BleepCast / Phil´s Blog » Retro

F-Zero & Too Much Free Time

Phil Strahl — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:55:52 +0000

Today was National Day in Austria and I had some free time on my hands. That’s why I tried hard not to get some work done today. “I’ll be messing around with my Super Nintendo,” I told Conny. And she said “Alright. Have fun with it.” And I did. But in a totally unexpected way. Read on if you want to learn about F-Zero and a little about the making of its music…

Today I really wanted to indulge my mind in some mindless gaming after having watched a couple of Street Fighter 2 Ending scenes, but there was a tiny little thing I wanted to try first: I had an inspiration of it a couple of days ago and now I finally had the time to try it out.

The Backstory

Recently I had the opportunity to create some SNES-styled music for a game of my friend Jot, the Game Designer. I already had some Super-Nintendo-game-soundfonts but all of them were more than ten years old and had lots and lots of missing samples or just bad samples in it. So gathering all the sweet SNES instruments I wanted to use in my composition was rather exhausting and the result sounded a bit patchy as well to me.

The Idea

So what did I think of? Well, I wanted to create a soundfont myself from a couple of SNES music files I had lying around in my extensive chipmusic archive. “How hard can it be?” I thought with a smirk to myself, “Maybe I’ll do three or four games in the next hour or so,” I thought. “Because this can’t take long; an hour tops,” I thought. This was eight hours ago.

The Realization

Part One: Research

Ages ago I ripped some sound samples from Jurassic Park for a remix I did back then, but ended up never using them. I remember using a command-line program that would harvest the samples from the game-ROM. That I was looking for.

But, alas, software from ten years ago is hard to find and I gave it up when I learned that I was helplessly living in the past, because today everything comes with a user interfaces and features: The SPCTool v0.7 (download) from 2004 was a bit buggy but otherwise just marvelously up to today’s task: It highlights used samples in a song, lets you preview the samples (with loop-points!) and batch-export selected samples either as compressed SNES-wave files or — yay! — standard Windows PCM WAV files. I loaded up my favorite F-Zero SPC file, Big Blue and hit play. It was great, I could see which sample was used in which channel while listening to the song. So I selected all the samples and hit Export.

I only needed an editor to create my soundfont with. Ten years ago I was busy with the Vienna Soundfont Studio but couldn’t find a working version for my operating system anymore. Time flies by… Yet again I stumbled across a superior alternative, namely Viena. What the program was lacking in n-letters in its name, it made up for with an incredibly feature-rich and easy to navigate interface. I was delighted once again!

Troubles?

Importing the WAVs I had exported from the SPCTool was a little troublesome. Either that or I had no clue what I was doing. In any case I figured that it might be a problem that the exported files had an odd sample-rate, something just below 22,050 Hz. So I now was in need of something that would help me batch-convert my ancient Japanese sample-files to 44,100 Hz.

Since I am a proficient Googler I found what I was looking for in no-time, the r8brain Sample Converter, free of charge and despite the fugly UI quite useful.

Getting to grips with it

The estimated hour I thought I would be spending with it was almost over and I didn’t even have a single sample ready. I looked at the clock again and it wasn’t that late. I had plenty of time to play around and get a closer look at how the folks at Nintendo set up their compositions. Yes, I felt like Indiana Jones, digging up some treasure from the past…

Learning from the Japanese Masters

Memory was tight back in the days and F-Zero was a launch title of the Super Nintendo, so it had to look and sound good without breaking the mold of the memory. I guess nobody would have thought back in 1990 how much data you could stuff into a SNES game-pak. So what did Yumiko Kameya and Naoto Ishida, F-Zero‘s sound-designers and composers do — apart from an incredibly good job? They tried to use as little memory for music samples as possible. In fact, all the samples in their original SNES data-format where just a bit over 100 kb. In today’s world that’s almost nothing. Even back in the days all the music-samples of the game would fit onto a 3.25″ floppy disk no less than thirteen times!

Interestingly they tried to use as little “real-world” recordings from instruments as possible: Only

trumpet,
french horn,
alto saxophone,
Hammond organ,
Slap Bass

and five drum samples — that’s all. The rest are synth-sounds (yes, even the warm E-bass), and some of them sound awfully much like FM-synthesized sounds. Around 1990 FM-Synthesis was state of the art: Soundcards for personal computers (if they had any) would synthesize MIDI-instruments that way, the SEGA Genesis (released in 1988) was keen with it and even Konami developed at the time their VRC-7 chip for NES games. The chip would provide the composer (and gamer) with six additional FM-synth-channels to the standard NES sound. So the SNES was something totally cutting edge with its eight sample-fed channels when it launched. But back to the game. Have a listen to the samples and how frickin’ short they are:

F-Zero Sound Samples by sephcarissa

And yes, there were only five drum samples in the whole game:

A snare,
a rimshot (I have absolutely no idea where it was used, to be honest),
a closed hi-hat,
a semi-closed hi-hat,
and a medium tom.

If you’re into making music yourself, you might have noticed that one basic drum is missing — the bass drum. So how the hell did they get away with that in the game? As it turned out, they pitched the tom-sound down a couple of semi-tones and used the result as a feasible bass drum sound. Oh boy, sample-memory must have seemed really small 21 years ago!

But the most interesting sound was the noise of the wind in the track Death Wind. It is very creative: First they used a noise-sample that’s so short, it sounds more like a castanet-clap than anything else. At first I didn’t even rip that sample because I thought it was junk. I mean, listen to it above (it’s the one on the bottom of the play-list).
So they took that sample and pitched it down, down and even further down to the core of Earth itself so it transformed from almost nothing into an eerie, three-second long humm. But they didn’t stop there: On top of it loops an equally down-pitched and stretched sample; the semi-closed hi-hat sample.
Oh how do I bow before thee, Kameya-san and Ishida-san! And needless to say that I had my fun recreating this for my soundfont.

When I was trying to recreate the loop-points in Viena from the samples, I realized how tight they were, some even shorter than a the tenth of a second! And this meant trouble:
I don’t know how much you have worked with sound-samples yourself so let me tell you: If you loop a very short sound sample, it begins to change its pitch. The more so, the shorter your loop is. This becomes a problem when you only have a single sample for one note (usually C’) that you want the hardware to pitch up and down so that you can use it for all notes. This really was a problem and is also the reason why I didn’t quite get some slight off-key sounds out of my soundfont. Of course, I only realized this when I was testing my soundfont out after hours of key-mapping and creating ADSR envelopes off the top of my head.

Yes, this was another problem: To keep the file-size small, many samples were so short that it was hard to figure out where they belonged, i.e. for what instrument they were used for. And since they all were synthesized, it was even harder: It’s easy to distinguish a piano-tone from an organ, for example, even if your sample is just a quarter of a second long. But if you have a synthesized sound you’re lost. More so, if there is a number of them, all sounding very similar. Whew!

The only thing you can do is listen to the songs then in SPCTool, muting and solo-ing different channels during playback and keeping a close eye on the entry that tells you what sample-number is currently playing. So with that approach I figured out most instruments and ADSR-envelopes over the course of two or three hours or so.

The Field-Testing

From VGmusic.com, my favorite game-MIDI archive for over a decade now, I downloaded some artfully recreated music-tracks from the game as MIDI-sheet music and imported them into Reason. There I created some NN-XT sample players and fed them with my soundfont’s instruments to test them out. Holy cow, that was awful at first! No instrument was in proper key, some I had forgotten entirely and with others I messed up the envelopes because I took them for a different instrument than they actually were. It sounded like the devil himself took an AVGN-like diarrhea-dump onto those sacred compositions and was mocking me. So back to Viena for some envelope-tweaking, back to Audacity for some hand-tuning of the samples (Viena‘s correctional settings didn’t quite work with Reason) and back to SPCTool to listen to the originals over and over again.

Engaged and analytic listening of your favorite music for hours really separates the wheat from the chaff: If you still can listen to the tracks the next day without your eardrums vomiting, then you truly are listening to outstanding music.

During that back and forth between three applications (which don’t quite enjoy each others presence and demand of sole reign over the soundcard) really was exhausting and quite often I spotted errors in the MIDI files I used as framework. Since I am a merciless perfectionist I spent also quite some time ironing out those inconsistencies as good as I could.

The Presentation

“So what does it sound like?!” I hear you asking. Fear not: Below is the playlist just for you. All the tracks in it are recreations from my bitterly crafted soundfont and the rigorously corrected MIDI files from VGmusic.com.

My F-Zero Soundfont by sephcarissa

If you want to compare these to the originals (provided those aren’t etched into your mind), I suggest you get started with this playlist where you will find it all.

The Acquirement

And if you want to play around with the soundfont on your own, I am happy to release it on this very blog under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License:

	Click the Image to download my SNES F-Zero Soundfont

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 8

Phil Strahl — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:00:32 +0000

Oh my god — it’s a bonus level! It’s a bonus to past BleepCast levels where I want to add a few of things or just pop in particular personal perspectives. And now there’s finally a way to do so! This bonus level deals with some awesome music for the SNES I totally forgot to play; and then there was this… misconception in BleepCast Level 1 that I need to fix — bleep-style!

Level Information:

This level occupies 13 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 14:14 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because I of my occasional pottymouthism.

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

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 7

Phil Strahl — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:00:33 +0000

This is the BleepCast on Rob Hubbard, part two. Everything you want to know about the man that taught the Commodore 64 to produce grand sound-scapes and catchy tunes amidst the incoherent 8-bit turds coated with incompetence in the early 80′s. We will hear his later music, hear him talk about his time in the US and why he eventually came back. Don’t miss it!

Level Information:

This level occupies 51.5 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 56:27 min.
This podcast is for once NOT EXPLICIT because I could keep my f**king mouth shut – yaaay!

More information about the games Hubbard made music for, including cover art and personal experiences by the author at The Commodore Zone.
An Interview with Rob Hubbard from 2001 by Neil Carr.
A really comprehensive Interview with Rob Hubbard on c64.com
Rob Hubbard’s unabridged speech at the “Assembly 2002” Demo Party in Finland, found in stormblast0891’s YouTube channel.
Rob Hubbard’s Wikipedia page. Somebody should edit it with additional information!
An interview from 1997 with Rob who was still at Electronic Arts back then.
Not the Rob Hubbard you’re looking for.
An awesome amount of remixes of Rob’s tunes at remix.kwed.org.
Too lazy for browsing the High-Voltage SID Collection? Here are almost all of Rob Hubbard’s SID tunes.
The starting point for your own research.

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

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 6

Phil Strahl — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:00:06 +0000

Two words that describe this and the next BleepCast: Rob Hubbard. The man that taught the Commodore 64 to produce grand sound-scapes and catchy tunes amidst the incoherent 8-bit turds coated with incompetence in the early 80′s. This level is huge, so it’s clipped into two. And you better stock up on extra lives and get ready to enjoy Hubbard’s music, hear Hubbard’s voice and lean about the man in a tenaciously researched podcast. This is part one.

Level Information:

This level occupies 41.5 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 45:27 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally I get quite profane…

More information about the games Hubbard made music for, including cover art and personal experiences by the author at The Commodore Zone.
An Interview with Rob Hubbard from 2001 by Neil Carr.
A really comprehensive Interview with Rob Hubbard on c64.com
Rob Hubbard’s unabridged speech at the “Assembly 2002” Demo Party in Finland, found in stormblast0891’s YouTube channel.
Rob Hubbard’s Wikipedia page. Somebody should edit it with additional information!
An interview from 1997 with Rob who was still at Electronic Arts back then.
Not the Rob Hubbard you’re looking for.
An awesome amount of remixes of Rob’s tunes at remix.kwed.org.
Too lazy for browsing the High-Voltage SID Collection? Here are almost all of Rob Hubbard’s SID tunes.
The starting point for your own research.

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

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 5

Phil Strahl — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:00:20 +0000

The BleepCast inspects covers, remixes and de-makes of our favorite tunes in the last 30 years in this level and asks how everything started, how it evolved and where it all went. This is a broad topic and so there’s no screwing around: This BleepCast hits you massively with 50 minutes of pure nerdsound, spoken and played alike. And the best of all: You’ll love it! I’m happy, Bob!

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!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 4

Phil Strahl — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:00:10 +0000

This is a rather personal episode of the BleepCast and deals with the first games I had been playing when I was a little kid and how my love for chipmusic eventually evolved over the years. I take you back to the 1980′s once again: You know the time, but most of you won’t know the place: My brain. Enjoy music from the C64, early PCs and some ramblings from my youth. If you don’t like it… then you’re a poo-poo-head!

Level Information:

This level occupies almost 24 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 26:16 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth once again.

The 1541 Floppy Drive. Easy to think inside the box- Because it’s so huge and heavy.
The Great Giana Sisters for the C64. Total Super Mario Bros. ripoff. Nintendo won lawsuit against the programmers. Now legendary.
The Competition Pro joystick. Mean Red & Black Gaming machine. Durability +5. Discard after playing “Summer Games” or “Winter Games”.
GORILLAS.BAS is also on the Wikipedia, by the way. I still haven’t checked out the source code.
Sokoban. Behold out the eye-cancerous CGA presentation.
The Secret of Monkey Island, the good old one. With good old Reggae influenced music.

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

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 1

Phil Strahl — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:01:44 +0000

There it is, what you haven’t been waiting for ever since: The BleepCast podcast is all about chip-music, retro gaming and memories from the good old times when we all were young and begun having no life, instead indulging in shitty games with shitty music, or as we call it: “Classics with epic soundtracks”. So if you want me to take you back to the past ~~to play the shitty games that suck ass~~, then you just discovered your favorite podcast!

Level Information:

This level occupies a good 42 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 46:24 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth. Sorry!

The first appearance of the term BleepCast at SongByToad.com. Still: I stick with the name and hope that nobody’s gonna be a dick about it.
Jon Dunn’s short bio on GiantBomb so you can read it yourself.
David Whittaker’s awesome Total Recall theme from the Amiga.
A list of Jon Dunn’s games which he made music for.
“Now you’re playing with power — SUPER POWER!“. Sigh.
The terrible, terrible ending of Jurassic Park on the SNES. Watching this puts me back in the rage I first had as a 11-year old.

Level Suffixes:

@C64Takeaway pointed out that Jon Dunn’s “Forever Autumn” subtune #1 *is* Comic Bakery by Martin Galway (!) according to the HVSC, which I shamefully didn’t check for the ‘cast. So stealing from your own work would be “reinterpretation” (Dunn from Dunn), stealing from some other’s work (Dunn from Galway for Jurassic Park on the NES) is, well, stealing.

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

Oh, and would you like to see the playlist of the played tunes on this page?

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Homo Ludens

Phil Strahl — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:48:32 +0000

Max, a former fellow student, asked me a few weeks ago whether I was interested in buying some old gaming consoles with a bunch of games from him. Since I started collecting and maintaining old computers and gaming consoles a couple of years ago, starting with the few I had since I was a kid, I was interested in Max’ offer, expecting not more than a few dusty plastic boxes with missing cables and scratched game discs with broken jewel cases to add to my museum. Man, was I wrong!

So yesterday I finally had the cash together and some time to pick up the heavy packing case with tons of 1990′s state of the art consoles. There was a a black Game Boy pocket, a painted PlayStation (“it glows under a UV-lamp”), a SNES with 50/60 Hz switch (“So you could play Japanese titles as well”), Nintendo 64 with memory extension, a Sega Dreamcast with modem and keyboard and a Sega Genesis with 32x extension and SEGA-CD drive, something so bulky that you just gotta love it. Everything in good to very good condition, complete with many controllers and memory cards (such as the Dreamcast’s VMU).

Holy frick!

And that was not all, there was a bunch of Sega 32 games, some dream cast CDs, excellent N64 cartridges (such as Golden Eye 007, Ocarina of Time or Perfect Dark) and many PS1 games. I don’t know when I have the time to hook all these consoles up or rather implement them into my museum’s grand hall of ludology (i.e. my dorm room), nor do I know where to put all the stuff! I guess for now I put them back into the big torn box they came in hoping that Ikea might sell some day a Billy-shelf that fits my nerdy needs.

In case you are interested in a complete list of the games I own, you can check out my have-list at MobyGames.

FMX 09, Day Three

Phil Strahl — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:06:27 +0000

7:30 am and somebody walks downstairs. Good morning to me. My program for today was mostly about tracking and motion capturing and heavy duty compositing. You might have guessed: It was the day of Benjamin Button.

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.

…that consists so far of one Ratatouille-themeded teapot. ↩
I only remember Robin McDonald (she’s here every year wearing an Incredibles T-shirt) and Danielle Feinberg (DOP of Wall·E). ↩
Not considering my term at the Graz University of Technology where they showed us how to have the logic (=true/false) programming language ‘Prolog’ compute multiplications. Crazy shit! ↩
It’s like lighting something with a ball of made single light sources: They all cast overlapping but sharp shadows. ↩

I Adore My Commodore

Phil Strahl — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:51:39 +0000

My Old Computer,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

When my mom brought me the car from the autoshop after a minor crash last year (not my fault, though), she also brought along my now weak and old PC, formerly known as “The Beast” that I used before assembling my new Beast, which is after two years also losing some teeth and is not the fastest one out there anymore. I remember the days when I was bragging about the Athlon FX-53 chip in its cozy 939 socket on my Abit AV8 motherboard. Yes, I was a proud daddy!

When I turned it on a couple of days ago I was happy that it still worked after those many days of neglect. Somewhat. I got a beeeeeeep — beep — beep — beep — beep error code and the thing turned itself off. On closer inspection the fan of my ancient graphics card was not operating so I pulled it out of its cute AGP slot and the next day I bought a new one — a nVidia GeForce FX 5200 for as little as 35 €!

In the good old days the nVidia GeForce FX 5900 T I had to replace served me well as a trusty ally through endless open fields and creepy dungeons filled with dynamic lighting and vicious polygons. In its hey-days it cost me a small fortune.

Back at home I plugged it in and — nada. Same error code, same delay when starting up. I suspected the PSU to be defect so the following day I invested in the cheapest 400 W PSU I could find: A UNIQ 400 W PSU, that cheap floozy came in a naughty see-through plastic bag and cost me only fifteen bucks and had only the most common power connectors: Three Peripheral Plugs and one floppy drive plug — that’s it.

My hopes were low so I already kept the invoice to return the PSU the following day but I gave it a shot. And it worked! After some troubles connecting a keyboard via a USB to PS2 adapter and recalling my old admin password I was on my old desktop again.

It was a strange sensation, like returning to a place you left in a hurry two years ago; a place that resembled much like what was inside your head at that time. According to Sherry Turkle that’s what computers are anway — outsources of our brains. So what greeted me was my old XP desktop with a flashy wallpaper Lisa once made in Maya and Photoshop. Many icons were scattered around, of the games that were hot in 2007, my studies, my ideas…

Everything had to go. I need a reliable audio-computer and there were so many programs and apps installed that it took me almost two hours to uninstall and clean everything. With this new clarity there also came a new name for my former flagship, Cassio. And I hooked up Cassio and my current beast (which has no name) through a LAN cable and began installing only applications I would really need: Sound drivers, trackers, sequencers, synths, and a MIDI controller.

But when I was really paying attention when looking at my old machine, I noticed something odd about its front. Not the missing casing, but rather the prominent black 5.25″ floppy-drive staring at me with its bleak open hatch. Then I recalled what else was plugged into a PCI slot inside my old grace: A Catweasel Mk 4 floppy controller, that makes it able to read and write Amiga, Atari and Commodore 64 floppies. But not only that: It has two sockets for certain Commodore chips: MOS 6581 and MOS 8580, two numbers that instantly evoke passionate feelings in every chip-tune musician or retro-afficionado: Those are the Commodore’s sound synthesizer chips, also known as SID chips.

Gone was my urge to fill my new old PC with audio apps and I was high with memories and chiptunes and swiftly installed the GoatTracker, a Commodore-tracker for the PC that makes use of the SID chips on the Catweasel controller. In a tine between two projects I spent some hours covering Spybreak! by Propellerheads in GoatTracker and now I wanted to find out, what it sounded like on an actual SID chip. Listen below and feel free to obtain the SID file to compare it to your own SID chip or emulator.

texx sound – Spybreak!. Propellerheads cover. 2009
Download audio file (texx_sound_-_spybreak.mp3)
Download 6581 SID

Suddenly the urge in me arose to play my SID file on my real Commodore 64 that was resting underneath a cloth for many months now and serves as a stage for my SNES. After countless attempts to write a 1541 ¹-compliant disk I realized that it was not possible: What I could was read all old Commodore floppies and make .d64-files backups of them, still the files I wrote via the Catweasel Mk 4 controller weren’t legible by the real 1541 disk drive.

But I was persistent and so I found a way to get it going. From former attempts a couple of years ago I still had an XM1541 cable around but never got it quite working. Still I was like giving it another shot today. So I hooked the cable to the printer port of Cassio and the other end into the 1541. So far, so good. To spare you the gory and most likely boring details of my flops, here’s how I got it working:

I’ve downloaded the latest i386-compiled version of OpenCBM, unzipped it and copied all the .dll and .sys files into my c:\windows\system32 directory. Then I downloaded the GUI for it and copied the single .exe file into the OpenCBM-folder with all the .exe-files and started it.

And that was it. I could write, read and format any disk I fed the 1541 with with ease.
As a test disk I exported my SID file as .sid from GoatTracker and with PSID64 converted it to a self-playing .prg for the C64. With yet another tool, the C64Editor I created a new blank disk-image and imported my .prg file there. I didn’t bother adding fancy stuff as separating bars and ASCII art (although I could if I wanted) and saved the disk image as .d64 file. I tested that with an older hence free version of the CCS Commodore 64 emulator for Windows and it worked there exactly like it should. So time for the big moment: I wrote the file with CBM4WIN and, just as anticipated, the written files worked no-problemo with the real Commodore. Rejoice!

Below is a picture of my success. Don’t bother about the somewhat pale, rather non existant colors: I suspect my C64′s color RAM to be defective. Once again. Time for another Commodore as spare-parts-galore!

1541 stands for the famous Commodore 64 disk drive which was just as huge as the old breadbox and as heavy as a brick. And it read and wrote 5.25″ floppy disks ↩