Computer Graphic World 2010-08-09

$6.00 USA $8.25 Canada

www.cgw.com August/September 2010

Charting a New Course

Creating compelling CG game characters

Wise guys

August/September 2010 1

ON THE COVER

SEE IT IN

Character is extremely important in the just-released computer game Mafi a II from 2K Games. As such, the artists honed their skills to create an amazing-looking cast and bring the story to life. See pg. 18.

• Director Rob Reiner discusses Flipped.• ABC’s The Gates is all-digital from start

to fi nish.• VFX supes on this summer’s fi lms. • Special DI section.

FeaturesIn Your Dreams

10 Helping director Chris Nolan achieve his unique vision for the fi lm Inception was VFX facility Double Negative, which, among other things, turned the actors’ world upside down. By Barbara Robertson

Character Traits

18 The digital stars of today’s popular interactive titles are growing more sophisticated and complex. Meet some of these characters, and learn how their creators brought them to life. By John Gaudiosi

Rivet-ing

26 Filmmaker/CG artist Sam Chen spent four years trekking through a digital rain forest to create his short “Amazonia,” made entirely on mobile PCs. By Karen Moltenbrey

You Are the One

34 Pixar’s “Day&Night” features CG scenes placed inside the short fi lm’s two main characters, which are 2D. By Barbara Robertson

Slow-Going

40 The CAD market is still feeling the effects of the recession, but growth is on the horizon. By Kathleen Maher

A Partial Rebound

42 Hiring in the fi lm and games industries continues, offering a bright spot for recent grads as well as seasoned professionals. By Jennifer Austin

Enhanced ContentGet more from CGW. We have enhanced our magazine content with related stories and videos online at www.cgw.com. Just click on the cover of the issue (found on the left side of the Web page), and you will fi nd links to these online extras.

COVER STORY

The Sky’s the Limit

28 Projecting and viewing stereoscopic 3D in domed environments capitalizes on new technological advancements to offer unique experiences.

August/September 2010 • Vol. 33 • Number 8/9 I n n o v a t i o n s i n v i s u a l c o m p u t i n g f o r D C C p r o f e s s i o n a l s

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34 42

DepartmentsEditor’s Note SIGGRAPH Sideshow

2 As expected, there were numerous new product debuts at the annual SIGGRAPH conference and exhibition. There were also some unexpected highlights from the show fl oor.

Which products were most impressive? Look on page 3 to see CGW’s Best-of-Show selections.

Spotlight

4 Products Luxion’s KeyShot 2. Dell’s portfolio update. Eyeon’s Fusion 6.1, Rotation 6.1. News The workstation market’s road to recovery. More growth expected in the CG market. CAD industry in slow-recovery mode.

Review

46 Adobe Creative Suite 5. x

Back Products

48 Recent software and hardware releases from SIGGRAPH 2010. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx x

18 26

Editor’sNote

SIGGRAPH SideshowThe Magazine for Digital Content Professionals

EDITORIALKAREN MOLTENBREY

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2 August/September 2010

continued on page 3

This year, the annual SIGGRAPH conference was not so much about super-new technology, but rather, better ways of using it. In a word, “efficiency.” To this end, many new products were unveiled, many high-

lighted in this issue and on our Web site. Some we even singled out for a Best-of-Show designation on page 3.

The conference, however, is far more than just new products. It is about art, technology, applications, education, and research. It is about sharing concepts and ideas to push the industry further. It’s also about building relationships and having fun. To this end, I want-ed to take this opportunity to mention some things that I thought were of particular interest. Let’s start with education. CGW kicked off the show with its third annual SIGGRAPH student volunteer ad-dress, as top industry experts (Avatar’s Rob Powers, Zoic’s Les Ekker, Microsoft Game Studio’s Paul Amer, and DreamWorks’ Craig Ring)

spoke to the students about the recent trends in the industry and offered advice for breaking into the job market.

The day before the exhibition floor opened, Don Marinelli gave one of the most interesting and engaging keynotes I have witnessed in quite some time. Executive producer of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), Marinelli relayed how this successful initiative, which dared to unite two seemingly opposite disciplines—fine arts and computer science—came to be. Think of it like the relationship of the characters Day and Night, in the Pixar animated short film “Day&Night”: Each initially wary and untrusting of the other (see “You Are the One,” pg. 34). That is, until they got to know and understand each other. Once they learned to appreciate and embrace their differences, they found they had something novel to offer. Now, substitute in place of the characters Day and Night, ETC co-founders Marinelli and the late Randy Pausch (of “The Last Lecture”). Throughout the keynote, Marinelli made reference to tornados: It is in the title of his book, and it is the basis for his many analogies, one of which is that every now and then the world needs a tornado to shake things up and tear down the old, outdated concepts so that new ones can grow. Not only were the “tornado” references appropriate for his presentation, but also for Marinelli himself, who is a true force of nature. Not only did his talk meet with the appreciation of students, but also with industry veterans, who could not help but be inspired by his enthusiasm and vision.

On the show floor, Nvidia made quite an impression with its all-digital booth—a first for SIGGRAPH. There were no printed signs, just amazing displays with amazing content (thanks also to Barco screens and HP and Dell machines). Not only did the area look sleek, but it really helped illustrate the complexity facing today’s digital content creators across various industries. The booth featured Nvidia’s new Quadro line, based on the Fermi architecture, and the company touted this as “the perfect platform for computational visualiza-tion”—the combination of advanced visualization with computational simula-tion. There were demonstrations by Bunkspeed, RTT, and others, but the one that stole the show was by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The puppeteer dem-onstrated how the Quadros enable the digital characters to come alive in real time—and now, thanks to the new Quadros, in stereo 3D. Plus, the guy was hi-larious! His quick wit drew laughs and smiles from all those who ventured by.

Not to be outdone, AMD also vied for attention with its huge video wall, with its 40 displays and more than 92 megapixels of resolution—all powered by just 10 ATI FirePro V8800 cards.

August/September 2010 �

SF F X

NewTek, which had been fairly quiet the past few shows, certainly made a lot of noise this year. Recently, the company brought on Rob Powers, who had created and supervised the virtual art department for Avatar, as its new vice president of 3D development. Rob certainly brings his own star power to the company, and, it seems, to the show as an engaging speaker. In an interesting move, NewTek teamed with precision motion tech-nology company InterSense to debut the industry’s first off-the-shelf 3D virtual pro-duction system: LightWave 10 with VCam, for 3D virtual production.

On Wednesday, NewTek had tongues wagging and cameras clicking when Wil-liam Shatner and Dick Van Dyke discussed the past, present, and future of visual effects. What few people realized is that both men are longtime LightWave users.

There is so much more, of course, but I only have so much room here. What did you find interesting? Share it with us online in the CGW Blog section at www.cgw.com. n

continued from page 2

Editor’sNote

Best-of-Show SelectionsNvidia Quadro cards (4000, 5000, 6000) built on the Fermi architecture.

Also: Quadro Plex 7000 and 3D Vision Pro stereoscopic 3D solution AMD ATI FirePro V8800 Intel Core i7 and Xeon ILM/DreamWorks Alemic Autodesk 2011 Entertainment Creation Suites NewTek LightWave 10 Eyeon’s Fusion 6.1 Pixologic’s ZBrush The Pixel Farm’s PFMatchIt NewTek/InterSense LightWave 10 with VcamWacom’s tabletsKudos to: n The workstation vendors, which continue to push processing boundaries. n The motion-capture vendors (namely Organic Motion, NaturalPoint,

Xsens, Vicon), which are making the technology easier to use n The rendering vendors, including Luxion (KeyShot 2), Bunkspeed (Shot),

StudioGPU (MachStudio Pro 2), Mental Images (iRay), The Chaos Group (V-ray) n Maxon’s Cinema 4D Version 12 n The Foundry’s Nuke 6.1 and Mari


PRODUCT: WORKSTATIONS

Dell is offering the latest graphics, computing processor, OS, and memory technologies in its Precision workstation portfolio, including desktops, a rack workstation, and mobile laptops.

On the mobile side, these include the 17-inch Precision M6500 and the 15.6-inch M4500. Customers can purchase 32GB

of system memory in the M6500, and 16GB of memory in the M4500. The Precision M6500 is also now available with the ATI FirePro M7820, which enables users to power up to three inde-pendent displays at one time using ATI Eyefi nity technology.

Precision tower and rack workstations are being refreshed with the newest high-end and ultra-high-end graphics solutions from Nvidia, built on the Fermi architecture to combine advanced visualization with high-performance computing capabilities. The

Precision T7500, T5500, T3500, and R5400 workstations sport the Nvidia Quadro 4000 and Quadro 5000 professional graphics solutions.

Based on Dell’s previous announcement of AMD’s Eyefi nity Technology and ATI FirePro 3D professional graphics on its Precision tower and rack workstations, the ATI FirePro V7800, ATI FirePro V5700, and ATI FirePro V8700 professional graph-ics cards now can be bundled with the Precision R5400, T1500, T3500, T5500, and T7500 workstations.

Dell is also offering the new high-performance Tesla C2050 GPU on the Precision T7500 workstation, transforming it into a personal computer for general-purpose scientifi c and engineer-ing computing.

Dell Upgrades Portfolio

At the annual SIGGRAPH conference and exhibition, held a little more than a month ago, numerous vendors introduced a bevy of new offerings, whether brand-new products or updates to existing ones. We have highlighted a number of them here in our Spotlight section and in our Products. A comprehensive report from the show can be found on www.CGW.com by select-ing News on the left side of the page.

PRODUCT: LIGHTING

Luxion has introduced KeyShot 2, an update to the original KeyShot and Hyper-Shot software. The release features a new user interface, rendering features, and performance improvements. It also imports native Pro/Engineer data with associative linking on both the PC and Mac.

KeyShot 2 is an all-new application built on Luxion’s interactive, real-time raytracing and global illumination technol-ogy. Now even faster, KeyShot 2 further breaks down the complexity of creating photographic images from 3D models. With its improved ease of use, KeyShot 2 enables the creation of photographic images in a matter of seconds, indepen-dent of the size of the digital model.

The interface now features drag-and-drop import of digital data, a scene tree for scene management, a library for all assets (materials, environments, textures, back-plates, and renderings) with drag-and-drop capabilities, interactive material and environment adjustments with real-time feedback, dynamic camera interaction with precise position control, and more.

The new rendering features in KeyShot 2 allow users to work faster and obtain even more accurate results. Key capabili-ties include: unlimited label placement on any material, light-emitting materials with intensity, color, and appearance control, and ground caustics without a physical plane. The product also boasts perfor-

mance improvements up to 50 percent, and has been further optimized to run even faster on the PC and Mac without the need for special graphics cards.

KeyShot 2 is available now for $995, and $1995 for the Pro version.

Luxion Rolls Out KeyShot 2

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Windows®. Life without Walls™. Dell recommends Windows 7.


The workstation market posted another round of steadily improv-ing results for the fi rst quarter of 2010, taking one more solid step in its recovery from the lows of 2009. That fi nding by Jon Peddie Research (JPR) comes after the fi rm’s fi rst-quarter analysis as part of its “JPR Workstation Report” series. The technology and market research fi rm reports that the industry shipped 725,000 worksta-tions worldwide in the fi rst quarter, resulting in sequential growth of 1.1 percent and a year-over-year increase of 25.7 percent.

While a welcome number, the 25.7 percent gain over the same quarter a year ago should be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s more of a refl ection on how bad the fi rst-quarter 2009 market performed than how good Q1 2010 turned out. Instead, it was the sequential gain that this time proved a better indica-tor of the progress the market is making in its climb back up to pre-recession levels.

In periods of fl at or even modest growth, Q1 sales tend to lag those of Q4, so even a modest sequential uptick is a bull-ish sign. And from that perspective, this year’s fi rst quarter was stronger than might fi rst appear, as a 1.1 percent sequential increase for Q1 signals a market ahead of its normal pace—more evidence of sustained momentum for its recovery from the ugly days of last year.

That said, it’s beginning to look like HP’s coronation as the new king of workstations might have been premature. After years of closing a major gap to market leader Dell, HP fl irted with volume leadership for three consecutive quarters, essen-tially deadlocked with Dell for Q4 2008 through Q2 2009. Finally, in the third quarter of 2009, HP surged ahead to take

the workstation shipment crown outright for the fi rst time. But HP didn’t get much time to revel in the top spot, as the

very next quarter Dell’s shipments surged, and in the process, virtually eliminated the scant lead HP had been able to manage. And in the fi rst quarter of this year, the company had an upside once more, jumping back in front of HP 39.3 percent to 38.1 percent. Since HP looks to still have a slight edge in revenue, JPR’s calling it a tie, and Dell has been successfully served notice that workstation market leadership is back up for grabs.

Amazingly, the professional graphics hardware market set a new record for shipments, surpassing 2007 and early 2008 numbers: The market shipped 1.26 billion total units, up 17.6 percent sequentially and a whopping 77.9 percent year-over-year. Not only was growth surprisingly hot, but the market managed to set a new record for units shipped, besting totals from the bullish days of late 2007 and early 2008. Given the exceptionally precipitous downturn of 2009, a new record wasn’t expected quite so soon, but the major benefi ciaries—Nvidia and AMD (ATI)—certainly aren’t complaining.

Now in its sixth year, “JPR’s Workstation Report–Professional Computing Markets and Technologies” has established itself as the essential reference guide for hardware and software vendors and suppliers serving the workstation and professional graphics markets. Subscribers receive two in-depth reports per year, providing a comprehensive analysis of the vendors and technologies driving the workstation platform. Clients also receive four quarterly reports detailing and analyzing market results for each calendar quarter. ■

The Workstation Market’s Road to Recovery

NEWS: WORKSTATIONS

The computer graphics industry has been a growth industry since it was established in the late 1970s. Weathering the storms of the recession of 2009, the CG industry is back on track and showing new, invigo-rated vitality and potential. To this end, Jon Peddie Research is expecting that the computer graphics hardware market—which was worth $59 billion in 2009—should exceed $63 billion in 2010.

In 2009, the CG software market was worth $11 billion (not counting services, maintenance, and other aspects) and should grow to $11.6 billion in 2010 as the industry shakes off the remaining

effects of the recession and starts replac-ing software tools.

As a result of the pullback due to the recession, more people will be buying computer graphics software programs, and we will see the development of tradi-tional segments, like CAD/CAM, expand as new design approaches in automotive, aerospace, and architecture are brought forth. Visualization, a market that has been almost dormant for the past few years, is poised now for great expansion due to exciting and lower-cost technologies.

Today, software programs for making movies and computer games, design-

ing products, and creating simulations are exploiting the features of current CG hardware. We’re seeing the results in amazing realism and real-time capabili-ties for the next generation of fi lms and designs, and the trend is accelerating.

The demand for programmers, artists, scientists, and designers has picked up again, and fi rms are actively looking for people who can use and exploit these new programs and their associated hardware accelerators. The economic recession has caused a slowdown, but it’s going to look like a small bump in the road by 2013. ■

CG Market: More Growth to Come

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Right along with the rest of the world, the computer-aided design (CAD) industry suffered severe setbacks in the reces-sion of 2008–2009. Fortunately, in 2010, world economies are recovering, and so are parts of the CAD industry.

Because CAD tools are used in architecture, manufacture, plant design, assembly, tool design, mapping, and geographi-cal information systems (GIS), recovery is decidedly uneven. For example, the architecture industry was the fi rst to feel the recession, and it will take the longest to recover.

On the other hand, the automotive industry, which saw a spec-tacular meltdown in 2009, is coming back more quickly. As with all recessions, there are benefi ts to be realized in a slowdown, and, in some cases, those benefi ts are already showing up this year.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) estimates the CAD software market to be $5 billion in 2009. This is a 23 percent decrease compared to 2008, when the market reached a high of $6.7 billion. All industries in all geographies felt the effects of the recession. The market will grow in 2009, but it will not recover to the high levels seen in 2008, which were unnaturally fueled by fi nancial bubbles.

As diffi cult as the recession in 2009 has been and will contin-ue to be for many companies, it will serve as a jump-start for long-term growth, as many companies take the time afforded by a slowdown to move to advanced technologies and retrain workers.

Inevitably, this same process is driving many workers out of the CAD industry. The contraction is tightest at the bottom

rungs of the CAD workforce, where CAD operators or CAD drafters move on to fi nd new opportunities. JPR estimates that at least 200,000 workers have left the CAD industry worldwide. In the coming years, there will be increased opportunities for CAD workers who can take advantage of new software capa-bilities to increase their companies’ effi ciencies.

In the architecture-related fi elds, these opportunities will come to people who can help their companies move to a building information management (BIM) workfl ow. In manufacture, we are seeing new opportunities appear in improving product data management/product life management/customer relationship management (PDM/PLM/CRM) workfl ows and analysis. In all segments of the CAD industry, rendering is become a main-stream capability across the board as workers become inter-ested in creating their own visualizations.

In 2010, the CAD market will grow to $5.4 billion, a modest increase of 5 percent, according to JPR. And, the consulting fi rm expects the CAD market to fully recover by 2013/2014.

The “2010 JPR CAD Report” looks specifi cally at the CAD market, and includes information on worldwide CAD software revenues, market share, and information about the user base. The 2010 report includes forecasts for the major CAD segments: architecture, MCAD, process and power, civil, GIS/mapping, and others. In addition, the report looks at the growing interest in the Mac among CAD users, and breaks down CAD use in geographic areas. The CAD report is available now for $5000 for a single license and $7500 for a sitewide license. ■

CAD Industry in Slow Recovery

NEWS: CAD

Eyeon Software rolled out Fusion 6.1, supercomputing compos-iting software for Linux and Windows platforms.

Fusion 6.1 utilizes the powerful, low-cost GPU to create assets and layers in real time. The tool set imports scenes from 3D animation packages, allowing for a much tighter integrated workfl ow between departments and applications. This open fl exibility also increases industry support for technologies such as RenderMan and RED Camera Mysterium X. Relighting and sophisticated fi nishing offer more control and transparent collab-oration between the compositing artists. OpenCL supercomput-ing is a fresh and innovative use of today’s massively parallel GPU. By speeding up computationally extensive operations such as Defocus, Fusion 6.1 allows the artist to instantly visual-ize sophisticated mathematical operations that compile code on the fl y for use by the new generation of graphics cards.

In other news, the company began shipping Rotation 6.1, a

focused tool set for rotoscoping, keying, paint and retouching, and clean plate and shot preparation. Rotation 6.1, which takes advantage of 64-bit computing, has been updated to include a plethora of new tools that enhance overall productivity, includ-ing signifi cant changes to the stereo conversion workfl ow.

Eyeon Ships Fusion 6.1

PRODUCT: COMPOSITING

When director Chris Nolan approached visual eff ects super-visor Paul Franklin of Double Negative with another dream job, Franklin had no idea Nolan meant that literally. Until

he read the script. Much of the fi lm Inception, which Nolan wrote, di-rected, and produced, takes place inside a dream world. � e Warner Bros. Pictures production stars Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb) as a dream thief and Ellen Page (Ariadne) as an architect who becomes a dream-space designer.

For Inception, Nolan brought back a team he had worked with on his award-winning fi lms Batman Begins and � e Dark Knight: visual eff ects supervisor Franklin, special eff ects supervisor Chris Corbould, and edi-tor Lee Smith, all of whom received Oscar nominations for � e Dark

Knight; stunt coordinator Tom Strothers, who won a Screen Actors Guild Award for � e Dark Knight; and cinematographer Wally Pfi ster, who received Oscar nominations for both of Nolan’s Batman fi lms.

Although the Batman fi lms are comic-book fantasies, Nolan insisted on grounding anything created with computer graphics in physical re-ality, from streets and buildings to Batmobiles. So, too, the eff ects in Inception’s dream worlds. “Chris [Nolan] will do his utmost to shoot for real if he can,” Franklin says. “We had fantastic special eff ects from Chris Corbould and truly astounding stunt work from Tom Struthers, and all three—visual eff ects, stunts, and special eff ects—worked in unison.”

Double Negative (Dneg) provided all the digital visual eff ects, with New Deal Studios providing miniatures for an alpine sequence. “By

August/September 201010

■ ■ ■ ■ Visual Effects

modern standards, we didn’t have a huge shot count,” Franklin says. “We had a modest 500 shots; but, it was 34 to 40 minutes of screen time.” Although Dneg altered reality in the real world for a few shots by adding passing views of a landscape outside a bullet train, for example, most of the studio’s eff ects involved altering environments inside the dream world.

Even so, Nolan wanted those environments to look and feel real. “� ere’s a large amount of sophisticated visual eff ects work,” Franklin says, “and what distinguishes it is Chris’s strong aesthetic grounding in reality. He says the audience has to believe it’s a fi lmed image, not syn-thetic.” So, even if a shot doesn’t call for a plate, the team will still shoot something real for reference.

Paris in the Dream TimeIn the fi rst part of the fi lm, we learn that Cobb, accused of murdering his wife, is on the run. He’s an extractor, someone who uses futuristic dream sharing to invade the subconscious of sleeping targets to steal information from their minds. Corporations hire him to do industrial espionage. But one industrial magnate has a diff erent idea: Rather than steal ideas, he wants Cobb to invade the dreams of a rival and plant an idea. Cobb agrees and hires a team that includes the brilliant student of architecture, Ariadne, who will design dreamspaces the team will share with their target. As she learns how dream sharing works, the fi rst series of eff ects take place.

We see her and Cobb sitting outside at a café in Paris, discussing dream


Visual Effects ■ ■ ■ ■

Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.


n n n n Visual Effects

architecture. Cobb asks how they got there. Ariadne answers that she can’t remember, and Cobb explains that they’re in a dream. He says people never remember how dreams start, and adds that they’re not in the part of Paris she thinks they’re in. She panics and loses control of the dream world she created in her own mind. When she does, the world explodes.

Nolan shot the scene in Paris. “We were on Rue Bouchut in central Paris,” Franklin says, “a marvelous 19th century classic Parisian street that Chris Corbould rigged with compressed air canisters that fired lightweight debris. Even though it looked dangerous, he rigged it so Leo and Ellen sit in the middle of things explod-ing around them.” To enhance that practical effect, the camera crew filmed the scene with high-speed cameras at 700 frames per second (fps)—a five-second take slowed to a minute on playback.

“That gave a slow-motion, antigravity look to the debris floating in the air,” Franklin says. “It shows the physics of the world inside their dreaming mind breaking down and falling apart. It’s a stylized look, not like a bomb go-ing off.”

For reference, the filmmakers examined the final scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriski Point in which Daria, a main character, imagines blowing up her boss’s home. Antonioni represented this by ex-ploding a house, filming it with a high-speed camera, and then projecting it in slow motion. “We wanted to create the same complexity,” Franklin says, “all the tiny fragments you get when you blow up something. But, the prac-tical effects team couldn’t destroy things to the extent Chris [Nolan] wanted. He wanted

cobblestones flying in the air, buildings ex-ploding and shattering. So, we did a lot of CG dynamics. We added levels of detail and com-plexity to the sequence.”

Franklin began by working with a rough cut that editor Lee Smith assembled in Quick-Time from footage shot on the street in Paris, using Dneg’s “Clip,” a Linux-based editing tool. “Clip allows me to draw annotations on top of the sequences and animate them over the timeline,” he says. “I could scribble with a pen, like in Photoshop, to show which bits break up and where the debris would go.”

After sketching an animated sequence in Clip, Franklin discussed his plans with No-lan and Smith via Cinesync’s remote viewing and approval software. Then, keeping notes from Nolan in mind, he replaced the ani-mated drawings with placeholder visual effects animations and sent the new versions back to Nolan and Smith.

“The final sequence evolved over six months,” Franklin says. “We’d iterate and iter-ate and iterate again. We’d review the sequence with Chris regularly and, toward the end, every day. It was an interactive, two-way process, and it was great.”

Effects supervisor Nicola Hoyle led the group that built the models and broke them apart, working with the studio’s DNDyna-mite, a rigid-body dynamics solver built inside Autodesk’s Maya. Lead effects TD May Leung led the animation team. Modelers used refer-ence photos of material filmed on location to match pieces of debris broken on set. But, they also built polygonal models and broke them apart using the studio’s DNShatter—bits of buildings, cardboard boxes, cobblestones,

furniture and tableware from the café, and so forth. DNShatter uses procedurally created patterns based on observed shatter patterns.

“We couldn’t have achieved the level of de-tail we have in the shot without these proce-dural tools and a fantastic level of photorealistic rendering,” Franklin says. “But, we also did a lot of work in our version of Apple’s Shake to re-time the slow-motion footage. The explo-sions start at 24 fps and then slow down, as if damped by a treacle-like medium, to 1000 fps, and hang in the air. Leo (Cobb) and Ellen (Ariadne) are moving around within a mael-strom of debris flying and shattering around them. It was a great sequence. A brilliant com-bination of special effects, visual effects, and fantastic compositing.”

Stepping UpWhen Cobb and Ariadne return to Paris in her dreams, the burgeoning dreamspace architect more confidently plays with “reality.” In this sequence, which appeared in the trailers, we see the buildings in Paris fold up and arc over-head to create a cube of streets at 90-degree angles, with people walking on the “ceiling.”

The visual effects team combined their digital work with a practical effects technique similar to one that helped Fred Astaire dance up the walls and across the ceiling of his apart-ment in the 1951 musical Royal Wedding. Franklin previs’d the shot.

As Cobb and Ariadne step up, in effect, onto a vertical plane, they are actually walk-ing on a tilting set built by Corbuold’s crew that has a camera fixed to it. “The whole set pivoted over and they stepped onto the ‘wall’ at the same time,” Franklin says. “We replaced everything except Leo [DiCaprio] and Ellen [Page]. But, we had to get them really step-ping up to that wall.”

A combination of practical explosions enhanced with digital models destroyed this procedurally created vision of a shattered dream that takes place in a Parisian café.

Slightly dangerous

made in modo© by Robert Lechl

20100505_CGW.indd 1 5/5/2010 8:21:46 AM



Because Franklin and Nolan had worked together on previous films, they could refer-ence visual memories shared over the past six years. And for the tilting building shot, they both remembered the drawbridges over the Chicago River. “Chris [Nolan] didn’t want plastic buildings that moved like taffy,” Frank-lin says. “He wanted a visceral, engineered feeling. In Chicago, the drawbridges lift great sections of road. It looks like the whole end of the street levers up on a giant hinge, so we used that idea. The streets would hinge up and arc over, but they would pivot, not bend.”

To build a Paris street as a full-CG envi-ronment, the team from Dneg worked with a visual effects team from Lidar Services that scanned the four-block area around Place Georges Mulot over a period of three weeks. “They had an SUV with a mast that had a Lidar head on it,” Franklin says. “They digi-tized the streets down to a quarter-centimeter level of detail and provided us with a high- detail model. Then the Dneg team did an ex-tensive photo survey of all the buildings.” In addition, because the crew couldn’t get per-mission to helicopter low over the city, to cap-ture a view looking down onto Paris rooftops, they turned to the Internet for images.

The Internet images, the combination of

data from the digital scans and the photo-graphic textures made it possible for CG su-pervisors Dan Neal and Philippe LePrince and their teams to create the highly detailed digital models of all the buildings. And more. In the shot, everything not on the horizontal, except the actors, is CG, including the buildings, cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians. CG crowds jostle on the sidewalks. “We photographed all the extras, made little 3D models of them, and drove them with a motion-capture library,”

Franklin says. “We built a straightforward ani-mation tool set system to place the people and traffic in the shots.”

Paris LightAlthough sending people walking up vertical streets and tilting buildings might seem to be the trickiest part of the shot, the challenge was in making everything look photoreal. “If you fold a building over on itself, you can’t see the sun anymore,” Franklin says. “So we had to work out a way to light the street to look natural, yet still fit with the live-action pho-tography. The actors are in broad daylight, lit by the sun. But, we couldn’t have light shining through a building.”

The answer was mystery light sources added artfully. “The lighting had to be so seamless that you never question it,” Franklin says. “It’s a dream that has to feel real. This sequence exemplified the key challenge in all the work: No matter how outlandish the imagery—fold-ing streets or a café blowing up—we had to ground it with convincing, absolute reality.”

The lighting was so complex, in fact, that the crew could not use Spangle, the interac-tive, in-house lighting tool developed at Dneg for The Dark Knight. Instead, they relied on optimized shaders and raw renderfarm power.

To render the digital buildings and people, Dneg used Pixar’s RenderMan and an updated shader set. “Philippe [LePrince] developed a new shading and texture-mapping system us-ing the Ptex technique invented at Disney,” Franklin says.

Ptex, per-face texture mapping for produc-tion rendering, developed by Brent Burley and Dylan Lacewell at Walt Disney Anima-tion Studios, stores a separate texture per quad face of a subdivision control mesh and

a per-face adjacency map in one texture file for each surface. First used for Bolt (see “Back to the Future,” November 2008) and “Glago’s Guest” (see “Short Subjects, Big Ideas–Simple Truths,” February 2009), the technique uses adjacency data to do seamless anisotropic fil-tering of multi-resolution textures across sur-faces, even those with arbitrary topology. The technique works through RenderMan.

“Basically, with this new way to map tex-tures onto 3D geometry, we didn’t have to go through the process of setting up UV co-ordinates,” Franklin says. “We used this more sophisticated projection system to map all the textures in the Paris street scenes. We’ve done photorealistic environments before at Double Negative: Gotham City, Chicago. But this sequence happens in broad daylight, in high-contrast sunlight. We had fantastic, beautiful plates shot by Wally Pfister with 64mm clear, anamorphic cameras. There was nowhere to hide. And Chris [Nolan] insisted the digital buildings be equal to photography.”

Compositing supervisor Graham Page placed the live-action actors in the digital en-vironment. But, before he did so, the artists re-alized that the movement of the actors looked too mechanical. “He worked out a brilliant way to separate the actors even though we filmed them in the same pass,” Franklin says. “And then, he changed the timing to make the shot feel more organic. It was a tremen-dous piece of compositing.” The compositors all worked at 4k resolution using the tools that Dneg’s R&D department created for the IMAX version of The Dark Knight to overcome Shake’s memory limitations (see “Extreme Effects–Dark Inspiration,” August 2006).

“I don’t want to play down our technical achievements, but this sequence is a testament to the artistry of the crew,” Franklin says.

If You See My ReflectionIn the final part of Ariadne’s Paris dream, she and Cobb walk out of the cube and toward the banks of the River Seine. As she approaches a road on the lower level, a bridge springs up out of the ground and builds itself toward her. She then walks onto the bridge.

“The idea sounded brilliant in the script,” Franklin says. “Everyone can imagine it. But building it so that it doesn’t look comical in reality was difficult.”

Nolan shot the sequence on Pont de Bir-Hakeim, the same location used by Louis Malle in Frantic and Bernardo Bertolucci for Last Tango in Paris. “We didn’t have the time or flexibility to build a greenscreen on loca-tion,” Franklin says. “Chris [Nolan] and Wally

Visual effects artists scanned, modeled, and texture-mapped a four-block area of Paris so they could pivot digital buildings up and around the live actors. A texture-mapping technique developed at Disney helped the Double Negative artists create the photorealistic digital set.


Visual Effects n n n n

[Pfister] shoot like a whirlwind. So, we roto-scoped the actors off the background using our rotoscope tool Noodle.” The rotoscopers traced around Ellen as she walked toward the bridge, and then the artists replaced the bridge, road, cars, pedestrians, and trees with digital replicas.

The modeling team worked from Lidar scans to build lightweight animation models that animator Dorian Knapp used to drive a more highly detailed final model. “The idea was to have it fold down into the road and then unfold itself, like a mechanical piece of origami,” Franklin says. “Dorian developed the rig as he was animating. He came up with a process by which the ridge unpacks itself and springs into place, and gave it a marvelous clanky, rack-and-pinion feel.”

As Ariadne continues exploring her Parisian dream, she steps onto the side of a platform and pulls on the handle of a giant mirrored door. Then, she steps to the other side and swings around another mirror, resulting in two mirrors parallel to each other. We see Ariadne and Cobb in infinite reflections going back forever, little Leos and Ellens between tunnels of wrought-iron arches. When Ariadne places her hand against a mirror, it shatters to reveal a bridge with repeating arches created from the nested mirror reflection.

On set, Corbould built an 8x16-foot mir-rored door on a hinge. The mirror had a large metal rig around it, and the entire unit weighed 800 pounds. “Ellen couldn’t pull the door,” Franklin says. “We had burly special ef-fects guys on the other side pushing. And, this door wasn’t as big as Chris [Nolan] wanted the mirror to be in the film. But, it showed how the reflections move.” Of course, the crew ap-peared in the reflections, as well.

As he had done before, compositor Graham Page removed DiCaprio and Page from the plates, and, as before, the Dneg artists built a digital background. Neal and lead lighting artist James Benson wrangled the raytraced reflections of the digital bridge, river, trees, and people in the distance. “They studied the way a real mirror moves and added the imperfections that ground-ed it in reality,” Franklin says. “You think of a mirror as smooth, slick, and seamless, but it isn’t.” To replicate DiCaprio and Page, the compositors lifted reflections from live-action images shot at various angles, and for a key moment when Di-Caprio turns around, inserted a digital double.

School’s OutThe shattered mirror concluded Ariadne’s first lesson in dream work. So, having learned to control her own dreams, she begins designing

dreamscapes. When people invade dreams, the dreamer’s subconscious tries to chase them out, and it’s up to the invader and the dream-scape creator to devise evasion routes and methods. So, Ariadne creates looped mazes that resemble Escher’s famous drawings.

“We had to work with the art department to build a physical set,” Franklin says. “The ba-sic idea is well understood, but it works only if the camera precisely lines up with the set. So, we created a carefully designed technical previs that showed the exact camera placement.” Post-production artists tidied up shots of the actors filmed on the physical set by painting out rigs and painting in holes in the atrium surround-ing the stairs cut to accommodate scaffolding. For the heist, Ariadne designs three levels of dreams inside dreams, all the better to hide in. The trick for Cobb and his team, who will enter their victim’s dream and plant an idea, is that time works differently in the dream world. Dreams are 10 times faster than the real world, and each dream inside a dream is 10 times faster than the first. “The danger is that at the bottom, Limbo, time runs at a mas-sively accelerated rate, so if you get trapped there, you’re trapped for centuries,” Franklin says. “You would go insane.”

The first level of Ariadne’s dreamscape is a rain-washed American city. The second level is an elegant hotel with labyrinthine corridors. Third is an Alpine snowscape with a fortress in the mountains. At the bottom is Limbo.

With the help of a flight attendant, Cobb doses his victim with sleeping powder while aboard a flight, and the team successfully enters the industrial magnate’s dream. In the first layer, they’re in a van, with bad guys in a Mercedes SUV chasing them through a rainstorm.

To film the sequence, Corbould rigged a three-block stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles with giant rain sprayers, and Strothers masterminded the car chase and gun battle. “We had to do a lot of manipulation to slow down the action,” Franklin says. “They shot the van skidding around the corner at 24 fps, but Chris wanted it at 700 fps. So, we needed to do incredible deceleration.”

The re-timing software Dneg typically uses, which relies on optical flow to analyze pixel vectors, couldn’t handle the motion-blurred layers of rain. So, compositing supervisor Julian Gnass rebuilt the shots from scratch by working with a 3D team that extracted ele-ments and re-animated them. “People watch

At top, a digital bridge builds itself toward Ariadne. At bottom, artists at Dneg re-timed the action in the live-action plates to slow down the dream sequence, and then enhanced the image with digital rain.



the sequence and think they shot a slow-mo-tion plate,” Franklin says. “But it wouldn’t have been possible. You can’t strap a delicate high-speed camera onto a speeding vehicle. Muhittin Bilginer [technical director] created layers and layers of slow-motion CG rain fall-ing down, hitting the street, and splashing.”

A Dneg team again added slow-motion CG rain to the end of the shot as the van drops off a bridge and plunges into the river below. For this shot, the artists created the rain us-ing Maya particles, and compositor Scott Pritchard supervised the layering of digital and practical rain elements into the sequence.

Because all the people inside the van except for the driver are dreaming another dream, and because the physics of one layer affect the next, in the second dream layer (which takes place in a hotel), the walls and ceiling move as the van leans around the corner and then freefalls off the bridge.

Borrowing an idea from techniques used to create zero gravity inside a spaceship for Stan-

ley Kubrick’s 2001, Corbould’s team built gi-ant rotating sets. “They built an 80-foot-long section of corridor that could rotate at eight feet per minute to create a tilting bar and ho-tel room,” Franklin says. “It was staggering to watch and a testament to the immense power of doing effects in camera.” As for postproduc-tion work, the artists’ main task was painting out wires, replacing backgrounds, and adding floating debris. In addition, for shots that take place later on this dream level, the Dneg team put CG faces onto stunt performers.

Below the hotel level, the dreamscape moves outside, to the top of a Canadian mountain, where the art department built a set at 8000 feet and filming took place in freezing tem-peratures. CG artist Vanessa Boyce led a team that built a CG model of the set and then ex-tended it, adding storms and blizzards using 3D particle and fluid dynamics. Compositing lead Richard Reed’s team fit the model and the effects into plate photography.

And then, with the help of New Deal Studios, they blew it all up. New Deal built a 45-foot-tall miniature and, working from Knapp’s previs, exploded their version of the set and the moun-tain. “They replicated the action from the previs and took it further,” Franklin says. “And then we added CG bits and more buildings in the back-ground. It was the best of both worlds.”

Inside this dream, the characters snooze their way into a deeper dream, the final level, Limbo.

How Low Can You Go?Limbo is where dreamers end up if the dream traps them, and at this point in the film, Cobb and Ariadne wash up on the shores of Limbo. Cobb was there before, trapped with his wife for 50 years. Both architects by trade, while there they constructed a modern city, but Cobb has been away for hundreds of dream years, and this city, constructed deep in his mind, is falling apart.

“Chris [Nolan] wanted a city collapsing into the sea, and he wanted it to be completely

unique,” Franklin relays. Dneg art director Gurel Mehmet created concept drawings of a sea wash-ing over a city, of a city embedded in a glacier, a sea in city streets, and more, but the drawings didn’t match what Nolan envisioned. “The art department tried, as well,” Franklin adds, “but nothing hit the mark. So Chris concluded that we couldn’t get there with concept art. The idea had to evolve in a complex fashion.”

Franklin remembered that when he was in art school, he would create steel sculptures by cutting pieces of metal that he’d stick together with spot welds. “Using this process, I’d arrive at an end result, a sculpture built from short sections of welded steel that had aspects of a drawing. But this process is the complete an-tithesis of digital visual effects.”

Franklin sat with Boyle and lighting su-pervisor Bruno Baron, and they developed a

technique that worked. Using reference pho-tos of glaciers, Boyle built polygonal models to capture the basic shape, and then created space-filling algorithms that used basic build-ing blocks. “It was like building a glacier with giant Legos,” Franklin says. “We added a rule to the procedural system to insert streets and intersections, and another set of rules to vary the width of streets and buildings based on the shape of the glacier. Through this iterative process, we ended up with a complex cityscape that had recognizable shapes taken from archi-tectural history, but had a crumbling, decaying feel because it was inspired by the shape of the glacier.” Then, with the help of a procedural destruction system implemented within Side Effects’ Houdini, they collapsed the buildings and destroyed the city.

For a final encounter between Cobb and the ghost of his wife, Dneg created a giant storm that sweeps across the city using the studio’s Squirt fluid dynamics system. The blizzard that tears through the streets and rips build-

ings apart echoes shots of the collapsing café in Paris at the beginning of the film.

“We are creating outlandish imagery from deep inside the mind with the clarity of a lucid dream,” Franklin says. “Visual effects are an integral part of that. But the most significant thing in this film is not that we are pushing the boundaries of new science, it’s the develop-ment of the art of visual effects. We’re reaching a level of sophistication in which filmmakers can treat visual effects as another camera. They can say, ‘I’d like to shoot this,’ and we can film it for them through visual effects.”

Film anything, in fact, that a filmmaker can dream of. n

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at [email protected].

At left, Double Negative artists created the decomposing city by procedurally stacking building blocks inside the shape of a glacier and then crumbled it with a procedural destruction system. At right, the studio sent a blizzard raging through the dream city using its proprietary fluid dynamics system called Squirt.

And much more...

Think you know RealFlow?Think again...

OUT NOW

BY JOHN GAUDIOSI

AAs technology advances, game developers are given more choices when it comes to creating the next generation of protagonists and antagonists that captivate gamers for hours on end. During the past few years, as studios have become more acclimated to current-generation con-soles, they have been pushing their processing power further, and as a result, gamers have seen a variety of diverse character types evolve. From photorealistic, motion-captured characters that seem to eerily live and breathe within the game worlds of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain to the epic, ripped-from-a-painting, blood-soaked beauty of Sony Santa Monica Studios’ God of War 3, there’s something for every graphic artist to dive into.

During the past several months, titles like Gearbox Studios’ Borderlands took the shooter genre in an entirely new direction with a unique cel-shaded, “living comic” look that had never been seen before, especially running on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3. A derivative of that comic-book style can be seen in characters like Ryu in Capcom’s new Super Street Fighter IV, and that studio is pushing this vibrant, pop-out-of-the-screen style even further with the 2011 fi ght title Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds. � ere are also games that are focusing on story and utilizing more robust, more human characters in story-driven titles, such as 2K Games’ interactive crime story Mafi a II and Visceral Games’ survival horror/adventure Dead Space 2. And then there are studios, such as Epic Games (Gears of War 3) and People Can Fly (Bulletstorm), which like to infuse hulking, arcade-style caricatures who carry big guns and let the ammo do the talking.

Here we examine some of the unique characters in these game titles and the CG techniques used to create them.

A


■ ■ ■ ■ Gaming

Bulletstorm People Can Fly/Epic Games� e folks at Epic Games liked Polish developer People Can Fly so much after working with the studio on the PC version of Gears of War that Epic bought the studio. Next spring, their fi rst collaboration, Bulletstorm (published by Electronic Arts), will be released on the PC, Play-Station 3, and Xbox 360 platforms. � e game introduces a “symphony of blood,” allowing players to methodically torture enemies before showing them mercy.

� e game’s protagonist, Grayson Hunt, is a drunken space pirate who was once an elite mer-cenary. Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Epic Games, says Hunt was modeled after rogue anti-heroes, such as Han Solo; players will journey with Hunt as he seeks revenge and, ultimately, redemption.

“Hunt is a member of Dead Echo, an elite group of mercenaries trying to keep the peace for the confederation of the galaxy,” explains Bleszinski. “He discovers that some of his commanding offi cers have been using him and his team to do their ill will, so he makes a decision to save his crew, and they end up in the dead of space.”

� e game’s action picks up years later with Hunt living a rogue pirate existence. After crashing his small ship into the Ulysses, the prized ship of the confederation, the game takes place on Sty-gia, a resort planet run amok by mutants and now overrun by confederation enemies, as well.

“Modern consoles, along with high-end game engines like Unreal Engine 3, can manage in-sanely detailed game characters with ease,” says Andrzej Poznanski, lead artist at People Can Fly. “Are there still restrictions and limitations? Sure, they’ll always be there, but these days it’s not about limitations, it’s about not getting overwhelmed and carried away with almost limitless possibilities.”

As Poznanski notes, good game characters need a tasteful balance of clean, simple shapes, complemented with meaningful details, which weren’t added just because there was empty space on a normal-map texture. He adds that it is important that even when players are squinting their eyes, they still clearly “get” the distinctive features of the model, including the character’s silhouette, props, and attitude.

� e team at People Can Fly start the character creation process with a mood concept draw-ing, “because we need to get the vibe and feel of the character before we go further,” explains

CHARACT ERTRAITS


Gaming ■ ■ ■ ■

To create the characters for its noir title Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream enlisted real actors to bring its CG characters to life. The artists spent a great deal of time creating realistic facial animations for the cast.


n n n n Gaming

Poznanski. Next, the artists make proper or-thogonal drawings of the character in a default pose, and then make necessary adjustments to ensure that the new character will work well with the studio’s standard skeletal rig for animation. “It’s important and lets us reuse all typical animations for our humanoid charac-ters,” he adds.

A 3D modeler then builds a base mesh, which is quickly rigged, and the person ap-plies some temporary textures and exports the character to the Unreal engine so that the team can get an early feel of the character. Once the base mesh is approved, it is used for the cre-ation of a medium-resolution model. People Can Fly employs Pixologic’s ZBrush for this

stage, and then uses re-topology tools before exporting the character to either Luxology’s Modo or Autodesk’s Maya or 3ds Max for fur-ther modeling. At People Can Fly, the art team usually juggles the software of choice a num-ber of times, depending on the specific task at hand or the artist’s personal preference. Once the medium-res model is complete, the group again uses ZBrush to create a high-resolution pass. The art team mixes default brushes with custom alphas, utilizing layers, morph targets, projections, Z spheres, and a 2.5D tool set.

At this stage, the mesh often reaches 30 million to 40 million polygons, which are trimmed to about four million to five million polys using Pixologic’s Decimation Master plug-in. An artist turns this medium-sized mesh into a low-res mesh using ZBrush’s re-topology tool, with all the details baked into it. Next, a character undergoes the time-consum-ing UV layout, an important technical step in creating a sharp and detailed protagonist.

“Normal map, base color, and ambient oc-clusion are derived from the hi-res mesh, and

hundreds of additional textures are layered in [Adobe’s] Photoshop,” says Poznanski. “A large part of the final effect can be attributed to Un-real’s powerful shader capabilities. We also can use the Fresnel effect, and breathe life into skin textures by emulating subsurface light scatter-ing, and create more 3D models using bump offset mapping, and even animate geometry using vertex shaders.”

At each step of the way, the character is tested in the game environment because it’s only after the artists see the character in the level with in-game lighting during actual gameplay that final adjustments and fixes can be tweaked.

“Does the character look distinctive? Does it have screen presence? Does it work well in

fast motion? Do detailed features work from a distance, or do they become meaningless noise?” asks Poznanski. “We are often forced to make significant changes at that stage, but when we’re done with them, then, and only then, can we finally say, ‘We no longer have just a character; we have a game character.’ ”

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Naughty Dog/Sony Computer Entertainment AmericaDeveloper Naughty Dog has pushed the idea of an interactive Hollywood action flick into new territory with the critically acclaimed Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. The group’s goal, says Hanno Hagedorn, lead artist at Naughty Dog, is to bring cinematic characters to life. The key focus is for these characters to deliver a believable performance in every way possible while meeting the studio’s high standards.

“An extremely high level of detail in our char-acters is crucial,” says Hagedorn. “Polygon counts can go up to 45,000, and texture resolutions up

to 4000 by 2000, not only in cut-scenes, but within the game itself. Some of our high-resolu-tion meshes went beyond the 100 million mark, which can be a challenge to work with. Despite all those numbers, the quality and believability of the final product purely comes down to what the artist is able to deliver.”

Naughty Dog begins with a concept that out-lines the major attributes of the character. For the characters’ faces, the artists use a mixture of concepts, reference photos, and photos of actors. Giving the game characters a rough resemblance of their actor counterparts helps with delivering a solid performance across the board.

When it comes to the look and personality of the characters, the artists work closely with creative director and writer Amy Hennig. In the end, it’s all about creating a character that fits and works with the story, notes Hagedorn. The Naughty Dog group uses motion capture as the base for the characters’ body animations, but all the facial performances are still 100 percent hand animated. “We’re actually proud of that fact,” he says. “Hand-animating facial movements goes along great with the stylized look of our characters and helps us avoid the biggest issues of the Uncanny Valley.”

When it comes to sculpting, the majority of the team use ZBrush, but some of the guys stick with Autodesk’s Mudbox. In the end, each artist picks his or her weapon of choice to deliver the best performance. For textur-ing, the artists at Naughty Dog use a mixture of Mudbox and Photoshop, and a little bit of ZBrush’s Polypaint once in a while. The abil-ity of Mudbox to display and paint on normal and specular maps can be a great help, too, Hagedorn adds.

“In general, we put a big emphasis on maintaining an artistic, hand-painted look,” says Hagedorn. “Therefore, using photos as textures is not the path that works for us the majority of the time.”

However, the artists sometimes use photo-realistic textures for minor surfaces, such as fabric patterns. The company’s shader system is hooked into Maya, enabling the artists to get a real-time preview of their shaders within Maya itself. The preview doesn’t take any post-processing effects into account, but it is close enough to ensure a sophisticated workflow, Hagedorn maintains. It also allows the group to dynamically select the resolution for each texture separately without having to re-export any assets. “Using this feature is a great help in optimizing our assets,” he adds.

To satisfy the technical directors and to get better skinning results, Naughty Dog uses quad-heavy in-game meshes. One side effect is

To build characters in its title Bulletstorm, the team at People Can Fly use a range of software, includ-ing ZBrush, Modo, Maya, and 3ds Max.

Images of the Ford Mustang* in this ad were created and provided by the Bandito Brothers studio.

Fortunately for fi lmmakers, animators, and other digital content producers, Adobe Creative Suite* 5 has been rewritten for just that purpose, and it can now take full advantage of all 24 threads that a two-processor, six-core Intel® processor-based system can deliver.

Bandito Brothers is a Los Angeles-based media company that uses the latest technology to create high-quality audio and visual content. Among its directors is Jacob Rosenberg, a fi lmmaker and author who in 1994 used software from Adobe Systems to build his own video editing system. For more than a decade since, he has been working with Adobe as a senior consultant on the continuing development of its video editing software

and has written and hosted numerous Adobe Premiere Pro* training DVDs.

Rosenberg, who also serves as the chief technology offi cer of Bandito Brothers, overseeing their Post-Production department, is considered a foremost expert in digital technology and its use in fi lm and video. He spoke with Intel® Visual Adrenaline about how the performance improvements in Creative Suite 5 have helped change the way his company manages its digital workfl ow, including making possible same-day edits and improved post-production processes, which ultimately helped to boost the company’s bottom line.

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TO GAIN THE FULL BENEFIT OF TODAY’S POWERFUL MULTI-CORE SYSTEMS, APPLICATIONS MUST BE CAPABLE OF DIVIDING TASKS INTO MULTIPLE THREADS AND HANDING THEM TO THE OPERATING SYSTEM FOR EXECUTION.


that the more evenly distributed polygons give good auto-LOD results. The other is that this, in combination with the polygon densities, al-lows the team to effectively use its in-game face meshes as its sculpting bases. As a result, the team can spend more time sculpting, thereby significantly easing various processes, such as the creation of wrinkle maps.

For Naughty Dog’s cinematic skin, the crew uses texture-space diffusion. The artists bake the lighting information into a separate map, which is blurred with different widths for the red, green, and blue channels. The blur kernel combines the five blurs into a single 12-tap blur. For hair, the studio uses the Kajiya-Kay hair-shading model, giving the hair its aniso-tropic look. The group then tweaks the shadow so that the hair does not self-shadow, but in-stead uses a diffuse falloff that wraps around the hair strands. The direction of the sun used for the specular is always set at a grazing angle.

According to Hagedorn, part of the game’s story is told with the look of the characters. Not only do they change outfits on a regular basis, but these characters sometimes become physically affected by what is happening to them as the narrative plays out. For some characters, Naughty Dog has as many as four different beat-up face textures. For each outfit, there is at least one dirty or beat-up variation. In addition, the characters can get dynamically wet or dynamically accumulate snow, also af-fecting their appearance in the title.

Mafia II 2K Games/2K CzechMafia II introduces a new cast of characters and an open world environment for players to explore through a 10-year journey that spans from the 1940s through 1950s in Mafia II.

The game introduces a colorful cast of young characters that enter the violent business of organized crime. According to Jack Scalici, director of creative production at 2K Games, who served as lead writer, music supervisor, casting director, and voice director for the title, one of the goals of the team was to bring these authentic-looking characters to life and build an emotional bond between the main charac-ters and the nonplayer characters that populate the New York-inspired city of Empire Bay.

“We examined each character’s reason for existing in the game, their relationships with one another, and we made some adjustments to ensure they all feel real and have a defined purpose,” explains Scalici. “From there, I start-ed working with the cast. The best thing you can do for your character is to cast a good actor and let him or her become that character. I end-ed up using the first draft of the script I was given as more of a blueprint than a script when it came to the characters and dialog. After the dialog was written, we still didn’t consider it 100 percent final. The guys at 2K Czech have some incredible tools, and they can respond to changes very fast, so I had the freedom to improvise during recording and to completely change certain scenes if they weren’t working out in terms of how they were intended.”

Joe Barbaro, who is protagonist Vito Scaletta’s best friend and wingman for most of Mafia II, was brought to life by actor Bobby Costanzo. Scalici describes Barbaro as the life of the party but someone who is going to end up in a fight by the end of the night. Although it might seem like there were Hollywood in-spirations for Mafia II, Scalici maintains that he did not watch any movies or TV shows to help craft these virtual characters.

“The development of Joe from what he

was at the start of the process to what he has now become is a result of me putting a lot of myself into him, along with little pieces of so many guys I knew growing up in New York,” says Scalici.“The Godfather is one of my favor-ite movies, but for this game, we wanted our characters to be real wise guys, not an idealized vision of what you see in that film. Plus, we certainly didn’t want them to be the stereo-types you see in so many movies.”

The team at 2K Czech used its proprietary Illusion Engine to bring these characters to life, while utilizing third-party middleware, such as Autodesk’s Kynapse for AI, PhysX for Physics simulation, and FaceFX for in-game facials. According to Denby Grace, senior pro-ducer on the title at 2K Games, this engine allowed the team to fully realize the vision for the game; as a result, the artists were able to provide a hugely detailed and destructible world that will load without the player incur-ring any wait time after entering the city.

“The main difference between Mafia I and Mafia II in terms of technology has been the dramatic increase of texture resolution and poly count (from hundreds to thousands),” explains Ivan Rylka, lead character artist on Mafia II at 2K Czech. “Civilian characters have 4000 triangles on average, while major characters exceed 6500 triangles; Vito, the protagonist, has nearly 10,000 triangles.”

This higher visual credibility was achieved through complicated shaders, as well as using normal maps for wrinkles and expressions, and facial animation through FaceFX technology. Rylka says that physically simulated cloth on a wide range of Vito’s outfits was also something the team couldn’t have done in Mafia I.

“During the process of character produc-tion, we also used ZBrush for high-res models, which gave us incredible detail to bake into the normal maps of our in-game models cre-ated in 3ds Max,” details Rylka.

Grace believes that this sequel ultimately benefited from a larger development budget, thanks to the success of the original title. That allowed the team to provide more depth for not only how these characters look, but how they behave in the game.

“Everyone who has played the game has said the same thing to me: Our characters feel like real wise guys, and the story has a mob feel and atmosphere that’s there in a big way,” relays Scalici. “What many of them don’t realize is that this is achieved without the characters ever using the words ‘respect’ and ‘honor,’ and when you hear the word ‘family’ in Mafia II, 99 per-cent of the time it’s the main character talking about his mother and sister. Like the first Mafia

Naughty Dog’s game Uncharted 2: Among Thieves brings the cinematic characters to interactive life. To do this successfully, the team made sure the characters delivered a compelling performance.


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game in 2002, Mafia II is not a story about the mafia. It’s the story of a regular guy who ends up in the mafia, and all the risks, rewards, and consequences that go along with it.”

Dead Space 2 Electronic Arts/Visceral GamesElectronic Arts brought gamers face to face with evil when they introduced Dead Space and its “strategic dismemberment” to shooters back in 2008. Following the 2009 Wii prequel with Dead Space: Extinction, the game gets its first sequel this winter with Dead Space 2. It’s been three years in game time since engineer Isaac Clarke faced off against the Necromorph monsters aboard the mining ship Ishimura in the original game, and since that time, tech-nological advances and upgrades to the Dead Space Engine have allowed the development team to further explore this protagonist. For one thing, players will actually see Clarke’s face and hear his voice for the first time.

“In the first game, Isaac always has his hel-met on, so there was no facial work necessar-ily,” says Ian Milham, art director for the Dead Space franchise. “This time, it’s a much more complicated rig. All the shaders have been punched up.”

According to Milham, Clarke’s helmet can fold away, revealing a full head underneath. He’s been given full mocap performances for his body, which now has more fluid, lifelike movement, and for his uncovered human face, which has the ability to emote. Milham said the team came up with this whole dynamic sys-tem for his helmet to fold away, so you could really play with that emotion on his face. “All the technology had to go up to match,” says Milham. “A lot of it wasn’t necessarily tech-nological advances as it was re-budgeting for a character that was much more complex and featured more bones, more shading, and more texture to support a fidelity of performance that is greater.”

The character also was given upgrades to its space suit for gameplay purposes. Players will now have full control of Clarke in zero-gravity

combat, so the suit has flaps, rakes, and jets that respond to player input. The visual up-grades to the suit are immediately recognizable and are the result of the pipeline that the team employed for the sequel. Because the world of Dead Space is rooted in reality, starting with the early-concept artist work, all the engineer-ing has to actually work and have real funda-mentals behind it.

“Rather than using CG to fake-transform how Isaac’s helmet folds up and away, we cre-ated engineering schematics so that the helmet actually works,” says Milham. He explains the process: “Those get passed to a modeler who does a high-res base model in Maya. It’s not all done in ZBrush because sometimes you’re just doing panel lines and that sort of business. That high-res base model in Maya is taken into ZBrush and up-res’d and done up com-pletely. Once that’s approved, a low res is done in Maya, and the normal maps off the ZBrush version are brought in. That gets passed off, and then a base set of textures is done for that. Next, a specific shader tech comes in and does the final shader punch-up. Our character’s pretty unique in that he has his health bars built in, so there’s actual gameplay informa-tion playing on the character. He has different helmet glows and things like that, so it goes through a whole technological pass before it is finaled up. Then it goes on to rigging, and everything else.”

Since Dead Space is a horror game, the envi-ronments the player will explore are dark and foreboding. Milham and his team are dealing with a world that tends to have a huge num-ber of lights that are moving, animating, and flickering, but they have relatively quick fall-offs. As a result, they have tweaked a lot of the shading for the character.

“Because Isaac’s suit is now more shiny and metallic, there’s much more stuff for those lights to chew on,” explains Milham. “That’s just as much thinking back to the design as it

was in the shading. We concentrated our new shader upgrading primarily on things that would pay off on a world that has a lot of light sources, as opposed to being outside where there is one sun. We’re on a spaceship with lots of blinking lights and lots of stuff moving around all the time.”

Part of that movement comes from the fact that this world—and those lights—are com-pletely destructible, which meant more work for the team to bring the causing effects to life as the player tears through these environments. This game employs live specularity and real-time reflections. In contrast, the original game used more canned content with prebaked environment maps or cubic enviro-mapping. The end result is a character that fully comes to life with a more realistic look and a new voice, whether he’s barking commands at his team or navigating the dark corridors, waiting to un-leash his weapons on the aliens.

Heavy RainQuantic DreamDeveloper Quantic Dream first pushed the envelope of interactive entertainment with its PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 title Indigo Prophecy in 2005. Since that time, the French-based developer focused on its dream project: Heavy Rain. This PlayStation 3 exclusive was created using the innovative new technology that allowed producer/writer David Cage and his team to utilize real actors to bring virtual characters to life.

The game introduces four unique characters that the player interacts with throughout the noir thriller: Ethan Mars, an architect suffer-ing from mental and emotional instability, journalist Madison Paige, FBI agent Norman Jayden, and private investigator Scott Shelby. Every decision that is made in the game di-rectly impacts the outcome of the story, which involves a missing boy and the hunt for the so-called Origami serial killer. As Cage explains,

The characters and their relationships with one another were vital to the story behind Mafia II. A mix of proprietary tools and middleware were used to create the protagonists and antagonists.


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these characters were critical to the gameplay: He wanted players to invest not only time, but also emotion, into them as they played through the game’s chapters.

“One of our ambitions was to create highly believable characters that look and move in a realistic fashion and express subtle emotions, captured from real actors’ performances,” says Thierry Prodhomme, lead character designer at Quantic Dream. “It necessitated rethinking the complete production pipeline and devel-oping specific techniques and tools that we then used.”

To ensure a cinematographic vision of this film-noir thriller, the studio built a character team comprising concept artists, fashion de-signers, and 3D artists. “Fashion designers were in charge of defining the mood and style of each character, concept artists provided turnarounds and proportions, and 3D artists produced the final models,” explains Christophe Brusseaux, art director at Quantic Dream.

Quantic Dream cast real actors to perform live acting, motion-capture shooting, and voice recording, and used 3D scans of actors’ faces. A cast of 70 actors worked on the mas-sive game, which required a record amount of work. The 3D scans were mostly used as tem-plates for the artists, who worked in Autodesk’s Maya. Accompanying photo sessions provided all the skin details in high resolution.

To model the characters, the group first re-surfaced low-resolution models of the faces with edge loops dedicated to facial deformations and animations. Then the artists created the high- resolution models in Pixologic’s ZBrush, unfold-ed UVs, and built the skin shader using specifi-cally developed proprietary tools.

“Our proprietary Materials Editor is based on a nodal shading network system similar to Maya Hypershade,” says Brusseaux. “With this

system, we can easily create a lot of complex shaders, in particular, skin shaders, including SSS, translucency, and thickness.”

To bring Heavy Rain’s characters to life, Quantic Dream built an in-house mocap studio. There, the team filmed multiple ac-tors on stage at the same time using props and basic sets. For the characters’ bodies, the crew used motion-captured data as a reference for building volumes and proportions. An initial skeleton was built for producing a body place-holder used by the animation team as a first reference and by the 3D artists for creating the final body model.

When the animators completed the basic skinning, they built an exoskeleton for each model: This additional skeleton was driven by the main skeleton, and contains automatic expressions, enabling special behaviors and in-creasing the quality of the mesh deformation.

For the faces, the group used only raw mo-cap data captured in the company’s sound studio at the same time of the voice acting. A special marker set was used to capture the face movements, while for the body motion, the crew used 1.5mm markers along with a Vicon setup that includes 14 MX cameras.

“For aesthetical reasons, we didn’t use blendshapes, as these often look too robotic,” says Prodhomme. “We focused on capturing raw mocap data to avoid heavy post anima-tion work, which also retained the maximum information from the original performance of the actor.”

The animators also produced a special rig that handles 76 base bones for the body, 105 for the face, and 60 for the exoskeleton.

To enhance the characters’ appearances, the team used Havok Cloth to dynamically simulate certain clothing, such as long trench coats, as well as hair and special props.

On traditional shots, the team used classical light setups for direc-tional, spot, and ambient lighting. However, Brusseaux noticed dur-ing the production that specific, highly cinematic, close-up shots required a higher quality of light-ing. To solve this issue, Quantic Dream’s R&D team developed a specific tool to manage the special lights with high resolution, inte-grating the technology into the real-time directing bench used by the camera team to set all in-game cameras and to “direct,” among other segments, the real-time, in-game cinematic sequences.

“Technology, tools, and pipe-

lines have greatly evolved during the past few years to allow us to create highly believable characters,” says Brusseaux. “The time when artists alone were crafting characters and ani-mating them is probably over. By using scan-ning and motion-capture technologies, as well as through the use of advanced shading, skinning, and lighting tools, we were able to capture the performance of real actors, produce highly realistic characters, and bring them to life in a way that, we think, has further pushed the boundaries of emotion in games.”

Given the success of the game and the ability for the team to avoid the Uncanny Valley criticism that has even plagued some Hollywood CG films in recent years, Quantic Dream’s pipeline has solved many problems and opened up a new doorway into character creations. By utilizing real actors and adding another layer of emotion to this game, the stu-dio has pushed the boundaries of interactive entertainment.

And Quantic Dream is not resting on its laurels; the studio is already working on its next project, and as the game industry looks ahead to the next generation of hardware, this pipeline will breathe life into even more be-lievable virtual characters in the near future.

Playing With CharacterAt the end of the day, many of today’s video-game characters have become as well rounded as anything seen on the big screen or on televi-sion. Technology has given the current genera-tion of artists and character creators the ability to craft unique heroes, heroines, and villains using the methods that they prefer.

Ultimately, whether using motion capture or cel shading, these characters are leaving an indelible mark not only in gaming, but in the broader entertainment landscape. Hollywood has taken notice, developing big-screen ver-sions of games like Gears of War, WarCraft, Uncharted, Dead Space, and EverQuest. Jerry Bruckheimer elected to turn Prince of Persia into a summer movie—and potential fran-chise—because of the character and story that Jordan Mechner created with Ubisoft.

Moving forward, these more believable game characters will more easily migrate across media. As gamers already know, one of the reasons is because many of these characters stay with players long after the power button has been turned off. n

John Gaudiosi has been covering the world of video games and the convergence of Hollywood and computer graphics for the past 16 years for outlets like The Washington Post, Wired Magazine, Reuters, AOL Games, and Gamerlive.tv.

Isaac’s suit in Dead Space 2 features a fold-away helmet to reveal the character’s emotion, which is apparent in his face.


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By Karen Moltenbrey

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Under the lush canopy of the Amazon rain forest is a vibrant ecosystem teeming with life of all variation and size. Amazonia, as it is often called, is home to more than two million insect spe-cies, three thousand types of fish, 1300 kinds of birds, almost 400 variations of reptiles, and just as many amphibians and mammals. From the outside, the environment—wrapped in bright

shades of green, from the tops of the great trees to the thick, lush jungle floor, and speckled with the rich, primary colors of its inhabit-

ants—is playful and inviting. But looks can be deceiving, as a pair of tree frogs soon discover in the animated CG short film “Amazonia.” Creating this green environment, along with the creatures

that live there, was Sam Chen, who directed the five-minute short. Unlike the main characters in the movie, who partner on a

dining adventure through the rain forest, Chen opted to embark on the moviemaking journey alone, scripting the story line, crafting and animating

the characters, and building the environments. However, he did receive as-sistance from Jamey Scott when it came to adding sound to the picture, col-laborating with his longtime sound designer and composer to add sound effects and give “voice” to the characters.

“The genesis of ‘Amazonia’ came to me while I was in the middle of a Beethoven and Stravinsky symphony concert,” recalls Chen. “As I closed my

eyes and let the music transport me, I started to see images in my head of frogs running around with big critters chasing them. Then the scene blossomed into

wild colors, dance, and song. I thought to myself that this must have been similar to what Walt [Disney] imagined in his mind when he first thought of doing ‘Fantasia’ back in the 1940s.”

Based on this experience, Chen decided to set the animation to music from Beethoven, and would later narrow down the selection.

A techie by education and an artist by trade, Chen graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering, though he found his passion more than 20 years ago as a 3D animator. As such, he has earned industry recognition as a veteran animation filmmaker, first with his short film “Eternal Gaze,” an exceptionally moving portrayal of the work of sculptor Alberto Giacometti, for which Chen won the top award at the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater in 2003 (see “Character Studies,” August 2003).

“One of my dreams since attending UCLA as a computer science major specializing in computer graphics was to be a part of SIGGRAPH’s Computer Animation Festival and Electronic Theater,” says Chen. Having found so much success there in the past with “Eternal Gaze,” as well as with “Piccolo’s Encore” (1999) and “Cat Ciao” (2000), Chen chose the conference’s animation festival to debut his newest short.

Chen completed the movie just in time for the festi-

CG animator/filmmaker Sam Chen single-handedly created the colorful CG short “Amazonia,” about two tree frogs embarking on a culinary adventure in the rain forest.

A pair of frogs discover the meaning of survival of the fittest in the whimsical animated short ‘Amazonia,’ created solely on notebook computers

By Karen Moltenbrey

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val this past July in Los Angeles, though work on “Amazonia” began in mid-2006, after he had completed the film festival circuit with “Eternal Gaze.” “At a running time of five minutes, that’s just a little over one minute of finished footage per year,” Chen says, adding with a chuckle, “I know, I’m a slacker.” Per-haps that would be true had the filmmaker focused solely on this project rather than working on it when he could between other jobs (teaching, freelancing, and so forth). This schedule, though, kept him from growing tired of the film.

While many artists stick to a certain anima-tion style, that was certainly not the case for Chen. In fact, “Amazonia” is at the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum from “Eternal Gaze.” While “Eternal Gaze” was dark, grun-gy, and set in gloomy black and white, “Ama-zonia” is vibrant and color-rich. “While some think ‘Amazonia’ is a big departure stylistically from my previous film, in reality, it was a re-turn to my roots of making fun and wacky CG shorts in the style of Looney Tunes cartoons, which I devoured everyday after school while growing up in San Diego,” says Chen.

In terms of production, Chen’s pipeline has not changed much, either. He has used the same tools more or less for the past 10 years, but be-cause of Moore’s Law and the advancements in powerful and affordable hardware, he was able to achieve much more with considerably less. For “Amazonia,” this meant doing something that most others would not dare to attempt: creating the short film using laptop computers (see “Mobile Moviemaking,” pg. 32).

Jungle JingleIn the whimsical, fun-filled animated short, two buddy tree frogs named Bounce and Biggy

team up on a culinary quest for food through the Amazon rain forest. But things quickly go awry when the proverbial hunters become the hunted. Take all these high jinks and set them to Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 8” (second movement), and you have “Amazonia.”

“It’s heavily inspired by the physical humor of Looney Tunes cartoons and the musical grace of ‘Fantasia,’ ” describes Chen.

As a one-man show, it’s always daunting and nerve-wracking when starting any new projects, Chen points out. “So during pre-production, I had to convince myself that the premise would work,” he says. To that end, the filmmaker relied heavily on previs to time out the story beats and gags, and to help him choose which piece of music to use. And to create the previs, he employed Autodesk’s Maya 8.0, along with Canopus’s Edius 3.0 for cutting.

Once Chen settled on Beethoven’s “Sym-phony No. 8,” he used early, non-textured models of his characters and moved them around the bare sets like chess pieces, block-ing out key storytelling positions and gags. Says Chen, “The important questions I asked myself at this early point were: How’s the story flowing? How are the actions cutting? What is the pacing and rhythm as they’re layered on top of the music?”

The previs gave Chen the answers he need-ed, convincing him that the story was sound and the project worth pursuing.

What CharactersThe short features a number of animal charac-ters and their habitats, whether it is land, water, or air, including a crotchety crocodile, an an-noyed anaconda, a bothered bee, and more—in addition, of course, to the main characters, the two fun-loving, albeit hungry, amphibians.

Before designing the characters, Chen studied quite a few nature books and imag-ery, building up his own library of tree frog, alligator, snake, and insect images. “The chal-lenge was to take these designs away from the realistic and toward the caricature and the car-toony, without losing the essence of the actual animals and creatures they were based on,” he explains. “The goal was to hit the sweet spot in the middle for maximum character appeal.”

While Chen considers his character designs unique, with a signature look, he notes that they are Pixar-inspired. “I’ve always been a big fan of [Pixar’s] character facial and eye designs in the way they’re able to convey so much emo-tion and appeal, all the while still resembling the animals or characters they’re based on,” he explains. “Because my story hinged on the physical comedy between the two hero charac-ters, Bounce and Biggy, even the size and color relation between them borrowed slightly from Mike and Sully in Monsters, Inc.”

To create the cast—which included ap-proximately 10 primary and more than 30 supporting characters—Chen again used Maya. “The [previs] footage was used mainly as a timing guide for creating the shot list and to inform the editorial process,” he explains. “So almost every animation curve was redone from scratch for the film.”

Most of the characters were built using a combination of polygons and NURBS. “As someone who started in 3D using Alias’ Power-Animator, I tend to prefer using NURBS for much of my organic character modeling,” Chen says. For more complicated NURBS shapes, he found the need to stitch and attach patch surfaces cumbersome and unreliable. So Chen started exploring Maya’s subdivision surfaces, which he found to have some perfor-mance limitations, as well. As a result, Chen taught himself organic modeling using poly-gons, a solution he calls “fast and reliable.”

“With Maya’s ability to polysmooth at will, anytime more smoothness was needed, there was less reason to use NURBS,” Chen relays. For some of the characters, such as the wasps and damselflies, where their thorax, abdomen, antennas, limbs, and wings were segmented and mostly cylindrical, he still found it advan-tageous to use NURBS for modeling because of their simplicity and their ability to be mold-ed easily by pushing and pulling very few CVs. “One of the features I love about Maya is its brush-based sculpt geometry modeling tool, formerly called ‘artisan.’ This tool provided a quick way to mold and shape organic charac-ters without having to jump out to [Pixologic] ZBrush or [Autodesk] Mudbox,” he adds.

The frogs encounter a number of characters in the film, including this seething snake. All the charac-ters were modeled and animated in Maya using a combination of polygons and NURBS.

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In the end, most of the hero characters were given a relatively moderate polygon count—50,000 to 100,000 quad polygons—to facilitate animation and rendering time. For texturing the characters, Chen hand- unwrapped the UVs the old-fashioned way using Maya’s texture UV editor, occasionally utilizing projected UV mapping and relax UVs to even out overlapping UVs. Using Adobe’s Photoshop CS3, he then hand-painted the surfaces and “blend-mode-layered them” over organic tex-tures from photographic sources. For example, the mottled look of the frog skin was achieved by using zucchini skin as the base layer.

At times, procedural 3D textures were ap-plied to quickly add noise and shading variation to the characters. While Biggy’s skin was rather generic in its design, Bounce’s skin was closely based on the natural coloration and patterns of the popular red-eyed tree frogs of the Amazon. With its distinctive yellow stripes over bluish-purple patches, along with vast areas of green and white, Bounce’s skin texture needed to be familiar yet customized to make him appeal-ing as an animated CG character. To this end, the filmmaker generated individual texture maps for the color, specular, and bump chan-nels, with the occasional map for transparency

and reflectivity. The maps were limited to no more than 2k x 2k pixels in order to minimize memory issues during rendering.

Once Chen finished with modeling, he had to rig the broad range of characters for opti-mum articulation and performance during animation. To facilitate the rigging process, he used Anzovin Studio’s The Setup Machine, which automated many of the redundant and

tedious tasks for the bipedal and quadrupedal characters, including those with tails. How-ever, for the less-anthropomorphic characters, like the snake, wasps, and scorpions, he made the rigs from scratch and custom-skinned them to each model. For the facial rigging, he stud-ied medical textbooks to better understand which human facial muscles are responsible for which human emotions, and rigged the char-acters accordingly using mostly Maya’s influence objects as deformers. For squash and stretch, he used lattice deformers to apply non-uniform deformation to all the main characters.

Chen simulated the characters’ breath-ing by using non-uniform scaling of selected bones created by The Setup Machine. He paid particular attention to engineering fine shape controls, especially for the character eyelids, eyebrows, and lips, in order to achieve the expressions and emotions required by the story. Meanwhile, he used sculpt deformers for special effects, such as when Bounce was swallowing his food and the bulge can be seen descending down into his belly. “One big lesson I learned from making this film is that caterpillar characters are very hard to rig cor-rectly, let alone animate properly,” Chen points out. “So, avoid caterpillars!”

Moving to the BeatAlthough Chen has been animating success-fully for many years, he wanted to take the process to a higher level with “Amazonia.” So, before embarking on the animation for the short, the filmmaker re-educated himself in this area, investing a good deal of time and effort re-learning the fundamentals. “I re-read Richard Williams’ Animator’s Survival Kit and focused

on getting the fundamentals—like overlapping actions, anticipation, arcs, strong poses, exag-geration, timing, and appeal—rock-solid,” he says. “Most animators are familiar with these basic principles of animation in their early years of education, but it takes a lifetime to learn how to apply them artfully. It is all too common for CG animators today to rush into their 3D soft-ware and start moving characters around aim-lessly because it is easy to do.”

By prolonging the storyboarding and thumb-nailing process in pencil and delay-ing work on the computer, Chen could try out rough ideas quickly and cheaply on paper first. The results were apparent. “I noticed that whenever I did due diligence and planned character expressions, poses, and gags thor-oughly on paper first, the end result invariably turned out stronger and better when translated to CG,” Chen says.

One of the benefits of applying strong prin-ciples of 2D animation to CG is that the ani-mation tends to loosen up and feel “more free,” Chen maintains. To support that statement, he points to the concept known as “breaking the joints,” which is used traditionally in 2D to give character animation more snap and im-pact. “Such exaggeration translated beautifully to CG when the rigs could be pushed beyond their breaking point,” Chen says. “Given the creative license to channel Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, I made sure to capitalize on any opportunity for exaggeration whenever a gag called for it. The more the rigs were pushed, the funnier the characters got.”

Chen used Maya for all the character anima-tion, following the 80/20 rule: “Although it’s not too difficult to take a given animation 80 percent of the way, the last 20 percent can take twice as long to achieve and drive one to insan-ity,” Chen says. Therefore, the filmmaker de-cided early on that he needed to budget enough time to strive for the last 20 percent “because that’s where characters came alive and became most believable and appealing.” Alas, that trans-lated into many long hours of finessing curves in Maya’s graph editor and lots of keyframe nudging in the dope sheet. This was particularly taxing due to the sheer number of shots Chen had to animate on his own (there are 99 shots in “Amazonia”).

“My unwavering commitment to meeting this goal was largely responsible for adding at least one year to the production schedule,” Chen points out.

Chen also spent a great deal of time animat-ing the characters’ eyes. Because the eyes are the window to a character’s soul, he made sure to pay a lot of attention to eye-dart animation,

The filmmaker spent a good deal of time in preproduction, using Maya and Edius to make sure the story and timing were on the mark, such as in these scenes as Bounce sizes up a delectable scorpion.


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and ensure that eye blinks were placed in just the right spots to add life and reflect what the characters were feeling. “It’s a lot of super-fine-tuning of animation timing and spacing in order to take a character’s performance some-where special,” Chen adds. One character in particular—Spike the caterpillar—proved es-pecially daunting, mostly due to the inherent complexity of this bug’s morphology and lo-comotion. With no real shortcut to animating a multisegmented rig with a complex network of IK interdependency, Chen had to hand-animate each segment, foot, and appendage to arc, overlap, and stagger properly—“another reason to avoid caterpillar characters in the future,” he says.

For some of the sight gags, Chen video-taped himself performing the physical acting and poses, which he used as video reference during animation. He also used a Webcam to capture his own face while acting out every facial expression that the script required. He then turned this information into a visual li-brary and chart for quick referencing during facial animation.

“Having actually gone through the physi-cal rigor of performing the film’s actions benefited the film tremendously by helping me get into the heads of the characters so I could better channel their spirit and motiva-tion,” Chen adds. “I didn’t merely animate the characters, I had to become the characters.”

Environmentally Un-friendlyThe environments of “Amazonia” are rife with flowers and plants. Chen modeled and tex-tured the former in Maya using a combination of NURBS and polygons, while for certain tropical plants, he used a stock model library to save time. All the flora models were rigged

with bones and Maya hair for animation, and the filmmaker set up dynamic simulation us-ing turbulence fields. Later, he omitted the sim after determining that the leaves rustling in the wind were not absolutely necessary in terms of story, choosing instead to put the time into character animation and storytelling. (The swaying palm leaves in the beginning of the film resulted from hand animation.)

To produce the lush, vibrant backdrop, Chen used photographic textures of real plants mixed with procedural textures created in Maya, making sure the plants always looked hyper-real rather than merely photoreal. “It was important to establish and maintain a slightly fantastical feeling of a cartoon, while providing a rich and believable backdrop to all the characters,” he explains.

To achieve a back-lit luminescence to the leaves, Chen conducted early tests using sub-surface scattering in combination with pro-jected-texture spotlighting. It turned out that a similar effect could be achieved through the careful use of the much faster translucency at-tribute of the plant shaders.

One of the obvious challenges of re-creat-ing a rain forest in CG is the sheer number of plants and leaves that are required in any given scene. In order to animate in real time and render efficiently without running out of RAM, Chen carefully divided the environ-ment scenes into categories of varying impor-tance—from hero and midground plants, to background plants and terrain.

The scenes, meanwhile, were lit with Men-tal Images’ Mental Ray, integrated into Maya. “In my many years of making CG films, I learned that the key to success in lighting and rendering is to always look and aim for the point where you achieve the best-quality

images without the prohibitively long render times,” advises Chen. “This is especially true for independent films without the big studio production budgets.”

Therefore, rather than choosing global il-lumination and photon-casting, Chen opted instead for final gathering, using HDRI for the image-based lighting. This created a soft bounced-light look by filling in the shadow areas while providing a warmth and richness, with realistic reflections, to the overall scene. He also chose a highly blurred HDRI texture of a sky and tree scene, which, after some color balancing, provided an ideal blend of light and shade for the desired rain forest look.

After establishing the indirect lighting, Chen used mostly Maya spotlights as key, fill, rim, and kicker lights, to punch up the scene and make the characters pop and stand out from the background. He avoided any use of ambient and point lights, while occasionally utilizing area lights to quickly flood certain areas with even lighting. Hand-painted go-bos and cookies were mapped to certain key lights to cast yet another layer of richness and shading to the sets. This was especially effec-tive when characters would move about the rain forest environment and appear to swim through the projected shadows, just like in the real world.

Chen averaged between 10 and 20 lights per scene, and these were mainly spotlights. “The ability of a spotlight to focus its cone of illumination and its falloff with a high degree of control meant there was little need for light-linking and dedicated lights, which made troubleshooting lighting problems much easier,” he explains. Spotlights were also used as dedicated kicker lights to add accents and seasoning wherever required. Shadows, mean-while, were completely depth-map-based, without any raytraced shadows.

“Being mindful of the old adage ‘Keep it simple, Stupid’ certainly kept this do-it-your-self production from bloating to something unwieldy and unmanageable,” Chen notes.

Post WorkFor rendering, Chen used Mental Ray. But in an unusual move, the entire film was ren-dered not using a renderfarm, but a squadron of energy-efficient HP notebook computers. By dividing and conquering, Chen broke up scenes into foreground, hero, background, and extreme background layers for faster and more reliable rendering. “This minimized the need to halt production in order to trouble-shoot memory optimization issues common in Mental Ray rendering,” he adds. Within

To save time while rigging the characters, Chen used The Setup Machine, which automates the pro-cess for some of the bipeds and quadrupeds. Other less-anthropomorphic characters, like the wasps and snakes, were rigged by hand.


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those layers, Chen made render passes for the color, ambient occlusion, and luminance-depth channels for compositing later in Adobe After Effects.

When Chen began working on “Ama-zonia,” he had just returned from screening “Eternal Gaze” in theaters, and with the coun-try moving to high def, he realized that this new film would need to be HD-ready. “From an independent CG filmmaker’s point of view, this was quite daunting because rendering at 1080p equated to almost seven times more pixels to render and composite than NTSC SD,” he says. “So I decided to make a reasonable compromise and render to HD 720p instead, and still use off-the-shelf notebook PCs with standard hardware. And the benefits were worth the trade-off: Most frames took between 10 and 60 minutes to render on two- and four-core systems.

With the imagery rendered, it was time put it all together. According to Chen, in the early days of his CG film-making career, compositing was either not done at all or was at best an after-thought, “as it was yet another time-consum-ing phase in the impossibly long and chal-lenging CG pipeline.” However, the art form progressed by leaps and bounds in recent years, and, as Chen points out, it is now almost un-imaginable to create a CG short without the luxury and freedom to make changes and to further enhance and mold a shot in post.

“Now, I design and create shots fully with post in mind,” Chen says. “I liken CG post to the darkroom of the traditional chemical film photographer, like Ansel Adams, who took a negative and, through the magic of tried-and-true darkroom techniques and his famed Zone System, was able to coax out an impossibly beautiful work of photographic art. Such was the case in my approach to creating a typical shot in ‘Amazonia.’ ”

It’s difficult to believe from looking at the finished film, but Chen admits that the raw shots that came directly from Maya were quite flat and not too interesting artistically. However, when the imagery was combined and layered in After Effects, he was able to experiment with different looks and schemes, all without re-rendering. After individual layers were gamma-corrected and the levels adjusted, they were composited with other layers (such as ambient occlusion and other foreground and background elements) until a semblance of a shot came together. Then the fun part began.

“At this point, the luminance-depth layer

During the past year or so, mobile computers—both suped-up laptops and mobile workstations—have made quite an impact in the professional DCC space, offer-ing a viable alternative to desktop machines. But can they take the place of their tethered big brothers? In many case, the answer is “yes,” as animator/filmmaker Sam Chen discovered while making his CG short film “Amazonia.”

During pre-production in 2006, Chen had used a couple of high-performance Windows XP workstations custom-made by Verari, and a Dell laptop. Both were quite effective at the time, allowing him to previs his entire film with relative ease.

As pre-production pro-gressed into production and then postproduc-tion, computers became faster, and all of a sud-den, a 64-bit 4gb quad-core laptop could be pur-chased for approximately $1000.

“It was quite an em-powering and revolution-ary day for the proverbial independent CG film-maker,” says Chen. So

much so that he quickly made the switch entirely to HP Pavilion notebook com-puters for his entire CG pipeline—from animation all the way to lighting, rendering, and compositing, as well as final HD video editing.

Chen used consumer-grade HP Pavilion dv7-1247cl 64-bit AMD Turion sys-tems with ATI HD3200 graphics chips as well as the much faster HP dv7-2270us 64-bit Intel Quad Core 2 with an ATI HD4650, and the newer HP dv7 64-bit Intel Core i5-450M with an Nvidia GeForce G 105M graphics card. All the systems sported 4gb of RAM. “Not only have my electric bills gone down dramatically, but the systems ran cool and quiet in my small home studio,” he attests. “Now, when I turn on the older desktop workstations, they seem unbearably loud and hot in comparison.”

Using only laptops for the entire production pipeline has reaped mostly positive results, according to Chen. “When I suffered from cabin fever, I loved the fact that I could take my entire production pipeline to a coffee house and work there, with very little compromise.”

What was the downside? The few negatives Chen cited were the generally slower hard drives that ship standard with these systems—sometimes 7200 rpm isn’t quite fast enough for video editing. “Even with the advancements in hardware technology, uncompressed HD video editing still requires RAID and other fast, dedicated hard drives to perform in real time,” he says. “Rendering to HD 720p instead of 1080p lightened the load a little, so I could still use off-the-shelf note-book PCs with standard hardware.”

Furthermore, most mobile upgrades, such as RAM, and hard drives are more expensive than their counterparts for desktop systems. Indeed, you will always be able to find faster and cheaper parts made for the desktop, but Chen found that the trade-offs were well worth it in retrospect.

“I have found that the HP notebook PCs are desktop-replacement systems capable of empowering the independent CG filmmaker with enough horsepower to produce professional-quality CG films,” Chen says. “I am proud that I made a CG film almost entirely using only notebook computers. I hope my film can set a positive example and help usher in a kindler and greener way of making CG films in the future.” –Karen Moltenbrey

Mobile Moviemaking


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was brought in and the levels adjusted for maxi-mum dynamic range,” Chen explains. Then he used the Frischluft Lenscare After Effects plug-in, crafting the camera depth-of-field effect us-ing the grayscale depth information. “Being a big fan of National Geographic and Planet Earth videos, I wanted ‘Amazonia’ to have a nature-photography look, whereby backgrounds are often blown out and appear painterly and im-pressionistic due to the extremely shallow depth of field,” he adds.

Atmospheric haze in the humid rain forest often created areas of light bloom and glow in the brightest parts of the image, along with distinctive bokeh highlights in the back-ground. All these effects in the Z-axis resulted in proper separation and depth between the layers, and effectively controlled where the audience’s eye should be focused. In some scenes, Chen used rack-focusing to bring the attention from the background characters to those in the foreground.

RE:Vision Effect’s ReelSmart motion-blur plug-in helped smooth out all the fast- action sequences and bring a professional pol-ish to the entire film. “The end product is a testament to the importance of reliable post-production tools in helping a one-man project cross the finish line with high-quality results and on schedule,” says Chen.

Once Chen rendered and composited the HD 720p frames, he output them as uncom-pressed QuickTime movie clips using the ani-mation codec. Then, he transferred them into Sony Vegas Pro for editing and mastering at 30 fps. Mastering to DVD and Blu-ray was done in Sony DVD Architect Pro. “After I switched from the workstations to the notebook PCs, I used Sony Vegas exclusively,” he adds.

Going SoloIn “Amazonia,” Bounce and Biggy benefit from their teamwork. Chen, though, had to face his challenges alone. “The most challenging part about being a one-man show is trying to stay fo-cused and passionate about the project for four long years,” he says. “Whenever I was traveling, vacationing, or working on freelance projects for clients, it meant that zero work was getting done. There was no one to tag-team with, no work to pass along to keep the momentum going. After returning to the film even after a short hiatus meant a few days of low productiv-ity while I struggled to regain my bearings and resume forward momentum.”

On a more practical level, whenever com-puter systems fried and hard drives crashed—“and there were many instances,” according to Chen—he was unable to appoint someone to do system administration. “The production would often come to a grinding halt, requir-ing me to switch from a filmmaker’s hat to that of a computer systems engineer, and roll up my sleeves for a day of technical trouble-shooting. It was maddening at times,” he says. However, thanks to his computer science engi-neering degree and work experience at Silicon Graphics, the filmmaker was in a much better position to address those problems than other filmmakers would have been.

Without the support of an R&D depart-ment or tool engineers meant that Chen had to occasionally write MEL scripts to perform certain tasks within Maya. For the most part, though, he kept his solutions off-the-shelf. “At times, I improvised and created my own unique systems mainly because there was nothing available at the time,” Chen says. “For instance, my character facial rigs were com-

posed of a system of Maya bones, influence objects, wire deformers, and lattices working together in concert to shape a given character’s facial expression. It is most likely similar to ex-isting facial systems out there today, but I had to invent it along the way as I needed it.”

While Chen shouldered the work all by himself, that is not what he had planned when he embarked on his jungle trek. “I believe in collaborating with artists who share a common vision and a common passion for excellence. Nothing is more exciting than being part of a world-class team producing amazing CG work,” he says. “Having said that, when I set out to create ‘Amazonia,’ I didn’t meet anyone who shared the same passion as I had who didn’t already have a demanding job creat-ing feature animation or commercial work in high-pressure environments. A few actually ex-pressed interest early on but gradually dropped out as the workload ramped up. So I marched onward, hoping to come across other collabo-rators. Before I knew it, four years had gone by, and I found myself standing on the summit of the figurative Mount Everest alone.”

Nevertheless, the filmmaker was determined to bring Bounce and Biggy to life. “As with most ambitious independent film projects, the goal of ‘Amazonia’ was merely to cross the finish line alive,” Chen says. “As my own harshest critic, I also wanted the end result to be excellent, and something I would be proud of. It might sound like a cliché, but I’ve always believed that if I set the bar extra high for myself, and I reached it, then everything would take care of itself.”

Indeed it has. A crowd-pleaser at SIG-GRAPH’s Computer Animation Festival, “Amazonia” currently is enjoying a world tour of the film festival circuit (having just won an Audience Award at a venue in Europe), leaving little time for Chen to enjoy the fruit of his labor. Once that is over, will Chen breathe life into yet another uniquely styled project? “I’m excited about getting right back into creating, animating, and visual storytelling,” he says. “This time, I’m looking forward to collaborat-ing with fellow artists on anything that catches my attention. This can either be in feature animation, turning my short into a feature, or even game animation and cinematics. I’m keeping my options open in case opportuni-ties come knocking. In the meantime, I’m go-ing to enjoy the wild and unpredictable ride.”

And just as Bounce and Biggy chased their culinary dreams, so, too, did Chen. The end result: A CG feast for the eyes and the soul. n

Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics World.

To create the lush, colorful environment in “Amazonia,” the artist mixed procedural textures with photographic textures, making sure that the plants looked hyper-real, not photoreal.

S ome short films build around a story arc—a beginning, middle, and end. For others, an interesting character, or perhaps a conflict, drives the concept. Teddy Newton’s stunningly original short “Day&Night,” on the other hand, began as a doodle and grew into a metaphor.

“I was drawing a keyhole,” Newton says. “I added a couple eye-balls, and it kind of looked like a guy. I wasn’t creating an animated film. It was just a gag.”

A gag until Pixar producer Kevin Reher (“Partly Cloudy,” A Bug’s Life) suggested that Newton pitch a short film. Newton had been a character designer for Pixar’s Oscar-nominated short film “Presto,” Ratatouille, and The Incredibles, a development artist for Up, and had help write the short “Jack-Jack Attack.” Before joining Pixar, he was a development artist for Osmosis Jones and The Iron Giant, and co-wrote and co-produced the mock-1950s public education film The Trouble with Lou. But, he hadn’t yet directed a film. With that oppor-tunity now staring him in the face, Newton remembered the keyhole drawings and thought he might be able to do something with them.

“I didn’t have a story,” Newton says. “But, I knew we were in-terested in [stereo] 3D movies. And the idea of looking through a keyhole seemed like a practical idea to pitch in 3D because you’d be looking into a world.” So, the keyhole doodle became a theme. Then, Newton imagined having two keyholes. “Like looking through binoculars,” he says, “but, with one eye nighttime and the other eye daytime.”

When Newton imagined putting two “keyhole” characters side by side, and using them to reveal the different times of day, the theme began to grow into a story. He wasn’t convinced, however, that the characters could do more than provide a window into 3D worlds. “If I set them in motion, there would be so many things to look at, I’d have to be careful where the [audiences’] eyes go,” he says.

So, Newton created walk cycles for the hand-drawn characters, put photographs inside the “keyholes,” that is, the inside of the characters’ line drawings, and looked at the result through stereo 3D glasses. “It convinced me,” he says. “I thought the characters

could walk along and reveal what they were walking against. I had an idea that they would meet, and I wanted them to change in a sunset moment in the end.” He turned a few of his ideas into a presentation—Day waking up, Day and Night fighting, and the characters going into the sunset at the end—and pitched his idea.

“I showed it to John [Lasseter], and it was the fastest green light to a film at Pixar,” Newton says. “I didn’t even make it through the whole presentation. John said, ‘Well, I guess this is the one we’re going to put on top of Toy Story.’ ”

Newton then began coming up with scenes he could use within Day and Night. “Fireworks, a girl on the beach, what-ever,” he says. “We wanted them to be qualities of the character’s inner world. Once I had a couple dozen, I filtered out the best ones, the ones I would showcase and that would catch the other character’s attention.”

Normally a short has two sets, not many more. Newton ended up with 18 different CG sets, that is, 18 little CG movies stitched together into backgrounds. “That was unprecedented for a Pixar short,” he says.

Waking UpThe film begins with Day, waking up. He is a 2D line drawing on a black background. Inside, he has a strip of green on the bottom and blue above—grass and sky. Birds chirp. He stretches, and animated clouds move into the blue sky. He scratch-es, and we hear a cow moo; he bends over, and we hear thunder. He ambles sleepily toward the right, then more hurriedly. And then quickly sits. We hear running water and see water spilling from a water-


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Images courtesy Pixar.

fall into a stream below. When he stands up and stretches, a horse neighs. Now fully awake, he strides jauntily, arms swinging, toward the right of the screen. Birds fly through the sky. When joggers run across the grassy field, he looks down and smiles.

And then he walks past a sleeping character, a hand-drawn char-acter identical to him, but filled with darker blue and darker green. Inside this character, sheep are jumping over a fence. Day pokes him, and Night wakes up. The two characters circle each other warily. When they stop, Night on the left and Day on the right, we hear frogs croak and an owl call. A songbird chirps, and Day pokes Night in the belly. Night wakes up and pushes Day. Day pushes back. They don’t like each other; they don’t accept their differences. They wrestle.

Through the film, the three-dimensional, animated world inside each character reflects their emotions. Day has a sun, Night has a moon. When Night sees a butterfly fluttering inside Day, he shows Day fireflies. Day counters with a rainbow. Night shoots fireworks. They continue one-upping each other. And then, Day shows Las Ve-gas in the daytime, and Night turns on the neon. Night joyfully grabs Day. They dance, and the characters become a metaphor.

“A lot of times people see someone, or not even a per-son, that’s extremely different,” Newton says. “It chal-

lenges their world a bit. You feel protective of your

routines and what you do, and you don’t want to be influenced too much by another person’s way. But if you learn a little more about the person or custom, you might get excited about the unknown.”

Creating the CharactersA team that fluctuated from 25 to 50 worked on the film, with six animators creating the hand-drawn characters. Newton, who had drawn the 2D titles for Ratatouille, penciled many of the drawings on paper, with supervising animator Tom Gately providing most of the key poses.

“It wasn’t so much like drawing a character and sending it into the world, like in Roger Rabbit,” Newton says. “It was framing a background with a character’s body. We had to be real specific about where we placed the character so we could frame the back-ground without having trees poking through the eyeballs.”

While the characters moved, the elements in the 3D background inside the character moved as well—wind blew, water poured, characters ran through the scene. Sometimes, though, the charac-ters would hold a pose while the background animation carried on. If the animators worried that the characters were sedentary too long, Newton would remind them that there was another movie inside the character. “Usually you have the main characters do all the work,” Newton says, “so this was an unusual idea.”


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This scene, with Night’s wolf howling at Day’s bathing beau-ties, required artful modeling and composition to have the wolf look down on a round, rather than elliptical, CG pool.

Images courtesy Pixar.


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Often, the animators would do what New-ton calls a “moving hold.” “We would have them strike a pose, and give the characters a subtle bit of motion,” he says. For example, when Day frames a radio tower during a Night and Day swing dance toward the end, the ani-mators stretch the character’s arm into a single pose. “We get subtle expansion by how far he’s stretching,” Newton says. “He’s not moving his hands and legs; it’s more like a rubber band that’s reached its limit. That’s the way we’d use moving holds. You look at the internals and then we trade back to the foreground world to keep life in the characters. It’s like having two films running side by side.”

Mike Fu, supervising technical director, might beg to differ. “What we have is three films in one,” he explains, “a short film made of CG backgrounds for Day, a short film made of CG backgrounds for Night, and the 2D char-acters. We ended up with three compositions: a composition for Night, a composition for Day, and a composition for all three.”

Triple Play To help the animators, the CG team would start with Newton’s storyboards to see his timing, mock up the sets, and stitch them together. Then, they printed out every frame and gave them to the animators to use as back-grounds on their light tables.

“In the end, you’d never know if a shot worked until we put it all together,” Fu says. Fu uses the scene in the opening, with jog-gers running inside Day while he’s walking, as an example. “The challenge was in getting everything to hit right,” he says. “The camera path, the length of the set, how fast the joggers ran, how fast the 2D character moved. If the joggers were too close, we’d move them back, and then they were too small. There were a lot of things Teddy could do in 2D and get away with that we couldn’t do in 3D.”

Another example: “On Teddy’s boards, when Day first meets Night, Night is sleeping on the ground. Day walks in front of him, and we fol-low Day. It looks great in 2D, but in 3D things on the horizon don’t move as far in screen space as Teddy had drawn. So, we had to solve that.

We introduced a pan, but we didn’t want it to feel like a pan. So we cheated the set and had it move in opposition to the camera.”

Similarly, the CG artists would often cheat scale to have the images inside the characters read properly. Trees in one scene might be as small as people, and in another, as big as buildings.

Come TogetherFu joined the production early in the process,

Stereo DualityDirector Teddy Newton envisioned “Day&Night” as a stereo 3D film from the start. In fact, he pitched the film as a stereo 3D film.

“We designed everything to be in [stereo] 3D,” Newton says. “In the begin-ning of the film, we wanted the 3D to be played out quite shallow and symbolic of the characters, who look only at surfaces. When they become interested in each other, we play with depth. The sets not only become deeper, but the fire-flies peek out beyond the perimeter of the character and the jets come through the body. It gets more elaborate so that by the time the sunset scene comes, we have a glow of light breach beyond the edges of the character as the sun unifies them.”

Although stereo added depth to the story, it deepened the challenges on the production side. “Teddy [Newton] had certain rules of the world that he had invented,” says Mike Fu, supervising technical director. “Even though Day and Night are cutouts, when Day walks in front of Night, he occludes him. We had to follow that, even in stereo. When the audience sees the film in a traditional theater, they see Day move in front of Night and block him. In stereo, they see that, but they also see Day move closer in stereo space. They see the characters actually circling each other in 3D space.”

Also, stereo meant that the team needed to compose the shots in 3D. They couldn’t simply layer the 2D characters over the internal 3D scenes in composit-ing. “Stereo removed the cheats we could have done,” Fu says. “But, it added a lot to the stereo version of the movie.”

Thus, to keep the pipeline consistent, the crew rendered everything, including the 2D characters in Pixar’s RenderMan. For most stereo 3D films, the crew ren-ders the shots from one eye and then, to add stereo, renders a second eye. This film required three renders. “For the 2D format, we split the difference between the two eyes,” Fu says. “Then we offset the eyes left and right.”

“Fortunately,” Fu adds, “because much of the image is black, we could afford to do it in terms of rendering resources. We could use the 2D to mask out the 3D and render only what we needed. It was an extra process, but when you look at this stuff a lot, you see the difference. Composition is such a key point for this film.” –Barbara Robertson

(Above) Night, a line drawing scanned and applied to a 2D plane, sleeps in the foreground. Day, another line drawing similarly added to the scene, shows dismay at seeing a darker version of himself. The CG sheep jumping over a fence in the background appear inside Night in the film. (Top, right) Night’s and Day’s internal scenes grow deeper in stereo 3D.

Committed to

ExcellenceEvery month the writers at CGW deliver comprehensive, original editorial

content to the movers and shakers in the DCC industries. Recently, chief editor Karen Moltenbrey and West Coast editor Barbara Robertson each received top honors for their editorial work by the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE). Karen won a National Gold Award for her case-history piece “Dino Might” (July 2009), while Barbara received a West Region Gold for her

case-history feature “What’s Old Is New Again” (January 2009).

Congratulations to Karen and Barbara for these outstanding achievements.


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when Newton knew he wanted 2D fore-grounds but still wasn’t sure how to do the in-ternal images. “He thought about doing stop motion or live action, but we decided on CG because I knew I could have the control Teddy wanted,” Fu says.

Because the animators drew the charac-ters in pencil on paper, Fu’s team scanned the drawings and then used Vector Magic’s software and proprietary code to convert the bit-mapped images to vector art. “With any vectorizing software, there are still some bits that aren’t exactly what the artist drew,” Fu says. “The software has to guess at some point. So, we’d pre-process the images to give the vec-torizer better information and help it as much as we could.” For example, the pre-process-ing technique might enlarge some areas and sharpen others.

The crew also used Toon Boom’s Animo to help with digital inking and painting. “We had to build a whole 2D pipeline,” Fu says. “That in itself was a big challenge.”

The larger challenge, however, was insert-ing the 3D scenes into the 2D characters. “We built a kludged pipeline,” Fu says. “We rendered out planes and brought them into our proprietary 3D system. Depending on what we needed in the scene, we’d attach them to the environment or the camera. It would have been faster to do this in com-positing, but we would have lost the interac-tion between other departments, such as the lighters and the animators. And, we wanted the ability to render the film in stereo.” (See “Stereo Duality,” pg. 36).

With the characters rendered as 2D cards, the animators could adjust the timing within the 3D system. “The first version the anima-tors saw had floating lines in a 3D world. But

as we refined the process, we’d scan the images and cut out the character holes. They could work with an animated texture card in the 3D system that was attached to the camera or the 3D set, depending on what they needed.”

Even so, it took a lot of back and forth to get the timing right. “It was like a Rubik’s Cube,” Fu says. “We’d solve one problem in Day that would mess up Night. We’d fix something in CG to fix the 2D, and then something else would break.”

Lighting also became a “night-and-day” prob-lem, one that production designer Don Shank and lighting supervisor Andrew Pienaar ad-dressed early in the production. “They knew it would be a challenge to get both characters to read at the same time, because the black back-ground is such a predominant part of the over-all image,” Fu says. “We had to light [the CG scenes] for Day and then light again for Night, and still have both characters read well.”

Sounds True Only one scene in the film has “dialog,” but even then, it is a voice-over. The characters never talk. Otherwise, the sound, designed by Barney Jones with Gary Rydstrom con-sulting, sometimes accents the action, some-times doesn’t.

“We often hear sounds in the distance,” Newton says, “frogs, trains. They didn’t re-quire internal visual action; we hear things in daily life that we don’t see.” In the theater, moviegoers hear night sounds on the left and day sounds on the right until they trade places. “I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard two sets of ambient sounds simultaneously—the nighttime ambience and the daytime ambi-ence happening together,” he adds.

The music, too, composed by Michael

Giacchino, comes from the world: from pass-ing radios, for example. “We only breached that maybe once when the sunset happens,” Newton says.

The voice-over happens toward the end, dur-ing the swing dance, when the characters come together. We see a radio tower appear inside Day and hear an excerpt from a speech by Dr. Wayne Dyer: “Fear of the unknown. They are afraid of new ideas. They are loaded with prejudices, not based upon anything in reality, but based on … if something is new, I reject it immediately because it’s frightening to me. What they do instead is just stay with the familiar. You know, to me, the most beautiful things in all the universe are the most mysterious.”

The newest idea in this film, was, for argu-ably the first time in a short film, placing CG animation inside animated 2D characters. But, the metaphor elevates the film from a cartoon into a significant work of art.

“One thing my crew said was that they re-ally enjoyed the message,” Fu says, “seeing people’s differences and appreciating them. It was fun to work on a meaningful project.”

For his part, Newton is a bit shy about the response people have to the film. “I’m glad that the people who love this film love it quite a bit,” he says. “It’s hard to know when you do a film. I’ve never seen this kind of story in an animated film before. It’s about people grow-ing and coming together, yeah, but the sunset is more or less about them being able not only to unify, but trade off. One can see the world through the other’s eyes a little.”

Like peeking through a keyhole into an-other person’s mind. n

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at [email protected].

Director Teddy Newton designed “Day&Night” as a stereo 3D film from the beginning. When projected in stereo, the airplanes appear to fly toward the audience in this shot.

‘Day&Night’ Content Creation Software

3D ToolsAutodesk MayaApple ShakePixar RenderManPixar proprietary software

2D ToolsAdobe PhotoshopDigiCel FlipBookToon Boom Animo, Pencil Check Vector Magic conversion software

Register Early and Save!Register today at: www.siggraph.org/asia2010/registrationEarly-registration discounts available for individuals and groups before 31 Oct 2010, 23:59 GMT.

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The 3rd ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in AsiaConference 15-18 December 2010 | Exhibition 16-18 December 2010Coex Convention & Exhibition Center

A Kaleidoscope of Sights, Sounds, and Interactive Experiences in Seoul,World Design Capital 2010!

Computer AnimationFestival

ExhibitionTechnical Sketches &Posters

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Join Seoul’s citywide festival of computer graphics and interactive techniques this December.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 is a convergence point for art, business, design, and technology, and a unique networking opportunity for theinternational digital media community. If you are a distributor, creator, researcher, developer, artist, producer, educator, game developer,filmmaker, or student, this major Asian CG conference and exhibition is a must-attend event for 2010!

Learn the latest technologies. Test-drive the industry’s newest software and hardware. Discover new opportunities for collaboration withcolleagues in Asia and around the world.

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Seoul Skyline

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

SA10 209 x273mm CGW Ad.ai 8/26/10 10:44:09 AM


n n n n Business

The 2009 recession changes the rules, resulting in slow market growth for CAD By Kathleen Maher

t he CAD arena is among the most recession-sensitive markets in the world. The archi-tectural sector feels good and bad news early, as regions build up their infrastructures, people move to new areas for jobs, and money dries up for loans. In fact, the architec-

ture and construction industries have been feeling the effects of the recession considerably before it hit the pocketbooks of people living in the US and Western Europe. And, recovery is coming slowly.

Recently, McGraw-Hill published its “Top 400 Contractors” survey and reports, and to no one’s surprise, the building industries remain challenged. In fact, most recent numbers for June show that US construction is down in the second half of 2010. Fortunately, there is growth in transportation and power, with the promise of coming growth in manufacture-related building and infrastructure projects.

Manufacturing, which is heavily influenced by consumer markets, is more responsive to the vagaries of the economy, and it responds faster to both good news and bad news.

The overall CAD market dropped an unprecedented 23 percent in 2009 to levels lower than 2008, and for some companies, something closer to 2007 figures. This year, the picture has begun to get brighter. Remarkably, and contrary to expectations, CAD vendors are re-bounding in 2010. Manufacturing is coming back as consumers find their wallets, but this is going to be a cautious growth in the West. The European Union is nervous that its weaker members—most notably Greece at the moment (but also Spain, Portugal, and Italy)—will dampen Europe’s economic standing and will slow growth. In the US, there have been signs of a faster recovery as stimulus money has been put to work on long-range infrastructure

Slow GoingDoctoral Degrees in Natural Sciences

and Engineering 1996–2007(in thousands)

’93 ’94 ’95 ’96 ’97 ’98 ’99 ’00 ’01 ’02 ’03 ’04 ’05 ’06 ’07

US totalUS foreignChinaJapan

US citizenGermanyUKSouth Korea

30.00

25.00

20.00

15.00

10.00

5.00

0.00


Business n n n n

projects. However, there is not much appetite for government spending in the face of high deficits, so when the stimulus money runs out in 2010 and 2011, it’s unclear whether the US Congress will turn on the tap again.

The combined oil and gas segment remains one of the important levers in the world econ-omy. President Obama has said that alterna-tive sources are not going to be able to make a significant dent in the West’s energy require-ments in the near future, thus oil is not going to release its grip on the economy or politics any time soon. So it comes as no surprise that oil and gas is one of the few areas where there has been growth through the recession.

Green energy and globalization are two flags the CAD companies were waving before the recession. They will return as important enablers for growth as the crisis mentality ebbs in some quarters. Finding new efficien-cies in construction and data management are already strong themes for the CAD industry, both pre- and post-recession.

For obvious reasons, there is always a strong focus on 3D CAD at the expense of 2D drafting. A 3D model provides a wealth of information, and that information can be built upon. For instance, material properties can be added, analysis performed, volume understood, and so forth. However, software vendors, and analysts are coming to the real-ization that basic drafting and modeling will always be a requirement. Still, maintaining 2D information for drafting, printing, and illus-trations is increasingly being seen as a function that could well become free.

Most recently Dassault has sought to speed the process by releasing DraftSight, a free 2D drafting product built on the ARES CAD en-gine developed by Graebert Systems.

We’ve seen the ranks of the rank-and-file 2D drafters thin out. This recession is throw-ing people out of work—the first to go are those with the least skills. In 2006 to 2007, the ratio between 2D users and 3D users was closer to 70 percent versus 30 percent. In 2009, the shift to 3D picked up speed as jobs disappeared on the low end. Unfortunately, those jobs aren’t being replaced by high-end positions. Rather, professionals are picking up tasks that were performed lower down on the pay scale. The positive side is that people “own” their data if they have a more direct role in creating it, but in terms of sheer numbers, fewer people are doing more.

Evolution NowNot all modeling (3D included) is part of a large enterprise or huge project. There is a growing interest in direct 3D modeling as an easier way to get to a design, and this is happening on the high end as well as the low end.

One of the most fascinating trends we have seen is the growth of design hobbyists. Inter-est in industrial design is expanding beyond the small, talented group of people who train in this area. In addition, it’s possible that the availability of 3D printers and CNC machines is stimulating interest in design in much the same way that YouTube has helped stimulate an interest in video creation. (If so, we’re just on the very cusp of this movement.)

In the US, it has been commonplace to worry about the reluctance of young people to study science and engineering, but now there are two trends that, while not altogether positive, point to a renewed interest in science,

engineering, and building. First, US colleges and universities have had to raise tuition and cut back on programs to help subsidize stu-dents. And second, in a related trend, people are reconsidering college as a requirement be-cause money is tight. Thus, when people do consider college, they are more interested in disciplines that will result in better jobs when they get out, so there are more people signing up for the sciences and engineering.

ConclusionNo doubt about it, 2009 was a very rough year for CAD. (See the related story “Alibre Grows While Others Slow” in the August/September issue Online Extras on www.cgw.com.) It’s still unclear whether the drop in CAD licenses repre-sents more people leaving the industry or people just waiting for times to get better before they renew their subscriptions or upgrade their soft-ware. There’s obviously a little of both.

The positive side of any “correction,” a nox-ious term when it’s applied to people’s jobs, is that it forces efficiency and helps lay the groundwork for more long-term growth. At this midpoint, we at JPR have updated our outlook for 2010. The major CAD companies are reporting good growth in 2010, especially for their design products. The larger PLM market is conforming to the more cautious outlooks from analysts, including JPR, issued at the beginning of the year. There are still rumblings of a double-dip recession, but we believe the market will return to solid growth in 2011, thanks to emerging markets and re-newed strength in manufacturing. n

Kathleen Maher is a contributing editor to CGW, a senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon, California-based consultancy specializing in graphics and multimedia, and editor in chief of JPR’s “TechWatch.” She can be reached at [email protected].

CAD Industry Revenues through 2010(in millions of dollars)

2D vs. 3D Users

Source: Jon Peddle Research

3D 41%

2D 59%

’ 04 ’ 05 ’ 0 6 ’ 0 7 ’ 08 ’ 09 ’ 10 *

$8000

$7000

$6000

$5000

$4000

$3000

$2000

$1000

$0

*estimated

Source: Jon Peddle Research

Percent Change in World Economic Output(Data from January 2010)

2008 2010 (projected)

2011 (projected)

2009

8

6

4

2

0

-2

-4

-6

-8

Source: IMF-10

Advanced economies Emerging and developing countries Japan Central and Eastern Europe Russia


■ ■ ■ ■ Recruitment

A PartialRebound


Recruitment ■ ■ ■ ■

ast year at this time, the global economy was generally acknowledged to be in a downswing, and most studios were reporting fewer projects, and more applicants. � e situation is a bit rosier now in 2010—not a com-plete reversal, but showing progress. “We’ve seen an

up-tick in hiring since the end of 2009, primarily among smaller- to medium-sized, privately-funded, independent video game develop-ers,” says Chris Scanlon, account manager for Digital Artist Man-agement (DAM), a recruiting agency that specializes in interactive entertainment (games).

Last year, studios outside the US seemed to be less affected by the down economy, and business is still good this year at the UK-based Double Negative, according to its recruitment manager, Hannah Acock. “We’re busier than ever at the mo-ment and receive around 60 applications per day,” she says. “Over the last 12 months, we have seen a large increase in the number of new recruits from the US, Australia, Asia, and New Zealand, but we’ve still contin-ued to hire a large amount from within the EU (European Union).” Inside the US, business is looking up in some quarters. At Rhythm & Hues Studios, for example, “We have new work on the boards,” says Barbara McCullough, manager of recruitment. Stressing that she could only speak for her company, McCullough reports that business had been a little slower previously but has picked up in recent months.

Many of the studios (fi lm as well as game) interviewed by Computer Graphics Worldfor this article report similar conditions, but not all the news was good. In March 2010, Disney announced that it intended to close ImageMovers Digital Studio in San Rafael, California. � at same month, Toronto’s CORE Digital Pictures shut its doors.

“It’s been a really odd year,” says Debra Blanchard, president of Fringe Talent, a recruiting agency focusing on visual eff ects and ani-mation artists for the fi lm industry, noting that things got off to a promising start, but that the recent closing of both ImageMovers and CORE has shaken many in the industry. “It’s been kind of shocking and surprising,” says Blanchard, who adds that nonetheless, projects are still ongoing and that there are geographical pockets that seem to be fl ourishing. For example: “Vancouver seems to be coming alive, and staffi ng,” she says.

Social FactorsHeading up the list of what’s new in studio hiring this year (besides the tentative economic recovery) are the maturation of social net-working as a tool for both recruiters and job seekers, and the impor-tance—which sounds almost counterintuitive in the Internet age—of maintaining human contacts. Last, it is vital that the job seeker main-tain a virtual presence, such as a Web or blog site, so that his or her materials may be reviewed by studios on a moment’s notice.

� e use of social networking sites, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, is not new, of course, but the way in which they are being used has evolved. LinkedIn, the more professional of the two networks, con-tinues to be more seriously considered by recruiters. Josilin Torrano,

recruiter at Nickelodeon Animation Studios, particularly likes using LinkedIn for hard-to-fi ll positions. But the importance of Facebook is not to be downplayed. At Electronic Arts, for example, the company’s Inside EA page has more than 100,000 fans and is an excellent way for a candidate to gain familiarity with the company, according to Cindy Nicola, VP of global talent acquisition for Electronic Arts.

Staying in touch applies to those not seeking work, as well. Know-ing what is going on at a studio is of primary importance. � en, when it comes time to seek work, the applicant doesn’t have to start from scratch. By the same token, potential applicants should stay up to date on who the right contacts are. “� ere are so many people applying blindly through the Web site,” says Torrano, explaining that such ef-forts are nearly useless. Applicants should address their information to a particular individual. � ey can fi nd recruiters’ names by subscribing to studio pages on Facebook or LinkedIn, or even by cold-calling the studios and asking for names. “Just make sure there’s some kind of human connection,” advises Torrano.

CG artists also need to make it easy for recruiters to stay in touch with them. “If an applicant doesn’t have a Web site or a blog, they are doing a disservice to themselves,” says Torrano, explaining that recruiters want to be able to see an artist’s work immediately upon request. � at means that demos should be available online, as well. If you decide to mail your reel to the studio, “someone else might get the job while we’re waiting for your package,” adds Torrano.

In addition to the economy, and the importance of staying virtu-ally connected, the following issues also factor into the ever-changing hiring landscape at CG studios.

A New PoolAlmost across the board, studio recruiters report that the economic situation both past and present has altered the hiring pool—sending ever-larger numbers of qualifi ed applicants into the market. Although a large number of applicants would seem to be a recruiter’s dream, that is not necessarily the case.

“Unfortunately, volume doesn’t always mean quality; it can be a little more time-consuming to fi nd the right one,” says Nicola. Tor-rano notes that at the height of the downturn, she would get many ap-plicants who were far too qualifi ed for the position. It could be diffi cult to deal with VPs and the like who were willing to take “a serious step

While some have felt the negative impact of the industry downturn, others, such as Double Negative, have been busier than ever with projects such as Iron Man 2, says the studio’s Hannah Acock.


n n n n Recruitment

down” to get a full-time position with a com-pany, or benefits, she explains. They were not always the right fit. Nowadays, she adds, people seem a bit less desperate, and more applicants are applying for the appropriate positions.

Applicants themselves have also learned to modify their expectations. “They understand that it’s more of a competitive climate,” says Scanlon. This is especially true for students and other entry-level candidates, as there is now a larger-than-ever talent resource from which to recruit.

Outlook for Entry LevelMost of the studios CGW interviewed for this article say they do hire entry-level CG artists, including those fresh out of school. In general, the larger facilities have more leeway to hire the inexperienced and then train them. Smaller studios are usually in the position of needing maximum productivity from everyone they hire, so they tend to stick to more seasoned professionals who can hit the ground running. At Lumière Visual Effects in Montreal, says HR recruiter Christine Zervos, the hiring depends on the project. “With a shorter contract, tight deadlines require experienced artists who know how to produce under stressful conditions,” she says. With longer projects, the studio is able to bring in artists who will learn as they go.

Says Acock, “We do hire VFX/anima-tion graduates who have come straight out of university. We usually hire 3D grads into matchmove positions and 2D grads into roto roles where they’re given time to get to know our pipeline and processes, and gain a full un-derstanding of the way in which we work as a company. We also hire a lot of grads into runner positions, where they can train on the in-house systems and are in line for the next roto/matchmove vacancies.”

So, there is definitely hope for entry-level artists and others who are willing to stay flex-ible and work the system. Internships are a basic component of that system.

The All-important InternshipMany studios offer internship and apprentice programs—some paid, some not. Nickelodeon has an unpaid internship for college juniors and seniors that requires between 15 and 30 hours a week at the studio. “We have an incredible intern-to-hire ratio,” says Torrano, noting that she herself began as an intern. “Most entry-level positions here are filled by interns.” Rhythm & Hues offers apprenticeship programs in three areas: animation, lighting, and composition. And EA also has what Nicola calls a “robust internship,” adding that the studio loves recent graduates because “they’re the people who are closest to emerging technologies.”

Internships are more than a way for an applicant to get a foot in the door, however. Increasingly, they’re mandatory in order for a graduate to be considered. Recruiters fig-ure that if you’re in CG school, you ought to have the wherewithal to get an internship or two under your belt before you graduate. Besides, spending time in a real work environment teaches so many “soft” skills—how to be profes-sional, work as a team, and understand a company’s pipeline and culture. “An internship is a must,” says Torrano. At DreamWorks Animation, however, says Marilyn Friedman, head of outreach, “it’s always nice if they have apprenticeships, but it’s not a prerequisite.”

Different Career OptionsIt seems that everyone wants to be a charac-ter animator. Says Acock, “We receive a huge amount of applications for entry-level and animator positions.” Fringe Talent’s Blanchard agrees. “There is a ton of competition for the character animator jobs,” she says, advising job seekers to consider options, such as light-ing and compositing, as well. Rhythm & Hues often has a difficult time finding texture painters and lighting artists, according to Mc-Cullough.

“It really takes a village to make one of these things [films],” says DreamWorks’ Fried-man. “Not everyone can do character anima-tion.” Therefore, the outreach training and ed-ucation program that DreamWorks conducts with different universities focuses on lighting, rigging, and other aspects of content creation, in addition to animation.

For those determined to do character ani-mation, patience is required. “We do review all show reels sent to us,” says Acock, “and we short-list the most interesting and inspiring. If we don’t have suitable vacancies at the time, we hold on to these applications and re-review them when a vacancy arises, and we always try to update everyone by e-mail so that they know the status of their application.”

The Right ToolsMost recruiters say they expect to do some amount of training—especially since many shops have proprietary programs. But when it comes to the software that most applicants should be familiar with, it will come as no sur-prise to hear that Autodesk’s Maya continues to trump all.

“Maya (for games) and XSI (for film) seem to be the most important packages to know these days. 3ds Max is still relevant, although seemingly less prevalent with each passing year,” according to Scanlon. “In the CG de-partment, if they don’t know Maya, we’re not going to hire them,” says EA’s Torrano.

Internships and apprenticeships provide valuable work experience and are offered at a number of studios, including Rhythm & Hues (which recently moved into a new, larger facility).

Lumiére, which worked on The Day of the Triffids, can train new hires if the pending project is a lengthier one.


Recruitment ■ ■ ■ ■

Generalists vs. SpecialistsAnother consideration for those entering the CG job market is how much to invest in one particular area of knowledge. “In video games, the general rule is that smaller studios tend to favor candidates with broad or generalist skill sets, whereas larger houses prefer specializa-tion,” says Scanlon.

Lumière goes the middle path, looking for specialists with at least one more skill set. Ex-amples include a compositor who also does matte painting, or a rigger who can animate. “� is allows us to work more as a team rather than in individual groups,” says Zervos. So, while waiting for those callbacks, it might be worth an applicant’s time to bone up on at least one additional discipline.

Full Time vs. Short TermFor many years now, the larger fi lm studios have done a lot of their hiring on a per-project basis. Game studios, according to Scanlon, are more likely to hire full-timers. One diff erence Zervos has observed recently at Lumière is that more applicants are looking for permanent or longer-term positions. “It is much harder to get artists for short contracts,” she says. “� ose who have jobs seem to be more interested in

staying put, whereas a few years ago, we had a lot more selection when hiring short term.” At Double Negative, as at many other studios, employees are hired on short-term contracts, but those contracts are typically renewed. “We hire most people on a six- to 12-month basis but look at them as long-term employees, nor-mally on rolling contracts,” says Acock. “After four years, they become permanent staff , and we have quite a large number of permanent employees now due to length of service. We don’t tend to ramp up just for specifi c projects

and then downsize afterward; we try to keep people long term.”

RecruitersMost studios contacted by CGW claim to use very few recruiters. “It used to be that the agencies had a lot of special contacts,” says EA’s Nicola. “But the Internet has leveled the play-ing fi eld somewhat. Still, companies are using them, as both Blanchard and Scanlon can at-test to. “Groups with an in-house recruitment staff often rely on DAM to complement in-house eff orts on hard-to-fi ll positions,” says Scanlon. “Smaller groups without internal re-cruiters lean on DAM to develop and manage their entire staffi ng and recruitment process.”

The Long View� ose in the job market, whether newcomers or seasoned performers, and in good times or bad, should take heart and keep the following advice in mind: “Talented veterans are always in demand, especially those who can lead and mentor; creative types are not always the best managers,” says Scanlon. Yet, studios seem to understand that everyone has to begin some-where. Says Nicola, “My philosophy in hiring is to look for people with skills you can’t teach.”

Acock advises: “In a competitive market, it is more important than ever to get the basics right. Ensure that your show reel is working hard for you; there should never be any excess or diluted work that will detract from the main event, which, for us, should be the fi rst 15 sec-onds of any reel.” Last, despite it being the dig-ital age, never underestimate the importance of face-to-face contact. “When at all possible, says Acock, “make the most of conferences as a chance to meet potential employers—a smile and a ‘hello’ go a long way.” ■

Jennifer Austin is a freelance writer based in New England.

CG SalariesHow much can a CG professional expect to earn? Studios are understandably reluctant to divulge salaries, and of course, the ranges vary greatly, but a ballpark idea can be gained from several sources, particularly as many studios are union shops for which the pay scale is a matter of public record. Disney Animation’s Animation Guild contract, for example, specifi es a current minimum payment for experienced or journeyman-level artists, from animators to lighting specialists, of $39.133 per hour, or $1565.32 per week for a 40-hour workweek. For positions like assistant animator, assistant lighter, or assistant technical director, the mini-mum pay is $33.49 per hour, or $1339.60 per week. A list of studios covered by the Animation Guild can be found at www.animationguild.org.

According to fi gures from the International Game Developers Association, sala-ries for CG artists in the gaming industry range from $57,000 a year for an artist with one to two years’ experience, to $68,000 for a lead artist or art director with six or more years of experience. Of course, salaries can be much lower for entry-level positions at studios, and go well into six fi gures for top producers. According to job-seeker search engine Indeed.com, the average salary for a senior character animator in the US is $62,000. And the US Bureau of Statistics reports that the average salary for a multimedia artist and animator in 2008 was $62,380, with jobs in the motion-picture and video industries averaging $71,910, and those in advertising and public relations in the range of $57,740. It should be noted that many CG professionals are paid hourly rather than annually.

Of course, salaries vary depending on country and region. Artists generally earn more in Los Angeles than in, say, the Midwest. On the other hand, it costs more to live in Los Angeles. As always, fl exibility is key. “I don’t see the crazy bidding wars we used to have,” says Fringe Talent’s Debra Blanchard, who advises job applicants to be willing to compromise on the issue of salary, “especially if it’s a job you really want.” –Jennifer Austin

One trend among a number of studios, including Double Negative, is to hire artists for short-term contracts, which are usually renewed until the person eventually becomes a permanent employee. Continual work, such as on fi lms like Kick-Ass, enables Dneg to maintain this trend.

Courtesy U

niversal Pictures

46

Adobe CS5 Master Suite

In April, Adobe updated its Creative Suite 5 (CS5). Every Creative Suite update is a massive undertaking for Adobe, because every one of its core products gets updated—from the venerable Photoshop to

Web design software such as Dreamweaver and Flash, to graphic design products such as Illustrator and InDesign, to video products such as Af-ter Effects and Premiere Pro. This creates a lot of new features in a lot of different packages, so this review will focus on Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro—applications most commonly used in CGI production. All these applications offer increased speed and stabil-ity, as well as a number of innovative new features.

The good news is the key applications in CS5 are now 64-bit native. Photoshop still works on 32- and 64-bit systems, but After Effects and Premiere Pro have gone totally 64-bit. In order to use these appli-cations, a 64-bit operating system is required: either Snow Leopard on the Mac, or Vista or Windows 7 on the PC. Sadly, Windows XP is no longer supported. The switch to 64 bit is mostly to increase perfor-mance, allowing for faster data processing as well as larger memory spaces, which allow you to work with larger images and process them faster. The switch to 64 bit only also seems to have increased stability.

PhotoshopPhotoshop is really the core application of CS5, as it is used through-out the suite for everything from Web design, to publishing, to mo-tion graphics and special effects. This version of Photoshop has a number of new features used in CGI production as well as increased performance.

Probably the most interesting and powerful new feature in Photoshop CS5 is that it is now aware of the content within an image and can use this to create intelligent fills, often eliminating the need for the clone or healing brush when retouching images. This allows Photoshop to auto-matically do things like use the surrounding content to fill in an image.

If you want to delete an object out of the scene, for example, simply lasso it and hit “delete.” The re-sulting dialog box will allow you to use the surrounding content to fill in the deleted pixels.

A few tests found that the con-tent awareness features work quite

well but can be dependent on the type of content it is replacing. Delet-ing some rocks out of grassy field, for example, worked quite well; Pho-toshop filled in the grass fairly seamlessly. Deleting an object against a wood-paneled wall didn’t work so well because the pattern of the wood panels wasn’t matched. The more you work with the tool, however, the

more you’ll understand how it works. When it does work, it makes things go much faster.

People who do illustration or retouching in Photoshop will appreci-ate improvements in Photoshop’s brushes, which allow for much more realistic painting. Brushes now support wet edges and much more real-istic brush strokes. Of course, these are all tied to pressure sensitivity, so those who use tablets can paint with more freedom than ever.

Puppet Warp, After EffectsPuppet Warp is another interesting tool, which is pretty much bor-rowed from the Puppet Tool that has been part of After Effects for some time. The tool allows you to use puppet pins to deform an image. This is particularly useful for repositioning objects, like a person’s arm. You could place puppet pins at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, then use these to manipulate the arm, much like a puppet.

After Effects CS5 also benefits from the 64-bit switch, and the added speed and increased memory space certainly is welcome, particularly for those working with large files, such as HD and film projects. Riding the wave of HD video adoption, After Effects CS5 has added support for some of the more popular professional HD formats. These include RED

DCCBy GEorGE MAEstri


Creative suite 5$2599 Master Collection (Mac or Windows)Adobe www.adobe.com

The Mercury Playback Engine speeds up Premiere Pro CS5 considerably, allowing it to handle multiple HD streams in real time.

High PerformanceCamera Tracking

Use SynthEyes for animated critter insertion, �xing shaky shots,virtual set extensions, making 3D movies, architectural previews,

accident reconstruction, virtual product placement,face and body capture, and more.

32-bit only $399Windows-32 / Windows-64 / OS X-32 / OS X-64

IncludesStereoscopic features

used in AVATAR

47

Review n n n n

In April, Adobe updated its Creative Suite 5 (CS5). Every Creative Suite update is a massive undertaking for Adobe, because every one of its core products gets updated—from the venerable Photoshop to

Web design software such as Dreamweaver and Flash, to graphic design products such as Illustrator and InDesign, to video products such as Af-ter Effects and Premiere Pro. This creates a lot of new features in a lot of different packages, so this review will focus on Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro—applications most commonly used in CGI production. All these applications offer increased speed and stabil-ity, as well as a number of innovative new features.

The good news is the key applications in CS5 are now 64-bit native. Photoshop still works on 32- and 64-bit systems, but After Effects and Premiere Pro have gone totally 64-bit. In order to use these appli-cations, a 64-bit operating system is required: either Snow Leopard on the Mac, or Vista or Windows 7 on the PC. Sadly, Windows XP is no longer supported. The switch to 64 bit is mostly to increase perfor-mance, allowing for faster data processing as well as larger memory spaces, which allow you to work with larger images and process them faster. The switch to 64 bit only also seems to have increased stability.

PhotoshopPhotoshop is really the core application of CS5, as it is used through-out the suite for everything from Web design, to publishing, to mo-tion graphics and special effects. This version of Photoshop has a number of new features used in CGI production as well as increased performance.

Probably the most interesting and powerful new feature in Photoshop CS5 is that it is now aware of the content within an image and can use this to create intelligent fills, often eliminating the need for the clone or healing brush when retouching images. This allows Photoshop to auto-matically do things like use the surrounding content to fill in an image.

If you want to delete an object out of the scene, for example, simply lasso it and hit “delete.” The re-sulting dialog box will allow you to use the surrounding content to fill in the deleted pixels.

A few tests found that the con-tent awareness features work quite

well but can be dependent on the type of content it is replacing. Delet-ing some rocks out of grassy field, for example, worked quite well; Pho-toshop filled in the grass fairly seamlessly. Deleting an object against a wood-paneled wall didn’t work so well because the pattern of the wood panels wasn’t matched. The more you work with the tool, however, the

more you’ll understand how it works. When it does work, it makes things go much faster.

People who do illustration or retouching in Photoshop will appreci-ate improvements in Photoshop’s brushes, which allow for much more realistic painting. Brushes now support wet edges and much more real-istic brush strokes. Of course, these are all tied to pressure sensitivity, so those who use tablets can paint with more freedom than ever.

Puppet Warp, After EffectsPuppet Warp is another interesting tool, which is pretty much bor-rowed from the Puppet Tool that has been part of After Effects for some time. The tool allows you to use puppet pins to deform an image. This is particularly useful for repositioning objects, like a person’s arm. You could place puppet pins at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, then use these to manipulate the arm, much like a puppet.

After Effects CS5 also benefits from the 64-bit switch, and the added speed and increased memory space certainly is welcome, particularly for those working with large files, such as HD and film projects. Riding the wave of HD video adoption, After Effects CS5 has added support for some of the more popular professional HD formats. These include RED

DCC

R3D file compatibility and native AVC-Intra files from the popular Panasonic P2 cards.

Probably the most robust new feature in After Effects CS5 is the new Roto Brush tool. This tool works similarly to the Quick Selec-tion tool in Photoshop, and can considerably help the process of cutting out foreground objects. In many ways, Roto Brush makes ro-toscoping a lot easier, and opens up rotoscop-ing to a much broader audience.

For special effects artists, Adobe has bun-dled the DigiEffects FreeForm 3D warp-ing tool with After Effects CS5. This tool is similar to the 2D Meshwarp tool that was already part of After Effects, but with an add-ed dimension. Images and elements can be warped and stretched not only in 2D screen space, but also along a Z-axis to push things toward and away from the camera. This can help significantly when integrating flat, 2D content into a live-action 3D scene.

Premiere ProPremiere Pro CS5 probably experiences the greatest speed increase of the bunch, and most of the improvements are under the hood. Not

only is the software full 64 bit, which gives it the requisite speed boost, but Premiere Pro also contains a new way to speed things up—and it is called the Mercury Playback Engine. This is a software mechanism that uses the GPU of a qualified graphics card to speed up playback by a significant amount. This tech-nology is built upon Nvidia’s CUDA paral-lel processing architecture and works with Nvidia’s Quadro cards as well as some of the higher-end GeForce cards.

The speed increase over CS4 is very no-ticeable and is most apparent when using multiple tracks and layers within Premiere Pro. Usually multiple layers would need to be rendered, but the hardware acceleration turns Premiere Pro into a real-time editing and effects system. The higher-end Nvidia cards can support multiple HD streams with effects. Adding to the HD workflow are sup-port for new HD formats, such as R3D, as well as support for most of the HD files used in popular DSLR cameras.

In terms of new features, Premiere Pro CS5 offers some nice enhancements. Prob-ably the most cutting-edge is the ability to

natively edit 3D stereoscopic content. This is done using the Cineform Neo3D plug-in, which offers features not found in any major nonlinear editing application. For those who do compositing in Premiere Pro, the new Ul-tra Keyer will help considerably with chro-ma-keying greenscreen shots and types of footage. Another nice workflow feature with Premiere Pro CS5 is the enhanced ability to exchange files with other popular video-edit-ing software, such as Avid systems and Apple’s Final Cut. This is nice because this version of Premiere actually takes quite a leap forward in speed and reliability, and even surpassing other nonlinear editors in raw power.

Overall, the CS5 suite is a very good up-grade. Those who skipped CS4 will appreci-ate the added speed and stability of CS5. The new features also offer another incentive to upgrade. Adobe has stabilized and enhanced CS5 in all the right places. n

George Maestri is a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World and president/CEO of RubberBug animation studio. He also teaches Maya for Lynda.com. He can be reached at [email protected].

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DIGITAL SCULPTINGPresented by Pixologic Pixologic unveiled its ZBrush Version 4.0 for Windows and Mac operating systems during SIGGRAPH 2010. Version 4.0 adds several new features to the 2D/3D digital sculpting application used in fi lm, game, concept design, and scientifi c illus-

tration projects. New to the latest edition are an animation “art in motion” timeline for producing demo reels or presentations, as well as the Best Preview Render utility with such features as 3D shadows, ambi-ent occlusion, and subsurface scattering. Version 4.0 also boasts an enhanced GoZ tool for transitioning between ZBrush and other applications. Now available for purchase and download, ZBrush 4.0 is

priced at $699 for a single-user license. Pixologic; www.pixologic.com

RENDERINGBecoming a MachStudio ProStudioGPU previewed its MachStudio Pro nonlinear, real-time 3D workfl ow and rendering software with support for Pixar RenderMan award-winning rendering software. StudioGPU is working closely with Pixar to build an open path from MachStudio Pro to RenderMan. With a direct path to RenderMan, MachStudio Pro artists can choose between the soft-ware’s built-in GPU renderer to produce previews or view final results, or using the CPU-driven RenderMan renderer to create beauty shots and/or specific render passes. Artists can also employ the MachStudio Pro and RenderMan render engines simultaneously, combining differ-ent passes from the two render engines. All shaders shipped with MachStudio Pro will have RenderMan Shader Language (RSL) equivalents. MachStudio Pro will also provide the ability to import, edit, and create custom RSL shaders, parameters, and attributes from within the application. StudioGPU also announced the avail-ability of a full-feature version of its Mach-Studio Pro nonlinear, real-time 3D work-fl ow and rendering software at educational pricing to qualifi ed students. MachStudio Pro bundled with the ATI FirePro V7800 workstation graphics card from AMD is available at the student price of $999;

the software-only version is available for $499. StudioGPU; www.studiogpu.com

VIS/SIMUpgrading Digital Nature E-on software previewed its upcoming Vue 9 products for professionals, includ-ing Vue 9 xStream and Vue 9 Infi nite, as well as its Carbon Scatter and LumenRT. The entire Vue 9 product line, including solutions for 3D artists and enthusiasts to create, animate, and render natural 3D environments, is scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of this year. Version 9 will feature EcoSystem 4 for reduced fl icker-ing and optimized rendering and memory management, Relighting, HDR Multi-

Pass Rendering and Interactive Network Rendering, an improved Terrain Editor, and HyperBlob Technology for convert-ing HyperTextured MetaBlobs to polygon objects. LumenRT is a 3D solution for visu-alizing architectural and design projects in real time. Carbon Scatter is a new set of plug-ins for the creation of complex popula-tions using the native instancing technolo-gies of leading CG applications. LumenRT extends the concept of static rendering by adding the ability to move around inside pictures, in photorealistic quality. LumenRT software is designed to provide high-fi del-ity, real-time visualization of architectural projects with accurate lighting, shadows, and refl ections. E-on software; www.e-onsoftware.com

Artist: Ed Steinerts. © 2009 Gardner Denver Nash.

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For additional product news and information, visit CGW.com

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August/September 2010, Volume 33, Number 8/9: COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD (USPS 665-250) (ISSN-0271-4159) is published monthly except in August (11 issues annually) by COP Communications, Inc. Corporate offi ces: 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204, Tel: 818-291-1100; FAX: 818-291-1190; Web Address: [email protected]. Periodicals Postage Paid at Glendale, CA, 91205 & additional mailing offi ces. COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD is distributed worldwide. Annual subscrip-tion prices are $72, USA; $98, Canada & Mexico; $150 International airfreight. To order subscriptions, call 847-559-7310.

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This month’s Products segment is devoted to many of the new product innovations introduced during SIGGRAPH 2010, the

37th international conference and exhibition on computer graphics

and interactive techniques, held in Los Angeles last month. For ad-ditional announcements from the

annual event, visit www.CGW.com or www.SIGGRAPH.org.

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Computer Graphic World 2010-08-09