Director and friend of the site Russel Rocheleau recently released his music video for the song “I Want To Report A Murder” by Otto Kinzel. The Song is from Otto Kinzel‘s 2011 full-length album “We Are All Doomed: The Zodiac Killer”. Why am I posting you this update? Because I can proudly say, that the Zodiac font featured was created by yours truly, four years ago.

So if you like the video and/or the music, be sure to give a thumbs up or leave a nice comment!

I only somehow woke up after my caramel macchiato shot (that I would have preferred injected directly into my heart but the lame-ass barista refused to) and I found myself in the Großer Saal. Second row — How did I do that?

DAY 4 IS COMPLETE – W00T! (at least the text is)
Soon I will finish writing the other days’ reports, then add lots of pretty pictures and proof-read the whole grammar-abomination thoroughly.

The Studio

The STUDIO from New York were giving the first presentation, STUDIO as space. Interestingly you could instantly tell that both presenters, Mary Nittolo and Gary Giambalvo were from New York. And their names rhymed, they both had an Italian sure name, the same hair-length, and I think they even had the same glasses — charming! Mary and Gary started off by showing a digital mural from their website, that was a collaborative piece of some of STUDIO’s artists. The concept of STUDIO is creating a community of functioning teams, especially with artists and freelancers that join the environment for just a couple of weeks before they are off again. Mary was one of the few employers that really gave this a though, how such freelancers feel when they arrive as strangers in an already established community, “there’s no constant environment when you freelance.”

Mary had the idea to the STUDIO in Italy, when she was observing a painting in a small church: The painting was done by multiple artists that all built upon what was already there, different people came together produce a piece or art together. Twenty years later the STUDIO is operating that way, although “it has become a bit difficult in the current market. But we’re close to a new renaissance of art and science.”

STUDIO has 20 employed artists and also offers places for interns. “We want them to come with a project,” Mary added and showed “The Sparrow”, a project by one of STUDIO’s interns who had a very illustrative style and did some character development sheets, a colorful and well elaborated storyboard and a very elaborated animatic of it, complete with music and sound.

But Mary also wanted to engage in an exchange, asked the audience questions about their two cents about working freelance. How was it to work and live in New York? “The problem with New York is finding a place to live you can afford. But if you are persistent and really want it, there’s always a way to figure it out,” Mary encouraged the audience, mostly assembled of students and freelancers at it seemed, and one zombie running on caffeine¹ So why not just work from home as a freelancer then? “Working alone is isolating. It may be a bit tough to arrive in a new environment but exchange can and will happen. Working alone from home is the most alienating, because you will always have to find a person in the studio who can give you feedback, that the working experience becomes valuable to you. It should be you to initiate that contact, a lot has to come from you that way. So you should ask for it to prosper from it.”

Despite producing small projects of their own, the STUDIO started out as a storyboarding facility — and still is. “I have seen many storyboards of you guys here and the storyboards we do are much more specific and detailed.” Indeed, the stuff Mary showed was really well done and looked more like high-level illustrations than storyboards. The STUDIO does this mainly for agencies whose customers don’t get the ideas they are pitching to them. “Their clients are not very visual so they need to see a very specific visualization of what ouz client wants to present to them. So rough sketches won’t do.” Additionally the STUDIO produces CG-animatics for the same purpose that look like what some cheap productions sell as “finished project”.

But what was even more eye-opening than the quality of the storyboards, was the time frame the STUDIO usually has for such things. “It’s not uncommon that the client calls at four in the afternoon and needs some 12-odd boards with a complicated concept finished by noon the next day. And we can do that. But you have to be very fast. If you spend an hour or more on a single board you won’t finish.”
The strength of the STUDIO emerges from it having “insanely versatile” employed artists available all the time, also on weekends. To pull of the feat of producing a 30-second CG-animated animatic within a week are motion-captured animations and around 30 different rigged characters they can only modify a little. “The Sparrow” for example, with character development, animatic and edit was produced in no more than three days.

“In the US, everything gets tested,” sometimes your creativity is limited quite a bit by the client who tend to cling to the animatic once they’re happy with it. They see it almost like a casting. It can even be arbitrary things they like in it and want to keep, like “I want exactly that dog!” or “I like her shoes!” On the other hand even best and most interesting idea sometimes won’t do it because “they’re testing it against a Midwestern housewives.”
“How can you still be creative in a situation like that?” one question was asked from the audience. Mary agreed and said that it sometimes was hard. “There are different kinds of artists, some need to be creative and others are more crafty. For the creative such projects can be very tough, so we try to delegate the work as best as we can.”

As Known As

Before the next presentation began, the room notably filled with people and having a seat in the front now was worth twice as much and you could tell why. Studio AKA‘s Philip Hunt was getting ready for his lecture on the studio’s experience with getting From Pitch to Screen.

How does everything begin? Basically with drawings. Lots and lots of drawings. They are the fastest thing to do (“The pencil is our most important tool), to shift from one thing to another and throw out a lot of sketches that don’t fit or they don’t like. “I’d say 70 to 80% is immediately discarded.” Then the storyboard phase begins and especially for the clients the 2D designs of characters are modeled in 3D because it is easier for them to visualize them in the final product. But many projects don’t make it to the end and eventually get killed after weeks of work. “You need to cope with that. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes ideas get accepted and everything happens very fast,” as it was the case with their commercial for SingUp, an organization helping kids find their voice.

Studio AKA‘s animation for the British Lottery, “The Big Win” set them into a certain direction and other clients wanted a similar style for their own commercials, such as Lloyds TSB, who became “our benefactor bank”, because the communication with the client is very fruitful and they quickly understand from small drawings what the idea is. The studio produced a number of animations for them, although “it is sometimes not easy coming up with a fresh idea after dozens of spots.”

To escape the colorful, friendly and maybe even a bit boring visual world of Lloyds, Studio AKA grabs every chance they get to do something different like BBC’s openerfor the Olympics, who wanted “something like SinCity only with sports.”

And less is often more, like the Love Sports films, whose characters are just some colored blocks. “Character is not about technical stuff or much defined by appearance, its what communicates and connects with the audience and tells a story. You can do so much with so little.

Studio AKA is mainly concerned with commercials, but they also made a name for themselves with their short films and more stylized animations, such as A Morning Stroll that he would present twards the end of his presentation. We all were looking forward to it. “We’re not so much an FX animation studio, as we’re focused on character and narration.” Currently in production is The Beast which is about a beast that lives in the basement and is visually much more experimental as well.

Lost and Found

Working on films is entirely different. They produce them over years and work on it when they have a break from their commercial work, which can sometimes mean a few days, but also not being able to get any work down for weeks. The film that was shown also shown at last year’s fmx as part of the Shelly’s Eye Candy screening. I remember not liking the sequence on the rough sea very well. I found it to be too long and that the appearance of the ocean clashed with the style.

“We really liked the book but we had to expand the story much to make it work. So we did a version of the book, not the book.” In the eleven months the project took place, the creators learned “the hard way about pipeline and planning.” A thing they prospered from was the involvement of Oliver, the author who brought himself in and enjoyed working and redrawing on his original story and set drawings and even small text for signs from New York via email.

The look of the ocean was a challenge of its own and one person worked nine months to get it right. The mass penguins on the South Pole were achieved by crowd animation but unfortunately this produced some “possessed penguins” whose animation was messed up and they dithered like they were, well, possessed. “I tell you, animating every last penguin by hand would have been less work than painting out those bastards!” Philip explained their solution to the problem.

They also got a complaint by the safety department why a kid was without a life-jacket and a guardian making his way alone to the South Pole. “So I explained to him that the trip was a dream the kid had, the rough sea part being a nightmare. And about the octopus,” he turned to the audience, “Do you remember when you were a kid and had a bad dream and fell out of your bed and then your parents would come and pick you up, you were still half asleep, and put you back in the bed and tug you in? That’s why the kid is dreaming of the octopus.” That really sounded like a reasonable explanation. “They bought it!”

One person worked really long on an automated and very complicated rig for the arms on the octopus. When the time came to animate it, all it would was wobble its arms, something that was not in the film at any point. So one of Philip’s colleagues looked at the storyboards what exactly needed to happen, considered it for a bit and said, “Yep, give me a week and I can do it.” And he did. “It’s a good example of what results blind panic can achieve!” Philip concluded.

Then it was time to screen A Morning Stroll to us, the first public screening of it — yay! And it really was everything that I was hoping for: Funny, witty, experimental perhaps, and with a great twist at the end (that it wouldn’t quite need in my opinion though). In the animation there even was a fictitious iPhone game featured “and we’re trying to make that game” Philip closed. Some still chuckled from the animation.

MacGuffed

Even more people flooded in despite it being the last day of the fmx while Pierre Coffin from Illumination Entertainment was setting up his laptop for the presentation. He looked into the audience, the room was completely full. “You all came to see this? You people should get a life!” before he began with outlining The Making of “Despicable Me”.

Originally Coffin was approached by an US producer with some concept drawing and a rough idea he wanted to see in a big film. It were drawings of a villain in everyday situations, how he would live his day-to-day life. “He really wanted to get the project done, so we went to dinner, I had chicken which was really really good and he presented me some ARGUMENT$. And then more, he was quite A$$ERTIVE.” Coffin declined until he was promised to work with Chris Renaud as his co-director who had worked as a storyboard artist at Blue Sky and co-directed there a Scrat short.

Still, the story was non-existant it was just that idea and a couple of gangs, but “they were strong”. Concept artists drew upon this some more art and coneptpaintings of how such a person would live. It was all very dark and black and steampuk-ish. Some elements from these illustrations were built upon to develop a story, because there just was no script to begin with.

But then, the steampunk-look was toned down a notch because the production grew a little worried to lose some audience, because “it needed to be a family movie. And who in the family decides what movie to watch? Dads don’t decide. The kids do. But only when their mother agrees, the family will watch that movie. So our focus shifted from teenagers to kids and the villain became just some sort of grumpy guy.” Also during the concept phase it was clear, that the protagonist shouln’t be too successful in what he does. “He should be smpathetic. We like failure”.

The actual script came in late: In the last four months of the production the third act got written, not quite knowing where the story was headed. “And the ending came, well, in the end.” Pierre confessed. As the script progressed and changed, so did the animation. “In the end we more or less has to do everything at once”, also (re-)recordings of Steve Carell.

Gru

“We always had this tall, Transylvanian looking guy as our villain quite long in our heads as protagonist.” Pierre continued. The character had already benn built and posed with early models of the girls. This main character had also a clumsy Igor-like assistant who was much rounder and bell shaped. “In the end we decided against him because it just was too much stereotype. And the Igor-character we called Kyle looked friendlier” and he also looked better in the expresson and stating tests. The only thing that needed to be changed was his bell-shape, so they put his head in his torso a bit straighter and gave him the tall long legs of the Transylvanian looking guy. Then animatoros experimented with walkcycles and little stories. “What animators love most is a character playing a charactor, like Gru explaining his money problems to the minions.”

Girls

The girls really had a great design and Pierre was looking forward to seeing them modeld but unfortunately they looked totally unpleasant. Inly two month before the principal animation began they needed to be re-designed and recosidere. The three girls were very long though of as being just one character split into three people but, obviously, this wouldn’t work. So the small one became the true one, the middle one, they almost mute, boyish one and the oldest the reasonable one, “but boring. I know I shouldn’t be bashing on her but I never really liked her” Pierre said. The modeling was done and changed until shortly before the production, “in the last moment we pulled her mouth down for aesthetic reasons with messed with the mapping a bit.”

Minions

In the original concepts the minions were various kinds of baddies but the budget didn’t allow for esigningk, rigging and implementing them, so their design was thought over. The idea behind them was like little plumbers working for Grro. The simpler the shape, the more of them the production could afford and Pierre wanted to put them just everywhere. And as many thing, their final design came “super-late in the production”. The three Minions who get sent off to buy a toy from the drugstore ha a whole story arch around them, like they would get lost and travelled the world unintentionally only to come back at the end to save the movie in the most funny way, “but we never could think of something good enough. So we discarded it.”

A typical shot

Everything would start from a scene in the scrip or a recording of Steve (who also came up with Gru’s accent and the names for the minions) for the storyboard.

Pierre’s main direction to the animators was that he hated overacting and “illustrative physics” as he alled it, something quite different from DreamWorks. He also wanted to get to the point visually very quickly without just stating the obvious. Another philosophy was to get to get to the idea, to the core of something, instead of a very elaborate storyboard, for example. The storyboards sometimes only showed generic locations, axial jumps but, again “that is not the point of an animation storyboard.” Based on that, the set and the layout of the scene were designed and modeled, everything still very rough and just to make it possible to point out blocking problems and camera angle issues.

“There is this myth of putting all and any of an actor’s performance into the character no matter what” Pierre explained as he was showing one of Steve’s recording sessions. “Overall he’s not really expressive all the time.” The artists sometimes filmed themselves and intercut the footage (like it had been donw occasionally on TRON Legacy with Jeff Bridges’ performance captures) and used that as a reference for their animation. Then they made blocking tests, just the keyframes of their animation to see whether it would work inthe framing and the set. Once this blocking pass was greenlighted the shot could evolve further. In parallel artists color sketched the scenes for the lighting artists. As said above, everything “kinda happened at once”.

Even despite the fact that the movie came out in stereo, it was not a particular technical challenge. “We did it in 3D because they wanted it and we made it work, that was it. But we didn’T invest months of heavy-duty-research like Disney on the use of stereo-3D” Pierre summed up and showed a very funny little short animation of the minions, titled Banana. We did a couple of them, it was like a TV animation and didn’t spend more than two to three weeks on each. On the feautre we worked three years in total.”

Chaos Theory

Then it was noon again and again I dropped my wallet, but this time I found it within minutes because I already expected it. Sounds like I should change something. Maybe I need more credit cards or something. So a strawberry smoothie and a box of rice later I was ready for some more knowledge. I just wish I had hurried up a bit, so I got a rather bad seat. Pixar’s lectures are always insanely popular, no matter what. If they just would present a new RenderMan version, everybody would be over the place. Wait a minute, that was the case three years ago!

This year again Variety‘s David Cohen said a couple of introductionary words and let Bill Polson begin with his lecture with the interesting title Chaos Theory: Making More than One Movie at the Same Time”. The first thing he threw on the wall was a roster of the release year and title of each Pixar films so far that showed that Pixar more or less released a feature every year in recent years.

Oh Shit!

But Pixar works four years on a movie, and those four years are split up into four stages, Bill lined out, Preproduction, Pipelining, Modeling and Shots, “or as I am going to call them Oh Shit!, Chaos, Stability and Crunch.

In your Oh Shit! stage you have no idea where it’s going and how to do it, the Chaos stage is defined by developing software, getting things to work and figuring out a way to put everything together. Stability means that everything is working and everybody knows what to do and where the project is going, and finally< in Crunch you pull over-nighters, some get carpal-tunnel syndrome and you just try to get the thing out.”

Then he gave some examples of the Oh Shit! moments with the corresponding Chaos stages in the last few productions, a slide I will reproduce here:

The Oh Shit! stage in Cars was figuring out how to make and animate cars and especially reflections; Ratatouille posed the problems of clothes, fur and rendering believable food; WALL•E asked for expressive robots and a world of trash and Up was set in the jungle — “The more things you do, the more things are going on.” Moreover these new additions to the shading pipeline needed to be implemented without braking what was already working. Pixar always tests new techniques against the models of the previous film(s) in order to ensure consitency and compability. So the shading pipeline of the last years looked like this:

So in 2007, for example, there were four different shading pipelines at play. In context of all the Pixar films, is has been that was since 2003.

Impact

Next up Bill showed how multiple films-overlaps at different stages overlapping affected the crew and culture, software development and the studio itself.

“Let’s see how the situation when we release one film every two years.” In this scenario a lighter would be in Crunch mode on a feature, the next year there would be nothing for her to do, only to join the following year another movie in Crunch. Since Pixar’s philosophy is to have the artists on staff at all time to ensure they share the same culture, they can’t have their lighters unoccupied for a year, so “they are encouraged do modeling work for the next movie.”
In an environment of releasing a film every year, lighting artists can either specialize in lighting or skip film, the latter not being encouraged because “when people skip every other film, their culture becomes fractured and this slowly adds up to an environment where people start losing touch with each other. A film means learning. Miss a film is missing an opportunity to learn.”

In terms of modelling and shading this fracture unfortunately inevitably appears because the artists need to be present in both Chaos and Stability stages.

But the worst break is evident for the technical leadership because they accompany a project from start to finish over the whole for years, “which would mean they can only work on a film every four years.”

So what can be done about that situation? The answer is a mix of generalists and specialists. Specialists work on projects of a short release cycle, whereas generalists can work on films with in a longer cycle. Cohesion is maintained only for single-year departments, as soon as multi-year departments come into play they get fractured. Worse, the technical crew gets fragmented and hyper-specialized.

Software

The problem with software is to keep the versions stable over the course of a project. With a film every year the software departments needs to manage and keep track of four to, at worst, eight different versions of software combinations, which is a huge problem. Currently there are two different systems in each screening room, each for a different production, moreover the screening rooms themselves are dedicated to, either project A and B or C and D.

For the software developers the sweet spot is a release cycle of a film every three years: They come to it pre-production, work on the software through the Chaos stage and in the third year stay on the project until it reaches Stability. When the productions shifts into Crunch, the developers can get to a new project.

But in a two-year cycle this looks differently: In the stage they would be working on the stability of a software for one film, they instead are on a new project in the Oh Shit! stage already, which effectively means that they leave the software before it is stable. And fracturing developers is a bad thing, but in order to get things done, you need to have 2 pipelines.

Bill put up another table: “When you as a developer join a new project in the Oh Shit! stage you need to answer a few questions about the status of the software of the film you were previously working on. This works out pretty well, if your previous film is in either Crunch or Stability,” as outlined just before:

So if the Oh Shit! moment occurs during the previous film’s Stability or Crunch stage, you’ll likely be okay.

So what they want in a yearly release cycle is the software developers jump from Stability to Stability stage — instead they get them jumping from Chaos to Chaos:

That paints a pretty bleak picture: If the Oh Shit! moment occurs too soon, when the previous film is in Chaos, “you’ll likely whipsaw the pipeline and your crew”. Bad. Very bad. “Part of a solution is to only let go of the previous film once everything works. Otherwise there is nothing to test the new film against and you’re flying blind for two years. So getting the stuff working is critical.”

So what are answers, rather, are there solutions to the problems? Bill sent a last table on the big screen:

“There’s a thing to say about the specialists vs. generalists” Bill said as he touched the subject of what kind of Pixar is interviewing and eventually hiring. “Schools that force students into specialization in their last year have a much better chance to get hired by Pixar,” as compared to students who come from schools that train generalists.

An Answer?

It seemed to me that there were not many (if any) solutions the situations and the slide of the presentation was rather general in the solutions it presented: “Management, trust, etc”, “Department structures”, “Focus on stability rather than artistic reach”, and “Others ?”.

In the near future Pixar will be producing three films in two years, so all the tensions and problems will only increase, “so we got to standardize” which was difficult so far. Lucky for Bill, who is concerned with the more technical task of pipelining and management, getting the stories together takes currently longer. “The lack of good stories is the main thing that has kept us from scaling up” so having even more movies in production at the same time is currently not an issue. “Once they get solved the technical stuff is not ready yet. But we’re working on it.”

In Pixar’s early early days there only were generalists around, people who also flowed in an out between technical and artistic departments and groups. “Now the walls are high and you need to specialize. It was more fun in the old days” Bill reminisced. Still, Pixar’s philosophy is to get motivated and talented people and make them great.

Q & A

“And now I would love to hear your war stories” Bill finished and sat down in a chair next to David Cohen on the stage.

“How does the short film division fit in?” one guy in the audience wanted to know. Clever question! Bill explained that they had to slice up the production to fit the shorts in whenever they can to fill the gaps in the rolling production of features. “The difficulty is to have the inventory ready”, because (much like what I heard about Studio AKA that day) there are months when nothing is done on a short, then a couple of animators work like crazy to finish in two weeks. Again, the short hibernates until the lighting artists have a couple of days to spare. “It’s incredibly difficult to schedule so we now treat and plan shorts like miniature films.” Shorts are also a good way of keeping the artists motivated and help them getting out of a rut.

“(Why) do you need to change the pipeline every year? Is this really necessary?” Bill explained, that every film need things implemented, that the previous films did not need. “Between WALL•E and Ratatouille we changed the definition of the geometry and shaders, lighting and added post effects. This in a way broke the ability to test against the old productions and the production few blind for two years.” Also, there are a lot of dependencies that get affected when you change one thing, say the shading affects also lighting and rendering. So Pixar changes only a few things at a time, keeps things as stable as possible and still, those petty paced steps end up in a pipleline that has not much in common with the one from five years ago.

“What do you do to maintain the culture, if it still keeps getting fractured so easily?” Pixar is assembled a groups of superiors who “own” teams of artists, like all the animators or all the lighters. This group also indicated community-events such as training for their employees, cross-show lunches or the monthly lighting-lunch where artists show, across the various projects, what shots they lit and get feedback from other artists. Further, there is a newsletter to keep everybody on the same level of information.

“How does standardization compromise creativity?”, a rather opinionated question arose. Bill smiled “In fact it does just the opposite.” He told the story, that even the shorts needed an adjusted and new pipeline to work. However, One-Man Band used the pipeline from The Incredibles without any adjustment because it didn’t need any. “It all worked, it was cheaper, it was faster and the animators had a great time” because everything worked like it should right away. On a related note, Autodesk organizes bi-annual meetings among the industry leaders to talk about what they want in future Autodesk releases, “but you don’t talk only about Autodesk products”, Bill assured and explained that in those meetings certain standardizations for core elements originated such as Alembic.

The Pixar Brain Trust is a small group of creative leaders at Pixar who oversee development on all movies. The group came about during the development of Toy Story. They meet frequently to watch the status of films currently in production and tell the directors their criticism. The directors have to listen to the Brain Trust, but are free to ignore their opinions (although this is rarely advisable). There also exists a Technical Brain Trust at Pixar who bring in their ideas to the Technical Supervisor who is also free to ignore the suggestions, yet implementing suggestions “its different with the Technical Brain Trust because the changes affect multiple films.”

“What if I have a real good idea for a story?” — Pixar doesn’t acquire stories, simple as that. Instead directors should come up with their story ideas themselves, “we want them to be passionate about their stories.” When the very first idea for Pixar-stories are thrown in for discussion by the director they usually are not the that good in first place,but have potential. “If you give a mediocre story to the best people, they can turn it into something great. Give a great story to mediocre people, the final result can only become mediocre” Bill explained. And basically, anyone at Pixar become a director. Usually people who have been observed being skillful in story and art get asked if they wanted to direct a film. If they accept, they are given the time to come up with some ideas for stories, which can be as simple as “What if a rat wanted to become a cook?”. Over time these stories get better and further developed until they are ready to be produced.

This culture of participation among all Pixar employees is what is unique to Pixar. There are oftentimes organized screenings of the films in production among the Pixar employees, from directors, to artists to security guards to kitchen staff. Everyone is encouraged to send notes and ideas to the producer like “I didn’t get that joke” or “that scene was boring”. This openness, it seems, served the integrity of Pixar’s storytelling well.

Layout

Next up was another Pixar presentation and again, the König-Karl Halle was packed. In all the chaos of people leaving and others coming in, I was able to catch a seat up front that left me more room to breathe and, more importantly, to take notes.

German Filmakademie Badem-Württemberg alumni Saschka Unseld and layout artist at the studio with the lamp was presenting Cinematography at Pixar. He was introduced by Terrence Masson who I observed tirelessly swiping away on his iPad the days before². Saschka’s presentation also featured a sneak peak of Cars 2 but mainly dealt with the opening sequence of Toy Story 3.

“When I get asked where I work the immediate response is: oh you’re an animator then? When I tell people that I am a layout artist they usually go ‘huh?’” Saschka laid out the situation of layout artists. Layout is all about camera, staging and cinematography, he summarized, “or visual storytelling.” Pixar employs 20 to 25 layout artists of whom 12 to 15 people work on the same feature together.

In principle the layout artist gets the storyboard(s) of a shot, creates very roughly the animation and interprets and explores it via camera angle, position and movement. This means for every single shot the artist tries out a number of different angles to give the editorial department plenty of stuff to work with. “It is not about recreating the storyboard as close as possible but to use it as a guide and to express its story point visually as good as possible.”

This starts with animating said sequence as a blocking pass and then putting cameras into the scene. An exchange between art and set-creation is always happening, for example when there is not enough space for the action to take place or elements obstructing it. Of course, there are some per-shot changes in the final film, but “we try to avoid it as long as possible.” in case you can’t tell: At Pixar work perfectionists.

Just like on a real set the action is filmed from different angles and in dialog scenes, there also are master shots rendered for the editorial department to cut together to their liking. The editors may also occasionally retime shots to make them work. When their work is finished, the shots come back to layout where the retimed shots are re-animated in accordance to the changes from editorial.

An important factor of this work is “Shot Hygiene” which means that every file that leaves the layout department must be clearly built and named, cleaned up, properly linked and have the exact frame range because the files files then are given to the animators who place their work right in the file, and so does the lighting department, for example. “When it leaves layout, the film is done.”

With every feature there also come certain cinematographic concepts and principle, one applying to all Pixar films: “Restrict yourself!” just because a camera can fly around everywhere and do crazy stuff, it shouldn’t. I guess we all have seen amateur works with nauseating and impossible camera movements and that it what they want to avoid, to “feel” CG. Many such real-worked developments were introduced in WALL•E as Danielle Feinberg explained two years earlier. So in addition to having a specific lens-set (ranging from 10mm to 150mm), the use of certain lenses in Toy Story 3 was restricted to either toy perspective or human world. Since the world of the toys should not feel too small, the DoF was kept high to avoid a macro look like in Toy Story (1)³ and to have the human world and the toy world consistent.

But staging is also a matter of framing as well. A character’s high point can be emphasized by putting him or her really on top of everything in the framing, in the low-point the arrangement and composition might be weighing down on the character and isolating him or her ⁴. You can also imprison your characters when they are trapped also visually and so on. Again, layout is visual storytellling and the link between the story department and animation.

Sequence Evolution

How does not a sequence evolve from a story board to the finished and locked layout? Sashka laid this out (pun intended) in detail on taking the opening sequence of Toy Story 3 as an example, were everything started out with the “Set Scout”> where the script and storyboards of a sequence are reviewed by a artists from layout, lighting set-design with the DP.
In the “Location Scout” phase the art department roughly designs the set on a plan where director and DP often propose changes. This very early and very basic set model then gets blocked out by producing a number of still frames to check the proportions and sized of the characters against their environment. The results are presented to director and DP for feedback and changes are made in accordance to their feedback once more.

“Shot Blocking” follows, the actual layout stage. Again, the angles from the storyboard are not simply copied, the blocking must tell the story beats as good and clear as possible. Sometimes it is possible to combine two or more story boards, at other times, the action needs to be broken down in more shots than anticipated. Since there is a lot of exploration happening, a layout artist might not have all the assets she or he needs for an idea, “if you don’t have something you want, temp-in something” Saschka encouraged.

What camera angles and shots end up on the big screen gets decided in the editorial with director and DP. Layout supplies them with as many interesting ideas to chose from for each beat as possible.

In the end, Saschka presented a short sequence from another feature’s opening sequence, Cars 2 where he showed the evolution of an action-laden scene from storyboard to final. It was stunning, how visual ideas Pixar managed to pack into it. “Are you sometimes not satisfied when you seen the final?” Saschka was asked as the clips had finished. “Always,” he answered instantly “every time I watch it I find something that I could have made better. The longer you explore a set, a shot, a beat, the better your ideas get” he concluded.

My mentor and former Disney animator Fraser MacLean is finishing his book about The Art & Evolution of Animation Layout which will be out in August this year. Highly recommended!

Megacity

The audience’s transition from Pixar to DreamWorks took a little longer and I found myself sitting next to some American college students, as it seemed to me. Almost instantly after the lights dimmed down and Philippe Denis began on “Megamind” — The Creative Process, the one next to me whipped out her Blackberry and launched Texas Hold’em Poker, her other hand found yet another cell in her purse via which she was heavily involved in keeping up what was new and cool on Facebook — the entire presentation. I really am thankful that my social life and craving for distraction are not as demanding, so I was able to take quite a few notes.

Without losing too many words about it Philippe verbally rolled up his sleeves and got to work, displaying an abstract slide with circles and lines on a jagged grey shape. It was the basic street layout of Metro City. Just like Blue Sky for Rio, they came up with a procedural approach for generating the city. Based on the rough boundaries and boulevards laid out beforehand, the tool created the street grid, then populated it logically with blocks and lots. “And in the lots the buildings could get placed.”
On the city map different colors indicated different types of buildings, residential lots were red, commercial ones where blue⁵ and so on. To control the height of the buildings a simple height-map was plugged into the script that would select a building type and then scale it to the desired height.

“Scale to the desired height?!” I thought but of course there wasn’t mundane scaling at play. Instead, the different types of buildings were coded, so that scaling the height effectively meant that more floors would be added automatically between ground floor and rooftop, each cleverly broken with ledges and other architectural braids. “Architecture is all about proportions” Philippe added as he rolled a screen recording from inside Maya where the operator scaled such a “coded” building into every direction.

And there were a lot of buildings to design and code. Ultimately the city was composed out of 20 thousand people, many thousand cars (following a traffic rule-set) and 70 thousand buildings, each with different LoDs and corresponding maps: If a building had a certain distance to the camera its modeled architectural details would retreat into a normal map, for example.

Also, the roads and streets were designed and coded in a similar manner, even details such as crumbled curb-edges, mailboxes, street lamps etc. had been modeled and were placed by the algorithm.

But the city’s buildings also needed to be shaded and this was where things started weighing down in memory; the whole city was around 1 terabyte of data. The solution was to bake the complex shading networks which resulted in a seven times faster rendering.

The city, however, would not only be used as a rigid stage, parts of it would also get destroyed at some point in the movie. As for the FX development there was a close cooperation with the other departments to always keep the direction transparent for each artist. The dust blown up by collapsing buildings was, for example, realized with Maya fluids that interacted with the geometry, so even DreamWorks put their pants one one leg at a time.

“A Cape Doesn’t Make a Hero”

“We also had to realize some character effects and because Megamind is all about superheroes it’s mainly about capes.” Philippe started off and displayed some cloth simulations in which the cape didn’t behave like it should, or to be more precise, like the animator wants it to behave. To cut a long story short the solution was giving the animators tools to deform and pose the cape with IK/FK handles; curl, skew and sine wave controllers and to also simulate the cape. Afterward the simulation could be seamlessly mixed together with the animation.

City Lights

In terms of lighting DreamWorks settled for a new path which seemed old hat to me to be frank: Philippe showed a shot board of some of the feature’s shots turned into black an white. It was obvious that a bit contrast was missing. Proudly Philippe beamed a slide-filling tone curve that was ever so slightly S-shaped and top-heavy. This evidently increased the contrast of the final renders and also provided a gentler roll-off towards the highlights.

But also the exposure range was presented as a bit braver than in a traditional animation as it had been decided to let things blow out into overexposure when they were not necessary to the shot (“we expose for the character”), such as bright-lit buildings in the background when a character was standing in the shadows in the foreground. Also nothing really new.

Metro City at night on the other hand asked for a little more ingenuity. I guess some of us had to build and mainly shade nightly illuminated CG-buildings. As soon as the camera starts moving (or in stereo 3D) you won’t get away with incandescent “interior views” that have been plastered over the windows. That is why behind the lit windows the buildings really had modeled rooms (= boxes) with HDI textures to suggest real buildings. Also the rooms were spanned across multiple windows “which really conveyed a real feeling.”

The street lighting was a bit trickier. The indirect illumination from the streets up the buildings was realized by an ingenious application of ambient occlusion: Take your ordinary ambient occlusion with a large radius, the subtract another ambient occlusion rendering with a smaller radius, tint it yellow and there you have your street-light illumination on the buildings, which worked really well⁶. Still, even by faking it that way, there still was enough to render, thousands of streetlamps with nine light sources each could only be rendered by calculating point clouds for the illumination.

As if that was not enough, a scene set at night also asked for pouring rain which amped up the render time per frame to a buzzing 38 hours, but that gain was feasible since the rest usually only rendered five to six hours per frame: “The complexity was not so much the geometry but the amount of map data and point clouds the renderer needed to access” Philippe summed up.

Like the old days

The college kids with the smart phone stood up as the lights brightened and I was thus granted a little more room in my row. I was rather exhausted of four days of taking notes and typing them into (somewhat) meaningful sentences that I almost forgot that there was still one presentation imminent: Animating “Tangled” by Clay Kaytis, Animation Supervisor at Disney.

“Tangled was Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 50th movie. And the really wanted to make it something special, something that could hold up to the old classics like Pinocchio or Beauty and the Beast in your DVD shelf,” talk about setting the bar high for yourself!

“But everything starts somewhere and often it is not pretty!” Clay smiled and showed the first test of a CG model, animated with blendshapes in Maya. And they really were producing disgusting holes and errors in the geometry; additionally the deformation looked eerie, like a corpse (and I am not talking about the flat shading). “The needs of the performer should drive the design” Clay remarked and went on to a photo of a beautifully sculpted maquette of Rapunzel that got scanned and cleaned. But unfortunately also this model did not work properly with the facial animation system back then.

In about a week an artist took the task of creating a new facial rig to heart and presented Clay with the result on an already modeled character: Instead of blendshapes he had settled for a rig of intricately weighted joints, eight lip controls, six for each eye, four or five for each brow and so on. Even in that early stage it was clear this was the way to go, because animating a character’s face was more intuitive than before. The rig was extensively tested with extremes and there things started to feel a tad too fleshy since the rig did not treat the bone structure differently. To tackle this issue, six extreme poses were defined, drawn and modeled and used as targets, once a certain constellation of joints was closing in on an extreme pose. This method assured a somewhat believable bone structure and additionally art-directed extreme poses. “You want your rig to be like a sports car,” Clay explained, “intuitive, elegant and very responsive.”

For body testing the team really had to gear up as Clay one day slipped that he wanted Tangled to feature the best character animation they had ever done. So they started learning animation from scratch: They animated Rapunzel turning, walking, jumping, looking and so on. Once the animator gave the character a motivation to turn or to act in a certain way, Rapunzel suddenly began to feel like a real quirky teenager, “You need to find a way to have the characters act from inside out.”

The character of Flynn should be sporty and slick although not too grossly “slick”, but the fears were allayed as soon as the character was modeled. Since Flynn and the Horse also needed to be in the sneak peek of the movie, the development on Rapunzel stopped, though.

Tangled did not have dedicated character supervisors. In the beginning all the animators played around with the characters and soon certain animators made certain characters the best.

Glen Keane, legendary Disney animator who had the luck of being trained by the “Nine Old Men,” came initially as a co-director to the production but for health reasons had to leave for six months. When he returned he stepped down from directing to just animating, “a dream come true for us other animators so he would sit with us all day and we could learn from him,” Clay remembered revelling. When he came back after his leave, the artists showed him what they got and Glen started drawing over the viewport rendering. And in 2D he drew the changes needed to be made on the model “which freaked out the animation department.”

In the end there were eight months time to animate the movie when all main characters were rigged, approved and ready for production. “The rig was so robust that there was nothing you couldn’t do with a character.” It was also scripted so it could be set up easily for another character.

Dailies with Glen

During dailies the artists showed Glen what they animated and he would give feedback and draw key poses on a Cintiq over their animation in the screening room. On a new shot, Glen would start drawing his suggestions and ideas of posture and poses and the longer an animator would work on the shot, the smaller and smaller the ideas would get. “Every day was like a masterclass in animation. You go in clueless and walk out with all the right answers to make your shot better.”

When the animation on a shot was final, a breathing pass would be animated to match the breathing of the voice actors which was vital in the singing sequences. Another very subtle detail that got added towards the end was the direction and shape of the eyelashes at each key pose, a detail Glen expertly used in all of Rapunzel’s drawings.

“And he’s always getting better. After 35 years he’s still improving!” Clay finished and rolled a reel of showcasing the animators with a sample of their contribution to Tangled — a well rounded conclusion to this year’s fmx. In the Großer Saal across the street followed the screening of the whole feature but with a heavy heart I had to pass.

“See ya in 2012!”

After four days of too little sleep, caffeine-abuse and battles for up-front seats, my body was aching for rest. Not more coffee, just rest. So I ransomed my car from the ridiculously expensive parking garage and rolled back to my hotel. I was asleep before I remember hitting the mattress.

…but it’s not over yet! Soon I will finish writing the other days’ reports, then add lots of pretty pictures and proof-read the whole grammar-abomination thoroughly.

This site is still currently under construction and more will follow soon.
Watch out for falling pixels!

I stumbled between the rows of the darkened hall as some animation’s credits were running and got my favorite seat to watch a couple of really funny Wily E. Coyote-like animation shorts about Mr. Hoppe, trying different approaches get rid of a barrel of atomic waste that always backfire. There were a bunch of lovely ideas involved, so check out the website!

Know the Past, Conquer the Future

Shortly after Eric Ross introduced the founder of Digital Domain before he sold it to director Michael Bay and a bunch of investors, so he was in the business right from the start on the other end of the spectrum, not an artist but a producer and manager. How he felt after being in the industry for thirty year? “Boy, am I tired!”

“I am going to talk about the past of the VFX industry a bit because it is important to know where we all come from.” Scott joined ILM in the middle of the 1980′s when the company was working on “Innerspace”. What surprised him, was that in fact very little was done on the computers. It was the time when companies had in-house teams (such as Pixar) to develop computers for specific tasks, so called transputers. Since Scott originated from a wold of optical printing and the telecine he thought “that wouldn’t it to be wonderful to bring that to the computer?” At ILM, John and his brother Thomas Knoll started developing a program for doing composits on a Macintosh computer, a program that what would eventually become Photoshop ¹. “But rendering was still a big issue and it only got feasible until we got us some Pixar cubes², which were used for the VFX on The Abyss³. And today? There are probably more colleges that provide VFX education than there were people in the VFX industry in the early 1990′s.”

Scott continued that historically not so much is known about the producers and managers behind the artists of the early days, although somebody “fighting off the client so the artists could work” is just as important. Oftentimes, he lamented, the industry is not really that much interested in the business of VFX. “If you wanna be only an artist then cut off your ear, move to southern France, eat cadmium yellow paint and have a good time!” he joked “In our business it don’t mean a thing if it don’t go kaching.” — simple as that.

But he made clear that the business people are out to suck out all an artists creative power, rather to empower them instead by providing infrastructure, time and the opportunity to individually make a living with their craft. “Well managed companies can always pay all of their employees’ hours all the time.” That made me remember the unpaid overtime I oftentimes did.

History

Scott continued painting the big picture, what companies were founded at what time, and what stages they went through, like the first generation VFX divisions that were all created out of the needs of a single project such as Industrial Light and Magic (which spawned Pixar later) was founded for the purpose of creating Star Wars; Douglas Trumbull created the Future General Corporation for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Rob Abel founded Robert Abel and Associates (RA&A) for Star Trek. All that happened in the 1970′s.

The second generation facilities were founded mostly by people who were fed up “working for the man” and decided to start their own companies. Rhythm and Hues was founded in 1987 by six former RA&A employees, Richard Edlund’s Boss Films, John Dykstra’s Apogee, Inc. and Scott’s Digital Domain were all companies created from former ILM guys who had a “religious problem” with George Lucas, as Scott put it: “He thought he was god, and I disagreed. So I started my own church.”

The next wave were studio owned VFX divisions that would open and close and open and close, depending on whether they were needed for a production or just were unprofitable such as Buena Vista EFX. Warner Bros. Digital is now closed, Sony Pictures Imageworks costs the studio a lot of money but they produce very well grossing features, or The Secret Lab that used to be Dreamquest got closed after Disney’s Dinosaur bombed.

Of the 3rd, 4th and 5th generation facilities some made it until today, such as Weta Digital or Method Studios whereas many didn’t (The Orphanage, Station X, Asylum, Café FX, etc.) or as Scott put it: “The highway is littered by dead bodies. For a successful business you need to understand the business aspect as well as the artistic and the technological aspect. And still, that might not be good enough.” And a good name is also important. “Somebody back then suggested Digital Domain, whereas I wanted to name the company Presto Digital-tation or something like that. I’m terrible with names… I have three children but I won’t tell you their names” Scott said with a smile.

And today? There are mostly studio-owned companies that produce full CG movies, which turned out to be highly successful: Disney got Pixar (“Toy Story”), Fox owns Blue Sky Studios (“Ice Age”), Dreamworks acquired PDI (“Shrek”) and Sony has Sony Pictures Imageworks that currently delivers high-end VFX. The advantage these companies have, is that they provide the content creators with all what is necessary such as distribution, marketing and licensing. Still, “content is king. Making and owning content will do you right” Scott is convinced.

The crux with today’s high-end VFX and CG production is that it does not happen in a free market environment. “In VFX, the consumer has no vote, s/he can’t say I am going to pay $15 to see a movie by Sony!. Instead the studios control the business, which means that when you have a VFX facility you have these six clients worldwide.”

The thing is, though, that the facilities are not profitable, as said before for a number of reasons: You can’t see long ahead if and when there will be which amount of work. Then, it is difficult to price VFX since everybody is constantly asking for something new that had never been done before which make it impossible to compare. What is really hard on the US-based facilities is the subsidized situation in the UK where VFX companies are basically spared from some taxes by her majesty. The cost of labor has steadily increased (which is at least one good thing for us artists) so when an artist got an annual salary of around $40k for the work on The Abyss the same skill set and expertise earns you today a healthy $200k to $250k per year. Broken pipelines are another issue that might cause great damage, technical prowess, managing the client, next-gen facilities, capital investments and satisfying the management’s expectations — that all costs money.

What grosses money today

The 80′s were dominated by a film star scheme that worked really well: Have a familiar name on the poster and you were certain to get your revenue from it. As Scott showed the top 20 grossing movies of all times there were only three of them starring a movie star with appropriate pay: Johnny Depp. Almost all the others were features heavy on VFX where the lead roles didn’t make a difference, “VFX and animation mean everything today!” Scott tried to motivate us. I know that I had really gotten worried on how the industry is headed right now. “The new film stars are you, your work gets shown in every trailer, not a witty dialogue by Tom Hanks, the images you create people want to see and pay for!”

In the end Scott talked about the Korean film “The Host” that was incredibly successful in Korea and Japan, “but if it was produced in English with a slightly more Western structure in the narrative it could have made twice as much internationally” he concluded and was running out of time on this extensive lecture so he jumped through the importance of outsourcing and spoke a few words of warning, that the low-cost content providers will become the provider of services in the near future — like it or not.

“But there is a bright future for you as the content provider, because, again, content is king!” he said. With the new models of distribution with the internet the current system of the Big Studios can easily change. “There is a bright light at the end of the tunnel. But it could also be the light of a train. You need to find a place to fit in, and don’t think that everything is gonna work out like roses, because sometimes it just does not.” I was irritated by the mixed messages I received from his lecture. And all that without coffee made me feel like Garfield on a Monday morning.

Oh, and here are two interesting facts from the presentation I could not find a place to fit in the text above:

• Scott played the cowbell on one Jimi Hendrix song. Funny story.
• Monkeypoints is net-profit on a movie. Since the studios have clever ways of shuffling and hiding the money a feature makes, it practically means you never see a dime; whereas First Dollar Gross means a percentage of what is made at the box office.

Going Global, Pt. 2

I remained in the König-Karl Halle because I was too exhausted to move and so I sat there and watched the panel that was up next. Eric Roth moderated the discussion Global Production from the U.S. point of view among the illustrious round of industry leaders and professionals. On the podium sat Jeff Okun, VFX Supervisor and chair of the VES; William Sargent, the founder and CEO of Framestore, Dan Glass, Executive VP and GM of Method Studios/CIS and Lee Berger, the President of Rhythm & Hues. I tried to note down their respective views and opinions on the topic.

Lee Berger stated right in the beginning that 90% of the costs is labor and if you want to stay in business you want to cut the costs by retaining the quality. And outsourcing is a way of doing that, in the case of Rhythm & Hues about 30 to 50 percent of a project is worked on abroad. Taking William’s statement “in the end it still comes down to the price” into account, Eric Roth asked if this was going to become a race to the bottom of the price. “Definitely. But you still don’t want to cut any corners quality wise. India and China catch up in quality pretty fast and will soon be able to deliver the same quality. And we do whatever we can to keep the prices low.” As brutal as this may sound, R&H still managed to stay in business for 24 years and counting and always managed to pay their artists.
A question from the audience was asked whether this fragmentation will continue to a level where the artists work on a powerful system from their homes and exchange via the cloud. “That would be too fragmented for productive and creative work,” Lee explained. “It is already happening for tasks like roto where you pay somebody $50 for it, but for creative tasks it just won’t do, you need to be around each other.”

Dan Glass considered taxes and subsidies to be a huge factor for where in the world to produce VFX, but also the skill set teams is important. “We want our teams to be self-sufficient, being able to work on sequences independently. We don’t split up tasks.” Apart from filmmakers still pushing for high quality and not accepting mediocre VFX, he also talked about the development that low-cost labor will not remain low-cost forever, so you always need to be vigilant about the global fluctuations and tendencies.

William Sargent was rather pragmatic in his view as an CEO of a big company, and stated that “in the end it still comes down to the price”. But in his eyes the globalization doesn’t really mean shipping jobs abroad, instead just growing abroad. Framestore also operates an office in New York, “but since New York is the center for commercials we just wanted to be near to our clients there.”
Nowadays you get paid for what you can deliver on a per-project basis, nobody wants to pay for the R&D that goes into the steady creation of something that has never been done before. But a positive development in recent years is that the VFX houses have become part of the discussion. “Clients say: We have $ 5 million and want to do this. Is that feasible? How can you help us achieve this?” In Williams’ opinion, the VFX industry has the best organized and still most flexible part of any production, “things can virtually change over night and we can react to that.”
Eric asked if he gave William $50 million, would he found a VFX facility again?
“There’s definitely an easier way to make a living than to start a VFX facility, but this is just where my passion lies. And with $ 50 million you wouldn’t open a VFX studio, you would start a project instead and maybe found a small VFX studio in the wake.”
But is being a small VFX studio with a better profit percentage preferable to a bloated system? “Well, you need a certain size to being able to obtain and finish some projects.”

Jeff Okun saw the change toward a global industry in bright colors and as an opportunity for the creative: “We are the migrant film workers,” he continued, “I didn’t get into the business to win an Oscar but I love figuring ways out to do the impossible and I don’t hesitate to take my family with me and go where there are opportunities. I lived half a year in New Zealand, six months in South Africa, six months in Thailand… I don’t think geography is that important anymore, it doesn’t matter. The only reason the industry is still so US-centered is because it’s where Hollywood grew and became the center of it, where everything used to be in once place. The US is a sad place right now, a lot of bullshit going on.”
“Embrace the change, change is good. It gives everybody the opportunity to fix things that are broken. This is a good age to be a student and a good opportunity for a do-over.

Fun fact: Bill Kroyer sat in the row next to me, a book with the colorful cover next to him (CG101: A Computer Graphics Industry Reference, 2nd ed.) and I was racking my brains to think of something I always wanted to know about the original TRON because I’d probably never have the chance to ask him again anytime soon if ever. In the end I nodded off during the Q&A session in the end. When I woke up, Bill was gone. Damn!

Outsourced

The next session of that day’s focus on producing global was held by Philippe Gluckman of the DreamWorks Dedicated unit who had started as a supervisor on Shrek and was at PDI when they got acquired by DreamWorks. In his presentation he talked about the struggles, surprises and success of building a DreamWorks animation studio in Bangalore, India. “So basically what we tried was to apply the same process of unification that was going on when PDI merged with DreamWorks.”

In May 2008 the studio in Bangalore was opened in cooperation with Technicolor that already operated from the same tech park. The studio “opened” in a sense that it was lacking employees and equipment but the premise were ready for them.

What was the goal for DreamWorks’ Indian unit? Cheap work? Low expertise work? Philippe made it clear that was not the case. “We wanted to make it the equivalent of PDI with the same level of quality.” Then he showed the studio’s demo reel with various Madagascar or Shrek themed seasonal TV specials. To me it looked just like the movies. “The only thing that’s different so far is that we don’t make or own innovations, we just use the techniques that PDI already acquired.” But what the Bangalore studio does not do is recycle already used sets, because it doesn’t quite work and in the end you spend more time making an existing set work in a new context than building a new one altogether.

Training

“We needed to train the local artists with our software first. It is proprietary and different than what the artists are used to. It has no full documentation and takes quite a time to get comfortable with.” But the training also needed to be broader than just teaching the tools. Some also needed to brush up their English and the leads were sent to the US, just as some people from the US were sent to India. “Our artists really enjoyed those visits and loved to be exposed to the top people of their field, they wanted to soak up their knowledge like sponges.”

Culture

What about the cultural differences? “The people weren’t used to the freedom we gave them: Instead of urging the animators to churn out a shot each day we gave them six weeks for it. But what sounds like creative heaven at first also needs to be seen in perspective: You need to figure out a way of working that fits you and that you are able to constantly improve on your shot. To keep this level of quality we ask much of our artists but they reward us every time.”
“At PDI there’s a culture of voicing you opinion and exchange so you also need to see criticism as opportunities, not threats. In the beginning it was difficult to get the artists voice their opinion and to be as forthcoming as would like them to be and pitch their shots before others. They got used to Tell me what you want and I do it exactly as you say. That is not how we do things.

The time difference of twelve hours soon made it obvious that there were only limited opportunities for reviews from DreamWorks in California. Since the studio felt like a start-up, sometimes people got promoted to fast into leading positions they did not feel quite ready for.

Technique

Technically there also were some challenges waiting to be mastered: “There was no person in India that lights the way we do. We don’t have a compositing department, everything happens in the renderer so we really had to train people first.”

Also the matte paintings in the trademark DreamWorks style were too uncommon to find a talented artist right away since they are not photo-real but much more detailed than a concept painting, they lie someplace in between.

In practical terms also the look of some elements resulted in different comprehensions, as with pixie dust. “Magic is terribly hard to get visualized because it is highly subjective compared to, say, water.” The Bangalore studio also animated clips for a DVD menu that asked for a fully deformable yet still fully loopable fire, which posed “a tricky but interesting task.”

The Future

DreamWorks’ goal is to have a studio in India that is capable of developing and producing a full feature with the quality standard of the headquarter in the US. “And this happens right now in Bangalore.” Philippe closed before showing some personal photos he took of the people he met on his exploring walks around the tech-park.

WALL-@

Again my caffeine batteries were empty, my low biological activity almost drained as well and it was hard keeping my mental focus. And to my knowledge there is only one medicine⁴: COFFEE! So I tried to get out and to the other Starbucks as fast as possible to avoid long queues. I finally arrived, merrily ordered a salami bagel and a caramel macchiato and reached for my wallet. It wasn’t there anymore. I looked incredibly stupid at the barista “I lost my wallet.” I uttered. This was not happening, I thought, there was everything in it! “Tough luck. NEXT!” he replied and I traced back my steps. Vanished was my exhaustion, exchanged for a cold panic with sprinkles of irrationality that made me text my beloved Conny who was hundreds of kilometers away and couldn’t do anything about the situation apart from sending a reply: “Oh no!!!!”. Back in the König-Karl-Halle at my seat there was nothing. I asked the technicians, they didn’t have a clue. I went to the info-desk and ask whether a wallet had been found. “Yes. What name?”. I showed her my ticket and she handed me my wallet. Even the money was still in it! I was so relieved I babbled like a madman about how relieved I was and sent an all-clear-message off to Conny. I went back to the coffee shop with a fresh boost of relief-induced energy and placed the same order at the same barista. “I hope you can now pay for it” he replied with a smirk.

Why did I tell you this? Because you should learn from my mistakes: Don’t hog so much loose change that your wallet gets so heavy, it falls out of your back-pocket when you try for three hours not to fall off a chair.

Forged Cutting Edge

FMX flags,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Usually I would have jumped into the conversation of the fellow fmx-attendees but my internal computer said “No!” because it runs on caffeine and was dangerously low on it. So as soon as I got downtown I went to Dr. Starbuck for my medicine before attending the day’s first lecture.

Peter Plantec dropped a few words about today’s special program on virtual humans, after all he had written a book on the topic. It’s almost safe to say that finally we have made our way out of the uncanny valley. Almost. There still are occasional outliers but Benjamin Button proved, that it could be done.

And Digital Domain was spearheading that development as Matthias Wittmann’s presentation Combining Ages — TRON Legacy showed where he talked about the development and realization of Jeff Bridges’ digital age transformation on screen.

Head of Development

So how do you start such an endeavor? First you make a physical life-cast of your actor which gets you a full cast of the head (also the back of the head), good detail of the wrinkles, a sense of the underlying bone-structure and position of the ear holes, all that won’t change over the years — as compared to sagging skin. The downside of this method is that the person has to sit still for half an hour. “And when you sit still for so long you relax and your jaw drops. Like in many of you right now, your teeth-rows aren’t touching. And that’s a problem when you want a perfect model.”

Another time Jeff’s face was reproduced, that time it was a LightStage scan of his face. “LightStage has a really high resolution but you have to sit perfectly still for five seconds and look into bright lights. So inevitably your eyebrows narrow and even very subtle movements during the scan distort the geometry a bit.” But they already had the brows right from the life cast, so the artists could combine it with the jaw from the LightStage scan and a modeler crafted a clean digital model in Mudbox with proper topology.

Now they had the old-Jeff head. This was needed because the solver of the tracked footage recorded from today’s Jeff Bridges with four head-cams on set would only deliver correct results if applied to the old-Jeff model which would drive the animation on the young-Jeff head.

This head was modeled after the scanned geometry and countless reference photos, movies and videos depicting a young Jeff Bridges. This young-Jeff model went through countless back-and-forth stages of “Are the wrinkles there too strong? Take them out” to “Now he looks too soft, put them back in!”. In the end the animation-model of the head had 23,088 polygons in the Maya viewport. The rendered model was composed of 369,408 polygons but was lacking displacement mapping of very fine details such as the pores, which got hand-sculpted, in the model as well. So in the end, with displacement mapping the model had 5,917,916 polygons.¹

And the work on the model was everything but over: For the animation-blendshapes Digital Domain used a FACS-based approach for which they needed to capture Jeff Bridges as he flexed single facial muscles as good as possible independently in front of a scanner. This performance got recorded live with a Mova Contour scanner that offered a realtime scan of up to 60 fps, although 30 fps were sufficient. The realtime scan was not as coarse as a LightStage scan, naturally, still the high-contrast make-up on the actor’s face provided the scanner with roughly 700 tracking points that were translated to vertices to drive the motion on the geometry, although lips and eyes were missing. The data was good enough to select on a per-frame basis the best “take” of single muscles that could be incorporated into the blendshape models. A talented modeler also took care of the transitions to areas the scans didn’t cover, such as ears when moving brows. In the end the animation-rig consisted of more than 200 blendshapes two modelers worked on for half a year. And almost as sophisticated as the rig was the GUI for the animators. “The rig is really well done, so you can’t break the model, no matter what blendshapes you mix and put on top of each other”. Still, that process was never finished and constantly new shapes needed to be added over the course of the production.

With the expressions now possible the young-Jeff head was posed to match various expressions of the photo and video-references of Jeff Bridges to see whether they would hold up. Only if it worked there, it was feasible to work on shots of the movie.

Approaching a shot

On the soundstage, Jeff Bridges’ facial performance was recorded with four cameras on mounted on a helmet that recorded his face with tracking markers from four different angles. Occasionally a witness cam filmed his performance from a fifth perspective, “although 90% of the time there was no room or time for a witness cam. When I suggested that, you know, even filming Jeff with a small handy-cam or cell-phone camera would suffice, the crew just shrugged that they couldn’t do that because they weren’t in the [cinematographer's] union. So we had to work with the head-cam footage most of the time,” Matthias recalled.

Instead of moving the skin according to the tracking markers on Jeff’s face, Digital Domain used a different approach: “Our solver tries to use the existing blendshapes to match the points as close as possible, so the animators can tweak, add and adjust the generated blendshapes,” although movement on eyes and lips is not recorded too well, so every shot is a lot of manual labor of a talented artist. Further, “there is no solver in the world that can correctly figure out what’s skin-motion and what’s bone-motion.”

The eyes proved to be a critical factor also in this production. The blendshape-controls around the eyes had to be refined and worked on by the two modelers with special care. Even simple blinking needed a proper deformation in the face. The eye-lines always came from John Reardon, Jeff Bridges’ body double on set, since it was John interacting with other actors and the environment.

John, the body double, would perform what he observed from the take with Jeff to reenact to the best of his abilities. His movements would get motion tracked so that the digital head could be popped on. Once the animation was done on the head, a preview was rendered with sub-surface-scattering so it could be evaluated how it would hold up with light and shadows; then with the hair simulation and if it looked right there, it would get rendered for the final shot, composited and color-graded.

But the animation was not just fixing what the solver couldn’t do, there was much more to it: For example the many “Jeffisms”, as Matthias called it, subtle expressions or looks, that the body double missed to reenact. “The problem is, that you can’t change the head motion much, since body and head are a unit and breaking their motions apart would look just wrong. This really opens your eyes on how much verbal communication happens through body language.” Still, sometimes the animators needed to add a little nod on a specific word in the head-animation or twist it differently.

Then there was the problem of a swimming or floating head. “We sent it back to tracking and what we got back still looked floating. We looked at the footage again and whereas Jeff was speaking his lines rather serious, his body-double played it much more casual and relaxed and his head just wobbled.” So the animators let the digital face smile a little more so that the lightness of John would be carried over. So sometimes you had to adapt the head to the body movement. “I can’t remember how often shot like this one”, he pointed at the bobble-head-shot looping on the screen behind him, “were sent to tracking back and forth and came back almost the same because the track wasn’t the problem.” In the lower left corner the version-number indicated that we were shown version 47 of it.

Occasionally the production team even rendered the head from the positions of the four motion-capture cameras with the same distortion they produced, “just to prove a point, since everything looks different when lit, moreover, Jeff’s lips look really big and different than from the shot perspective. This way the decision-makers could compare the original and the animated emotion one-to-one.”

Headworkers

Not that often, but still, the team encoutered the opposite problem, that there was too much movement in the face, or some “Jeffisms” were happening that a young guy just won’t do so that needed to be taken out. Something that did happen a bit more often was edited reference footage, so that Clu would deliver his line angrily, only to laugh in the end, such as with the line “Where are you now? Ha-ha!”. In those situations the animators had to manually blend the different expressions together as plausible and natural as they could.

During the animation an HDR image of the set was used for a quick lighting reference, but it also happened that the lighting changed drastically once the head was positioned in the scene. In one instance the head was not lit from above but from below. “A smile lit from above doesn’t need to be that big to have the same impression than when the face get lit from below like it was in this case.” Oftentimes it was not easy to tell whether the animation of the face was dead-on, so an intermediate rendering of a Lambert-shaded head with displacement was done, where the skin-details where much better to discern than with sub-surface scattering.

Lastly the sound and timing of the expressions needed to be edited occasionally as well. On one shot Matthias demonstrated the problem in the plate with the body-double: The first part of the dialogue he wasn’t looking quite in the right direction, in the second part his face was obstructed when he delivered his line. Again, the right transitions needed to be animated to get the timing right.

And also there were shots where there was little animation in the face going on from the beginning, like in a reaction-shot of Clu just listening. It always seemed too static and the director wanted a maximum of still plausible movement in the face, despite the freeze-frame-like appeal of Jeff Bridge’s reference from the shoot. “Sometimes people just don’t move!” Matthias said, adding “Still, you can’t ever totally stop animating a face, especially if it should look photoreal. This would give it away instantly.”

“Sometimes… sometimes shots just clicked together from start to finish and went exactly as expected” Matthias concluded his lecture. There were not many questions and I tried to get to the “Raum Ulm” for the Adobe presentation as fast as possible. Unfortunately I still was trapped between two rather heavy guys and so I endet up as one among many waiting and pushing towards the room’s entrance. A few people squeezed themselves through the packed crowd from inside the room and the fmx hostess only let in as many people as had left. I was not among them but still waited in front of the door, eager to get in to Adobe’s D-SLR Workflow presentation. Then the presenter, Michael O’Neill, appeared from the back of the crows with a bowl of sweets. “Gee, you all wanna in?” — “Yeah!” the crowd replied. I have never seen so many Canon 5D’s and Rebel Ti’s in such close proximity. “Okay, then can we do another session during the lunch break? Yes?” The hostess shrugged. “Alright, then see you all in my break then!” and he slipped through the door. “Cool guy!” one girl uttered. And then the crowd slowly dispersed and I went across the Schloßplatz in the Holanka Bar, a bookstore-café to start this report on today’s lectures.

Upon leaving I had a little accident that resulted in a graze on my nasal bone that began emitting a small but steady current of blood. The fun part is that I wasn’t aware of it until half an hour later when people eyed me more suspiciously than usual.

Adobe-Schmoby

Adobe’s notebook,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I returned just in time to queue up once again in front of the Raum Ulm for an Adobe presentation titled Hollywood Visual Effects. Again masses of people were packed like sardines in a tin can and waited patiently in front of the door. But this time I picked a better place and was among the first that had been granted admittance by the hostess. As I walked past her I could feel the stirred crowd pushing into the room like a herd of kettle. I don’t know how but she managed to keep them back. Didn’t matter to me, I had a seat in the front row.

Michael O’Neill arrived after the Geisha VFX reel had finished and seemed a bit stressed but happy to see an eager crowd. A few minutes in his presentation he asked “Who has worked with Premiere?” Many hands were raised. “Who has worked with After Effects?” Almost all of them stayed up. “I love you!” Mike beamed enthusiastically. I bet if he would have asked “And how many have 100% legal versions of our products?” his smile would have vanished instantly.

What followed was the VFX reel of Shutter Island with rather basic comments on how to use masks and keying, and then he re-made a so-so crowd duplication in a shot of Gareth Edward’s Attila the Hun movie. A tremendous no-budget effort but with… how do I put this… obvious not-really-state-of-the-art VFX. So frankly I was a bit bored by the very basic VFX 101 which might have been totally new for some of the youngsters among the crowd. At least I got rewarded with some candy for making a smart-ass remark. Nobody likes smartasses like me, but what does Michael do? He encourages my behavior by feeding me candy! Still, I was hoping to learn something new. What really kinda blew me away was the VFX reel of Boardwalk Empire because as I saw those sequences I not once even considered them being so VFX laden when I saw them in the show.

And in that respect I was rewarded because the presentation turned out to be a clandestine marketing plug for bringing the Adobe CS 5.5 suite to our attention with some cool new features such as the “Refinement Plate” effect in After Effects (or something like that) which basically is the Roto-Brush as an effect. Further I really enjoyed seeing at least some of After Effects’ effects ready for 32-bit or at least 16-bit color depth.

Mike also presented the new Lens Blur which, according to his presentation, lets you set the focus-point anywhere in your live-action plate and have the rest blur physically correct. When it was Q&A-time I wanted to know how this worked, like After Effects triangulated the content and calculated a quick depth-pass. But, alas, Michael had a tendency to understand questions the wrong way (not only mine) and explained in detail to me how the lens correction profiles in Camera Raw worked. I knew this. He even boasted “We have made profiles for all lenses and cameras that there are!” I really forced myself not to talk back, because just a few days before I downloaded Adobe’s little lens profiling tool because they obviously missed quite a few lenses in their latest update. Still I wanted to know about the Lens Blur, so I pressed the issue: “Yeah, but that was not my question…” He cut me off and started explaining how a lens worked, what the aperture does and so on. Sure, he couldn’t know that I most certainly know better than him how that stuff worked, still I felt like he treated me like an idiot who had a Canon 5D set to full-auto. Frankly, I was pissed.

Still I remained at my seat although it was lunch break. Micheal had promised us the DSLR Workflow lecture and really stuck to his word, although it was obvious that he wanted to get through it as quickly as possible to enjoy at least 15 minutes of lunch time. Nothing really new here either, just a little Dynamic Linking here, a little Adobe Bride interaction and bouncing everything to Premiere or After Effects. I don’t know why so many people look down on Premiere because Michael demonstrated its USP extensively: The ability to work with native DSLR-footage (and even RED and Alexa raw footage!) in real-time without the hassles of converting everything to your intermediate codec as it is the case with Final Cut and Avid. Since Adobe got their hands on the RAW-color-specifications, even camera-raw for RED footage in Premiere and After Effects did not affect the speed and quality of the real-time playback thanks to their Mercury Playback Engine. That was the most impressive thing I’d seen in this year’s Adobe presentation. At least something.

VFX Politics

Jeff Okun presenting,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Today I had enough energy and motivation for trying something new and so I made my way across the street and into the other building for Jeffrey A. Okun’s²Politics of VFX. I was lucky and got a seat right in the front row so view and sound were excellent and allowed me to take some good photos of the speakers as well.

VES‘s executive director and FMX veteran Eric Roth introduced Jeff, chair of the VES, in very dear and complimenting words so the man got a big applause despite we, the audience, quite didn’t know why we applauded so enthusiastically. This blind and externally fueled enthusiasm should really give us to think. On the other hand, well, we didn’t applaud Hitler.

“Let’s talk about politics!” Jeff begun.

“I want everybody to raise their right hand and swear not to ruin my already rickety career because I am going to name names and expose people. Now do it and say ‘I swear’!” Yes, this was going to get juicy, I thought with a smile.

Jeff started a –god knows– overladen and ugly Power Point presentation. The first slide read “Visual Effects and Politics. Politics show up when you are: 1. Getting Hired” and I counted five different fonts, three different fade-ins and also three different colors. I was overwhelmed by this visual bravery. Jeff climbed the highest point of the stage, directly in front of the projection and lifted the veil on one myth: “You don’t get hired because of your skills. You get hired because people think you are an interesting person, like the way you are or because you have a good reputation. If you don’t really have a dynamic personality you won’t even get hired.” And Jeff went on telling anecdote after anecdote.

“How many of you are industry professionals? … Good. How many of you are students? … And how many of you don’t know why they’re here but thought this was a good way to spend some time?” I already liked Jeff, whose polarizing character and appearance could be compared to being the VFX industry’s Julian Assange.

“Everybody on a movie has an agenda. And creating the best result on screen is usually never makes it to the top-ten of their priorities. On top are promotions, family, friends, future plans, etc. And this can lead to the strangest and most wacky decisions during the making of a film”, like when the whole movie gets shot in a certain location just because the girlfriend of the director, who happens also to be the lead actress, wants to visit Malta. Or that, for example, the production designer hates the VFX team because it threatens his job and so he sabotages their efforts in as many ways as possible on set. Jeff also told how on the set of Last Samurai Tom Cruise (whose high-fives were vicious to the point that you would duck away to escape them) was ordered to be shot in front of a blue screen — in a navy blue suit. “This was not because they didn’t know any better. This was because of proving a point, that the VFX crew follows the orders of the director and not vice versa.” It sounded painful. “When you’re not Digital Domain or ILM you don’t have much to say on the set and are under constant pressure to just get what you need.”

“Cinefex always presents the same old making-of story over and over again: We met with the director, developed the look, made some tests, he loved it, we shot it and produced the VFX and everybody loved it… Raise your hands, who of you has ever been in such an ideal production where everything worked from start to finish?”. Silence. I thought back about past and also present productions I took part in which where tattered and torn by the interplay of individual agendas. And in the audience not a single hand was raised as far as I could tell.

The next set of slides with sickening word-by-word-transitions materialized on the projection. As we all waited for it to finally finish, Jeff added with a charming childish smile “I had so much fun doing that!” The slides essentially said that all politics come from a certain point of view and that “your brain sees what it is expecting, not what is there”, a statement underlined with photos of optical illusion graffiti like these in Toronto “by a group of people who just do this, they say, to mess with drunks”. That got a huge laugh. Jeff then continued showing blivets, impossible objects. “Trying to get the right perspective hurts your brain like watching a bad 3D-movie” he spoke, not missing to make a small remark about the stereo-conversion of Clash of the Titans. “A blivet is to perspective what reality is to your brain” was prominently placed across a slide in a stinging yellow color. “Can you really trust your brain?” Jeff asked rhetorically “No. That’s the point.”

“Some politics are good politics, some politics are bad politics and some politics are just crazy politics. These crazy politics get propagated by crazy people, and artists are oftentimes crazy people. And where do you have a bunch of artists together? In a movie production. So 90% of the politics you get are crazy politics.” Jeff deduced. Was it really that simple? Well, it made sense though. “The thing is, that politics affect the story. The Story… this is the altar before we bow.” Jeff paused for a moment. “And, by the way, the thing that killed 3D three times now is not bad technology, it’s bad stories. Now look at today: The big studios are dependent on flat stories about super heroes. Soon we will have super hero TV shows and commercials. The thing is, studios make movies for business, we do it because we love doing it.”

Jeff then talked extensively about the issues on Red Planet, how the story sucked, how the leading actor pissed everyone off and sabotaged the whole shoot so “that you were lucky to get two shots a day.” The VFX Producer quit, there was no VFX supervisor and Jeff only stayed on the set because he was promised work on the newest Harry Potter movie if Red Planet was thgouh. Things heated up further, so that the two remaining lead actors (the story had killed the others one by one before) filed restraining orders against each other and the only way to finish the movie was by shooting them one at a time and compositing them together. All that sounded dreadful! And this was just one of many productions that were going down the toilet during production. “You can tell how bad things are going when you look at the versions of a shot.” One had the version number of v1156.

“VFX is another word for not being able to say no”

The problem of all this is that the costs increase and the VFX department gets blamed for “getting crazy”. According to Jeff, the budgeting usually works like this: “Some 21-year-old one reads scripts all day at a studio and evaluates them, like The VFX on this movie will be $ 800,000! Then I read the script and say: That will cost you $ 25 million! Then the studio panics and asks us to cut costs. With some trickery we figure we can do it for $ 19 million which still is too much for the studio. Maybe you should order a re-write of the script? I suggest and then the rewritten version comes back with a new scene of an army marching though a city to the harbor and I say: Phew, with all that we are around $ 28 million and the studio will reply in lack of understanding: Why the heck is it now even more expensive?!”
On every film Jeff (and I for that matter) ever worked on, the final number of VFX shots went up, and so did the costs.

“What only matters is what ends up on the screen. Nobody will ask you whether everybody had a great time or you barely made it out alive.” If the movie is a success, so are you. If not, and you’re the VFX Supervisor or Producer, it’s your fault. “But always be aware of the agendas and politics of the people around you.” That was heavy. But hey, somebody needed to say it.

Pioneering for future legacies

After a few minutes’ break Eric Roth once again made the audience tingle with excitement as he was announcing another industry veteran, Bill Kroyer, who talked about the making of TRON from 1980 to 1982 in How Classical Animation boosted CG.

Bill Kroyer, then and now,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Bill started with a short history lesson and with what it was like when he begun at Walt Disney Animation and got trained under the tutelage of the Nine Old Men. In the 1970′s the animation studio was the same as it had been for decades, Disney was very reluctant (if not avoiding) to adopt new technology back in the day. To get this point across Bill threw up a slide reading “The only technology in the studio not available on Snow White…,” the picture below showed an old electric pencil sharpener. You couldn’t start much lower on technology than that.

Around the end of the 1970′s Steven Lisberger became intrigued with video games and wanted to make a film in that aesthetic of glowing colored lines. Out of that idea he initially envisioned TRON as a fully 2d-animated feature in mentioned aesthetic, but the project grew bigger and so did the ambitions of him becoming writer and director creating TRON. He recruited a couple of animators and flirted with state-of-the-art technology in bringing the vision to life: by modeling the world and the vehicles in the three-dimensional computer-space to create “Simulated Images” as it was called back then. This was where the training as a Disney animator really set them on course because at Disney “you always think spatially, you create the illusion of depth,” Bill explained as he showed a character-board of Jiminy Cricket, drawn from any angle with the underlying three-dimensional primitives sketched in. This board was over 70 years old!

As for the look they got design legend Syd Mead work on the “evil” architecture and vehicles (such was the famous light cycles) and French comic artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius, to work on the “good” designs like the Solar Sailer. Moebius also was one of the first artists to rely in his storyboards only on outlines and different shades of gray markers. When the storyboards were finished and the few artists on the project knew exactly what they wanted it to look like, the hard part begun. For that matter each story board panel had two numbers on the bottom, the first one indicating shot order, the second one defining the exact length in frames.

“A lot of graph paper”

The Light Cycle,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

There was no unified software for creating computer graphics at the time, there weren’t even unified computers, “the companies even built their own computers.” Four of these companies were tasked to recreate the designs of Syd and Moebius in 3D space with combinations of primitives, in the case of the light cycle it was MAGI/Synthavision in New York, a company that was founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman, “the guy who also invented the MRI,” Bill added.

“At that time there was software for creating and describing stuff in 3d, displaying stuff in 3d, even lighting stuff in 3d but nobody ever thought of software for animating stuff in 3d” Bill explained. So “animating” became a completely different endeavor than in traditional animation:

322,200 values,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

First, the animators needed to specify how the models would move in the digital world. For example, what the turn radius of a light cycle was, how it would tilt according to what curve angle and all that — not approximately but exactly, in values and degrees. The same route needed to be taken for the scene geometry: Everything hat to be drawn and outlined in the right proportions with numbers and curves on graph-paper; yet it didn’t end there: Animations of vehicles and the camera needed to be put into numbers and the classical exposure sheet now had 7 columns for each object: XYZ position, XYZ rotation (yaw, pitch & roll) and frame number — for each frame³.

“That means 144 values for one second of animation” Bill’s slide read. The next continued with “TRON had 15 minutes of computer-generated animation. That’s 900 seconds of footage. With an average of two vehicles and a moving camera in each shot, the animation required 322,200 hand-recorded values!” Heavy.

But Wait!,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

“But wait!” Bill continued like a TV salesman, “there was one computer on the Disney lot in 1980.” It was the computer that was controlling the intricate moving panes which were used for pans and other intricate effects in Disney animation movies. And this computer could even calculate and interpolate soft Bezièr-splines, something your average curve editor does without bragging nowadays. So Bill would sneak into the animation department with the computer during their down-times (usually at night) and enter the start and end values. With the tap of a button the machine would compute and display the inbetweens. “But it didn’t have a printer, so you needed to record the values per hand,” Bill reminisced with a smile. And the operators at MAGI took these exposure sheets with manually recorded values and their people, Chris Wedge among them, typed them up for use in their software. That’s how early computer animation was done.

Bill talks about the Chromatix 9000,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

“The first time we would see any objects in motion was in 70mm projected on the stage,” another slide emphasized. Because creating, calculating, positioning, rendering and outputting the animation was such an enormous feat there were no second takes, everything needed to be dead-on the first time. “Occasionally you got the chance to tweak a bit. So we had to know and envision each shot exactly and completely before getting to work, something that has changed with increased computation power over the decades” Bill subtly nudged the audience verbally towards the “think before you animate!” concept that gets so often left behind.

Luckily for the small team, new technology was available to them during the production in the shape of the Chromatix 9000 computer with a big screen, that could calculate and display shots in a rough wireframe, although not in motion. The transfer from 3d-workstation to the Chromatix was in fact via a phone modem and one screen refresh would take about ten minutes. “People in the studio would just drop by to watch that, shouting with glee how amazing it was.”

Optical Compositing

For some it audience the cumbersome post-production process of TRON was new and even for those who knew, the recognition was palpable: For the crisp and digital look of the movie, the soundstage needed to be filmed with a large depth of field which, naturally, required a big amount of light, even more so for 70mm footage⁴. Each frame of the black-and-white footage then got transferred multiple times to 11″ by 17″ film and boards on which various portions got masked out manually in the end by Taiwanese artists with paintbrushes and ink. These single masks then were then used for various different exposures that got optically composed back together which meant an insane amount of film-transparencies, masks and compositing-layers. Not even the color glow was out-of-the-box, instead it required thousands of wedges to get the right amount of glow intensity for each character in each shot.

And then there was the problem of flickering blacks, its origin in the pipeline the team could not pin down for a while until the varying black-densities of the Kodalith lith-film could be identified as the source, as Bill explains in the video below.

“You should get the BluRay of the old TRON it has been restored beautifully,” Bill plugged the movie, adding with a serious expression “but it if hadn’t been preserved on film, it would have been gone.” Bill was talking in the last minutes of his presentation about what he coined Digital Nitrate.

Bill during Q&A,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I was sitting in the first row and took a photo of that slide as Bill looked at me and pointed at my D-SLR. “Did you know that photographers at the Academy Awards carry two cameras, one being digital and the other analog? Because currently we have no way of reliably preserving anything digital⁶.” The last words also appeared on his final slide, erupted into Keynote-fire and vanished to ashes.

Instead of a grim ending like this one, Bill hurried to a more uplifting finish, mainly directed at the students among the audience, many of them eager for a job as animator — the sooner, the better. “People hire always the artist and not the technician,” Bill told them, “Visualize and communicate, independent of your software to become a better artist. Skill in a classical sense transfers to new technologies, so no matter what tools you use, stay focused on honing your skills.”

Applause. Then Q&A followed, some of it in the video just below. And a fun fact: Rendering all the CG-sequences in TRON together took less rendering time than a single frame of TRON Legacy. Amused chuckles in the audience.

Bye-bye

Unfortunately that was day two for me. I didn’t stay for the VFX of “The King’s Speech” and had by god no intentions for another round of Adobe’s presentations. In fact, my head was as tilt as any good pinball machine after a hearty bump so I left with the would on my nose for a bite to eat, a dose of caffeine and a smooth ride to the hotel.

The first row in many rooms is now reserved for lecturers so I had to abandon one of my favorite seating places of past years. Further the exit of the main auditorium has been moved to its side, probably because people pushing their way out and people pushing their way in made the access to popular lectures a pain — literally. Further, the FMX had matured and grown and hence offered even more parallel lectures in the opposing building.

Shortly before ten I had my ticket, had set off my first tweet, got my welcome bag, had my ballpen at hand and took a seat in the second row: I was ready for this year’s conference! Since I was a bit early I came to see the last of the screened animations of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, a satirical take on the juicy topic of Austrofashism in the 1930′s.

Going Mobile

Neil Trevett,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Then they rolled this year’s FMX trailer, in my opinion a fresh idea after last year’s rather featureless animation. Then the first speaker of the event got introduced, Neil Trevett from nVidia, incidentally nVidia being the event’s main sponsor. I was preparing myself for having some marketing mumbo-jumbo dropped onto me but it wasn’t that bad after all in his lecture Movie Making and More, All in the Palm of Your Hand.

First he lined out how proud nVidia is of their Quadro series, CUDA and that all of this year’s Oscar nominated VFX films used nVidia technology somewhere in the course of the production. Big whoop — Adobe can claim the same thing probably.

Then followed some more nVidia-green Power Point slides depicting how the market of the “classic”, stationary desktop computer was more or less saturated today, even the growth for notebooks and netbooks started to level out, yet the market for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet-computers exploded exponentially, with the Android operating system already ahead of Apple’s iOS. And since nVidia wants to get a big slice of that cake as well they started development of the Tegra series, high-performance graphics processors with as little power consumption as possible.

But that’s not enough: The old x86 chip architecture is also in decline since tablets and smartphones don’t come with a constant connection to a power grid, so the old ARM architecture will become a big thing of the near future. For nVidia this is Project Denver, ARM with integrated GPUs, while Microsoft’s Windows 8 will also support this kind of hardware. nVidia also works together with Adobe to make the execution of Flash and AIR applications more economic on mobile devices. “Apart from playing back video, the main task of Flash seems to be blending and filtering. And we let the GPU do this.”

nVidia seems to be pretty tight with Motorola as well, because their cutting-edge processors chips are and will be inside cutting-edge Motorola hardware as a chart showed. And I realized that I will carry a laptop with me for a couple of years longer, because what I want and need to do on the go can’t be feasibly done on a tablet anytime soon. But for the average person who wants to listen to music, surf the web, read eBooks and write emails a tablet with a full-sized keyboard/dockingstation/battery-combo (like the ASUS Transformer) might be just what they need. USB-input-device support anyone? Ice Cream Sandwich?

In the very near future mobile devices will have quad-core processors hence multitasking should become as common as necessary, further the portable devices will provide autostereoscopic displays, such as the Nintendo 3DS. Last but not least the resolution with increase drastically to an estimated 2560 by 1600 pixels (nVidia boasts it “Extreme HD”) which effectively results in a resolution of 300 dpi on a 10-inch tablet — print quality.

But what about power consumption? “As paradox as it may sound but more cores save you more power: The excessive cores only turn on when an application needs them” Neil explained.

Gee thanks, Neil, that’s pretty interesting, consumer-wise, but what about our industry? “Tablets in the movie industry can be and currently are used in three different ways,” he continued. One possibility is to port software to mobile devices. I snorted mentally: Anybody who tried the incredibly limited version of Photoshop for Android knows that a smartphone is still way too underpowered to get real work done. “By 2014 mobile devices will have 100 times the performance of today.” So will CUDA also work on phones? “No, CUDA’s power consumption is one of the biggest stepping stones in that respect” Neil shrugged. But that didn’t matter to me, because “the next generation of tablets and smartphones will be aimed at the demands of artists and the creative, like by additionally offering stylus operability and pressure sensitivity. The first devices will probably be released this year.” I dumbly smiled at the poor person sitting to my right. I am so buying into this!

The next useful integration of tablets was wireless tethering with desktop applications, because “this ‘new’ way of interaction with a user interface that is so much more intuitive than having to nudge a mouse pointer across the screen.” Adobe released for developers the Adobe Photoshop Touch SKD which opens developers the door to think of clever ways to integrate a tethered device. For example, it could serve as a color palette where swiping blends colors together. The resulting colors then can be returned to the host application. EDIT: Adobe recently me an announcement via eMail to update Photoshop and get complement software from the AppStore. Pity I roll with Android.

The third possibility is using tablets as cloud-clients. nVidia has already a Flash-based technology for combining collaboration with Tegra-powered tablets called “Studiopass”: It lets you upload, stream, annotate and comment in real time on video files with others. It is also possible to use the tablet as intuitive virtual viewfinder that’s connected to a render farm that returns within a few seconds the rendered image to the device. And, surprise, Studiopass is built on Flash.

Just when Neil got glowing eyes and popped up a slide in purest nVidia’s corporat0- design reading “Super” Computing, the time was up. Close call!

Baking Light

François takes a pic,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I was too lazy to cross the street for Approaching a CG Production so I stayed in the König-Karl-Halle for Bakery Relight by Thomas Driemeyer, Emmanuel Turquin and François Belot from The Bakery who talked about their company and their software, Relight. I was a bit distracted by the amount of people swiping away on their iPhones, Joseph Olin among them, while François outlined the history of the company in southern France. I only got to hear the last few words, “Sand, Beaches and Girls!”, although what I understood as “Beaches” could have been some other word. Or maybe it just was the thick French accent and the tendency to pronounce some words French, or switch to French vocabularies entirely.

Relight is essentially a tool for lighting and shading shots and to develop looks, realistic as well as artistic. “This tool was designed by artists and not by engineers” they noted and indeed: As Emmanuel showed a quick overview of the interface it seemed quite straightforward, a bit like Katana. “You don’t need to make a break every time you want to render a change on your way to the final shot, you always work with the final and that really fast.” Even little comfort features are implemented, like solo-ing certain light sources.

It plugs directly into Maya, 3dsmax and XSI, it comes with its own hair and fur system that is created at render-time by its production renderer that produces really good and clean images. The renderer itself is a Reyes-like rendering algorithm, iterative and optimized for fast feedback in production quality. But this need for heavy-duty-caching takes its toll on memory consumption I guess.

Once the scene’s visible geometry is cached by renderer (many millions of polygons take a couple of minutes) Relight unfolds its performance. Lighting and rendering a forest-scene with hundreds of trees and atmospherics only took a minute on an average notebook computer — impressive. And once the geometry and the first lighting pass is cached, the renderer gets even faster with every change. It keeps track of what has been touched or adjusted and only updates the dependencies, what had been affected by the change; and nothing more. “Depending on how many processors you use, the suite scales pretty well accordingly.” Even motion-blur and DOF (depth of field) are fast.

Another big thing of Relight are point clouds for quickly carrying out calculations that would bring a raytracer too its knees, memory wise. Point clouds (or disk-clouds to be more precise) are independent from the underlying geometry and make it possible, for example, to render ambient occlusion in fur stunningly fast. But ambient occlusion is only one application. Point clouds can be used for glossy reflections, environment light (from HDRIs, for example), area-lights or sub-surface-scattering.

Towards the end, François added that since Relight provides feedback so fast, it is a great tool for budding lighting artists and there are many collaborations with schools. Then he closed with a sentence in thick French accent that sounded to me like “Thank you very much for your invention!”. You’re welcome!

Arnold, the Tracer

Whereas The Bakery‘s Relight tries as much as Pixar’s RenderMan to cheat around raytracing, Sony Pictures Imageworks has a completely opposite approach with their proprietary renderer Arnold. The lecture by Marcos Fajandro and Larry Gritz Path Tracing and Unbiased Rendering started off by comparing rasterizer/Reyes renderers and ray-tracing.

Of course, Reyes depends on shadow maps and offers no ray-tracing but can be insanely fast, whereas a pure ray-tracer craps out completely with too complex geometry (see the issues with Davy Jones as discussed on the FMX/08) and/or/like hair.

So what do you do? Integrate some limited raytracing into a Reyes renderer or hack rasterizing & (deep)shadow functionality into a raytracer? Both options aren’t exactly irresistible. So the folks at the Spanish company Solid Angle, I haven’t heard of ever before, developed Arnold.

The first feature film rendered with Arnold was the, in my opinion terrible, Monster House and now since a couple of years it has become Sony Pictures Imagework’s only renderer.

Arnold is based physically on the Monte-Carlo methods, it uses no storage for lighting and global illumination information, has only one quality knob to tweak on (namely the sampling) and outputs the final in a single pass. Yes, Arnold is a ray-tracer par excellence and traces millions of rays. “And when you trace so many rays you need to make the rays really fast”. Further, Arnold sports networked, programmable shaders, subdivision surfaces and yet can handle “hundreds of millions of triangles and hair splines” and virtually “hundreds of gigabytes of texture-maps”. Impressive!

Since everything (everything!) is ray-traced, the final image is optically seamless. There’s no need for say, a shadow pass or motion vectors. My worst fear of such a renderer is that it probably takes ages just to get a feedback of lighting changes, but that is not the case: An example video showed a car in Maya in the viewport whose camera was turned around it. As soon as the operator let it go, Arnold kicked it and its interactive mode rendered the selected region in big blocks, then smaller blocks and even smaller blocks until you could make out the raytraced details of car paint and reflections. This refinement process took not more that two seconds.

“In the end what matters is not how long you wait for your beauty-rendering but how long you wait for feedback of each iteration in the (re-)lighting of a shot. Since an artists costs you approximately $ 40 an hour, this way of saving time saves you a big amount of money and the artist downtime between iterations” Marcos explained. I heard several mental kaching-sounds in the audience.

Making raytraced motion-blur efficient is also important for the final rendering. A fully lit and shaded scene with production-quality deformation motion-blur rendered only 15% longer than without. Arnold even is proficient when it comes to volume renderings.

“The joy of Arnold is, that everything just clicks together seamlessly when you raytrace everything in your image. If you use different renderes for different tasks, even simple things like shadows can be a problem, like shadows in volumes. With Arnold there’s no catch — you get the whole package in one go with ambient occlusion, motion blur, soft shadows on motion blur, caustics, etc. ” Marcos summed up.

And just as joyful is instancing of geometry that gets loaded into the memory once for whatever number of instances. One shot of Alice in Wonderland had 61 million triangles and could be rendered in a single thread’s 15 hrs which boils down to an hour or less in a farm.

“Still there is lots of room for future improvements” Marcos concluded before Larry took over. Larry talked in more detail about Sony’s way of VFX and relighting using the upcoming Smurfs movie as an example.

For every shot with CG-integration, they shot a HDRI of the set with an incredibly expensive Spheron camera. In fact, not just one panorama, but two in different heights so with the set survey data it is possible to calculate and to recreate the scene geometry via triangulation roughly in CG. Then, for quality reasons, the light sources and instruments in the panorama get replaced by Arnold lights and erased from the HDRI panorama via Katana. The actual plate from the camera is projected onto the low-poly scene geometry, then the HDRI panoramas get also projected into the scene. “It’s kinda the same what was done for Benjamin Button” Larry added. Now the CG-characters are imported into the scene and get their lighting and bounces from the surfaces that the plate and panorama was projected onto.

As mentioned above, Arnold has an open shading language. “Traditionally, shaders are black boxes to the renderer that just return some values to it; their units are sloppy oftentimes and their underlying C/C++ code can also crash the renderer altogether. With an open shading language, we don’t have these issues.” Instead of returning color values to the renderer, the Arnold shaders compute so called “closures”, descriptions of how the surface will react to light, and pass these numbers on to the renderer, which can decide what to do with them. “This is also 20% faster!” Larry added happily.

What working with these “closures” exactly meant and what it had to do with ray-budgeting and Multi-Importance-Sampling (MIS) for the Monte-Carlo raytracing I did not fully grasp but Larry had some links (and his email address) on the subject, in case anyone was interested. I reproduce them here for the same purpose:

• http://bit.ly/s10shaders
• http://opensource.imageworks.com
• lg AT imageworks.com

Some features of Arnold like sub-surface-scattering are performed with point clouds on-the-fly, although the renderer still employs Monte-Carlo methods when point clouds won’t suffice. Since Arnold is proprietary, Imageworks developed a plug-in for XSI themselves and a very basic one for Maya.

But why did Sony Pictures Imageworks settle for just Arnold a few years back? “The pass management grew so complex and bloated, it was hacks upon hacks, that overwhelmed the mental capacity of the TDs. Now it’s back to just having a single pass. Lighting got so much faster and in the end. Lighting and rendering a single pass still is faster than rendering lots of different passes and trying to get them working together.” Larry explained, and Marcos added: “When you reduce time somewhere in the process, however, somewhere somebody uses the new freedom to add more complexity.”

Currently Arnold uses only the CPU despite the trend of making everything CUDA- and hence GPU-compatible. “Porting would be complex and time consuming and in the end wouldn’t speed up things significantly, so we spend the efforts to optimize the CPU code instead. Further, the terabytes of textures would need to be streamed to the GPUs as well…” Larry summed up the bottleneck situation.

“We still have a couple of minutes left so I’m gonna show you the Green Lantern trailer. Everything was rendered with Arnold.”

Fun fact: The plate at the end of the trailer with the title and release date also had a rather small line reading “Also playing in 2D theaters.” Like it or not: Stereo has finally arrived and it is here to stay. Deal with it!

And here’s a LaTeX-set presentation on Importance Sampling for Monte Carlo Ray Tracing from 2006 with lots of pretty pictures (and some equations).

Coffee!

Haus der Wirtschaft,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The few hours I was asleep took their toll and I was wasted for the break. I schlepped my bag and camera to a long queue in front of Starbucks where I got me a motivational Caramel Macchiato so I had the energy to look for food. I found an Asian noodles stand in a subway station and made my way back to the Haus der Wirtschaft, munching on fresh cooked vegetables. The remaining ten minutes I had an espresso in the showroom of the FMX. When I felt ready for some more lectures and headed into the König-Karl-Halle and was surprised to see all the good seats taken. So I settled for a suboptimal seat next to a German student who was constantly eating or drinking something and merrily ignoring the ban on recording devices. Funny thing though was that he thought I didn’t speak German and I was in no mood to shatter his belief. So I sat there with Ophelia, my notebook, in her bag on my lap and waited eagerly for the next lecture to take place.

Render de Janeiro

Building, Lighting & Rendering “Rio” by Blue Sky’s Andrew Beddini was up next. Andrew somehow reminded me of a friendly Ben Stiller character and his engaging lecture was a pleasure to listen to without once the need to close my eyes for just a couple of hours. Or maybe it was because I was so close sitting to the pumped-up loudspeakers that I feared my ears would pop as they rolled the FMX-trailer.

Blue Sky, founded in 1987, is a veteran of the industry, they even took part in creating CG sequences in Disney’s original TRON. The next milestone was the animated short Bunny in 1998 I remember seeing at the Ars Electronica that time. I even remember that it was the first animation to employ the nowadays obscurely named Radiosity.

People really like to talk about their renderers I realized, as Andrew started summarizing the features of their proprietary renderer with the featureless name CGI Studio, or just Studio. On a rendering from 1993 Andy demonstrated the features their raytracer could produce back then which they still use today. Some of its features used for Rio were secondary rays, true radiosity, raytraced soft shadows, tesselation of beziér patches, a procedural shading pipeline and the possibility to use procedures for much more than just shaders. Rio is a feature of 1800 shots, and 80% of it had to be done in just 5 months so the focus was on creating a pipeline that was fast and efficient.

Character lighting was one of the main and foremost concerns of the production. And “good lighting needs good development.” The character of Susan with fair skin, glasses and big eyes was the first testing ground for plausible shading and lighting. First they applied the sub-surface-scattering-shader to her skin and realized, oh boy, that it looked not really convincing. So the first thing was to implement a density adjustment into it, then light transmittance through the skin, radiosity and a subtle but necessary secondary transmittance model that made the skin softer still.

Eyes behind glasses were another challenge because “eyes are critical for emotion. You really want to get the eyes right first. If they are off, if the audience doesn’t buy it, then all the other efforts are in vain, so get the eyes right!”. First they raytraced the eyes and the glasses but the physically realistic look did not work with the stylized character design. For example, the shadowing of the glasses under the rim was just too dark with the realistic refractive index of 1.5, only 1.1 was just about right. Can you do this? Should you do this? Andrew made it heard: “Break reality to make it work for you!” What was behind the glasses was rendered separately with a plate of the background to yield realistic refractions of it, as for the reflections, the reverse angle shot was used ever so subtly. But still the eyes didn’t look alive, so Blue Sky went the whole nine yards and rendered for the eyes a UV pass, a reflection pass, an object pass so the highlight could be adjusted in Nuke accordingly. This finally gave the eyes that certain something that was missing and was tweakable in every shot.

The set creation of the favelas was a difficult task as well. After the first color studies the assets were created with low complexity in a modular fashion and could be combined to a very organic whole according to a plan of the set’s final layout. “If you want to sell a set to your director render it in gray with just the ambient occlusion and he’ll love it!” Andrew joked. “There were absolutely no texture maps involved, everything was done procedurally with using the world space coordinates. Also we don’t need a level-of-detail (LOD) system.”

With just one building block, the lighting department instanced the geometry for lighting and mood tests of what the location might look in broad daylight, in the afternoon, at night and with atmospheric effects.

Raytracing and motion-blur — another dreaded combination of mine. But to tackle that problem Blue Sky employed a lot of tricks that made their lives easier. One of those was modulating the render-resolution accordingly via script: “At some point you can’t tell whether a 2k image was blurred or a 1k image was blurred, so if the renderer dials down the resolution you effectively are four times faster.” Another trick was using Nuke’s excellent vector blur: The camera and a Z-Depth channel from Maya got imported into Nuke and was blurred there in post.

A slide depicting the favela at night appeard on the screen. “In this particular scene we had about ten thousand light sources” Andy spoke and paused for emphasis. Ten thousand light sources with raytraced shadows?! “The thing is,” he continued “we use the same pool for all shadows, they get calculated at the same time. So if we’re having one light source or ten thousand only adds 10 to 15 % to the overall render time.”

Since the protagonists in Rio are birds, the sky is an important part of the film as well. “About 30% of the picture is sky!”. So how do you get a beautiful art-directed sky? The traditional answer is to have talented matte-painters. “The problem is, that we had four to five matte painters but hundreds of skies to paint. So this wasn’t feasible. Further the feature is in stereo, so…” he switched to the next slide depicting various clouds on a black background “…we had our art director paint a style guide for clouds we then built in 3D with volumes. We rendered each cloud with surface normals from 38 different camera tilts so you had almost any angle. Then we imported those onto planes in Nuke and populated the sky in the 3d-space there with the clouds.” The normals made it possible to vertex-light the cloud planes in Nuke. “This is really fast and you can churn out skies quickly. We did this for an entire sequence at once, not only for a single shot.”
But sometimes you need hero clouds, especially when they needed to have a volume and depth or some advanced lighting effects, like transmission on the edges of a key light. These clouds got individually modeled and rendered. The atmosphere-gradient with the sun was also done as a dome in Nuke and when you throw everything together — voilá — there’s your final sky! This sky then got rendered in Nuke and was used on a plane in Maya for the reflections on the water.

Generating a vista of Rio de Janeiro, especially a stylized version that still looks as photoreal as possible was the next challenge on Rio. The foundation for the environment was survey data of the topography that got artistically adjusted with some liberties. Still, it was built to scale so the renderer would deliver correct results of atmospheric effects, for example.

The vegetation was, like almost everything in Rio, procedural with implicit surfaces. But here the procedural approach posed some difficulties: it is hard getting a procedure to a single point. As for the shading, two world space procedural textures were created, one for the granite and one for the plants. A simple rule that depends on the steepness of the topology then blended between the two, so vertical walls would have no vegetation and soft slopes would be fully covered in trees. Finally, the city’s buildings were roughly modeled, but also were designed for procedurally driven variety: They could have differently spaced windows, doors, floor-segmentation, surfaces and rooftop structures.

What surprised me the most was the way the lighting was defined and carried out: It was script-driven and those scripts were simple text-files the production edited with NEdit in Perl and Python. “This is great because the files are small and portable, you can send them securely via email, and you don’t need to open Maya just to twist a light a bit to one side.” Blue Sky even has an interactive front-end called “Quick Render” to render models and light situations without waiting for Maya to finally launch. And there was more: “Light sources are not defined in the world-space but in camera-space,” instead of XYZ they are described by values for rotation, elevation and distance from the camera. Again, you don’t need Maya to adjust a light; creating a consistent rim-light can be done with a few lines in a text-editor easily.

Finally, even the atmospherics were rendered in favor of a Z-pass. “A Z-pass always has artifacts along the edges so you need to render it really big.” And once you have time for that and to add fog & haze in post, you can render physically much more plausible (and within the scene reflected) atmospherics.

A Hairy Subject

We only had a few minutes to let sink in what was heard before Mohit Kallianpur from Disney Animation Studios continued with his lecture of Untangling “Tangled” where he was the Look & Lighting supervisor and described the history of the look of the movie.

In 2007 the movie had a much darker, browner tone to its concept art until John Lasseter intervened and pointed the production in a more colorful and saturated direction. Still, that was relatively late in the pre-production stage and there was not that much time left to get the movie done. So Mohit got down to the root of art direction and formulated three principles: Stylized shapes, illustrative colors and believable textures.

Shapes

Then the research begun by watching and analyzing the shapes, colors and appeal of the old Disney classics Snowhite, Pinocchio and Cinderella. Especially the latter had a certain shape language of flowing curves visible in almost every shot, a graceful harmony. Moreover, a set of signature shapes of that movie was collected consisting of various bell-shapes, s-curves and leafs. Everything in the film would follow these shapes, even the canopy of the trees.

Based on a very impressionist and rough mood-painting that followed the shape-guide, the team produced a full CG version of it as reference. This made it obvious that the language of shapes worked well, but the painterly appeal of the surfaces was too stylized. So the world needed to have believable textures, not rely on impressionist suggestions of detail.

Architecture

The architecture of Tangled was influenced by European cities, Disneyland (!) and Pinocchio: Everything should be small, friendly and approachable. The buildings are not tall and they flare out in a curve, they appear even chunky and beefy with no sharp corners and a very organic and hand-built feel. And like this Mohit wanted the architecture on Tangled to look: old and used but not decrepit or dirty.

Color

But what does “illustrative color” now mean exactly? The production settled for a lush saturated palette and always a play of warm against cool: If the light is cool, then the shadows should be warm and vice versa.

Legally Blonde

Yet the most intricate and most critical task was to get the look of Rapunzel’s hair perfect. Much like the sky in Rio, the hair in Tangled was a character by itself. The first tests showed that the hair shaders the studio had developed so far didn’t do justice to blonde hair. At all. So research needed to be done and a hair model was found and her hair photographed in probably any appearance (even wet) and every possible lighting situation. Also commercials of hair care products served as a valuable reference “since they propagate the ideal on their packaging we wanted to recreate in the film.” Even a PhD student did extensive research on the subject and in the end a feasible shader was programmed:

First of all, hair comes in individual strands and strands that make up a volume of hair. Moreover, these strands have a top, a bottom and a body with an uneven surface, none of which is like the cylinder-representation of hair we all used to work with. So hair has a specular reflection, so far so good. And for black hair that’s usually all you see. Light hair also has a sub-specular portion that is a broader highlight in the color of the hair, whereas the specular highlight has the color of the light source. Then hair has a transmission value when lit from behind, and multiple scattering is important for light colored hair. Still that’s not enough because a hair rarely comes singly: There’s also a volume diffuse portion, that is backward scattering of the light and volume transmission, which scatters away from the light source through the volume.

Now if you add up those five components it looks good but not perfect, a certain richness is missing. This “richness” comes from the light bounced back onto the hair and ambient occlusion. Then, and only then, you are rewarded with beautiful blonde hair. But for eyebrows, fur and eyelashes you still need a different shader because the blonde shader needs a volume to work with after all.

Appeal

And another question: What constitutes appeal? What makes a person look appealing in a movie? How to light a character to look appealing? Mohit dug deep once again and looked through lots and lots of glamor-shots of actresses and actors of Hollywood’s golden age in search for unifying principles. And his answer is simple: “Cheat!”

The starlets on photos (and in movies) were always lit by a soft light, no matter what the rest of their environment looked like. Then there needed to be hue in the shadows, the dreaded “graying” of multiplying occlusion with diffuse passes makes characters look sickly. Since the eyes are the window to the soul, they needed special attention and always a specular reflection, no matter what. And as painters suggested, the cavities of mouth and nostrils should not go completely black but into a warm darkness. And unappealing colors (usually green bounces of leaves and grass) also make a character look weak and sick, so they had to cheat there as well. Finally a subtle bloom on the highlights never hurt anyone.

Look

On Tangled there were 19 look development artists that in the end produced over a thousand paintings of looks. And lighting was important to elevate the mood that was already there by narration, staging and framing. As Mohit showed some examples of lighting I could not help but remember the words of my mentor, Fraser Maclean as Mohit uttered them as well: “Put light where you need it, not where it realistically would be.” Indeed, the progression of shots he showed were lacking any continuity of the origin of the lights. “And here… well I don’t know where the light is supposed to be coming from, there is no window there” …but still it works perfectly in each shot. It went so far, that even the murals in the tower could be toned down or changed in opacity on a shot-by-shot basis. “Light shapes add to the drama.”

And so does saturation. In dramatic sequences the saturation got sucked out of the pictures, only to return almost fully later on.

Art-Directed Trees

Once you can art-direct everything, you have to art-direct everything. The R&D department provided a simple tool for Maya that allowed the modeling artist to draw a couple of curves and the plug-in would make a tree with branches out of it. Moreover, they also had a tool that would grow leaves into a pre-defined canopy-shape which was really fun to watch.
And since there are so many trees in a forest, the models were also switched to “brickmaps”, a RenderMan-term for low-res voxel-representations of a model, if far enough away and automated “stochastic pruning”, which meant that depending on the distance to the camera, not visible leaves would be automatically switched with low-poly models or removed entirely.

“In the end we generated too many trees and had to hide them in haze or atmosphere in post” Mohit admitted. That really was new to me, having accidentally too many in the final picture of something so complex such as trees!

Tangled was rendered with RenderMan (finally another Reyes renderer today, I was almost worried!), had 1380 shots and 55 lighting artists which, in sum, resulted in 9.01 million hours of a single lighting thread. “That’s more than 1028 years”. Ah, statistics. It’s like I tell you now that this blog post is already some 6000-odd words long.

Physically Based Shading

Ben Snow,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I used the short break to get back close to the front in row 2 and to empty my can of Starbucks “Doubleshot Espresso” to be all up an ready for Ben Snow’s and Christophe Héry’s Physically Based Shading at ILM¹.

Ben showed some definitions at first outlining GI, IBL and HDRI. “We’re not trying to reproduce reality,” Ben made clear, “but filmed reality” and described a little ILM’s history in their attempts to achieve this goal over the years.

The practice of trying to capture as much information from the set grew over the years in scope and professionalism as well. In the 1990′s they started filming and photographing light probes on set, 18% gray balls, to recreate the light later in the computer. But soon they realized that was not enough. Along came six photos in each direction for cube-maps and then the familiar chrome ball, a technique I never quite got to work for my own projects. Indeed, the chrome sphere’s reflections were rather low-res and you needed to paint out the photographer every time as well.
So in the “early days” ILM made heavy use of texture maps with painted in highlights and shadows, for shading they employed the Cook-Torrance specular model. Their light rigs were also pretty basic but could handle real world situations already rather well. Occasionally shadows grew really dark and some ways to cheat were e.g. spot lights or churning down the overall shadow opacity².

Then came Perl Harbor when they really needed to crank their depicted reality up a notch since ambient occlusion wasn’t enough. So they developed what they called Ambient Environment Lighting, which essentially is creating a pass for the ambient lighting via ambient occlusion: Rays are cast in a hemisphere around the surface normals, then a number of rays hitting other surfaces dictates the occlusion; and a pre-pass is done to calculate the average direction of the light. At least that’s what I copied from Ben’s slides. The film was a milestone nevertheless because Michael Bay, the director, was not able to tell the difference between CG and live-action-footage anymore.

What happened after Perl Harbor was boosting the quality consistently further. 8-bit images had served their purpose well (including in Perl Harbor!), but the need and time asked for floating point precision. Also, no mirrored balls would be photographed anymore in favor of photographed panoramas.

So a couple of years afterward came Iron Man and asked for the realistic depiction of, well, iron and metal that needed to match the practical suits on set. And a thing that had been troubling the folks at ILM was anisotropic highlights that appear on brushed metal.

Further, a new approach for taking HDRI panoramas was employed and meant taking a series of photographs from a tripod in all directions, although (as it appeared to me) not in a truly high dynamic range but only covering two two exposure brackets — too little from my experience but still it worked for them.

New Frontiers

And just as they thought they had mastered metal, along came Terminator: Salvation where it was impossible to cheat any longer and they had to move to a new paradigm for lighting and shading in RenderMan. ILM’s goal was to get a simpler, more intuitive and physically based system of lighting and rendering:

The quality of shading and lighting requred a BRDF-model that not only looked right but also acted physically correct in terms of energy conservation. In short this means, that the rougher a material is, the weaker is highlight gets, otherwise the energy (= light) reflected would be bigger than the light received — impossible³.

That also meant a normalized specular highlights with a more physically plausible specular falloff, so the further away a light source is, the weaker the specular highlight gets, depending on the roughness or the “Normalized Importance Falloff”: The intensity of the highlight falls off on rougher surfaces. For tight specular highlights like chrome or mirrors the light source has to get a long way away before dimming. The broader the speculars are, the more quickly they will dim. For this to work the light needs to have a physical size in the system, so no more point-lights or directional lights at ILM

“This was hard for everyone to adjust to and Christophe and I remember some very passionately fought holy wars” Ben remembered.

On the set of Terminator: Salvation the chrome spheres were back, but differently. Now they were moved and shot in motion so their reflection could be used on moving models. “We still don’t have a great way of capturing HDR moving images,” Ben continued in front of a turntable of a T-800 in front of a steelworks plate, “instead we shoot HDRIs with stable lighting and we also shoot our chrome spheres so we still get our FX, strobes, sparks, etc. And on top of that we applied some pyro elements shot on film and used them as reflections or area-lights in the scene.”

Iron Man 2

“We now had our tools that worked, they weren’t really mature but technically they were robust” Ben noted. For image based lighting ILM then used a graphical tool, the Environments Browser, to quickly define light sources within the image so they could be recreated with area lights. The match-move of a shot creates the environment and the HDRI panoramas get projected onto the geometry and you basically end up with a HDRI-mapped recreation of the set environment in 3d. That enabled the artists to render dynamic HDRIs from any position in the set to be used in image based lighting of the digital characters.

IBL via HDRI

But Image Based Lighting also poses some risks or at least things to watch out for. An important thing to be aware of is that IBL-lights are treated as infinitely away point-lights from the scene. A fact, that comes distractingly into play when CG-lights with a discrete position within the scene are meant to work alongside an IBL dome. Then it really takes an experienced photographer and visual effects team to produce good and usable HDRIs from the set which is essential for this approach. Last but not least the pipeline should support the the floating-point nature of HDRIs or else one might run the risk of losing dynamic range along the process when editing HDRIs.

On set ILM still photographs chrome and grey spheres but only as references. This only works properly if the film crew is in the habit as well and does not treat those shots lightly or worse, forgets about them. Since the VFX team later needs to match the lighting of the shot everybody liked on set, those references should be shot immediately after the director yelled “cut!”. “You wanna make sure that your spheres are as big as possible in the frame and you wanna make sure they are in the right spot. And you don’t wanna shadow or be reflected in the sphere” Ben reminded. Sometimes when the spheres are moved like an object though the scene, it is advisable to take some static sphere footage as well.

“On the set as soon as they say We’ve got it! then off you go and get the references.” These references, of course, should only be shot for shots that will have CG portions but if there is ever any doubt that a certain shot definitely will not require CG, one should still capture the references to be on the safe side.

“And be serious about it. If you don’t take this seriously nobody else on the crew will” Ben shared his experience with the audience and switched to his last presentation slide, titled “How we capture HDRIs” which I shall reproduce here:

• Canon 1Ds Mk3 with Sigma 8mm fisheye lens
• Nodal Ninja & Tripod
• Remote shutter trigger
• 0.6 ND (2-stop) filter (depending on how bright it is)
• 7 exposures, 3 stops apart
• Direct sun f/16, ISO 100, center exposure 1/32 sec

After a quick slide of acknowledgements Ben handed over to Christophe who would once again talk in a little more detail about the math-laden background behind the presented concepts.

Since my senior-high maths-teacher sucked out all the fun I ever had with mathematics, I wasn’t in the mood of trying to follow Christophe’s every word but I got the general idea:

Calculating reflections and IBL with the Monte Carlo approach requires a high amount of samples for a clean picture. Since the distribution of the rays is random, you end up calculating a lot of stuff you will not really see in your final rendering. So he came up with MIS, Multi Importance Sampling, that takes into account what the camera sees, that the light illuminates and identifies an area in the lighting-dome where rays have a probability to affect the final rendering, such bright portions in the HDRI used for IBL. With the same number of samples used for rendering, which are only weighted differently, in the end compose a much more pleasing result because you only calculate what you need.

To implement this into the renderer, the BRDFs and lights need to provide eval() and sample() methods, where eval() returns a color and a pdf for a given input direction and sample() that returns an array of directions and pdfs: For instance, in a dome IBL situation, these will be the vectors to the bright spots in the image.
I just copied this from a slide of Christophe’s presentation, so don’t ask me what it all means. The only thing I am pretty sure is that pdf in this context stands for probability distribution function and not for Adobe’s favorite way of storing their user guides.

ILM’s BRDF specification has to follow a number of principles too: The shaders now must be normalized e.g. energy conserving, they must “substitute” to ILM’s trusted but old Cook-Torrance model, they should be anisotropy aware and, as always, efficiently computed.

Their solution now is D-BRDF based on an yet unpublished paper by Michael Ashikhmin and Simon Premoze; the Beckmann distribution⁴ and no masking: the reciprocity term is simply 4.0 * V.H * max(L.N, V.N).

For the nerds among you I even noted the links Christophe’s presentation closed with:

• Eric Veach’s paper⁵
• Last year’s SIGGRAPH course
• D-BRDF

You’re welcome. Now where is my mind?

After this heavy information laden day I skipped nVidia’s panel discussion and went straight home to type up this blog post. who would have thought that it would take me effectively over two weeks to finish it?

Level Information:

• This level occupies 50 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 55:27 min.
• This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth. It’s a fuckin habit — I’m sorry

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

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 maquettes¹ 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.

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.