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MakingDigital artists create ‘pretend spontaneity’ in the documentary-style animation Surf’s Up

Waves

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Computer

w w w . c g w . c o m JUNE 2007 Computer Graphics World | 1

W O R L D

Departments

Editor’s Note 2Triple the Fun

Summer blockbusters are making their

debut at theaters, and this year, it is

apparent that three’s a charm, as ani-

mators upped the graphics ante in

Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, and At World’s

End. Yet, others are making a techni-

cal splash as well, including Surf’s Up

and Ratatouille.

Spotlight 4

Products

Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2, Final Cut Server

Eyeon’s Vision, Rotation

Blackmagic’s Intensity Pro, Multi- bridge Eclipse, HDLink Pro

AJA’s FS1, GEN10

User Focus

KONA 3 cards keep the fi lm The Flock on course.

Viewpoint: CG 10Wave Effects

The digital technology that made

waves in Surf’s Up.

Portfolio 38SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater

Products 42

Classifi eds 43

Features

Cover storyRadical, Dude 123D ANIMATION | In one of the most

unusual animated features to hit the

screen, Surf’s Up incorporates a

documentary fi lming style into the

CG medium.

By Barbara Robertson

Wrangling Waves 183D ANIMATION | The visual effects

supervisor on Surf’s Up takes us on an

incredible behind-the-scenes journey

as the fi lm takes shape.

By Rob Bredow

Mind Expansion 20GAMING | A look at the AI tools and

technology that are helping to make

state-of-the-art non-player characters

more intelligent.

By Martin McEachern

Effects Driven 30VFX | A plethora of digital techniques,

including colorful greenscreen work

and a novel CircleVision camera appli-

cation, create drama for the new TV

series Drive.

By Karen Moltenbrey

GPU Computing Uncovered 34TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGY | Under

the microscope: High-performance

computing on the GPU, and what it

means to DCC professionals.

By Alex Herrera

On the cover:Surfi ng penguins and water that becomes

a main character, that’s what’s up in the

unique CG “mockumentary” Surf’s Up

from Sony Pictures Imageworks, pg. 12.

12

June 2007 • Volume 30 • Number 6

» Director Luc Besson discusses his black-and-white fi lm, Angel-A.

» Trends in broadcast design.» Getting the most out of

canned music and sound.See i

t in P

ost

ww

w.p

ostm

agaz

ine.

com

Also see www.cgw.com for computer graphics news, special surveys and reports, and the online gallery.

20

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KAREN MOLTENBREY : Chief [email protected]

36 East Nashua RoadWindham, NH 03087

(603) 432-7568

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:Courtney Howard, Jenny Donelan, Audrey Doyle, Evan Marc Hirsch,

George Maestri, Martin McEachern,Stephen Porter, Barbara Robertson

WILLIAM R. RITTWAGE Publisher

SALESMERLE MODEL : East Coast Sales Manager

[email protected](781) 255-0625

MARI KOHN : West Coast Sales [email protected]

(818) 291-1153

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Editorial Office / LA Sales Office:620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204

(800) 280-6446

PRODUCT IONKATH CUNNINGHAM: Production Director


MICHAEL VIGGIANO: Art Director

[email protected]

CHRIS SALCIDO: Account [email protected]

(818) 291-1144

WILLIAM R. RITTWAGE President and Chief Executive Officer

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editor

’sno

te

2 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2007 w w w . c g w . c o m

As I write this editorial, summer is nearly here—that is, according to the cal-

endar. But if you look at the theater releases, the season has already begun.

Kicking off the 2007 summer movie fest is a trio of “threequals,” whose CG

technology has set new standards in feature films and beyond.

In early May, nearly everyone became ensnared in Spider-Man’s web, as

this number 3 shattered box-office records, raking in a reported $148 million during

its first three days. (As a result, Spidey bested last year’s record debut of $135.6 million

captured by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.) In Spider-Man 3, Peter Parker

grows into his superhero role, and as he struggles to do so, he has to face not only

inner demons, but also more intense villains sporting unique powers that could only

be had through quantum leaps in digital technology (see “Facing the Darkness,” May

2007, pg. 8). A complicated rigging system turns Venom into a creepy, intelligent crea-

ture. Dynamic particle simulation and animation makes The Sandman a huge force to

be reckoned with. And intricate face replacement, matchmoving, and stunt work give

Spider-Man and the villains commanding performances. Overall, the battles are more

intense, the performances more engaging, and the action more realistic.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, another third, hit some rough seas dur-

ing its opening weekend at the box office, failing to surpass the stellar figures for last

year’s Dead Man’s Chest but turning a respectable sum of coinage nevertheless. Last

year, a compelling performance by a CG Davy Jones and his digital mates resulted

in Oscar gold. This year, the VFX crew is hoping to repeat that success by extend-

ing Davy’s performance and that of his cursed pirates (see “All Hands on Deck,” May

2007, pg. 18). Along with more magical mocap moments, simulations proved extreme-

ly seaworthy in the film, especially the fluid sims that result in a CG maelstrom that

becomes an unforgettable battle at sea.

In Shrek the Third (see “Merry Tales,” April 2007, pg. 12), the ogre matures into

a father and a temporary king. Likewise, the CG technology in this fractured fairy

tale matured at the hands of DreamWorks. For instance, consider the cast’s clothing.

The weave in Shrek’s burlap outfit is far more detailed than before, but the crow-

ing achievement is the cloth simulation, which opened up more story possibilities.

In addition, the film’s “hairy tales” boast a new simulation engine that realistically

moves Merlin’s long beard and Rapunzel’s long braids. And when Puss and Donkey

become drenched, their matted, wet fur looks fantastic. Already in production on

Shrek 4, DreamWorks is planning a Shrek 5, which is expected to bring this endear-

ing series to The End.

A new just-released animated feature, Surf’s Up (see “Radical, Dude,” pg. 12), offers

a new spin on penguins, and on CG animation. Last year’s Happy Feet brought song

and dance to the medium, along with an Oscar (see “Happy Feat,” November 2006).

In Surf’s Up, the 3D birds show off their surfing skills, and Sony Pictures Imageworks

introduces a documentary style to the world of CGI, once again extending not only the

technical, but also the storytelling boundaries, of computer graphics.

As we go to press, Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille is poised to hit theaters, and the film is

already creating buzz in family kitchens everywhere. The imagery, created from some

new technical ingredients, is truly unique, and promises to whet theater-goers’ appe-

tites for more of this type of CG delight.

KarenMoltenbreyChief Editor

Triple the Fun



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P O S T P R O D U C T I O N

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Your resource for products, user applications, news, and market research

V I D E O

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spotlight

With its focus on image-processing

solutions, Eyeon Software announced

the addition of two new products,

Vision and Rotation.

A postproduction system for the

broadcast industry, Vision’s tool set

has been designed as an add-on to

NLEs and postproduction suites, with

fields/frames and PAL/NTSC support.

Extensive motion graphics capabilities

are combined with a scripting engine

to automate repetitive tasks, such as

station packaging and promos. Vision

is resolution-independent, with 64

times the color fidelity of 10-bit video.

Sporting multiple plug-in APIs, Vision

allows for hundreds of extra features

from many third-party manufacturers.

Rotation, meanwhile, complements

the company’s Fusion compositing sys-

tem, providing an all-inclusive package

for the demands of rotoscoping, keying,

and retouching. The integrated script-

ing and bins system make Rotation

part of the collaborative workflow.

Large departmentalized film facili-

ties can use this solution to create roto

mattes, while retouched clean plates

can be funneled to the senior compos-

iting suites for finishing.

Vision and Rotation are shipping

now for $695 and $1495, respectively.

Eyeon Shows Its Vision and More

Apple polished its reputation in the

broadcast realm by rolling out two

major releases, Final Cut Studio 2 and

Final Cut Server.

A significant upgrade, Final Cut

Studio 2 includes Final Cut Pro 6, which

introduces Apple’s ProRes 422 format

for uncompressed HD quality at SD file

sizes, and support for mixed video for-

mats and frame rates in a single time-

line. The suite also includes Motion 3,

featuring an intuitive 3D environment,

paint, and new behaviors; Soundtrack

Pro 2, with a number of new tools for

multi-track editing, surround mix-

ing, and conforming sound to pic-

ture; Compressor 3, delivering batch

encoding for multiple formats with a

single click; and DVD Studio Pro 4.2

for SD and HD DVD authoring. Final

Cut Studio 2 also contains Color, a new

professional color-grading and finish-

ing application for consistent color

and signature looks.

Final Cut Studio 2 is available now

for $1299, or $499 as an upgrade.

In another big announcement,

Apple unveiled Final Cut Server, a

new application that works seam-

lessly with Final Cut Studio 2 to pro-

vide media asset management and

workflow automation for both

postproduction and broadcast

professionals.

A scaleable server app that sup-

ports variable-sized work groups,

Final Cut Server includes a cross-plat-

form client that enables content brows-

ing, review, and approval from within

a studio or over the Internet. The offer-

ing automatically catalogs large collec-

tions of assets and enables searching

across multiple volumes via an intui-

tive user interface.

Final Cut Server, available this

summer, will cost $999 for one server

and 10 client licenses, or $1999 for one

server and unlimited client licenses.

Apple Unveils Final Cut Studio 2, Final Cut Server



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Intensity is the world’s first HDMI capture and playback card for Windows and Mac OS X systems. If you want to go beyond the quality limits of HDV or you need big screen HDMI edit monitoring, then only Intensity will let you upgrade to true Hollywood production quality.

Beyond the Limits of HDV

Working in HDTV is exciting, however, HDV’s heavy compression and limited 1440 x 1080 resolution can cause problems with quality and editing. Intensity eliminates these problems using direct HDMI capture from the camera image sensor, at full 1920 x 1080 HDTV resolution and uncompressed video quality.

Cinema Style HDMI Monitoring

If you’re editing in DV, HDV, uncompressed or JPEG video, you can use Intensity’s HDMI output for incredible digital video monitoring. Now you can use big screen televisions and

video projectors for breathtaking cinema style edit monitoring and experience the true quality of your work.

Multi Camera HD Production Studio

Perform live production with 2 Intensity cards and cameras plugged into your system using the included On-Air software. On-Air sync’s

HDMI cameras, handles monitoring and recording, plus is so easy to use, it’s ideal for education, theater, corporate training and more.

Use your Favorite Software

Intensity is fully integrated with both Adobe Premiere Pro on Windows and Apple Final Cut Pro on Mac OS X, as well as After Effects, Photoshop and many more. Intensity also works in 1080i HD, 720p HD, NTSC and PAL for worldwide compatibility.

Intensity introduces high definition HDMI editing for only $249

Learn more today at www.blackmagic-design.com

Intensity

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C O N V E R T E R

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Blackmagic Unveils Three New Offerings

AJA Launches New ConvertersAJA Video announced two new converters: the FS1, support-

ing virtually any video input or output in HD or SD, and the

GEN10, an SD/HD/AES sync generator for professional video

post and broadcast environments.

The FS1 is a universal HD and SD audio and video frame

synchronizer and converter. With a flexible architecture, the

FS1 can simultaneously support both HD

and SD video—all in full 10-

bit broadcast-quality video

and 24-bit audio. Also, the

FS1 supports virtually any input

or output as analog or digital, HD, or SD. It can up- or

down-convert between SD and HD, provide simultaneous out-

puts of both formats, and support closed-captioning and the

conversion of closed-captioning between SD and HD formats.

FS1 also includes 10-bit HD-to-HD cross-conversion for

1080 and 720 formats. For audio, the FS1 supports eight-chan-

nel AES, balanced analog, or embedded audio with flexibility.

The converter is also network-ready, supporting SNMP moni-

toring and Web-based remote control.

The GEN10 is a flexible solution for synching video and

audio devices across a facility or network. The GEN10 con-

verter features seven outputs, including two groups of inde-

pendently controlled SD/HD sync outputs and one AES-11

output. The SD outputs can be switched between black or

color bars, and HD tri-level sync can be switched between 19

HD formats, including all that are in use today. Moreover, the

AES-11 output can be switched between silence and tone, and

all outputs are in sync with one another and are sourced from

an accurate master time base.

FS1 and GEN10 are expected to ship this month. FS1 car-

ries a price of $3990, while GEN10 costs $390.

Blackmagic Design made a trio of product announcements at

NAB, including Intensity Pro, a new, low-cost yet high-qual-

ity video capture and playback card for professional videog-

raphers; the Multibridge Eclipse editing system; and HDLink

Pro, a new model of the popular HDLink converter.

The Intensity Pro is said to be the first card to combine

the high quality of HDMI capture and playback with the wide

compatibility of analog component, NTSC, PAL, and S-Video,

along with analog audio capture and playback. It enables

users to capture directly from the HD camera’s image sensor,

bypassing the video compression chip for true uncompressed

video quality.

Intensity Pro can be connected to any big-screen televi-

sion or video projector for edit monitoring, since current com-

puters don’t have the processing speed to render complex,

multi-layer, real-time effects in HDV playing back to FireWire

cameras. Included with every Intensity Pro card for real-time

video mixing is On-Air software, which enables customers to

plug two Intensity or Intensity Pro cards into a computer for

two-camera mixing for live video production.

The card is available for $349.

Also at the show, the company unveiled its Multibridge

Eclipse, possibly the first editing system with 3Gb/sec SDI,

HDMI, and analog video capture and playback, 16-channel

audio, and 2K film via SDI resolution capture and playback.

Multibridge Eclipse allows twice the SDI data rate of nor-

mal HD-SDI, while retaining compatibility with normal HD-

SDI and standard-definition SDI equipment. The 3Gb/sec SDI

allows 4:4:4 video using a single BNC-type connection, while

Blackmagic Design’s new 2K via SDI ability enables high-reso-

lution, real-time 2048x1556 feature-film editing. The system

also includes color management via built-in 3D lookup tables.

Multibridge Eclipse will be available in July for $3495.

In addition, the company announced the HDLink Pro, like-

ly the first monitoring solution for DVI and HDMI displays

that features 2K support via 3Gb/sec SDI. A new model of the

HDLink converter that allows low-cost DVI and HDMI dis-

plays to be used for SDI monitoring, HDLink Pro allows any

supported DVI or HDMI display to be used for HD-SDI moni-

toring. Moreover, HDLink Pro supports the new 3Gb/sec SDI

standard for twice the SDI data rate than normal HD-SDI. Ideal

for HD or 2K film monitoring, HDLink Pro switches between

SD, HD, and 2K instantly. HDLink also features a new chassis

with all connections on one side.

Expected to be available in July, HDLink Pro will be priced

at $795.



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Multibridge Pro is the first bi-directional converter that’s also an editing system. Featuring a built-in PCI Express link, you can connect to Windows or Apple Mac systems for the highest quality editing solution.

Connect to any Deck, Camera or Monitor

Multibridge Pro supports standard and high definition 10 bit SDI and analog YUV, as well as NTSC/PAL video in and out. Multibridge Pro also features 4 channels of sample rate converted AES audio and analog stereo XLR audio in and out, combined with two channel RCA audio outputs, great for low cost HiFi monitoring.

Advanced HDMI Monitoring

Multibridge Pro includes built-in HDMI out. Perfect for connecting to the latest big screen televisions and video projectors for incredible digital cinema style edit monitoring.

World’s Highest Quality

Multibridge Pro works natively in 10 bit 4:2:2 and features the industry’s only true 14 bit analog conversion with uncompressed video capture/playback. With uncompressed 10 bit capture and playback, you’ll always retain that pristine film look.

Dual Use – Converter and Capture Card

Get the world’s most amazing editing solution for Apple Final Cut Pro™ and Adobe Premiere Pro™. When not connected via the PCI Express link to your computer, Multibridge Pro also works as a bi-directional video and audio converter. Multibridge Pro is really two products in one, always adapting to your needs.

Multibridge Pro has HD-SDI and analog editing with HDMI monitoring for only $1,595

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The Drawn Together images are courtesy of Comedy Partners.



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D I W O R K F L O W

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In the recently released action/drama The Flock, a vigilant

state agent (Richard Gere)—while training his young female

replacement—must track down a missing girl who the agent

believes is connected to a paroled sex offender he is inves-

tigating. Working against the clock, the pair sort out the

details while tracking the potential

killer. Similarly, those working on the

movie had to work against the clock

while solving difficult issues. To this

end, the group facilitated its unique

2K workflow and digital intermediate

process by using AJA Video’s KONA

3 video capture card.

KONA 3 is AJA’s uncompressed

capture card for SD, HD, Dual Link

HD, and 2K for PCI Express (PCIe) Apple G5 Power Macs

and Mac Pro systems. Supporting any uncompressed SD or

HD format, KONA 3 also captures and plays back uncom-

pressed 10-bit and 8-bit digital video and 24-bit digital

audio. With this flexibility, the card was an integral part

of the film’s Apple Final Cut Pro editing pipeline. Warner

Bros. performed the scanning, color correction, and film-

out for the project.

David Blum of Phoenix-based Catalyst FX served as the

visual effects supervisor on the film, and he recruited George

Rizkallah of the Burbank, California, Product Factory to

develop a customized 2K pipeline that would enable the team

to do a final conform on the feature using Apple’s Final Cut

Pro. The pipeline employed four KONA 3 cards running on

Apple Mac Pro systems with Final Cut Pro on an XSAN net-

work with 26TB of storage. The systems were connected via

2Gb Fibre Channel.

“Because of the way that our visual effects shots were

created—many multi-layer timeline effects on more than

800 shots—the only practical way to complete the film on

time and on budget was to do our final conform in Final

Cut Pro,” says Blum. “The AJA KONA 3 provided the per-

fect solution and performed brilliantly. I could not have fin-

ished this film without the KONA 3 card. The folks at AJA

worked closely with us to ensure that our pipeline was run-

ning smoothly.”

The Flock is the first major feature film finished in 2K,

DPX, 4:4:4 log color space using Final Cut Pro, and both

Blum and Rizkallah credit the success of this workflow to

the card. Because the offline Final Cut Pro sequence was

too complex for all the visual effects and editing to be repli-

cated within the production company’s timetable, Rizkallah

customized a pipeline using Cinema Tools combined with

original software to create pull lists for scanning, and then

set the handles of the scan to match the Media Manager han-

dles set in Final Cut Pro to the KONA 3 2K setting. Using

AJA’s DPX-to-QuickTime Translator, the sequential DPX files

were wrapped as QuickTime files for proofing and rendering,

and then converted back into sequential DPX frames, which

were then delivered to Warner Bros. for color correction on a

FilmLight Baselight system.

“We chose the KONA 3 for several reasons,” says offline

editor and Product Factory owner Rizkallah, who was the DI

supervisor for The Flock. “When you’re doing a 2K conform

in Final Cut, you have huge file sizes and amounts of data

to work from. AJA is the only solution that can handle files

of those sizes. The fact that the KONA 3 can do HD or SD

down-converts from the 2K in real time is a huge timesaver,

as is the fact that you can look at an accurate 2K image on

an HD monitor, especially when the alternative is renting a

very expensive 2K or 4K projector. Most importantly, AJA’s

tech support provides immediate solutions to problems as

they arise.”

Rizkallah points out that the key to the group’s success

was AJA’s DPX Translator. “The fact that AJA technology can

convert DPX to QuickTime is incredibly efficient—QuickTime

can be easily read in Final Cut or just about anything else

that uses QuickTime out there,” he says.

Keeping The Flock Process On Course

Images courtesy B

auer Martinez S

tudios.



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view

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By Matt Hausman


through collapse, and back to flat again. By offsetting in time the animation of neigh-

boring cross sections of the wave patch, the motion of a tubing wave could be achieved.

The waves were animated in this way entirely by hand without procedural mecha-

nisms and with a great deal of time spent getting the motion to appear to generally obey

a narrow subset of real-world characteristics, such as forward velocity, lateral break

speed, a lip that fell at a speed close to gravity, plausible volume preservation, and cor-

responding surface stretching. For composition and timing purposes, the ability to pre-

visualize dominant wave and surfing features, such as the white-water explosion of the

crashing wave and the wake from a surfboard, was incorporated into the rig as well.

While the function of the wave rig was to provide the gross animation of the surf-

ing waves, it was not designed to provide the small, higher-frequency waves of the

water surface. Inspired in part by Tessendorf ’s work on simulating ocean water, we

developed a Side Effects Houdini- and Pixar RenderMan-based system to simulate

open ocean waves for the overall displaced water surface. The system employed

“wave trains,” simply defined as the sum of continuous wave patterns of varying

period, amplitude, direction, and speed.

By creating sets of Gerstner-style wave trains whose speeds, by default, were

physically based but whose frequency ranges and angles of propagation were hand-

tailored, we chose several water surface “styles.” These ranged from almost dead

calm to stormy and chaotic. The frequencies of the wave trains were segregated

into three ranges: low, medium, and high, each with individual control over ampli-

tude, cuspiness, and speed. Provisions were made for general noise-based and spe-

cific hand-tailored control of areas of amplitude reduction of the wave trains for a

varied and natural look of the ocean surface. The peaks of waves could be deter-

mined and isolated in the shader to create areas of aerated water or to be used as

the source of emission for particle effects. Data, output from the simulation system,

describing the frequency ranges and propagation angles and speeds of the wave

At the onset of development,

the Surf’s Up effects team was

given two main directives in

regard to the water and wave

effects: Make it look 80 percent

real, and make the entire process

capable of producing 20 minutes of final

surfing footage as efficiently as possible.

For anyone who has worked on a

large-scale project such as this, it will

come as no surprise that the latter of

those goals was the one that took the

most work. A couple of months were

required to hammer out the basic

approach and produce a test that, while

crude in comparison to the end prod-

uct, more than adequately proved the

overall technical strate-

gies. It then took well

over a year to iron out

the specifics and craft a

production pipeline that

spanned five depart-

ments: character rig-

ging, layout, animation,

effects, and lighting.

In a collabora-

tive effort between the

effects and character

rigging departments, a

wave rig was developed

in Autodesk’s Maya that

provided the motion of

the surfing waves (see

“Radical, Dude,” pg. 12).

The rig deformed a rect-

angular patch so that

any lateral cross sec-

tion of the patch could

be animated through

the evolution of a two-

dimensional wave shape,

from flat water, to tubing,

Imageworks

chose several

styles for the

water surfaces

in Surf’s Up.

Wave trains such as these were used to add textural detail to the water surface.

Wave Effects

Matt Hausman is an effects animation supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks.



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trains was input into the water displacement shader for rendering.

Ambient foam—foam created from crashing waves, splashes, surfboard wakes,

and shore break—all were critical components of the look of the Surf’s Up water.

From the start, it was important to create methods for general and specific foam

placement, erasure, dissolution, and animation. Used not only to create a more real-

istic look, different foam patterns and formations were employed to distinguish wave

styles and locations from one another.

Three distinct foam patterns were designed from live-action reference and con-

sultation with the visual development department: a patchy foam used for choppier

water and splashes from rocks and characters; a more elegant graphic style referred

to as “web foam” taken from specific photographic examples and used with calmer

water at the North Beach location; and a convected bubbly foam used with the beach

break system of small waves lapping at the shoreline.

A distinction was made between “standing” foam, foam that was generated with

procedural noise functions in the shader, and “interactive” foam, which was specifi-

cally placed or the result of a specific event like a splash or wake. Interactive foam

used the same noise functions as standing foam but was placed on the water using

point clouds sampled in the reference space of the water, with attributes describ-

ing search radius and density. Once enough points, collected in the reference space,

crossed a density threshold, foam would appear in the additive space of the points’

search radii on the corresponding part of the wave surface. Similar to the methods

of amplitude reduction of the wave trains, areas of foam could be erased or reduced

procedurally with noise fields or specifically with artist-designed maps projected

onto the ocean surface.

Particle Matter

All the spray effects in Surf ’s Up—the white water, lip spray, surfboard sprays, char-

acter splashes, rock splashes, and so forth—were rendered entirely, or in part, as

dense clouds of RiPoints calculated at render time in RenderMan. To accomplish this,

a proximity-based particle instancing scheme, called Cluster, was developed as a

RenderMan DSO. The instancing algorithm produced new points along and around

the vectors between pairs of seed points from sparse particle simulations with many

parameters controlling point size, distribution, density, opacity falloff, and attri-

bute blending. Because the final particle counts required for white water or lip spray

in a given shot would most often exceed the memory limitations of the renderfarm

machines, methods for rendering subsections of the elements had to be developed.

Thus, a scheme for slicing cluster renders into layers based on distance from the cam-

era plane and for managing the compositing of those layers was implemented.

Throughout the show, the cluster DSO was optimized in an attempt to render

as many points as possible and, ultimately, was capable of rendering without slic-

ing nearly 45 million motion-blurred points. For a big Mavericks wave shot in Surf ’s

Up, the combined point count of the white water, lip spray, and foam ball (the white-

water explosion inside the tube) could easily reach 500 million points.

The clustered effects were lit using deep shadows, which were rendered from each

light: typically a key, rim, and fill. The final beauty render of the element was a “util-

ity” pass with equal contributions of the key, rim, and fill lights segregated into the

RGB channels of the image to be balanced and color-corrected into the shot during

compositing. Extra passes for specular glints, particle life, and density variation also

were provided to increase the detail of the element. To save time, especially during

sliced renders, the matting of other objects was handled by rendering deep shadows of

the occluding geometry from the shot camera and sourcing them into the white-water

and spray shaders for opacity variance.

In retrospect, it seems odd that a

computer-generated movie with so

much water in it would have been

made without the use of a fluid solver

at any point in its production. But that

fact underscores the overall method-

ology used by the effects and anima-

tion teams on Surf’s Up, which were

initiated in response to the following

quandary: How to efficiently create a

lot of realistic-looking surfing waves in

a production pipeline whereby the pri-

mary animation of the waves occurs

during layout and key features of the

wave need to be previsualized and

altered during animation.

As more sophisticated ocean-simula-

tion techniques become available, CPUs

become faster, and memory more expan-

sive, future answers to this question may

not rely on any of the strategies outlined

above. However, given the demands

of an animated feature, during which

keeping creative and technical options

open for as long as possible through-

out the pipeline is strongly desired, the

approach of layering linked yet discreet

solutions to the primary wave features

proved highly successful.

Matt Hausman is an effects animation super-

visor at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Upper: An early test rendering of a pipeline

wave. Lower: An early lighting test show-

ing various shadow-casting techniques.



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It’s all about Cody Maverick, an aspiring surfer,

who is the subject of a surfi ng documen-

tary and the star of Sony Pictures

Animation’s Surf’s Up.

. . . .3D Animation

Images courtesy Sony Pictures Animation.



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the fi rst two commandments would be: “Live in

the moment,” and “Have as good a time as you can.”

So, if you were fi lming a documentary about surfers, even if those surfers were

penguins and not people, you’d want to capture that spontaneity. To do that using

animation, in which every frame is handcrafted and precisely controlled, would

be...well...radical, dude.

Yet, that’s exactly what the directors and producers at Sony Pictures

Animation (SPA) did, thanks to a crew of approximately 250 talented anima-

tors and artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks. And the result is one of the most

unusual animated features ever to hit the screen.

In Sony Pictures’ Surf’s Up, a documentary fi lm crew follows a young

hot-dog surfer named Cody Maverick from Shiverpool, Antarctica, to

the Big Z Memorial Surf Off on Pen Gu Island. It’s the fi rst feature ani-

mation mockumentary. “It was fun to fake that whole style to create

the illusion of reality, the believability of characters, to shoot with a

handheld camera, to even have access to archival footage,” says Ash

Brannon, who directed the fi lm with Chris Buck.

Producer Chris Jenkins sparked the idea. Jenkins, who came to

SPA from Disney Feature Animation where he worked as a visual

effects supervisor and effects animator on Who Framed Roger

Rabbit, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King,

and other fi lms, thought of turning a story about surfi ng penguins

into a Spinal Tap-like documentary.

“This is a new way to tell a story and a way to realize great ani-

mation,” Jenkins says. “We had to create ‘pretend spontaneity.’ We

had to pretend to interview someone who we happened to catch.

But, it was all planned, of course.”

The planned spontaneity in the mockumentary forced changes

through the entire production, from recording sessions to water sim-

ulation. The characters needed to be self-aware. The camera had to be

handheld. The water became a character.

To help give the dialog track the freshness of a real conversation, the

directors recorded actors two or three at a time, something that rarely

happens for animated fi lms. Usually directors record each character’s dia-

log separately.

“Animation is tending to become very shticky,” Jenkins says. “The

characters deliver lines, and there’s almost like music hall pitter-patter to

the timing. We let the actors read the script, and then we threw the script

away and had them put it in their own words.”

For example: During Surf’s Up, the documentary crew making the

fi lm about Cody often captures the Sports Penguin Entertainment Network

(SPEN) crew, which is covering the surfi ng championship event. Real-life

XGames sports announcer and surfer Sal Masekela is SPEN’s sports announcer

in the fi lm, and two of the top surfers in the world—Kelly Slater and Rob

Machado—voice the penguins playing his roving reporters on the beach.




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into the virtual, animated world. As he

or she moved the camera, the scene in

the virtual world changed. It’s a process

similar to that used for virtual sets. “If

you turn around, you’re turning around

in the virtual world,” says Bredow. “And,

you can zoom in and out.”

Here’s how the “Handicam” system

affected the animation process: First,

layout artists blocked out the approxi-

mate positions for the characters and an

approximate camera move. “Unlike the

usual straight-ahead narratives with spe-

cific beats and actions, we had a wide-

open palette,” says Shaub. “We could cut

loose and animate.”

When the directors approved that

basic performance, the layout artists

filmed the action with the Handicam.

The shots then went back to the anima-

“We did several recording sessions

with them when we could catch them,”

says Buck. “We’d show them footage,

and they would riff on it. They added a

cool sense of believability.” The directors

not only used the improvised dialog, they

caught flubs, microphone hits, coughs,

and so forth, all of which gave the record-

ing an on-the-spot feeling.

When the documentary crew interviews

characters on camera, the directors

wanted to capture that same feeling of

spontaneity.

“These characters are not just deliver-

ing lines to drive a story in a narrative

fashion,” says David Shaub, animation

director, who led a team of approximately

60 animators at the peak of production.

“Rather, they are aware of themselves and

how they might appear on camera. What

a character is saying and what he’s think-

ing (or what he really means) might be

entirely different things.” The documen-

tary camera adds another layer of com-

plexity to the subtext. Some characters

liked being on camera; others didn’t.

But, what appears to be spontaneous

on screen is the result of animators having

crafted the performance down to the last

eye dart. “The difference between a believ-

able performance and one that is over-

played can be as subtle as a bottom eyelid

raised a touch too high,” says Shaub.

Because Shaub wanted animators to

experiment with acting ideas, he asked

for fast, responsive rigs. “From my per-

spective, it was better to animate with a

basic, stripped-down puppet that was

faster than a slower rig with a lot of cool

features,” he says. “It was a complete

joy to animate because we were free to

explore without the technical burdens

typically found in a character rig with

lots of bells and whistles.” Or, as it turns

out, some of the logistical strictures typi-

cal of most animated features.

To create an animated film, typically

the layout department first creates cam-

era moves based on the storyboards.

Then, for the most part, animators per-

form the characters from the camera’s

view. The pre-determined camera moves,

camera angles, pans, zooms, and so forth

rarely change because that would affect

the animation. But to capture the doc-

umentary feel for Surf’s Up, the action

needed to drive the camera and the cam-

era needed to be flexible.

“When we decided we needed a real-

time camera, the challenge was to put

that camera inside Maya,” says Chris

Juen, digital producer. “We did a lot of

development early on to make that work,

but it really sealed the documentary feel-

ing of the movie. It affected everything.”

One of the most obvious changes was

that layout artists controlled the virtual

camera with a real, handheld camera.

“We bought a $250 camera on eBay and

Frankensteined a motion-capture unit

on top,” says Rob Bredow. The motion-

capture unit had six lenses that looked

at flashing infrared markers on the ceil-

ing to track the camera’s position in real

time. The camera operator/layout artist

looked through the camera’s viewfinder


. . . .3D Animation



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tors. When they finished the animation,

they had the final camera to go with it.

Although at first the crew thought that

inserting the Handicam into the process

might be a bottleneck, it not only pro-

vided the handheld feel they were after, it

became a timesaver.

“I’d say about 85 to 90 percent of the

movie was filmed with the handheld cam-

era,” says James Williams, layout super-

visor. “Because it was relatively easy to

do in terms of setup, and the technology

was robust, we ended up using it even for

static shots. When we’re looking at the

characters, we get the slight movements,

the slight adjustments in frame.”

When they shot from shore, the lay-

out artists used a telephoto lens; when

a character was surfing and the camera

crew was standing in the water, they’d

often use a wide-angle lens. To clear an

area in the middle of their workspace at

Imageworks for filming, the 12 layout art-

ists moved their desks to the edges of the

room. In the center of the ceiling above

them was the grid of infrared lights.

“We jumped, we fell over, we did all the

things a documentary camera crew would

do,” says Williams. When Cody is injured,

the camera crew runs after the characters

transporting him for help. When a pen-

guin throws shells at a cameraman, he

ducks. “By physically placing a camera on

your shoulder, you truly felt present in the

scene for the first time,” Williams adds.

The scene was optimized geometry

that played in Autodesk’s Maya, which

meant that once the layout artists cap-

tured a camera move, it became the vir-

tual camera move for the scene without

needing any translation.

In addition to the documentary crew, the

SPEN television crew also shot footage

during Surf’s Up. For this footage, the lay-

out artists created camera rigs in Maya

that could displace themselves with the

movement of the water, as if the SPEN

crew had attached the cameras to a boat

or surfboard. For helicopter shots, the lay-

out artists translated the camera in Maya

using motion paths, and then used their

Handicam system to simulate the feeling

of a camera crew looking out the window.

The documentary crew cut some of

this footage into their film, as well as that

from little video cameras on the beach

and other cameras. Each of these sources

had a different look, from the high-defi-

nition quality of the SPEN footage to the

footage from yesteryear.

“As you’re watching the documen-

tary [about Cody] being filmed,” says

Williams, “various crews are shooting

the competition as well. And when some-

one is interviewed, you might see archi-

val footage.”

For the archival footage, the effects

artists dragged film prints through the

parking lot, scanned them, comp’d the

scratches into final shots, and added

dust, penguin feathers, and other effects

to “age” the images. Some shots in the

archival film and in the documentary

used cameras with limited depth of field

and imperfections around the lens. “All

the shots are based on real-world surfing

documentaries,” says Bredow, “all the

way down to the lenses.”

John-Paul Beeghly, director of pho-

tography for the surfing documentary

Step into Liquid, offered advice on lenses

and camera speeds. When he invited

Bredow to accompany him on location at

Cortes Bank 100 miles off the Southern

California coast where surfers ride

some of the biggest waves in the world,

Bredow jumped onboard (see “Wrangling

Waves,” pg. 18). He shot reference of surf-

ers unafraid to ride 60-foot waves and, of

course, of the waves. “At that point we

still didn’t know how we were going to

do the waves,” he says.


3D Animation. . . .

At top, from l. to r.: Imageworks modeled three types of waves with blendshapes, generated particles from the shape, ani-mated the wave using concentric rings, added the surfboard and surfer, and then rendered a final image (above).



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Bredow had helped develop CG water

for dramatic shots in the film Cast Away.

But water in those shots had appeared in

night scenes. Now, he needed to lead a

team that would create believable, surf-

able CG waves for shots in broad daylight.

“There was no room to hide,” he says.

And there was a second problem:

“We needed the waves to know where to

put the characters, the camera needed

to know where the white water was to

frame the characters, and we needed to

know where the character was so we

wouldn’t cause it to disappear in white

water,” Bredow says. “We needed all

three all the time, and it wasn’t clear

which needed to come first.”

Rather than trying to create water

with a fluid simulator, they decided to

model three types of waves using blend-

shapes that an animator or layout artist

working in Maya could use to change the

wave’s action. The idea is similar to using

blendshapes to manipulate a model into

various facial expressions over time (see

“Wave Effects,” pg. 10).

The modelers used reference footage

to create three base models: Mavericks, a

huge, gnarly wave that looked like those

off the coast at Half Moon Bay, California;

Pipeline, a perfect tube wave like those in

Hawaii; and spilling breakers that don’t

have enough power to throw water over

the lip (the part of the wave that curls over

at the top). Then, they animated these

waves to look like the reference footage,

and checked the animation against math-

ematical equations using a virtual speed-

ometer and gravity balls.

A speedometer placed in the mid-

dle of the wave measured how fast the

wave moved forward and broke from

left to right. Gravity balls placed on the

lip and released as the lip reached its

apex measured whether the lip fell at

the correct speed.

“Animators or layout artists could

animate the waves like characters,”

says Bredow. “They could also preview

the effects that go along with the waves

in real time—the white water and the

wake trails from the surfboards. The

wake enabled the camera operator to

frame the shot properly and position the

characters.”

John Clark, the wave animation lead and

a lifetime surfer, helped refine the Maya-

based rig. He also created 22 generic ani-

mations for each of the waves that anima-

tors could use as starting points.

Clark began by modeling the Maver-

icks wave. “Imagine a huge NURBS plane

created by a set of parallel curves,” he says.

“Each one of those curves is responsible

for a certain number of isoparms. The rig

has a series of concentric rings that run

along the surface, and as I rotate those

rings, they drive the curves through their

blendshape stages.” By swapping blend-

shape curves, he could use the same rig

for the three different wave types.

After testing rigs with various num-

bers of rings, Clark settled on 19 for

most of the waves, although a few spe-

cial waves needed 38 rings. By rotating

the rings, he could drive the wave from

flat, to peaking, to breaking, to crash-

ing, to flat again. “By animating one ring

at a time and offsetting that animation,

I created the down, or the line-breaking

action of the wave,” he says.

At the same time, Clark would ani-

mate such attributes as how far the lip


. . . .3D Animation

At left, the raw edge of the rendered wave becomes realistic when, at right, particle spray is added.

At top, appearing on camera makes some characters uncomfortable. At bottom, to create “archival footage” for the mocku-mentary, the effects crew aged animated sequences in various ways.



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would throw out or curl over, the depth

of the trough, the thickness and thinness

of the lip, the height and width of the

wave, and the roundness of the face. The

squarer the wave, the more powerful it

was. In addition, for helicopter shots, he

could control how much volume of water

was behind the wave, and for all shots,

the amount of digital noise that added

texture to the lip and face.

Clark also blocked out surfing shots

so that the layout department could film

them. “I had detailed storyboards, but

I made some adjustments once I got a

character on the CG wave to re-create the

feel and action they were after,” he says.

“When I had the generic waves set up, I’d

bring characters in and block out shots

really fast. The nice thing about having

the waves and the timing right is that it

dictates what the character and camera

must do. The surfer has to keep with the

lip of the wave. There is a certain amount

of time. And that all dictates what the

camera will do.”

The water dictated what the surfboard

would do. “We constrained the surf-

board to the forward translation of the

wave,” says Shaub. “It was locked to the

surface of the wave, and then we had off-

sets on the board with moveable pivots.

So, we had an infinite number of posi-

tions to pivot on the board. If Cody stands

on the nose hanging six, the board piv-

ots from there. It swings around from the

pivot on the tip.”

To make it possible for the short-legged

birds to run and, more important, surf,

the animated penguins had to have lon-

ger legs than real penguins, and they had

to have knees. “We couldn’t have any-

thing that would be bashed by the surfing

community,” says Shaub, “from the way

they carry the board with its tip down a

little bit, to how they surf on the water.”

Despite having surfing as the theme

for the film, however, much of the action

takes place on the beach and in the jun-

gles on Pen Gu Island.

“People look at this film and go, ‘Wow,

it’s about the water,’” says Lydia Bottegoni,

coproducer. “But there are many impres-

sive effects. The sand moves and inter-

acts with the characters every time they

take a step on the beach. Branches and

bushes and trees move.”

CG supervisor Daniel Kramer wrote

what the group calls the “sandbox” tool,

which worked in Side Effects Software’s

Houdini. “It was a newer incarnation

of the technology we used to put foot-

prints in snow in previous films,” says

Bredow. “The simple simulator in sand-

box allowed the sand to fill in the foot-

steps. Ironically, it was also the core

engine for the wakes.”

Technical director Tom Kluyskens

built a system in Maya and Houdini that

produced little breakers rolling onto shore.

And wave development lead Deborah

Carlson sent waves moving along the sur-

face of the ocean into infinity, whether

the weather was stormy or calm.

The nearly 50 people in the effects

department also created lava, feathered

penguins, and one chicken; they ani-

mated crowds and generated hundreds

of particle simulations. “Everything gen-

erates particles,” says Bredow. “We have

spray coming off the boards, off the lip

of the waves. The average wave shot has

460 million particles. We calculated that

with the number of wave shots in the

film; we generated 48 trillion particles.”

Lighters working in Imageworks’

new proprietary Katana software sent

hundreds of layers to Pixar’s RenderMan

for final renders. “Lighting was a huge,

complicated problem,” Bredow points

out. “The directors wanted the water to

look believable and photorealistic. And,

they wanted to art-direct it.” For photo-

realism, they used raytracing and refrac-

tion. For art direction, they provided

a “zone system,” which controlled the

shading on the waves.

“The water is astonishing,” says Jen-

kins. “You can really feel the waves. I

always knew we had a very special idea.

But, I couldn’t have imagined how phe-

nomenal it would look. There’s a shot of

Cody and Z on the beach. We’re looking

at their backs. The full moon is creating

glitter on the ocean. When they showed

that shot to me, I was kind of overcome. I

was amazed by the quality, the technical

achievement, the mastery of CG, where

we’ve come to now. It’s not the The Little

Mermaid, that’s for sure.”

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning

writer and a contributing editor for Com-

puter Graphics World. She can be reached

at [email protected].


3D Animation. . . .

Lani, the lifeguard, and Cody share a moment. Their surfboards have moveable pivots so that when they’re surfing, the board follows their movement.



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JP Beeghly: Hey Rob, can you get down to Dana

Point within three hours?

Rob Bredow: Uh, yeah. It moved up?

JP Beeghly: Yup, Sean thinks the swell is coming

early. Jamie Stirling and Carlos Burle are already in

the air from Hawaii. We’re leaving tonight.

Rob Bredow: I’ll grab my camera, and I’ll be on

my way.

The next 48 hours became my fi rsthand intro-

duction to the world of big-wave surfi ng. I tagged

along, invited by award-winning cinematographer

and producer JP Beeghly as his sound guy and grip

on an expedition to Cortes Bank with several profes-

sional surfers. Cortes Bank is a break 100 miles off

the coast of California, created by a giant underwa-

ter mountain that makes the water shallow enough

to create breaking waves with 30- to 60-foot faces

under the right conditions. Sean Collins, who runs

surfl ine.com, is the master at predicting these waves

and had just moved our timetable up by another 30

hours so we wouldn’t miss this swell.

In the summer of 2003, I found myself sitting

in a pitch meeting during the early days of Sony

Pictures Animation. The fi rst pitch was a detailed

series of 10 or more boards full of illustrations fea-

turing a bear and a mule deer, who we all know

today as Boog and Elliot, the stars of Open Season

(see ”Bearing Up,” September 2006). The story

was well under way, and the movie already had

the momentum of a picture going into production.

Almost as an aside, the story artist wandered over

to a single board that contained some of the fi rst

drawings illustrating the next movie in the produc-

tion pipeline. At that point, the story team was still

working out whether the story was ”West Side

Story meets The Endless Summer” or something

else entirely. But one thing was clear: We were

making a movie with waves and surfi ng penguins.

This was the movie that I wanted to be a part of.

After meeting up with everyone on the boat,

the night was spent trying to sleep below deck as

the vessel made its way 100 miles out to sea in

large swells. There was a reporter from New York

who, unfortunately, didn’t take any seasickness

pills...he was literally green.

Sony Pictures Imageworks has a long history of

working with water, and I have been a part of

most of those projects. From early small-scale,

photorealistic water in Stuart Little (1999) to the

full-scale nighttime storm in Cast Away (2000),

Sony Imageworks has been a part of making water

serve the needs of fi lmmakers for years. However,

Surf’s Up was clearly going to raise the bar a few

notches, since it required more than 20 minutes

of tropical waves with surfi ng penguins. Where to

start? We began by collecting reference from every

surfi ng documentary we could fi nd.

I remember waking up in the early morning

because the boat stopped rocking as violently as

it had been. I climbed up to the deck to see the

predawn sky and noticed that we were passing

an island, which shielded the boat from the giant

swells and made the water as smooth as glass. A

couple of minutes later, we left the shelter of the

island, and the boat began its familiar rocking as

we continued toward Cortes Bank.

One fi lm that stood out for me and Ash

Brannon and Chris Buck, the directors of Surf’s Up,

was Step Into Liquid. Because of its outstanding

photography and authentic view of the surfi ng life-

style, we all had fallen in love with the movie and

the surf documentary genre in general. I looked up

some of the people involved in the movie’s creation

and John-Paul (JP) Beeghly, the producer and cine-

matographer, visited Imageworks to give a lecture

to our crew on shooting a surfi ng documentary.

JP and the camera assistant spent the morn-

ing assembling the camera on a special stabiliz-

ing rig on the back of the deck and getting ready

to shoot. The surfers prepped their boards, and

we did a presurf interview with them about their

expectations of surfi ng the legendary Cortes Bank,

a break only a few surfers have ever braved. They

were hoping for the biggest waves of the year. I

remember the moment the captain of the boat

pointed out the window to white water breaking

on the horizon: Our fi rst glimpse of the break in the

middle of the ocean.

We took away several important things from

JP’s lecture and the movies we had been studying to

help us with our goal of making waves which were

detailed enough that the audience would leave the

theater feeling as though they had actually been

out there riding inside the tube themselves. We

knew we needed to handle slow motion naturally

throughout every department, since most spectac-

ular wave shots are photographed at 240 fps. We

needed the camera to go above and below the

surface. We needed to create a wide variety of

waves, and we needed to fi gure out how to push

20 minutes of wave shots through multiple depart-

ments. It was going to require a substantial team

of wave experts.

Our boat was drifting slowly, with engines run-

ning off the left shoulder of the break about 150 to

200 yards away from the white water. Even at that

distance, the waves looked huge. By 11 am, the


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surfers were being loaded onto the jet skis that

would be pulling them into the break. With

long lenses we could watch the surfers drop

onto the 40-foot faces of these waves and

disappear behind the swell before we could

see them again getting picked up by the jet

skis. A couple of times a surfer would get

caught in the churn, and it was diffi cult for

the skis to get in to save them between the

closely timed sets. It was pretty amazing.

Fortunately, Surf’s Up was the type of

project that attracted some of the best tal-

ent in the industry. Our CG supervisor in

charge of all the effects animation was Daniel

Kramer, who came from a strong effects back-

ground and led the team in writing tools and driv-

ing the look of the water. Matt Hausman handled

fi rsthand many of the hardest water elements in

the movie Castaway, and returned as one of the

VFX animation supervisors on this fi lm (see “Wave

Effects,” pg. 10). Debbie Carlson joined the team,

having just completed some of the most challeng-

ing sequences in The Polar Express, and imple-

mented much of the water surface and wave shad-

ing issues for our fi lm. We also found our wave

animation lead early in the project’s life: John Clark,

who brought years of actual surfi ng experience to

the crew and, in the end, animated many of the

waves himself.

We fi nished the day eating fresh fi sh that the

crew had caught and reviewing the tape that we

shot. The most popular was the helmet-cam foot-

age of one of the wipeouts during which Carlos was

forced down over and over again as the sets poured

in over him. He hit with such impact that it ripped

apart his backpack that held the waterproof recorder,

but, somehow, he and the equipment both survived.

Everyone had amazing stories to tell.

In the end, we made an animated documen-

tary starring surfi ng penguins and waves. The

waves were keyframed and controlled just like

the rest of the characters in the fi lm, and they

played a starring role. Whether it was the 50-

foot breaks in the sequence during which

Cody gets pummeled by the giant Pen Gu

break (modeled after the Mavericks break off

the shore of California), or the overhead pipe-

line waves that Cody and Geek surf on the

south shore, the movie has the authentic feel

of a surfi ng documentary.

Rob Bredow is a visual effects super-

visor at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TAKES CENT

The great American author Henry James once posed this ques-

tion: “What is incident but the illustration of character; what is char-

acter but the determination of incident?”

To look for such depth in the actions of the non-player charac-

ters (NPC) currently inhabiting modern video games would be

laughable, to say the least. Often seen walking into walls, stymied

by doors, or falling down readily apparent holes, NPCs have gained

little in gray matter over the years. Indeed, while motion capture has

brought lifelike authenticity to their motion cycles, and soaring polygon

counts and intensive normal mapping have defi ned the pores in their skin and

the weave of their garments, advancements in artifi cial intelligence have not

proceeded apace. Today’s NPCs are, unfortunately, all beauty and no brains.

They’ve been lobotomized, in part, by a lack of processing power available

for pathfi nding—the term used for the technology required to make an NPC react

to his or her situation and move from Point A to Point B. Pathfi nding can be so

taxing on the CPU that the cities and streets of video games—while always store-

lined and well landscaped—are curiously bereft of crowds in that they sometimes

resemble ghost towns. In addition, writing pathfi nding algorithms can be so chal-

lenging that programmers often resort to “cheats” by oversimplifying landscapes,

thoroughly scripting the characters’ actions, or manually positioning pathfi nding

data into the world to direct the NPCs—like blind men with canes—around obsta-

cles or toward hiding places.

Even worse, the developers might limit the NPCs’ interactivity with the envi-

ronment if they cannot, for example, climb stairs or use an elevator. Moreover,

the characters’ physical reactions are confi ned to a fi nite set of canned animation

cycles, which soon grow stale, repetitive, and boring. These crutches not only rob

the NPC of autonomy, but also more importantly, rob the player of the anticipation

of unexpected reactions, a feeling so crucial to fueling suspense in movies, novels,

and other storytelling forms.

Part one of a two-part series.

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ER STAGE IN NEXT-GENERATION GAMES

As the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 shatter the hardware barri-

ers that have previously handicapped AI, several new technologies

are emerging to capitalize on this newfound power; fi nally, this will

enable NPCs to set their crutches aside and take the fi rst steps toward

moving on their own. And, they will do so in unprecedented numbers,

fi lling the ghost towns of yesteryear’s games with bustling, intelligent

crowds. Thanks to advancements in behavioral AI and real-time, synthe-

sized human movement, NPCs will be capable of reacting and moving on

their own, and have almost infi nite freedom in responding to a situation; they

will even learn from human players, game designers, and from their own mis-

takes, like truly adaptive organisms.

Natural Motion’s Euphoria Of course, implanting a highly developed brain into an NPC would mean lit-

tle without a sophisticated motor control and nervous system to make the char-

acters’ bodies carry out those high-level decisions. Typically, animators would

keyframe or motion-capture cycles for various actions, such as running, falling,

or jumping, and then blend those same animations ad nauseam during gameplay.

Take the example of a baseball player charging home plate and colliding with

the catcher as he receives a throw from the outfi eld. Whether the runner slides

headfi rst or feetfi rst, or tries to swerve around the catcher, the play at the plate

can only unfold through a fi nite set of animations created for each player. The

moment is always “canned” (so much for unexpected reactions). Now, imagine

if every time the runner collided with the catcher, the collision would transpire

according to the characters’ muscular responses, just like in real life. In effect,

every single collision would be different.

Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS) is poised to cut the puppet strings off digi-

tal characters—both in fi lms and now in games. Through Euphoria, the real-time

version of NaturalMotion’s Endorphin software, DMS can assume control over a

By Martin McEachern



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character at any time during gameplay and adaptively drive the

character’s movements using AI motion controllers that simu-

late the character’s biomechanics, muscles, motor control, and

nervous system in response to sensory input. As a result, it pro-

duces interactive animations and, more importantly, unique

game moments.

The first title to introduce this technology to the world will be

LucasArts’ tentatively titled Indiana Jones, scheduled for release

in 2008. At E3 2006, onlookers were astounded by a sequence

set in 1939 San Francisco during which Indiana Jones balances

atop a moving trolley car, fending off enemies pursuing him in

jeeps. The enemies drove the jeeps in real time, responding to

the traffic around them; and if the henchmen hanging onto the

vehicle sides sensed an impending crash, they would jump onto

the trolley—not to attack Indy, but to avoid the accident. When

one was thrown into an oncoming truck, not only did the driver

attempt to swerve out of the way, but as the enemy hit the wind-

shield and rolled off the hood, he clung desperately to the grill

before getting pulled under the tires.

Self-preservation dictates these behaviors, not a scripted rou-

tine or predefined animations. Through the use of a physics

engine, Euphoria-enabled characters acquire sensory informa-

tion about the position, direction, and speed of other characters

or objects, and adjust their behavior accordingly. (For Indiana

Jones, LucasArts is using Havok Physics for both collision detec-

tion and rigid-body simulation.)

Astonishingly, many viewers reacted with empathy for char-

acters that seemed to be engaged in an independent pursuit

of their own self-preservation. Judging by this early reaction,

consumer expectation for unique game moments and height-

ened identification with NPCs may force the entire industry to

adopt DMS. Obviously, animators and programmers alike are

nervous about how such technology will affect their futures.

Will it spell the demise of ragdoll, keyframed, or motion-cap-

tured animation?

Rewriting the Rules of Animation

It is the opinion of Haden Blackman, project

lead for Indiana Jones, that traditional rag-

doll animation eventually will become obso-

lete. “Ragdolls typically look like sacks of

flour tied together; characters using Euphoria

behave in far more realistic and natural ways

because they are literally infused with a cen-

tral nervous system that takes into account

the ways in which muscles, nerves, and skel-

eton all interact in a real human body,” he

says. “Ragdolls flop around when knocked

over or thrown; Euphoria-enabled characters

protect their heads, roll with punches, try to

brace themselves when falling, and even try to

regain their balance. You’ll never see a falling

ragdoll character grab for another character or

object in the world, but at LucasArts, we have Euphoria charac-

ters that can perform these types of [self-preserving] behaviors.”

With the Xbox 360 running on three processors and the

PlayStation 3 firing on as many as seven, Torsten Reil, CEO and

co-founder of NaturalMotion, believes that the new generation

of consoles will take their place in gaming history as the birth-

place of intelligent, interactive animation. It’s an inevitable evo-

lution, because, as Reil says, “We finally have the CPU power

and technology to simulate characters, rather than just playing

back animation data. Moreover, it is what gamers want. You

just need to take a look at some of the major gaming forums on

the Web. People want characters that are believable, that act

differently every time. Rendering quality is very high already,

but people are dismayed by the artificial nature of static ani-

mation playback.”

Euphoria comprises two components: an authoring tool

chain for tuning DMS Behaviors (Euphoria:Studio) and a run-

time engine (Euphoria:Core) to execute them during gameplay.

After modeling and rigging a character—in Autodesk’s Maya or

3ds Max, for example—an artist uses Euphoria’s Maya or Max

plug-in to create the Euphoria skeleton based on the full charac-

ter rig. This skeleton also includes collision volumes represent-

ing the character’s mesh.

Using the Euphoria skeleton, an animator—often working

closely with a behavior engineer and AI programmer—deter-

mines and tunes a character’s behavior during a scene. The art-

ist can direct a character to act drunk, look at another character,

attempt to cling to an object or another character, or pursue any

other goal. In essence, an animator works much like a director

directing actors. To trigger the DMS behavior during gameplay,

the game engine sends the current frame of the running ani-

mation to Euphoria:Core, which seeds its skeleton with the in-

game skeleton, and then takes over. The process simply reverses

itself on the handover back to the animation data.

Since Euphoria is skeleton agnostic, it can assume control

NaturalMotion’s Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS) technology uses the processing

power of the computer’s CPU to create character movements in real time that result in

adaptive behaviors like those in the football tackles shown above.

Gaming. . . .




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over any kind of skeleton created in any modeling software—be

it biped, quadruped, or the more exotically articulated. In fact,

the software does not affect a developer’s existing modeling,

rigging, or animation pipeline, nor does it place a greater bur-

den on the AI programmer. “Your existing rig, including muscle

deformers, weightings, and blendshapes, continues to work as

usual,” adds Reil. In this way, Euphoria can also play canned

animation cycles at the same time as a DMS simulation, so a

simulated action can run simultaneously with facial animation

or lip-syncing, for example.

For armor-clad characters, such as the stormtroopers in

the upcoming next-generation Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

(scheduled for a Spring 2008 release), Euphoria will make

the armor and other accoutrements, such as hats and weap-

ons, interact naturally with the simulation of the body. Though

Euphoria’s focus is currently character simulation, it can also

control vehicles and other rigid objects while interfacing seam-

lessly with all the major physics engines, such as those from

Havok and Ageia.

LucasArts on DMS

So, what will become of the traditional keyframing animator in

this new era? “Keyframed animations and motion capture will

still have a prominent role in game development, and always

will,” says Blackman. “At LucasArts, the size of our anima-

tion teams hasn’t really changed. However, rather than wast-

ing time animating the tenth variation of a punch impact or a

fall, for instance, these animators are able to focus on charac-

ter performances and signature animations such as attacks. So,

we have the best of both worlds: endless variation supplied by

Euphoria, and handcrafted and memorable animations where

they are really needed most.” Blackman asserts that in addi-

tion to handcrafting animations, LucasArts animators will work

closely with engineers to develop Euphoria behaviors, and both

will be able to adjust parameters to achieve the best effect and

most authentic reactions.

Having unlimited interactivity within a game sequence

has triggered a radical mind shift in the way LucasArts now

approaches the creation of game environments. “I think that,

as an entire team, our mentality has shifted towards creating

environments and situations that take advantage of our charac-

ter’s behaviors and capabilities,” says Blackman. “The Euphoria-

enabled characters can do some surprising things, and finding

ways to spotlight these behaviors and interactions is a totally

different—and sometimes challenging—mind-set for design-

ers and engineers. We’re always asking: In this encounter or

area, where are the opportunities to show the player something

they’ve never seen before?”

A huge amount of variation in behavior can result from the

slightest changes in the environment. “A character thrown from

a balcony might try to catch his fall when he hits the ground, but

a character thrown from a balcony over a canopy of trees will

try to grab hold of branches or perhaps shield his face before he

hits the ground,” Blackman notes. Moreover, changing the size,

weight, and build of a character—from fat to skinny, for exam-

ple—will also alter the simulation.

Collaboration across the pipeline

By strengthening the collaborative relationship between char-

acter TDs, animators, AI, and gameplay engineers, Euphoria

is breaking down the compartmentalization of the production

pipeline. This unifying effect extends to the physics team as

well. “Our [behavior] engineers need to be aware of the impact

of physics simulation on the characters and their behaviors.

We all have to collaborate, iterating on the behaviors to ensure

that we get the best payoff for everything the player does,”

says Blackman.

While Indiana Jones 2007 will only feature Euphoria-enabled

humanoids, Blackman says that LucasArts is considering apply-

ing the technology to the creatures, droids, and even vehicles of

forthcoming, next-generation Star Wars games. Another revolu-

tionary technology set to debut on LucasArts’ next-generation

LucasArts is using NaturalMotion’s Euphoria to generate intelligent characters in its upcoming title based on the Indiana Jones film series.

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titles will be Pixelux’s Digital Molecular Matter (DMM).

A breakthrough in material physics simulation, DMM

enables every substance in the virtual word—be it organic,

inorganic, rigid, or soft—to behave with the properties of its

real-world counterpart. Glass shatters like glass, wood splinters

and breaks like wood, rubber bends like rubber, stone crumbles

like stone, and so forth. Thanks to DMM, even Jabba the Hutt’s

blubberous rolls of fat and the loose wattles of flesh dangling

from the cackling Salacious Crumb will jiggle and jostle with

unprecedented realism.

“We’re truly bringing together two bleeding-edge, simula-

tion-based technologies to make the interactions with charac-

ters and environments much more rewarding, surprising, and

authentic,” notes Blackman. “A stormtrooper thrown at a DMM

wooden beam knows that beam exists and might try to grab

onto it. The DMM beam also knows about the stormtrooper,

which means the weight of the stormtrooper might cause the

beam to splinter and eventually break, resulting in the storm-

trooper losing his grip or falling, at which point he might flail or

attempt to break his fall.”

Havok’s Behavior

While Euphoria is set to imbue next-generation NPCs with neu-

romuscular autonomy, new behavioral tools are enabling ani-

mators to author extremely complex behaviors quickly by

combining huge numbers of animation assets into graphi-

cally created blend trees based on “finite-state machines”

(branches of motion). Two of these middleware solutions

are Havok’s Behavior and NaturalMotion’s Morpheme, and

they’re giving artists control over the transition logic and

blends of their in-game animations—a power previously

reserved for programmers.

With either of these tools, animators can layer anima-

tions for a given situation and evaluate them with a “what

you see is what you get” result. Moreover, NaturalMotion’s

Morpheme can seamlessly integrate with Euphoria to real-

ize an infinitude of emergent behaviors. While Behavior does

not use DMS, it does offer some behavioral controllers, such

as grab, tackle, and climbing, to add emergent performance

to an NPC. To illustrate this capability, imagine a character

standing inside a building just as a missile strikes. As bricks

and rubble rain down, the character can use Havok Physics

to query for information about collidable objects, such as

the proximity and velocity of the debris, and then, using

Behavior, procedurally cover his head, run for cover, duck

under a doorway, or access any number of other “states” to

handle the event.

Moreover, Behavior-driven characters will deflect when

they brush up against a wall or another person. They can

reach out to touch or grab a nearby object, stagger differently

based on the direction from which they are hit, and blend

continuously between a walk, run, and turning without los-

ing traction or requiring a discrete change of state. If they fall,

they can automatically lunge toward a protective position. They

can climb ropes, tackle others, or be tackled themselves—all in

unscripted ways.

“Our goal is to keep creative control in the hands of the artists,

without requiring a lot of custom programming. With Havok

Behavior, artists can immediately pull animation and charac-

ter assets directly from 3ds Max, Maya, or XSI, and combine

them with physics, procedural animation, real-time IK, and

Havok’s Behavior enables artists to control the transition logic and

animation blends in a game.

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even facial animation, to create event-driven character perfor-

mances that react to changes in the game,” says Jeff Yates, vice

president of product management at Havok.

According to Yates, Havok Behaviors comprise “states,” each

representing a specific mode of movement for the character (such

as cover, run, or hide). Within each state, the artist can empower

a character with a wide array of capabilities through the use of

blending trees. Using a collection of built-in and user-written nodes,

artists can blend different motion types while acknowledging the

physical world to alter movements and event-change states.

Blended transitions between the states provide a smooth

bridge for shifting a character seamlessly between different

modes when a key event occurs. “The real backbone of Havok

Behavior is the generalized node processing tree that comprises

each state,” says Yates. “The processing tree for a particular

state is analogous to shader trees in today’s 3D modeling tools,

except that in Havok Behavior, the nodes of the tree are motion

generators, not shader programs.”

Character Behavior

Once animation cycles have been developed for a character,

the animator brings the character into Havok Behavior. Here, a

behavior “container” is filled with related states, each compris-

ing a component of the behavior. Within each state, a blend tree

is built that synthesizes animation for the character, using a

variety of operators, or nodes. While the simplest of these oper-

ators is an animation clip, more complex operators can blend

a variety of clips; at a higher level, they can incorporate phys-

ics, IK, and purely synthetic or procedural operators that per-

form special operations that may sense the environment using

collision detection from Havok Physics. In those, sensory infor-

mation is incorporated into the resulting motion, allowing the

character to reach and grab a nearby object, for instance.

“The process of building the behavior is akin to rigging a

character,” explains Yates. “It is a task that can be allocated to

a single person, like a character TD or a game designer who is

in charge of the ‘logic’ of a particular character’s motion graph.

This does not need to directly involve the animators, but it can.”

To program a character to catch a football, for example, art-

ists use Behavior to create nodes for a character that sense the

environment (through collision detection and raycasting) to

determine when the ball is within reach; the character then

attempts to reach it through an IK end effector. Complex, pro-

cedural interactions between characters, such as tackling, com-

bine balance nodes and keyframe animation with environmen-

tal sensing. When the player senses the other character, Behavior

drives the end effectors of the arms to the proper location, and

then drives to a pose to close the hands around the other player.

Simultaneously, the “tacklee” senses collision events and deter-

mines if they are severe enough to cause a “recoil,” or to warrant

a large-state transition—perhaps to a fully ragdoll-driven state.

At any time, the game’s AI can modify Havok Behaviors by

tapping into the values that control blends, transition times,

animation speeds, ease in/out values, and so forth, based on

the particular circumstances of an event. At critical moments,

just before transitions, the AI can intercept event traffic and

alter the behavior based on more global conditions that perhaps

only the AI knows or understands.

Havok Behavior also fully exploits other physics-based capa-

bilities of the Havok physics engine, including ragdoll simulation

and ragdoll “muscle” or constraint systems, which, together, drive

the pose of the character in controllable ways. A developer can

choose, for example, to transition from an animation-driven state

to a ragdoll node. “This transition equates to the familiar ‘death

by ragdoll’ effect,” says Yates. “But even better, a game developer

may choose to blend the ragdoll death with a [keyframed] ‘death

pose’ or ease it slowly into a ‘getting up’ pose so that the character

is lying in the right position to return to its feet.”

The Havok Behavior tool and SDK both extend and build

upon other Havok products, including Havok Animation and

Havok Physics, all of which target PS3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo

Wii, making it attractive to developers hoping to produce games

across multiple platforms. “Havok Behavior augments [tradi-

tional animation] tools by harvesting the keyframe animations

they produce, and giving the game creator a tool designed spe-

cifically for an event-driven, run-time world,” says Yates.

Of course, Havok demurs at LucasArts’ grim forecast for the

future of ragdoll animation, which is integral to Havok’s suite of

software. “This is someone’s personal opinion,” counters Yates.

“This seems to imply that Euphoria characters are unique in per-

forming self-preservation behaviors, and that they do it alone.

Euphoria characters are very much dependent on physics and

AI to tell them where they are in the world, and that there is a

threat approaching. Ragdolls are still the basic building blocks

for creating character performance, whether you’re using DMS

or Behavior, or any other tool. Without a stable skeleton with

defined joint constraints and correct mass distribution parame-

NaturalMotion’s new Morpheme, an advanced animation engine

and graphical authoring tool chain, gives animators unprecedented

control over the look of their in-game animations.

. . . .Gaming




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ters, you have nothing to apply your higher-level behaviors to.”

Indeed, ragdolls have advanced since Havok pioneered them

six years ago. At GDC 2005, Havok demonstrated a new genera-

tion of ragdolls that can be imbued with sophisticated behaviors,

such as ducking to avoid a missile or rolling to protect the body

from blows. These new-gen doll behaviors are created through

blending procedural controllers such as reach IK and physics.

Softimage’s Face Robot

As progressively autonomous characters cultivate greater empa-

thy and identification in the player, the need for advanced, real-

time facial animation systems to express and heighten their

emotions will only increase. For example, in Valve’s Half-Life 2

(see “Larger than Half-Life,” March 2004), the game engine and

AI combined 34 blendshapes non-linearly to make the charac-

ters express a wide range of emotions.

To address this growing need, Softimage Face Robot has

now been updated for real-time use. Face Robot provides art-

ists with tools for creating high-quality facial animations. At the

heart of the system is a proprietary soft-tissue solver (referred

to as the Jellyfish Solver) that procedurally simulates the flesh,

muscles, and bones of the face using motion-captured data or

keyframed poses. It will work with any facial mesh that fol-

lows the flow lines of the face. Once key points on the mesh are

selected, Face Robot automatically determines the underlying

musculature and binds the soft-tissue solver to the skin, then

allows the artist to animate the face and fine-tune its deforma-

tions to achieve the desired look.

With the new game export tool, Face Robot can transfer

the entire performance onto a game-ready version of the face,

which is typically, but not necessarily, lower resolution, by com-

puting an optimal envelope and animating a user-specified set

of bones to closely match the original performance. To capture

the highly detailed wrinkles and furrows that could only be

achieved through a denser model, Face Robot’s game export tool

also generates a series of blendable normal maps and applies

them to the face as the bone-weighted mesh deforms, thus re-

creating all the fine creases found on the high-resolution mesh.

“Face Robot is all about making it much easier for the artist

to create those intensely lifelike facial expressions,” says Gareth

Morgan, senior manager of business development

for Softimage. “So, if you have a dynamic emotion

engine at runtime, and a list of X number of facial

emotional states that you have to create, Face Robot

will help you make those facial states on your mesh

more easily and more quickly.”

Typically, says Morgan, to set up a robust facial ani-

mation system within a game pipeline—a challenge

that game developers must now inevitably confront—

usually takes more than a year’s work. “If you want to

do something with the quality level that next-genera-

tion gamers are going to expect, Face Robot will reduce

to a matter of weeks, even days, that long and complex

process of getting faces set up and into an animation pipeline.”

As Morgan points out, building a facial animation system

from scratch is something that happens at the pre-production

stage, and typically a developer doesn’t get that lead in time to

build an entirely new animation pipeline. “Facial animation is

different and specialized compared to full-body character ani-

mation; what Face Robot offers is an end-to-end solution for that

part of their pipeline, shortening the development cycle and

providing facial animation at a speed and level of realism that

would be otherwise impossible,” he adds.

LucasArts is also recognizing that the need for greater facial

expressivity will only intensify in the wake of advancing AI.

According to LucasArts’ senior engineer Steve Dykes, “We’re

presently working closely with Industrial Light & Magic on

new motion-capture techniques, including facial mocap tech-

niques that will allow our characters to actually act and show

an incredible range of emotions.”

For both the player and the characters, these emotions stem

from the constant thwarting of expectations during gameplay.

Watching a character struggle to cope with such an unyielding

world is what allows the player to root for or against their suc-

cess. But since this struggle has, until now, always been pre-pro-

grammed, video games have been unable to exploit this rooting

mechanism within the player and, hence, unable to unlock the

full emotional potential of the medium.

“Soon gamers will feel like they’re no longer playing a pro-

grammer, but a thinking entity. It puts them in an entirely new

head space,” says Dr. Paul Kruszewski, chief technology officer

at Engenuity, a leader in artificial intelligence solutions. While

experts disagree over the specifics of the impending AI revolu-

tion, one thing is certain: This is the generation that will sow

the seeds of emergent intelligence, seeds that may ultimately

grow to realize Henry James’ ideal in the interactive world.

Next month, Part 2 of this series looks at several AI middleware

tools aimed at improving AI in next-generation games.

Martin McEachern is an award-winning writer and contributing

editor for Computer Graphics World. He can be reached at mar-

[email protected].

Though not a game AI tool per se, Softimage’s Face Robot allows artists to cre-

ate high-quality facial animations for characters that are far more expressive.

. . . .Gaming




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or the past several years, Zoic

Studios has helped fast-track

movie-quality visual effects on

television by creating stunning imagery

for a number of series, including Battle-

star Galactica, Serenity, Buffy the Vampire

Slayer, Firefl y, CSI: Crime Scene Investi-

gation, and more. Most recently, the

facility found itself behind the wheel in a

new action-fueled Fox Television drama

called Drive.

Drive follows a diverse group of

Americans driving for their lives, or the

lives of a loved one, in a sinister, cross-

country road race. Some of them have

been coerced into joining the race, while

others have sought out the race on their

own amid rumors of a $32 million prize.

To put viewers on the edge of their seats

(and in their seats) during the pilot, Zoic

created a cutting-edge, two-minute open-

ing sequence that employs a range of dig-

ital and photographic techniques.

The segment moves seamlessly from

the open highway and into, around, and

through six cars and a motorcycle, guid-

ing the audience to the leader and the

star of the series, Nathan Fillion, at the

front of the pack. Zoic accomplished

this through a combination of live-action

stunt photography, a 220-degree matching

highway psyclorama, greenscreen stage

work, CG cars, refl ections, and charac-

ters. “Drive required the entire gamut of

visual effects practices to accomplish the

new techniques in the scene,” says Loni

Peristere, creative director and partner at

Zoic. The result is a seamless experience

in race photography as seen through the

eyes of an omniscient camera whose lens

is not bound by physics or structure.

According to Peristere, the dramatic open-

ing sequence was made possible through

extensive previsualization and planning

that required the production and effects

crews to follow a meticulous road map;

that map itemized and scheduled each

step in the lengthy and complex process.

The previz not only considered the tech-

nical limitations of the camera equip-

ment, but also established the technical

requirements of the sequence. The end

result appears to be one layer, although,

in reality, it comprises several thousand

layers. Moreover, it doesn’t appear to

have much technical fl ash; the effect is

almost invisible, save for the fact that the

viewers have this improbable omniscient

view, says Peristere.

The script called for a shot that moved

into the Florida Keys over Highway 1,

then down onto the road where the cam-

era would pass in and out of seven vehi-

cles involved in the race, thus introduc-

ing the cars and the drivers. With this

in mind, Peristere and creative director

Chris Jones met with Robyn Roepstorff,


. . . .VFX



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a senior previz supervisor who built the

previsualization in Autodesk’s Maya. The

artists at Zoic then brought this layout to

the set, where they used it as a working

template for shooting, giving CG super-

visor Jarrod Davis the ability to make

changes when necessary.

As Peristere explains, he and others

gathered the stunt team and professional

drivers around the monitors to discuss the

layout of the 37 pieces of the puzzle they

would need to make the shot whole. After

they viewed the previz, the group moved

to a long table where Andy Gill, the stunt

coordinator, used Matchbox cars to illus-

trate the shot pieces to the drivers, so

everyone could see the action from the

top down. “From there, we jumped into

the vehicles, rehearsed, and then shot the

pieces,” Peristere says. “The stunt team,

led by Spiro Ratzos, had to hit dangerous,

hard marks at high speeds. Once we had

our take for the performance, we had to

retake the scene using CircleVision (con-

sisting of several independent film plates)

for our psyclorama.”

According to Peristere, this meticu-

lous prep enabled the group to cut the

Zoic Studios created a number of digital

images and effects for the new Fox Televi-

sion drama Drive. What looks real often is

not, as this image series illustrates. Above,

from top to bottom, shows the elements

comprising the final comp (above, right).


VFX. . . .

Images courtesy Zoic Studios.



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shooting schedule in half, and as a result,

make the action and coverage broader

and better—“key successes for television

production,” he adds.

The sequence, at its core, shows an entire

freeway with several hundred cars, all

incorporated into a continuous two-min-

ute shot. And the layers add up: fore-

ground live action, onstage greenscreen

technocrane match plates, background

CircleVision psycloramas, a live-action

exit, 3D tracking, 3D reflection passes,

3D specular passes, 3D key lighting, a

3D beauty pass, a 3D ground pass, a 3D

tire pass, a secondary 3D traffic pass, and

more. In addition, Zoic had to introduce

11 characters in seven moving vehicles

without a cut.

“It’s two minutes-plus, and the most

challenging part was creating the illusion

of a camera that seems to move freely

up and down the freeway at high speed,

passing in and out of cars as it introduces

the characters,” describes Peristere. “No

equipment or solution alone could make

this happen; it required a concept of ideas

developed by many experienced people.”

While the end result is an invisible

effect that seems simple and unimpressive,

quite the opposite was true. According

to Peristere, the plan initially seemed

improbable from the concept stage. “It

was a creative idea that did not have a

solution that could be applied out of the

box,” he says. “Rather, it required a giant

think tank involving stunts, production,

special effects, and post to even begin to

fathom, and even with all that planning,

we were unsure of its final potential.”

All the driving shots involved digital

compositing and 3D reflections and light-

ing applications. So, everything was, to

some extent, affected digitally, despite

the fact that the imagery originated from

photography. “The actors never went on

the road. We used visual effects to put

them there,” Peristere points out. “We

needed to move freely in and out of the

vehicles, and the CG windscreens and

car interiors at times allowed us to shoot

without limitations.”

Similarly, the car exteriors could

only be used in a limited fashion, so CG

vehicles—modeled in Luxology’s Modo,

animated in Maya, and rendered with

NewTek’s LightWave—often were placed

within the real-world environment

to augment the scenes. According

to Peristere, the CG cars were used

mainly when the practical cars could

not be timed to meet the complex

performance demands.

The most pressing demand was

for a solution that would allow the

camera to move around the free-

way in an apparently omniscient

manner without the usual motion-

control limitations. Moreover,

the team needed to carry the

effect into episodic production,

which can require the work to

come together in literally less

than a week. And key to this

was an internal application

dubbed ZoicEarth, which, in

itself, became a complicated

R&D project, albeit one that

worked well toward Zoic’s

endgame of creating a vir-

tual “drive-through” world.

ZoicEarth is a 2D/3D proprietary imple-

mentation of immersive CircleVision

camera plates that gives the director the

freedom to move the camera in any way

he or she desires. This became ideal for

the show’s backgrounds, as it allowed

the camera to move freely on the stage,

thereby creating an extra level of real-

ism to the shots. However, this process

results in a terminal parallax that can-

not account for near-ground vehicles.

Therefore, those cars had to be computer-

generated or shot on stage. Zoic did both,

depending on the story point.

“The [CircleVision] effect involved

a high level of R&D, and we actually

The camera moves seamlessly among vehicles in the opening sequence. Yet, the actors were never actually on the ride, thanks to VFX.

All the actors were filmed on a greenscreen set (above);

Zoic added background imagery to finish the shots.


. . . .VFX



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walked down several roads until we

found the best one,” says Peristere. “The

photographic technique we used in the

final was not a sure thing, and we actu-

ally overbuilt the CG assets to protect

ourselves if we failed in the photographic

approach. The big question we had going

in was whether or not the lack of paral-

lax in the near-ground would render the

photographic method unusable; in post

we discovered this wasn’t an issue, as

the nodal point of the CircleVision rig

and its offset were good enough to render

the midground authentically. The near-

ground on the highway wasn’t an issue

here, and when it became one later, we

used CG. That is why the motorcycle was

built in CG.”

The series of shots, just like every

driving shot in the show, was a com-

posite; the actors never left the sound

stage. The CircleVision camera system

uses up to nine motion-picture cam-

eras to capture a 360-degree picture in

motion and in sync. The resulting plates

were then stitched together and rendered

out for the ZoicEarth application, which

involved the application of a 3D track and

the subsequent rendering of 3D passes

that later were used not only as

background imagery but also as

a lighting and reflection kit in 3D

for placing on the road the vehi-

cles that were shot on stage.

Zoic then used the lighting

chart gathered on location to light

the greenscreen set. Working in

Adobe’s After Effects, Apple’s Shake,

and Autodesk’s Combustion, the com-

positors prepped the plates, added the

backgrounds, and color-corrected

the imagery, then handed them off

to Steve Meyer, composite supervisor,

who brought all the big pieces together

in an Autodesk Flame system.

“One of the cool things about doing so

much photography for this [sequence] was

the quick comp. On stage it looked good,

but the comp had mismatched lighting

and reflections that could not come from

any other place besides a digital applica-

tion applied by an artist with a good eye,”

says Peristere. In the end, Meyer, along

with Nate Overstrom, brought these ele-

ments together using 3D renders of CG

vehicles provided by Davis.

In all, this VFX trip took a 16-person

team at Zoic nearly six weeks to com-

plete. Along the way, they

encountered new sites—

requiring the formation

of the ZoicEarth applica-

tion, which is now part of

the facility’s tool set. Says

Peristere: “It’s one killer

tool, but it wasn’t easy to

set up.”

And Zoic is continu-

ing its journey on this

series. Drive features

locations all over the

country, but production

will never leave the city

of Los Angeles. The exte-

rior driving sequences, which take the

audience from location to location, will

be photographed on a greenscreen stage,

while the location-based exteriors will be

shot by a second unit and combined in

post. In all, Drive will feature more than

120 greenscreen composites per episode,

transporting the viewer and the cast all

over the US and beyond, and Zoic will be

navigating that work, in addition to con-

tributing a number of 3D set extensions.

So, how is the effects work for Drive

helping Zoic push the state of the art

on television yet again? According to

Peristere, the work has opened up the

creative aspect somewhat. “The stage

production of location work is not only

economical but practical. We can shoot

14 pages a day without worrying about

tow rigs and wild walls,” he says. “This

is efficient and exciting.”

Furthermore, the composited world

opens up production value, allowing the

crew to travel to exotic locations—or just

down the street—without the myriad

of complications that come along with

taking the first unit there. “It is really a

beginning for a tool and a process that

will evolve and give us a great deal for

less,” says Peristere. “The realism of the

work also gives production new answers

to problems that they may have written

themselves out of before. Now they can

keep the idea in the show because we can

give it to them without breaking the bank

or the schedule.”

As Zoic proved, anything can happen

on a road trip.

Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor for

Computer Graphics World.

On set, Zoic used its proprietary ZoicEarth,

which gave the director the freedom to

move the camera without limitation, result-

ing in a virtual drive-through world.

The vehicles do not have windows, allowing for the camera to

freely move in and out of the car interiors.


VFX. . . . Previous Page Contents Zoom In Zoom Out Front Cover Search Issue Next Page


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. . . .Trends and Technology


It’s offi cial. GPUs are not just about

graphics any longer. With the release

of its latest generation G80 chip and

accompanying CUDA driver, Nvidia’s

GPUs are now equal-opportunity,

fl oating-point compute engines aimed

at a wide variety of uses. Make no mis-

take: The company isn’t backing off 3D

graphics, and the G80 promises to push

both throughput and render effects to

the next level. But now the company has

another angle to push its chips: high-per-

formance, general-purpose computation

for demanding, fl oating-point intensive

applications in a new category called

GPU Computing.

The GPU Grows Up

Once upon a time, hardwired graph-

ics accelerators ruled the graphics world.

Limited to the subset of features that hard-

ware designers chose to implement, a per-

son could turn a rendering function on or

off, albeit with very limited control on how

it rendered. The user might have Z-buff-

ered triangles with Gouraud shading and

depth-cued vectors, but not much more.

And as far as using the accelerator for any-

thing other than rendering, forget it.

During the past fi ve years, that has all

changed, and in a big way. The year 2001

marked the advent of the programmable

graphics shader with Nvidia’s GeForce3.

Hardwired vertex transform/lighting and

pixel engines gave way to ISV program-

mable shader units. Primitive in their

fi rst incarnations, these units today have

evolved to deliver massive amounts of

fl oating-point power—power made avail-

able to the programmer through high-

level shader languages.

With successive generations of shader-

based GPUs, vendors and analysts alike

began pointing out that GPUs had not

only achieved parity with most CPUs

in terms of complexity, but in a cou-

ple of important aspects they reigned

supreme. GPUs trounce CPUs on matrix

fl oating-point mathematics and tend to

be coupled with a huge amount of band-

width for streaming applications. And

the growth in that raw horsepower, bet-

ter exported to the application via pro-

grammable shader architectures, had

not gone unnoticed in technical and sci-

entifi c communities.

A grassroots campaign has since

grown from a few factions of the sci-

entifi c communities and become more

organized, looking for ways to harness

all those FLOPS for general-purpose com-

puting. The idea of high-performance

computing (HPC) on GPUs was born.

But hopeful users soon found more

than a few issues in porting their code

and algorithms to GPUs, all of which

stemmed from the basic principle that

GPUs were built specifi cally for graphics

and CPUs were not.

These included the idea that: the GPU

outputs colors (or Z) into a quad/trian-

gle region; there was no memory man-

agement on the GPU; no communica-

tion existed between stream processing

stages (everything in and out of mem-

ory); there was no scatter support, load,

or store functions; the primary GPU data

type was a stream, whereas the CPU was

a word (32 bit); graphics languages were

very different and more diffi cult to pro-

gram; and GPUs were limited in instruc-

tions, all geared to rendering.

Most notably, the programmer had to

think—and structure instructions and

data—in terms of geometry and pixels.

The GPU operated on a stream of verti-

ces and output colors (and Zs) restricted

to memory regions defi ned as triangles

or quads. Also, there was no support for

scattering data—that is, writing data to

some location based on an index—and

awkward, incomplete support for gather-

ing data. Data was output strictly as pixel

colors scanned into a quad or triangle.

Feeding the GPU often meant organiz-

ing input data as textures, and that was

something only the pixel shader could do,

not the vertex shader.

All in all, this was not a pretty sight

for programmers accustomed to CPUs.

Advocates of HPC on the GPU loved the

processing power, but to program, they

needed to see more of a typical comput-

ing model rather than a typical render-

ing model.



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Trends and Technology. . . .

A Step Forward for HPC

Nvidia and ATI were surely intrigued by

the possibilities of HPC on the GPU. Both

would welcome the prospects of fi nd-

ing new pockets in the market to gener-

ate more volume. But one problem was

that the early vocal GPU adopters weren’t

promising much volume, but, rather, were

presenting traditional HPC opportunities,

such as scientifi c computing, geosciences,

and non-polygonal graphics like fi nal-

frame or volume rendering. Nvidia, for

one, generates remarkable revenue-ply-

ing niches in the professional ranks, but

does so primarily with the same silicon

designed for the consumer/gaming ranks.

Making incremental changes to a complex

chip in order to serve new markets is a

powerful proposition for any vendor.

In 2005, the HPC community got some

help for free, thanks to Nvidia’s G70 GPU

and Microsoft’s DirectX 9c API. There

was nothing in DX 9c specifi cally for

HPC, but advancements built for graphics

helped nonetheless. Single-precision (32-

bit) fl oating-point throughout, dynamic

branching, larger code sizes, and vertex

textures eased some of the programming

issues. Vertex texture support—the read-

ing of indexed texture data into the vertex

shader—in particular, helped address the

lack of gather support.

With the G70 and DirectX 9c, the pro-

grammer had a reasonable, though still

far from simple, solution—streaming

data in from video memory, through a

shader, and then back out to memory.

Even with the help of the G70 and DX

9c, the technology was still limited to a

select few. These were typically academics

who were desperate to fi nd some reason-

ably priced, capable hardware solution to

work their hugely compute-intensive prob-

lems, but who also possessed deep insight

into the 3D graphics pipeline. In order to

tap into all those FLOPS, a person faced

the daunting task of tearing apart the

algorithm and data and then effectively

repackaging it as a stream-based graphics

rendering operation.

The As, Bs, and Cs

of GPU Computing

Recently, the industry got a look at the fi rst

fruits of Nvidia’s labor. As part of the roll-

out of its latest G80 GPU, Nvidia unveiled the

category of GPU Computing, the company’s

fi rst comprehensive answer to the demands

of HPC on the GPU. GPU Computing cov-

ers both hardware solutions specifi cally tai-

lored to the needs of the HPC market and

software, in the form of CUDA, or Compute

Unifi ed Device Architecture, a C compiler

and standards libraries that provides a com-

pletely new programming environment for

GPUs—one designed and optimized for gen-

eral-purpose data parallel computing.

Nvidia opened up GPU Computing in

conjunction with the launch of the G80,

the code name of the GeForce 8 series,

High-performance

computing on the GPU:

Where it has come from,

where it is going, and

why CPUs wil l never

be the same again

By Alex Herrera

GPU Computing Uncovered

With the release of Nvidia’s CUDA,

users are able to accomplish

high-performance computation

for fl oating point-intensive

applications. Here, an

artist can see quick results

while manipulating a

complex model.



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. . . .Trends and Technology


with a couple of key pieces of the planned environment—the

debugger and profi ler, and double-precision accuracy—follow-

ing later. The GPU Computing model exploited the G80’s unifi ed

shader architecture, where shader resources are not built specifi c

to vertices or triangles and can be more effi ciently allocated to

whichever processing threads are active and demand attention.

Most notably, CUDA provides: a dedicated, general-purpose

computing model, standard C language, load/store support, and

a more complete instruction set. The parallel data cache elimi-

nates the need to make multiple passes to memory, and concurrent

threads can share data. Specifi cally, with CUDA, GPU Computing

programmers get their own dedicated computing model. The driv-

ers and models can run concurrently, in two separate contexts,

allowing developers to, for example, calculate physics in the CUDA

context and send results off to a graphics (DirectX) context.

Running multiple threads on unifi ed, general-purpose

shaders, CUDA eliminates the awkwardness of mapping algo-

rithms and code-to-triangle rasterizers and graphics shad-

ers. Programmers can thankfully forget about vertices, trian-

gles, and pixels, and stick with a model that better mimics what

they’re used to. Textures are still available (for free, as they

have to be there for graphics), and are something an image fi l-

tering application might use, for example.

The programming language is standard C, and in the

CUDA model, programmers call a function, specifying how

many threads to run. The G80’s Massively Multi-Threaded

Architecture manages hundreds of threads, allocated across the

chip’s 128 shader units (each running at 1.35 GHz).

The G80 implements a parallel, software-managed cache,

which CUDA uses as a central repository to store and share data

among shader units and the threads running on those units.

With the cache and thread manager, threads can share data and

pass along output directly to other threads and shader units,

thereby resolving another of the oft-quoted complaints of GPU

Computing programmers.

Nvidia is working with ISV partners to optimize code to best

exploit CUDA and the GPU Computing engine.

With the new capability, Nvidia promises big bumps in

throughput. Beyond easing the programming burden,

Nvidia’s GPU Computing technology promises bigger

boosts in computation throughput. Holding up a host

of test cases from applications in weather, oil/gas

exploration, medical imaging, simulations, and, of

course, physics, Nvidia is touting some spectacular

numbers, as compared to Intel’s recent Core 2 Duo

CPU (at 2.66 GHz).

There is no clear way of commenting on Nvidia’s

specifi c sped-up numbers, but we don’t have trou-

ble believing they’re substantial. Schmid & Partner

Engineering AG, which, along with Acceleware, is working with

researchers at Boston Scientifi c to investigate the impact of mod-

ern design parameters on implantable medical devices, such as

pacemakers, when exposed to electronic magnetic fi elds. Nik

Chavannes, director of software at Schmid & Partner Engineering,

states: “Running electromagnetic simulations using Nvidia hard-

ware empowers faster processing times by factors of 25 or more,

enabling the analysis and optimization of medical products apply-

ing a level of complexity that nobody dreamed of, even two years

ago. Nvidia’s and Acceleware’s solutions have opened completely

new worlds for Computational Electromagnetics.” Listen closely,

and you’ll probably hear more cheering from all those HPC users

anxious and ready to put that boatload of G80 FLOPS to work.

Changing Tide

Nvidia—not to mention AMD/ATI and, most likely, Intel—are pav-

ing the way for dramatic changes in the computer architecture. Any

vendor is going to claim that its new technology will change the

industry; that’s just marketing. But when can you tell that a vendor

is really serious about such claims? When it puts its money where

its mouth is, and Nvidia’s done just that with GPU Computing.

Adding cost, schedule, and risk to a GPU is a serious commit-

ment, but that’s what Nvidia did. And it plans to continue doing

so, tipping its hat about double-precision fl oating-point operations

in some next-generation GPUs later this year. Double-precision

fl oating point today has virtually no applications in graphics ren-

dering, so it would have to justify itself based exclusively on GPU

Computing. Yep, Nvidia is bullish on the notion of GPU Computing,

and it’s willing to take on signifi cant risk to make it work.

What’s pushing them? Maybe it was that promise of sub-

stantial incremental volume for GPUs running as processors

for high-performance computing markets. Or maybe Nvidia

was taking the “build it and they will come” approach, count-

ing on creative developers to come up with new killer applica-

tions that can take advantage of an HPC-optimized GPU solu-

tion. Or maybe it was something else.

Nvidia’s GPU Computing technology allows for far greater

computational throughput, making it ideal in the medical

realm, where users regularly interact with very dense imagery.



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Trends and Technology. . . .


In this industry, if you’re a vendor of peripheral chips, you’re

constantly looking over your shoulder for the relentless threat of

obsolescence by integration. Remember discrete chips for audio,

telephony, and networking? Gone.

Looking to the Future

Integration has taken a toll on those vendors making a living

off graphics already. Remember, it’s Intel that sells more graph-

ics hardware than anyone, integrating controllers in its north

bridge. Arguably, gaming is the only reason that graphics inte-

grated in memory controllers have not relegated both ATI and

Nvidia to niche roles. GPUs are continually under pressure to

justify themselves as discrete components.

One sure way to ensure that a peripheral is not subsumed

by the CPU is for it to stop being a peripheral. In fact, Nvidia

is not the fi rst GPU vendor to substantially shift its architec-

ture toward general-purpose computing, though it is the fi rst to

deliver a comprehensive solution to market.

In last year’s R520, ATI already made advances to make

its architecture more general purpose, for example, with a

big array of general-purpose registers (providing inter-thread

communication a la Nvidia’s parallel data cache) as well as its

UltraThreading technology, preceding the G80’s GigaThread.

And in early October, ATI more formally positioned its hard-

ware for more general-purpose computing applications with its

announcement of StreamComputing, an initiative that will prob-

ably look something like CUDA when it’s offi cially unveiled.

But guess what? GPU vendors aren’t the only ones reading

the tea leaves to make sure they’ll still be around in 10 years.

With the capabilities of GPUs on par—or exceeding—CPUs,

don’t think companies like AMD and Intel aren’t concerned

about the incursion of GPUs on their turf. We’ve just witnessed

the blockbuster acquisition of ATI by AMD—what do you think

that was all about?

AMD had to be ready. It needed the graphics expertise to ensure

that it was prepared to evolve, no matter what direction the base-

line architecture would take. Whether it is the CPU taking on GPU

functionality, CPUs sharing the motherboard with GPUs, or a fully

integrated combined CPU/GPU, AMD felt it critical to improve its

footing—critical enough to justify the $5.4 billion buyout of ATI.

Earlier this year, before ever revealing its intentions regard-

ing ATI, AMD had already tipped its hat when it made a fl urry

of announcements paving the way both for GPGPU and the ATI

acquisition. First it announced it would license Opteron’s cache-

coherent HyperTransport and socket, allowing third-party pro-

cessors to share the motherboard with its fl agship processor.

Then it followed up with Torrenza, a platform formalizing the

concept of “socket fi llers,” allowing OEMs to build hybrid sys-

tems optimized to deliver maximum performance for specifi c

application demands.

From Torrenza, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the CPU

integrating all or part of that third-party accelerator. And this past

October, that’s precisely what AMD announced with its Fusion

program, promising future multi-core chips starting in 2008,

combining both CPU and GPU cores on a single processor.

So, what’s Intel doing during all of this activity? For a couple

of days, Wall Street, for one, was guessing it would go and acquire

Nvidia, resulting in a short-term spike in its stock price. But there

were lots of reasons that made such a move unlikely. Intel’s got

graphics technology in-house, though it has not had success doing

the type of innovative, high-performance designs as Nvidia or ATI.

To date, Intel hasn’t been as vocal on how it is position-

ing itself for this changing landscape. But at the latest Intel

Developer Forum last September, the company did unveil the

concept for a future large-scale, multi-core platform called

Terascale. Terascale combines both general-purpose and special-

purpose cores in a processor, supported by a new interconnect

fabric. Intel didn’t say so, but one can imagine the general-pur-

pose core would be a conventional x86 core, and a special-pur-

pose core might be a GPU or some subset/variant thereof.

For its part, Nvidia is going it alone, at least for now. With GPU

Computing, it is fi rst to market with a better-thought-out, compre-

hensive solution for carrying out HPC tasks on a GPU. It should

lead to incremental business for Nvidia GPUs, fi rst and foremost

in higher-volume gaming, as well as a non-trivial amount in

lower-volume but higher-margin workstation applications.

As it has in the past, Nvidia is taking risks and aggressively

blazing its way ahead. And if the past is any indication of future

success, Nvidia is sure to be rewarded handsomely.

Alex Herrera is a senior analyst with Jon Peddie Research and

author of “JPR’s Workstation Report.” Based in Tiburon, CA,

JPR provides consulting, research, and other specialized ser-

vices to technology companies, including graphics develop-

ment, multimedia for professional applications and consumer

electronics, high-end computing, and Internet-access product

development. For more information about the reports, visit www.

jonpeddie.com/special/Workstation.shtml.



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38 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2007

PortfolioSI

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Clockwise from top:

Ark (Best of Show) This creative animation, produced by Marcin Kobylecki and Grzegorz Jonkajtys of Poland, captured the SIGGRAPH Animation Festival jury’s eye to take the top prize.

Dreammaker (Jury Honors) From Germany, this piece by Leszek Plichta of Filmakademie Baden-Wurttemberg surpassed the expectations of the jury, thereby receiving accolades from some of the industry’s top representatives.

En Tus Brazos (Award of Excellence) Another student entry, this short from directors Francois-Xavier Goby, Edouard Jouret, and Matthieu Landour of Supinfocom/Premium Films, also garnered a coveted prize.

Often called the Academy Awards of computer graphics, the annual SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater is a premier event for the world’s most innovative and amazing digital films and video creations. This year, an internationally recognized eight-person jury—which, collectively, has expertise in all the various segments of the industry—selected 39 submissions for the honor of appearing in the 2007 Electronic Theater. All told, the jury, in three and a half days, reviewed more than 900 entries, which is 20 per-cent more than the total of the previous record for submissions. The jury’s choices rep-resent outstanding achievements for this era in the particular area of computer graph-ics that each animation represents, says chair Paul Debevec of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

The entries to the Computer Animation Festival—which comprises the Electronic Theater and Animation Theaters—are representative of the wide range of interests in



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© Nvidia© Nvidia

JUNE 2007 Computer Graphics World | 39

computer graphics present at SIGGRAPH, including animation, visual effects, research, scientific visualization, art, broadcast, and real time. Similarly, they reflect CG excel-lence from around the globe: 72 animations are from outside the US. “I am thrilled with the jury’s selections and feel they did a great job not only in choosing innovative and excellent pieces, but also in selecting those from across the board in all the submis-sion categories,” says Debevec.

Aside from the Electronic Theater pieces, another 93 were chosen for the Animation Theaters. This content will be presented in themed segments that will play throughout the show.

Three groundbreaking films received the coveted SIGGRAPH festival awards: “Ark,” Best of Show; “Dreammaker,” Jury Honors; “En Tus Brazos,” Award of Excellence.

“This year’s winners are perfect examples of how computer graphics is enabling small,

Clockwise from top left:

HP Hands “Paulo Coelho” This image is from a spot for HP by creative directors Rich Silverstein and Steve Simpson from Motion Theory in the US.

Cascades This still is from a technical animation by the Nvidia Demo Team.

Nvidia Real-Time Graphics Research: The GeForce 8 Demo Suite This image is also from R&D by the Nvidia Demo Team.

A Gentlemen’s Duel This amusing animated short film was sub-mitted by Blur Studio.



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Portfolio

40 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2007

Portfolio

independent groups to create films with vast landscapes, complex characters, and amazing visuals,” says Debevec. “Just as CG blurs the line between real and virtual, each of these, in its unique way, explores what is tangible and what is imaginary, and whether that difference is important.”

According to Debevec, this is a notable year for studio shorts in the Electronic Theater. There are always tent poles of the show that everyone looks forward to, and they include Pixar’s “Lifted,” Blue Sky’s “No Time for Nuts,” and Blur’s “A Gentlemen’s Duel,” he notes. “Not every show is lucky to have three of the major studios with a major shorts effort.”

2007 is also a big year for real-time content; to that end, there are nearly 10 min-utes of real-time material in the theater. One highlight is a documentary of a new game

Clockwise from top left:

Happiness Factory This still is from a compelling commer-cial directed by Todd Mueller and Kylie Matulick of Psyop.

Gears of War This game image is courtesy of Mark Rein and Epic Games.

Formation of a Spiral Galaxy A wondrous visual, this proj-ect came from The Four-Dimensional Digital Universe Project by the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan.

Travelers: Snowball Complex in composition, this still is from a piece courtesy of Dan Lemmon, visual FX supervisor, and Weta Digital.



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JUNE 2007 Computer Graphics World | 41

module for Half-Life 2, called “Portal,” which has an especially innovative gameplay element. Additionally, there will be a montage comprising various real-time techni-cal advances in gaming, as chosen by the jury. Also, the show features various scien-tific visualizations, including a breathtaking animation of a galactic formation, called

“Formation of a Spiral Galaxy.” “Every piece is there because it is different—it pushes beyond the borders of what

we have seen before,” says Debevec. “And there are more than a few laugh-out-loud moments that are humorous in unexpected ways.” In other words, there is something for everyone to enjoy.

A small selection of images from this year’s the Electronic Theater is presented in these pages. —Karen Moltenbrey

At right, from top to bottom:

Swirl An intriguing still from the animation presented by Lee Griggs of the UK.

Raymond An image from a piece by Fabrice le Nezet, Jules Janaud, and Francois Roisin of The Mill in the UK.

Sears Tools “Aboretum” This selection comes from an ani-mation by Sabrina Elizondo of Method Studios in the US.

300’s Liquid Battlefield The highly stylized movie 300 con-tains a number of CG achievements by various facilities, includ-ing this work by Scanline VFX, submitted by Stephan Trojansky and Danielle Plantec.



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For additional product news and information, visit w w w . c g w . c o m

products

SOFTWARE

V I D E O

Camera and Color ControlWin FilmLight and Grass Valley demon-

strated FilmLight’s Baselight system in direct

control of the entire command block of the

Grass Valley Spirit Classic DataCine camera.

This event marked the fi rst time a software-

based color-grading system has been used

to control a Spirit DataCine, and the pairing

lends to a more productive telecine work-

fl ow. Baselight controlled the system’s fi lm

transport, primary and secondary color, focus,

resize and rotate, sharpness, and degrain fea-

tures. The companies also have integrated

Grass Valley’s Bones Dailies postproduction

solution with FilmLight’s Truelight color-man-

agement system as part of a calibrated, on-set

to deliverables production pipeline. Baselight

control for Spirit Datacines and Truelight color

management for Bones Dailies are available

this month.

FilmLight; www.fi lmlight.ltd.uk

Grass Valley; www.thomsongrassvalley.com

Encoding in a FlashWin Kulabyte is shipping the Kulabyte

Professional Flash Encoding Suite, introduced

at NAB2007. The video encoding solution

uses industry-standard codec engines and

combines Kulabyte’s Live 2-pass variable bit

rate encoding and on-demand broadcast-

ing. The Kulabyte system enables media cre-

ators to encode and distribute digital content

more than 12 times faster than industry-stan-

dard codec times, while also delivering high

picture quality and optimal bandwidth use.

Kulabyte’s Professional Flash Encoding Suite,

packaged with the On2 VP6 codec engine,

starts at $8000.

Kulabyte; www.kulabyte.com

P L U G - I N S

Fx for Final CutMac Noise Industries unveiled its FxFactory

for Apple Final Cut Studio 2, a visual effects

tool for postproduction and broadcast pro-

fessionals. FxFactory Version 1.05 includes

GPU-accelerated, native visual effects plug-

ins for Final Cut Pro 6 and Motion 3, via

Apple’s FxPlug architecture. The latest edi-

tion also boasts custom presets, new fi l-

ters, and GPU-accelerated rendering. The

included FX for Motion Pack offers Glitch,

3D Shatter, Panel Vision, and RGB Trails

effects plug-ins; whereas the FX for Editing

Pack contains Cheshire Fade, Explode Away,

Panels Mix Off, Spinner, and Zipper transi-

NEWS FROM



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PRODUCTS • SERVICES • EMPLOYMENTclassifieds

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tions. Noise Industries also demonstrated

two new FX Packs: ImageFlow FX with 10 dif-

ferent animation styles, and TextFlow FX with

10 beat-synchronized text animation effects.

FxFactory Pro is priced at $399 and includes

the Motion and Editing Packs. Version 1.0.5 is

a free update for current owners of FxFactory.

The Motion and Editing Packs are each avail-

able for $99.

Noise Industries; www.noiseindustries.com

HARDWARE

V I D E O

Red or Blue?Bluefish 444

introduced its

RedThing and

BlueThing com-

pact multi-standard

HD-SDI to DVI-I converters,

enabling HD and SD signals to be viewed

on virtually any LCD, plasma, or projector dis-

play. The solutions automatically sense and

size incoming signals and output resolution

to ensure image conformity with 16:9 and 4:3

screens. Its high-quality spatial and temporal

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Other features include DVI-D and DVI-I out-

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by an external AC/DC power supply and lock-

ing connector. RedThing and BlueThing are

priced at $1695 and $2095, respectively.

Bluefish 444; www.bluefish444.com

Collaborative EncoderWin Kulabyte and AMD partnered at NAB

to demonstrate the Kulabyte Professional

Encoding Suite, a multi-core encoding system,

driven by Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors

in an eight-socket server. This 16-core video

encoder server is said to deliver a 60 percent

speed increase over comparable multi-core

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Kulabyte; www.kulabyte.com

AMD; www.amd.com

S T O R A G E

It’s a RAIDCiprico demonstrated a direct-attached stor-

age system using the new PCI Express exter-

nal cabling standard and based on the compa-

ny’s RAIDCore software RAID stack. Ciprico’s

RAIDCore was running on a direct-attached

20GB/sec PCI Express 8x external connection

to a SATA 2 I/O card. The external card was

mounted in a 3U, 16-drive chassis with 16

Hitachi 1TB SATA 2 drives running Adobe’s

video editing suite and supporting multiple

streams of HD video. The scalable RAID system

is designed to meet the bandwidth demands

of HD, 2K, and 4K video applications.

Ciprico; www.ciprico.com

P R E V I Z

Precision with PrevizionCinital showcased the latest motion-track-

ing and visual effects features in Previzion

HD Studio, the company’s end-to-end vir-

tual studio solution for previsualization and

visual effects creation. Previzion aids artists

at visual effects and film, television, and mul-

timedia companies in integrating computer-

generated graphics and live video to create

synthetic visual spaces. The solution com-

bines camera motion tracking, scene integra-

tion technology, and advanced features such

as keyed subject occlusion. Use of the FBX

file format ensures camera motion data can

be recorded and imported into popular 3D

programs, including Autodesk Maya and 3ds

Max, Softimage XSI, Luxology Modo, and

Maxon Cinema4D.

Cinital; www.cinital.com

June 2007, Volume 30, Number 6: COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD (USPS 665-250) (ISSN-0271-4159) is published monthly (12 issues) by COP Communications, Inc. Corporate offices: 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204, Tel: 818-291-1100; FAX: 818-291-1190; Web Address: [email protected]. Periodicals postage paid at Glendale, CA, 91205 & additional mailing offices. COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD is distributed worldwide. Annual subscription prices are $55, USA; $75, Canada & Mexico; $115

© 2007 CGW by COP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without permission. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by Computer Graphics World, ISSN-0271-4159, provided that the appropriate fee is paid directly to Copyright Clearance Center Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 USA 508-750-8400. Prior to photocopying items for educational classroom use, please contact Copyright Clearance Center Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 USA 508-750-8400. For further information check Copyright Clearance Center Inc. online at: www.copyright.com. The COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD fee code for users of the Transactional Reporting Services is 0271-4159/96 $1.00 + .35.

POSTMASTER: Send change of address form to COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD, P.O. Box 3296, Northbrook, IL 60065-3296.

International airfreight. To order subscriptions, call 847-559-7310. Ride along enclosed.



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Contents Zoom In Zoom Out For navigation instructions ... · Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, another third, hit some rough seas dur-ing its opening weekend at the box