences and workspaces. I don’t know what files exactly you have to delete, but be aware that your saved templates, workspaces and other user files will be reset. I know this hurts, but you want AE running again, don’t ya?
   • Adobe After Effects 8.0 Prefs.txt
   • Adobe After Effects 8.0 Shortcuts.txt
   • AfterFX8.ini
   • Workspaces.xml

That’s it. On the next start-up After Effects will create these files again with default settings. Good Luck!

You ask “What’s new? What’s cool?” and I tell you: A lot: I’ve been in the trenches with Nuke and fought After Effects so there’s a lot of stuff I want to show and tell what I’ve learned in the past weeks, not only about VFX.

I recorded a couple of tracks for my upcoming album (release: summer 2009). The Samson G-Track is a sweet piece of hardware, it combines a condenser microphone and an USB-soundcard. Finally I am able to record my acoustic guitar and piano work without the “help” of my 5€-headset whose microphone buzzes worse than the wasp hive in Donkey Kong Country 2 and rumbles more than my PS2′s Dualshock 2 controller that surrendered yesterday to material fatigue after nearly nine years of heavy duty service. Got me a new one today.

Between all my private creative work I am tackling 87 effect shots for our student short film “MOSKAU” and have only 4 weeks more to go. Luckily I am not alone with that truckload of effects still many shots end up on my todo-list. I am really honing my skills with Nuke right now. One year ago I only considered After Effects as the way to go and even was surprised that neither Double Negative nor Dreamworks ever came back to me after my enthusiastic applications at the fmx/08 conference.

That reminds me: If I was you (and I am 80% certain that I am not) I would keep an eye on this blog because I’ll be covering the fmx/09 in Stuttgart in detail on this very blog, complete with pictures and serious grammatical errors. So if you won’t be able to see it all in Stuttgart yourself, come back on the 5th of April 2009.

That’s all for now folks. I gotta get some sleep before the weekly meeting tomorrow. Which means I am shredding some Guitar Hero songs on extreme. Yes, you read correctly: I am publicly admitting that I am good at that game. On the upside: I got better on a real bass guitar as well.

So it all boils down to that simple phrase for me at the moment: Practice makes less imperfect.