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I N N O VAT I O N S I N V I S U A L C O M P U T I N G F O R T H E G L O B A L D C C C O M M U N I T Y

Computer

w w w . c g w . c o m JULY 2008 Computer Graphics World | 1

W O R L D

Departments

Editor’s Note 2A Man of ‘Character’

Remembering pioneer makeup artist, visual effects artist, director, producer, costume designer, and writer Stan Winston.

Do you have a fond memory of Stan or one of his projects? Share them at

www.cgw.com.

Spotlight 4

Products

Frantic Films’ Awake

Imagineer’s Mogul

Animazoo’s IGS-190H mocap system

Duiker Research’s Color Symmetry 1.5

Iconix’s Studio2K camera

User Focus

Animation studio Titmouse dives into the high-def waters using Blackmagic Multibridge products.

Viewpoint: Art 8 Gergely Vass discusses the importance of color temperature.

Portfolio 38SIGGRAPH Art Gallery

Knowledge & Career 40Screen TestThe iCinema Research Centre of Australia’s University of New South Wales is evolving panoramic projection.

Job Skills 101Internships provide valuable lessons.

Back Products 46

Features

Cover story

Rampant Risk-Taking 10CGI | Disney/Pixar devises new lighting

and photographic tools for the just-

released CG feature Wall-e.

By Barbara Robertson

Heavy-Handed 18CHARACTER MODELING | The Hulk is

back, and he is in the best shape of his

life, thanks to new CG techniques.

By Barbara Robertson

Dimensional Art 26HOLOGRAPHY | Digital technology

sparks a renewed interest in

holographic art.

By Linda Law

Hollywood North 32TRENDS & TECHNOLOGY | Ontario is

growing a digital content creation

community, offering many incentives

for those willing to set up shop in

the area.

By Martin McEachern

On the cover:

Disney/Pixar’s latest character, Wall-e, is

a non-speaking robot, yet CG artists have

made him quite expressive—so much so

that he has no trouble stirring up human

emotion from audiences, pg. 10.

July 2008 • Volume 31 • Number 7

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.

» Director Peter Berg turns to Technicolor for his Hancock DI. » Journey to the Center of the Earth’s water effects. » Key to shooting/com-

positing greenscreen.

10

18

26

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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, Kathleen Maher, Martin McEachern,Stephen Porter, Barbara Robertson

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editor

’sno

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2 | Computer Graphics World JULY 2008 w w w . c g w . c o m

His creatures are legendary. And so was he.

Sadly, the industry last month lost one of its pioneers and innovators:

famed makeup artist, visual effects artist, director, producer, costume design-

er, and writer Stan Winston, who succumbed to cancer at the age of 62.

Winston’s career spanned four decades, though his mark on the indus-

try will last for generations. In 1972, Winston, a struggling actor-turned-makeup artist,

realized his true Hollywood calling, and established Stan Winston Studio.

It didn’t take long for the Emmy and Oscar nominations and awards to pile up for

Winston’s makeup and effects work. First, he established himself in the broadcast

world with the tele-film Gargoyles. Later, he placed his stamp in the burgeoning field

of music videos with Styx’s Mr. Roboto. Soon thereafter, he made a name for himself in

Hollywood. Working alongside famed directors Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and

Tim Burton, he crafted such timeless monsters as the metallic Terminator, the slime-

coated Alien, and its bloodthirsty counterpart, Predator. He brought dinosaurs to life

for Jurassic Park. He made the deformed Edward Scissorhands interesting and likable.

He gave the grotesquely misshapen Penguin screen presence next to the sleek super-

hero Batman. His creations were more than just bits and pieces of plastic and metal

molded together in an interesting way; his creatures had character.

As a true visionary, Winston, along with Cameron and Scott Ross, founded VFX

facility Digital Domain. After a short period, Winston and Cameron left the studio,

though not before releasing the top-grossing film of all time, Titanic.

While Winston’s name is associated with a number of huge effects films, a good

deal of his work was in animatronics and puppetry, not digital work, where he pushed

the essence of non-living characters to a new level. Nevertheless, he was a master at

merging practical effects with CG effects, as was the case in AI: Artificial Intelligence,

Jurassic Park, and more. Today, his creations live on in films and at theme parks, includ-

ing the 3D Terminator production—a mix of live action, animatronics, and effects—

at Universal Studios. At the time of his death, Winston was working on Terminator

Salvation: The Future Begins and the highly anticipated Avatar, and was said to be look-

ing ahead to Jurassic Park 4.

Winston was a true artist, able to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

His work transcends time and place, bringing the past and future into the present.

He made jaws drop. Audiences scream in terror. Men, women, and youngsters shud-

der and shiver in fear—and laugh in delight. With four Oscar wins and six Oscar

nominations, his work can be found in many notable films from the 1980s to the

present, including the current hit Iron Man, for which Winston designed the super-

hero’s metal suit.

Even though Winston never found fame as an actor, he indeed became a true film

star, even a legend. While he never received accolades for acting, it was the perfor-

mances by his own creations that won over audiences. And for all his work, his vision,

and his innovation, Winston received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The introduction on his studio’s Web site provides a snapshot of how this larger-

than-life person viewed his work: “We think of the work we do as art and the people

who work here as artists. Our goal is to create images that are forever etched into your

imagination.” And they will continue to live in our memory, just as he will.

KarenMoltenbreyChief Editor

A Man of ‘Character’



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


spotlightP L U G - I N S

PR

OD

UC

TS

Frantic Films Software, the software development divi-

sion of Frantic Films VFX and a division of Prime Focus

Group, has made its Awake plug-in pack for Eyeon Fusion

5 commercially available. The collection, which features 10

plug-ins that streamline stereo 3D compositing and visu-

al effects workflows for artists using Fusion 5, were devel-

oped by Frantic Films during production on Journey to the

Center of the Earth 3D.

“Stereoscopic filmmaking is on everyone’s lips this year,

and the Awake plug-ins were created and production-test-

ed for just that purpose,” says Isaac Guenard, senior prod-

uct manager at Eyeon. Seamlessly integrated into Fusion 5,

the Awake suite boosts Fusion’s feature set to unlock a host

of tools that take advantage of Fusion’s speed and interac-

tivity. The tools simplify common compositing processes

essential to working on a ste-

reo 3D VFX film.

The Awake Toolkit now

includes support for depth

blur and frequency blur, a ste-

reo image stacking/unstack-

ing capability, an edge-aware

filter, content-aware resizing

support, digital camera noise

integration, lens distortion correction, a grid calibration

tool, and support for spherical distortion when converting

between various cameras.

Awake, priced at $299, is available through the Frantic

Films Software Division.

Frantic Films Software Offers Awake

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

Imagineer Systems unveiled Mogul, a new open, collabora-

tive VFX architecture supporting a suite of tightly integrat-

ed, modular VFX systems, all built on Mogul’s 3D engine.

Mogul unites common design-facility tasks, such as editing,

compositing, 3D design, and modeling, and provides design-

ers with a new VFX workflow that fits the way artists work.

Mogul comprises integrated system-level and desktop appli-

cation-level components, including: Mogul/Serve, a collabora-

tive shared storage management system; Mogul/Browse, a file

browser application for media and metadata; Mogul/Review,

a disk-based playback and review system with tools for qual-

ity control and annotation; Mogul/Master, an interactive fin-

ishing system with I/O, 3D compositing, editing, and grading

tools; and Mogul/Traffic, a dedicated I/O system with cap-

ture, encoding, layback, and job duplication. Also, Imagineer

offers applications for rotoscoping (Mogul/Roto), 2D and 3D

tracking (Mogul/Track), paint (Mogul/Paint), and node-based

compositing (Mogul/Comp), which are compatible with

Mogul/Master.

Imagineer is offering subscription-based pricing, mak-

ing Mogul accessible for all facilities. The Mogul systems

and application modules will be available in a phased roll-

out throughout the year, beginning with Mogul/Review,

available now.

PR

OD

UC

TS

Imagineer Introduces Mogul



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P L U G - I N

PR

OD

UC

TS

Duiker Research Rolls Out Color Symmetry 1.5Duiker Research released Version 1.5 of its Color Symmetry

plug-in suite, now with Universal Look Authoring. A sin-

gle-package solution, the suite is used for emulating film

looks and handling color consistently across applications

and platforms. Users can create custom looks and view

them across a number of industry-standard animation,

graphics, effects, and postproduction packages, there-

by allowing artists to create and render shots to see the

images as they would appear on film.

Version 1.5 supports a growing number of post work-

flows and formats, as well as today’s increasingly cre-

ative look development demands. Two new nodes in the

plug-in suite allow custom looks to be authored with-

in one Color Symmetry-supported application and then

used instantly within any other supported application.

In this way, looks can be developed by a director or DP

in a Color Symmetry-supported application and ensure

those looks are used correctly by their collaborators.

Furthermore, the company has expanded the prod-

uct’s Look Up Table (LUT) support for new formats,

with tools to convert between the various formats.

Color Symmetry Version 1.5 with Universal Look

Authoring is available now. Pricing varies according

to project.

S T E R E O S C O P Y

PR

OD

UC

TS

Iconix Introduces Studio2K CameraIconix Video announced Studio2K, the next generation

of its HD-RH1F camera. Compatible with the current

line of Iconix camera products, the POV Studio2K pro-

vides 2K capability for digital cinema and stereo.

The Studio2K is well suited for shooting scenarios

that require very small, lightweight cameras. It offers

45 format and frame-rate conversions, and captures and

outputs video for 2K digital cinema format, including

2048x1080p and 2048x1080PsF at rates of 23.98, 24, 25,

29.97, and 30 frames per second, as well as HD resolu-

tions of 720p, 1080i, and 1080p at rates of 24, 25, 30,

50, and 60 fps, plus NTSC and PAL. 2K data is output

via the camera’s dual-link HD-SDI ports at 4:4:4 RGB.

All the formats can be accessed directly through the

front panel of the CCU, which also features a redesigned

recessed power switch for increased protection.

This offering is part of Iconix’s strategy as it moves

from camera company to integrated service provider,

though the firm will continue to develop technology for

digital cinema and stereoscopic 3D production and post.

The Studio2K system is lightweight though it com-

prises a robust camera head, a processing control-

ler unit, power supply, and cables. Available now, the

Studio2K sells for $16,000.

M O T I O N C A P T U R EP

RO

DU

CT

S

Mocap company Animazoo is offering the IGS-

190H (Hybrid), its new hybrid mocap offering for

optical-quality data from an inertial, gyroscopic

system. The IGS-190H combines the features of

the existing IGS-190M (Mobile) with a new ultra-

sonic tracking system, ExacTrax, and Animazoo

Jump Injector, editing and auto-cleaning tools.

These editing tools accomplish 80 percent of post-

processing within a point-and-click cleaning mechanism.

ExacTrax, developed to work with the IGS-190M and the

company’s GypsyGyro-18 systems, includes a scalable con-

figuration of one Sonar Processing Unit (SPU) per four sonar

sensors (up to 96 sensors per standard PC). The basic system

comes with a 20-sensor/five-SPU configuration. The hybrid

system can accommodate as many as four IGS-190 systems

without needing additional sonar gear.

What sets the IGS-190H apart from usual motion-cap-

ture technology is the five SPUs, each controlling four micro-

phones. The synchronized ultrasonic ExacTrax hardware col-

lects root position data for the IGS-190M. The sonar emitter

fits onto the back of the suit, sending an ultrasonic pulse to

the sensor microphones, triangulating its position. The SPU

receiver modules process the data for the PC.

The package is available now for $98,000.

Animazoo Launches IGS-190H Mocap System








B R O A D C A S T

HD. It’s awesome. Just ask anyone

who has been mesmerized by sporting

events in HD, or has grown to love a

favorite television sitcom in high-def-

inition detail. But what about richly

colored CG “cartoons”?

Thanks to Titmouse, viewers soon

will enjoy Metalocalypse, an animat-

ed series on Cartoon Network’s Adult

Swim, in high def, too.

Recently, Titmouse, a full-service

animation studio founded in 2004 by

Chris Prynoski and his wife, Shannon,

installed a new HD workflow for a

seamless transition to the new HD

formats of the (very near) future. As

a result, the facility will be produc-

ing film and television works—creat-

ed using traditional animation crafted

with the latest digital techniques, as

well as traditional non-digital media—

in high definition.

Titmouse’s first series gig was

Metalocalypse, seen on the Cartoon

Network’s Adult Swim. The first sea-

son of the show, comprising eleven-

minute episodes on the exploits of a

fictitious death-metal band known as

Dethklok, has a large audience world-

wide. The crew composited the series’

material in HD, but posted in stan-

dard def, partly due to budgetary con-

straints and partly because the net-

work didn’t require HD. Going into

season two, Adult Swim decided to

begin looking forward to future plat-

forms so that content would transition

seamlessly to the new high-definition

formats, including HD and Blu-ray.

“Most important, they wanted to be

able to fit as many pixels of blood and

guts and gore into each frame as pos-

sible, so naturally we began upgrading

our facility to handle a full-HD work-

flow,” says Prynoski.

The Move to HD

As far as new equipment was con-

cerned, the group was already sold on

Blackmagic: The studio’s animators

and editors had been using Blackmagic

products already, so when they were

ready to make the jump to HD, it made

sense to stay within the Blackmagic

family, says Prynoski. For the main

edit systems, Titmouse chose the

Multibridge line due to their 4:4:4 capa-

bility and connectivity.

Prynoski then turned to Nathan

Adams of The DR Group to manage

the transition to HD, having worked

successfully with The DR Group in

the past.

“Multibridge products are the only

turnkey capture system for Final Cut

Pro that allows easy connection to leg-

acy analog SD equipment, HDV decks

over HDMI, and all the way up to dual-

link, 10-bit uncompressed HD at 4:4:4

RGB,” explains Adams.

Animation stations and produc-

ers’ systems were equipped with inex-

pensive Blackmagic Intensity cards for

accurate monitoring of projects in HD

on LCD and plasma displays. “At their

low price, it was a no-brainer to put

these Intensity cards in every system

on the SAN that didn’t need to connect

to the machine room,” Prynoski adds.

Because working in HD requires

more bandwidth than the existing

infrastructure could provide, Titmouse

installed the Facilis Terrablock 24D

shared storage system. The group has

allocated partitions to different epi-

sodes or projects to facilitate manage-

ment of video material.

The crew also connected additional

edit bays to its new HD machine room

with the addition of HD-SDI video,

digital audio, and RS-422 deck con-

trol, while new fiber runs throughout

the facility, giving all editors access to

the machine room for capture and lay-

back via the Multibridge Extremes. For

the most part, the main edit rooms are

tied into the decks in the rack, and the

sound booth is tied into the decks so

the team can capture or monitor mate-

rial for ADR.

“We have been using Blackmagic’s

cards for several years, so we were

comfortable going with the Multibridge

Extreme in our two new edit bays,

US

ER

F

OC

US

Animated Details

Soon to begin its third season, Cartoon Network’s Metalocalypse will be created in

high definition, thanks to the efforts of Titmouse.

Animation studio Titmouse dives into the high-def waters

©2008 C

artoo

n Netw

ork.



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which gave us flexibility with 4:4:4

HD in and out, as well as analog in

and out. Plus, our producers and

compositors were able to add inex-

pensive Intensity cards to their sta-

tions,” says Prynoski. This allows the

group to monitor the production on a

larger screen, like a plasma or LCD,

right in their office and without slow-

ing down production. “We are super

psyched with the results,” he says.

Other new shows Titmouse is work-

ing on include 3Star, an action/animat-

ed series that features an intergalactic

championship ping-pong team, and an

adult comedy series called Goldbutt.

Additionally, it will be starting the

third season of Metalocalypse this fall.

Titmouse Commercials, a new

department that the facility opened

this past January, is concentrating on

bringing the company’s vision and

animation style to both 2D animated

commercial spots and mixed-media

spots, integrating animation with

live action. For this, the Multibridge

Pro is used as a video breakout box,

and the studio uses it to lay off to

its HDCAM SR, DigiBeta, and other

broadcast decks.

According to Prynoski, the rest of

the year promises to be similarly pro-

ductive and innovative as the stu-

dio continues to expand its HD proj-

ects. “We have great confidence in the

reliability of our new HD workflow. It

gives us new freedom to create car-

toons that will inebriate your help-

less eyeballs with their juicy pleasure

lasers,” he says. “And you can put that

in the bank.”

The move to HD meant installing new equipment. Titmouse, which had been using

Blackmagic’s products, decided to stay with the vendor, installing its Multibridge line.



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Gergely Vass isa software developer in the Image Science Team of Autodesk Media and Entertainment.


Art

view

poin

t

physical or perceptual definition of “white.”

Human perception and many digital imaging devices adapt to the current white—

essentially the color of the dominant light source—so we may not even have to care

about it. We face problems, however, when trying to reproduce images on computer

displays. Sending equal red, green, and blue components to monitors may result in

a color that looks tinted, and we typically get different colors for different monitors.

It should not be a surprise that one of the most important steps in the calibration of

monitors or projectors is the setting of the “white point.”

But why would we

bother calibrating our

monitors? If our work only

involves character rig-

ging, scripting, or subdi-

vision modeling, we do

not necessarily have to

do this. However, making

critical decisions regarding

the lighting of our virtual

scene or picking textures

or material colors is only

possible using a calibrated

display device. This is

particularly important for

architectural or design visualization: We do not want our clients to look at false col-

ors when presenting the rendered images of their future product or building.

Even if there is no universal stimulus that appears white, we should at least be

able to describe it quantitatively. Without this, color calibration would be impossi-

ble. The most complete description of a light source—and its color—is the spectral

power distribution (SPD), a curve indicating the exact “composition” of spectral col-

ors. The SPD is a function of wavelength, so we need at least 30 samples (numerical

values) to store it digitally. But do we really need all this data to describe a specific

color? Not necessarily. While there are commonly used standards describing the

SPD of the illumination (for instance, the CIE D65 standard illuminant, which cor-

responds roughly to a midday sun), we often use a single number to describe white:

the color temperature.

To understand this number, let’s take a look at the sources of illumination. Most

natural and man-made light sources have some heated object at their core as the pri-

mary source of illumination. Just think of a candle, lightbulbs, or the sun itself. This

kind of illumination is called incandescence. Why is this important? As we will read

later in this article, the color—and the complete SPD, too—of a perfect “hot” light

source can be described by a single number. It is true that most natural illuminants,

like the sun or fire, are not perfect in the sense that other physical/chemical/elec-

trical effects alter the SPD. Also, the much more efficient compact fluorescent lights,

What is white? At first

glance, this question

seems rather easy to answer.

None of us would have

any problem pointing at

something that is considered

to be white. However, com-

ing up with a proper technical defini-

tion is hard. Even looking at Wikipedia

would not help us: “White is the combi-

nation of all the colors of the visible light

spectrum.” In fact, combining all spec-

tral colors equally will

not necessarily produce

white. Furthermore, it is

possible to create white

by combining only three

(or even two) spectral

colors. As always, we

need to be careful with

such sources of infor-

mation.

So, what is white

then? In the case of

paints or pigments, the

answer is simple: A

white surface reflects

(almost) all incident

light. Can we come

up with the same sort

of definition for light

sources? The answer is

no; there is no universal

white color.

On a sunny day,

inside an artificially

lit room, or under the

cloudy sky, the stimu-

lus—the physical rays

of light—we consider

white is very differ-

ent. Technically speak-

ing, there is no unique

It’s hard to

determine

what is

white, so we

face prob-

lems when

trying to

reproduce

images on

computer

displays.

Color Temperature By Gergely Vass

Digital cameras may get confused what white is, if there is a

mix of incandescent, halogen, and natural lighting.

Pho

to by Tim

Easterday.



___________






LEDs, or gas discharge lamps work differently, but manufacturers

do try to match their color to incandescent sources to make it look

and feel more natural. Even though a given light source may not fall

on the “black body locus,” one can still project its chromaticity onto

this curve in order to have a single number that describes how yel-

low or blue it is.

In the 19th century, physicists studied electromagnetism and

thermodynamics very actively. With quantum mechanics not

invented yet, researchers tried to explain the results of all experi-

ments using the classical theories of the Newtonian mechanics—

something that eventually turned out to be impossible. One, if not

the, most important experiment was the heating of objects and mea-

suring the emitted electromagnetic radiation.

To describe this thermal radiation, the concept of black body was introduced

in 1860 by Gustav Kirchhoff: an object that absorbs all light—that is, all electro-

magnetic radiation—that falls on it, thus nothing is reflected from the surface.

Unfortunately, if we simply paint an object black, it will not necessarily be a “black

body.” There is a great chance (it is certain) that the object still will be visible using

an infrared camera.

The spectrum of the detected black-body radiation depends solely on the temper-

ature of the object. While it is impossible to construct perfect black-body radiators,

due to unavoidable electric and chemical reactions altering the spectrum, we can

always find the nearest one that matches the chromaticity in question. For incandes-

cent lights, this match is going to be almost perfect. And why is this important for

us? The concept of black-body radiation allows us to describe white color with a sin-

gle temperature value: the correlated color temperature.

The temperature of 6500 degrees K (Kelvin) correlates with the average daylight;

regular lightbulbs boast approximately 3000 K degrees and appear more yellow com-

pared to daylight. The “coldest”—1700 K to 1800 K (2600 to 2800 degrees Fahrenheit,

or 1400 to 1500 degrees Celsius)—visible incandescent light source is the flame of

a candle, turning into orange and red. We can see that there is a great range of stim-

ulus our eyes can adapt to, resulting in the same “white” sensation.

The curious reader may now wonder: How should we interpret, for instance,

the color temperature of 310 K? That happens to be the temperature of our own

body (36 C, 97 F). Well, we can compute the electromagnetic radiation emit-

ted by ourselves, but the resulting spectrum will not fall into the visible range of

wavelengths. However, it should be clear: All objects above absolute zero Kelvin do

emit electromagnetic waves. Speaking of absolute zero Kelvin (-273 C, or -460 F),

objects at that temperature do not emit radiation, and it is not possible to make any

object colder than that.

The sensors of thermal- and some night-vision cameras, and even some

animals, can detect portions of the invisible radiations emitted by objects below

1700 K. Such special devices are often seen in Hollywood movies, used for sur-

veillance and for military personnel to “see in the dark,” but there are much

more humane applications. A good example is veterinary. Horses have evolved

with an ingrained tendency to mask pain to protect themselves in the wild. This

makes the veterinarian’s task of detecting, diagnosing, and treating a problem

with a horse extremely challenging. With thermal cameras, it is very easy to “see”

inflammations, and there is no need to even touch the animal. This is essentially mea-

suring temperature by looking at color. Is that possible only in the infrared range

of electromagnetic spectrum? No. Another practical application related to black-body

radiation is measuring the temperature of hot lava. By simply observing the color of

the molten stone, even from safe distance,

the temperature can be easily estimated.

Describing the emission of heated

objects—using the formula of Max

Planck—is handy for us to describe the

white color, but in the early 20th century,

it gave birth to quantum mechanics, as

well. In Planck’s formula—which was

fitted to experimental results and not

derived theoretically—a universal con-

stant popped up that seemed to suggest

electromagnetic energy could be emitted

only in small pockets, in quantized form.

Note that this time, photons were not

known yet. Planck did not really think

much about this, but rather, took it as

purely a formal assumption. He strove

hard to keep his theory on the solid

ground of classical physics and rejected

for many years the revolutionary idea

of photons, which seemed to contradict

contemporary wave theories of light.

It was a couple years later that Albert

Einstein laid the foundation for the

photon theory, and eventually man-

aged to reconcile mechanics with

electromagnetism. And it all started by

observing heated black bodies.

Gergely Vass started his career in the com-

puter graphics industry as a Maya TD and

soon became a Maya instructor in Budapest,

Hungary. Having moved to the “dark side,”

he is currently a software developer in the

Image Science Team of Autodesk Media and

Entertainment. His research areas include

image processing and computer vision.

Gergely can be reached at gergely.vass@

autodesk.com.

The temperature of hot lava may be estimated by measuring

its color.

Pho

to by G

reg Smith

.



___________






Imag

es ©

2008

Dis

ney

/Pix

ar.

. . . .CGI



___________





CGI. . . .


hat if everyone had to leave Earth and no one remembered to

turn off the last robot? That kernel of a story idea from Pixar’s

Andrew Stanton, who won an Oscar for directing Finding Nemo,

grew to become Wall-e—a love story, a science-fi ction fi lm, and

the latest feature animation in Disney/Pixar’s mega-successful

series of CG hits. It’s also the most unusual fi lm Pixar has pro-

duced, and arguably the studio’s biggest creative risk.

“Andrew pitched the idea to me when I met him,” says producer Jim

Morris, who left LucasFilm to join the Wall-e team. “It had an almost haunting

quality, like a Robinson Crusoe story. Why would everyone leave Earth and for-

get to turn the robot off? Where does this lead? What might cause him not to be

lonely? The more we got into the story, the more it appealed to me. I’m a sci-fi

fan, and after being on the business side for years, I was hankering to get back

into production.”

The robot left behind is named Wall-e, of course, an acronym for Waste

Allocation Load Lifters–Earth Class. He’s a rusty little machine that rolls around

the dusty planet on triangular tank treads. When the humans’ rampant consum-

erism trashed Earth, they all moved to a giant spaceship, the Axiom, leaving him behind with the

junk. It made sense: Wall-e’s job was to compact all that stuff into cubes, and his program didn’t

change. He still motors along and stuffs detritus into his metal belly. When he’s full, out pops a cube

that he stacks to create ever-growing towers of trash.

And here’s the risk. Wall-e has no mouth, no nose, and no head. He’s a real robot; he doesn’t

talk—in English, anyway. He only makes machine sounds. His expressions come entirely from his

body language and his eyes, which are a pair of binoculars that sit atop a long “neck.” And that means

Stanton built an entire feature fi lm around a character who doesn’t speak one line of dialog. It doesn’t

mean the fi lm is entirely silent, however, although the fi rst third largely is. And, it doesn’t mean that

Wall-e hasn’t changed since the people left Earth. He has.



___________





. . . .CGI

Meet Wall-e

The fi rst third of the feature takes place

on Earth’s dusty, debris-fi lled environ-

ment, where billboards on abandoned

buildings still broadcast messages from

Axiom’s CEO and, conveniently, help set

the stage for the audience. But the bill-

boards are in the background. Our atten-

tion is on Wall-e. As he rumbles around

compacting junk, we see him picking

out favorite bits and bobs—a Rubik’s

cube, an iPod, bubble wrap—and stash-

ing them in a Styrofoam container. As he

does so, we see his personality develop.

He fl icks open a cigarette lighter, and the

fl ame surprises him. He covers his eyes

with a bra. He’s a character. And, he has

a friend of sorts: a cockroach.

At the end of his day, Wall-e rolls

inside a maintenance truck, his little

home, and adds his new treasures to his

collection. The detail in Wall-e’s rubbish-

fi lled world outside and inside his main-

tenance truck is amazing. We can iden-

tify household items, electronic gear, car

parts, all manner of stuff in the trash

towers and in Wall-e’s personal collec-

tion—and it’s all CG.

Inside the truck, the musical Hello,

Dolly! plays on Wall-e’s TV set, and we

watch him discover how two people

in love interact. He taps his “fi ngers”

together in front of him like a nervous

little man, and we sympathize with the

lonely robot.

Stanton’s mandate was to give his ani-

mated feature a different look from Pixar’s

previous fi lms, and he succeeded. The

blown-out, gritty, garbage-fi lled Earth is

about as far from Finding Nemo as you

could imagine, and integrating such live-

action elements as the billboards and the

movie into the animated world give it a

cinematic feeling. Axiom, where most of

the second third of the fi lm takes place,

is closer in style to previous Pixar fi lms:

a colorful, clean, bright space fi lled with

thousands of people and robots. Creating

that detail was one problem. Focusing

attention on Wall-e was another.

“Because there is no traditional dialog

in the fi rst third of the movie and not a

lot of dialog in the second two-thirds, it

put more pressure on the camera and the

lighting than before to tell you what to pay

attention to in the world,” says Danielle

Feinberg, DP for lighting. For that reason,

and because Stanton wanted to create an

animation with a cinematic feel, many of

the technical innovations for Wall-e cen-

tered on photography and lighting.

Photography

“The thing that was aesthetically so entic-

ing about [Wall-e] was that Andrew

wanted to create the feeling that it was

fi lmed, not recorded in the computer,”

says Morris. “I had spent much time in

the live-action universe, worked with a lot

of DPs, and was a camera operator myself.

So we got a Panavision camera similar to

the one used for the original Star Wars,

shot fi lm, and analyzed it.” They realized

that most tools they had created to imitate

the aberrations in live-action photography

weren’t correct.

“We ran a battery of tests with a crude

model of Wall-e and propagated the data

back into our existing camera,” says

Nigel Hardwidge, supervising TD. “A lot

of things were off, so we redesigned how

we wanted our camera model to work.”

The new virtual camera imitates the

anamorphic lenses used to fi lm such sci-

fi epics as Close Encounters of the Third

Kind and the fi rst Star Wars. These lenses

squeeze an image horizontally to occupy

the full height of 35mm fi lm, and then

during projection, a second lens expands

the image to fi ll a wide screen. “The dif-

ference in quality is almost subliminal,”

says Hardwidge.

In addition, Pixar added such com-

mon lens aberrations as barrel distortion,

fl ares, oval-shaped circles of confusion,

and lens “breathing” (the way the fi eld

of view changes during a rack focus), to

help give the computer images the look of

photographed fi lm.

Director of photography Jeremy Lasky

supervised the 12 layout artists at Pixar

who used the new camera and lenses to

design camera moves for the fi lm. The

artists worked in Pixar’s 3D animation

software, Marionette, from 2D story-

boards. “It’s similar to live action in a

way,” Lasky says. “We shot coverage for

the sequences. Then, as the shots get

assembled in editing and the sequence

gets polished, one idea wins out.”

For example, once the artists started

working with Wall-e in the 3D world,

they might offer Stanton such choices as

an over-the-shoulder shot, a wide shot,

and a close-up with the foreground out

of focus. “The layout artists could plug in

the lenses and see the view change right

in front of their eyes,” Lasky says. A lim-

ited set of lenses helped maintain consis-

tency through the fi lm.

On Earth, the camera is always mov-

ing, panning, tilting, and sometimes act-

ing as if it is on a camera operator’s shoul-

A shallow depth of fi eld helps focus the

audience’s attention on the sunbathing

Wall-e within his vast CG world.




___________





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. . . .CGI


der. Often, the camera watches the little

robot wander through the frame. “We’d

deliberately put him on one side of the

frame and something else on the other

side to give a bigger sense of the world

around him,” Lasky explains. On Earth,

Wall-e is always in his element.

The artists used different techniques

for the spaceship Axiom, where thou-

sands of refugee humans, tended by thou-

sands of robots, float through the scenes

on motorized hover chairs. The humans

can’t leave their chairs; a constant diet of

inaction has turned their bones to mush.

Here, reflecting the ship’s orderliness,

the camera moves on virtual dolly tracks

and on cranes, not on a camera operator’s

shoulder. “Anytime the camera moves in

a more handheld way, we replicated a

steadicam look,” Lasky says. “We took

the rough edges off everything.”

To reinforce the notion that Wall-e

is out of his element on Axiom, the lay-

out artists framed those shots to include

chaos. “We were always trying to cap-

ture something else going on in frame,”

Lasky says.

Wall-e lands on Axiom by following a

beautiful robot, Eve, and this is the love-

story part of the film. When Eve arrives

on Earth in a spaceship, it’s love at first

sight for Wall-e. The sleek, white, egg-

shaped ’bot with the sparkling blue eyes

and the ability to fly is his Dolly. He shares

his treasures with her even though she

is not very interested in him. When the

spaceship returns, she flies onboard, and

lovesick Wall-e stows away. The scene

when she leaves Earth is one in which

the layout artists added drama with cam-

era moves.

“It was boarded with Wall-e working,

a cut to the ship, and then Wall-e at the

top of the ramp telling the cockroach

to stay,” explains Lasky. “We thought it

would be really cool if the camera raced

behind him as he ran to the ship and you

could see Eve moving inside.”

To help the layout artists design live-

action camera moves, Pixar brought in

seven-time Oscar nominee Roger Deakins,

a DP for such films as No Country for Old

Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fargo,

and The Shawshank Redemption. “He’s

very good at helping you take an idea and

simplify it down,” Lasky says.

For example, Deakins worked with

Lasky on scenes in which Wall-e and Eve

are together in the maintenance truck.

“We talked about how you’d coordinate

camera moves in that tight space,” Lasky

says. “Too many cuts would take you out

of the moment, so rather than cutting, we

adjusted the camera to keep things mov-

ing. It allowed us to stay with the actors.”

Deakins also contributed an idea that

radically altered how the layout artists

worked. Lasky explains: “We were look-

ing at a layout on the computer for half a

sequence. It had basic models, no shad-

ing yet. He said, ‘I don’t see many lights.’

I said, ‘Right. Lighting comes later.’ He

looked at me and said, ‘It would drive me

nuts. Lighting is half my job.’ ”

After that, Feinberg provided the lay-

out artists with a simple lighting setup.

Then, as they composed shots, they could

see light, for the appropriate time of day,

with colors and shadows. And, as they

moved the camera, the shadows and the

light falloff changed.

“It was literally like we had been work-

ing in the dark,” Lasky says. “It opened

so many options.”

An example: During a sequence in

which Eve tries to resuscitate Wall-e, he’s

in shadow. She sings to him a little, and

lifts his face into the light for a second.

He falls back into the shadow. When he

revives, he steps forward into the light,

and it changes the dynamic of the scene.

“We discovered that setup during lay-

out and showed it to Andrew,” Lasky says.

Stanton approved the shot. Before, they

would have created the sequence without

considering the interplay between light

and shadow.

Lighting

To help give the film a more cinematic

look, Pixar also rewrote the illumi-

nation model used for lighting the 3D

world. “We wanted the materials to feel

more realistic in the way they reacted to

light, and the lights to be more physically

driven,” says Feinberg. “We’d had the

same illumination model since A Bug’s

Life. Ratatouille even used the same code

but with big pieces added to change the

color space.”

The new code builds energy conserva-

tion into the lighting and shading model.

“We have one knob that takes the mate-

rials from rough and diffuse at one end

and, at the other, highly reflective metal,”

Feinberg says. “Before, we tuned diffuse,

specular, and reflection separately. Now,

they’re all on a continuum.”

Pixar modelers work in Autodesk’s

Maya, with all the shading happening

through the Slim interface to RenderMan

within Maya. “Our old shading set relied

on a TD or an artist to make explicit

choices about materials,” Hardwidge says.

“For this film, we wanted the degraded

pieces of metal and plastic to respond as

accurately as possible.”

The shading coefficients now incorpo-

Wall-e and Eve run away from the robots chasing them on Axiom. In this world, the camera

captures chaos to reinforce the feeling that Wall-e is out of his element.



___________





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. . . .CGI


rate judgments about how much various

materials preserve the energy of light hit-

ting the surface. In addition, because the

new lighting and shading model made

manual tweaking to produce high-qual-

ity materials less necessary, it helped

maintain consistency.

“Any prop, whether hastily built for the

background or a hero prop, still has the

same level of quality in its response to

light,” Hardwidge says. “We wanted to

build this integration and believability

through the whole image.”

In addition, new lights with a built-

in reflection component and a falloff set

to mimic reality helped the lighting art-

ists do their jobs. To keep render costs

within reason, they avoided raytraced

reflections, relying on environment maps

instead. “We used some RenderMan point-

based occlusion,” Feinberg says. “If we

had done raytraced occlusions, we would

have been in a world of hurt.”

As a result, on Earth, the junk looks

real; on Axiom, the environment reflects

light accurately, including the light from

the colorful, animated billboards that

advertise the latest drink to consume and

things to buy.

“Axiom is a more reflective and clini-

cal environment, and the shading model

allowed us to leverage that,” Hardwidge

says. “Rather than a round, white high-

light on white plastic, we see the light

from the billboards reflecting and

stretching, and the way the light falls off

and diffuses is much closer to what you

would expect.”

Epic Scale

In addition to lighting and photography,

the other significant challenge for the art-

ists at Pixar was the scale of the film. On

planet Earth, the first act, which extends

for the first 25 minutes of the film, takes

place in a large cityscape. “We needed five

or six square miles of set,” says Hardwidge.

“And, when we were planning it, the story

wasn’t defined enough to know where

specific locations would be.”

So rather than build the Earth only

from camera view, the studio modeled a

huge set, into which the director and lay-

out artists could place the camera where

they wanted.

Because the set extends for miles, disap-

pearing eventually into the horizon, matte

paintings sometimes added subtleties in

the distance, but the sets were largely 3D.

Within these sets, tall towers built from

trash cubes rise from the dusty ground,

and huge piles of litter collect against

buildings. The detail is astounding.

“Clearly, we couldn’t dress the sets with

geometry, but you can go only so far with

displacement, so we needed to balance the

two,” Hardwidge says. Early tests on 50-

foot piles of junk helped them determine

how to blend the different techniques.

Hardwidge explains: “We built pieces

of trash as geometry and turned some of

that trash into displacement shaders we

controlled with paint and procedural tech-

niques. Then, we put geometric trash on

top, depending on the angle of the shot.”

Adding the geometric debris on top of

the displacement shaders gave the final

piles of junk some nooks and crannies so

lighters could add shadows, depth, and

occlusion. “The displacement shader was

awesome,” Feinberg says. “The set dress-

ers piled up the right amount of big, little,

and medium pieces so the towers don’t look

like buildings or rock pillars; they look like

they’re made from cubes of trash.”

To scatter rubbish with varying den-

sities, the set dressers used procedural

paint tools, and on the shading side, pro-

cedural shaders intelligently lit the litter

depending on surface angles and on how

much dirt or dust had collected.

Effective Details

The effects department also helped dress

the sets. The wind sends bits of paper and

plastic swirling in the dusty air. Within the

trash cubes, small bits of stuff move slightly

and catch glints of light. Everything keeps

changing in the junkyard landscape.

Pixar developed a new illumination model for Wall-e to cause all the materials, from highly

reflective plastic to rusty iron, to respond realistically to lights that are more physically driven.

Wall-e, seen here with his cockroach friend, doesn’t have real eyes; he sees through binocu-

lars. Pixar lit the gray aperture rings in the binoculars to help give the impression of eyes.



___________





CGI. . . .


“We knew we had a big effects job on

this show,” Hardwidge says. “We had

dust storms, steam coming off the space-

ship when it lands, dirt, paper caught in

the wind—and a lot of these effects were

full-screen. We re-engineered the effects

pipeline for more flexibility and to have

more powerful tool sets for using our vol-

ume shader.”

A new nodal-based tool set named

Dynamo acted as the interface between

such software applications as Side

Effects’ Houdini, Maya, RenderMan, and

Marionette. “We could feed into Dynamo

any kind of particle through plug-ins—

blobbies, spheres, points, sprites, or

curves,” Hardwidge says. “It became the

framework the effects TDs used to insert

particle data into the scene and decide

how to output it.”

The particles ranged from hard pieces

of dirt thrown off Wall-e’s tire treads, to

large-scale nebulas in space, to the low-

lying dust that constantly blows across

the Earth’s surface. The effects TDs gen-

erated 90 percent of these effects and oth-

ers using various types of particles. They

turned to fluid simulations for only a few

shots—when Wall-e travels through oily

sludge, for instance, and when the space-

ship lands.

The detail increased render times,

of course, and one of Hardwidge’s jobs

was managing the computational load in

Pixar’s 2600-processor renderfarm. “You

always run into strange things in some

shots, and we had a few that took 30 to

40 hours per frame, but we also rendered

complex imagery in three to four hours,”

he says. “Our goal was to keep it down to

eight hours. We achieved an average ren-

der time of seven hours per processor for

a film-resolution frame with all the ele-

ments in there.”

On Axiom, which is approximately two

miles from head to tail, the detail is largely

in the huge numbers of people and robots

that populate the spaceship. To build

the enormous variety of robots that con-

stantly serve the people, a team of model-

ers used component parts. “The articula-

tion belonged with the part,” Hardwidge

says. In addition, a unified shader helped

keep the designs consistent.

For the lazy, fat humans, who have

lost bone mass, Pixar created a rig

with varying thicknesses of skin that

responded to a simulation system. “We

needed to have the body deform if it fell

on the floor,” Hardwidge says. “So we lev-

eraged the Physbam system developed at

Stanford to create a volumetric system. If

you pushed one area of the human’s skin,

you’d see an appropriate response based

on the thickness of the skin in that area.”

To animate the crowds, the effects team

used a combination of systems. For the

robots on Axiom, particularly those in the

mechanical areas rather than the human

areas, Pixar used Massive to apply vari-

ous motion cycles created in the anima-

tion department. Similarly, Massive moved

the 10,000 flaccid humans on their hover

chairs. “We had a complex network of

lines on the floor,” describes Hardwidge.

But, when the ship tilts and the roly-

poly people tumble onto the floor, Pixar

pulled in a simulation based on the

open-source Open Dynamics Engine

implemented in Maya, called MODE, to

add physics-based motion. “We gener-

ated the rigid-body simulation for the

10,000 people as they hit the chairs

and kept kerplunking along the deck,”

Hardwidge points out. Then, based on

the motion and the speed generated

from the simulation, Massive’s fuzzy-

logic brain applied cycles from the ani-

mation department to the characters.

“We’d bake the simulation and pass it

into Massive to choose files of animation

based on what the poses from the simu-

lation were doing,” Hardwidge says. “The

nice thing about MODE is that you can

scale up the number of elements in the

simulation in a linear fashion, so the sim-

ulation times don’t become excessive and

you still get good behaviors.”

All of this—the new cameras and

lighting models, the simulation, the

attention to details—helped Stanton real-

ize his dream of creating an animated

film unlike any other Pixar feature; in

fact, unlike any other feature animation.

The haunting images of the gritty but fas-

cinating debris-filled planet Earth will

stay with audiences long after they leave

the theater. The futuristic spaceship will

delight them. They’ll laugh at the fat peo-

ple on their silly hover chairs. They’ll

cheer little Wall-e in his attempts to woo

the cool Eve, and applaud his heroism.

And, they’ll do all this without hearing

one complete line of dialog from Wall-e

or Eve, and without, for the most part,

having any idea of the risks Pixar took in

making this remarkable film or the tech-

nology that made it possible. And that’s

the Pixar magic.

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning

writer and a contributing editor for Com-

puter Graphics World. She can be reached

at [email protected].

Wall-e stores his collection of interesting stuff in hundreds of bins inside a maintenance truck.

To manage the detail, Pixar used a system of displacement shaders topped with geometry.



___________

______________





18 | Com-puter Graph-

. . . .Character Modeling

Rhythm & Hues developed a

new animator-controlled,

volume-preserving muscle

system to give Hulk his “zero

percent body fat” physique.

Imag

es ©

2008

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Character Modeling. . . .

he biggest thing about this year’s big-screen

interpretation of Marvel Comics’ Hulk char-

acter is not the size of the CG superhero. It is

how much Hulk has changed since his fea-

ture-fi lm debut in Ang Lee’s 2003 fi lm. From

all appearances, the uncomfortably green

fi ghting machine spent the past fi ve years

working out in the gym. He’s beyond toned; his mus-

cles strain against his taut skin.

Directed by Louis Leterrier, Universal Studios’

Incredible Hulk stars Edward Norton as Bruce

Banner (Hulk) and Tim Roth as his nemesis, Emil

Blonsky (Abomination). Three studios—Rhythm &

Hues, Soho VFX, and Hydraulx—created the digi-

tal characters and surrounding environments, with

Rhythm & Hues taking the lead on character design

and modeling, and in creating the bulk of the digital

behemoths’ close-up shots. Rhythm & Hues’ Betsy

Paterson supervised a crew of approximately 250 art-

ists working in Los Angeles and Mumbai, India, who

gave Hulk his new, buff body and Abomination his

grotesque shape, and sent the two battling through

the streets of New York City.

Universal Studios, Leterrier, Marvel, and overall

VFX supervisor Kurt Williams knew from the begin-

ning how they wanted this rendition of Hulk to differ

from the previous fi lm’s cartoonier giant. “They had

done their research,” says Keith Roberts, animation

director at Rhythm & Hues. “They knew what people

liked and didn’t like. They wanted Hulk to be much

more of a street brawler. Nasty. Rough. Edgy.

When people saw him, they wouldn’t immedi-

ately know that he was a good guy.”

Rhythm & Hues, though, is famous for its

award-winning furry animals, not edgy

monsters: The studio won Oscars for

Babe and The Golden Compass,

and an Oscar nomination for

The Chronicles of Narnia:

The Lion, the Witch

and the Wardrobe.

This is the fi rst fi lm

for which the artists

at Rhythm & Hues

have created a digital

humanoid.

“We pushed ourselves to the limit technically and

creatively,” Paterson says. “We pushed everything we

could already do to 11. Maybe 15.”

The push started even before they had a contract:

Strong animation tests helped the studio secure the job.

“[The production unit] gave us a rough model that

conceptual artist Aaron Sims did,” Roberts says. “Of

course, we re-modeled and re-rigged it. And, in three

days, we had motion tests on the rig to show the execu-

tives. Winning this fi lm was a big coup for us.”

Character rigging supervisor Matt Derksen master-

minded the rig development for the test and the evo-

lution of that rig for the fi lm. It was, Paterson believes,

a state-of-the-art breakthrough. Hulk needed to have

zero body fat, pulsing veins, and straining muscles,

and move through scenes in full daylight. And the

crew had to transform Bruce Banner into this huge

monster in close-ups under laboratory lighting, and

then back into his human form.

Zero Percent Body Fat

Rhythm & Hues uses Autodesk’s Maya for modeling

and Side Effects’ Houdini for effects, but rigging, ani-

mation, lighting, and rendering happen within the stu-

dio’s proprietary software. “The major thing we had to

develop was a new skin-slide system,” says Derksen.

“We had to slide Hulk’s skin tightly over his muscles

without using a simulation approach. It was important.

Without it, he would look unbelievable.”

The new system uses two geometries acting differ-

ently within the same space; that is, two skin “binds,”

one sliding over the other. The riggers started with a

pre-existing system. “We build the character as if it

is a real person, defi ning each muscle using volumes,”

Derksen explains. “Then we bind across all of those

muscles based on the skeletal structure.” If Hulk bends,

the muscles squish up and hold their volume, and the

skin moves across his body appropriately.

“If he lifted an arm, you’d see the skin pull and tug

across his ribs,” Derksen says. It’s a very organic bind.”

That might have been enough for some creatures, but

not for Hulk. The riggers added a second, newer bind.

The second bind was simpler, less distributed,

more rigid. It doesn’t slide; it bends only at the joints.

“We take that rigidly bound skin, relax it, and suck it

against the initial bind per frame,” Derksen says. The

second skin bind becomes smooth and shrink-wrapped

against the original bind, but still somewhat rigid.

“The major benefi t of sucking the one skin against

the muscles was to make the Hulk look like he has

zero percent body fat,” Derksen says, “which was an

important part of the character’s redesign.”

As a result, when Hulk moves, the fl exible bind

crawls under the more rigid skin. When he roars, you

see tense muscles push against his skin from his huge

neck to his feet. “[The rigging system] gives you the




___________






sense of tight skin, as if you pushed your

fist against a sheet of rubber and moved it

around underneath,” describes Derksen.

“You can see the muscles and inner struc-

ture moving beneath.”

Because the riggers built this move-

ment into the rig, rather than creating

the skin sliding through a simulation,

animators could control the entire pro-

cess. Working with the director, the ani-

mators set key poses and determined the

bind for those poses—that is, the amount

of striation we see across Hulk’s chest, for

example, and the amount of muscle vol-

ume preserved.

For animating Hulk and Abomination,

the studio started with motion captured

from stunt actors by Giant Studios (see

“Maximum Motion,” pg. 25). But in addi-

tion, animators could control every mus-

cle in the creatures’ bodies by hand and

see them take shape.

“Usually, we set up a fast bind for the

animators to see in real time while they

work,” Derksen says, “but the final bind

is fast enough that they could see in their

file exactly what shape the muscle made,

which is beneficial.”

A similar approach using layers of

volume-preserving muscles and slid-

ing skin worked for Hulk’s facial ani-

mation as well. “We slid the tight skin

over his skull,” Derksen explains. “The

most important parts of his face were

his giant Neanderthal eyebrows and

cheeks, so we needed to get the skin to

slide over those bones without making

it feel as if the bones moved.”

For reference, the riggers and anima-

tors used data captured from Edward

Norton during motion-capture sessions

using Mova’s facial-capture system. “It

was like having a cyber scan for every

frame,” says Roberts. “We had 24 incredi-

bly detailed models per second. We could

see subtleties—micro-movements in the

cheeks and under the eye—because we

could study his face in detail. That was a

great thing that Mova gave us.”

The animators, however, ended up

hand-keying Hulk’s face to give him

comic-book expressions, using the Mova

data primarily to help with timing. “Hulk

doesn’t have Edward Norton’s expres-

sions, but the two are eerily similar in

facial timing,” Roberts says.

The Mova data also helped Derksen

design the skin deformations. “We could

see how Edward Norton’s face moved in

3D,” Derksen says. “We could see how

his skin slides over his face, so we inter-

preted that and put it into Hulk. It helped

us determine what controls we needed.”

The animators moved individual mus-

cles to make final expressions using a

master control, but they could also exert

a finer level of control for any part of

Hulk’s face, down to 10 vertices. A new

user interface allowed them to pick any

part of the face, click on that part, and

drag it to move it. “We wanted to give

them more of a sculptural approach,”

Derksen says. “They could pick a part

and scrub it.”

Becoming Hulk

The ability for the animators to control

Hulk’s muscles and skin was especially

important for the transformations, the

most obvious of which happens during

a scene in which Banner is on an operat-

ing table in a laboratory, taking what he

hopes is a cure.

“The idea [of the transformation] is

that the gamma radiation that turns

Banner into Hulk is stored in the back of

his brain, and when he transforms, every-

thing radiates out from there,” Paterson

says. “You see it first in his eyes. Then as

the green blood moves through his veins,

the skin changes color, his muscles stri-

ate, the bones enlarge, and the muscles

catch up to the bones. It happens in a

non-symmetrical way, so it feels organic.”

The rig made it possible for animators to

achieve an art-directed transformation,

even in close-ups.

One rig handled both the bipedal per-

formance and the transformation. To

accomplish this, the team created mod-

els for Hulk and Banner that precisely

matched, vertex for vertex. “We pro-

cedurally generated the Bruce Banner

model based on Hulk’s geometry by

relaxing the geometry in the Hulk model

and then sucking it up against a 3D scan

of Edward Norton,” Derksen explains.

“Once we had that, we took Hulk’s bind-

ing and re-proportioned it into Bruce

Banner. And, once we did that, we could

morph locally around a given joint.”

The animators had two sets of con-

trols for the rig: one for the bipedal per-

formance and one for the transformation.

With these controls, the animators could

transform any part of Bruce Banner’s

body—even one finger—into the Hulk

at any time. Because they could control

selected body parts, they could offset and

propagate the transformation through his

body and limbs.

Some controls affected bone length;

the animators could elongate a bone they

were animating. When they did, the skin

around the bone tightened and created an

emaciated look around the bone because,

for a short time, the character had Bruce


Actor Edward Norton fights against the inevitable transformation into Hulk. His eyes and his

veins turn green, his bones lengthen and stretch his skin, and his muscles expand beneath.



___________





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Banner muscles and Hulk bones.

Using a separate control, animators

determined when the muscles grew and

filled in under the tight skin. “That was

an aesthetic choice,” Derksen says. “The

director wanted the transformation to

feel painful.”

Point attributes in the rig drove ani-

mated color maps and vein displace-

ments. As the animators caused an area

to flex and transform, the rig sent infor-

mation, in effect, to lighters who could

animate the color change for that area

and the vein displacement.

“The animators knew if they were

transforming a hand into a Hulk hand, it

would turn green and the displacement

maps would change the detail and stri-

ation in the render,” Derksen says, “But,

they didn’t see that detail until we ren-

dered it.” Though when Banner’s bone

pops out of joint in a close-up, the crew

used the studio’s proprietary cloth engine

to simulate the skin shrink-wrapping

over the shoulder and muscles crawling

over the clavicle.

Abomination

Once the rigging team had developed

Hulk, they moved his muscle and skin

tools and techniques to Abomination for

that creature’s scenes. Abomination rep-

resents the result when an overachieving

fighter forces a scientist to quickly turn

him into a Hulk-like human weapon. The

experiment goes horribly wrong.

“The concept is that he grew so fast,

he exploded out of his human skin and

has remnants still on him,” Derksen says.

“So he has an outer layer of skin.” Also,

his bones protrude—he has a lizard-like

spine. To snug his skin up against the

protrusions, the team used areas of influ-

ence that caused the skin to compress as

it moved up against the bone.

For facial animation, the team

returned to Mova for a facial-capture ses-

sion with Tim Roth. “Roth had acted with

a mask for Planet of the Apes,” Derksen

says, “so he was great at exaggerating

facial motion that translated well into

Abomination. We used a lot of that data

to develop Abomination’s facial structure

and poses.”

Action

When Hulk appears in a shot, it’s usu-

ally an action sequence; the monstrous

superhero is angry. He fights an army

battalion, tanks, soldiers, cannons, and

ray guns on a college campus, and fights

Abomination in Harlem. Soho VFX and

Hydraulx helped with the action scenes

and some other shots, working with mod-

els (meshes) and textures from Rhythm

& Hues for both characters.

Soho VFX handled the “first reveal”

of Hulk in a bottling plant early in the

film and a complex scene with the char-

acters fighting on a Harlem rooftop from

the time they climb up the buildings

until a helicopter crashes on the roof.

(Rhythm & Hues took the “Hulk fighting

Abomination” shots from the crash to the

climax.) In addition, Soho VFX gave Roth

a muscular body during a locker-room

shower scene.

In the bottling plant sequence, which

begins in the nearby Brazilian slum,

Banner tries to control his excitement

while thugs and soldiers chase him.

Eventually, though, his inner Hulk bursts

out. “It’s dark, and we try not to show too

much at first, but by the end, we see him

entirely, chasing through the bottling

plant,” says Allan Magled, Soho VFX

visual effects supervisor. Anything Hulk

interacts with in the plant is CG, and

he interacts with tons of stuff—literally.

At one point, he tosses a CG water tank

that’s six feet in diameter and nine feet

long, and near the end of the sequence,

throws a CG forklift.

Starting with the Rhythm & Hues

model and textures, Soho VFX assem-

bled Hulk in their pipeline, adding their

own hair and eyes. “We had a basic

static OBJ file of the model and a bunch

of Open EXR files, each with a thousand

texture maps or more, for displacement,

textures, and subsurface scattering.”

The same was true for Abomination,

although that creature didn’t need hair

or cloth.

Because Soho had shared assets with

Rhythm & Hues for Narnia, they had a

system in place to handle the differences

in the studios’ pipelines. “The hardest

part was making their maps work with

our rendering technology,” says Berj

Bannayan, co-visual effects supervisor.

Rhythm & Hues uses proprietary render-

ing software; Soho VFX uses 3Delight,

a RenderMan-compliant program from

DNA Research.

“We animate and light in Maya, and

then use our own tools to bridge between

Maya and 3Delight,” Bannayan says. For

cloth and hair, we have custom software

extensions in Maya. Everything starts

with Maya as a base, but we have cus-

tom geometry tools and our own ways

of deforming.”

Rhythm & Hues used Hulk’s muscle and skin tools and techniques to create a more

grotesque body for Abomination.



___________





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Rooftop Rage

All told, Soho VFX’s crew of approxi-

mately 100 artists created 150 shots, with

most taking place during the nighttime

battle between Hulk and Abomination on

Harlem rooftops that extends for nearly

two minutes of screen time. For those

shots, Soho VFX built highly detailed CG

rooftops and streets seen below. “We had

to be able to shoot everything close up,”

Magled says. “Every water tank, ledge,

and brick. The previs kept changing; we

had to be prepared for anything.”

A crew of approximately 35 mod-

elers and texture painters spent five

months constructing the environments,

working from Lidar scans and 19GB of

photographs.

When they finished, the entire asset—

the texture maps, models, shaders, and

so forth—totaled 750GB, but animators

could work with only the sections they

needed for particular shots. They could

also select whether they wanted to put

the characters into low-, medium-, or

high-resolution backgrounds as they

worked. “We had only one shot with the

entire rooftop,” Magled says. “In that

shot, Abomination runs from end to end,

with the helicopter firing at him.”

For the creatures’ musculature, Soho

VFX worked with Autodesk on a custom

build of the muscle technology in Maya,

and then spent months creating addi-

tional tools. “We spent as much time

on Hulk’s muscles as we spent on build-

ing the rooftop,” says Bannayan. “It’s all

about seeing how the creatures’ veins

and tendons pop, and how the muscles

interact with the skin.”

Animators could work with tradi-

tional weighted skin to get coarse anima-

tion and then activate the muscle rigging

to see the muscles jiggle and deform. In

addition, localized displacement maps

linked to muscle movement added wrin-

kles, veins, and fine details. A lightweight

shader set provided quick renders for ver-

ification during the process. And, a new

system of blendshapes accelerated char-

acter cleanup.

“Before, character cleanup was

tedious,” Bannayan says. “We now have

a system of cleanup shapes that we can

use to fix any part of a character with-

out affecting other parts.” The crew also

rebuilt the lighting rigs to smooth the

process and reuse lights set up for simi-

lar environments.

On the Edge

Hydraulx, on the other hand, had only

three months to create its 300 shots,

which included an Abomination transfor-

mation, CG environments, and multiple

effects. In Abomination’s transformation,

we see him change part by part, starting

with his boots.

“We had a surface model and texture

maps, but not shaders,” says Greg Strauss,

who shared the job as visual effects

designer with Colin Strauss. “We rigged

the model, giving animators spheres

of influence—proprietary plug-ins for

Maya—they could use to precisely control

what part would transform.” Modelers

also created details with Autodesk’s Mud-

box and with Pixologic’s Zbrush displace-

ments baked into the model.

“We had a second layer of deforma-

tion on top when the skin was growing

and the monster beneath was pushing

it aside,” says Chris Wells, visual effects

supervisor, describing how the group

created the “snake shedding its skin”

effect. “We had multiple ways to push

things around with the deformer. Once

we applied a deformer, it would tear the

model open without doing horrible dam-

age to the UVs.” Animated textures that

coincided with the deformers affected

the geometry according to color; the tex-

ture maps animated off as the green skin

pushed through. Animators keyframed

his boots tearing apart, used a rigging

trick to pop off the threads, and Syflex

cloth simulation to tear his pants.

Perhaps most important for this work,

though, was a new photometric lighting

system that Hydraulx installed in time for

this film. “In the past, we’d cheat the light

fall-off values,” Strauss says. “What was

in the fill light would be a cheat. Now, it’s

physically accurate. We match the true

light, the energy level of the true lights.”

Much of that work happens with lens

shaders and output shaders in Mental

Images’ Mental Ray (now owned by

Nvidia). Hydraulx changed the color

space for calculations at the end of the

Mental Ray pipeline to a photometric

color space. But the studio also imple-

mented final gathering, in which the color

from every object in a scene influences its

surrounding environment.

“Final gathering is particularly impor-

tant on daytime exteriors because of

the fill light in the Earth’s atmosphere,”

Strauss says. “We thought it was too time-

intensive in the past, but the tables have

turned. Now, it takes too long to fake it.

We turn on final gathering and all of a

sudden, things look photoreal. Even our

less-experienced artists can make stuff

look good.”

Hydraulx’s lighting TDs work on

Rhythm & Hues shared shots in the film with Hydraulx and Soho VFX. For example, Hydraulx

built the city for the fight between Hulk and Abomination (above). Soho VFX took the fight

to the rooftop, and then Rhythm & Hues brought it to a climax.



___________





Character Modeling. . . .


eight-processor machines equipped with

16GB of RAM. “In the old days, when we

were working out of our apartments, that

was our entire renderfarm,” Strauss says.

“Now, that’s one kid’s workstation.”

In addition to the creature work,

Hydraulx worked on the university battle

scenes. An OBJ model of Rhythm & Hues’

final Hulk acted as a proxy to hold out

the dirt, dust, explosions, and the illu-

sion of rays created with Maya fluid sims.

Hydraulx also crashed and exploded the

CG Apache helicopters. For a grotto shot,

Hydraulx added a waterfall created using

Next Limit’s RealFlow. And for the fight

between Abomination and Hulk in the

streets of New York City, Hydraulx built

the city.

“We matched Soho’s aesthetic because

they had final shots for what the city

needed to look like,” explains Strauss.

Using textures from their library and

painted textures, the group quickly mod-

eled five blocks close up and a larger

area for midground shots. “The sequence

is at night with a fast camera, so the

midground buildings didn’t have to be

so detailed,” Strauss says. The CG team

worked 18-hour days, and two shifts of

compositors worked on Autodesk Inferno

systems to complete the shots. “The night

crew left as the morning crew showed up,”

Strauss says. But, together, they pumped

out a remarkable 300 complex shots in

three months.

It’s easy when you watch a film like

Incredible Hulk to focus on the action

and forget that CG artists created every

bit of muscle and tendon straining Hulk’s

skin. That they touched every chunk of

concrete ripped from the roof of a build-

ing, every chain about Abomination’s

neck, every propeller blade on a helicop-

ter, and every metal fragment that lands

on the ground. And, they created the sad

look on Hulk’s face. That it’s all digital.

But that’s the point, of course.

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning

writer and a contributing editor for Com-

puter Graphics World. She can be reached


Rhythm & Hues animation director Keith Roberts has performed animal characters in Babe, Harry Potter,

The Chronicles of Narnia, and Garfield, but until The Incredible Hulk, he had never animated a human

character, nor had he worked with motion capture. Perhaps as a result, he approached this project with

his eyes wide open.

Giant Studios managed the equipment and sessions, providing real-time playback that allowed the

performers to see their avatars on stage in Toronto and in Los Angeles.

“I had three performers with their own different styles of motion,” Roberts says. “I cast the performers

per-character and also per-action. Some people don’t have a body type suited to certain actions—it’s a

subtle thing, but I picked up on it straight away.”

For example, one performer could run and walk like Hulk, but couldn’t roll in the way Roberts imag-

ined Hulk would roll. Another performer had a particularly good stance for Hulk when the giant roared.

“Motion from motion capture is as pure as it gets, so once you see the differences, you want to start

with something right,” Roberts says. “If you give an animator data from a performer who moves his arms

too much, or looks too bowlegged, your chances of success are diminished.”

Roberts worked primarily with two performers in Toronto: Terry Notary, a former gymnast, Cirque du

Soleil performer, and choreographer; and Cyril Raffaelli, a martial arts expert, acrobat, and Parkour practi-

tioner (moving quickly while efficiently overcoming obstacles in an urban or rural environment). Although

they had suits for both actors playing Hulk and Abomination, Edward Norton (Hulk) didn’t wear the suit,

and Tim Roth’s (Abomination) motion wasn’t right. “Cyril was faster and could do Abomination better,”

Roberts says. “So, that left Terry more of the Hulk work to do.” He estimates that the motion-capture data

landed in scenes without tweaking from animators in only about four of the 240 shots.

“If we wanted the characters to look like guys in suits, we could have plugged in the data and gone

ahead,” Roberts notes. “But they’re larger than life, heavier, stronger, and faster, so we had to speed up

some parts, slow down other parts, and reconstruct the motion to give the characters more weight.”

Roberts also discovered that they lost flexibility in the characters’ upper torso when they applied the

motion-capture data to the rig. “I think that’s because you don’t put the targets directly on the skin,” he says.

“So, it’s difficult to get the enormous amount of compression and extension happening in that area.”

Giant Studios provided Rhythm & Hues with only a rough track; Roberts wanted raw data. “We

never asked them to clean it up,” he says. “I always wanted my best animators to make those decisions. I

wanted raw materials coming into my ‘kitchen,’ not premixed sauces.”

All in all, Roberts found his first experience with motion capture educational.

“They teach you the principles in animation school,” says Roberts. “But it’s only when you study the

motion capture, the way the body twists and torques, the way all the action comes from the hip, that you

can see what they’re talking about. It was an epiphany.”

But, it didn’t make the job easier. “This is the hardest show I’ve done,” Roberts says. “With a cartoon

character, you can get away with an enormous amount of dodgy animation. But with a human, my God.

It’s so much more specific, so much more difficult.” –Barbara Robertson



___________

_______________





. . . .Holography

Last month, we explored the technology

behind digital holography (see “Digital

Holograms,” pg. 28). This month, we look

at the artists who are venturing into the

brave new world of 3D imaging and the

facilities where digital holography can be

studied.

here are numerous places around

the world where non-digital holog-

raphy has been taught for many

years—it was invented in 1948,

and with the development of the

laser, the fi rst holograms were actually

made in the early ’60s. But the medium

has been languishing for some time.

The magic of holography—the ability

to capture light dimensionally, the possi-

bility of showing interpenetrating dimen-

sions, the ability to encapsulate time, the

capacity to show fully 3D images project-

ing out into space—has, from the begin-

ning, enchanted all who have laid eyes on

even the most simplistic of these images.

However, the promise of the creative

exploration of this medium has always

been limited by the diffi culty in actually

making holographic imagery. Stringent

requirements for no vibrations make it

necessary to record these images with

either huge vibration isolation tables in

dark basements or the use of an expen-

sive and powerful pulsed laser (the holo-

graphic equivalent of a fl ash in photog-

raphy). Then there is the need for very

high resolution, fi ne-grain emulsions for

recording them (commercial manufactur-

ers have been steadily dropping out, as the

predicted market has not manifested).

As a result of those challenges, only

the most stalwart artists have managed

to continue working in this realm. There

is a hard core of dedicated and talented

artists out there who are still working,

but very little new talent has been enter-

ing the fi eld.

Part 2 of a two-part feature

An image by Dieter Jung (made by Pro-

nova in Germany) from the exhibition “The

Garden of Light” in 2005 at the Kaohsiung

Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan.




___________






With the development of 3D animation

and the evolution of digital video and dig-

ital photography, it was apparent by the

1980s that a digital form of holography

was needed to open the creative potential

that was clearly held within the virtual

depths of this new medium. It took quite

some time for holographic technology to

mature to the point where this creative

fusion could manifest. There needed to

be a groundswell of artists with skills

in these areas ready to jump to another

level, and an audience hungry for 3D.

Today, we are at that point. There are

a number of commercial systems—holo-

graphic printers—available to output 3D

imagery. There are also several educa-

tional facilities worldwide that are teach-

ing digital holography, and a few places

where artists can apply for residencies so

they can create new work.

Indeed, there is a current inter-

est surge in everything three-dimen-

sional, and many hints at what might be

developing in the growing digital holo-

graphic realm. It is apparent that digi-

tal holography is approaching a tipping

point, and we are at a time when the

door has cracked open and interest in

digital holography is starting to push it

wide. Without question, there is much

promise for what is to come. To quote

holographic artist Melissa Crenshaw,

who will be curating an exhibition of

holography (which will include digital

holography) for the eighth International

Symposium on Display Holography in

China next July, “We are at the dawn of

a golden age in holography.”

So, with that in mind, let’s look at

where these new directions are origi-

nating and the multiple dimensions that

these artists are exploring. Last month’s

article delved into considerable detail

about the commercial facilities through-

out the world that have hologram pro-

duction capabilities. Alongside the evolu-

tion of these companies, there have been

a few far-thinking educational facilities

that have been opening the door to art-

ists to learn about digital holography.

Providing non-commercial digital holog-

raphy systems for experimental work,

these facilities exist because of their affil-

iations with commercial companies that

have built entry-level holographic sys-

tems with which artists can work.

This piece, titled “Holopublikum” from the

artist Mioon, measures 3x2x1.7m

and shows computer-generated stereo-

grams of 400 clapping people. The hologram

was made at KHM in Germany.



___________





. . . .Holography


KHM (Academy of Media Arts)

Dutch Holographic Laboratories (DHL),

headed by Walter Spierings, a man who

has always been sympathetic and sup-

portive of holographic artists, devel-

oped a digital holographic system for

the Academy of Media Arts, also known

as Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln

(KHM) in Cologne, Germany. Thanks to

efforts spearheaded by holographic artist

and university professor Dieter Jung, this

facility has acquired three holography

systems over the years from DHL.

The first, installed in 1991, used photo-

graphic slides in sequences of 200 images

to create images from either 3D anima-

tion or photographic sources. These holo-

grams were produced in a two-step pro-

cess to make single-color, white-light

reflection holograms. The second system,

a dot-matrix printer, was installed around

2002 and makes holograms through a

simpler process whereby images are

not dimensional but have the shifting

and brilliant color properties of rainbow

holograms. A third and more sophisti-

cated system was installed a year later;

it uses a DLP projector to transfer digital

sequences of images and employs three

different laser wavelengths to make full-

color, white-light reflection holograms.

Jung’s holograms have always been

focused on color. Using the shifting color

qualities of the rainbow hologram to good

effect, he has made images that contain

dimensional fields of light, with colors

contrasting or blending to give a glow-

ing ethereal quality to his holograms.

Jung has incorporated his latest images

into mobiles, wherein the holograms

themselves reflect light onto the surfaces

around them, as well as shift color as the

viewer moves. He utilizes both of KHM’s

recent systems to create dimensional

images as well as flat color-field images

with an illusion of depth from the clever

design and placement of the colors.

Recently retired from KHM, Jung has

been showing his work extensively, with

solo shows at such locales as the Museum

of Modern Art in Shanghai, China, the

Beijing Imperial City Art Museum in

the Forbidden City, China, the Today Art

Museum in Beijing, China, and a major

retrospective at the Taipei Fine Arts

Museum in Taiwan.

At KHM, holography is now available

to all the media students regardless of

department. The presentation and accep-

tance of a proposal defining the proj-

ect gives them access to the digital holo-

graphic printers. Working with content

from digital stills, video, 3D animation, or

other potentially innovative sources, stu-

dents can mix and match data from many

sources to produce holographic images.

A technical staff headed by hologra-

pher Urs Fries oversees the holographic

printers. Many students have utilized

this facility, and some of their work can

be seen at www.holonet.khm.de/khm/

index.html, along with work by many of

the visiting artists who, over the years,

have made holograms at this facility.

DHL has been an invaluable entry point

for many artists who otherwise had no

access to these facilities. It also serves as

a place where artists have frequented to

commission pieces. Providing a willing-

ness to work outside the box, DHL enabled

a numerous artists to create images that

continue to evolve the medium.

Other artists working with DHL or

KHM, or both, include New York City

artists Sam Moree and Doris Vila, both

with long histories in holography and

who have stepped into the realm of digi-

tal imaging; another New York City art-

ist, Ikuo Nakamura; Pepe Buitrago from

Spain, whose work straddles both analog

and digital holography; and Waldemar

Mattis-Teutsch from Bucharest, Romania,

who has been working extensively with

the dot-matrix process at KHM as well

as CG-originated holograms at DHL.

“In my opinion, digital stereography is

the best, the vastest, and the most beau-

tiful form of expression that an artist

can have from holography,” says Mattis-

Teutsch. “This kind of holography is in

constant development and change.”

Paula Dawson’s “Luminous Presence” was

shown at SIGGRAPH last year. Measuring

1.5x1.0m, it was made at Geola uab in

Lithuania and funded by a grant from the

Australian Research Council.

Measuring 50x60cm, this hologram, titled “Beat,” was created by artist Waldemar

Mattis-Teutsch and produced at Dutch Holographic Laboratories in Holland.



___________

_______





Holography. . . .


University of New South Wales

Australian artist Paula Dawson has always

pushed the limits of holography. Having

worked for many years in the more tra-

ditional approaches (making some of the

largest holograms in the world at that

time), she has moved very firmly into

digital holography. Traveling around the

world in order to create her images, she

has worked with DHL to explore some

experimental ideas, with Geola uab in

Lithuania to create the large-scale holo-

gram that was exhibited at SIGGRAPH in

2007, and an earlier work that was cre-

ated with Zebra Imaging in Texas.

Future projects are in the works

for later this year: creating a digital

hologram with Holographics North

(Burlington, Vermont), an experimen-

tal holographic video project at the MIT

Media Lab (Boston) that uses SensAble’s

Phantom haptic device to create 3D draw-

ings in real-time holographic space, and a

pulsed hologram project at the Center for

the Holographic Arts (New York City).

Dawson has received two grants

from the Australian government for her

research into holographic art, resulting in

the digital holograms produced by Zebra

Imaging and Geola uab. As an associate

professor at the University of New South

Wales’s College of Art, she has also been

developing an online course in hologra-

phy. Using a small kit from Intergraf LLC,

students will be able to make small holo-

grams using the earlier analog approach

to holography, and by creating anima-

tions in Autodesk’s Maya, they will make

a digital hologram for their final project

by sending data to Geola uab and have

their holograms mailed back to them.

De Montfort University

Other holographic teaching facilities are

coming online as well. At De Montfort

University (Leicester, UK), Dr. Martin

Richardson, a senior research fellow in

the Faculty of Art and Design, is teach-

ing digital holography as a part of the pro-

gram for his master’s degree and doctor-

ate students in digital art. For the past

four years, Richardson and his students

have been creating digital holograms

with Geola uab. Most recently, the univer-

sity acquired a motorized digital camera

and track system from Geola uab, which

allows students to create holograms

from sequences of digital images. These

sequences can be manipulated in post-

processing and combined with 3D anima-

tion to create complex animated images.

The data created by the camera and

the track system can be used to create len-

ticular photographs as well as holograms.

To make a hologram, the final data is sent

to Geola uab for processing. The finished

hologram (or Synfogram, as Geola has

branded them) is mailed back to the art-

ists usually in a week or so.

These students also have the

option of creating holograms

completely with CG.

Richardson, who has a

doctorate in holography from

the Royal College of Art in

London, has had a long career

in holography. His work has

encompassed a large body

of portraiture in pulsed laser

holography and includes mak-

ing holograms for David Bowie.

With the facilities available to

him, he has switched over

to working 100 percent with

digital holography. “We are heading into

uncharted waters, and a paradigm shift is

inevitable where holography is in the hands

of many rather than just a few,” he says.

Martina Mrongovius, a young Austra-

lian artist who also has a background in

physics, has been traveling the world in

order to study and create her art. Working

in London with Richardson before he took

up his position at De Montfort University,

Mrongovius has been moving from lab to

lab. She has made holograms with Geola

uab in Lithuania, at KHM in Germany,

and at the Center for the Holographic Arts

in the US, where she is currently assist-

ing in rebuilding a holographic printer

originally built by holographic artist

Ikuo Nakamura. Mrongovius brings with

her the experience she gained by work-

ing with Juyong Lee and using his digi-

tal holographic printer at the Holocenter

in Korea.

Another Australian artist, David Warren,

has been seeking access to holographic sys-

tems and has had numerous residencies in

optics facilities at various university engi-

neering and physics departments to do

non-digital holographic work. However,

he has turned to John Perry, owner of

Holographics North, in order to execute his

ideas that require digital output.

“My current concerns and theme is

the exploration of the use of personal

technologies: cell phones, laptops, dig-

ital cameras, iPods, blog sites such as

YouTube and MySpace, computer gaming,

and virtual environments,” says Warren.

“I’m fascinated by the almost fetish and

addictive need to communicate orally

and visually; witness the decline in the

quality of communication in favor of

quantity. In all these cases, the use of

this type of related imagery and the rel-

evance in using digital imagery compo-

nents becomes obvious.”

The Holocenter Korea

The Far East has its own wave of activity

in digital holography. Juyong Lee teaches

courses in Light and Holography as well

as Space and Holography to third-year

students enrolled in the School of Visual

Art at the Korean National University of

Art in Seoul, Korea. He has a class of 20

students with backgrounds in architec-

ture, sculpture, painting, ceramics, com-

In Martin Richardson’s piece, made at Geola uab, is a

scene from the movie Vertigo that was dropped into the

holographic space using Final Cut Pro and Photoshop.



___________





. . . .Holography


puter graphics, video, and holography. In

this facility, they are well equipped with

two large labs containing large, continu-

ous wave lasers capable of making very

large analog holograms.

Lee’s other laboratory is at the

Holocenter, where he has a pulsed laser

system and a newly constructed digital

holography system. He recently launched

a new artist-in-residence program at the

Holocenter, where Mrongovius will be

returning later in the year for her resi-

dency, as will New York City artist Mike

Finegan, Guillermo Federico Heinze from

Germany, Geumhyung Jung from Korea,

Setsuko Ishii from Japan, and Ya-Ling

Huang from Taiwan.

Lee’s personal work encompasses a

broad spectrum of hologram types, but

his most recent work is in digital hologra-

phy, which will be exhibited in July at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art in Seoul.

Kun Shan University

Ya-Ling Huang is the dean of the College

of Creative Media at Kun Shan University,

where she was charged with establish-

ing a holography teaching facility. After

much exploration and with some help

from Jung and Richardson, she has

worked with Walter Spierings of DHL to

first obtain a dot-matrix system and, later,

a more advanced DLP system. Working

within the school’s graphic arts program,

she has been gradually expanding the

scope of her facility and the range of proj-

ects that her students can undertake. She

will also be expanding her skills through

the residency she has been awarded in

Korea at the Holocenter.

Mike Finegan, a photographer, has

been exploring holography for some time

and has established a working relation-

ship with Yves Gentet in France. As dis-

cussed in part one of this article, Gentet

has his own digital holography system

and produces his own full-color holo-

graphic plates—with stunning results.

He has been shooting sequences of still

images and running tests with Gentet’s

system, and will also be going to Korea

this year to participate in the residency

he has been awarded.

Here in the US, no academic facil-

ities are teaching digital holography

or offering residency facilities to art-

ists. However, The Holocenter in New

York City (which predates the Korean

Holocenter by many years) is develop-

ing an entry-level system with the help

of Mrongovius.

As discussed in part one, John Perry

at Holographics North has worked with

many artists and continues to be a valued

resource for this community. His flexibil-

ity and support for artists with little back-

ground in the technology has made him

popular with a new wave of artists enter-

ing this medium. Most prominent among

them is well-known light sculptor James

Turrell, but some promising artists are

stepping into this realm and experiment-

ing with a wide range of approaches with

his support.

Christine Remy, from San Francisco,

has produced a series of large portraits

that are planned as part of an installa-

tion. “The concept of this installation has

to do with grief; in particular, a moth-

er’s grief at the loss of a child due to war,

urban violence or any type of violence,

really,” she explains. “The reason why

I chose holograms for this installation

is that they suggest other worldliness, a

spirituality not encased in religion, and

of a quality that transcends the mate-

rial world. A hologram is there and it

is not; spirituality is there and it is not.

They are both there for human beings

to experience in their own way and by

their own choice.”

Sam Saunders, an artist interested in

architecture who also works in video, has

created two pieces with Perry and plans

to continue working with him. A large

installation piece featuring his first holo-

gram with Perry in an environment of

large projected video works was shown

in a gallery in Chelsea, New York.

…And More

The Ontario College of Arts and Design

(OCAD), the University of Toronto, the

Photon League, and Photonix Imaging, all

located in Toronto, are intimately linked

together through the work of Michael

Page, a holographic artist who has been

immersed in holography since the early

1970s and who is committed to providing

artists with access to digital holography.

Page has been teaching holography at

OCAD since he ventured into the field, and

has been collaborating on projects with

scientists at the University of Toronto since

1974. In the early 1980s, graduates from

his program at OCAD founded the Photon

League, an artist-run center for holography.

A decade later, when OCAD sold the build-

ing, the two facilities began sharing space,

and the OCAD equipment was moved into

the Photon League building.

In 2000, Page, along with many others,

formed Photonix Imaging as a research

group, with the goal of accessing funding

for projects through the Ontario Centers for

Excellence. Now, OCAD, the University of

Toronto, the Photon League, and Photonix

Imaging are intimately linked: gradu-

ates from Page’s courses at OCAD have

become members of the Photon League;

In the 30x30-inch “Cath,” made at Holo-

graphics North in Vermont, Christine Remy

shows portraits of a woman grieving.



___________





Visit cgw.com......for the URLs of the holographic artists

mentioned in this piece and for the Web

addresses of the educational facilities teach-

ing digital holography and AIR programs.

Holography. . . .


Photon League members are research-

ing projects and creating their own art;

research results are shared with OCAD

students; scientists from the University of

Toronto assist in research projects and co-

teach a course with Page that includes stu-

dents from both institutions.

In 2000, a collaboration between sci-

entists at the University of Toronto and

workers from OCAD, along with Michael

Page acting as principal investigator, built

a digital holography system using a light

valve, which was discussed in part one of

the article.

Page is also on the advisory board

of RabbitHoles Media and has support

from the Ontario Centers for Excellence

to build a digital camera and rail system

of the same type that has been devel-

oped by Geola uab. The association with

RabbitHoles aids his students on another

level in that RabbitHoles has agreed to

take the best project from each class at the

University of Toronto and create a holo-

gram (a RabbitHole) from the data. These

groups all share the same facility with a

time-sharing arrangement. Page points

out that the overlap creates a rich envi-

ronment of creative exchange that serves

them all well.

Three artists—Ron English, Meats

Meier, and Jacques Desbiens—have

been working with RabbitHoles Media

in Ottawa, Ontario, to create limited edi-

tions of their work, and are pushing the

envelope in the creative expansion that

is occurring in digital holography. In his

pre-holographic work, English has been

teasing and taunting his audience, pro-

voking them with controversial images

and slogans. That aspect of his work has

been enhanced by his move into digital

holography. Experimenting with animat-

ing his controversial characters, he has

created “Kathy Cowgirl” and a series of

holograms from videos that encapsulate

his in-your-face poster series.

Meier, a leading 3D animator with

amazing skills in Pixologic’s Zbrush, has

also been developing a series of holo-

grams. (We will be exploring his work—

in particular, the hologram he has cre-

ated with RabbitHoles for SIGGRAPH

2008, in the August issue.)

Desbiens is a digital artist working

on his PhD at the University of Quebec

in Montreal. Originally a part of the

team at xyz Imaging (Montreal), which,

along with Geola uab, created the sys-

tems used now by RabbitHoles and

Geola, he possesses a wealth of experi-

ence with these sophisticated systems.

In his time at xyz, he created a number

of holograms, and most recently has cre-

ated one that compares the portrayal of

perspective in Chinese scroll painting

with the exploration of perspective in

digital holograms. Desbiens’ extensive

experience with the medium has given

him a sophisticated view of the poten-

tial and largely unexplored creative pos-

sibilities of digital holography.

RabbitHoles Media is also commis-

sioning 12 new limited-edition holo-

grams by a group of respected 3D enter-

tainment artists. These pieces will be

shown in the Gallery of the Gnomon

School of Visual Effects in Los Angeles,

where the opening of the show will be

timed to coincide with SIGGRAPH 2008

and will remain open for the following

month. RabbitHoles Media has formed a

collaborative relationship with Gnomon

and is sponsoring a student contest in

which winners will be able to make a

hologram. The awards will be given in

the following categories: character mod-

eling, hard-surface modeling, environ-

mental interiors, environmental exteri-

ors, and character animation.

Opening Doors

Holography is not just a medium to

explore 3D space. We now have a medium

in which it is possible to explore our per-

ceptions, the subtleties of human aware-

ness. The potential for a deeper level of

understanding of our relationship to the

many dimensions of space has been hov-

ering around holography since the first

holograms appeared.

Quantum physicist David Bohm pro-

posed theories that explored the idea of the

universe being holographic in nature, and

renowned neuroscientist Karl Pribram has

talked extensively about the holographic

nature of the brain. They both have intu-

ited the importance of holography as a

tool to help us to more fully perceive the

underlying nature of our existence.

With the earlier forms of holography, a

small group of holographic artists strug-

gled to express these ideas in a difficult

medium. With digital holography, we are

opening the doorway to a flood of differ-

ent perceptions, a rich tapestry of images

expressing ideas that have the potential to

change how we perceive our world.

Linda Law is a digital/holographic artist who

has been working in holography since 1975.

She is a fine artist who has also worked in

holographic research, education, as cura-

tor for the Museum of Holography, as a

3D animator for digital holograms, and as

a writer about 3D technology. She will be

co-chairing the Digital Holography sessions

at the eighth International Symposium on

Display Holography in China in July 2009.

She can be reached at [email protected]; for

more about Linda Law and her work, visit

www.greenwomanart.com. “The Broken Window” is a 140x47cm image

created by Jacques Desbiens and made at

RabbitHoles Media in Canada.



___________

_________

___________





. . . .Trends & Technology


Ontario is set on becoming the digital media capital of the world By Martin McEachern

Image courtesy Starz.



___________





Trends & Technology. . .

ince winning their last World Series in 1993, it’s been a slow and steady

decline for the Toronto Blue Jays, and with the Toronto Maple Leafs—

or “Laughs,” as some Torontonians would say—still searching for their

first Stanley Cup in more than 40 years, the beloved Canadian team

has taken its cursed place as the Boston Red Sox of hockey (well, at

least prior to 2004). But if the Ontario government has its way, the citizens of Ontario

may have a new team to cheer for—its ever-growing digital content creation commu-

nity. That’s because the newly established Ontario Media Development Corporation

(OMDC), an agency of the Ministry of Culture, has set its sights on world domination

in the computer animation industry. The Ministry is open about its ambitious battle

plan, and is giving game developers and effects houses powerful financial incentives

to set up shop in the province.

Having long ago earned the moniker Hollywood North, Ontario’s thriving film pro-

duction industry has helmed some of the biggest productions in recent history, includ-

ing last year’s Hairspray and the 2003 Oscar winner for Best Picture, Chicago. Several

months back, The Hulk wrapped shooting at the Toronto Film Studios. Walking

across the studio lot, the names that have graced the doors are impressive indeed: Ed

Norton, William Hurt, and legendary producers Walter F. Parkes and Gale Anne Hurd.

Unfortunately, while practical photography of these large-scale productions occurs

frequently in Toronto, the visual effects work usually is delegated to heavyweight ven-

dors down south, such as ILM or Sony Pictures Imageworks.

The irony of this is that some of the talent at these houses came from Ontario, where

they were educated at its world-renowned animation schools, including Sheridan

College in Oakville (alma mater of Steve “Spaz” Williams, former lead animator at

ILM and director of Disney and CORE Digital Pictures’ The Wild) and Seneca College,

whose students helped animator Chris Landreth with his Oscar-winning short Ryan.

In addition, Rob Coleman, ILM’s animation team lead for the Star Wars prequel trilogy,

is also Ontario born and educated.

Not only is Ontario a breeding ground for animators, but is a hotbed for software

development experts, as well. Autodesk and Side Effects, both headquartered in Toronto,

routinely scout for technical wizards from the acclaimed Computer Science programs

at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. Unfortunately, in the

past, most of these graduates have joined Ontario’s rich talent pool of film

and game talent that’s been siphoned by companies abroad, in the US, or

even to other Canadian institutions, such as Electronic Arts in Vancouver

and Ubisoft in Quebec.

Needless to say, the OMDC is determined to stop the brain drain

through direct funding of digital content creation and the administra-

tion of a variety of generous tax credits. And by early accounts, the

handouts are working. Premier developers, such as Capcom and Koei,

have recently chosen to open North American offices in Ontario.

Meanwhile, last September, US entertainment conglomerate

Starz Media—which includes Film Roman (The Simpsons, King

of the Hill) and Anchor Bay Entertainment—opened its state-of-

the-art animation studio in Toronto. One of Canada’s largest studios with

more than 150 employees, Starz is now hard at work on the Tim Burton-

produced animated feature 9, based on the award-winning short by

Shane Acker (see “Short and Sweet,” February 2006).

“In the past, Ontario would lose a lot of its talent to studios in

California, but what we’re seeing now is a steady repatriation of that

Canadian studios have been churning out hit projects, such as Every-

one’s Hero (opposite page) and This is Emily Yeung (left).

w w w . c g w . c o m JULY 2008 Computer Graphics World | 33Image coursey Marblehead.



___________







talent,” says Starz executive vice presi-

dent David Steinberg. Also thriving on

the generous funding and tax credits of

the OMDC are homegrown companies

like Silicon Knights (developers of Metal

Gear Solid and the upcoming Nordic-

themed next-gen title Too Human for

publisher Microsoft), Artech Studios, and

Marblemedia, which makes the hugely

successful preschool series This is Daniel

Cook and This is Emily Yeung.

“Without the Ontario government’s

financial support, especially on the

development side, we would never have

achieved the level of success we have

now,” points out Mark Bishop, president

of Marblemedia. Marblemedia exports

the two series across multiple platforms,

including television and the Web. Another

huge Ontario success story has been

Groove Media, which allows players to

download retail-quality skill games, such

as uTour Golf, and play online against

competitors for fun or real money.

The Programs

So what is Ontario offering? Well, for

starters, several funding programs for

video game developers. The OMDC

Video Game Prototype Initiative provides

as much as $500,000 to help develop-

ers create a prototype for a market-ready

game—an incredibly risky undertak-

ing since such “prototypes” are created

under speculation of a sale to a publisher.

The OMDC Interactive Digital Media

Fund provides up to $100,000 to create an

interactive digital media content project,

such as a Web, console, or casual game.

The OMDC Export Fund offers $10,000

to qualifying companies to fund busi-

ness development trips and participate

in major industry events, such as GDC,

DICE, or the Tokyo Game Show.

Furthermore, the Entertainment and

Creative Cluster Partnership Fund sup-

ports strategic partnerships that forge

fresh solutions to the needs of the indus-

try. Application deadlines for each pro-

gram can be found at www.omdc.on.ca.

In addition to the funding programs,

the OMDC also sweetens the digital

pot with six tax credits. The Ontario

Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit

refunds 30 percent of the costs of labor,

marketing, and distribution for games

created in Ontario—without any per-

project or annual corporate limit on the

amount that can be claimed. On top

of that credit, The Ontario Computer

Animation and Special Effects Tax Credit

will refund 20 percent of the labor costs

for computer animation and special

effects work incurred by foreign produc-

ers on local CG productions. The Sound

Recording Tax Credit refunds 20 percent

of production and marketing costs of

sound recording.

And that’s not all: If a developer works

with an Ontario university or college—

such as Sheridan or Seneca College—in

the making of a game, it’s eligible for

another 20 percent tax credit. The gov-

ernment also encourages developers to

hire, train, and evaluate Ontario’s ani-

mation students by providing cash-back

incentives or tax refunds for student

salaries. In addition, the combined fed-

eral and provincial tax incentives could

cut the costs of $100 in R&D to less than

$44. Through the Ontario Innovation Tax

Credit program, software and hardware

developers such as Autodesk, Side Effects

Software, and AMD are all eligible for a

10 percent tax credit for the cost of R&D

for their yearly software updates.

The only drawback to Ontario right

now may be the surging Canadian dol-

lar, which recently touched parity with

the American greenback, then roared

past it. Regardless, Starz Entertainment

CEO Robert Clasen remains bullish about

Ontario as he cut the ribbon on a 45,000-

square-foot Toronto studio. “If you’re

going to do CGI, the dollar has no bear-

ing. Toronto is where the talent pool is,”

he says, pointing to such famous anima-

tion schools as Sheridan College and the

Ontario College of Arts.

Leveraged by the benefits of the Ontario

Computer Animation and Special Effects

tax credit, Clasen anticipates that the facil-

ity will grow from about 150 animators to

300 by 2009. In addition, Steinberg notes

that the proximity to Autodesk allows

Starz animators to write their own pro-

prietary software code for significant cost

savings. Starz has already spent about

$150 million on animation production in

Toronto. Completed CG features include

Universal’s The Pirates Who Don’t Do

Anything and Fox’s Everyone’s Hero.

Building for the Future

Already the third largest television, film,

and digital media cluster in North America,

Ontario’s digital media industry generates

more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

Nevertheless, the province is hell-bent on

ruling the future of both the film and game

industry by investing in new, state-of-the-

art production facilities. The crown jewel

in this plan is FilmPort, a new studio com-

plex being developed in partnership with

Pinewood Studios in London and film

director Ridley Scott. Scheduled to open

in 2010, FilmPort will offer 550,000 square

feet of film, television, and game produc-

tion facilities, including 14 state-of-the-art

soundstages, one of which will be 45,000

square feet—making it the largest sound-

stage in North America.

CORE Digital Pictures has crafted the cartoon Chop Sockey Chooks, a co-production

between Decode Entertainment and Aardman Animations.



___________






To support the growing need for

motion capture in game cinematics and

real-time play, Toronto’s Seneca College,

in partnership with Fast Motion Studios,

recently opened a new state-of-the-art

facility encompassing 8000 square feet,

with a capture studio occupying 2500

square feet. With a 20-camera Vicon

system reaching two stories high and

capable of single and multiple body and

facial capture, it is the largest indepen-

dent mocap studio in eastern Canada,

and can easily accommodate Crouching

Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style wire work.

Unfortunately, thus far, beating

out industry giants such as ILM or

Imageworks as the primary effects ven-

dor for a major blockbuster such as The

Hulk (see “Heavy-Handed,” pg. 18) has

been an elusive goal for Ontario effects

houses, although one of Toronto’s big-

gest and best houses, CORE Digital

Pictures, single-handedly produced The

Wild, a visually stunning film that was

unfortunately hurt critically and com-

mercially by parallel development with

DreamWorks’ Madagascar. CORE also

delivered stunning CG animation for

Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II and, most

recently, for Showtime’s The Tudors.

According to CORE managing direc-

tor Ron Esty, the key to competing with

giants like ILM and WETA is to consoli-

date and coordinate the resources of the

various boutique effects across Ontario

to deliver large-scale effects. That’s pre-

cisely the goal of a newly formed asso-

ciation called the Computer Animation

Studios of Ontario. “Those two devel-

opments could have a profound effect

on the digital animation industry in

Toronto,” says Esty.

Education

Animation has been part of the cultural

fabric of Ontario since the inception of

the Canadian National Film Board, and

this identity has been woven into the

province’s many colleges and univer-

sities through a variety of animation,

game development, and computer-sci-

ence programs. While the University of

Toronto and the University of Waterloo

churn out some of the top computer sci-

entists in the world, students at Algoma

University College in St. Sault Marie

can get a master’s level degree in com-

puter games technology. The program,

developed by the University of Abertay

Dundee in Scotland in 1997, runs for

three semesters over 12 months.

Students also flock to Seneca

College’s Animation Arts Center and

most famously to Sheridan College in

Oakville. Called the best in animation

training by DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey

Katzenberg, Sheridan was also cited

by Jack Lew, director of International

University Outreach at Electronic Arts,

as EA’s number one choice when look-

ing for the next crop of game designers.

Sheridan Spark, Oakville’s digital media

incubator, supports aspiring developers

and digital media content producers

with a variety of digital media products

and services.

Walking through Sheridan’s 80,000-

square-foot facility, meeting the staff

and students—potentially the best in

the next generation of animators—I ask

what skills recruiters from the big stu-

dios are looking for in a prospective

animator. Almost unanimously, I am

told that the big companies are look-

ing for storytelling ability. “They want

a student who can produce the next big

idea,” says Michael Collins, Dean of

School of Animation. Acting and draw-

ing ability are obviously indispensable,

which Sheridan emphasizes. However,

many students I spoke to also cited the

Internet as still an important part of

their education.

As one fourth-year animation stu-

dent told me: “For networking, career

services, and developing classical ani-

mation skills, Sheridan and Ontario

have been incredible. But I cannot over-

emphasize the importance of the ’Net in

the learning process. Sites like http://

www.animationmentor.com (run by

former Pixar animators) have been an

essential part of my education, as well.”

In my random survey of the students,

The list ofFusion houses

continues,to name a few...

To great artists.To a great team.

To the future.

eyeon

Aardman Animations Ltd.Animal Logic

Atmosphere Visual EffectsBattlestar Galactica VFX

Blur Studio IncBSkyB

C.I.S. London/VancouverC.O.R.E. Digital Pictures

CAFEFXCharlex

ClearCustom Film Effects

D.A.M.N. FXDef2ShootDigi-Guys

Digital DimensionDigital Pictures IlouraDisney Toon Studios

Django Animation LtdEden FX

Electronic ArtsEnigma Studios Inc

Envy Post ProductionFake Graphics Ltd.Flash Film Works

Ford Motor Company Inc.Framestore CFC

Frantic FilmsGhost A/S

IMAX CorporationIntelligent Creatures

JanimationLLP Digital Inc.M2 Television

Magna Mana ProductionMatte World DigitalMechanism Digital

Mercedes-Benz USA LLCMotion FX

Origami Digital LLCPeerless Camera Company

PendulumPrime Focus London

Rhino FXRhythm & Hues Studios

R!OTRocket Science VFX

RushesSanctuary Post

Screaming Death MonkeyStargate Atlantis

Starz Media Canada CoThe Boeing Company

The OrphanageThe Syndicate

Tigar HareToon City Animation Inc.Toy Box EntertainmentTroublemaker Studios

Turner BroadcastTV2 / Denmark

TV-AsahiUbisoft

Walt Disney Television Animation



___________

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____





other sites paving the way for aspiring

animators include gnomon3d.com and

highend3d.com.

Immigration and Health care

Besides access to one of the best techni-

cal and artistic talent pools in the world,

Ontario offers relocating companies half

the health-care costs of the US (thanks

to a publicly funded health-care sys-

tem); payroll taxes that are 40 to 60 per-

cent lower than in the US; and salaries

for 3D animators that are approximately

$10,000 less than their average American

counterpart in New York or California.

Canada’s immigration policies also help

streamline the transplantation of a large

foreign work force to Ontario. “Transferring

key staff from Japan proved to be easy,”

says Hidenori Taniguichi, senior vice pres-

ident of worldwide game developer Koei.

For Koei, Ontario’s strategic location in the

heart of the North American market (just

hours from Boston and New York), as well

as its easy access to the European markets,

proved to be other strong lures. Capcom

president Midori Yuasa concurs. “Toronto

is the center for the North American indus-

try; it gives us access to a seemingly end-

less supply of talented, entertainment-

savvy people, thanks to its colleges and

universities,” he says. “Ontario also offers

low business costs, exceptional R&D tax

credits that you can’t find anywhere else

in the world, and helpful economic devel-

opment people to facilitate all aspects of

business startup.”

Several provisions in Canada’s immi-

gration program can expedite the relo-

cation of qualified talent. Work per-

mits from the Information Technology

Workers allow qualifying applicants in

seven software developer occupations

to work in Canada on a temporary basis.

Company staff, including managers

and employees with specialized knowl-

edge, may transfer to Canada under the

Intra-company Work Permit category.

Meanwhile, Canada’s Skilled Worker

immigration category selects permanent

residents based on a point system using

selection criteria including education,

experience, and language ability. Highly

skilled digital media workers generally

do well under this system. A job offer

from a Canadian employer is not man-

datory, but it can positively contribute to

an application.

Moreover, unlike in the US, once a

skilled worker arrives in Canada on a

work permit, the person not only receives

health-care coverage, but the worker’s

residency is not tied to his or her job,

which means that if the person loses

the job before the length of the permit

expires, he or she is not deported. Rather,

the person is allowed to remain in the

country, seek employment, and, if suc-

cessful, apply for permanent residency.

The Great White North

Also thriving in Ontario’s new developer-

friendly climate is Tira Wireless, maker

of a widely used porting technology for

transferring software and games (such

as EA’s NHL hockey titles) across myr-

iad operating systems of mobile phone

carriers. The company’s clients include

Disney Mobile, Sega Mobile, Sony

Pictures Mobile, Warner Brothers, and

Capcom. Tony de Lama, Tira’s senior

vice president of product management,

emphasizes Ontario’s strong venture cap-

ital community as a critical component

in the firm’s success.

Symbols of his own company’s suc-

cess adorn the office of Silicon Knights’

vice president Rob DePetris. On one wall

hangs a congratulatory letter from Metal

Gear creator Hideo Kojima for the Metal

Gear Solid games; on his desk sits a Master

Chief helmet signed by the entire crew

of Bungie after a favorable viewing of an

early build of Too Human; and on another

wall hangs a work of art; below it, his

degrees from Ontario’s Brock University;

and below that, two samurai swords.

“Those are the three keys to success: art,

education, and warfare,” he says.

As I’m led through the halls of Starz

Animation by Steinberg (a former Disney

producer whose credits include Meet the

Robinsons, Mulan, and Hercules), I ask

him how such a massive studio sprung

up so suddenly on the industry land-

scape. “Actually, Starz began after pur-

chasing a small studio in Toronto called

DKP Effects, founded by Dan Krech in

1985,” he says.

“Oh, my God,” I respond in shock.

“DKP was the first effects house I inter-

viewed as a journalist covering the DCC

industry way back in 2001.”

At the time, DKP was a comparatively

tiny outfit doing digital cars for Ford and

working on the short-lived digitally ani-

mated TV Series Game Over. It’s hard to

believe what’s become of such a tiny studio,

transformed almost overnight into a fea-

ture animation powerhouse with a seem-

ingly endless sprawl of animators hard at

work—with Tim Burton, no less, peering

over their shoulders as they animate to the

voices of Martin Landau, John C. Reilly,

Jennifer Connelly, and Elijah Wood.

My, how times are changing in

Ontario.

Martin McEachern is an award-winning

writer and contributing editor for Com-

puter Graphics World. He can be reached


The crew at Starz recently finished work on the 3D animated Veggie Tales movie The

Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.



Imag

e cou

rtesy Starz.



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AnimationVancouver Film School students

produce impressive and award-winning animation

• • • SPONSOR ED EDI TOR IAL • • •

“Results matter.” At Vancouver Film School (VFS), Canada’s largest pri-

vate post-secondary entertainment arts institution, it is not just a motto;

it’s a mantra, for students and instructors alike. This principle guides

teachers and students in the VFS Classical Animation program, and they

give the industry the very best of themselves—with stellar results.

The VFS Classical Animation program is an intensive, one-year cur-

riculum designed to turn out professional animators in just one year. In

those 12 months, students learn and experience the entire animation

process, from concept development to finished product. All the corner-

stones of animation technique—drawing, storyboarding, layout, back-

ground, and character design—combine to deliver a comprehensive,

well-rounded education in classical animation.

“Students in Classical Animation are living, breathing animation for a

year,” explains Larry Bafia, Head of Animation & Visual Effects at VFS and

a former Commercial Animation Director and Sequence Lead Animator

at PDI/DreamWorks.

Over the course of six months, students learn technique and theory,

as well as how to present their work and benefit from critiques. Woven

throughout is a nuts-and-bolts technical education, ensuring that future

animators have the technical experience and know-how to produce

professional-looking results. The sixth month ushers in the develop-

ment phase, in which students “take an original idea, boil it down to

its essence, and determine how to put it into film language,” continues

Bafia. Of the curriculum, says Bafia, “We set the standards high. If they

work hard enough, they will rise to the occasion.” And rise they do.

To gauge the quality of VFS student and alumni work, one needn’t

look far: VFS student works are part of noteworthy entertainment-art

showcases, including YouTube.com, where hundreds of impressive VFS

student pieces reside (http://youtube.com/user/VancouverFilmSchool).

VFS submits its students’ animated shorts to a wealth of animation fes-

tivals in North America and abroad. Castelli Animati, the international

festival of animation in Italy, recently showcased two VFS student works,

for example. “Student films coming out of VFS are standing up to profes-

sional work and gaining international exposure,” says Bafia, noting that

very few schools were included in event.

VFS has been named as the top animation school in Canada and the

fifth best worldwide in 3D World Magazine’s first global Ivy League rank-

ing. In fact, VFS’s Animation & Visual Effects department is the only one-

year program in 3D World’s top five—a recognition Bafia attributes to

the dedication of the students and staff at VFS. “To rank so high among

schools with much longer programs speaks to the hard work and atten-

tion to detail,” he says.

“It is a privileged person who gets to do their art, their craft for a living,”

Bafia admits. “I consider myself fortunate because I do get to do that.”

For this and other reasons, he and his colleagues take their responsibil-

ity very seriously. A majority of the staff not only teach, but also actively

work in the industry; many are former VFS graduates who wish to give

back to the school and their field. The school’s faculty feels a responsi-

bility, to the student body and to the greater industry, to deliver well-

educated, well-rounded professionals—ensuring that animators, the art,

and the market continue to thrive.

In the end, results really do matter, and matter most—in education,

and in life. When the students and faculty of Vancouver Film School

look back on their life’s work, the results will speak for them and their

creativity, hard work, and education.

It’s easy to see what VFS and its staff, alumni, and students bring to

the industry: imaginative, eye-catching, and awe-inspiring animated

characters, shorts, and full-length films. To begin your life’s work in ani-

mation, visit Vancouver Film School online at www.vfs.com.

Awe-inspiring

Images (left to right) provided by Jon Brown, Tammy Dubinsky, Rodolfo Collado Hernandez, and Choom Lam.




___________





Portfolio

38 | Computer Graphics World JULY 2008

Imag

e ©Jin

g Zh

ou

.SI

GG

RAPH

Art

Gal

lery

Clockwise from top:

Fragment.1207.0304.3 Created by Tim Borgmann, an inde-pendent artist from Wuppertal, Germany.

Purity Created by Jing Zhou from Monmouth University in the US.

Kashikokimono Created by Takahiro Hayakawa from Kyushu University in Japan.

Ask any digital artist, and he or she will say that one of the big advantages to using CG over

traditional media is speed—in particular, the ability to create iterations and changes in a flash.

So it seems rather ironic that the theme of this year’s SIGGRAPH Art Gallery is Slow Art. That

is, until the meaning of the title is revealed. “ ‘Slow’ refers to the Slow movement. It advocates

being more thoughtful about what you eat and how food is prepared. The movement encour-

ages community and taking the time to enjoy something fundamental and good from a very

broad perspective,” explains Stanford University’s Lina Yamaguchi, this year’s Art Gallery chair.

Since we commonly think of computers as speed enhancers and art as a platform for

contemplation and commentary, Yamaguchi concluded that this concept would make an

intriguing call for participation in which the Art Gallery is considered a venue for new media







JULY 2008 Computer Graphics World | 39

work. Furthermore, the title parallels with SIGGRAPH’s other conference themes, including

Global Responsibility, Impact on Society, and Future History.

The committee received more than 400 submissions, with 64 accepted for the Slow

Art and the Design & Computation exhibits. The works will be shown in one of four areas:

Erosion, Hybrids, Rhythms, and Traversal. Yamaguchi describes these segments: “Erosion is

a grouping that speaks to time, repetition, and natural processes, such as disintegration and

entropy. Works in the Hybrid section contain objects that uniquely combine the old and new.

Rhythms refer to patterns of time and the often-forgotten idea of play. Traversal inspires

thoughts about journeys and our surroundings.”

Some images from this year’s gallery appear on these pages. —Karen Moltenbrey

From left, top to bottom, and then right:

Dark Days–New York Created by Gabriele Peters from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Dortmund in Germany.

Water Planet Created by Anna Ursyn from the University of Northern Colorado in the US.

Smoke Water Fire Created by Mark Stock from Mark Stock Studio in Newton Center, Massachusetts.

Fragment.0140.02b Created by Tim Borgmann, an independent artist from Wuppertal, Germany.







. . . . .Knowledge&Career

hile its technology can be found in numerous com-

mercial applications, Norwegian projector man-

ufacturer ProjectionDesign also plays a key role

in advancing academic research through a num-

ber of initiatives. In particular, the company’s

relationship with the iCinema Research Centre of

Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW) has led

directly to the development of new panoramic screen experi-

ences that are having a major impact on the way we use and

perceive audiovisual media.

The relationship between ProjectionDesign and iCinema

began in 2003, when professor Jeffrey Shaw, iCinema’s direc-

tor, contacted ProjectionDesign’s Thierry Ollivier to examine

the suitability of the manufacturer’s projectors for his 360-

degree applications. Shaw, an international media art pio-

neer, had begun researching the potential of panoramic pro-

jection in 1995, when he was founding director of the ZKM

Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Shaw’s initial use of ProjectionDesign products was

for iCinema’s Advanced Visualization and Interaction

Environment (AVIE) system—the world’s first 360-degree

stereoscopic panoramic projection environment, which was

launched in 2004 using 12 F1+ projectors.

AVIE comprises a cylindrical, silvered screen measuring

four meters high by 10 meters in diameter; on the internal

surface, 360-degree 3D panoramic multimedia content can

be projected. The setup uses a cluster of seven PCs and 12

projectors, arranged in stereoscopic pairs fitted with polariza-

tion filters. The total resolution is approximately 8000x1000

pixels. The iCinema team also has developed custom warp-

ing and edge-blending software for a seamless, fully immer-

sive experience.

Visitors to the AVIE environment can be tracked by infra-

red cameras as well as by real-time position and gesture-anal-

ysis software. This enables audience participation and inter-

play between real people and projected characters or avatars,

and, in a training application, precise analysis of audience

reactions and behavior.

Subsequent to AVIE, the iCinema team developed the

hemispherical iDome, using ProjectionDesign’s F30 1080p

projectors. The iDome utilizes a three- or four-meter diam-

eter fiberglass dome for 360x180-degree projection utilizing

one projector and a spherical mirror as a reflection surface.

The size and shape of this vertically mounted hemispher-

ical projection setup covers the entire peripheral vision of

the user standing directly in front of it, resulting in a truly

immersive and interactive experience.

iCinema’s panoramic production resources include a

custom-built 24-megapixel digital video camera, called the

Spherecam. With this ultra-high-resolution system, the camera-

person does not have to frame the shot; instead, the person

captures the whole world and then lets the viewer choose

what to look at when it is all projected in the round.

The original AVIE and iDome systems are installed at

iCinema’s Scientia facility at UNSW in Sydney, and they have

since been the basis for a number of installations throughout

the world, in a mixture of scientific and artistic visualization

and training applications.

“As a result of our experiences, ProjectionDesign was

chosen by the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe

to equip the recently built PanoramaScreens with F20

sx+ projectors,” Shaw explains. “This was also the case

for the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre at

Rensselaer Polytechnic University in New York—another

iCinema partner, which has recently purchased our AVIE


Kn

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Car

eer

The Australian mining industry recently signed contracts for mul-

tiple AVIE and iDome systems for the purpose of safety training.

Pho

to cou

rtesy Jeffrey Shaw

.



___________





Knowledge&Career. . . .


system equipped with ProjectionDesign F3+ projectors.”

One of the latest applications for AVIE is T Visionarium,

which premiered in January 2008 at the International Sydney

Festival and will be shown in Shanghai, China, later in the

year. Offering an all-surrounding 3D spectacle of hundreds of

video clips that the viewers can interactively sort and edit, T

Visionarium is a unique interactive cinema experience that

lets the user remix more than 20,000 video clips derived from

Australian broadcast television.

Meanwhile, the Australian mining industry recently

signed contracts for multiple AVIE and iDome systems for

the purpose of safety training with New South Innovations,

the technology commercialization division of UNSW. The

agreement will have iCinema supply four AVIE theatres

and 12 iDomes to four purpose-built VR training sites

across New South Wales. Among them, the systems will

use more than 80 of ProjectionDesign’s F20 sx+ and F30

1080p projectors.

“Our groundbreaking research, in cooperation with

ProjectionDesign, has brought about unique advances

in panoramic visualization and simulation,” says Shaw.

“Interactive digital media systems offer extraordinary new

opportunities, and our research is focused on the way these

can be used to create new methods of living in the contem-

porary world, redefining how we seek recreation and learn-

ing, and how we work and do business.”

Anders Løkke, marketing and communications manager at

ProjectionDesign, concludes: “Our relationship with institutions

like iCinema is part of what makes us different as a manufac-

turer. We are happy to support academic and artistic research

into the use of AV and cinema technology because we know it

will bring about specialist commercial benefits—for us, for our

end customers, and for the industry as a whole.”

Working with ProjectionDesign, iCinema Research Centre has developed

new panoramic screen experiences.

Pho

to cou

rtesy Jeffrey Shaw

.



___________

_____________________________






or those aspiring to break into the computer graphics,

production, or post industries, an internship can play

an important role. Not only does it provide a foot in the

door, it’s also a way to see how a studio operates from

the inside, as well as an opportunity to ask questions

and learn from veteran talent.

Many facilities are opening their doors to students, giv-

ing them hands-on experience that goes beyond what can be

learned in a classroom. And those who show aptitude and

desire are often rewarded with paid positions down the road,

when openings become available. Here’s a look at a cross sec-

tion of facilities that host internships—not just in the sum-

mer, but all year round.

Company X/Sugarbox

According to Rachelle Way, executive producer at Manhattan

edit house Company X and its sister company, Sugarbox,

which provides original music, supervision, searches, and

recording services, the two studios utilize interns through-

out the year. With the facility located in New York City, Way

says the group is able to tap the local colleges as well as post

opportunities on Web sites such as mandy.com.

“We get a big variety of students, post-college people,

and even a little older people looking for a career change,”

Way says.

Company X and Sugarbox have been hosting their intern

program for approximately three years and structure it

around the semesters of the school year. At any time, there

might be four or five interns working at the locales.

“They don’t come in every day,” Way explains, “they come

in a couple of days a week. We have a schedule.” Candidates

range in skill level and experience.

Depending on the person’s skill level, the time at the

studio could entail helping composers and engineers with

mixes or recordings. Those with editing experience can help

with digitizing and creating QuickTimes. “They are able

to get hands-on experience if they have some experience,”

says Way. If they don’t have experience, they will be given a

chance to sit with editors, composers, and engineers to learn

more about the tools. “We try to get them involved in proj-

ects, like reorganizing the music library, just to give them an

idea of the type of stuff we do.”

The staff at Company X and Sugarbox later report to Way

on an intern’s progress. “If an intern has been really help-

ful, they let me know that. And when it comes time to fill an

entry-level position, we think of our interns first.”

Imageworks

Sony Pictures Imageworks in Culver City, California, has an

internship program that runs throughout the year, says Sande

Scoredos, executive director of training and artist develop-

ment. The company’s IPAX program connects teaching fac-

ulty at 18 educational institutions with industry pros who

can offer direction in animation and VFX trends. This can be

passed on at the classroom level to help develop future talent.

Teachers involved in fellowships can recommend students

for an internship, and those who are selected—as many as 15

in the summer—begin the eight-week program by taking an

in-house training course that details the technology, vocabu-

lary, and positions at the studio.

“They do a week of that,” Scoredos explains. “They get

assigned a work space, e-mail address, and computer, so they

are pretty immersed. We are looking at their skills, and we


Kn

ow

led

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Car

eer

Brian Lee (right), USC School of Cinematic Arts, receives a certifi-

cate from Suzanne Labrie (left), Imageworks’ executive director

of production management.



___________





For this exclusive partnership, we are pleased to announce a unique scholarship opportunity for the one-year Animation & Visual Effects program at VFS.

So put your talent to work. Study with pros, develop your idea, invent your character, and produce your animation.

The application deadline is October 31, 2008. Visit vfs.com/cgw to apply.

CGW, Vancouver Film School (VFS) and HP have joined forces to offer full scholarships to a number of VFS’s acclaimed production-oriented programs.

VFS student work by Zack Mathew









have classes during the whole eight weeks

that they can take—whether it’s in anima-

tion, effects, or different areas. Some come

in and don’t know the particular software

we use, and some do know, so they have

different levels [of knowledge].”

All the interns are active students

who are enrolled and registered to return

to school. Imageworks is not looking for

graduates, says Scoredos. “We’re looking

for people who will benefit the most from

an internship experience and take that

back to the classroom, and those who will

learn more—and, hopefully, we will hire

them. We have been successful in doing

that. We’ve hired a lot of interns, but they

have to finish school.”

The program also provides a chance

for participants to get exposure to different disciplines. “They

may have come in thinking they want to be an animator, but

did not know there was matte painting, or texture painting, or

Inferno work,” Scoredos notes. “They get the chance to take

a class with an actual artist, who explains what they do and

how they got into it, and also show their work. It can be very

enlightening, and they might go back to school with a bit of a

different focus.”

PostWorks

Because of its Midtown location, PostWorks prefers to select

candidates who are ready to embrace postproduction as their

career, rather than those on college break. According to Bill

Ivie, VP of PostWorks’ Sound Group, the studio often receives

resumes from graduates of The School of Audio Engineering

(SAE), the Institute of Audio Research (IAR), and Full Sail

University. Clients and friends also make recommendations.

The studio interviews a half dozen candidates every three

months or so, and has two or three interns on hand at any time.

“The intern’s primary responsibilities are to run packages

between the Midtown office and clients, and especially to our

main facility in SoHo,” Ivie explains. “They also need to be

able to answer phones, cover the reception desk, run errands,

change an occasional lightbulb, and be sure the studios are

well stocked. They don’t clean bathrooms or mop floors, nor are

asked to keep long hours.”

In addition to their regular duties, interns have a chance to

learn the basics of duplication, signal flow, and patch bays, and

how to operate the numerous SD and HD equipment. They are

also encouraged to observe sessions and ask questions.

“If our intern survives three months of scrutiny and he

or she displays plenty of potential, we do our best to find an

entry-level position somewhere in the company,” says Ivie.

“We advise them to put aside preferences and accept whatever

opening becomes available, because once

they’re in, they will gravitate towards the

right specialty or even discover an area

they hadn’t even known about that might

be more appealing.”

Ravenswork

Robert Feist is the owner of Venice,

California-based audio post house

Ravenswork and co-chair of the Venice

Media District, a local collective that

shares and promotes its community

resources. The Venice Media District

has a relationship with Venice Arts, a

local nonprofit organization that works

with at-risk youths in the area, offering

them instruction through programs that

include photography and digital film-

making. These participants have a chance to intern at some of

the District’s member studios.

“Until now, there hasn’t been any way for them to move for-

ward,” says Feist of the kids in the Venice Arts program. “So by

starting this internship program, we are able to take these kids

and keep them moving forward.”

Ravenswork regularly has one or two interns working at the

studio at any time during the year. Interns have a chance to

learn the workflow of the facility, see how the machine room

operates, and obtain an understanding of the in-house post

tools. “We don’t have anyone sweeping up,” says Feist. “They

get some hands-on experience. They hang out with other work-

ers and assistants, and pretty much learn what the assistants

do. It gives them more of a direct hands-on experience in a real

working environment.”

Ravenswork also works with local colleges. Those seeking

internship opportunities have to show more than just a casual

interest, though. “[When] I take students who just want to

learn, it just doesn’t work out. They have to show they are inter-

ested,” says Feist. “It takes a certain amount of work for a com-

pany to [support] these interns. It takes effort to manage them,

give them experience, and train them.”

Feist says he has a few simple rules interns need to follow

in order to be a success: “They have to treat it like a job. They

have to be on time. If they are going to be late, they have to call,

and if they don’t, I’ll let them go. I want them to have a feel for

what it’s like to have a real job.”

Internships can last three or four months, and one recent

participant showed real desire—staying after hours and asking

lots of questions. His reward? He received a paid, entry-level

position.

Marc Loftus is a senior editor at Post, CGW’s sister publication. He

can be reached at [email protected].

PostWorks’ Bill Ivie: Make a good impres-

sion and secure a position at the studio.



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SOFTWARE

R I G G I N G

TFM from AnzovinWin • Mac • Linux Anzovin Studio has

released The Face Machine (TFM) for Maya,

a software tool for rigging faces quickly and

easily. TFM performs intelligent point weight-

ing, supports box controls and direct controls,

and is based on direct deformation, rather

than pre-defined blendshapes. TFM enables

animators to deform the face into virtually any

expression. It includes Anzovin Rig Nodes, a

free plug-in that allows rigs generated in TFM

to be used in Maya. TFM users can easily com-

pile a facial-pose library, saving it locally or on

a server for use by an entire team of anima-

tors. The Face Machine for Windows, Mac OS,

and Linux is priced at $199. The Face Machine

and The Setup Machine can be purchased as a

bundle for $249.

Anzovin Studio; www.anzovin.com,

www.thefacemachine.com

C O L O R C O R R E C T I O N

Collaborating on ColorWin Da Vinci Systems recently revealed

that Gamma & Density Co.’s 3cP (Cinematog-

rapher’s Color Correction Process) is interop-

erable with its Resolve and 2K Plus systems,

delivering on-set color correction and calibra-

tion. The 3cP laptop-based system enables

the cinematographer or director of photog-

raphy to make color-grading decisions on set,

after which settings can be passed directly to

the dailies timer and the colorist in postpro-

duction. 3cP is being used by cinematogra-

phers on major motion pictures, including

The Tudors and The Kite Runner. The system,

a laptop computer loaded with 3cP software,

works with film, DI, video (NTSC/PAL), and HD

productions to perform on-set color correc-

tion with live settings. The settings are saved

to a USB memory stick as ASC CDL (American

Society of Cinematographers Color Decision

List) XML files and then transferred to the

Resolve suite for finishing.

Gamma & Density Co.;

www.gammaanddensity.com

Da Vinci Systems; www.davsys.com

P L U G - I N S

Daz 3D NewsWin • Mac Daz 3D has unveiled two new

plug-ins: Daz Studio 3D Bridge for Photoshop

and Mimic Pro for Carrara. With the 3D Bridge

plug-in for Photoshop, Daz Studio users can

automatically apply 3D imagery to Photoshop

projects. The Daz Studio 3D Bridge plug-in

enables users to view 3D scenes as Photoshop

layers, render directly into Photoshop, com-

posite 2D and 3D content, and import, export,

and modify image maps and textures onto 3D

models in Photoshop. Priced at $199, the plug-

in is available as a free 30-day trial install, and

requires Daz Studio Version 2.1 or later, which

is offered free of charge.

The Mimic Pro for Carrara plug-in enables

seamless lip-synching, sound analysis, and

speech animation simulations within Carrara

6.2. Mimic Pro for Carrara aids users in add-

ing greater expression to 3D characters by

creating facial animation sequences, such

as winks, nods, and smiles. Mimic Pro for

Carrara animates 3D figures using exist-

ing audio files in any language or personal-

ized speech files created with Mimic’s record-

ing studio. Mimic Pro for Carrara is available

in Macintosh and Windows formats for $199.

Mimic Pro for Carrara is compatible with Carrara

Version 6.2.

Daz 3D; www.daz3d.com

3D in StereoWin • Mac • Linux The Foundry has

announced Ocula, a collection of plug-ins for

3D stereo postproduction. Ocula automatically

replicates processes on left and right chan-

nels, and provides tools with which to polish

and refine 3D stereo material. Ocula plug-ins

employ new disparity-mapping algorithms to

track and correlate differences in positional

space and movement between correspond-

ing pixels in the left and right cameras. The

tools apply corrections by warping, stretching,

and squeezing areas of an image that require

treatment. Artists also gain pixel-level control

over images. Corrections can be made to the

left- and right-eye channels together or sep-

arately, helping minimize discomfort during

the 3D viewing experience. Ocula’s Interocular

Distance Shifter corrects horizontal alignment

issues, whereas its Vertical Aligner automati-

cally attempts to vertically align correspond-

ing image features in each view. Ocula plug-

ins are designed to increase productivity and

reduce the labor involved in rotoscoping work,

paint effects, and other operations. Ocula

plug-ins will be available for the release of

Nuke Version 5.1, expected this month.

The Foundry; www.thefoundry.co.uk

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

products




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July 2008, Volume 31, Number 7: 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 post-age paid at Glendale, CA, 91205 & additional mailing offices. COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD is distributed worldwide. Annual subscription prices are $72, USA; $98, Canada & Mexico; $150 International airfreight. To order subscriptions, call 847-559-7310.

© 2008 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. Ride Along Enclosed.

POSTMASTER: Send change of address form to Computer Graphics World, P.O. Box 3296, Northbrook, IL 60065-3296.

CG ConnectionWin pmG Worldwide has released its

plug-in connections as open source, enabling

users to maintain a real-time data connection

from MessiahStudio’s animation to Autodesk’s

Maya or 3ds Max, NewTek’s LightWave,

Maxon’s Cinema 4D, or a studio’s own propri-

etary CG program. The resulting open-source

connection enables users to rig and animate

in Messiah, and then use that animation in

another program over a real-time connec-

tion. The animation is instantly available and

can be edited, without any manual importing,

exporting, and reconverting scene files. In this

way, MessiahStudio can serve as a front end

to virtually any CG package. The source code

for each connection is available for down-

load from pmG’s Web site by clicking the SDK

menu item. The code can be modified or used

as a template to create a connection to any

other software that allows the use of point or

motion data. Pricing for MessiahStudio, now

in Version 3, starts at $399.

pmG Worldwide; www.projectmessiah.com

A N I M AT I O N

Animation Antics Win Antics Technologies has upgraded its

Antics real-time animation software to Version

3.1, adding the ability to import models and

images from the Google 3D Warehouse and

Google Earth. The software includes intelli-

gent props and characters, enabling users to

point and click to move a character from one

location to another. Users can import mod-

els, including scaled buildings and textured

landmarks, from Google 3D Warehouse and

Google Earth, and add Antics characters and

animation effects to them. Version 3.1 also

boasts improved walk sequences for char-

acters and a new tab in the Antics Resource

Centre, providing direct access to the Antics

Content Warehouse.

Antics Technologies; www.antics3d.com

Poser ProWin • Mac Smith Micro Software recently

announced Poser Pro for professional content

creators in studio and production environ-

ments. Poser Pro boasts scene-hosting plug-

ins for popular 3D environments, a 64-bit ren-

der engine, Collada support, and advanced

network rendering. Poser Pro delivers 3D char-

acter design and animation tools, distribut-

able 3D characters, and utilities for fine-tuning

light, shadow, color, and detail on figures. It

includes PoserFusion plug-ins, enabling the use

of animated and static Poser scenes in Maxon’s

Cinema 4D and Autodesk’s 3ds Max and

Maya. Additional features include a distributed

Network Render Queue and Queue Manager,

background rendering, the updated 64-bit

Firefly Render Engine, Gamma Correction, and

Normal Mapping support. Poser Pro ships with

four medium-resolution, face room compli-

ant, rigged human characters that

can be modified and redistributed

as new content. Poser Pro is priced

at $500. Registered users of Poser

6 and Poser 7 can side-grade to

Poser Pro for $200 until the end of

the month.

Smith Micro Software;

www.smithmicro.com

M O D E L I N G

Photo-Based ModelerWin Eos Systems unveiled PhotoModeler

Scanner, able to generate high-quality, realis-

tic 3D models from two photographs taken

from a typical camera. With PhotoModeler

Scanner, users can quickly reproduce objects

as detailed 3D representations for use in ani-

mation, reverse engineering, or the recording

of scientific or legal evidence. The new soft-

ware delivers all the capabilities of the com-

pany’s PhotoModeler, plus its new Dense

Surface Modeling (DSM) technology. DSM

technology scans photo pairs to generate a

large number of measurement points, auto-

matically creating a point cloud similar to the

output of laser scanning equipment. Built-in

tools translate the data into a mesh surface,

which can then be used in popular 3D CAD

or design applications. The DSM scan also reg-

isters photographic color information pixel

by pixel onto the resulting 3D model surface.

Colors can display as a point cloud or be fully

rendered to create realistic solid models. The

PhotoModeler Scanner software package is

now shipping for $2695.

Eos Systems; www.photomodeler.com

products




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