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T H E M A G A Z I N E F O R D I G I T A L C O N T E N T C R E A T I O N A N D P R O D U C T I O N

$4.95 USA $6.50 Canada

Sony Imageworks creates an unusual home life by putting a new spin on graphics

HouseHaunting

July 2006 www.cgw.com

Computer PiracyILM’s new mocap tech brings a digital crew to life

Super CGThe Man of Steel’s virtual alter ego

Art of DesignCan CAD and art co-exist in today’s 3D world?

Re-building ProjectArtists re-create an ancient church for The Da Vinci Code

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T H E M A G A Z I N E F O R D I G I T A L C O N T E N T C R E A T I O N A N D P R O D U C T I O N

W O R L DComputerAlso see www.cgw.com for computer graphics news,

special surveys and reports, and the online gallery.

w w w . c g w . c o m JULY 2006 Computer Graphics World | 1

Departments

Editor’s Note 2Classics New and Old

CG has movie presence. Recently, the medium gave screen life to the book The Da Vinci Code and, once again, to the theme-park attraction Pirates of the Caribbean.

Spotlight 4

Products

AutoDesSys’s FormZ

E-frontier’s Virtual Fashion Basic

RealViz’s VTour

Side Effects’ Houdini 8.1

Eyeon’s Fusion 5.02

News

ArtVPS, Mental Ray team on a new raytracing solution

User Focus

Finishing Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

Target commercial brings CG characters to life in CG backgrounds

Viewpoint 14Animation 2.0

Portfolio 72SIGGRAPH Animation Theater

Products 76

Backdrop 82Fur Fun

Creating and grooming the fat cat Garfi eld for his sequel appearance.

Features

Yo Ho Ho! 16MOTION CAPTURE | Innovative mocap

and simulation enable ILM to create

CG pirates, a menacing sea monster,

and more in this treasurable sequel.

By Barbara Robertson

Cover storyThis Old House 28CHARACTER ANIMATION | Performance

capture and hand animation help

artists construct Monster House.

By Martin McEachern

Leaps Tall Orders 52DIGITAL DOUBLES | CG artists help the

Man of Steel when the action became

too intense even for the superhero.


When Worlds Collide 56CAD/ART | How digital design and CG

art co-exist in a changing world.

By Kathleen Maher

On Holy Ground 62SCENE RE-CREATION | Artists rebuild

an ancient church for The Da Vinci

Code using 3D geometry and photos.

By Karen Moltenbrey

Roundball 68MODELING/ANIMATION | Creating a

theater-in-the round game experience.

By Karen Moltenbrey

On the cover:

An animated house springs to life in the

uniquely handcrafted world of Monster

House, created by a Hollywood newcomer

and Sony Pictures Imageworks, pg. 28.

28

52

56

62

July 2006 • Volume 29 • Number 7

16

68



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KAREN MOLTENBREY : Chief Editor

[email protected]

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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:

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George Maestri, Martin McEachern,

Stephen Porter, Barbara Robertson

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[email protected]

(818) 291-1113

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[email protected]

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President and Chief Executive Offi cer

Computer Graphics World Magazine is published

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2 | Computer Graphics World JULY 2006 w w w . c g w . c o m

editor

’sno

te

After all these years, I am still amazed when it comes to the power of computer

graphics. It has the ability to educate, to make our lives more effi cient and safe,

and much more. Above all, it has the ability to entertain. The medium can turn the

pages of a book into a cultural phenomenon, as was the case with The Lord of the

Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the popular Harry Potter series.

Indeed, Hollywood has used many a novel—some best-sellers, some obscure titles—

as the basis for feature fi lms. This summer, author Dan Brown’s phenomena, The Da

Vinci Code, fi nally made its long-awaited fi lm debut. Some critics loved it; others did not.

And some readers expressed their disappointment, as well. Most of the less favorable

comments were reserved for the actors and their dry performances. Yet, fans of this book

turned out in droves to see the novel’s intriguing plot unfold on the big screen.

While making the fi lm, director Ron Howard’s goal was to stay true to the book. At

times, though, this was extremely diffi cult to do. One of the more challenging scenes took

place inside the ancient Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris. As Rainmaker VFX supervisor Mark

Breakspear notes, Saint-Sulpice is both atypical and well known, and as a result, no other

church could have been substituted for this scene without audiences raising an eyebrow.

But, the Vatican would not allow fi lm crews into the actual church. So, under VFX super-

visor Angus Bickerton’s guidance, Breakspear and his group of digital artists re-created

this magnifi cent structure in 3D splendor by building on a

relatively standard method of mapping photographic textures

onto 3D geometry (see “On Holy Ground,” pg. 62). The proce-

dure worked so well that, according to Breakspear, audiences

will think the scenes were fi lmed rather than created virtu-

ally—as Howard did when shown early tests.

Not only can CG turn a book into a fi lm classic, but it

also has the ability to transform what is already a cultur-

al icon into one of even bigger proportions for the theater.

This summer, Buena Vista/Disney used the medium to

once again bring the fi ctional pirate Jack Sparrow to life

in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, a sequel to the 2003 blockbuster The

Curse of the Black Pearl. Both movies, in addition to a third in production, are adapta-

tions of the popular Disney theme-park attraction Pirates of the Caribbean. When the

ride opened in 1967, it marked a high point in the development of audio-animatron-

ics technology. Similarly, in Dead Man’s Chest, a novel technique involving the ability

to capture the performances of several actors on location during principal photogra-

phy rather than during a separate motion-capture session sets a new watermark for

motion capture (see “Yo Ho Ho!,” pg. 16). With this treasure trove of new technology

from ILM, animators can create far more believable CG character performances, and

fi lmmakers can look beyond the previous limitations of physical location and time

restraints when employing motion capture.

CG turned this animated property (by way of animatronics) into another smash,

as it surpassed the weekend-opening box-offi ce record previously set by Spider-Man.

Disney, anticipating this reception, just updated its classic theme-park attraction to

include Sparrow as the new hero of its high-seas ride. These are but two of the recent

“novel” effects of CG.

CG can turn a book

into a fi lm classic,

and it can transform

a cultural icon into

one of even bigger

proportions.

KarenMoltenbreyChief Editor

Classics New and Old



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mailto:[email protected]











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spotlightM O D E L I N G / A N I M A T I O N

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

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Enhanced with a number of new features and functional-

ity, FormZ 6.0 will be released this month at SIGGRAPH by

maker AutoDesSys. Some of the new features include ani-

mation, 3D printing with color and textures, and a number

of others that extend the software’s modeling power.

The release will

have object-centric ani-

mation, meaning the

object retains its integ-

rity during the anima-

tion process. FormZ

animates well-defi ned

objects complete with

their parameters and

attributes, which can also be freely animated. This poten-

tially makes the animation process a modeling venue that

can generate forms beyond what is possible through con-

ventional means. At any stage during the animation pro-

cess, models can even be captured as different types of

objects. FormZ 6.0 also offers a seamlessly integrated ani-

mation environment, where objects, lights, and cameras

can be animated and transformed over time.

In addition, AutoDesSys offers a venue to prototype its

objects not only in color but with textures, as well, through

Z Corp.’s new ZPR fi le format, which is optimized to sup-

port geometry and color capabilities of current 3DP systems,

providing an option for those needing a tangible example of

their project in color and with textures. FormZ also sports a

new 3D print preparation tool.

Also, the new release contains a number of new model-

ing capabilities, including a morphing ability that allows

users to pick two objects, the source, and the destination,

and have the shape of the former change to the shape of the

other by a certain percent. The operation can be executed

dynamically or in one step, and can be used as part of an

animation or by itself.

FormZ 6.0 will be priced at $1495. Updates from previ-

ous versions are available for a reduced cost.

AutoDesSys Improves its FormZ

The New Virtual Fashion Basic E-frontier has accessorized its product

line with the new release of Virtual

Fashion Basic for Poser, easy-to-learn

design software for the creation of

dresses, jackets, skirts, shoes, and

other 3D design garments. Originally

developed for high-end designers such

as Gucci, Prada, and La Perla, Virtual

Fashion Basic for Poser was modifi ed

to incorporate Poser characters and

export “dynamic clothing” directly

into Poser libraries.

Virtual Fashion has an intuitive user

interface that makes creating garments

for Poser fi gures easier than ever. The

work fl ow-based interface moves users

through a series of steps to quickly

create almost any garment. After the

garment is designed, fabric choices

such as silk, cotton, denim, or fur are

selected and simulated in the Fitting

Room module. In PhotoStudio, lights

and camera angles are set, and print-

ready images are produced in a vir-

tual photo shoot. The last step uses

the Material Editor module to adjust

materials and change fabric colors.

Poser users export garments cre-

ated in Virtual Fashion in the native

Poser fi le format. The program cre-

ates its own runtime folders in Poser

and automatically uploads every new

garment into the Poser library.

Virtual Fashion Basic for Poser sells

for $99.99.



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From acclaimed feature film finishing...

To film quality effects for television...

Copyright © 1988-2006 eyeon Software Inc. All rights are reserved. All trademarks, company names and products are the property of their respective holders.

eyeonline.com

Armies Of Exigo image courtesy of Digic Pictures.© 2006 Cinergi Interactive LLC. All rights reserved.

© Copyright ABC, Lost image courtesy of Digital Dimension.

The Da Vinci Code © 2006 Columbia Pictures.All Rights Reserved. Image courtesy of Rainmaker.

eyeon continues its tour de force.

To high definitiongame creation...

Fusion delivers.



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C A T E G O R Y

M O D E L I N G / A N I M A T I O N C O M P O S I T I N G

S C E N E C R E A T I O N

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Image-processing software developer

RealViz has unveiled VTour, the latest

addition to the company’s content cre-

ation offerings. VTour draws on the tech-

nology of RealViz’s Stitcher and Image

Modeler products, offering users a solu-

tion for creating photorealistic 3D envi-

ronments from 2D photos or panoramas.

Starting directly from digital

photographs or full 360-degree pan-

ormas (crafted, for example, using

Stitcher), VTour facilitates the cre-

ation of 3D scenes such as interi-

ors or urban areas using polygo-

nal photo-textured primitives. The

results can then be exported and

published as a 3D movie or an inter-

active application using 3D viewers

such as Spi-V3d (based on Shockwave).

VTour is ideal for a range of applica-

tions such as virtual walkthroughs of

buildings and monuments, 3D simula-

tion, virtual reality, urban planning, and

video games. It can also be used for the

creation of digital sets in fi lm and tele-

vision. In this way, the product comple-

ments RealViz’s StoryViz, 3D previz and

storyboard software for creating photore-

al backdrops for previsualized projects.

VTour is available for Windows 2000/

XP for $499. A Mac version will be avail-

able in September.

RealViz Offers a VTour

Houdini 8.1 Appears in 3D for AnimatorsSide Effects Software has released Houdini 8.1, featuring

an animator-friendly Auto Rig, Muscle System, Character

Picker, and Pose Library, as well as other enhancements to

the Rigid Body and Wire dynamic solvers. The new version

also supports the importation of Collada fi les, an open digi-

tal asset exchange schema for interactive 3D applications.

A new Biped Auto Rig tools lets artists quickly posi-

tion their character’s joints and generate production-

ready rigs at the touch of a button. It creates both an ani-

mation rig with built-in proxy geometry for blocking and

a separate capture rig for deforming geometry. These rigs

are created as Houdini

Digital Assets and form

the backbone of the char-

acter pipeline. Moreover,

technical directors can

customize the anima-

tion team’s rig to con-

form to their preferred

way of working.

For capturing and binding geometry, Houdini 8.1

includes a new approach that is ideal for setting up fully

functional muscle system using a system of metaball-

based muscles that can be used in place of bones for

capturing the geometry.

Houdini 8.1 is priced at $17,000; through September,

users also can save up to 40 percent on Houdini Master.

Eyeon Fuses Together UpdatesEyeon Software continues to build momentum with the

release of Fusion 5.02 by adding approximately 100 new

features and enhancements to the compositing soft-

ware’s core architecture. Fusion 5.02’s OpenGL accel-

eration with display views makes interactive viewing

more fl exible, while the new GPU-accelerated plug-

in architecture and

LUT system make

for easy transitions

between multiple-

display LUTs.

Tailoring and im -

proving the prod uct

based on demand

and ongoing artist

feedback, Eyeon has added a plethora of cutting-edge

innovations, such as format improvements, to give

Fusion the ability to read DV OMF and 32-bit fl oat

PSDs from Photoshop CS2. OpenEXR format options

now display a drop-down list that shows available

channels. The product also has new enhanced optimi-

zation tools that affect all blur-based tools and func-

tions, resulting in as much as a 30 percent increase

in performance. And, the company has added more

than 20 new scripting functions.

Fusion 5.02 pricing starts at $1295 for the DFX+

video version, and $2995 to $4995 for the fi lm versions.



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spotlight


R E N D E R I N G

Two of the industry’s largest commer-

cial forces in rendering—ArtVPS and

Mental Images—have formed a part-

nership that will result in an integra-

tion of their respective products, which

will cater to the increasing demand for

photorealistic visualization of 3D data

within the design sector.

ArtVPS, developer of a unique graph-

ics processor for photorealistic raytracing,

and Mental Images, developer of the high-

end Mental Ray rendering software, will

further the evolution of advanced raytrac-

ing solutions. As part of the deal, Mental

Images will license intellectual proper-

ty from ArtVPS with the exclusive right

to its sub-licensing. In turn, ArtVPS will

become an OEM partner of Mental Images

for the integration of Mental Ray into

future 64-bit versions of its RenderDrive

products. Also, the company will become

a system integrator for RealityServer, a

unique software platform for the develop-

ment and deployment of 3D Web services

and applications from Mental Images.

According to a Mental Images

spokesman, the partnership will allow

the duo to explore the use of dedi-

cated graphics processing hardware

architectures for the acceleration of

raytracing algorithms within Mental

Ray and RealityServer without com-

promising on image quality. The col-

laboration will cater specifi cally to

the demand for photorealistic visual-

ization in product marketing, design,

architecture, and the automotive seg-

ment, where photorealism and real-

world lighting is a requirement for that

market’s 3D imagery.

ArtVPS, Mental Ray Team on New Raytracing Solution

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West Post Digital, a boutique postproduction facility special-

izing in HD and SD online fi nishing and color correction,

recently completed work for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition—

After the Storm. The work was for a series of four shows featur-

ing rebuilding projects in Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and

Texas following major destructive hurricanes.

West Post Digital had been handling online fi nishing for the

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition reality series since its premiere

in 2003. “We’ve been able to streamline processes to where we

can completely fi nish

an entire show in about

24 hours,” says West

Post Digital co-owner

Kenny Fields.

It was this ability to

make “Extreme” dead-

lines that led produc-

ers to select the facility

to complete work on

the special editions. The group did all the fi nishing process—

assembling, conforming, and color-correcting the shots, as

well as titling, in standard defi nition. The assembly/con-

form/titling was done on an Avid Symphony system and a

Symphony Nitris running on a Unity. Meanwhile, the group

performed the color grading on a da Vinci 2K system.

According to colorist Paul Roman, the ability to color-

correct the show in real time on the da Vinci while conform-

ing and titling simultaneously on the Symphony played a

big role in helping the group fi nish the episodes quickly and

at a high quality. Pre-digitizing fi ne cuts (a show in prog-

ress that will change but has a lot of what will end up in the

fi nal version) and digitizing only new shots in the locked

picture instead of the whole cut also helped bring the show

in under deadline.

“The most challenging aspect is time,” says Fields.

“The locked cut is not delivered until the last minute. We

pre-digitized with handles, so if slight adjustments were

made in the off-line, we didn’t have to re-digitize the clips.

By pre-digitizing the fi ne cuts with handles, we were able

to relink once the locked cut came in—late in the process—

making the digitizing of the locked cut much faster. So,

instead of digitizing 1500 clips from scratch, we only had

to do about 200 to 300 at that point.”

Each Extreme Makeover: Home Edition features a construc-

tion project that is essentially a race against time. Similarly,

shooting, editing, and posting it is another race against time—

one that West Post Digital has consistently won under these

Extreme conditions. —Karen Moltenbrey

Working Under Extreme Conditions

©20

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spotlight


A N I M A T I O N

US

ER

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US

The department store Target is

known for its whimsical, stylized

television commercials that feature

men, women, and children—and, of

course, the signature Target dog—

moving at a fast pace within a set-

ting dominated by its other signature

of red and white colors and bull’s-

eye. Recently, the store began a new

“Product People” campaign that con-

tains a similar colorful, active, and

theatrical look as the previous com-

mercials. But, on the other hand, it is

a marked departure from the earlier

design-oriented spots: In place of the

energetic actors are energetic 3D char-

acters made from everyday items that

can be purchased at the store.

After completing the design

phase, Radium, which crafted the

spot, used Autodesk’s Maya to

model all the objects that would

later comprise the characters, from

a “woman” composed of nail pol-

ish and cosmetic–related items to

an “athlete” made from sporting

goods: a football face, tennis ball

eyes, and a basketball belly.

Next, the crew photographed the

actual products under studio light-

ing, fi rst to enhance their natural color and texture, and then

to give them a photoreal quality and retail appeal that would

be retained in CG. The lighting pipeline was based on global

illumination techniques to achieve the desired mix between

photorealism and stylization, notes Aladino Debert, lead CG

artist and head of CG at Radium.

The group had to design characters that would be not only

photorealistic, but also fun to watch. Their anthropomorphic

nature dictated that the artists use motion capture for the ani-

mation. So, fi rst the artists created simple rigs of each charac-

ter within Maya that mocap facility House of Moves (HOM)

used during motion-capture sessions. At HOM, the animation

was derived by motion-capturing a set of live dance perform-

ers (seven dancers responsible for a total of 14 actor/charac-

ter combinations) within a 40x40-foot capture space using a

Vicon MX 40 camera setup. During

the process, all the “Product People”

characters were shown in real time to

give the director and the actors/danc-

ers the ability to see how each of the

characters moved. Real-time video

feeds allowed the client and Radium

creative team to approve the perfor-

mance prior to animation.

“There were a lot of character rigs,

and they were very complex and

needed attention from our technical

directors to ensure that there would

be reliable real-time feedback and

a high-quality fi nal product that

matched exactly what was seen on

set,” says Scott Gagain, executive

producer at HOM. “It was one of our

larger commercial productions. The

set was packed with dancers and

clients, but it was also fun, and it

shows in the fi nal product.”

Once the animation data was

delivered, Radium used its lay-

ered controls to fi nesse the motion,

which Debert says was “90 percent

there.” Next, the group textured the

images, and then rendered them

using Mental Images’ Mental Ray.

“We were modeling, lighting, tex-

turing, and rendering so that everything had a real feel. The

animation comes to life via motion capture,” he notes.

The biggest challenge, though, resulted not from the

complex motions but from the complexity of the entire

piece, with 16 3D characters and full CG environments—a

kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, hallway, and more, all tex-

tured using Target’s signature red-and-white color palette

throughout for brand recognition.

“The project required that many parallel processes move

forward in a smooth way. For example, as we were fi n-

ishing the character design, the set designs were moving

ahead, along with the fi nal storyboards and rehearsals

with the dancers,” says Debert. “In the end, though, all

those at-times disjointed processes came together to give

the spot a unique look.” —Karen Moltenbrey

A TV Commercial Hits its Target

When the different products came together into

each distinct character, it was important to

retain visual integrity so the piece made sense.

Grouping similar products into a background

where they belonged accomplished this.

While CG played a key role in the earlier Target

commercials (mainly to generate or augment the

backgrounds), this time the medium not only took

center stage, but was integral to casting, as well.



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Torsten Reil is CEO and co-founder of NaturalMotion, the fi rst company to create 3D character animation software based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS), a technology that utilizes adaptive behaviors and artifi cial intelligence to simulate the human nervous system.


Gam

es

By Torsten Reil

view

poin

t

frame animation or processed motion-captured clips, and the data is played back

at, more or less, appropriate times in the game. There are two issues with this

approach. First, animators have little creative control over the last section of the

pipeline (that is, what their animations look like in-game). Second, played-back

data can never be truly interactive.

Animation Solutions

The manifestation of the fi rst problem usually results when animators walk over to

the game’s animation programmer and complain that their carefully crafted anima-

tions look totally wrong in-game. The way to solve this, and to get in-game anima-

tion to the quality that the raw material already supports, is to provide animators

with intuitive tools to perform the tasks currently carried out by animation program-

mers. Those include the determination of the transitions between animations, the

nature and timing of blends, the distribution and weighting of different animations

across the character’s body, and even the responsiveness of the animation to user or

AI input. All of these are creative tasks and, therefore, should be under the full con-

trol of the animator, and this should result in very quick turnaround times.

The solution to the second problem (that is, non-interactivity and repetitiveness)

lies in the CPU power available on next-generation hardware. Rather than pre-pro-

ducing every clip beforehand, we can use the console’s processing power to syn-

thesize animation on the fl y, as the game unfolds. This, of course, is not straight-

The visual quality of video

games has improved dra-

matically with the arrival

of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and,

soon, Sony’s PlayStation 3. In

fact, some games—in particu-

lar, racing titles—approach the much-

promised goal of photorealism. However,

amongst all the talk about HD, new

shader models, and lighting, many con-

sumers have come to realize: The ani-

mations still look distinctly last gen.

The high state of rendering fi delity

exposes low-animation quality much more

than on previous consoles. Characters look

great in screenshots, but they can seem

unnatural, clunky, and even robotic

when in motion.

And a second prob-

lem has surfaced, as

well: After playing any

game for a little while,

users will notice that

the animations always

look the same. This

didn’t matter so much

when simple rendering

signaled that we were

merely playing a com-

puter game. However,

when a photorealistic

Kobe Bryant repeats a

move for the hundredth

time with digital preci-

sion, something seems

very wrong.

The reason for

these two problems is

that our game anima-

tion pipelines have not

changed very much

since the 16-bit days.

Animators create key-

The high

fi delity of

new consoles

exposes low-

animation

quality.

NaturalMotion’s Euphoria (above) and Endorphin is based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis,

which uses adaptive behaviors and AI to simulate the human nervous system.

Animation 2.0



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Vancouver Film SchoolWhere Results Matter

Special Presentation: “Tech Talk: Training for Careers in Animation”Wednesday, August 2 at 1pm on the trade show fl oor

MAKE MORE ENEMIES

Booth 2204August 1–3, 2006

Boston Convention Center415 Summer Street

Join us at Siggraph in Boston and discover why Vancouver Film School is the place to be for everything you see, hear, and experience in the entertainment industry.

VFS is offering $50,000 in bursaries to students who arepassionate about video games and want to make their own.To apply, visit www.vfs.com/games

Game Design at VFS

and take your

share of $50,000


forward, as it requires a full (and real-time) simulation of the 3D

character (including body, muscles, and motor/nervous system),

but it is now possible on the Xbox 360 and PS3. Not only does

this approach increase the visual quality of the game, but it also

enables unique moments that have never happened before, and

will never happen again: every tackle is your tackle; every hay-

maker is your haymaker. Crucially, animators require full control

over synthesis, too. In this case, rather than creating baked anima-

tion, they determine the style and parameter of adaptive behaviors.

They, therefore, work at a higher level, akin to a director.

The upshot of all of this is that animation will become the pre-

dominant quality determinant of next-gen game visuals and expe-

riences. The role of the animator will grow signifi cantly, from key-

framing to controlling in-game blends, to directing motion synthesis.

There’s never been a better time to be in this industry.

Torsten Reil graduated with a degree in biology from Oxford University and holds a master’s

degree in evolutionary and adaptive systems from Sussex University. Prior to founding Natu-

ralMotion, he was researching for a PhD in complex systems at Oxford University, and in 2003,

was named as one of the world’s top 100 innovators by MIT’s Technology Review. Along with

CTO and co-founder Colm Massey, he developed NaturalMotion’s core technoIogy. Based on

Oxford University research on the control of body movements, NaturalMotion’s Euphoria

synthesizes 3D character animation in real

time on the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, creat-

ing unique game moments and previously

unachievable interactivity. NaturalMotion’s

other DMS product, Endorphin, creates off-

line animation an order of magnitude faster

than with traditional techniques, and is used

in the fi lm and gaming industry.

The rendering quality in the new generation of console games,

particularly racing titles such as Project Gotham Racing 3, is

close to photorealism, but game animation hasn’t kept pace.



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. . . .Motion Capture


After you’ve seen Davy Jones’ beard

writhe like a sea creature. After you

learn that Industrial Light & Magic dis-

covered a way to motion-capture the per-

formances of multiple actors during prin-

cipal photography without using one

piece of motion-capture equipment. After

all that sinks in, it’s the details in Walt

Disney Pictures’ Pirates of the Caribbean:

Dead Man’s Chest that will amaze you.

Gore Verbinski returned to direct this

sequel to the popular action/adventure/

comedy Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse

of the Black Pearl, as did actors Johnny

Depp, Keira Knightley, and Orlando Bloom,

visual effects supervisor John Knoll, and

ILM. The sequel has 1100 visual effects

shots, of which 600 are animation shots.

Digital pirate Davy Jones stars in 200 shots;

he’s on screen for 15 minutes of the fi lm.

“It was a lot to push through this facil-

ity in a short period of time,” says Knoll,

who rolled onto the show immediately

after fi nishing last summer’s Star Wars:

Episode III—Revenge of the Sith. ILM han-

dled all the shots except approximately

60 composites that the facility farmed

out, under Roger Guyett’s supervision, to

Tippett Studio and Evil Eye Pictures.

Knoll divides the work into three cat-

egories: Davy Jones and his crew, Kraken,

and shots that establish time and place.

Davy Jones and all but one of his crew are

CG creatures played by actors whose per-

formances were captured on location: ILM

recorded motion data during principal

photography in a variety of lighting con-

ditions and environments without restric-

tion. Kraken is a giant sea monster per-

formed by animators using a sophisticated

new rigging system. The “time and place”

shots included turning Dominica, a lush

island in the Caribbean, into Cannibal

Island with fully CG environments. To

do these shots, Steve Sullivan, director of

R&D at ILM, cites three areas in which the

fi lm pushed technology at ILM: simula-

tion, rendering, and motion capture.

“This was a very simulation-heavy show,”

Sullivan says. “You’ll see that in Davy Jones

and other characters. The rendering moved

forward, not just in the aspects of the look,

but also in making the characters tractable

to render. And, the new motion-capture

system made a big difference.”

Cod Is in the Details

Thirteen modelers led by creature super-

visor Geoff Campbell sculpted the fi shy

characters. Gentle Giant’s body scans and

face scans from ILM’s own Clonecam sys-

tem—a photographic technique that pro-

vides 3D geometry and textures—gave

modelers the actors’ proportions, but they

built the CG characters entirely from con-

cept art. Art director Aaron McBride drew

many of the cursed, crustacean-encrusted

sea phantoms based on sketches by Mark

“Crash” McCreery, and added three of his

own mutants—Angler, Wheelback, and

Ratlin. “We have 18 hero characters that

hold up close to the camera and 32 vari-


Yo Ho Ho!

ILM creates a sea monster and

15 lead characters in Pirates of the

Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest using

innovative mocap and simulation



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Motion Capture. . . .

ations,” says McBride, who followed the

artistic development of the characters

through production. “The only non-digi-

tal character is Bootstrap Bill.”

Working in Autodesk’s Maya, the

modelers spent close to 10 months of pre-

production time building polygonal mod-

els of the characters’ bodies and, work-

ing in ILM’s proprietary software Zeno,

creating the face shapes. Then, many of

them carried on for the next eight months

sculpting face shapes during production,

as animators needed them. “We moved

in a whole new direction,” says Campbell.

“We went from B-spline models, which

we’ve been using since Terminator, to sub-

division surfaces. And, we used Z-brush

for displacements. We couldn’t have cre-

ated these characters in any other way

because of their complexity.” Pixologic’s

Z-brush helped the modelers cover the

surfaces with barnacles, mussels, coral,

and other briny details.

“Pat Meyers, one of our TDs, created

a sea-life picker,” says David Meny, digi-

tal production supervisor. “We could pick

one creature and instance it on the sur-

face and adjust the scale. The Z-brushed

components added organic variety to the

whole. And then we also had painted tex-

tures—the painters got the Z-brush maps.”

The creatures had so much detail that

sometimes there were more vertices, more

geometry to render, than there were pixels

available. “It meant that anything that was

raytraced, occlusion passes, or even subsur-

face scattering, was much slower because

the raytracer ran for all the geometry, all the

CVs inside a pixel,” says Christophe Hery,

lead R&D engineer. “It summed everything

up for one pixel at the end, but we were

wasting a lot of time for not a lot of result.”

Because ILM decided to use Render-

Man for the entire fi lm, Hery contacted

Pixar. An exchange of ideas resulted in

©2006 D

isney En

terprises, In

c. and Jerry B

ruckh

eimer, In

c. All rig

hts reserved

. Pho

to credits: ILM

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Pixar adding a solution derived from a game technique docu-

mented in Nvidia’s GPU Gems 2 to RenderMan. The technique,

which approximates raytracing, cut the render times by around

75 percent—from 12 to 13 hours to three or four.

Imocap

Meanwhile, ILM crewmembers working on set with Verbinski

began acquiring data. They built digital representations of the

environment so that later they could easily lock the digital charac-

ters to scans of the live-action plates. And, they captured the per-

formances of the 15 actors playing the hero characters. Later, this

motion-captured data would drive the character animation for the

creatures that would replace the actors in the live-action plates.

Jason Snell, layout supervisor for the show and matchmove

supervisor, built the digital representation of the set and loca-

tion environments using photographs. “My job was to collect

data for where the creatures were in the environment,” he says.

“Most data collectors make diagrams and take measurements.

At ILM, we build the environments on a laptop, while we’re

on location.” To do this, Snell took photographs with a digital

still camera of the entire environment from multiple angles and

matchmoved each frame. Then, he looked for common points in

several pictures. “If I have three pictures of a house and fi nd one

point in common, the system can triangulate those points and

fi nd a point in space,” he explains. By using multiple points in

multiple images and Zeno’s tracking system, Snell could build a

CG environment from the triangulated views. Then, later, once

he had plate photography, he could lay those images on the 3D

world that he built to create a photorealistic environment.

John Knoll supervised the motion capture on location.

On the fi rst Pirates, the skeletal CG pirates also appeared as

real people who were fi lmed in costume. To substitute the

skeletal people, the crew used “matchimation”: Artists lined

up a CG model with an actor’s image on the scanned fi lm

plate and copied the actor’s motions onto the 3D model. The

same technique helped ILM blend a CG terminator into half

of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body in Terminator 3. But for the

second Pirates fi lm, animation director Hal Hickel, who had

also supervised animation for Black Pearl, asked for a way

to make the matchimation artists’ lives easier.

“He asked if we could put some kind of tracking

lights on the actors,” Knoll says.

Knoll never considered setting up a tradi-

tional motion-capture system on location in the

Caribbean—not with 15 actors to capture, some-

times working in 2 feet of water, and not with-

out completely disrupting principal photography,

which could not happen. And yet, he wanted to

gather the same high-quality data produced on a

motion-capture stage. “That was the challenge we threw down

to R&D, and they came up with a technique we call Imocap,” he

says. The “I” stands for “image.”

On set, actors playing Davy’s crew wore gray suits provided

by the costume department with tracking balls and bands from

ILM. ILM had printed the bands with black and white dots in

black and white squares, and positioned them at the joints—knees,

ankles, wrists, waist, and so forth. “The dots help us see how the

suit moves,” says Kevin Wooley, motion-capture engineer. “We’re

not tracking dots in space.”

Because ILM’s character animation pipeline works with

joints organized into skeletal animation rigs, Imocap puts the

captured data onto skeletons. To an animator, the result looks

ILM captured data from actors in gray costumes

during principal photography (at left, below),

applied the data to “manikins” (middle, below), and

then fi tted the manikins to specifi ed creatures (at

right, below) to create a fi nal performance (at left).



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MAKING THE GRADEIn the world of digital content creation—andperhaps more so than in any other industry—many of us define ourselves by our work. Howmany times have you described yourself by citing

the work you’ve done on a particular film, game, or novel design? And why shouldn’t you? You infuse projects with yourideas, creativity, imagination, and personality. You often put your heart and soul into your work—and they shine through.Your work is, in many ways, tied to your identity; and through your hard work and talent, you’ve made a name for yourself.As a result, you cannot entrust your reputation, your legacy, and your future to sub-par equipment. You need your graphicsworkstation to work as hard, as reliably, and as well as you do.

HP WORKSTATIONS WITH ATI FIREGL GRAPHICSSERVE UP HIGH-END POWER, PERFORMANCE,AND GRAPHICS AT ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF ART.

Above: HP xw8400 Workstation Left: ATI FireGL V3300

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It all begins in school, as you train intently to hone yourcraft and, in doing so, master the latest technologies andskills related to the career you seek. Students on path toa career in digital content creation are unique. Just as theypush the bounds of their imagination and creativity, theytoo push the limits of their software and hardware.

“The students are always looking to achieve more,” admitsJim Aubry, director of technology at the Illinois Institute ofArt in Chicago. As a result, they daily test the workstations’ability to handle really complex compositions.

The Illinois Institute of Art, part of The Art Institutes,offers a graphics-rich curriculum with programs in media

arts and animation, visual effects and motion graphics,and game art and design, among other applied arts.And, with roughly 2500 students working on more than600 workstations, the Institute is a perfect environmentfor testing the performance and reliability of myriadsolutions, including leading-edge technologies employedin workstations for graphics-intensive work.

As the director of technology for the school and its manyprograms, Aubry makes certain the school’s hardwareand software offer a host of core competencies, suchas high-end graphics performance, to meet the demandsand objectives of the education department.

“Because we’re so heavily focused on the applied arts,we require computer systems that can run a variety ofgraphics programs,” notes Aubry. “The systems have tobe able to handle a good collection of design software,not be focused on just one product. We require systemsthat not only are reliable, but also have the speed andability to handle high-end graphics programs.”

For this and other reasons, the Institute standardized sixyears ago on Hewlett-Packard workstations, the majority

of which are driven by ATI FireGL graphics accelerators.Before doing so, Aubry and his colleagues regularlytested computer systems from various manufacturers,considering the availability, reliability, and compatibilityof each.

Design decision“On the graphics side, HP can’t be touched,” saysAubry. “That’s why we’ve gone with HP and ATI. Theirproducts give us the best performance for the suite ofsoftware products that we need to provide our students.

We have a very creative student body; the tougher onesare the 3D animators. The 3D and animation programsrequire significantly more powerful systems than, say,the fashion programs.”

Power isn’t an issue for the HP workstations with ATIFireGL graphics. In fact, the memory offered by the next-generation FireGL cards enable users to work interactivelywith extremely large datasets—an important and recentinnovation for digital artists and animators. At the sametime, the cards’ expanded bit depth extends the colorpalette to include more than 1 billion colors, helpingfoster further creativity and artistic expression, whereasits support of ultra-high-resolution and widescreendisplays enable a larger workspace, contributing toincreased productivity.

The Institute configures the HP Workstations with ATIgraphics with Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Officeas a base, upon which various solutions are loaded, includingAutodesk’s 3ds Max, MotionBuilder, Maya, and AutoCAD.Whereas an average desktop PC would likely buckle underthe strain of supporting these complex, graphicallydemanding software programs, the HP workstation and

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ATI FireGL deliver high performance, rapid response rates,and the ability to multitask with several applications andcomplex data sets running simultaneously.

“We know that the graphics programs are going to workon them,” offers Aubry. “We have a vast assortment ofprograms, and we’re very comfortable that HPworkstations with ATI FireGL are tested for theseprograms, so we know that they are going to work forour environment. The students are finding that thesesystems work reliability. It provides them the opportunity,the power they need to create their designs.”

In the trenchesA senior in the Design track at the Illinois Institute of Art,Randy Johnson knows well the value of a reliable, high-performance workstation with a high-end graphics card.He is intricately involved with the school’s technology,

as he works with incoming students, showing them howto use the computers and software programs.

“When it comes to the PC, I am picky,” notes Johnson.“It has to keep up with me.”

Johnson considers HP workstations to be the bestWindows-based computer systems on which he has everworked. Many systems could not keep pace with the speedat which he worked. For this and many other reasons, it iscritical to choose a workstation designed specifically foryour work, opposed to an average desktop PC.

“I would have to wait for the system to catch up withme, or it would just freeze and I would lose my work,”Johnson recalls. “A slow system is such a pain. I haven’thad any problems with HP workstations. It has beenable to keep up with the speed that I work and how

quickly I outline things and modify designs. It helps mecreate the things I want to create.”

Johnson, a self-proclaimed Macintosh user, admits, “I trustHP workstations because I haven’t had problems withthem—they don’t freeze on me and I haven’t had one crashor slow down so that I can’t work on it. HP workstationswith ATI FireGL graphics keep up with me. I’m able to paintand change things, and I don’t have to spend all my timewaiting for it to do something. I rely on the HP workstationsat school.”

Innovation, reliability, and supportFrom a business standpoint, Aubry and others at theInstitute have never regretted standardizing on HPworkstations with ATI FireGL. The HP workstations oncampus are configured with some of the latesttechnological innovations in processing power, such as

Intel’s new CPU. At the same time, the HP workstationsat the school that take advantage of ATI FireGL graphicscards provide users powerful graphics processing,memory, and functionality. In fact, the high-performanceHP workstation configurations have required littlemaintenance.

“HP workstations last,” notes Aubry. “They have givenus good performance over time, so the total cost ofownership is lower. The workstations also have beenvery reliable over time, and we have not spent a lot oftime or had the need to upgrade them.”

Aubry admits that the one component he has had causeto upgrade on the HP workstations is main systemmemory. The process was a smooth one, given that HP’sinnovative tool-less chassis enables technicians at theschool to make any necessary internal changes quickly,

“Because we’re so heavily focused on theapplied arts, we require computer systemsthat can run a variety of graphics programs.The systems have to be able to handle agood collection of design software, not befocused on just one product.”—Jim Aubry, Illinois Institute of Art



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easily, and without the need for tools. Yet, this is not tosay that Aubry doesn’t encounter situations that call fortechnical support, such as when a student succeeds infully tapping a system’s resources.

“With 600 machines, you’re always going to have one ortwo challenges,” recognizes Aubry. “HP has given us avery strong support network. We deal directly with HPsupport, and the company is very good in terms ofsupporting the product—if we need parts, getting us theparts; if we need technical support, giving us tech support.”

Users such as Aubry and the Illinois Institute of Art likewiseappreciate that HP partners with leading technologycompanies, such as Intel, ATI, and various independentsoftware vendors. These relationships ensure not only that

HP workstations feature and benefit from the latest andgreatest in processing and graphics technologies, but alsothat all of the components have been adequately testedand assured to work together seamlessly and without fail.

“It adds another level of reliability to our systems,” saysAubry. “It is very important that we have a degree ofknowledge that they have been certified to work with thesesoftware applications—that they have been tested, andthey work with the configuration.”

HP and its partners further aid the school not only incompeting for incoming students, but also in deliveringstudents precisely what they need to succeed.

“Many high-school students looking at our school are verysavvy,” admits Aubry. “They know technology. They generallyhave an idea of the field that they want to get into, andthey know the software programs that are being used outthere. So they appreciate that we have the most currentsystems and we can support their goals and careerobjectives. Technology is one of the top things that theylook for in a school of our nature.”

At the same time, the Institute’s technology—including itshundreds of HP workstations with ATI graphics and Intelprocessors—is a critical component of its mission.

“We’re very much geared toward the students knowingtheir profession, and meeting their career goals,” saysAubry. “all the tools associated with the software and the

hardware are critical to the students achieving the successthey are setting out for. Those items are very important forthe success of the students, and they realize that.”

Selecting a workstation for your education and your careeris a personal decision. It, like your graphics education,should meet your needs, help you realize your creativevisions, and support the goals you have set for yourself,your art, and your business. It’s a purchase decision thatcannot be made lightly or on an impersonal website oronline storefront. Contact people who know how you workand who understand your specific needs. Contact Hewlett-Packard Company and ATI, and tell them about you andthe fantastic places your imagination, education, and career—as well as the latest technologies—are going to take you.

“That’s why we’ve gone with HPand ATI. Their products give us thebest performance for the suite ofsoftware products that we need toprovide our students.”—Jim Aubry

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Motion Capture. . . .

the same as if a motion-capture crew

had acquired the performance using a

traditional system.

“We calibrated an animation rig

(skeleton),” says Michael Sanders, digi-

tal supervisor in charge of data acquisi-

tion. Then, to calculate the motion for the

skeleton, the Imocap system inferred the

skeleton’s movement from the image of

the body. “The skeleton and the images

lock together,” he says, “and we get a per-

frame motion solution from a sequence of

images. It’s like the inverse of a motion-

capture system, but with the same fi del-

ity. Normal mocap is constrained by

hardware, controlled lighting, and a cali-

brated environment. The inverse is no hardware constraints, no cal-

ibrated equipment, and full freedom to shoot in any location, under

any lighting conditions, and in any environment.”

To help capture those images, while Verbinsky directed and

his camera operators fi lmed the dot-banded, gray-suited actors,

Knoll and the ILM crew also shot the action using prosumer HD

camcorders for reference. The extra coverage helped verify the

3D performance for Imocap; however, the technique worked even

when all they had was the fi lm image. “The technique, by design,

had to be very forgiving,” says Knoll.

Once ILM had the footage, Snell oversaw a group of 16 people

who matched the camera from the principal photography to the

digital environment he had created from photos on set. Then, using

the Imocap solver, they retargeted the performance of each actor

onto his corresponding CG creature. It sounds a little like matchi-

mation, but it’s leaps and bounds beyond. “I think of Imocap as a

blend between match animation and motion capture that produces

motion-capture data, a hybrid of techniques,” says Snell. “It sets a

new bar for visual effects. Wait ’til you see these guys.”

Sneering Tentacles

It may be revolutionary, but, like traditional motion capture, it

wasn’t perfect—an actor might cover another’s face, for exam-

ple. Animators cleaned up the Imocap movement, animated

special appendages like crab claws sticking out of a character’s

back, and gave the faces expressions. “We gave all the charac-

Hadras, performed by Ho Kwan Tse, loses his head in a chase scene. Modelers sculpted the

creatures in Maya, created face shapes in Zeno, and added such detail as barnacles in Z-brush.

Davy Jones’ performance by Bill Nighy wearing a gray suit with tracking markers and bands at

left, top, was captured using ILM’s proprietary Imocap system and then applied to the cursed

creature at left, bottom. Keyframe animators and simulation artists performed the tentacles.

A new articulating rigid-body system controlled internal motors that bent the organist’s 46

tentacles forward and backward in different dimensions and at various speeds.



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ters facial shapes, even Ogilvey, whose head is made of coral

and looks like he doesn’t have a mouth, and Crash, who is so

eaten away he has sea anemones for a mouth,” says Campbell.

“The tricky thing was translating Bill Nighy’s emotion to Davy

Jones’ character. He’s a lip-synched main character.”

A custom analysis tool called Compare helped animators

with that process. “Animators can quickly bounce back and

forth between Bill Nighy’s performance and the CG character,”

says Knoll. “They could look at the timing of an eye blink, how

high the corner of his mouth goes on a sneer. It was our job to

copy Nighy, not interpret what he was doing.”

Because Davy has no nose, the modelers had to fi nd ways

for the animators to reproduce Nighy’s contemptuous sneers

through his facial tentacles. Although animators created the

sneers, usually Davy Jones’ 46 tentacles moved procedurally

thanks to an evolution of ILM’s rigid-body dynamics system.

Each tentacle was made of cylinders connected with joints—

imagine soup cans one below the next. ILM’s previous rigid-body

dynamics could spin the soup cans relative to one another and

rotate them in various directions, which

was fi ne for battle droids in Star Wars that

crashed to the fl oor and landed like rag dolls.

But Davy’s tentacles needed to bend, curl,

sway, and writhe. To make that possible,

the simulation team put motors between the

joints and created an articulating rigid-body

dynamics system.

“We can feed the motors mathemati-

cal expressions or keyframe motion, and

they’ll try to move on their own,” says

James Tooley, senior technical director

(TD) and animation supervisor. “They

seek out and try to perform, and we can

change that performance. You’ll notice that

in some shots, they swish back and forth,

but when Davy Jones gets angry, the ten-

tacles get angry.” They also added some-

thing they called “sticktion,” which caused

the tentacles to stick a bit to Davy as they

swished—like wet spaghetti on a leather

jacket, as Knoll puts it—rather than slide.

Each of the 46 tentacles could have as

many as 40 moving parts. Karin Derlich,

lead creature TD, developed a “super con-

troller” system to manage the complex-

ity. With the super controller, TDs could

adjust parameters to specify the speed

that the motors moved the joints. To cre-

ate the sine waves that caused a tenta-

cle to curl like an octopus tentacle as it

moved up, down, sideways, and twisted

in three dimensions, they selected which

motors would go forward and which would go backward.

Monster Effects

Kraken, the sea monster that Davy invokes, has enormously larger

tentacles. We fi rst see the squid-like creature’s giant tentacles ris-

ing from the sea to overtake the trading ship Edinburgh. “Most

of the time the tentacles are fl ailing around causing destruction,

picking up sailors, and smashing things,” says Hickel. Animators

worked with main controllers spaced along the length of the ten-

tacle, and with smaller subsets of controllers, to add wobbles and

shocks without disturbing the larger animation. In some shots,

they used shape animation for individual suckers on the under-

side of the tentacles to bring the suckers alive.

“We had 16 base suckers that animation TDs could instance

with random variations,” says Meny. “They could change the

look on a per-shot basis.”

Creature modeler Frank Gravatt built the Kraken tentacles in

three sizes: a small, noodly arm for snatching people, a medium-

sized tentacle for wrapping the mast, and a crusher that smashed

The complex detail in such all-CG characters as Davy Jones caused ILM’s R&D department to

derive a new rendering solution based on a game technique to save time.

The hardest compositing shots in the fi lm were during Kraken destruction scenes, which

included CG water, real water and mist, real smoke, live-action actors, and the CG Kraken.



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Our world just got bigger!

Computer Graphics WorldTim MattesonSales Director(310) [email protected]

Jeff VictorDistrict Sales Manager(847) [email protected]

Post MagazineMerle ModelEastern Sales Manager(781) [email protected]

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the ship. In addition, a full-body Kraken, with its gruesome maw,

appears in a few shots. To animate the beast, ILM developed a

new system. “Tentacles, snakes, ropes, things like that are, by their

nature, very diffi cult to animate,” says Tooley, “especially when

you need to pull on one end and have the whole thing follow.”

To solve that problem, Tooley’s team of 36 TDs developed

a non-ballistic posing system on top of an inverse-kinematics

control system. The result allowed animators to move the ten-

tacles around as if they were pieces of rope. “We also added

extra control systems to the underlying inverse-kinematics

control structure,” Tooley says. “Animators could move any

part of the tentacle where they wanted at any time. They could

grow it, make it stretch, shrink it, or make it fatter, and, as it

changed length, it also changed volume.”

On top of that, they sometimes added a fl esh simulator,

which also ran on Davy Jones’ tentacles and a few other faces,

to add jiggle and to preserve the volume. “There’s a really cool

shot I like of a tentacle moving past a cannon port,” Tooley says.

“We used the fl esh system, this tetrahedral volumetric system,

so as the suction cups on the tentacle pass the cannon and the

cannon port, you can see that they really get pushed around by

this collision object and vibrate a little bit.”

Mayhem and Magic

Kraken’s attack causes some of the most diffi cult composites in

a fi lm fi lled with diffi cult composites. Compositing supervisor

Eddie Pasquarello led a team that averaged around 65 composi-

tors and peaked at 80. The compositors used ILM’s Comptime,

Apple’s Shake, and ILM’s Sabre system, which is based on

Autodesk Discreet’s Inferno.

“We had to integrate CG characters with live characters wear-

ing makeup,” he says, referring to Davy and his crew, which

includes Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), the only non-CG char-

acter. “And we had water integration. Ship rigging. Backgrounds

behind. Bluescreen people. There were no easy shots.”

Kraken picks up sailors with one tentacle while using another

to smash onto the deck, and a third to wrap around a mast

and rip it out. The ships are sometimes CG, sometimes models,

and sometimes combinations of the two. There’s smoke, fl ying

debris, and water spray—all photographed on set because Knoll

believes in having the environmental effects shot in-camera.

“It just looks more real,” Knoll says. “But it makes these shots

the most horrible compositing nightmare you could imagine.”

Rather than trying to extract smoke and water splashes from

the plates, compositors laid the tentacles on top of the plate

atmosphere and then layered smoke or water elements on the

tentacles. A 100-layer shot, of a tentacle crashing through the

middle of a ship, took two and a half months to composite.

Compositors also handled Turkish prison digimattes, a

bone cage fi lled with Black Pearl crewmembers that dangled

from simulated CG ropes across a canyon, backgrounds that

turned Dominica into Cannibal Island, and many other shots.

Given the technical challenges, technical fi rsts, and sophis-

ticated artistry, the work on this fi lm should easily put the

crew in the running for a visual effects Oscar. “As much as I

know people like to mention technical things, what I was most

pleased about was the quality of artistic talent on this show,”

says Campbell.

The fi rst Pirates captured a box-offi ce treasure chest of

$653 million as it sailed into the top 25 all-time box-offi ce hits

domestically and internationally. With Johnny Depp, several

totally gross characters, and the same outrageous humor as in

the original, the sequel is likely to capture enthusiastic audi-

ences as well.

“It’s pretty neat and kind of disgusting, but not so much you

can’t enjoy the fun of it,” says Hickel.

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing

editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at

[email protected].

Animators could stretch or shrink the tentacle and move any part using a

non-ballistic procedural posing system on an inverse-kinematics control system.

Technical directors added detail in some shots to other-

wise instanced tentacle suckers with random variations.



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. . . .Character Animation


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Imageworks uses performance capture and hand animation

to create ‘dollhouse’ realism

This Old House



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Character Animation. . . .

ny animator who has spent

months sculpting blendshapes

or posing IK handles will tell you that the

phrase “computer animation” is not only a

misnomer for the person’s art, but a border-

line insult. Computers don’t animate any-

thing; people do. One of the reasons for

the misconception is that digital charac-

ters usually lack the hands-on tangibility

that makes stop-motion puppets feel hand-

crafted and unique. It’s this handmade

charm and tactile reality of stop motion

that fi rst-time director Gil Kenan, backed

by executive producers Steven Spielberg

and Robert Zemeckis, wanted to intro-

duce to the CG medium in Sony Pictures

Imageworks’ latest feature, Monster House.

Kenan wanted the digital characters to

feel as though human hands had labored

on them, even if it meant preserving the

fi ngerprints the sculptor left in the clay

maquettes from which they were scanned.

“I wanted the audience to feel like it could

relate to every character in every environ-

ment by reaching out and touching them,

so that meant devising an entirely new

approach to putting together a computer-

generated movie,” says the 29-year-old

director, who has spent the last four years

living every aspiring fi lmmaker’s dream

(see “Building a Career, pg. 46).

Kenan was fresh out of fi lm school at

UCLA when his short movie “The Lark”

was noticed by Zemeckis; along with

Spielberg, Zemeckis had opted against

developing Monster House as a live-action

fi lm because the anthropomorphizing

Monster House in question could only be

brought to life through animation. And

they needed a director who could handle

the challenges of animation and direct-

ing the partially motion-captured per-

formances of the CG characters. Kenan’s

“The Lark,” which featured a stop-motion

bird and rotoscoped live actors performing

against 2D animated backgrounds made in

Adobe’s After Effects, earned him the job.

Not bad for a fi lm shot on DV and edited in

Apple’s Final Cut for a mere $400.

Monster House utilizes the same per-

formance-capture system pioneered for

2004’s The Polar Express (see “Locomotion,”

December 2004, pg. 16), which lent itself

perfectly to capturing the weight and phys-

icality of the characters. Unlike The Polar

Express, however, Monster House’s world is

far more stylized, blending the childlike

elements of Rankin/Bass with the stop-

motion work of Ray Harryhausen (Clash

of the Titans) to forge a kind of “dollhouse”

realism in which characters feel more doll-

like than CG creations.

The story follows a boy named DJ

(played by Mitchel Musso) who is obsessed

with a mysterious house across the street

that is owned by the meanest old man in

the neighborhood, Horace Nebbercracker

(Steve Buscemi). When DJ and his friend

Chowder (Sam Lerner) try to recover their

basketball from Nebbercracker’s lawn, the

old man goes berserk, lifting DJ off the

ground before collapsing dead on top of

him. That’s when the house comes alive,

devouring anyone and anything that

comes its way. DJ and Chowder do their

best to alert those living nearby, but their

warnings fall on deaf ears, namely those of

Zee (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the world’s worst

baby-sitter, her apathetic headbanger boy-

friend Bones (Jason Lee), and two witless

police offi cers. It’s up to DJ, Chowder, and

a prep-schooler named Jenny (Spencer

Locke) to save the neighborhood.

Stop-Motion CGI

In an era when CG characters can boast

millions of volumetric hairs and scenes

can be rendered with hundreds of lights,

Kenan’s plan to never let the comput-

er’s “inhuman” ability to process data

defeat the human connection to the fi lm

was bold and audacious, and had reper-

cussions throughout the production. “In

my fi rst conversation with my visual

effects supervisor, Jay Redd, we decided

to remove motion blur from the entire

movie,” says Kenan. “Motion blur has

been used as a crutch in CG animation for

so long, and what you lose is that amazing

Harryhausen staccato effect, where things

have a real connection to the ground, and

a real weight and gravity to them. I want

everything to feel planted and tangible

and connected to the world.”

In fact, the choice to turn off motion

blur was a direct nod to stop motion,

notes Redd. “When you’re seeing every

frame sharp, when your brain is regis-

tering every pose, every eye shape, every

dart of an eye or fi nger movement, it

makes the fi lm feel handmade.”

By Martin McEachern



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continued on page 37



Forging the fi lm’s hand-labored look began during the model-

ing phase, where sculptor Leo Rijin fashioned clay maquettes of

each character, ranging in size from 12 to 16 inches. Under normal

circumstances, a modeler would then work from scans to build

one half of the character, duplicate it to the other side, and stitch

the halves together. Not here. “That drove me crazy when I fi rst

found out that’s how they did it,” says Kenan. “I insisted that both

halves of the original clay maquettes be modeled. It was really cru-

cial that all the characters had distinct features and weren’t per-

fectly symmetrical. If you look closely at DJ, you’ll see that one of

his nostrils is a little wonky, and that’s just because [Rijin] had a

little accident in sculpting his nose, but it constitutes what we iden-

tify as a particular characteristic, and it makes a big difference.”

Modeled with polygons, subdivision surfaces, and bits of

NURBS, the asymmetrical character geometry also demanded

asymmetrical rigging. “We couldn’t just rig one side and fl op

it over to the other side because the model was different on the

other side,” says animation supervisor Troy Saliba. “Each side

had to be rigged independently.”

To ensure that the character models manifested the slight-

est nuances of an actor’s facial performance during the motion-

capture process, modelers infused the models with the unique

facial structure of each actor. For instance, artists gave Mr.

Nebbercracker big, walnut shell eyelids, and tailored the eye-

brows to match those of Steve Buscemi. They also accentuated

the nasolabial furrow so Buscemi’s frequent sneering translated

perfectly during motion capture.

Continuing with this stripped-down aesthetic, the fi lmmak-

ers also avoided hyper-realistic cloth and hair simulation, rely-

ing instead on simple geometry for hair and tubular geometry for

clothes. “[Redd] and his team came up with simplifi ed hair. It

doesn’t move, and you don’t think about it; you shouldn’t think

about it. You don’t think about an actor’s hair in a feature; if you

are, you aren’t watching the movie,” says Kenan. In the same vein,

the team kept the eyes simple and graphic. Adds Redd: “When the

eyes become complex, you tend to want more, and then you start

to get into shiny skin, subsurface scattering shaders, and all these

photoreal qualities we weren’t interested in doing.”

Actors and Animators United

The biggest revision to the performance-capture pro-

cess used for The Polar Express occurred with facial

animation. Unlike The Polar Express, where the char-

acter rigs were geared almost exclusively for motion

capture, Saliba made sure Monster House’s rigs were

equally capable of responding to motion capture and

hand animation. As a result, the animation is always

a blend between actor and animator.

In The Polar Express, the motion-captured data from

the 150-plus markers on each

Carrying fl ashlights and armed with Super Soakers, DJ, fl anked by

his friends Jenny and Chowder, explore the strange happenings

inside the Monster House. The characters and everything else in the

fi lm look handmade rather than CG-perfect.

Modelers gave characters the unique facial structures of

the actors voicing them, so the artists could more easily

incorporate nuanced facial expressions.



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Software vendors, such as Autodesk, Softimageand NewTek, continue to infuse applicationswith greater functionality to enable creatives todo more at a faster pace. With the increasedneeds of users and expanded softwarecapabilities comes the necessity for hardwaresolutions capable of supporting more complexprojects and applications.

The workstation market has responded,delivering such leading technologies as multi-core processing and 64-bit architectures. Multi-core technology involves having more than oneprocessor core packaged in a single chip, therebyboosting performance and enabling applicationthreads (instructions) to run in parallel. Theresult is increased system performance and userproductivity. The newer workstations now offerup to two dual-core processors designed tosimultaneously handle eight softwareinstructions at the same time—four physical and

As a graphics professional in the entertainmentindustry, you don’t compromise when it comesto your work—always striving for the highestquality, greatest realism, or most eye-catchingeffect. You push your creativity, imagination,talents, and even your time to the limit. Youshould expect no less from the solutions youuse to get the job done.

Industry projects—whether involving characteranimation, a novel visual effect, or aphotorealistic gaming environment—arebecoming increasingly complex. Because ofthe nature of what you are trying toaccomplish, you continuously push theenvelope and, in turn, drive greaterperformance. Answering the call for morerobust tools, software and hardware vendorsare refining applications, workstations, andcomponents to put more powerful, high-performance, and reliable solutions in thehands of graphic design customers.

Successis in the CardsMaking the right workstation and graphicschoices can help you achieve greatness

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four virtual. This technology, known as hyper-threading, is becoming more and more prevalentin the industry, as leading software developers,such as Adobe, Autodesk, Softimage and NewTekunveil applications capable of running on morethan one processor, or core, simultaneously.

Another industry trend driving greater graphicsperformance is 64-bit computing, which isparticularly beneficial to digital content creatorsgiven the necessity to work with large, complexfiles. 64-bit technology answers the need for largeraddressable physical and virtual memory,scalability, and faster processing and responsetimes. Desktop-class systems do not, as a generalrule, offer 64-bit computing; rather, it is typicallyfound only on enterprise-level servers andworkstations, which support both 32- and 64-bitapplications. Newer graphics workstations offerup to 64GB of physical memory—incredible.

Workstation class vs. desktop classYour workstation is an integral part of your job,and your success. If you’ve ever worked with anunresponsive computer system—one that takesconsiderable time to complete a task or respondto a command, one that crashes without warning,or one that refuses to multitask—you have a keenunderstanding of this fact.

It might be tempting to save money on an initialhardware purchase by opting for a more affordable,run-of-the-mill desktop PC or building your ownsystem. Yet, the hardware and software tools youselect to do your job are an investment in yourcareer, and your future. You want a systemdesigned for your work, with your needs in mind.Your needs are unique, so your system should bein sync with you.

It is tremendously important, then, to understandthe latest hardware technology to configure theoptimal system to meet your exacting needs.

Workstation technologies might be complex, butthe selection process needn’t be.

Computer considerationsThree components should be considered whenselecting a workstation for graphics-intensiveapplications. Of significant importance are aworkstation’s memory, processor, and graphicscard.

As the complexity of graphics projects increases,so too do corresponding file sizes. The moreimpressive an animation or effect, the morememory and processing power required.Workstation-class systems generally providegreater main system memory, often at fasterspeeds, when compared to desktop PCs.

From a processing perspective, workstation-classsystems employ the latest technologies fromleading vendors. Dell’s Precision™ workstations,for example, take advantage of the latest Intel®Xeon® dual-core processors, whereas its consumer

product lines use Intel® P4processing. Workstations are designed and

built to provide a higher capacity for calculationand processing because the applicationsdemand it.

Memory capacity and processing power contributeto the overall performance of a workstation, butno component is as critical to your workflow asthe graphics card. A system tailored to meet theneeds of digital content creators employs a high-end OpenGL graphics card, such as ATI’s FireGLline, designed to support today’s advancedapplications and their expanding feature sets.

Graphics power and memoryThe graphics card is a powerful part of theworkstation, thanks in large part to the graphicsprocessing unit, or GPU. The GPU is similar to acomputer processing unit, or CPU, but is focusedon displaying pixels on the screen. Whereas theCPU is responsible for running the softwareapplication and performing some calculationsrequired by that program, anything involved in

Success is in the cards



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Integrated outputsBy selecting a card with the latest outputtechnologies, such as digital video interface (DVI),as well as support for dual link and 10- and 16-bitdisplays, you are ensuring the viability of yourworkstation in the future, or future-proofing. Cardssuch as the ATI FireGL series provide two DVIconnectors, expanding the digital content creator’sworkspace by driving two displays off a singlecard. Users can start with one display and addanother as their needs grow.

Another desirable technology, dual link usesmore of the pins on a DVI connector toessentially double the bandwidth and drive moredata throughput. Dual link aids users in takingadvantage of ultra-wide, high-resolution displays,such as Dell’s 30-inch 3007WFP with 2560x1600resolution. Those seeking an ultra-wide visualworkspace need the right graphics card to drivedisplays at full resolution. In fact, a single ATIFireGL V7200 sports two dual-link DVI outputs,suitable for driving two widescreen monitorsside-by-side for a workspace measuring morethan 5000 pixels wide.

With more pixels on the screen, artists anddesigners gain greater flexibility, accuracy, andproductivity. Visual professionals benefit from alarge workspace and the ability to run multipleprograms, boosting productivity and improvingoverall workflow. At the same time, it’s importantto choose technology that affords you growth,for your work today and in the future, as peripheralsquickly become more capable.

Added valueWorkstations, as compared to desktop PCs, offera newer system bus architecture. The bus, thebandwidth that data travels between the processoror the hard drive and the memory, should use thelatest technology and offer adequate bandwidth.Today’s best graphics cards provide 16 lanes ofPCI Express native.

Look for algorithms and technologies in the GPUthat enhance the visual experience, like Avivo (ATIvideo in video out). Avivo extends the traditional8-bit color space, with 16.7 million total colors, to10-bit color with more than 1 billion colors in all.The expanded color spectrum lends to morecompelling, realistic, and crisp visuals, as well as

rendering graphics to a display is handled by theGPU. GPUs, such as those from ATI, take advantageof more than 350 million transistors, far more thanCPUs, and are roughly 10 times more powerful interms of raw computational power.

With all that processing power behind you, youneed sufficient memory to store the impressivegraphics on your monitor. Memory on the graphicscard is used, in part, for the frame buffer, whichstores information displayed on the screen.Graphics cards today offer up to one gigabyte ofmemory on board, and ATI offers a range ofsolutions with different amounts of memory andprocessing power to meet the needs of a widerange of customers.

Graphics memory requirements continue toincrease, with the growing popularity of double,triple, and quad buffering. Double bufferinginvolves the use of a front buffer and a back buffer,translating to a need for twice the memory. Asyou animate, for example, the computer displaysone buffer while the graphics card renders to thesecond buffer; then, in a sixtieth of a second or

less, the buffers are swapped to prevent screensfrom flickering. Double buffering enables smoothanimation, which is further expanded with tripleand quad buffering.

High-end graphics cards enable stereo 3D, a uniquecapability involving left and right views that areeach double-buffered, using four buffers. The ATIFireGL V7200, for example, offers a stereoscopic3D connector through which alternating left andright 3D representations are displayed andsynchronized with 3D glasses. Demand for thisstereoscopic view is growing, as it provides greaterdetail when working with very intricate models.

Those using sophisticated rendering and shadingtechniques require adequate memory. Texturemapping is improved by the ability to load texturesin the graphics card’s memory. Today’s popularpixel-shader programs also can be loaded intographics memory to aid users in simulating water,metal, and myriad other effects.

These latest industry and software innovationsput an emphasis on the GPU and graphics memory,but the graphics card’s outputs also should notbe overlooked.

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brings about an increase in image detail, especiallyin highlights and shadows.

Ten-bit color is significant for digital contentcreation markets, like Hollywood, that require thebest possible image with the best color quality.ATI’s FireGL cards offer 10-bit color throughoutthe graphics pipeline, enabling users to takeadvantage of high dynamic range imaging (HDRI).ATI cards also output 16-bit color, lending to morethan 1 trillion color combinations and significantlymore detail.

Behind the scenesYou work nights and weekends, whatever isnecessary to get the job done well and on time.The last thing you need is an unreliable,unresponsive computer system thwarting yourefforts, and contributing to lost time, money,and clientele. For this reason, it is importantto ensure that your system is certified towork in tandem with your software andperipherals, and that a support structureis in place should you need it.

ATI, as an example, works directly with leadingsoftware vendors to ensure that its graphics cardsand drivers are optimized and validated for usewith character animation software. Dell Precisiontakes it a step further, subjecting the entireworkstation—the graphics card, system bus, BIOS,memory, hard drive, and more—to a thorough testingand certification process, so users can be confidentthe configuration will work in their environment.

Forced downtime can be both infuriating andcostly. When was the last time you experienceda system that didn’t work in some way? Chancesare you remember, considering it may have costyou time, money, and patience. Certification affordsyou peace of mind, stability, and if a problem shouldarise, accountability.

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Don't forget that the cost of owning a computerdoesn't end with the initial purchase, rather itextends over its lifetime and may be affected bymaintenance, downtime, and more. For this reason,

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Now, and in the futureThe design industry is changing and innovating,just as you are always perfecting your craft andexpanding your knowledge. You need a systemthat will serve you well into the future, as yourwork increases in quality, complexity, and quantity.

In a studio or workgroup environment, invest inworkstations with a scalable architecture that cansupport users in the organization now, and growwith them in the future. A junior animator workingon a character’s hand may not need the highest-

performing graphics configuration, but the senioranimator who is animating the hands, feet, body,and head wants the best solution available.

Selecting the optimal workstation for your digitalcontent creation career is an important decision.Consider a system’s memory capacity, processingpower, and, above all else, its graphics card, beforecommitting to a purchase, and ensure that themanufacturer stands behind its products, offeringthe appropriate certifications, assurances, andsupport. For more information about Dell Precisionworkstations and ATI FireGL graphics cards, visitwww.dell.com/workstations and www.ati.com/firegl.Once you are armed with your optimal workstation,go have fun, be imaginative, and create some ofthe greatest art the world will ever see.

Success is in the cards

For more information visitwww.dell.com/workstations

or contact your Dell sales person

For more information visitwww.ati.com/FireGL

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Dell cannot be responsible for errors in typography or photography. Dell, the Dell logo, and Dell Precision are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade namesmay be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and namesof others. © 2006 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of Dell is strictly forbidden.

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continued from page 32


actor’s face was applied directly to the

corresponding patches of facial geometry on the character, actu-

ally shifting the mesh around without any intermediary enhance-

ment. For Monster House, however, the team processed the same

motion-captured data from the facial markers through a new pro-

prietary Facial Action Coding System (FACS) muscle system, also

used in Superman (see “Leaps Tall Orders,” pg. 52). Developed by

Mark Sagar, now with Weta Digital, the system uses Paul Ekman

and WV Friesen’s cataloging of facial expressions based on muscle

movements to solve motion-captured face data.

“Imagine it is a library of over 100 facial poses, such as ‘inner

eyebrow up’ or ‘outer eyebrow up.’ It harnesses the complete

facial range of a person and divides it into individually num-

bered poses, so that it can choose any number of them, such as

4, 36, 37, and 94, and combine them in different percentages to

create a complete facial shape,” explains Saliba.

To set up the system, the team videotaped each person act-

ing out the 100-plus FACS poses, and then hand-keyed a blend-

shape for each pose to create a FACS library for each actor. Using

the motion-captured data, the FACS solver then selects the cor-

rect poses and combines them in various percentages to create

an expression on a frame-by-frame basis. Once the FACS solver

has created these expressions, animators use Imageworks’ pro-

prietary Character Facial System (CFS) to fi ne-tune them with

blendshape controls.

“Simplicity was my mandate going in because I knew we

were doing a lot of editing and animation to the motion cap-

ture. I wanted to have rigs that were geared toward animation

and not set up so that they would only work with motion cap-

ture,” says Saliba. “That was one of the problems they ran into

on The Polar Express, and I didn’t want to be in that position

because I knew our fi lm was more stylized, meaning the anima-

tion department was going to be leaving an indelible fi ngerprint

on top of the motion capture.”

As the FACS solver accessed the various poses and set val-

ues on them, it didn’t touch the CFS rig, giving artists two layers

of control over the motion-captured performances. (They could

also keyframe the FACS poses manually if a performance failed

to capture properly or the director wanted something different.)

“We can use these FACS poses as a foundation to build our anima-

tion on. For instance, instead of trying to combine 11 or 12 differ-

ent muscle blendshapes to create a smile [with our CFS], we can

go into the FACS poses and fi nd the smile shape and start with

that, using the CFS to make it more organic,” explains Saliba.

While the animators were aiming for a puppet-like feel in the

animation, they utilized proprietary sculpt deformers, known as

Tweak Clusters, to give the body animation a touch of squash and

stretch, and a more graphic look. In all, animators had 11 types of

tweak clusters in their arsenal: Some of them would incorporate

lattice deformers, others would add or subtract volume, giving

the portly offi cer Landers, for example, a wobbling belly.

Motion Capture

Using 200 Vicon mocap cameras, Imageworks captured the faces

and bodies of the actors as they performed on a 20x20x16-foot

stage—nearly double the stage volume used for The Polar Express.

“We had only one stage this time [as opposed to the three used for

The Polar Express], and one of our goals was to capture within a

larger space both face and body data simultaneously for a longer

amount of time, so we didn’t have to break up the motion. To do

that, we needed a larger stage, because characters are always run-

ning across the street or climbing stairs in our fi lm,” says Redd.

The body performances were analyzed and mapped to the

character skeletons using Autodesk’s MotionBuilder, and output as

an Autodesk Maya fi le for animation. Kenan also used six video

cameras to record the scenes, which he edited together to create

Breaking with standard practice, artists sculpted both sides of

the maquette, rather than only half and replicating the image for

the other side. This gave the characters distinctive features, but

required separate rigging for each side of the character, as well.



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a live-action previz to make sure the

story was working on a purely charac-

ter level. Animators also used the video

footage as reference as they shaped

and sculpted the motion-captured data.

Unlike The Polar Express, Kenan says

the fi nished performances for Monster

House were a completely organic collab-

oration between actor and animator. “It

became such a stew between keyframed

and motion-captured animation that it’s

almost impossible to discern between the

two while watching the fi lm,” he says.

On the mocap stage, wire mesh and

foam-core props, which were invisible

to the infrared camera, represented the

various sets, including the exteriors and

interiors of DJ’s home and the Monster House. Of course, the

greatest challenge with the motion-capture process itself lies in

correcting eyeline problems and other proportional discrepancies

between the actors and their digital characters. “We were very

conscious at the beginning about casting actors with similar pro-

portions as their digital characters,” says Redd. “So we cast kids

as the kids. Maggie Gyllenhaal is very similar in height to Zee,

Jason Lee is the same size as Bones, and so a lot of our eyelines

usually worked very well.”

According to Redd, the kids running across the street tended

to be the hardest animations to capture because it was diffi cult

endowing their stride with a believable sense of weighting. “We

would capture fi ve or six volumes at a time of the kids running

across the 20x20-foot volume, and then

edit them together. Capturing scenes

involving four or fi ve characters in the

volume was also challenging. When the

cops show up and the kids crowd around

the car, those are the hardest to deal with

because the actors are all in close prox-

imity, and the cameras can’t see through

them because they’re optical-based. Most

times we’d employ [keyframe] animation

to solve it.”

Once possessed, Nebbercracker’s

house becomes a character in itself,

and had to be every bit as emotive and

expressive as the humans. The crew

videotaped Kathleen Turner, who plays

the house, rampaging through foam-

core props on the stage. While the animators took cues from her

performance, the entire house was keyframed. Artists rigged

the house with more than 40,000 controls (mostly IK), including

base controls that could torque the overall shape of the house,

and fi ner controls for moving, rotating, stretching, and break-

ing every plank, shingle, stairway, railing, siding, brick, fl oor-

board, and even the trees on the front lawn. The house has four

specifi cally rigged states: calm, slightly broken down, articulate,

The set of images at the top of the page depict a model of the

Monster House (fi rst) in its pristine condition and (second) during a

stage of disruption. The image to the right shows the hundreds of

controls on the house that allowed the animators access to every

little detail. Below is that same model that appeared in the fi lm.



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Autodesk and Alias are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., in the USA and/or other countries.All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. ©2006 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.

Image created by: Morph Studios (Maya), Caroline Delen (3ds Max).



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Idea: Greater creative freedom.

Realized:Join us in celebrating the beautifulnew relationship between Autodesk and Alias. Whether you’re looking for robust out-of-the-box power, a highlycustomizable solution or premier character-animation tools, this pairis ready to help you push creativeboundaries for years to come. Tolearn more about this power couple,visit autodesk.com/animation



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and uprooted with tree arms. “We had to plan out how the house

would perform, the faces it could make, the emotions it needed

to convey,” says Redd. “This resulted in many meetings and story

sessions, determining exactly which boards had to break, which

could bend, where the joints were, how the windows would twist,

how the gutters, steps, and bricks would react, and so forth.”

Autumn in the Air

After the animations were completed and the camera move-

ments were blocked out in Maya, Kenan, director of photography

Xavier Perez Grobet, and camera operator Paul Babin then shot

the scenes virtually using Wheels, a virtual camera system devel-

oped at Imageworks for The Polar Express. Standing on the mocap

stage, the fi lmmakers shot the scenes as if they were fi lming live

action, using a camera head as an input device to control the vir-

tual camera in MotionBuilder. Turning the wheel on the camera

head, they could control the pitch, roll, and tilt just like they could

with a real camera.

Because so much of the fi lm involves children running

across streets and through houses, Imageworks also developed

a shoulder-mounted steadicam for Monster House. This allowed

the fi lmmakers to add a more human, handheld feel to the cam-

era movements, better capturing the urgency and emotional

charge of a scene. “Monster House has tons of action, in addi-

tion to being a very scary fi lm, so we needed a handheld camera

to add tension to its movement,” says Redd. “It all goes back to

our mandate of making the fi lm feel handmade. We wanted the

camera to have the little quirks and pops that humans give it.”

The autumnal atmosphere of Halloween was also a cru-

cial character in the fi lm, with the pale sky of day, the blazing

orange sun at dusk, the deep blue shadows of night, the naked,

skeletal trees that grasp like talons for the kids, and the fl urry of

leaves swirling across the ground. “From a dramatic storytell-

ing point of view, we look for what creates the best mood. The

sky is very blue in the fall, the sun never gets very high, and the

shadows are always very long, so those are the cues people will

pick up on,” says Redd. “The fi lm unfolds over a day and a half,

jumping from 2 pm to 7 pm in successive scenes. Using angle of

light and color of shadow, we could tell the audience what time

it was without throwing up subtitles.”

To make sure the characters and environments refl ected this

atmospheric lighting, Imageworks developed new global illumi-

nation, radiosity, and raytracing software to light the movie as if it

were shot on a practical, live-action stage. The software combines

refraction, refl ection, indirect diffusion schemes, fl ags, and com-

plex bounce lighting to produce the kind of photorealism a doll-

house might have, even without being completely “real.”

“Bounce light is perhaps the single most important visual

component, next to control of shadow color and length,”

explains Redd. “After all, we are making a scary movie. It

was the key to super-blue shadows, and making this fi lm feel

handmade. It’s important to show how the color of the carpet

or the wall in DJ’s room affects his skin color in order to get

that tangible feeling.”

Artists also strategically placed lights in Maya so they would

only cast shadows from certain objects. For instance, really long

Autumn is more than just a season in the movie; it played a crucial

role in setting a mood, with its subdued sunlight and the nearly bare

trees that look as if they could reach out and grab someone.

For the characters in Monster House, Imageworks used its proprietary

FACS muscle system that utilizes a category of facial expressions

based on muscle movements to solve mocap face data.



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shadows are cast by the trees

but not by the kids, so that

they loom ominously over the

children as if they’re about to

attack. Astonishingly, the team

used only one light in most

scenes—the sun—and then

arranged bounce cards around

the characters, mimicking

the way a live-action movie is

shot. “I took my lighters down

to a small stage, brought in a

couple of grips and a camera

operator, and through lights

on miniature sets, fogged the

scene, and got them thinking

about how to transcend a cliché night or day look,” says Redd. “I

wanted them to tell the story with color, time of day, angles of sun

and shadow, atmosphere, and bounce cards.”

Once the kids infi ltrate the house, the children wield volumetric

fl ashlights to illuminate the structure’s interior. Because the story

demanded tight control over what was revealed to the audience,

the artists used dust clouds, cuculoris, and barn doors to block

parts of the set from view. For the plumes of dust cast up by their

footfalls that thickened the light inside the creaky old house, the

artists used Imageworks’ proprietary sprite renderer, called SPLAT

(Sony Pictures Layered Art Technology). As the kids proceed inside

armed with Super Soakers, SPLAT also generated the fl uid effects.

All the particle simulations were fi rst done in Side Effects

Software’s Houdini or Maya, and then rendered by SPLAT using

specifi c sprites. Because the fi lm is teeming with destruction

effects, the fi lmmakers needed a way to generate massive dust

When the kids make their way inside the Monster House, they use volumetric fl ashlights to illuminate

their way. The fi lmmakers, however, took care not to allow the lights to reveal too much so as to not

give away any “secrets.”



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clouds and volumetric effects, yet maintain fi ne control over their

scale and detail. “SPLAT allows us to dial in looks and styles

quickly and see the results rapidly, without having to calculate

tons of volumetric information,” says Redd. “We can create ‘vol-

umes’ with the types and number of sprites that we use. There

are many variables that

we can tweak to get a

specifi c ‘look’ for Monster

House’s dust clouds, fi re,

and so forth.”

As ide f rom the

destruct ion clouds,

another big effects chal-

lenge was the ubiquitous

‘Pigpen’ dust that set-

tles around the Monster

House. Each cloud had

to be individually sculpted for every shot in order to hide or

reveal the particular action of the house. “I worked with our

effects team to plot out the location, speed, height, and width

of the dust clouds from shot to shot,” says Redd. Continuity

was very important.”

Strategically

placed lights

inside Maya cast

shadows from

specifi c objects—

the tall, leafl ess

trees extend long

shadows while the

children do not

cause shadows—

providing an

ominous feel.

In an interview with contributing editor

Martin McEachern, Monster House director

Gil Kenan shares his fairy-tale journey from

a $400 student fi lm to a multimillion-dollar

feature fi lm with two of the industry’s

biggest names: Robert Zemeckis and

Steven Spielberg.

How did you become the director of Monster House? I won an award at UCLA with my student fi lm “The

Lark,” so it was screened at the Director’s Guild

of America. It was my fi rst screening outside of

my apartment! One fateful day, my movie made it

onto the desk of Robert Zemeckis. He saw it, liked

it, and told me about Monster House, which he’d

been developing with Steven Spielberg for about

eight years.

Were you aiming for a stop-motion aesthetic from the outset?That’s defi nitely something I was going for, mostly

because traditional CG work is not really appealing to

me as a fi lmmaker. I’ve had a really diffi cult time with

CG. That’s why for my student fi lms, I avoided Maya

like the plague, because you can fancy things up all

you want, but at the end of the day, it all ends up

feeling similar. It doesn’t have a tangible feel.

How did you imbue the characters with that tangible feel?In my fi rst conversation with effects supervisor Jay

Redd (who’s a master at texturing), we talked about

wanting to feel the fi ngerprints of the sculptor on all

our characters’ faces. And that’s all there, sometimes

preserved right from the source scans. Individually,

you wouldn’t notice all those human ‘touches,’ but

the point is when you add them all together, it makes

a human connection between the fi lm and the audi-

ence, and that for me is what’s been lacking in CG

fi lms. It’s the idea that it’s not all computer-pro-

cessed; it took humans to make every model, every

environment, and every character. And because the

movie stars humans, I wanted that sense of humanity

to exude out of every frame.

How did you anthropomorphize the house? I started out by casting the house just like I cast the

kids. I went to my production designer, Ed Verreaux

(who was Spielberg’s storyboard artist at the begin-

ning of his career, and the fi rst person to draw ET

and design Elliot’s bedroom), and together we drove

around Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Glendale, tak-

ing pictures of houses that would fi t the charac-

ter of our house. Then, we reassembled them on a

desk, and took one window from one house, a door

from another, a porch from the next, and kind of

built the face, an ideal facade for this house. The fi rst

night I read the script, I just drew like crazy, making a

bunch of drawings to show Zemeckis what I wanted

the house to look like, and those original drawings

remained very similar to the fi nished look of the house.

The houses seem to have the arti-fi ciality of a studio backlot. Is that something you were aiming for?Yeah. I really wanted this movie to take place in an

idealized movie suburban reality. I was always a

big fan of the studio backlot suburbs. For me, that

always defi ned a certain feeling and emotion. In

fact, on my second house hunt with Ed, we com-

mandeered a golf cart and let loose on the Universal

backlot. We drove down that street from every awe-

some suburban movie ever made, taking pictures and

just getting the feeling of it.

Is that where The ‘Burbs was shot?Absolutely! It’s also Wisteria Lane on Desperate

Housewives. I think there’s something magical about

it. We also ended up at the Psycho house. I jumped out

of the golf cart, took a chance at trying the door, and

found it miraculously unlocked. I went inside, started

goofi ng about and rolling around on the fl oors. I

couldn’t believe I was actually in the Psycho house!

The funniest part is when I came out: There was a

tour group driving by in a tram, and they freaked out

Building a Career



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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxw w w . c g w . c o m JULY 2006 Computer Graphics World | 47


Landscaping

The fi lm climaxes with the emergence of the “Constance

Ghost,” an elegant and graceful apparition—encircled dra-

matically in a 360-degree camera move—that had to be

recognizable as a person. To this end, the artists created

keyframed animations as a guide for the simulations, pro-

ducing dozens of wisps, tendrils, and ringlets of spectral

smoke that were rendered and lit, and ultimately coalesce,

into the fi nished apparition via Imageworks’ proprietary

compositing software, Bonzai.

In addition to Bonzai, the artists also used Adobe’s

Photoshop and Maxon Computer’s Cinema 4D to create the

many digital matte paintings that furnish the shots with back-

ground trees, the sky, and deep vistas. Nevertheless, there are

almost no static backgrounds in Monster House. The envi-

ronment is perpetually alive with gently blowing leaves, moving

bushes, and scattering leaves. For leaves, grass, rocks, and bricks,

Imageworks used Houdini and exported the surfaces into the stu-

dio’s internal geometry format for dynamic simulation or effects.

The house, once it is possessed, transforms from a structure to a main character,

and is every bit as emotive and expressive as DJ and the other CG actors.

because just as they were passing by, there was this

weirdo with big eyebrows jumping out of the door.

Did Wheels, Imageworks’ virtual camera system, help you capture the emotion of a scene better than you could by animating the camera in Maya?Well, there’s one huge fl aw with traditional CG anima-

tion, and it has driven me crazy since the early days, and

that’s the weightlessness of the camera. As a fi lmmaker,

it has always been the most frustrating thing, because I

feel like the weight of the camera is not just an aesthetic

thing, it has an emotional thing; there’s a gravity to it

and a connection to the actors and the scene and the

story. It was really important that I shoot this fi lm with

the philosophy of a live-action fi lm, which is the philoso-

phy of narrative fi lmmaking as it’s been learned during

the last 100 years—but still not forgetting that when

it’s absolutely necessary for the story, I can go nuts and

break all those laws of narrative fi lmmaking.

How did you give the camera this connection to the actors?The fi rst thing I did was hire the least technical, the

least computer-knowledgeable cinematographer I

could fi nd, someone who made fi lms purely emo-

tionally without any artifi ce, and that was Xavier

Perez Grobet, who shot Before Nightfall. That fi lm

is purely emotional fi lmmaking and cinematography.

He came in without knowing anything about Wheels

or mocap; all he knew was traditional fi lmmaking. It

was a really good marriage between us because I felt

comfortable in 3D space, and so together we could

fulfi ll our goal of shooting the fi lm with a real sense

of weight and gravity. We had four camera operators

at Imageworks who worked with us for fi ve months

to place the cameras and get all the coverage. I then

went back to my cutting room and edited all that cov-

erage into the fi nished cut.

Are there differences between directing actors for live action than for motion-captured performances?You have to work harder to help them imagine the

world, but as soon as the actors were able to embrace

the theatrical nature of mocap performance, they were

able to imagine themselves purely in character. I fi nd

that when you strip away a lot of the stuff—take away

costumes, wigs, sets, and props—the fi rst couple of

days can be scary because you’ve taken away their

safety net, but shortly thereafter, a kind of transforma-

tion takes place where the actors become purely con-

centrated on character. And in many ways, you get a

really heightened sense of character.

Have you heard of a Danish director who made a fi lm called Dogville by doing that exact same thing—stripping his actors of sets and elaborate costumes?

Yeah, Lars Von Trier. And that’s the perfect anal-

ogy. It’s like black-box theater. Focusing on charac-

ter helped me a lot in bridging the gap between the

mocap performance and the fi nished animation. I

worked with all the actors to get a sense of height-

ened physicality in the performances and mannerisms,

making sure they were a bit broader than normal

because I knew it would take that extra 5 to 10 per-

cent to translate to the digital characters.

What advancements would you like to see in the motion-captured fi lmmaking process?As these movies become technologically advanced,

there’s this strange kind of show-off race that’s

been happening, and most of it is about how many

lights they can fi t into a scene, how many amazing

hair simulations they can stick on a character, and I

feel that’s wrong. Every movie should create its own

technology. For instance, global illumination was

extremely important to our fi lm, to give our [delib-

erately artifi cial world] a real sense of existence,

so we developed new technology for that. A fi lm

should defi ne its own technology and not vice versa.

That’s where you get into trouble. I feel like mocap

is a tool to serve the story on this fi lm and nothing

more. That’s where I want to see it go, to become

something that’s not talked about and just appreci-

ated by an audience for facilitating a great, commu-

nicating performance.



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For surfacing the characters and environments, texture lead

Dennis Bredow and his team used Maxon’s BodyPaint. “We used

it for almost everything on the movie, including the myriad lay-

ers of dirt, decay, color fade, scratches, dents, dings, scrapes, and

so forth,” says Redd. “We spent a lot of time on the character

makeup; we coordinated costumes with the color of each char-

acter’s face, the rosy qualities of their cheeks, freckles, marks,

bumps, and more. [The texturing process] even involved reveal-

ing fi ngerprints on the characters’ skin. It adds another layer of

doll-like realism to the whole world without trying to create real,

living fl esh. Our characters get beat up and dirty over time,

so we had to map out when, where, and how each character

would become dirtier and dirtier. Lots of tricks were used with

alpha channels and layered shaders to control the continuity.”

To give depth and realism to surfaces for extreme close-ups, the

artists added procedural bump and displacement maps to some of

the painted textures. Finally, to replace the perfections of CGI with

the living chemistry of fi lm stock, the team added fi lm grain to

every shot and created a diffusion fi lter to soften the highlights.

Monster House represents a signifi cant step forward in the

evolution of the motion-capture process pioneered on The Polar

Express, primarily by giving animators far greater control over

the actors’ performances. “It is turning into a new kind of hybrid

medium,” says Redd. “Motion capture is really an immaculate

reference for the animators. The analogy I use is to Disney’s use

of fi lmed reference for the dances in Snow White. No one would

say Snow White is a terribly animated fi lm. For us, the motion

capture is the DNA, the substance of a performance.”

In a summer fl ooded with CG features, each competing for

technical supremacy, Monster House also steps out of the beaten

digital path to assert, not hide, the authorship of the human

hands behind it. “I wanted to make a fi lm that didn’t have the

signatures of CG,” adds Redd. “No fi lm is computer-generated,

and we wanted our fi lm to show that.”

Martin McEachern is an award-winning journalist and contribut-

ing editor for Computer Graphics World. He can be reached at

[email protected].

The CG artists avoided giving the characters hyper-realistic hair

and clothing, and instead used simplistic geometry for the hair and

tubular geometry for the clothing. This worked well with the

movie’s stripped-down aesthetic.



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. . . .Digital Doubles


W hen Superman soared above Lois

Lane’s house in Warner Bros’

Superman Returns, he fl ew on the

wings of computer graphics technology and

visual effects expertise that has taken super-

heroes and digital humans to new heights.

Andy Jones, animation supervisor at

Sony Pictures Imageworks and Oscar

nominee for I, Robot, led the team that

created the digital stunt double’s perfor-

mance. Richard Hoover, Oscar nominee

for Armageddon, supervised Imageworks’

300 visual effects shots. Mark Stetson,

who won a visual effects Oscar for The

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the

Ring, supervised the work of 11 visual

effects studios that created the fi lm’s

1400 shots. And, Bryan Singer of X-Men

and X-Men 2 fame directed the fi lm.

Digital stunt doubles have accelerated

the actions of superheroes since Batman

took a 60-foot tumble in 1995’s Batman

Forever, and with each, the camera has

moved closer to the digital double’s face.

“We got much closer than we ever thought

we’d be,” says Jones of Superman. “In

one shot in particular, his head is about

a third, maybe half, the screen space.

There were only a few shots like that, but

they were extremely challenging.”

Jones should know. As animation

director for Final Fantasy: The Spirits

Within and I, Robot, digital stunt sequence

supervisor for Titanic, and director of The

Animatrix and Final Flight of the Osiris,

he’s spent much of his career leading

teams that have put photorealistic (and

stylized) digital humans on screen. “The

techniques for face shots have changed

quite a bit from Final Fantasy,” he says,

“and also what we can do with animation,

skin dynamics, and muscles.”

To reproduce the face of Brandon Routh,

who plays the role of the Man of Steel,

Imageworks used the same Light Stage 2

system developed by Paul Debevec and

his team at USC’s Institute for Creative

Technology that had captured Alfred

Molino’s face to create Doc Ock in Spider-

Man 2. With the Light Stage 2 system, an

actor sits unmoving in a chair while a

mechanical arm fastened with strobe lights

swings around the chair. The lights strobe,

the arm moves, and cameras positioned

around the chair photograph the actor’s

face to produce images in various lighting

conditions.

For Spider-Man 2, Imageworks used

four synchronized cameras, but later dis-

covered they had missed part of Molino’s

neck. For Superman Returns, they cap-

tured Routh’s face and the back of his

head using six ARRI Group Arrifl ex fi lm

cameras snapping images at the rate

of 60 frames per second. At the end of

the session, Imageworks had 480 sets

of six images. Each set of images, when

blended, could surround a 3D model of

Routh’s head with a seamless photo of his

face. Some image sets captured specifi c

expressions—eyes open, eyes closed, and

mouth open, mouth closed, for example;

others captured a neutral expression.

“We have several shots where the digital

Superman fl ies right by the lens, and we get

a really good look at his face,” says Hoover.

“We get close enough to see his expression.”

A technical crew led by John Monos

removed highlights from the images, used

custom algorithms to extract refl ective

data, and ended up with 480 refl ectance

maps that could wrap like a rubber sheet

around the 3D model of the actor’s head

Sony Pictures

Imageworks

creates a digital

Superman for

close encounters


In some shots, Superman is actor Brandon

Routh “fl ying” on wires against a green-

screen with puppeteers maneuvering his

cape, as shown in the photograph above.

Compositors then blended the greenscreen

footage into background plates and digital

environments. However, Superman is often

Routh’s digital double created at Sony

Pictures Imageworks, as in the image at right.



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Digital Doubles. . . .

TM

and on which technical directors could

aim CG lights. “Our TDs just position

lights, and based on that, the map comes

in,” explains Monos. A custom algorithm

helped the TDs dial in refl ectance data

as the face moved, and the image-based

rendering (IBR) system handled potential

problems with double shadows.

“With IBR, shadows are baked in,

like the shadows from the nose onto the

cheek,” Monos says. “We didn’t want a

double shadow if maybe an arm crossed

the faces, so we resolved that internally

as part of the program.” Although the

crew captured Routh’s hands with the

Light Stage 2 system, his hands moved so

much that it became easier to use painted

texture maps and traditional rendering

with subsurface scattering.

Faster than a Speeding Bullet

To create Superman’s performance, anima-

tors worked with motion-capture data and

greenscreen reference. They captured Routh

in basic fl ying poses and, because the crew

thought it would need to have the digital

Imag

es © 2006 W

arner Bro

s. Entertainm

ent Inc. A

ll rights reserved

.



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. . . .Digital Doubles

double deliver dialog, it motion-captured

facial expressions based on Imageworks’

proprietary application of the Facial

Action Coding System, also used in

Monster House (see “This Old House,” pg.

28). “It was extremely challenging trying

to make a superhero look real and still

look like a superhero,” says Jones. “The

instinct is to go for comic book poses

and fun, big styles of motion. But Bryan

[Singer] wanted us to pull back and make

him look real, with a cool factor.”

The fl ying shots were a mixture of all digital double, all green-

screen images of Routh on wires, and Routh’s head on a digital

body. “We had close-up shots where they couldn’t use his face for

one reason or another, so we had to get the essence of Brandon

[Routh] in there,” says Jones. Some were especially demanding.

“In a few, we went from the CG human into a live-action green-

screen, which was complicated because we had to match lighting,

body pose, everything.”

In one shot, for example, the digital Superman fl ies through

a tunnel of fl ames, and right after he lands, as he

starts to stand, the camera pulls into a close-up and

Routh’s image replaces the double. “We had very

particular things worked out about how he fl ew,”

says Hoover. “We used his arms aerodynamically

and his knees to turn and create wind resistance

like a rudder on a plane.”

How fast does he fl y? Although it might not be

apparent in the shots, the animators could see in Autodesk’s Maya

that he fl ew over 1200 miles per hour. “That made it diffi cult for

the cloth simulation,” says Hoover. “The physics don’t work.”

Superman’s cape had to look like Superman was fl ying faster

than a speeding bullet, but it also needed to look pleasing. For cloth

simulation, the crew used Syfl ex software and devised techniques

to sculpt the shape using parameters and forces. To replicate the

patterns on the real cape, CG artists used Pixar RenderMan shad-

ers, which scattered light in specifi c ways.

“It was very complex to get the material to fold in one direc-

tion, ripple in another, look like it was going fast, but moving with

a certain amount of amplitude that was acceptable to us,” says

Hoover. Simulations based on physics do what they do, but the

end result wasn’t always what we liked, so we used sims to do

the physics and other controls to manipulate it. We had dozens of

shots where we replaced the real cape with the digital cape.”

Animators blocked out, roughly, how they wanted the

cape positioned, and then Jones worked with technical direc-

tor Takashi Kuribayashi to set wind direction, speed, and other

parameters. “We tried layering small, fast simu-

lations onto larger ones, but it felt like the cape

was fi ghting itself,” Jones says. “We ended up

simulating the cape at low resolution for fast

shots and higher resolution for slower shots to get

more wrinkles and folds.”

Kuribayashi also helped the animators

with hair simulation, for which the crew used

Imageworks’ in-house system to help preserve Superman’s

famous curl in the middle of his forehead. “If his hair blew back,

he looked less like Superman, but more like Brandon,” says

Jones. “But if that’s what it did on the greenscreen, that’s what

we did, too.”

In addition to its own shots, most particularly the sequence

early in the fi lm in which Superman stops a plane nose-div-

ing into a baseball stadium, Imageworks provided its digital

Superman to other studios for close-ups. “Our mandate was to

make him ready for anything,” Hoover says. “If Bryan [Singer]

needed him in any shot, we could come to his aid.” In doing so,

the studio pushed digital stunt doubles out of the background

and into the limelight.

“One thing I wanted to do was give the majestic fl ying

sequences to Imageworks,” says Stetson, “in particular, the ‘lis-

tening post’ sequence, where he sees Lois in her family situation

and realizes what he’s lost and fl ies to a point in space and hov-

ers. It’s beautiful. Also, Superman’s fl ight in the end sequence is

graceful and almost playful.”

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contribut-

ing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at

[email protected].

Digital Superman fl ew 1200 mph in Autodesk’s Maya, using his arms aerodynamically and his

knees to turn and create wind resistance.

Imageworks used the Light Stage 2 system to capture photographic

textures of actor Brandon Routh’s face that they applied to a 3D

model for close-up shots of Superman fl ying.

To read a Q&A with

Superman Returns

director Bryan Singer,

see the story

in our sister

publication, Post.



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. . . .CAD / Art


When WorldsCollide

Image courtesy Cenveo Armstrong-White.



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T


CAD / Art. . . .

he premise is an obvious

one: All the work that goes

into creating a design for a

product can be reused to create art for a

video, documentation, or a slick maga-

zine ad. But is the theory more attractive

than the actual application?

In the last three years, there has been

remarkable progress in hardware and soft-

ware technology to make the process of

creating art from computer-aided design

(CAD) much easier. For example, graphics

processing units (GPU), thanks to the evo-

lution of common APIs such as DirectX 9

and OpenGL 2, provide hardware acceler-

ation of shader programs. The new GPUs,

in turn, have given software vendors good

reason to support DirectX and OpenGL,

and to offer their own shader programs.

CAD vendors have long anticipated the

blending of art and CAD, and were way

ahead of the curve in this area. Much of the

early work in rendering software was done

to enable the rendering of CAD models.

Countless rendering products were devel-

oped to enable architectural walk-throughs,

and CAD products took on more and more

rendering capabilities. In fact, Autodesk

acquired 3D Studio Max, as 3ds Max was

once known, at least partially to enhance

its capabilities in CAD. More recently,

the company acquired Alias Technology,

which gives Autodesk both industrial

design tools and digital content creation

tools for the entertainment industry.

Likewise, Dassault has acquired Virtools,

a company actively involved in the game

development industry.

New 3D exchange formats—such

as U3D, DWF, 3DXML from Dassault,

and the Web3D consortium’s X3D—are

appearing, as well, and are designed to

improve the ability of artists and design-

ers to collaborate and output art for use

on the Web, in print, or in animation.

Also, companies such as Okino, Right

Hemisphere, Immersive Design, and

Lattice 3D have emerged to sit in the mid-

dle and mediate as fi les are

exchanged for creating art

and documentation. More

than simple fi le exchange,

these companies’ prod-

ucts facilitate collabora-

tion and documentation. In

fact, many of these compa-

nies were born of the chaos

that surrounded the early

CAD wars and the need to

exchange CAD data; oth-

ers came along to accom-

modate large companies

that are collaborating and

creating documentation.

The CAD revolution means that data

is digital and, thus, it can be reused,

repurposed, and mined…at least in the-

ory. In practice—even at this late stage of

the game—CAD and engineering depart-

ments often exist in their own isolated

worlds, and it is diffi cult to get models

and even images out of the design and

engineering departments for use by other

groups such as marketing, service, main-

tenance, and so forth.

Who Is the Artist?

The dirty little secret about art and CAD

is this: Artists called on to create artwork

for products frequently start from scratch

to create artwork, even when CAD mod-

els are available. Why? Artists will tell

you that the complexity of CAD models

and their data sometimes gets lost in the

fi le exchange, making it easier to just

start at the beginning. Also, of course,

the art department might be attached to

an outside marketing fi rm rather than

the designing company, so it’s not always

easy for the group to communicate with

the CAD and engineering group. Even

internal art departments might fi nd

themselves challenged by the need to

negotiate with engineering or to work

with CAD models in a variety of formats.

And often, the engineering department is

loath to relinquish precious CAD data.

Yet, the problem is not necessarily a

technical one. Rather, it’s more of a human

resources issue. Where does the process

begin? Who is in charge? What is the out-

put? The truth of the matter is there indeed

exists a gap between the CAD model and

the art output, and there is no well-defi ned

job description that covers it.

For example, Greg Smith, CEO of

Immersive Design, says that as CAD data

moves out of the engineering department

and into publishing, CAD professionals are

being asked to change the way they work.

Immersive Design is one of those compa-

nies that sit between the CAD model and

the output format—in this case, Acrobat

se

The ability to use CAD models in marketing materials means

that photographers may now just shoot backgrounds rather

than the entire ad using real cars or prototypes. On the

other hand, the whole shot can be created in the computer,

allowing for a wealth of options.

What really happens

when CAD models are

transformed into art?

By Kathleen Maher



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. . . .CAD / Art

3D. The company’s product, IPA, lets users employ 3D models

from solid modelers—such as SolidWorks’ SolidWorks, UGS’s

Solid Edge and I-deas, and PTC’s Pro/Engineer—add animation,

text, and so forth, and create an interactive Web page that can be

used for collaboration, documentation (for manuals, maintenance,

and such), supply chain management, and marketing purposes.

Smith notes that as people work with 3D CAD models for an

interactive document, they often fi nd themselves wishing that

the model had been created differently so that it would be eas-

ier to animate. The most common example is a model that will

be used to create an exploded view. And certainly, it helps if the

parts are created in the right sequence. The same can be said for

creating materials, adding lighting, and so on. Smith notes that

it’s more important than ever to think about how a model is going

to be used downstream before it is ever created in the fi rst place.

JaJa Ishibashi, director of business development at Works

Zebra, enthusiastically agrees that job descriptions are changing,

and his company is capitalizing on that situation. Works Zebra

collaborates with Toyota to create beautifully rendered images

for print and the Web. Also, Works Zebra has been working with

the Lexus division to create e-Catalogues, wide-screen, interac-

tive 3D presentations used as sales tools. The e-Catalogue is tai-

lored to Asian customers who expect a very high level of service

and designed to accommodate car dealerships with limited fl oor

space. Lexus offers customers luxurious rooms at dealerships in

Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore, where they can look at beautifully

rendered models of cars and specify colors and interiors. They

can also look at cars in different environments and times of day.

According to Ishibashi, the rooms have been big successes,

and Lexus is exploring the idea of bringing them to the US.

“People come back again and again,” he says, noting that cus-

tomers often visit their cars before they get delivered. When

customers fi nally make their choices, the e-Catalogue system

can print out a glossy brochure for them to take home.

The company uses Toyota’s CAD models and Initial Graphics

Exchange Specifi cation (IGES) as a neutral exchange format.

Next, the group brings them into Robert McNeel & Associates’

Rhino to clean up the IGES data, and then into 3ds Max. From

there, Works Zebra puts its own technology to the task, includ-

ing the company’s proprietary normal-mapping routing tool,

ZSurfacing. The fi rm built quite a few custom shaders for the

car, in addition to using its own high dynamic range (HDR)

environment mapping and dynamic cube mapping technology.

Works Zebra renders out the imagery in Splutterfi sh’s Brazil

and authors interactive videos in Adobe’s Macromedia Director.

Works Zebra has also developed its own engine, called Zeany,

based on Microsoft’s ActiveX for the interactive application.

The Designer as Artist

It could be said that the way that Works Zebra pulls in all avail-

able technologies and uses a variety of applications refl ects the

industry today—with no one way to do anything and a lot of

options. In contrast, Autodesk is building an entire ecosystem.

The company has long resisted opening up its formats, and

instead offers exchange formats that let users take drawings

and models into other programs. Most recently, the company

has offered its DWF format to let users collaborate, and the com-

pany is revamping its DWF Composer as Design Review.

The more signifi cant step along the way to realizing

Autodesk’s vision is the acquisition of Alias. Obviously Alias’s

Maya is an important tool in digital content creation, especially

in fi lm work. And thanks to Alias’s acquisition of Kaydara (and

its FilmBox product, now called MotionBuilder), Autodesk

has yet another exchange format to offer its users in FBX. FBX

is widely used by game developers and in fi lm and video to

exchange fi les. And, of course, Autodesk now has AliasStudio,

a product suite long favored by industrial designers. Autodesk

has not exactly put all the pieces together yet, and the former

StudioTools still seems like a bit of a stepchild (as it did when

Alias was a separate company). But, it’s clear the vendor wants

to offer companies ways to design and market all of its imagery

within one happy family.

As an example of how all this might work, Autodesk points

to Wild West Motor Company. Founded by mechanical engineer

Works Zebra creates visualizations of Lexus car models so that

customers can see the new cars in action —even before the vehicles

roll off the production line.

Imag

es cou

rtesy Wo

rks Zebra.



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CAD / Art. . . .

Paul Seiter in 1995, the company

crafts custom motorcycles—the

dream of many a mechanical

engineer slaving away on compar-

atively mundane product designs.

The company has its own in-house design

center and uses AliasStudio to design its motor-

cycles with the kind of fl uid lines that embody the

fantasies of every boy who ever doodled a motorcy-

cle in homeroom class. More important, AliasStudio

enables the company to design parts that are manufac-

turable. The company’s designers draw sketches of a new

design, bring it in to AliasStudio, and they are able to snap curves

to the orthographic views, giving them something they can surface.

Afterward, they use a CNC machine to create a physical model. The

team then goes back to AliasStudio to make any additional changes.

At the same time, the company is able to start developing its

marketing materials. The company’s industrial designers use

the same models in Studio to create photorealistic renderings,

even before the motorcycle is produced. The company’s Web

site (www.wildwestmc.com) features both models and photos

of the machines, and one would be hard-pressed to pick the real

from the digital.

Yet another example is Animation Dynamics, Inc. (ADi) of

Portland, Oregon, which creates ani-

mations for fi lm, video, and the Web.

Increasingly, says Jamie Elmer, ADi’s

creative director, “CG is quietly sup-

planting traditional photography and

video.” He notes that once a designer

creates a CAD fi le of a product, a CG art-

ist can create a photoreal image or video

for less than a photo or video shoot. ADi

created a segment for a Bowfl ex com-

mercial to demonstrate a new product,

the Bowfl ex SelecTech, before it had

been produced. The scene employed

match-cut cinematography to morph

from real footage to a photorealistic

animation. ADi uses Okino’s Polytrans

to translate CAD fi les to Alias Maya.

Adobe After Effects was used to achieve

the smooth transition to animation.

Revolutions Happen So Simply

Finally, as was envisioned long ago by

software developers and product design-

ers, the CAD model really is becoming

the repository of all information about

a product, and it is being mined for

that information. While photorealistic

renderings, beautiful Web pages, bro-

chures, and even videos made from CAD models

are the most glamorous side of creating marketing

materials from models, there is plenty of other work that

has to be done as a product goes to market and beyond.

Documentation may well be the least glamorous side of the

design, production, sales, and support cycle, but it is vital to the

long-term success. In the realm of documentation, the writing

is on the wall for the technical illustrator. Increasingly, what is

created digitally stays digital, and there isn’t the time or the will

to redraw images for manuals. And 3D models enable detailed

assembly views to be pulled directly from the models, embed-

ded in documents, and distributed—often digitally via PDF.

For example, the Federal Aviation Administration distributes

thousands of pages of manuals to safety experts. By doing it digitally,

the FAA can keep pace with changes and eliminate the dangerous

practice of sending pages that have to be replaced by employees.

Likewise, the automotive industry produces manuals for its

Animation Dynamics, Inc. created

a segment for exercise equipment

maker Bowfl ex that demonstrated

its new product, before it had

been produced. The scene

contained video that

morphed into CG.Image courtesy ADi.



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. . . .CAD / Art

cars and technical documentation for automotive repair. The

data for these products is already coming from the CAD informa-

tion, and the industry wants to better collaborate and create digi-

tal marketing materials from the CAD data. As a matter of fact,

even as CAD companies stonewalled on the development of open

exchange formats, their customers—especially those in the auto-

motive and aeronautic industries—have been demanding some

way to access models and put them to work. Dassault has offered

one solution in 3DXML, which has been accepted by IBM and, to

some degree, Microsoft. (Alternatively, Autodesk offers DWF.)

In an effort originally spearheaded by Intel, interested parties

such as Adobe, Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, Bentley Systems, and

Right Hemisphere came

together to form the 3D

Industry Forum (3DIF)

to develop an exchange

format. Eventually, after

more sturm und drang

than one expects from

the CAD community, a

new exchange format,

U3D, was born, and it has

opened the door to another

avenue of image creation.

Adobe has built upon the

U3D format to create Acrobat

3D PDF, and anyone with an

Acrobat reader can access a

3D model within Acrobat 3D;

as a PDF format, it can also

be output for print publica-

tion or for the Web.

Right Hemisphere worked

with the 3DIF group and

Adobe in the creation of

Acrobat 3D. The company,

founded in New Zealand, started out building tools for digi-

tal content creation, and it still does a lot of business with the

New Zealand fi lm industry. Interestingly, the right side and the

left side of Right Hemisphere’s corporate culture are coming

together in the evolution of Acrobat 3D. The company’s Deep

Server product line provides large enterprise companies an

organized way to move engineering data through the organiza-

tion. It offers fi rms the ability to exchange fi les and collaborate—

a lot of left-brain tasks—and with the introduction of Acrobat

3D, can also create interactive documentation.

Right Hemisphere offers tools that can automate the docu-

mentation process so that all the pages of a manual are format-

ted correctly and models placed consistently. In addition, com-

plex CAD models can be transformed into lightweight models for

downstream applications such as Web publication. Also, CAD

models can be optimized for output to just about any digital con-

tent creation software, including, of course, Autodesk 3ds Max

and Maya, or Softimage XSI. The company also offers tools for the

creation of photorealistic models for brochures and video —decid-

edly right-brain tasks.

Case in Point

Right Hemisphere points to all the complicated elements that go

into creating images for an automotive brochure: background

photography, lighting effects, refl ections, shading, materials, tex-

tures, and more. There is also the creation of leather interiors,

metallic exteriors, and rubber tires. All those elements have to be

created according to rigid parameters—after all, the whole point

is that they look exactly like the real thing.

Right Hemisphere claims that its software enables

designers to keep track of the proper materials and envi-

ronment components so the scene can be automatically

rendered and published in a PDF or 3D PDF for review.

At the same time, engineers don’t ever have to let their

valuable CAD data leave their

department unrestricted.

For instance, Cenveo

Armstrong-White works with

US car manufacturers to cre-

ate still images and anima-

tions. The company has been

able to work directly with

CAD models to create images

that would be impossible to do

in the real world. To accom-

plish this, the company uses

Right Hemisphere’s technol-

ogy to prepare models for ren-

dering and animation. And

once again, as discovered by

Wild West Motors and Works

Zebra, the ability to use the

CAD model eliminates the need for expensive prototypes and lets

the marketing campaign start earlier in the process of readying a

new car or truck for sale.

Interestingly, Acrobat 3D renders all the arguments about

what tools to use in the creation of CAD, animation, video, and

photorealistic rendering just about moot. Everyone has Acrobat

these days; everyone with the most recent version of Acrobat can

see and interact with a 3D PDF model. Immersion Design’s Smith

says that building Acrobat 3D into his proposals helps assure sign-

off from IT because Acrobat is a standard.

Yet, Acrobat 3D has yet to prove itself in a broad range of appli-

cations—it has just been introduced, and there is more work to

be done. Adobe, with its acquisition of Macromedia, has a big

meal to swallow, but it also has Flash to add to the equation. Now,

Adobe has in-house all the components to enable its partners and

customers to build interactive 3D applications for a wide range

The Gunfi re Motorcycle from Wild West Motors was created using a

combination of artistic and design tools. The company has its own in-house

design center that uses AliasStudio to achieve the fl uid lines of its bikes.

Photorealistic renders are output before production begins.

Imag

es cou

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est Mo

tors.



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CAD / Art. . . .

of platforms, including PCs, kiosks, and even handhelds. In fact,

depending on how Acrobat puts it all together, all the exam-

ples mentioned in this story could still be authored in the

same ways as discussed, but they could be output

to common formats like Flash and Acrobat.

Where Is the

Artist Now?

In this new era, the artist can be

anywhere in the equation.

Ironically, in some instances,

traditional marketing fi rms

have been slow to accept

digital models. Although

these companies use digital tech-

nology in the creation of videos, they are also the ones doing

photo shoots and producing videos. They are being challenged

by a new creation pipeline. And, to be fair, they are adapting.

According to Works Zebra’s Ishibashi, a prototype for a car

can cost upward of $500,000 to build because it’s a one-off with-

out the economies of scale that come with high-volume produc-

tion. What’s worse, the slick car brochure uses several prototypes

because to create the classic overhead shot of a car’s interior

means that unless it happens to be a convertible, you have to

have a prototype without a roof. And,

that’s not going to work for your shot of

a lovely car on top of a mountain in the

snow or at the seashore in the spray.

It’s estimated that US carmakers

can use up to 100 prototypes for photo

shoots a year. According to Right

Hemisphere, a Detroit design agency

reported that the creation of photo-

realistic automotive renderings for

customer brochures saved the com-

pany more than $10 million. Likewise,

Toyota has announced that it will cut

back on its prototype fl eet thanks to

the ability to do more work in CGI—

and US automotive companies are

using CGI to create digital models for

sales, marketing, technical publica-

tions, and training.

As a result, the work of photographers

is changing. Instead of shooting cars in

exotic locales, they may simply shoot the

backgrounds. And, as Ishibashi has dis-

covered, there is a new role emerging for

technical artists who may often work

between the industrial designer, the CAD

engineer, and the ad agency. Sometimes

that person might exist within the engi-

neering department, sometimes in marketing, and

sometimes that person may be an outside contrac-

tor; his or her job description requires a fair share of

technical ability as well as artistic ability.

The role of industrial designers and engineers

is changing, too, as they are being brought in to

play a more active role in the creation of materi-

als for marketing. Their job may be as simple as

building models in ways that enable the images to be

reused downstream with less optimization and remodel-

ing, or it may be as involved as adding textures, custom shaders,

and lighting to take the model halfway to the artists creating mar-

keting materials and advertising.

Artists and engineers have always known that they need to

work together, now they’re learning new ways to do it.

Kathleen Maher is a senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon,

California-based consultancy specializing in graphics and multimedia,

and is also editor in chief of JPR’s “TechWatch.” She can be reached

at [email protected].

Often, a company will use DCC software from various

vendors. Autodesk, however, has an extensive offering

with CAD, design, collaboration, and CG modeling,

animation, and visualization tools.

Image courte

syAuto

desk.



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OOO. . . .Scene Re-creation


The Church of Saint-Sulpice, it is said, has the most eccentric history of any building in Paris. Built over the ruins of

an ancient temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis, the church possesses an architectural footprint matching that of Notre

Dame to within inches. The sanctuary has played host to the baptisms of the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire, as

well as the marriage of Victor Hugo. The attached seminary has a well-documented history of unorthodoxy and was once the clan-

destine meeting hall for numerous secret societies. ✦ Embedded in the gray granite fl oor, a thin polished strip of brass glistened in

the stone…a golden line slanting across the church’s fl oor. The line bore graduated markings, like a ruler. It was a gnomon, Silas

had been told, a pagan astronomical device like a sundial. Tourists, scientists, historians, and pagans from around the world came

to Saint-Sulpice to gaze upon this famous line. Slowly, Silas let his eyes trace the path of the brass strip as it made its way across the

fl oor from his right to left, slanting in front of him at an awkward angle, entirely at odds with the symmetry of the church…. The

strip fi nally arrived at the base of a most unexpected structure. A colossal Egyptian obelisk. —From The Da Vinci Code

On Holy Ground

By Karen Moltenbrey

Unearthing the mysteries of The Da Vinci Code’s

Saint-Sulpice Church



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Scene Re-creation. . . .

In author Dan Brown’s popular novel The

Da Vinci Code, this ancient church was

the setting for a scene in which the albino

monk Silas believes he has located the

hiding place of the mysterious keystone

(Holy Grail); after all, the brothers, imme-

diately before their deaths at Silas’s hands,

all had given him this precise location for

the object he desired: beneath the brass

Rose Line that ran through Saint-Sulpice.

In this scene and throughout the book,

Brown uses an actual place, object, or per-

son on which to weave his tale, and adds an

element of mystery or mystique, or builds

on current lore, to infuse it with added

drama. For example, historical records

show that the actual Saint-Sulpice was

in fact built upon another structure—an

ancient Romanesque church constructed

during the 13th century, rather than an

ancient Egyptian temple, as the book

states. And, indeed, there exists a strange,

brass meridian line that runs through the

church fl oor to a gnomon of white marble,

both added in 1727 on orders by a Saint-

Sulpice priest to help determine the equi-

noxes (and, hence, Easter).

With such a thin line often separating

real-life fact and Brown’s fi ction, it’s no

wonder the two blend together so well in

The Da Vinci Code that it becomes diffi -

cult to separate one from the other. And

for many, that is what makes the book

so interesting—so much so that several

industrious individuals have started so-

called Da Vinci Code tours, taking fans to

many of the locales detailed in the book.

But, it’s one thing to write about these

actual locations and quite another to fi lm

there, as director Ron Howard soon discov-

ered when he set out to make a movie that

accurately depicted the events from the

book. “In re-creating Dan Brown’s book,

the director faced a lot of actual locations

that are integral to the plot. And while

many movie scripts start with something

like, ‘opens on a beach in Hawaii,’ due to

budget constraints, it will end up being

‘opens on a beach in Vancouver,’ or some

other cheaper solution,” says Rainmaker

VFX supervisor Mark Breakspear. “But

with this story, to tell it accurately, you

had to use the actual locations because

they are intertwined with historical facts

that appear in the book.”

Such was the case with Saint-Sulpice,

a church whose unique architectural style

sets it apart from ancient cathedrals, as

Brown accurately describes in the book

as Silas enters the building:

Unlike Notre Dame with its colorful fres-

coes, gilded altar-work, and warm wood,

Saint-Sulpice was stark and cold, convey-

ing an almost barren quality reminiscent

of the ascetic cathedrals of Spain. The lack

of décor made the interior look even more

expansive, and as Silas glanced up into the

soaring ribbed vault of the ceiling, he imag-

ined he was standing beneath the hull of an

enormous overturned ship. ✦ Kneeling in

the fi rst pew, Silas pretended to pray as he

scanned the layout of the sanctuary. Saint-

Sulpice, like most churches, had been built

in the shape of a giant Roman cross. Its long

central section—the nave—led directly to

the main altar, where it was transversely

intersected by a shorter section, known as

the transept. The intersection of nave and

transept occurred directly beneath the main

cupola and was considered the heart of the

church…her most sacred and mystical point.

“The director couldn’t swap this church

out for any other while fi lming the scene,”

says Breakspear. “So many churches look

similar, but this one in Paris is so specifi c,

with its 80-foot domed, vaulted ceiling;

it’s breathtaking. People who visited the

church would know if a substitute loca-

tion had been used in the movie.” But get-

ting the Vatican’s approval to fi lm inside

the church was out of the question, as it

had denounced the book and, therefore,

the movie. This presented Howard and,

eventually, his visual effects supervisor

on the fi lm, Angus Bickerton, with an

enormous obstacle, one that was eventu-

ally overcome using computer graphics.

CG Building Blocks

Months before, Bickerton had worked

with Breakspear and Rainmaker on

the 2006 action/thriller Firewall, using

projected textures to create a photore-

alistic digital backdrop of Seattle out-

side a high-rise offi ce window—as it

was fi lmed on location in Vancouver.

As Breakspear explains, Rainmaker

employed a technique whereby it used

textures pulled from thousands of

photographs and applied them to 3D

objects and geometry. With NewTek’s

LightWave, the team built accurate 3D

models based on maps, and calculated

correct lens angles using Google Earth,

free 3D landscape software. “We used

that information as a reference to deter-

mine how far some of the buildings

should be, especially if you were using

a 35mm lens and looking down from

this giant window,” he explains.

As Breakspear points out, this tech-

nique is not new—it has been used in CG

for years, mostly for a quick shot here or

there, “I think with Firewall, we saw that

this approach had way more possibilities

than had been previously thought.” After

the movie was completed, Bickerton moved

on to another project: The Da Vinci Code.

Because fi lming was

not permitted inside

the actual Saint-Sul-

pice Church, design-

ers constructed a par-

tial set for a scene at

Shepperton Studios in

the UK. Due to space

limitations at the

studio, the set was

built 15 percent

smaller than the space

in the actual church.



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. . . .Scene Re-creation

But when the issue with Saint-Sulpice surfaced, Bickerton asked

Breakspear if his solution from Firewall would work for this scene.

Subsequently, Breakspear and Rainmaker examined hundreds of

photos that Bickerton had taken at the church (photos are permit-

ted, fi lming is not). They did a test, mapping the photos onto a sim-

ple digital model they had created of the church based on the pho-

tographic references.

“We did the test at full 2K resolution so we could see if it would

hold up on fi lm, as though you had a fi lm camera and were walk-

ing down the church looking at the ceiling, which is the most

amazing part. I did it when I walked in; [Bickerton] did it when he

walked in. Everyone who goes to this church, the fi rst thing they

do is look up at the ceiling because it is so spectacular.” The group

sent the test with the 3D camera moves to Bickerton, who liked it

immediately. He, in turn, showed it to Ron Howard, who asked the

visual effects supervisor how he got the shot considering the no-

fi lming rule. “When [Bickerton] told him it was all-CG, that was it.

Suddenly, we were in the running to get the sequence.”

For four months, Rainmaker worked to bid on the sequence for

this highly anticipated movie, competing against a handful of other

visual effects companies—namely Moving Picture Co., Double

Negative, and The Senate, which were working on other segments

that encompassed the lion’s share of the movie’s VFX shots. “We

bid and re-bid, followed by some extra bidding and re-bidding, and

eventually we got the job,” says Breakspear. “Once we did, all the

niggling problems we tossed out during the bidding stage suddenly

had to be solved. And one of those was that in the story, Silas arrives

at the church at midnight, when the church is dark.”

Rainmaker’s plan was to take photos of the church during the

day—the only time when it is open. But a church during the day

is very different from a church at night, Breakspear points out.

“Like any environment, it is completely different with the refl ec-

tions, the way the light comes in,” he explains. “And here we

had candlelight instead of daylight. It presents a whole new chal-

lenge.” This became yet another major hurdle for the artists.

Beginning their quest, Rainmaker dispatched several of its art-

ists to Paris for a week to take photos inside the church. All told, the

group acquired more than 10,000 digital pictures using a Canon 16-

Megapixel camera. “It gave us insane quality,” says Breakspear. “We

bracketed all our shots, and we had complete exposure ranges, like

HDRIs basically.” Trying to blend in as tourists, which they techni-

cally were, the artists returned to the church every few hours to snap

another round of pictures, even once taking photos of a bride and

the wedding party. “I had a better camera than the wedding pho-

tographer, so it made sense to help them out!,” Breakspear says jok-

ingly. “We had asked if we could take pictures at the church, though.

We had a job to do, but we were trying to be respectful; it is a tourist

location, but many people still go to there to pray.”

After returning from the photo session, the

group examined the pictures. “We knew that

we’d have no problem creating the effects for a

daylight sequence,” Breakspear says. “But, how

were we going to take these pictures and make

them night? You really can’t do day to night

using this technique; it doesn’t work that way.”

Typically, effects artists accomplish this by a

Computer graphics, photographic textures, and a

physical set comprise this scene inside Saint-Sulpice.

Left is the fi nal shot that appeared in the movie.

Bottom left is a photographic image taken inside

the actual church, whose textures were used for the

fi nal shot. Bottom right shows the 3D wireframe

imagery used to augment the sparse set.



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Scene Re-creation. . . .

common technique of upping the blues, darkening the shot, and,

if appropriate, comping a moon and some stars into the back-

ground, he says. But, that was never going to work on a movie

of this scale; the quality would never suffi ce. “So, we had to

develop a whole new process,” he adds.

Lead compositor Mathew Krentz and lead CG artist Les

Quinn came up with a plan whereby they would create the envi-

ronment as if it were daytime but provide all kinds of alpha

channels, maps, and controls to selectively grade and rebuild

a nighttime version during compositing with Eyeon Software’s

Digital Fusion. Then, they would composite greenscreened

actors on top of the footage. “It looked fantastic, unbelievably

believable,” says Breakspear.

Building the Church

The scene was fi lmed on a set at Shepperton Studios in the UK dur-

ing a three-day period, one of which involved extensive previz and

calibration of the fi lm lenses to those of the CG cameras, and vice

versa. A crew constructed the physical set—complete with 10-foot

marble columns, wooden chairs, a replica fl oor made of shiny slabs

of stone that looked as though they had been walked on for thou-

sands of years, and more—that would then be augmented with CG

set extensions. The dimensions of the set were acquired using a

most unusual measure device: Bickerton’s foot.

“Angus [Bickerton] claims his feet are exactly 12 inches long.

And because we couldn’t go in there to take precise measure-

ments, he walked the space toe-to-heel as a tourist, to determine

the length and width of the environment,” explains Breakspear.

From those dimensions, the art department drew up a set plan,

from which a 15 percent smaller version was built (to accommo-

date the size of the Shepperton stage).

In one corner of the set, the crew made a wall with frescoes

and statues. It was here where Silas breaks the stone looking for

the hidden treasure. Because of the way this part of the set was

built, and the height of the columns, it was one scene where visual

effects would not be required…in theory. “Because of the angle

they chose, looking upward, we had to step in,” says Breakspear.

When fi lming began, the actors, director, producer, and DP

were all looking at a big, 360-degree greenscreen. “It is the lon-

gest running visual effects shot in the movie—at 40 shots span-

ning about 3 to 4 minutes—and it was crucial that the actors

understand their surroundings. Plus, there were no camera lock-

offs; they had to move that camera around,” says Breakspear.

“We brought up our digital model so they could see what they

were supposed to be looking at on set. There are so many little

things about the church where you just can’t say, ‘Look down

the center aisle toward the entrance.’ From the center of the

church back toward the entrance there is an enormous wooden

organ, and depending on which lens you use and the angle, you

are looking at only half of it or all of it in the shot; we needed to

be sure of what we were looking at.”

In all, the crew shot nearly 60 different angles, 40 of which

made the fi nal cut. In turn, the CG team returned to Paris to

make sure it had the proper photos to match. A few shots, how-

ever, such as those looking downward from the ceiling, were

unattainable and the artists had to paint those using Adobe’s

Photoshop. Later, the artists used Photoshop to import all the

photos into CG, where they cleaned up the shadows, refl ec-

tions, and so forth so they could be mapped onto the geometry

and virtual models. Then, when they began refi ning the digital

model of the church, they ran into problems.

“Our LightWave model is based on the pictures, and the pic-

tures are based on the real church, which is the true size. The

set, meanwhile, is 15 percent smaller, but not consistently so—16

percent smaller here, 14 percent smaller there,” says Breakspear.

“Nothing was quite lining up with the photos. It was a funny

moment where we would line up one end of the church and the

other end would come unstuck. And we were already deep into

postproduction when we discovered this.” In the end, Rainmaker

did not use the expanded physical set, but rather a sparse version

of it, with just the people, the chairs, and the fl oor. In one shot,

everything but the actors was digitally replaced.

Good Night

The artists used 2d3’s Boujou to track the scenes and LightWave

to map the photographic references onto the CG objects; next, they

rendered them in various passes. As Breakspear stresses, all this

was done with daylight textures. The group rendered out depth

maps, matte passes for the columns, moonbeam elements coming

in from the windows, smoke passes, a chandelier pass, and can-

dle pass. “Candlelight was crucial because candlelight was present

throughout the scene, fl ickering off people’s faces and the walls. It

had to be extremely accurate, and CG candlelight doesn’t look real;

it doesn’t react in the same way as the real thing,” he says.

To obtain footage of all the candlelight that would be needed

for the scene, Breakspear gathered candles and, aided by a bot-

tle of wine, positioned a DV camera looking at a candle, zooming

into the fl ame full frame as he continued to blow on it to make it

fl icker. The artists then mapped that footage onto cards, and placed

them in the shots. “Some of the shots with the candles, fl ames,

and smoke had major camera moves, and we needed proper paral-

Digital artists took tens of thousands of photographs of the church

from 60 different angles; 40 of those angles were incorporated into

the movie by the fi lmmakers for the Saint-Sulpice scenes.



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. . . .Scene Re-creation

lax added to the elements,” says Krentz. For that, the group used

Fusion’s new 3D camera to import the Boujou track and apply the

camera move to the elements.

But the real challenge came when the group adapted its photo-

graphic mapping technique into something more powerful—to turn

day to night. According to Krentz, the group treated each individual

shot as a matte painting. Neutralizing the sunlit renders was the

fi rst priority; next it determined which direction the moon would

be coming from to create the beams fi ltering through the windows.

“For most of the shots, we created the

moonbeams in 2D, which were combined

with the smoke elements for a hazy atmo-

spheric look,” he says.

The most important part, Krentz

notes, was keeping the actors’ skin tones

warm from the fl ickering candles while

also keeping the albino monk from look-

ing “dead.” Rather than simply increas-

ing the blues and decreasing the satu-

ration, the artists actually converted

the textures to refl ect the evening light

so the skin would retain its warm tone

even in the darkly lit church. “When you

go out at night and look at your skin, it

doesn’t turn blue. You retain the same

skin tone, a little darker maybe, but not

blue,” says Breakspear. “It’s an obvious

thing to say, but to fi x it meant throwing

away the old technique and having to do it differently.”

Using what Breakspear calls a “pretty nifty” approach, the

compositors used a grade on the fi lm footage that made the tex-

tures look as if they were fi lmed at night, albeit in various “types”

of night. This grading was accomplished inside Fusion, which ran

on 3DBoxx workstations from Boxx Technologies. Working in

fl oating point, the group used logarithmic fi lm fi les from editorial,

scanned them, and brought them into Fusion, a process done at

Rainmaker’s London offi ce. Although the studio had planned to

open a location in London for some time, the decision was has-

tened by Sony Pictures’ encouragement to use UK facilities for the

visual effects work due to tax credits, which turned into a substan-

tial chunk of change given the number of effects in the fi lm.

“A lot of us, myself included, are English or have English

ties, so it was not problem,” says Breakspear. “And, Angus

[Bickerton] had set up his offi ce nearby, and could walk to any

of the nearby VFX facilities working on the fi lm, look at the

shots, and make comments. It was inspiring to see the great

work the other studios were doing.” Like Rainmaker, they were

chosen for their roles based on previous work.

A New Arc

As Breakspear notes, the Saint-Sulpice scene was not the biggest

overall visual effect in The Da Vinci Code, but it was certainly one

of the most desired because of its length. Adding further appeal

was the fact that it presented a great problem for CG and com-

positing. “It’s a real ‘visual effects’ visual effects sequence,” says

Breakspear. “These are the types of shots we love to do. They are

impossible to shoot, so the CG has to look real and blend in.”

In the end, a revolutionary process was born out of a per-

plexing issue. “It’s all about using new approaches to techniques

we have taken for granted, and thinking about how far they can

be pushed. We used a technique that companies know how to

do, but we attempted it on something

big, and along the way, had to solve

problems that arose,” says Breakspear.

Currently, Rainmaker is applying the

lessons learned from this process to

Dreamworks’ Blades of Glory, creating

virtual environments and photoreal CG

actors. “Had I attempted this before The

Da Vinci Code, I would have panicked

and hid under the desk!”

Not only has this novel process

opened new doors for Rainmaker, but

Breakspear also believes it will open the

doors for producers to feel more confi -

dent with CG and integrate it into produc-

tion more frequently. “Accomplishing

something like this strengthens the

relationship between what producers

think they can get away with and what

they can really get away with,” he says. “It allows CG to be taken

more seriously for the creation of larger environments.” In The

Da Vinci Code, the technique was used to virtually construct an

actual place, but it can also be used to re-construct places that no

longer exist, such as long-gone historical sites, Breakspear points

out. And, unlike the secrets in the movie, which have been hid-

den for centuries, Rainmaker has been extremely open about its

work on the fi lm, hoping to open the doors for others to push the

technique, or CG in general, even further.

As he stood and examined his fi nd, he realized he was hold-

ing a rough-hewn stone slab with engraved words. He felt for

an instant like a modern-day Moses. As Silas read the words

on the tablet, he felt surprise. He had expected the keystone

to be a map, or a complex series of directions, perhaps even

encoded. The keystone, however, bore the simplest of inscrip-

tions. Job 38:11. ✦ Finding verse number eleven, Silas read the

text. It was only seven words. Confused, he read it again, sens-

ing something had gone terribly wrong. The verse simply read:

Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.

Unlike the fi ctional character Silas, Rainmaker cracked the

code that enabled it to complete the mission at Saint-Sulpice.

Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor for Computer Graphics

World.

All the photogaphs inside the church were taken

during the daylight. The digital artists turned the

scenes to night using a grading technique.



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. . . .Modeling / Animation


Artists create a 3D animation,

projected in 360 degrees, to

promote EA’s NBA Live 06

By Karen Moltenbrey

roundball



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Modeling / Animation. . . .

electronic arts recently challenged

the digital artists at Brickyard VFX to a

game of roundball, only the court, the

players—and everything else involved—

were completely digital.

Electronic Arts wanted an animated

piece promoting its EA Sports game title

NBA Live 06 that would feature the video

game’s characters, realistic virtual ver-

sions of actual professional basketball

players from the NBA as they performed

amazing feats on the court in front of a

packed arena. And, the presentation had

to play out on a large 360-degree screen

in front of the gaming industry’s most

discriminating eyes.

For this project, the name of the game

was realism—NBA Live 06, released sev-

eral months ago, takes character modeling

and animation to a new level of realism.

Likewise, the promo had to do the same,

and more, since the animation had to play

out on a huge circular screen where every

digital detail (or potential fl aw) would

be clearly visible. In the end, Brickyard

achieved those goals, as viewers had to

look closely to determine whether the

action they were seeing was CG or video

footage from an actual game.

To achieve this, Brickyard passed the

project to its in-house 3D division, which

opened last fall. There, the artists used

game assets, motion-capture data, and

sophisticated lighting techniques to cre-

ate the fi nal animation, which included

a digital stadium fi lled with 25,000 fans.

Brickyard delivered the fi nal animation at

high resolution for 360-degree projection

on EA’s 2006 Video Wall during E3, the

world’s largest electronic gaming show.

“We were able to take game models and

assets and, through lighting and shading

techniques, show the kind of fi lmic qual-

ity and resolution that’s possible with 3D,”

says Brickyard artist Yafei Wu.

According to Jay Lichtman, executive

producer at Brickyard, the company estab-

lished its 3D studio to support the ever-

demanding and technical requests com-

ing from various sectors of the industry:

television commercials, gaming, and fi lm.

Previously, the company delivered high-

end visual effects scenes through its in-

house compositors but outsourced the CGI

portion. “It made more sense to create an

in-house 3D studio that worked directly

with our compositors and graphic art-

ists,” he says. “This enables a much more

effi cient internal pipeline and, inevitably,

raises the level of quality on any project

with the artists working side by side.”

Since its formation, the department

has completed nearly 15 projects before

getting tapped for the EA assist. Among

those were high-end commercials that

aired during the Super Bowl and the

Olympics, in addition to CG promos for

the gaming industry. Currently, Brickyard

is in discussions with several studios per-

taining to feature-fi lm work.

In the Game

NBA Live 06 features photorealistic mod-

els of basketball superstars that perform,

act, and actually look like their real-life

counterparts. For the promo project, EA

handed off those in-game assets, including

the player models, stadium, textures, and

even the motion-capture data used to ani-

mate the game’s digital basketball players.

(For an in-depth look at how the game was

created, see “The Art of the Deal,” October

2005, pg. 15). Because the artists did not

have to create the models from scratch,

they were fairly ahead in the game. On the

other hand, the data required a great deal

of work to make it usable for the promo

Brickyard was tapped to rework game assets

from EA’s NBA Live 06 for projection onto a

large 360-degree screen. To accomplish this,

Brickyard had to tweak many of the game

assets by creating new lighting setups and

advanced shaders.



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. . . .Modeling / Animation

animation, so the fi rst order of business whenever EA delivered

an asset was to clean it up. Sometimes this was accomplished

through the use of scripts that group had created, while the

remaining assets required basic manpower. Some of the tweaks

occurred to the mocap data, while others demanded the develop-

ment and application of advanced shaders and lighting setups so

the CG players would look realistic on the large screen.

As Lichtman points out, the biggest challenge was the amount

of assets and textures that were needed to create a full CG stadium

fi lled with a cheering crowd and on-court players. So it was vital to

the image quality and to make deadline that the group work with

those assets in an effi cient and manageable way. “Our R&D phase

allowed us to establish an effi cient pipeline, and the subsequent

render times were no longer such an issue,” he adds.

Yet, to work with this amount of data, the team had to write

a myriad of scripts to facilitate every process. As a result, the art-

ists were able to focus on the aesthetic aspect and let the pipeline

handle the rest. For example, the shaders Brickyard created picked

up the textures from the assets they were attached to, enabling the

group to handle subsequently fewer shaders.

EA originally built the NBA roster using image-based tech-

niques and, with its custom Vicon mocap setup and Autodesk’s

MotionBuilder software, applied the animation information and

cloth simulation to the 3D models. When remodeling tweaks

were necessary, Brickyard used Autodesk’s Julya, along with

Pixar’s PhotoRealistic RenderMan (PRMan) for all the shading

and rendering. Compositing for the project was done in Adobe’s

After Effects and Apple’s Shake, while image enhancements

were made in Adobe’s Photoshop.

When Brickyard received the EA mocap data, sometimes

it was presented as full Julya scene fi les from which the ani-

mation was extracted, and sometimes as animation fi les.

Whenever changes had to be made to the motion-captured

data, the revisions were minor, such as planting a player’s feet

on the fl oor, tweaking the way objects and cloth intersected,

and producing re-animations to accentuate the original data

and to accommodate the client’s requests. The artists also

received the cloth animation (simulated cloth simulations)

from EA that were used for the players’ uniforms.

“There were revisions to the animation even through the last

week of the schedule,” says Lichtman. “These changes, though,

were facilitated by the use of a nice control rig that EA had cre-

ated for the players.”

Faces in the Crowd

The game crowd, meanwhile, was driven by motion-capture ani-

mation recorded by EA using six performers. The team then applied

those actions to six digital characters, and turned the movements

into animation cycles. The Brickyard artists also received place-

ment locators along with a script to place objects where the locators

were. Next, they created RIB archives of each animated model so

they could use simple proxy boxes in their scenes; at render time,

the boxes were automatically switched to a random model with

random animation based on predetermined parameters. The art-

ists then replicated, shaded, textured, and rendered the crowd to

create a randomized effect. According to Wu, the crew used live-

action reference stills to add detail and effi ciently output all the

data, including a crowd of thousands, within PRMan.

“Of course, each character varied slightly in scale,” notes

Lichtman. “Finding the right amount of hue shift proved to be

the key factor in ultimately matching the reference images of

real crowds supplied by the client. Because we ended up with

more than 20,000 proxy boxes in the scene (the amount of peo-

ple rendered in the crowd), we actually made a RIB archive

that included the stadium, as well. So in the end, our fi nal

scene only consisted of 10 hero players and one polygon box

that, at render time, switched into a fully animated crowd pop-

ulating a fully lit stadium.”

For the stadium, Brickyard modeled the space in 3D, and

used HDR technology to light the interior building as well as the

players and fans. According to Lichtman, the group started by

lighting the stadium in the usual way, with spot, point, and area

lights, and ambient occlusion. Once the lighters were happy

with the results, they baked the lighting as a “brickmap,” which

is a Pixar RenderMan feature that allows artists to bake infor-

mation as a hierarchical 3D texture.

“In this case, we baked all the lighting information and

used that in conjunction with a custom shader that multiples

the lighting information with our textures,” Lichtman explains.

“This allowed us to change textures (primarily for logos and

such if and when the clients request it) without the overhead of

all the lighting calculations.”

With the stadium lighting complete, the group created an

HDRI map of the result and used that as its base lighting setup

for the crowd and players. For the players, the artists used an

average of six area lights, to beauty-light the players on top of

Brickyard created scripts that cleaned up the game assets, so the

team could work with the complex data more effi ciently.



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the created HDRI image in order to put the rims and speculars

wherever they were needed. The HDRI was used for the main

diffuse and bounce lighting, while the rims and speculars were

more directed to create an artistically appealing look.

“The shaders we created were fashioned in such a way that

we could reuse as much as possible of what we had received

from EA,” says Lichtman. “This meant we had to create a cus-

tom normal map shader that relinked the Julya hypershade tex-

tures to our custom PRMan shaders. Our shaders for the players

consisted of one diffuse layer, three different specular/refl ective

layers, one rim layer, and a subsurface scattering layer.”

Because of the nature of the project, Brickyard tried to

restrict itself to just using the textures from the game. The only

textures created in-house were for the subsurface scattering

layer. Brickyard generated those by building a rough skeletal

structure inside every player, and using the distance between

that and the player to determine the strength of the subsurface

scattering. That was baked out, Lichtman explains, as a texture

to accentuate the subsurface scattering calculation.

“We were working with a lot of information, but the real trick

was lighting and rendering the piece for high resolution and a

high degree of realism,” says Lichtman.

For rendering, the group used 12 dual-core Boxx render nodes

with Pixar RenderMan. In the end, the stadium and crowd had an

average render time of six minutes per frame with baked lighting

and ambient occlusion, motion blur, and depth of fi eld. The play-

ers had an average render time of six minutes per frame, including

ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, depth of fi eld, motion

blur, area lighting, and raytraced refl ections for the fl oor.

Theater in the Round

The fi nished fi le—three 120-degree fi lms—was joined together

using stitching and dewarping programs for projection in the

round. As Lichtman explains, the group was tasked with creat-

ing a 12-second, full-CG animated basketball game at 60 frames

per second in 3357x1117 resolution. This was then projected

onto a 360-degree screen to create a buzz at E3. (Brickyard was

given plug-ins and scripts for Shake and After Effects to warp

and stitch the images together.)

The novel animation was an ambitious project, especially for

a 3D rookie. But with the work, Brickyard’s 3D division scored a

winning shot for the facility, and a slam dunk for EA.

Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor for Computer Graphics World.

Though the players are the main attraction in the animation, the

background crowds add some excitement of their own. The fans

were created with motion capture and then randomized.

To create the 360-degree animation, the artists broke the scenes

into three 120-degree fi lms, and then stitched them together and

dewarped them using Shake and After Effects plug-ins.



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72 | Computer Graphics World JULY 2006

PortfolioSI

GG

RAPH

Ani

mat

ion

Thea

ter

Clockwise from top:

Flight Patterns This technical image was acquired from a project directed and animated by Aaron Koblin from UCLA Design Media Arts.

Fog (Niebla) This still is from an animated short directed by Emilio Ramos, and animated/designed by Ramos, along with Maria del Mar Hernandez and Jordi Codina, from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

Aal im Schädel This compelling student fi lm was directed by Martin Rahmlow and produced by Anne Hoever from the Institute of Animation, Visual Effects and Digital Postproduction in Germany.

>> “The setup, payoff, and comic timing make this one of the most humorous fi lms this year.”

>> “Another example of great design, animation, and gag all coming together in a superb,

technically tight edit. A hilariously funny piece.”

>> “A brilliant, behind-the-scenes demonstration of a mind-boggling and complex sequence.”

>> “The fresh look of this fi lm, the comic timing, and tight animation make it a very clear favorite.”

>> “ One of the best examples of character animation in the entire show. Absolutely tight timing

with wonderfully subtle eye movements, voice talent, staging, character design, lighting,

set dressing, and much more.”

These are but a few of the accolades and observations made by Digital Fauxtography’s Terrence

Masson, chair of the 2006 SIGGRAPH Animation Festival, about some of the projects that will

be shown at this year’s event later this month. “From across the globe, the word is out that the



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JULY 2006 Computer Graphics World | 73

Computer Animation Festival is one of the premier venues for showcasing artistic and techni-

cal talent in the fi lm world,” says Masson. “The competition among [submissions] was fi erce.”

Nearly 100 animation selections from more than 725 entries were chosen for the Animation

Festival: 34 appearing in the Electronic Theater (see the Portfolio section of the June issue for a

detailed look at that venue) and 63 featured in the Animation Theater. Among those are a mix-

ture of 2D and 3D animations from the worlds of feature fi lm, short fi lms, scientifi c visualizations,

game cinematics, television commercials and specials, and more. Some projects were created by

high-profi le special effects facilities such as Digital Domain, Framestore CFC, and Cinesite, while

others were crafted by boutique facilities like Psyop and Rhinofx. Others were generated by aca-

demia at universities such as the University of Alabama and the University of California, Berkeley,

while a good number of animated shorts and other projects were submitted by students at vari-

ous schools and animation colleges, including California Institute of the Arts, Savannah College

Clockwise from top left:

Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy This image contains digital imagery created by the effects facility Cinesite for the sci-fi feature fi lm. Production VFX supervisor for the movie was Angus Bickerton.

The MagicBox A visually unique production, the project’s 3D and video production was done by LotusArt and Alexander Beim from Germany.

Moongirl This animation was written and directed by Henry Selick and produced by Helen Kalafatic of Laika Entertainment in Portland, Oregon.

Delivery An unusual animation, this project was directed and produced by Till Nowak from Germany.



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© D

isney. C

ou

rtesy Walt D

isney Featu

re An

imatio

n.

74 | Computer Graphics World JULY 2006

Portfolio

of Art and Design, and Ringling School of Art and Design. “This year’s crop of accepted pieces is

diverse, thought-provoking, and technically superb,” says Masson.

A number of selections appearing in the Animation Theater garnered special praise from

Masson and others on the jury. This includes “Fog (Niebla)” from director Emilio Ramos of the

Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain, about an old man who spins a nostalgic story of how the

village’s fl ying sheep brought the town a brief moment of prosperity. “An original and very per-

sonal work that is absolutely beautiful in so many ways,” says Masson of the animation. “The

combination of such originality with overall technical excellence makes the piece quite memora-

ble. The look, the storytelling, and the facial animation of the main character are all completely

brilliant. This is a fi lm truly meant to be watched multiple times.”

Another particularly exceptional project from the Animation Theater is “Delivery,” from

director Till Nowak of the Framebox in Germany. His piece tells the story of an old man who


Multi-Layered Cloth Simulation This technical animation was directed by Anthony LaMolinara and produced by Craig A. Sost for Walt Disney Animation.

Relighting Human Locomotion This technical image, taken from an animation exploring lighting techniques, was done by Paul Debevec from the University of Southern California.

Rama The vibrant imagery of this animation was modeled, textured, and lit by Eric Bruneton from France.

Musashino Plateau Directed and produced by Nobuo Takahashi, this project was completed as part of his education at Nagoya City University in Japan.



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JULY 2006 Computer Graphics World | 75

lives a lonely life under the dark shadows of industrial smog, until one day, the man receives a

mysterious package that gives him the ability to change his environment. Praises Masson: “A

perfect example of the power of storytelling. Using computer graphics to illustrate this simple

fantasy world is truly the fi lmmaker taking advantage of the medium.”

One animation, “Robin Hood Flour,” was so well received that the jury chose to put two

separate spots from the short into each theater: one appears in the Electronic Theater (“Robin

Hood Flour—Giving”) and the other in the Animation Theater (“Robin Hood Flour—Memories”).

“One of the best examples of character animation in the entire show,” says Masson. “Absolutely

tight timing with wonderfully subtle eye movements, voice talent, staging, character design,

lighting, set dressing, and much more.”

Some of those pieces, along with other selections from the Animation Theater, are

presented on these pages. —Karen Moltenbrey


Refl ect This technical image from an animation set to music was done by Dennis H. Miller from Northeastern University in Boston.

Snakes Inspired by a woodcut by MC Escher, this image is from an animation that was directed by Spain’s Cristobal Vila, who was also responsible for its production, 3D modeling, texturing, lighting, editing, and animation.

Robin Hood Flour—Giving Directed by Richard Rosenman, this animation was done by Red Rover Studios in Toronto.



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HARDWARE


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

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5000X chipset. With new performance features

such as a 1333MHz front-side bus, 4MB of cache

shared between two cores, FB-DIMMs (a cutting-

edge memory technology), and powerful I/O,

the new 3DBoxx 8300 Series Workstation pro-

vides enhanced work fl ow for today’s VFX pro-

fessionals. The 3DBoxx 8300 Series Workstation

is the latest manifestation of Boxx’s intention to

help the VFX artist benefi t from trends toward

multi-core processing and multi-threaded appli-

cations. It will replace the 3DBoxx 8200 Series

Workstation, which has been a mainstay of the

Boxx workstation lineup. The 3DBoxx 8300

Series Workstation will be available soon. Base

pricing starts at $2995.

Boxx Technologies; www.boxxtech.com

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

Quantel Increases its eQBoosting its eQ product range, Quantel intro-

duced eQ FX, a complete high-specifi cation HD

system that meets the HD and multi-resolution

postproduction needs of post and broadcast

users at a reasonable price. According to the

company, eQ FX will help ease a studio’s tran-

sition into HD by providing all the tools and

power necessary to speed HD work through

the suite. The system ships with 160 minutes

of HD work space, built-in TimeMagic no-wait

hardware, the QColor in-context color-grad-

ing package, the latest Eiger 3.5 software, and

a choice of plug-in packages—either GenArts

Sapphire or new SpeedSix Monsters. The sys-

tem is available now for $248.

Quantel also launched Newsbox HD, a cost-

effective news system in a box that now offers

a risk-free path to HD. The complete, self-con-

tained news production system arrives tested

and proven, and ready to ingest material, view

rushes, choose shots, edit stories, review fi n-

ished pieces, and play them out to air. Pricing

for the HD model starts at $250,000.

Other recent Quantel announcements

Panasonic, Sony Develop New Recording FormatPanasonic and Sony announced specifi cations for AVCHD, a new high-defi nition digital video

camera recorder format that the two companies jointly established. The AVCHD format allows

the recording and playback of high-res, digital HD images using 8cm DVD media. The AVCHD is

an HD digital video camera format for recording 1080i and 720p signals onto 8cm DVD media

using highly effi cient codec technologies. The format uses MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 codec for video

compression, making it possible to develop HD video camera recorders that achieve compact size

as well as high-quality video, in addition to audio. The MPEG-4/H.264 codec is a promising tech-

nology that is said to be two times more effi cient than MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 codec technologies.

Artists Get in the Zone ArtZone, a focused online destination that brings community to art, is now available and free to

artists worldwide at www.ArtZone.com. Backed by Daz Productions, a developer of 3D models

and software, ArtZone brings a new environment that enables the sharing and growth of each

member’s passion for art. ArtZone.com is a community in which artists of every medium can

join and share examples of their work, whether or not it is computer-generated. It was created

to be just as inviting to those who simply appreciate art or want to grow in their own skill levels.

Members can present a personal profi le and their own virtual galleries, which are open to mem-

ber comments. Through media such as groups, live chats, and message boards, artists may also

mingle with one another socially or professionally. ArtZone offers features, including virtual gal-

leries, spotlight images, multimedia links, searchable artist profi les, forums, events, and more.

Pay-As-You-Go PCsMicrosoft and AMD announced a pay-as-you-go PC program to drive personal computing in

emerging markets. The two companies will jointly support fl exible business models powered by

Microsoft FlexGo technology. The initiative refl ects both fi rms’ efforts to bring affordable access

to technology, with a pilot program that allows consumers to purchase PCs through a combina-

tion of innovative technology and a pay-as-you-go computing model. This represents a key stra-

tegic component of AMD’s 50x15 Initiative, which seeks to narrow the global digital divide.

It’s All a DreamActivision plans to open a studio facility on DreamWorks’ campus that will allow the game com-

pany and studio to collaborate on upcoming movie-licensed titles such as Bee Movie, Kung Fu

Panda, Rex Havoc, and How to Train Your Dragon. With this move, Activision will be able to

align its game production schedules with those of the fi lms, from preproduction onward.



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SOFTWARE

products


PARTNER NEWSinclude a new platform and TimeMagic support

for Paintbox and the rollout of the Pablo next-

gen real-time 4K color-correction system.

Quantel; www.quantel.com

M O B I L E P H O N E S

Digital Entertainment Goes Mobile Nvidia rolled out the Nvidia GoForce 5500

handheld graphics processing unit (GPU), the

fi rst handheld GPU to enable true, fl uid dig-

ital TV, high-fi delity surround sound, rapid

multi-shot photography, and console-class

3D graphics. For years, these capabilities have

been the domain of function-specifi c devices

such as the home entertainment system, digi-

tal still camera, or Sony PlayStation; today, this

new GPU brings all these features and more to

mobile phones, the company reports.

“High-quality multimedia services are a key

revenue growth for the world’s carriers and

content providers, and we believe we’ll see sig-

nifi cant update of these services this year,” says

Mario Morales, semiconductor analyst for IDC.

And, with the introduction of the GoForce 5500

handheld GPU, the functionality of 3G mobile

phones will be expanded signifi cantly. Phones

based on the GPU will be available from key

handset manufacturers at the end of the year.

Nvidia; www.nvidia.com

V I D E O C A R D S

Kona 3 2k SupportAJA Video recently unveiled 2K-resolution video

support with the V2 upgrade to Kona 3, the

company’s top-of-the-line uncompressed HD/

SD capture card. Kona 3 now provides cus-

tomers with editing and fi nishing on an Apple

Power Mac G5, with the capability to bring

in and play back material at 2K. Furthermore,

Kona 3 V2 supports hardware-based 1080-to-

720 or 720-to-1080 cross conversion. This fea-

ture further streamlines dailies and deliverables

creation at true broadcast picture quality in real

time. Kona 3 is available now for $2990; V2

software can be downloaded for free for exist-

ing users of Kona 3.

Meanwhile, the company also announced

two additions to its line of SD and HD convert-

ers: the HD10AVA, an HD/SD audio and video

A/D miniature converter, and the RD10MD, a

10-bit, broadcast-quality card for dual down-

conversion from HD to SD. The HD10AVA costs

$990, while the RD10MD retails at $2390.

S T O R Y B O A R D I N G

Toon Boom Sketches Stories Win • Mac • Linux Toon Boom Animation

announced the release of Toon Boom

Storyboard, a storyboarding system for visual

storytelling. Storyboard helps users take an

idea and translate it into a visual story that will

become a complete animation. Toon Boom

Storyboard provides a fl exible layer-based panel

display with motion-camera capabilities; a com-

plete set of drawing tools, including pressure-

sensitive brush tool when using a digital graphic

tablet and pen; customizable caption fi elds to

insert fully searchable textual content, such as

scene descriptions and comments; advanced

timeline to control timing and automatically

generate an animatic with sound tracks and

transitions between shots; real-time animatic

creation with dynamic camera moves; and

extensive export capabilities, including printing,

image sequences, and Harmony/Opus, EDL,

D E V P R O G R A M S

Autodesk Makes SparksAutodesk, announced the merger of its

two existing Media & Entertainment de-

veloper programs, Autodesk Sparks and

Alias Conductor Programs, under the

global Autodesk Developer Network

(ADN). New and existing members will be

joining a full service, worldwide developer

program that has more than 2600 mem-

bers worldwide. The program, titled ADN

Sparks, will align the developer programs

of the former Discreet and Alias organiza-

tions and better serve Autodesk’s media

and entertainment customers.

Autodesk acquired Alias in Janu-

ary 2006, and has integrated both Alias

and Discreet into its Media & Entertain-

ment Division. ADN Sparks offers a uni-

fi ed developer network for all Autodesk

partners, with increased benefi ts and a

streamlined process for Autodesk’s devel-

opment communities. The program gives

third-party developers the opportunity to

create tools that extend the functionality

of Autodesk’s media and entertainment

technology. Such tools are integrated into

Autodesk customers’ development pipe-

lines, optimizing workfl ow and increasing

their creative capabilities.

The pricing structure of the ADN

Sparks program aligns with the current

pricing and delivery practices of the Au-

todesk Developer Network. The ADN

Sparks program cost of membership var-

ies by the service level required by the

member and by the number of users:

ADN Standard, ADN Professional, and

ADN Premier Partner. The new pricing

structure will come into effect for exist-

ing Autodesk Sparks and Alias Conduc-

tor members on the date of their next

membership renewal. For complete pric-

ing details, contact your local Autodesk

Developer Network.

Autodesk; www.autodesk.com



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ComputerT H E M A G A Z I N E F O R D I G I TA L C O N T E N T C R E AT I O N A N D P R O D U C T I O N

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Team Disney/Pixar shifts into high gear to create cars with character

The Wheel Deal

June 2006 www.cgw.com

On CG LocationSetting the virtual scene in prime-time showsYoung AgainDigital artists reverse the

aging process for X-Men

CSI: CGIUncovering the clues for an immersive game experience

Pave the road to your

success with a free

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Computer Graphics World

See us at SIGGRAPHSpin by Booth #2219


SWF, and QuickTime fi le formatting.

Toon Boom Storyboard is now available as

an Early Access Program to all animation stu-

dios using Toon Boom Harmony and Opus. The

commercial release is scheduled for August 1,

and is priced at $900.

Toon Boom Animation; www.toonboom.com

V I D E O

Blackmagic Materializes Software Win Blackmagic Design announced the

immediate availability of Version 5.6 software

for all Multibridge and DeckLink products.

This release includes new support for Eyeon

Fusion 5, 720p/50 on DeckLink high-defi ni-

tion cards, and new HDV playback support

in Premiere Pro 2.0 on Windows XP and XP

x64 systems. Fusion 5 is a full-featured, node-

based compositing system used for digital fi lm

pipelines. When integrated with Blackmagic’s

Multibridge Extreme, compositors can take

full advantage of a true 10-bit uncompressed

4:4:4 RGB work fl ow.

Multibridge Extreme also features “true

2K” real-time preview for Fusion 5 at 23.98 and

24 fps. This gives broadcast paint and special

effects professionals the ability to monitor 2K

on Dual-Link DVI-D LCD displays. Also included

is 720p/50 support for older-model DeckLink

high-def cards, allowing customers running

discontinued models of DeckLink high-defi ni-

tion cards to add compatibility for the European

broadcast industry’s chosen HD standard.

Blackmagic’s latest software driver Version

5.6 is available free and can be downloaded

immediately from the Blackmagic Design

Web site at www.blackmagic-design.com/

support/software.

Blackmagic Design; www.blackmagic-design.com

E N V I R O N M E N T S

E-on Streams Vue 5 Win E-on software, a developer of natural

3D environment solutions, announced the pre-

release of two new versions of its xStream suite

of plug-ins: xStream for LightWave and xStream

for Cinema 4D. Vue 5 xStream is a suite of plug-

ins that enables the seamless integration of Vue

environments into 3D applications. Versions of

xStream were already available for Autodesk 3ds

Max and Maya. Versions of xStream for NewTek

LightWave and Maxon Cinema 4D are also avail-

able, while xStream for Softimage XSI is still

under development. The Vue 5 xStream suite

of plug-ins lets CG professionals fully integrate

their 3D projects into Vue environments. Vue 5

xStream for Cinema 4D and LightWave will ship

this summer; the product is priced at $495.

E-on Software; www.e-onsoftware.com



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QA

continued from page 82

QA

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Q

A

QA

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A

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Q

A

Compared to the other

cat you crafted recently,

Aslan, how does

Garfi eld’s fur differ?

Garfi eld’s fur is longer and

messier. It’s probably more like

Aslan’s mane than his body fur.

How many hairs

does Garfi eld have?

There are 3.3 million hairs on

him. The pelt hairs were grown

off of Garfi eld’s polygon sur-

face using hand-painted pelt

maps that determined the length, density,

clump, scruff, etc. The guide hairs were

also created using the same techniques,

but they controlled the direction, fl atness,

scruff, and other parameters to give the

overall fl ow and directionality to the fur.

How did you

animate the hairs?

The hairs are not animated by

hand except in special cases.

Most of the time they move

according to physical rules,

similar to a particle system. When other

objects touch Garfi eld, the guide hairs are

animated to move the fur appropriately.

What about the lighting?

The fur is lit the same way any

other CG object would be lit,

using a combination of environ-

mental lighting obtained from

HDRI taken on the set and hero

CG lights. The orange color is very sen-

sitive to different colored lights, so we

generally toned down the contribution

of the environmental lighting. Every shot

needed individual attention to maintain

the balance between realistic lighting and

keeping the orange color as bright and

saturated as the director wanted.

What did you

use for rendering?

We render using our in-house

renderer, Wren. The improved

light/comp pipeline enabled us to make

adjustments to color and

lighting without having to go

through a time-consuming re-

render each time. In addition, we created

2D motion blur that signifi cantly reduced

rendering time. In the past, motion blur

would have been applied prior to render-

ing, but using 2D motion blur allowed

the crew to apply it in the comp stage.

What was the biggest

fur challenge?

We had a number of shots

where substances had to get

stuck in the fur. CG lasagna

sauce in one scene, and mud

and dirt in another, all had to stick to and

fall out of the fur.

How did you

accomplish that?

First, special grooming and tex-

tures were created that made

the fur look wet and dirty.

Then, individually modeled

pieces of mud or sauce were attached

to the hairs. These were also controlled

with a rules-based system that allowed

them to interact with the fur, and react

to gravity and fall out where necessary.

Did the fact that you had

two cats in the fi lm this time

impact your process and

rendering times?

Not really, except that the shots

in which they were together

took twice as long to render.

Now, onto the compositing.

How did you naturally blend

a CG cartoon character into

the live action and make it

look rather seamless, as if

the characters belonged?

The HDRI and other data that

we collect on set is very impor-

tant for making sure that the

lighting blends seamlessly. Once the char-

acter is rendered, quite a bit of work goes

into the integration. Contrast levels, color,

and fi lm grain need to match the plate.

Contact shadows and refl ections are ren-

dered and need to be composited con-

vincingly. Pieces of the plate are roto’d

and comped back on top of the character.

What were the biggest

challenges you faced in

putting the CG characters

into the live action?

Both cats spend quite a bit

of time on soft surfaces, like

beds and couches. They needed to be

able to push into these surfaces so that

we believe that they have real weight.

Getting the shadows right in these situa-

tions is tough. We also had several shots

where people pick up and carry Garfi eld.

These are always challenging and require

quite a bit of frame-by-frame work for

both the trackers and the compositors.

To do this work, they used our in-house

compositing software called Icy.

Is there anything else you

want to point out about

the work in this fi lm?

The best part about working on

sequels is that you’re getting a

second chance. The work we

did on the fi rst Garfi eld was fantastic, but

there are always things you would do dif-

ferently if you had it to do over. A sequel

gives you that chance. All the work—ani-

mation, lighting, compositing—was some

of the best CG character work we’ve

done…’til the next one, of course!

For the second Garfi eld movie, thecat has 3.3 million hairs, which consist of guide hairs and pelt hairs.



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5 days of real-world, real-timegraphic, interactive twingularityThe only conference and exhibition in the world that twingles everybody in computer graphics and interactive techniques for one deeply intriguing and seriously rewarding week. In Boston, where thousands of interdisciplinary superstars find the products and concepts they need to create opportunities and solve problems. Interact with www.siggraph.org/s2006to discover a selection of registration options that deliver a very attractive return on investment.

The 33rd International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive TechniquesConference 30 July - 3 August 2006 Exhibition 1 - 3 August 2006 Boston Convention & Exhibition Center Boston, Massachusetts USA

John Knoll | BA University of Southern California | Visual Effects Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic, San Francisco, California | Co-creator Photoshop | 20-year SIGGRAPH attendee

Tobi Saulnier | PhD Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |CEO, 1st Playable Productions, Troy, New York | 3-year SIGGRAPH attendee

IMAGE CREDITS: Diamond Age © 2004 Jeff Prentice; Khronos Projector © 2005 Alvaro Cassinelli, Monica Bressaglia, Ishikawa Masatoshi; Rogue IV © 2004 Eric Heller; John Knoll photo by Tina Mills



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dropbackInterview by

Chief editor Karen Moltenbrey


QA

QAQAQ

A

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continued on page 80

Betsy Paterson is Rhythm & Hues’

VFX supervisor for Garfi eld: A Tale of

Two Kitties, overseeing a crew of 300

digital artists to bring the feline back

to the big screen. Her supervisor credits

include The Ring 2, both Scooby-Doo

fi lms, and others.

What was the extent of the

work you did for Garfi eld 2?

Rhythm & Hues’ scope of work

for Garfi eld 2 consisted of 390

shots featuring a 3D animated

Garfi eld and/or his alter ego,

Prince. We created, animated, lit, and

composited Garfi eld and Prince, his

almost identical counterpart, and all the

things that they interact with.

During how

long of a period?

We had about four months of

development and about six

months to do the actual shots.

How many people

worked on it?

At our peak, we had more than

250 people on our crew from

the US and India.

Did other studios

work on the fi lm?

Rainmaker in Vancouver also

did a signifi cant amount of

work, particularly the ‘talking

animal’ portion. They are live-

action animals with CG faces.

You also did the hair

and compositing for the

original Garfi eld movie?

Yes. We did the animation, as

well, for the fi lm.

How did the work

this time differ?

Garfi eld got an upgrade to

take advantage of advances

in our software and pipeline.

He also got some slight mod-

eling tweaks. He’s actually fatter this

time around. Our animation rigging has

improved, so it was a bit easier to get

more iterations of animation, and to get

more believable fat, skeleton, and mus-

cle interaction. As with any fi lm that

depicts an animated character, that char-

acter is an actor; it must evoke emotion

and be totally believable. To that end,

we made improvements to the original

Garfi eld rig so that he moved more natu-

rally than in the fi rst movie.

Did you create any new

hair and fur technologies

or techniques for the fi lm?

We’re constantly tweaking our

software, so in a sense, we cre-

ate new technology on every

job. Most of the recent advances have

to do with better application of environ-

mental lighting to the fur itself, better

sheen, and better self-shadowing.

Would you describe

your fur process?

The fur is groomed and con-

trolled using various levels of

guide hairs. Maps are used for

color and opacity. Several dif-

ferent lighting layers are rendered so that

details like sheen and shadows can be

controlled in the composite.

Which tools did you

use for the hair/fur?

We use our own proprietary

software for just about every-

thing we do. Our main package

is called Voodoo.

Did any of this technology

evolve from the work you

did in Narnia?

Absolutely. Every show is built

on the things we learned from

previous shows.

Rhythm & Hues places an improved CG Garfi eld into

‘hairy’ situations in the fat cat’s live-action sequel

Fur Fun

Rhythm & Hues has a long history of character animation, going back to the early ’90s with

the Coca-Cola Polar Bears. In 1995, with the Academy Award for Achievement in Visual Ef-

fects awarded to R&H VFX supervisor and co-founder Charles Gibson for Babe, the studio

established itself as the leader in the talking-animal niche, with Stuart Little (cats), followed

by Cats & Dogs (felines and canines). Rhythm & Hues leveraged the talking-animal repu-

tation with its strong character animation pipeline, and started doing fully CG-animated

characters for live-action fi lms and commercials. Some of those included Mr. Tinkles in

Cats & Dogs, Scooby-Doo (1 and 2), Cat in the Hat (fi sh), and the fi rst Garfi eld release in

2004. That run culminated with the recent box-offi ce smash and Academy Award nomi-

nee The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which featured the

photoreal CG Aslan lion and 40 mythical character types, under the supervision of one of

R&H’s in-house VFX supes, Bill Westenhofer.



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Our world just got bigger!

Computer Graphics WorldTim MattesonPublisher/West Coast Sales(310) [email protected]

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Post MagazineMerle ModelEastern Sales Manager(781) [email protected]

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index t

o a

dvert

isers


3Dconnexion www.3dx.com/gd 48

Academy of Art University www.academyart.edu 30,31

@Xi Computer www.xicomputer.com 67

ACM SIGGRAPH www.siggraph.org/s2006 49,50,81

AJA www.aja.com 45

Appro www.appro.com 39

ATI www.ati.com CV4

ATI/HP www.ati.com/fi regl/HP CV2

Autodesk www.autodesk.com 40,41

Blackmagic Design www.blackmagic-design.com 27

BOXX Technologies www.boxxtech.com/apexx4 9

Ciara-Tech www.ciara-tech.com 12,13

D2 www.d2software.com CV3

Dell www.dell.com/DCCsolutions 7,33,34,35,36

Dimension www.dimensionprinting.com/cg 3

Eyeon www.eyeonline.com 5

Eyetronics www.eyetronics.com 11

HP www.hp.com/go/dcc 19,20,21,22

Isilon Systems Inc. www.isilon.com 51

NewTek www.lightwave3d.com 25

NVIDIA www.nvidia.com 59,61

New York University – SCPS www.scps.nyu.edu/x94 44

Okino Computer Graphics, Inc. www.okino.com 55

Thomas Course Technologies www.amazon.com/siggraph06-Thomas 43

Vancouver Film School www.vfs.com/games 15

advertiser phone or web page

The ad index is published as a service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.

index t

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isers

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DIGITAL CONTENT CREATION • CAD • MEDICAL IMAGING • VISUALIZATION

IT WORKS FOR USIntroducing the ATI FireGL™ V7350 — the workstation industry’s first one gigabyte ultra high-endgraphics accelerator and the highest performing professional graphics product available, bar none.*

ATI’s next generation workstation accelerators feature a highly parallel rendering architecture, innovative ring bus memory system and vibrant 10-bit graphics pipeline capable of displaying over a billion colors. It’s no wonder that animators, designersand engineers are relying on FireGL to deliver better performance, higher imagequality and superior value.

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Find out how ATI’s FireGL™ graphics can work for you at:ati.com/FireGL

©Copyright 2006, ATI Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. ATI, FireGL and Avivo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ATITechnologies Inc. Architectural image produced by Visualisation One. Automotive image designed and visualized with ICEM software.*ATI FireGL v7350 delivers the highest benchmark scores based on SPECapc application based tests for available products as of publication date of 3/1/06.

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