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THE MAGAZINE FOR DIGITAL CONTENT CREATION AND PRODUCTION
Bear Necessities Imageworks creates new tools for the strong, graphic style and detailed characters in Open Season
$4.95 USA $6.50 Canada
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DIGITAL CONTENT CREATION • CAD • MEDICAL IMAGING • VISUALIZATION IT WORKS FOR US
Introducing the ATI FireGL™ V7350 — the workstation industry’s first one gigabyte ultra high-end graphics accelerator and the highest performing professional graphics product available, bar none.*
ATI’s next generation workstation accelerators feature a highly parallel rendering architecture, innovative ring bus memory system and vibrant 10-bit graphics pipeline capable of displaying over a billion colors. It’s no wonder that animators, designers and engineers are relying on FireGL to deliver better performance, higher image quality and superior value.
From entry-level to ultra high-end, the entire ATI FireGL workstation graphics family is optimized and certified for all major CAD and DCC applications based on DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0.
Find out how ATI’s FireGL™ graphics can work for you at: ati.com/FireGL 1GB FRAMEBUFFER ©Copyright 2006, ATI Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. ATI, FireGL and Avivo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ATI Technologies Inc. Architectural image produced by Visualisation One. Automotive image designed and visualized with ICEM software. *ATI FireGL v7350 delivers the highest benchmark scores based on SPECapc application based tests for available products as of ati.com publication date of 3/1/06.
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Karen Moltenbrey Chief Editor
KAREN MOLTENBREY: Chief Editor [email protected]______An Industry Flashback 36 East Nashua Road Windham, NH 03087 (603) 432-7568
This past summer I visited Walt Disney World, and was amused by my nine- CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: year-old’s reaction to the Carousel of Progress in the Magic Kingdom. Created Courtney Howard, Jenny Donelan, Audrey Doyle, Evan Marc Hirsch, for the 1964—1965 New York World’s Fair, the attraction highlights the jour- George Maestri, Martin McEachern, Stephen Porter, Barbara Robertson note editor’s ney of an American family, in 20-year increments, as it experiences technologi- cal transformations throughout the 20th century. My son was shocked to learn KATH CUNNINGHAM: Production Director [email protected] there was a time when the family was entertained by listening to a show on a radio, rath- (818) 291-1113 er than watching it on a high-def TV. He was even more surprised to discover that video CHRIS SALCIDO: Account Representative games, DVD players, and PCs are relatively new staples of the American home. [email protected]______We only have to step back in time a mere 10 years to notice how computer graphics (818) 291-1144 technology has evolved into a relative standard in our lives. A decade ago, Toy Story intro- COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD Editorial Offi ce: duced us to the fi rst full-length animated feature fi lm created entirely by artists using 620 West Elk Avenue proprietary computer tools and technology, while the merger of Wavefront Technologies, Glendale, CA 91204 (800) 280-6446, x1105 Alias Research, and Silicon Graphics led to the development of Maya, a commercially
available advanced tool set for the creation of digital content. Also, Quake and other 3D SALES
games began to emerge, and PCs were beginning to fl ex their power within the pro- TIM MATTESON: Publisher/West Coast Sales fessional graphics community. Meanwhile, the Internet was expanding by leaps and [email protected]______(310) 836-4064 bounds, and with that came the early growth of graphics on the Web. This month Adobe is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Flash, which has evolved JEFF VICTOR: Midwest/East Coast Sales [email protected]______from a simple Web animation tool to a broad and robust platform for delivering rich (847) 367-4073 media content and applications. Introduced as FutureSplash Animator in 1996, the LA Sales Offi ce: product was swiftly purchased by Macromedia and re-branded with its current name. 620 West Elk Avenue Originally designed for vector illustration and animation, Flash continued to evolve, and Glendale, CA 91204 (800) 280-6446 in 1999, Flash 4 included a scripting model for development of dynamic, interactive con- tent—one of the most vital aspects of the technology today. No doubt many of us can recall when animation on the Web was limited for the creator and the end user. Flash helped change that. As Flash grew, so did broadband connections, fast computers, and the Internet, which drove the demand for higher quality, interactive content as well as more robust video and audio. When Macromedia integrated a scripting
engine into its Flash Player Run-Time, it sparked a revolution in interactive Flash content WILLIAM R. RITTWAGE on the Web. Soon after, Macromedia incorporated video and audio into the Flash Player. President and Chief Executive Offi cer So where has this technology taken us of late? Flash-forward to 2004, when JibJab’s Computer Graphics World Magazine is published by Computer Graphics World, a popular Flash-created “This Land” animation consumed the Web at the height of the COP Communications company. presidential campaign. Today, the Flash authoring tool has an installed base of more Computer Graphics World does not verify any claims or other information appearing in any of the advertisements than 1.5 million developers and designers, and the Player is installed on more than contained in the publication, and cannot take any responsibility for any losses or other damages incurred 600 million desktops (98 percent of all PCs), making it the most widely distributed cli- by readers in reliance on such content.
ent on the Internet. Now with Adobe at the helm after its acquisition of Macromedia Computer Graphics World cannot be held responsible for the safekeeping or return of unsolicited articles, several months ago, what can we expect from Flash in the near future? The company manuscripts, photographs, illustrations or other materials. is working on a product code-named Apollo—a new, cross-browser, cross-platform, Address all subscription correspondence to: Computer Graphics World, P.O., Box 3296 Northbrook, IL 60065-3296. cross-device client that uses Flash and other Adobe technologies for “an identical expe- Subscriptions are available free to qualifi ed individuals within the United States. Non-qualifi ed 1 year rates: USA rience across browsers, desktops, and devices online or offl ine, in or out of the brows- $4.95. Canada & Mexico $6.50. All Airmail Delivery is available for an additional $75.00 annually. Subscribers can er.” (A look at Flash’s past, present, and future can be found on the Computer Graphics also contact customer service by calling 847-559-7310 or sending an email to [email protected].______Changes of World Web site at www.cgw.com.) address can be made online at http://www.omeda.com/cgw/ Often, technology becomes such an integral part of our lives that we sometimes click on customer service assistance. need a “fl ashback” to appreciate where we have been in order to provide a perspective Postmaster: Send Address Changes to Computer Graphics World, P.O. Box 3296, on where we are going—even when “long ago” is only a decade in the past. Northbrook, IL 60065-3296
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Visit http://emgz.blogspot.com for more September 2006 • Volume 29 • Number 9 THE MAGAZINE FOR DIGITAL CONTENT CREATION AND PRODUCTION
Also see www.cgw.com for computer graphics news, Computer special surveys and reports, and the online gallery. WORLD
Features
Cover story Bearing Up 8 ‘TOON STYLE | The animals, objects, and scenery in Open Season may Departments appear simplistic, but they are Editor’s Note 1 indeed state of the art. An Industry Flashback By Barbara Robertson Computer graphics technology can change signifi cantly in a decade, Corps Values 16 as Adobe illustrates during its 10th GAME SIMULATION | The Army uses 8 anniversary celebration of the rich its intelligence, technology, and media content tool Flash. experience to create a realistic military-style game experience. Spotlight 4
By Karen Moltenbrey Products Nvidia’s Quadro Plex Faces in the Crowd 24 Dell’s Precision 390 Workstation | CROWD ANIMATION An independent Boxx Technologies’ 3DBoxx 8300 studio embraces the latest CG tools to HP’s xw9400 Workstation create a fi lm with a cast of thousands. Services By Jenny Donelan Mova’s Contour 16 GPUs Unplugged 28 Portfolio 44 GRAPHICS PROCESSORS | Vendors SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, Part 2 prove why the future of CG is in the cards. Products 46 A look at a range of product offerings By Courtney E. Howard making their debut at SIGGRAPH 2006.
SPECIAL SECTION
Storage in the Studio 31 A look at advanced storage technologies and how they are enabling DCC studios to be more creative. By Barbara Robertson, Mark Brownstein, 24 and Dave Simpson
On the cover: Sony Pictures Animation survives its fi rst adventure in the wild world of 3D animated fi lms with the 2D graphic- styled movie Open Season.
28 2 | Computer Graphics World SEPTEMBER 2006 www.cgw.com______
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SIGGRAPH 2006, held last month in Boston, drew a crowd of 20,000 attendees, who witnessed a number of new digital content creation product releases and demonstrations by a range of hardware and software vendors. In this issue, we are highlighting a number of those products in both the Spotlight section here and in the Products section beginning on page 46.
GPU Graphics Playing at the Quadro Plex
Nvidia, looking to establish new era of advanced visualiza- ogy, the Quadro Plex is an external visual compute system tion for the professional graphics market, introduced the delivering up to 20x in visual compute density compared to PRODUCTS Nvidia Quadro Plex 1000, the fi rst dedicated visual comput- traditional GPU solutions, performance of up to 80 billion pix- ing system (VCS). Delivering an order-of-magni- els/sec and 7 billion vertices/sec, and resolutions as tude increase in productivity and capability for high as 148 megapixels on 16 synchronized digital- advanced visualization, the Quadro Plex offers output channels and eight HD SDI channels. The advanced scalability in a desktop or dense 3U system scales from a single system to a cluster. rack-mountable confi guration for demanding The Nvidia Quadro Plex 1000 is compatible professional applications such as those power- with a certifi ed set of x86 32- and 64-bit Intel and ing multiple streams of 4K HD video, 3D styling AMD processors running Windows and Linux and design, scientifi c and medical visualiza- operating systems (see www.nvidia.com/quadro-
tion, oil and gas exploration, or visual simula- __plex for more details). The Quadro Plex, planned tion and training. to be certifi ed on all industry-leading applica- Featuring Nvidia SLI multi-GPU technol- tions, will ship this month starting at $17,500.
DATA CAPTURE Mova Intros Contour Reality Capture System
Mova unveiled a so-called reality-cap- ists more control over VFX creation. using a standard 3D animation pack- ture system, whereby visual effects cre- Contour uses two separate yet syn- age. Contour can also be used with SERVICES ators and game developers use digital chronized camera systems to simul- marker-based motion-capture and key- cameras to accurately acquire and depict taneously record visual and geomet- frame animation systems. While mark- full-motion, photorealistic CG charac- ric information. The two data sets are er-based mocap systems acquire realis- ters and other imagery. This new volu- then combined, resulting in a high-res tic performances from skeletal captures, metic cinematography process promises 3D image. With this markerless, optics- Contour acquires the intricacies of soft- to reduce production costs and give art- based process, every subtle detail of a tissue motion, such as pursing lips or human performance is record- billowing fabric, with a sub-millimeter ed in real time, giving directors precision at up to 120 fps, at a resolu- more creative control. tion of over 100,000 polygons per frame. The acquired information Nvidia GPUs accelerate the capture of can then be imported, modi- the 3D imagery. fi ed, manipulated, or retar- The Contour service is available geted to other characters now; pricing is project-dependent.
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© 2006 AJA Video Systems
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WORK AND WORK OF ART
AS PASSIONATE AS YOU ARE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE OUR DESKTOP VIDEO SOLUTIONS CAN MAKE,
VISIT US AT ______WWW.AJA.COM.
VIDEO SYSTEMS
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WORKSTATION Dell Extends its Workstation Line with the 390
Dell recently extended the breadth of CAD, architectural engineering, and digi- The workstation also incorporates an its workstation products with the Dell tal content creation, versus the compara- improved chassis that provides fl exibil- PRODUCTS Precision 390 Workstation, which offers ble Extreme Edition processor on the Dell ity for deployment or redeployment. For custom-built confi gurations, including Precision 3802. example, customers can easily convert Intel Core 2 Duo and Extreme proces- The Precision 390 complements the between a tower and desktop confi gu- sors, to deliver dramatic performance recently announced Dell Precision 690 ration and, because the chassis is rack- improvements for appli- and 490 desktop work- mountable, it can be ideal for larger, net- cations ranging from 3D stations. In addition worked deployments. Large front bezel entertainment to engi- to the Core 2 Duo and vents and a new real-time thermal sen- neering design. Core 2 Extreme proces- sor help improve airfl ow to better manage The Precision 390 can sors, the Dell Precision system thermals. The real-time thermal deliver improvements up to 390 Workstation features sensor also helps improve fan effi ciency. 63 percent in compute per- high-performance Open- The Dell Precision 390, certifi ed on formance, up to 56 percent GL graphics to manipulate many of the workstation industry’s most in application benchmarks, high-resolution images demanding CAD, CAE, DCC, and other and up to 88 percent in and deliver dramatic per- applications, is available today starting graphics performance for formance improvements. at $1050.
WORKSTATION WORKSTATION The Power of HP Debuts High-End Xeon in a 3DBoxx xw9400 Workstation
PRODUCTS Boxx Technologies, developer of high-performance PRODUCTS Hewlett-Packard has expanded its professional worksta- workstations and render nodes for visual effects profes- tion line with the release of the high-end sionals, released the 3DBoxx 8300 Performance Series HP xw9400. The xw9400 is posi- Workstation. The 8300 leverages the power of the new tioned to meet the demanding dual-core Intel Xeon 5100 Series processors running computational and visualization with the new 5000X chipset. needs of professionals in the 3D The 3DBoxx 8300 features a 133MHz front-side bus, 4MB animation, video editing, design, of cache shared between two cores, 32GB of FB-DIMM ECC and engineering markets. It features (cutting-edge memory tech- support for true dual PCI Express nology), and powerful I/O x16 graphics, an to help VFX professionals expandable work- enhance their work fl ow. The station chassis, and workstation also sports up a choice of Nvidia to 3TB of local storage with a grapics options, including four-drive chassis; an eight- or Nvidia SLI technology. 12-bay chassis is available for The HP xw9400 workstation up to 9TB of local storage with takes advantage of the new AMD Opteron Series 2000 750GB drives. dual-core processors, designed to deliver more perfor- The 8300 will replace the mance and require less power than other CPUs. The sys- 3DBoxx 8200, until now a tem boasts a HyperTransport bus capable of up to 12GB/ mainstay of the Boxx work- sec throughput, serial-attached SCSI (SAS), 667MHz DDR2 station lineup. The 3DBoxx memory, and support for system memory of up to 64GB. 8300 is available now with The HP xw9400 workstation is available now at a base pricing starting at $2995. starting price of $2000.
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Ima gew new or too ks ls a d replicate a nd e 2D g te ve rap ch lo hic n p sty iq s le ue in s a to 3D w o r earingU ld B p
Two improbable buddies—Boog, a 900-pound grizzly bear voiced by Martin Lawrence, and Elliot, a one-antlered mule deer voiced by Ashton Kutcher—exhibit the strong graphic shapes with lush textural details used in Open Season, an animated fi lm created with 3D tools.
Images ©2006 Sony Pictures Imageworks.
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By Barbara Robertson A Fungible Pipeline Ikeler, visual effects supervisor for Open Making its fi rst animated feature was Season, who led a team that grew to 250 a learning experience for Sony Pictures people during production. A look devel- Imageworks, as well. SPA relied on opment package, for example, helped art- If a summer fi lled with CGI features has Imageworks’ visual effects pipeline to pro- ists quickly shade, light, and render the taught us anything, it’s that moviemak- duce the animation, and many of the art- numerous ordinary elements that added ers can’t guarantee box-offi ce success sim- ists and technical crew at Imageworks details to the 3D environments. ply by using 3D to make an animated fi lm. moved between visual effects shots for cli- “In visual effects, we have texture art- The thrill of seeing 3D characters in a 3D ents and work on the feature animation. ists, shader artists, and lighting artists world is gone, which might explain why But, Open Season bears little resemblance working on elements, and that’s a slow, CGI features are beginning to look so dif- to Imageworks’ Oscar-winning visual iterative process,” Ikeler explains. “We ferent from one another. Or, maybe it’s ram- effects in Spider-Man 2, its Oscar-winning needed a system that one artist could use pant creativity. Other than the fundamen- short animation, “The Chubb Chubbs,” or to put a book in the corner of the room in tal rule “You must start with a good story,” the animated fi lms The Polar Express and one day. We used it mostly for props and there is no CG aesthetic, no recipe for what Monster House, which used a motion cap- one-off stuff, not for main characters, trees, makes a good CGI fi lm. But if there were, ture-based pipeline to drive much of the or anything with heavy re-use.” With the Sony Pictures Animation’s (SPA) fi rst foray human characters’ performances. new tools, the look development team cre- into the growing fi eld of CGI animation “We wanted to go for more of a graphic ated approximately 600 digital props. would have changed it. Directed by Roger style,” says Culton. “Our characters have But that change to the system was Allers, Jill Culton, and Anthony Stacchi, strong shapes with lush details; the back- minor compared to the major effort and Sony Pictures’ Open Season is layered with grounds are the same way. It’s a challenge in attention the crew focused on convert- improbabilities, artistic and technical. 3D to fi nd a graphic look that worked from ing Eyvind Earle’s graphic style, as inter- Set in Timberline, a Northern Exposure different angles. We had to come up with preted by SPA’s art department, into 3D type of backwoods town, the fi lm stars special tools for the backgrounds and ani- backgrounds and characters. Boog, a 900-pound grizzly bear voiced mation, and sometimes we had to cheat.” by Martin Lawrence. Forest ranger Beth Culton discovered the graphic look that Behind Every Character (Debra Messing) raised Boog from a cub. became the fi lm’s style in a book stored in The fi rst sequence to move into production He lives in her garage and performs in her her attic: The Complete Christmas Card Art at Imageworks was a scene in which Boog nature shows. At night, Beth tucks Boog of Eyvind Earle. During the 1950s, Earle fl ies to the woods in a helicopter. When into bed with his little teddy bears. had painted backgrounds for such Walt Ikeler had fi rst spotted it, he noted that One day, a hunter named Shaw (Gary Disney animations as Peter Pan, Lady and because of the long forest vistas, the back- Sinise) rolls into town with a one-ant- the Tramp, and Toot Whistle Plunk and grounds would probably be matte paintings lered mule deer strapped to the hood of his Boom, and was a color stylist for Sleeping with a little 3D geometry in the foreground. truck. Remarkably, the deer, Elliot (Ashton Beauty. By pushing the background out of “Everyone was looking for footage; Kutcher), is still alive. He persuades Boog to focus, using long, raking shadows, and a because the layouts were simple to do, free him, and follows Boog home; and that’s simple graphic style that captured only they put this sequence into production the end of Boog’s cushy life. The fast-talk- the essence of environments, fi rst,” Ikeler says. “It wasn’t a ing Elliot tempts Boog into trouble, and the Earle put the viewer’s atten- good idea.” The problem rangers send the two miscreants into exile tion on the characters. was the painted back- in the woods. There, the citifi ed bear and Thus, Imageworks grounds defi ned the hapless deer discover true friendship while not only needed to add look for the sequence. encountering wacky woodland critters. But, tools such as those for “When we put grass in it’s hunting season. When Boog realizes he’s layout artists to its pipe- the foreground, every- among the hunted, he helps turn the tables line. It also had to mod- one recognized that the on the hunters. And then, he must decide ify some of the existing 3D foreground and the whether to return with Beth to Timberline tools and techniques to 2D background didn’t fi t or live as an animal in the woods. replicate in 3D the strong 2D together.” “It’s a good, universal theme,” says graphics that defi ned the visual Something had to give. The Culton. “Kids have to leave home, style for the fi lm, both in the backgrounds 3D team decided to work on one tree whether for kindergarten or college, and and in the characters. “We leveraged off from the artwork, a Douglas fi r, rather parents have to watch their kids grow up Imageworks’ expertise, but this fi lm’s than the entire forest, to work out a way and be OK with letting them go.” needs were quite different,” says Doug to add detail without losing the graphic
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style. The pine tree looked like a Christmas tree, with swooping tles—splashes, foam, water running down things, and character branches, pinecones on the outside, and needles on the inside. interaction—but we knew it had to be art-driven.” In the most dra- “It’s easy to paint a pine needle texture on a tree that has a matic shot, Boog breaks a beaver dam. The resulting fl ood wipes smooth profi le on one frame, or to render one frame of a 3D tree, out the other animals’ homes and fl ushes them into the hunters’ but the challenge was to keep the texture and a smooth profi le grounds. The sequence, which they’ve dubbed Splash Mountain, when the camera spins,” Ikeler says. “It was a huge R&D proj- sends the animals down rapids while they cling onto logs. ect.” The system Imageworks developed used layers of cards “One of the major issues was that we had preplanned marks, fashioned into the shape of a tree, each with clumps of pine cues, and beats to hit,” says Dave Stephens, effects animation needle textures. As the camera moved around, the cards also supervisor. “In a lot of cases, you set up a simulation, run it, and moved so they laid fl at against the underlying structure. work the shot around it. This was the reverse. They had the shot Once everyone approved that tree, the crew created other tree already worked out; we had to work to those requirements.” types and ages, varying the levels of detail on the cards for each. The effects team devised a Side Effects Houdini-based system Trees close to the camera used cards with more detail than those to handle Splash Mountain, and from that, derived water for the that needed to blend into matte paintings in the distance. calmer streams and ponds. The solution used a hierarchy of sim- The forest fl oor presented a different challenge. “The direc- ulations. “We moved a mass of water through the scene using a tors expected to move or add ground cover on any shot,” says coarse-level simulation,” Stephens explains. “Then we fed that Ikeler. “They wanted control through the fi nal composition.” data into smaller scale simulations. At the end of each simula- Five types of ground cover—pine needles, dirt, clover, dead tion, we had a set of particles, and we could construct a surface or grass, and green grass—defi ned with painted maps provided the have motion vectors that described the fl ow. The large simulation foundation for landscape artists who could then add 3D rocks, directed the overall motion; the smaller simulations directed small tree roots, mushrooms, leaves, and 10 different fl ower types areas and created foam elements.” with a new General Instancing Tool (GIT). The GIT artists dotted Also, a system of custom plug-ins for Houdini controlled the the ground with particles that grew into 3D elements or sprites, interaction of the water with static and moving elements. “The which were painted cards. system monitored how much water fl owed past an intersection Even the water was highly art-directed. “Water is always a hard and decided whether there should be foam or not,” says Stephens. effects element,” says Ikeler. “We needed all the cool bells and whis- If a large splash was called for, 3D foam fl ew up into the air as particles; otherwise, 2D particles traveled on the surface to cre- ate foam that fl owed with the water. The system could also tell whether a character or object was entering or exiting the water and create appropriate deformations, splashes, and ripples. “Because this part of the system was entirely procedural in Houdini, rather than a fl uid simulation, if a director wanted something physics couldn’t dictate, we could make that happen,” he adds.
Graphic Characters Boog, Elliot, Beth, and Shaw head a large cast of secondary char- acters—a herd of deer, beavers, rabbits, a skunk, a squirrel, and other animals, plus a pack of hunters and an old sheriff. The Eyvind Earle look chosen for the backgrounds infl uenced the design and animation of these characters, as well. All have exag- gerated shapes: Boog has a big belly and small head, Elliott has a large head on a long neck, the beaver has a big nose. All the men except Shaw are round; the women have elongated faces. Similarly, the town of Timberline and the vehicles the human characters drive are highly stylized. “All the buildings are a little bit off-center and there are no parallel lines,” says Ikeler. “At fi rst it was tough getting the modelers not to build everything perfectly.” Other than Main Street and Beth’s garage, most of the action in town takes place inside cars and trucks. “Making the cars Imageworks art-directed water shots using a simulation hierarchy. First, a coarse simulation directed water fl ow (at top, left). Then, fi t in the wonky town was a challenge,” says Max Bruce, CG smaller simulations created foam (at top, right). Custom Houdini- supervisor, “but one of the ways we tried to evoke a 2D feel was based plug-ins handled interactions procedurally (bottom). to give vehicles a mid-20th century look.” The hero vehicles,
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Idea: Assemble the ultimate team to create a John Woo sequel that you can play.
Realized: The line between video game and fi lm is officially blurred. When faced with the challenge of creating a video game sequel worthy of John Woo’s movie “Hard Boiled,” the team at Midway chose to use Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk Maya® and Autodesk MotionBuilder™. Using this 3D arsenal, artists are able to create graphically stunning characters, backgrounds and animations with amazing production efficiency. Get the full story on this next-generation masterpiece at autodesk.com/stranglehold
Stranglehold © 2006 Midway Amusement Games, LLC. All rights reserved. Stranglehold, MIDWAY, and the Midway logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Midway Amusement Games, LLC. Autodesk, 3ds Max, Maya and MotionBuilder are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product offerings and specifications at any time without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document. © 2006 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.
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however, were more up-to-date, albeit simple and iconic. her face and for her ponytail. The volumes were bound to a joint For the characters, the design challenge was retaining their system that was bound to the skeleton. Each volume drove a speci- simple lines while providing enough textural detail to make fi ed number of control hairs that, in turn, drove more hairs, and them interesting. For the humans, that meant putting enough eventually generated thousands of hairs on the surface. detail in texture maps so that the humans looked real, but not so “The volumes were easier to manipulate than trying to grab much that they looked realistic. “We couldn’t put real skin on a each hair,” says Yee. “Some of the hairs have 50 CVs.” For char- 2D character,” Ikeler says. “But we needed to please the viewers acters that used these volumes, Maya’s hair-simulation engine and give people what they’re used to.” added ancillary movement later, but the volumes always con- For animals, it meant art-directing fur on a cast of furred trolled the goal curves. characters. At fi rst, in keeping with the graphic look, SPA didn’t want the animals to have realistic fur. That plan changed when Shaping Characters the look development team showed the directors the fully-furred The two-dimensional backgrounds and character designs also characters. “When you see Boog’s fur, you want to get in and infl uenced the animation style and, therefore, the character hug him,” says Allers. “And you can see the growth patterns, the rigging. “We had to treat the animation in a way that would swirls where the direc- tion changes in the mid- dle of his chest.”
Stylized Fur Imageworks uses a hair and fur system based on control hairs interpo- lated during rendering into millions of hairs New tools helped groomers comb the and texture maps that characters’ fur into specifi c styles; each control how the hair clump could have different dynamics. For further art direction, a volume-based looks. The grooming rig could also move the fur. tools are proprietary; the studio uses Autodesk Maya dynamics for hair simulation. match the style of that world,” says Sean Mullen, animation For Open Season, CG supervisor Darren Lurie helped create supervisor. “To do that, we took more of a 2D approach by new tools that could clump and mat the hair in specifi c designs using shapers on the rigs.” to achieved the dramatic graphic look required for the animals Usually, animators pose 3D characters by rotating joints. and the humans. “We could create geometry and fi ll the shape However, the animators working on Open Season could also with hair,” he says, “which was a good way to visualize the move control points on the surfaces of characters to, in effect, overall shape we were trying to match in the drawings.” By des- sculpt poses. “Imagine that an arm was divided into eight slices ignating areas of infl uence around a control hair, combing art- that looked like little squares,” Mullen says. “You could grab a ists could cause nearby hairs to clump around it. Each of the square and move that section of the arm like a rubber hose. Or, clumps could have different properties and dynamics. you could grab points on the square to pull the surface on one Once groomers fi nished combing the hair, the hair-simulation side.” This pliability enabled the animators to mimic the squash team incorporated the animation, and the hair moved dynami- and stretch of traditional animation. Working in 3D, they could cally and automatically as the character moved. However, for stretch a character’s arm to exaggerate a gesture, and then snap some characters in this fi lm, because the movement of the hair the arm back into its original shape. affected the silhouette and, therefore, the graphic style, the crew “Early CG characters often felt ‘puppety’ because the anima- needed a way to direct the movement. “We needed more control tors didn’t have fl exibility,” says Allers. “The new shaping tools than we previously had,” says Chris Yee, lead technical director, not only helped us achieve a graphic look, but they gave us the who had worked on hair for The Polar Express and fur for both strength of traditional animation: greater stretch and squash Stuart Little fi lms. The answer was a volume-based rig. and strong shapes.” The rig was the brainchild of Dustin Wicke, Francois Giving animators the fl exibility in 3D that their counterparts Chardavoine, and Armin Bruderlin. “The volumes, which were have in a 2D world brought with it the same downside: It became part of the rig, moved the hair as a transform when the skeleton easy for them to go “off model.” When that happened, Mullen used moved,” Yee explains. “There were no dynamics happening at all.” new drawing tools to correct shapes and tweak timing. “I could Beth, for example, had separate volumes to control locks of hair on draw over the renders,” he says. “Sometimes I’d go over an entire
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character, to show how to pose it, what kind of timing to use, the arcs to follow, the shapes. It was basically like doing traditional animation.” The animators could then use the shapers to match his drawings.
Light and Dark While creating a performance, the animators also needed to be aware of lighting in the scene. In Eyvind Earle’s illustrations, background colors and long, raking shad- ows help focus attention on the characters; similarly, in Open Season, the graphic shapes of shadows often had as important a role as solid objects. “We used lighting thumbnails, the little paintings that showed the light- ing and colors in the scenes, as reference,” says Mullen. “We’d know, for example, that if we put Boog all the way to screen left in a shot, he’d go completely dark.” If a ges- Effects artists created fi re for this explosion using Maya’s fl uid simulator, ture on an approved animation, however, moved into a tweaked it in Houdini, and rendered it in RenderMan with a volumetric shader. shadow, the lighting team would add highlights. Colors also affected performance. For example, in bright every object for every type of light, creating separate lighting areas, little Elliot could be in front of big Boog because his passes for fi ll lights, key lights, ambient light, shadows and so forth. lighter colored fur created an internal silhouette, but Elliot’s They used RenderMan’s AOV (arbitrary output variables) option for color values were lost in the shadows. the multipass rendering. “When we put all those separate objects Because shadows played such an important role in the look together in the composite, we’d get the same result as if we ren- of the fi lm, the crew developed techniques to add shadows that dered them all at once,” Ikeler says, “but everything, for the most were not cast by geometry and to exaggerate or even remove the part, was still tweakable. It allowed us to do 10 iterations in less cast shadows. If this had been a typical 3D animated fi lm, to than a week and address tiny notes on the shots every day.” light Beth’s garage, for example, the technical directors might In addition to tweaking the lights, the artists could also change aim lights based on where the characters were standing to cre- individual elements in a scene during compositing. If the direc- ate a particular look, and then render the shot from various cam- tors didn’t like having both of Elliot’s legs the same brightness, for era angles. But because this fi lm was so art-directed, the lighting example, a soft gradient could darken a rotomatted leg. crew had to design shadows not from the geometry, but from the “We used a lot of grads,” adds Bruce. “We did vignetting to effect they had when seen in the 2D plane from the camera. make the trees and background darker toward the bottom, and to “At fi rst, we tried to push the virtual set idea onto the direc- push anything that approached the perimeter of the screen darker tors,” says Ikeler, “that you’d build and light the set once. But and out of focus.” Also, depth passes adjusted during composit- all the notes we got ing helped reduce the contrast, darken, and decrease the focus of from the directors were objects in the distance. “We could select parts of an image and do image-based. They whatever we wanted,” Bruce says. “It helped the 2D look.” wanted small edits that You might ask why SPA didn’t ask Imageworks to create the kept taking us back to a fi lm in 2D rather than 3D if the goal was to achieve a 2D look. The 2D art place.” For exam- answer is simple. It isn’t just that the studio had a 3D pipeline in ple, the directors might place to work with, it’s that the fi lm wouldn’t have looked the same. ask for a gradient on a Boog wouldn’t have been furry and huggable, and Splash Mountain tree in the top right cor- wouldn’t have become a wild, three-dimensional thrill ride. And, ner of a frame, or less as is evident by the increasing numbers of CGI features, audiences light on the chevron on now expect animated characters to be 3D and live in a 3D world. Boog’s chest. “For us By fi nding ways to incorporate 3D graphics into a 2D graphic-shape to make those changes language, Imageworks blended the best of both worlds and created by moving the lights in a unique CGI feature with a strong visual style. Animators could move control points 3D meant huge render on the surfaces of characters to sculpt times,” he says. Again, Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contribut- poses and mimic traditional animation’s something had to give. ing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at
squash-and-stretch style. The crew rendered [email protected].
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America’s Army gives the public a feel for what America’s Army contains high-tech weap- ons—an attractive feature in fi rst-person it is like to join its ranks By Karen Moltenbrey shooters (FPS). And the newest release in the franchise—America’s Army: Special Forces (Overmatch)—features some of today’s most sophisticated real-world On July 4, 2002, the United States Army its original mission: A force in the enter- battle technology. Also, the title incor- introduced America’s Army, an online tainment realm, it is one of the top-rated porates state-of-the-art game technology PC action game intended as an informa- PC action-game franchises played online. and compelling imagery for a realistic, tion vehicle to teach teens, through the More and more, companies and insti- immersive experience. use of virtual experiences, about soldier- tutions are using computer gaming tech- “We created the game to provide ing as a career choice. The initial goal was nology to train today’s young adults, who young adults with a virtual portal into simple: Provide the information within feel more comfortable in an interactive the Army. We built it in such a way that the entertaining and immersive environ- environment with a joystick and a key- they can explore key aspects of the Army, ment of a high-production-value game, pad than in a passive scenario. While from basic training to simulated deploy- thereby reducing the Army’s initial search these serious games are achieving suc- ments in the War on Terrorism. In this costs for new recruits. Four years later, the cess in terms of training and educa- way, we are able to leverage the popular- America’s Army franchise has far exceeded tion, they are by no means considered ity of games to provide young people with compelling entertainment—after all, it’s a fi rsthand look at what it is like to be a The latest version of the America’s Army series, Special Forces (Overmatch), contains extremely unlikely that, given a choice, a soldier,” says executive producer Phillip realistic replicas of the Army’s latest weap- person would play one of these titles for onry and simulations of its most sophisti- fun. Not so with America’s Army. cated battle technology. So, how did America’s Army success- fully capture the attention of gamers?
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Bossant. “The public is able to learn more terms of their ability to engage and defeat are suitable targets and what are not. about the Army, right from the source, in much larger hostile forces. To illustrate the accurate depic- an entertaining environment where more As Bossant notes, the US Army makes tion of these and other weapons in the knowledge and clarifi cation of Army val- continuous advancements in equipment title, Bossant points to the in-game ues and ethos can be gained without forc- and technology, and a few of the more M4 SOPMOD (Special Operations Mod- ing that information on the participant.” recent rollouts have included shoulder- and ifi cation). “This weapon has accu- vehicle-mounted systems. Overmatch pro- rate scale and uses the Picattiny Rail Equipped for Battle vides some of these real-world devices to System for attaching a number of swap- In development since 2004, Special Forces players, including the Javelin portable mis- pable equipment pieces,” he says. “These (Overmatch), a new expansion release sile system and the “up-armored” Humvee include three different scopes, the M203 for the military simulation game, will be vehicle with the CROWS weapon system. grenade launcher, Harris Bipod, and muz- available this Fall as a free public down- “America’s Army is widely recognized as zle suppressor. Weapon reloads, fi x jams, load, as are all the America’s Army games a highly immersive, high-quality visual and even brass ejections are added to the (there is also a commercial Xbox title experience,” says Bossant. “There is a lot CG imagery to make for a high-fi delity called Rise of a Soldier). America’s Army: of attention given to detail and authentic virtual experience.” Special Forces, the second major install- presentation of weaponry and equipment, ment of the franchise, builds on the orig- even to replicated functionality.” This type Gameplay and Army Values inal America’s Army: Operations title in of simulation in the game is accomplished It is diffi cult to categorize Overmatch. terms of player progression, expanding by the development team programmers. With such attention to detail, particularly play to let players gain an inside view Before players can utilize these weap- in terms of the weaponry, it can be consid- inside the world of the Army’s elite Special ons—which are all built using Autodesk’s ered a simulation game. Because it places Forces soldier. In the installment’s expan- Maya—they must successfully complete a players into a simulated experience of an sion pack Special Forces (Overmatch), virtual training course. For example, the actual soldier, it also can be considered a missions will feature cooperative game- Javelin Training/Qualifi cation Level is a reality-based role-playing game. And, due play against advanced artifi cial intelli- single-player mission focused on teaching to the title’s focus on teaching, it is often gence in which players experience the the player how to use the game version of labeled a serious game. Still, many hard- overmatched capabilities that the Army’s the Javelin, a man-portable, shoulder-fi red core gamers would consider Overmatch an special troops bring to the battlefi eld in missile. In this game level, players are FPS. Yet, unlike most online FPS games, introduced to the Javelin, given instruc- Overmatch is a compelling action game tions on how to use it, are tested on the that rewards teamwork as the method of information, and then are given informa- achieving in-game objectives. tion as to how the Javelin should be “While offering an exciting and intense used in combat—that is, what gaming experience, America’s Army still differs from many other titles by focusing the point-reward system on achiev- ing goals, and not running around Rambo style,” says Bossant. Consistent with real-life Army values, ethics, and morals, players must adhere to rules of
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engagement or they will face consequences. In another atypical aspect of gameplay, players do not “re-spawn” if they die in the game and must wait until a new round begins. Also, players must be cautious not to harm fellow teammates or civilians. Minor infractions include point and honor loss, but reckless behavior and indiscrimi- nate weapon usage will land the person in a virtual Leavenworth prison cell where the player will not be able to rejoin the server for a short period of time. America’s Army already has the great- est number of random elements in its mis- sion levels, Bossant says, and its multiplayer team versus team missions feature ran- dom spawns, random objectives, dynamic objectives, movable objectives, items that can be carried, random civilian and infor- America’s Army Special Forces (Overmatch) contains advanced artifi cial intelligence so that mant spawns, and even random extractions. players can join with other players to fi ght against computer-controlled AI. “Now we added character and vehicle AI to this mix, and we think players will get a deep and exciting virtual part of the US Army repertoire. For example, an untrained ter- game experience that is never the same and will be fresh no matter rorist might shoot from the hip, which is a common but highly how many times they play the same level maps,” he says. inaccurate way to use a real weapon. But change that to a more A completely new line of fi ctional enemy soldiers has been controlled, tougher adversary, including enemy tanks and other added to support the new AI feature in Overlook. As a result, vehicles, and a team effort becomes critical to successfully com- players can join other live players to cooperatively fi ght against plete a mission, Bossant points out. computer-controlled artifi cial intelligence. Also, vehicles are controlled by both the players and the opposing forces via enemy Gaming Technology AI. The enemy fi ghters can range in skill level from poor to very No one knows military simulation like the US Army, and the effective and dangerous, and can include methods that are not fact that the Army is the publisher and developer of the fran-
Overlook is unique in that it features the Real Heroes pro- was challenging on a number of fronts. First, the result they refer to as “painted realism.” gram, which portrays the lives and actions of actual sol- artists made custom head-model designs using “We can create a high-fi delity model with exact diers who have been decorated for bravery in combat. Autodesk’s Maya, and then animated the faces so the likenesses, but the solutions for our current game Players will be able to interact with the heroes in-game versions looked accurate. The crew started engine [Epic Games’ Unreal 2.5 engine] and its Real HeroesReal through in-game video that recounts the circum- with a photo base for reference, and hand-modeled design requirements had to fi t within predeter- stances and actions in which they were decorated in a relatively low, custom-poly head. As executive pro- mined specs,” Bossant explains. He notes that a the Global War on Terrorism. In addition, these sol- ducer Phillip Bossant points out, the heads need to be task like this will be easier when the group incor- diers appear throughout the game as interactive char- more unique than the generic-head versions used for porates the next-gen Unreal 3.0 solution into the acters in training missions related to what they do in the player characters, but not to the extent that there forthcoming America’s Army title. real life, giving players more exposure to real soldiers is a wide disparity in quality between them and the Although some of the America’s Army charac- and an opportunity to compare their virtual train- other player models. Alas, the artists were not able to ter faces came from actual soldiers, until now the ing with the accomplishments of real people. On the make custom eye and eyelid sizes and functions, and characters were considered generic. “Previously, we
America’s Army and US Army Web sites (www.amer-______are currently limited to a generic mouth construction didn’t try to re-create any particular soldier, but rather
______icasarmy.com and www.goarmy.com, respectively), for generic global lip-syncing. (This will no longer be used them as reference,” Bossant says. In contrast, players also can view extended videos, photo galleries, an issue when the team moves onto the next-genera- Overlook—with the inclusion of actual Real Heroes, copies of medals and awards, and locate additional tion engine and redesigns character models to accom- including their names and stories—“puts a human biographical information about these people. modate a higher fi delity.) Lastly, the artists painted face on the values, ethics, and efforts of the individu- Re-creating a virtual version of the Real Heroes atop the photo textures, allowing them to achieve a als in the US Army,” he adds. —Karen Moltenbrey
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eyeon continues its tour de force.
From acclaimed feature film finishing...
The Da Vinci Code © 2006 Columbia Pictures. All Rights Reserved. Image courtesy of Rainmaker. To high definition game creation...
Armies Of Exigo image courtesy of Digic Pictures. © 2006 Cinergi Interactive LLC. All rights reserved. To film quality effects for television...
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chise ensures that the simulation is realistic and the gameplay adheres to its strict standards. In fact, the team maintained a high level of standard throughout all aspects of development, including game graphics. This enabled the developers to suc- cessfully compete for the attention of its intended target: game- savvy young adults. Unlike some game developers, though, the Army was able to tap internal resources for leading-edge technology and materials. “We are not a company working for the Army, but the US Army development team, which affords us a signifi - cant amount of access to current active-duty soldiers, loca- tions, and equipment,” says Bossant. “We then take that ref- erence material, whether it is photographs, video, and, in The virtual soldiers in the game, which are physically representative of some cases, personal hands-on experience, and bring it into the “average” recruit, were modeled in Autodesk’s Maya. Each character our ‘games as art’ philosophy. We truly want to create excit- exhibits eye and head tracking, as well as lip synchronization. ing, compelling virtual experiences.” When the franchise began, Michael Zyda, director of the of-the-art Unreal game engine, which includes the Karma MOVES Institute, assembled a team of master’s and doctoral physics engine (supporting Karma Ragdoll Simulation). students, all military offi cers, whose emergent research— For Overlook, the team extended its well-honed skills, model- including streamlined graphics algorithms and analysis of ing the characters, objects, and scenery in Maya, and incorporat- the psychological dynamics of immersion, was piped into the ing UV lighting and baked light onto the model before applying game. (The Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation the textures. The artists painted the textures onto the models with Institute, or MOVES, is an internationally renowned center for Adobe’s Photoshop. “Our model accuracy set the new highest stan- modeling and simulation.) dard back in ’02 and still holds up today,” says Bossant. In addition, the development team visited a number of Army In keeping with the tradition of strong visuals in the fran- posts where they acquired a fi rsthand experience of Army chise, the artists changed the US soldier character models in activities. They also took photographs for texture references, the game to refl ect the current US Army uniform and equip- shot motion-capture video for animations, and recorded thou- ment. In-game soldiers now wear the army combat uniform, sands of sound effects. For the foundation of the franchise, the use a camel back instead of canteens, wear a Mitch helmet team selected an outside source, Epic Games, using the state- and even have different types of body armor depending on whether the soldier is in infantry, Rangers, or Special Forces. Careful attention was also given to how the weaponry was represented. When shooting, for example, the weapon sways slightly with the character’s breathing, recoils on discharge, and occasionally jams; bullets penetrate or ricochet depending on the make-up of the target, dis- tance from the target, and so on. Realistic physics inevitably infl uence play- ers’ decision-making. For instance, because ricochets tend to travel along vertical surfaces, players learn to resist hugging walls if they want to stay healthy and combat-effective, and they don’t detonate a blinding and deafening fl ashbang at close range if they value their sight and hearing. “While some players may like to charge around shooting recklessly, America’s Army is designed for zooming in and aiming through sights, and rewards shooting from The development team accurately re-created weapons in the game both in terms of their stable postures such as crouched and prone,” appearance as well as their performance. Bossant explains.
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MASTER
The art team re-created a range of environmental conditions within the game to simulate real-world conditions.
The Reality of Realism According to Bossant, the biggest content creation challenge the team faced for Overmatch was fi nding the exact detailed refer- ence material the artists needed for accurately portraying cer- tain equipment or locations in high fi delity. “Sometimes it was as simple as trying to fi nd out what the exact sound of a spe- cifi c mechanism was or how some part functioned, even how a person would get into a specifi c vehicle,” he explains. “Other times it concerned detailed information about ballistics, dam- DESIGNER age zones, or audio for an uncommon or exclusive weapon or piece of equipment.” While realism is an important aspect of the game, the devel- opment team is aware that there can be such a thing as too much reality. The group often captures and re-creates a variety NYU Master’s in Digital Imaging and Design of soldier movements, techniques, and equipment functionality that does not always make it in to the public version of the game. Obviously, the government only allows declassifi ed information Take your place at the forefront of digital imaging and animation. into the game; even so, sometimes that information is not nec- With artistic and creative insights from instructors at the top of essary or conducive to the entertainment nature of the public the industry, you’ll learn the critical process of managing the version, but is valuable for the iteration used as a training tool multi-faceted animation process in a team environment. Join a by the actual soldiers. professional network that will open doors, whether it’s Hollywood, an East Coast boutique, or any of the new, emerging opportunities Training for a New Generation in the field. Visit our website to view a gallery of student artwork. While Overmatch continued to push the state of the art in gam- ing, the Army is not resting on its laurels. The next-gen technol- Information Session: Wednesday, Sept. 27, 6-8 p.m. NYU Midtown Center, 10th Fl. ogy version of America’s Army, which is a brand-new version 11 West 42nd St. (btwn. 5th and 6th Aves.) on a newer, much more advanced Unreal 3 game engine, will Please call to RSVP. surpass all the achievements the group has made thus far in the franchise, Bossant promises. “Many of our biggest accomplishments in pushing the bound- aries of CG technology occurred earlier in the America’s Army life cycle,” says Bossant. “The results of that are still evident. Even today, it looks good for a title that, in game years, is consid- ered old. Not many games can say that. But this makes us even more excited to tackle it from scratch again to create a far more www.scps.nyu.edu/319 That’s why I go to NYU. powerful expression of a virtual environment and informative 1-888-998-7204, ext.319 Army messaging.”
New York University is an affirmative action/equal opportunity institution. ©2006 New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies Karen Moltenbrey is chief editor of Computer Graphics World.
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hortly after fi nishing his who only makes his life more miserable. and then started using [Autodesk’s] Maya fi lm Jimmy Neutron: Boy Lucas begins taking out his anger on the for animation and [Side Effects Software’s] Genius, director John Davis ants in his backyard, stomping out their Houdini for lighting.” received a copy of the book hills and blasting them with a hose. Prompting the changes was Davis’s The Ant Bully from Tom Meanwhile, members of the tiny com- desire to provide each team with its tools of SHanks. Though Davis and Hanks had munity under his feet are making plans choice. Lighting wanted to go with Houdini never met, the actor/producer thought to protect themselves. Eventually the ant and RenderMan, and compositing wanted that Davis would be a good choice to wizard Zoc (voiced by Nicolas Cage) uses to go with D2 Software’s Nuke. The model- develop the story, which he’d been read- a magic potion to shrink Lucas to ant ing to his son, into a CG fi lm. Davis liked size. The now-tiny Lucas must learn The Ant Bully, and devised a potential to cope in the ant community, where take on it within a few days. he experiences the incredible com-
There was a possible drawback: “To be plexity of their society, and also their Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. honest, when I fi rst looked at it, I thought, concepts of teamwork and loyalty. Oh, why did it have to be ants again?” The Ant Bully was directed and says Davis, referring not only to the 1998 produced by Davis, who, with movie Antz, but to rival CG “insect movie” Keith Alcorn, owns the Texas-based A Bug’s Life, which came out the same DNA Productions, which created year. “But the more I thought about it, I the movie. The fi lm, produced by Lucas (the ant bully) torments a colony of ants in said, ‘So what? It’s got as much to do with Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman of his backyard, little knowing that he is about to The Incredible Shrinking Man as it does the Playtone, was presented by Warner be cut down to ant size. other bug movies.’ It’s a completely differ- Bros. Pictures in association with ent story. I looked at it as a challenge.” DNA Productions and Legendary Pictures, ers wanted to use whatever program they a Playtone Production. The Ant Bully also were comfortable with, he notes. (The mod- An Ant’s Life came out simultaneously in IMAX 3D. elers eventually chose Maya, LightWave, In any case, ants and their way of life turn and Luxology’s Modo.) “So we said, ‘OK, out to be central rather than incidental to Cleaning Out the Pipes that’s what we’re going to use—now how the fi lm’s plot, which pivots around issues Before work on the fi lm could begin, Davis do we stitch it together?’” of teamwork, cooperation, and helping oth- and the animation team took on the produc- It took programmers more than a year ers. The Ant Bully is based on the book of tion pipeline, which was completely over- to develop ways to get data from one the same name by John Nickle. Its main hauled for this project. “Our old pipeline place to another in an intact format, so character, 10-year-old Lucas Nickle (voiced with Neutron was pretty much everything that fi les could be transportable not only by Zach Tyler Eisen), is a new kid in town in [NewTek’s] LightWave, using [PMG’s] between departments but also off-site. with no friends and a mostly unsupportive Messiah plug-in,” says Davis. “That changed “The new tools were so completely new family. The one peer who does pay atten- substantially for Ant Bully, when we switched to us that it wasn’t until halfway through tion to Lucas is the neighborhood bully, to [Pixar’s] RenderMan for rendering output, the production that we got all of our fi le
The Ant Bully animated feature offers an ant’s-eye-view of the world: A common frog (right) is a huge menace, and grass towers like a jungle above the ant wizard Zoc.
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Crowd animation
software brings
life to background characters in faces in The Ant Bully By Jenny Donelan the crowd
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structure worked out and were using the tools properly,” says Davis. Even though The Ant Bully was four years in the making, he notes, with a laugh, “I think most of the fi lm was really made in the last six months of production.”
Crowd Reactions Among the vital new tools used in The Ant Bully was Massive Software’s 3D crowd animation program, seemingly a natural fi t for a fi lm involving ants. The software uses artifi cial intel- ligence to enable characters to react to stimuli, including one another, in random but rational ways. One character in a crowd might yell out something, for example, which will start all the other members of the crowd muttering, shaking their heads, and stamping their feet, but in different ways, with different timing. Since the software’s “Brain” uses fuzzy logic, each char- Crowd software from Massive helped created convincingly acter reacts, or can react, to the same stimulus in a slightly dif- animated swarms of insects, both airborne and otherwise. ferent manner. One might look left, whereas another might look right, for instance. Massive was fi rst developed and used in con- the hero crowd layer was slowing down animation. It wasn’t pos- junction with Weta Digital’s The Lord of the Rings movies. sible to hand-animate so many ants in so little time. Thielen’s Mark Thielen was the crowd animation supervisor for The Ant team was asked to bring some of its Massive characters closer to Bully, responsible, as he says, for “getting all the masses of ants the screen, but at only 4000 polygons apiece, the Massive charac- doing their things in the background.” Early on, his team and the ters didn’t hold up next to the heroes. Since the hero characters fi lm’s animation director, David Tart, looked over the script and the were being subdivided through RenderMan, the next step was to animatic to see where Massive could be used most effectively. request subdivison support from Massive. An added twist, explains Thielen, was that much of the earlier “About a week later, Steve Regelous [Massive’s founder and Massive crowd animation for The Lord of the Rings had been done product manager] called to say there was a solution,” says Thielen. with motion capture. “You can’t motion-capture ants,” he says. So “We tested it, and a month later we were building shots with sub-D Massive had to work with keyframe-animated cycles, and what’s characters.” These characters held their own alongside the heroes; more, the production team wanted that animation to include facial in fact, during dailies, there were times when the group couldn’t expressions, since the fi lm was very character-oriented. “So we remember if a character was a Massive agent or a hero animation, requested [and got] facial animation support from Massive,” which notes Davis. Using Massive in this way ultimately freed up the core involved transferring facial animation blends from Maya into animation team to spend more time on the hero character work. Massive. “That was a huge thing for us,” says Thielen. And the special orders kept coming. Originally, explains The View from the Ant Hill Thielen, there were three layers of characters in the fi lm: hero and The end result is an ant’s-eye view of the world and the story hero crowd, both hand-animated, and then a crowd that would of a boy who is literally forced to look at that world from a dif- be animated in Massive. At some point, the team discovered that ferent vantage point. Because of this unique perspective, the fi lm is especially effective in IMAX 3D. “It looks wild,” Davis says. Filming in stereoscopic 3D, he adds, enhanced the non- IMAX version as well, because the team couldn’t use the kinds of time- and labor-saving “cheats” they had previously used for other projects. Where they would have used 2D effects, such as sprites for creating dust, smoke, and the like, they couldn’t because “if you tried to do that in 3D IMAX, it would just fl atten out,” he adds. “So all of our effects, everything, had to be done in real, physical, 3D space. It kept us honest.” As for those ants? No regrets, says Davis. “There’s a boy and a lesson he needs to learn, and ants are sort of the quintessential model of community and cooperation.”
Facial expression, as demonstrated here by the ants (left to right) Jenny Donelan is a contributing editor for Computer Graphics
Kreela, Hova, and Fugax, were key to telling the fi lm’s story. World. She can be reached at [email protected].
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Technology companies continue to push the state
of the art to put more power in the hands of content creators
Today, makers of computer processing units card manufacturers has decreased: Several market converge in graphics; it seems to be (CPU), graphics processing units (GPU) and months ago, 3dlabs exited the fi eld, leaving a key focal point for these technologies. For graphics cards, and graphics-oriented work- Nvidia, ATI, and manufacturer/supplier example, 64-bit computing is much more stations assume as much, if not more, space PNY Technologies. prevalent now, with Microsoft’s 64-bit and attention at industry trade shows and operating system and the availability of 64- exhibits as the major Graphics Growth bit chips. That is enabling customers to put software developers By Courtney E. A number of factors are contributing a lot more memory in their systems and, as serving the content Howard to the increased adoption of profes- a result, work with much larger datasets.” creation market. The sional-level graphics cards. For start- latest industry fi g- ers, industry vendors and consortia More 3D than Ever ures likewise refl ect continue to invest handsomely in 3D is pervasive in today’s society: in enter- the growing market research and development efforts, tainment, including fi lms and games, to position of these advancing the technology and tai- the Web, e-mail communications, com- tech companies. loring hardware and software prod- puter desktops, cell-phone screens, PDF “The graphics ucts to better meet the needs of digi- fi les, and even to your local hospital. And market is just exploding, growing 20 per- tal content creation professionals. “A new it is growing rapidly in engineering, oil and cent year-over-year in branded worksta- architecture, a brand-new graphics API gas exploration, biomedical, defense, and tions—about twice the rate of the PC mar- such as OpenGL and DirectX, comes out myriad other markets and applications. ket,” notes Jeff Brown, general manager roughly once a year,” explains Brown. “And “Today, there’s a whole migration from for Nvidia professional products. “Hewlett- the workstation side is still very much tied 2D to 3D, and increased precision and reso- Packard and Dell had amazing years. And to a once-a-year refresh rate. With graphics lution,” says Brown. “For example, Google we just announced that the customer base processors, we’re now seeing a lot of varia- is starting to add 3D models to Google for Nvidia’s Quadro FX product grew by tions of products and incremental changes Earth, which has a huge user base with more than 20 percent.” to product families throughout the year.” hundreds of millions of people. Autodesk Dan Shapiro, senior marketing manager “The pace of innovation is incredible,” is moving users from AutoCAD in 2D to for workstation products at ATI, echoes this recognizes Shapiro. “New manufacturing Inventor in 3D. A lot of ultrasound applica- sentiment, stating, “Right now, we see year- processes enable us to pack more on the tions used to be 2D grayscale, for example, to-year 20 percent growth in the profes- chips, and new algorithms and new tech- and now you’re seeing 3D color ultrasound sional market worldwide.” niques are being integrated into the hard- with increased precision and quality.” Despite these fi gures, the number of ware. A lot of trends in the workstation Growth in 3D content means more and
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The newest offerings tially doubles the amount different pins on it,” describes Shapiro. in ATI’s FireGL family of of graphics horsepower “It will enable higher resolution support workstation 3D graphics required, given the need over twisted pair, deeper bit-depth sup- accelerators range from an to drive twice the number port natively, much longer cable lengths, ultra-high-end 1GB confi guration of pixels. On the video and the ability to drive multiple displays to a 128MB model, and are based on side, the move from stan- off a single cable. It’s a new technology ATI’s scalable, ultrathreaded architecture dard defi nition (SD) to that, over time, will be low cost and con- with Avivo video/display technology. high defi nition (HD), for nect a desktop or a laptop to the next gen- larger models, which translates example, is accompanied by four times the eration of display technology.” to more geometry, Brown notes. number of pixels to render. The industry relationships don’t stop More sophisticated shaders and fi ll “High-resolution displays, such as there; rather, graphics card manufactur- rate drive the requirement for more par- Ap ple’s 30-inch Cinema and Dell’s 30-inch ers work closely with independent soft- allelism and more pixel pipelines. Higher 3007WFP, are enabling professionals to be ware vendors (ISV) and makers of graph- quality output means higher pixel preci- more productive, especially on the content ics workstations and computer processors sion and higher bit depth. “It impacts every creation side,” says Shapiro. Graphics card to ensure the seamless integration and portion of the GPU architecture,” he says. vendors, in response to this growing trend, compatibility of components. Identifying the growing demand for have infused their product lines with sup- more visual computing power, Nvidia last port for today’s ultra-high-resolution dis- Software Sophistication month introduced the Quadro Plex 1000 plays with high refresh rates. For example, “It’s a whole ecosystem,” says Shapiro of visual computing system, a scalable offer- ATI’s professional FireGL line provides dual- professional workstations, in general. “You ing—akin to a GPU farm—that can be uti- link technology and a native 10-bit engine need to have a lot of geometry process- lized as a single VCS node or scaled in a for displaying more than one billion colors. ing and all components of the workstation rack space for unprecedented visual com- The 10-bit display engine is being embraced operating in tandem. As Intel and AMD pute density (see Products, pg. 4). by various high-tech market segments, are making advances on the CPU side and including medical imaging, scientifi c visu- as the software companies are coming out Displays in Demand alization, and others in which the ability to with multi-threaded applications, we work The growing demand for eye-catching, see extremely fi ne detail is critical. together to remove all the bottlenecks of realistic 3D has altered the DCC work fl ow, Graphics card vendors, display manu- the system and to expand our capabilities.” bringing about increased requirements for facturers, PC and workstation companies, Professional DCC involves consider- faster iterations and time to market. To and a consortium of other graphics sup- ably large datasets and sophisticated soft- boost productivity and speed work fl ow, pliers have been hard at work on a new ware solutions with which to create and professionals now often employ multiple standard called Display Port. “It’s about manipulate them. Software developers displays. Yet, the use of two displays essen- the size of a USB connector, but it has such as Autodesk, Maxon, and Softimage continue to expand the functionality, capa- bilities, and tool sets within their 3D appli- GPU and CPU Manufacturers Partner cations. These full-featured programs, in Graphics card manufacturers ATI and Nvidia work with various indus- turn, increase the necessity for a powerful, try organizations, including vendors of software programs, workstations, and high-end graphics card to accelerate them. workstation components. At the end of July, just prior to SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston, The availability of increased processing ATI revealed that well-known computer processing unit manufacturer AMD intends to power enables DCC professionals to work purchase the graphics card company. with larger models and potentially become “We work closely with the CPU manufacturers, Intel and AMD,” says Dan Shapiro, senior mar- more productive and innovative, as they keting manager for workstation products at ATI. “Although an acquisition has been announced are better able to create, edit, and experi- between ATI and AMD, ATI’s focus as a graphics provider is very much on supporting all the major ment with 3D models in a real-time, inter- CPU companies. We will continue to support both Intel and AMD.” active interface and work fl ow. The acquisition transaction had not been fi nalized as of press time. Neither company has announced Given that certain 3D DCC software offi cial plans as to how the new organization will be structured. Yet, Shapiro offers some insight into vendors infl uence the design and develop- the potential acquisition agreement, noting that battles over architectures and a considerable reduc- ment of graphics cards and associated tech- tion in staff are both unlikely. “These are two complementary companies merging together,” he nology, imagine the impact of the largest says. “As concerns future product innovations, I think we’ll see a lot of crossover technolo- mainstream software application: the oper- gies between CPUs and GPUs, and combining them into various effi cient and very ating system. Microsoft is poised to intro- powerful chipsets.” —Courtney E. Howard duce Windows Vista, a new version of the
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Nvidia Quadro GPUs and nForce Windows operating system that Professional MCPs are robust, harnesses the power of the GPU high-performance workstation to deliver impressive graphics solutions for professionals on and performance. desktop and mobile platforms. Apple designed its OS X with an interface based on OpenGL. physical phenomenon are modeled using In doing so, Apple built into the operat- similar kinds of mathematical equations that ing system a wealth of 3D and graphical ele- are used to compute graphics display,” he says. In ments—a stark contrast to the 2D bitmaps com- a demonstration at SIGGRAPH 2006, in fact, ATI illus- mon in older operating systems. In its development of trated the ability to accelerate Havok’s physics libraries Windows Vista, Microsoft is likewise instilling the OS with directly on the GPU. In the on-screen presentation, a bowl- advanced graphics effects and capabilities, including transpar- ing ball collided with thousands of pins and elicited a chain ency, 3D geometry, and imagery mapped onto 3D objects. Users reaction in real time. “It was a real-world simulation of thou- who wish to take advantage of the interactive, graphically rich sands of objects interacting,” he notes. “When we ran it on the Windows Vista interface will require a powerful graphics card. CPU, it ran at roughly three or four frames per second; when we “Windows Vista provides an interface with all the bells and ran it on the GPU, it was real time, over 30 fps.” whistles, things like transparencies and scalable icons, using In addition to physics engines, programmable shaders are the GPU entirely,” Brown explains. “Even in the lowest end con- among the many applications being powered by the GPU. “A sumer markets, people who are going to want to take advantage really great example of an application using the graphics card is of that GUI are going to need a reasonable GPU. That is one of CATIA,” Brown mentions. “The latest version uses CG effects for the trends, without a doubt, that is going to drive 3D graphics shading; you can shade your models with realistic shaders. That and GPU use in a lot of markets.” capability has been in the DCC applications for a couple genera- tions now, but now there’s increased use of the GPU. The grow- Moving to the GPU ing DI market, which includes Assimilate solutions and Autodesk Virtually all segments of the graphics industry are investing in Lustre, uses the GPU heavily. All these trends in the professional today’s 3D graphics processing technologies. “What’s interesting graphics market push virtually every unit within the GPU. It’s is that research departments and specialized market segments that ecosystem that helps to drive GPU development.” are fi nding that CPUs are not fast enough for their applications,” admits Shapiro. “In fact, our GPUs are roughly 10 times more pow- Tomorrow’s 3D Graphics Cards erful than an Intel Pentium processor in terms of raw gigafl ops.” Graphics card companies partner with various industry organi- As a result, much of the market is intent on attaining high-end 3D zations, including ISVs, chip manufacturers, workstation ven- graphics cards to harness the power inherent in GPUs. Moreover, dors, and standards bodies, to stay up-to-date on, become edu- software developers increasingly are designing their programs to cated about, and keep pace with the latest technology trends. tap a workstation’s graphics processing power, as opposed to its Yet, at the same time, it’s clear that all R&D efforts begin with computer processing power. That is, tasks traditionally handled by the end user. At present, for example, the companies are keep- the CPU are being relegated to the realm of the GPU, and translat- ing their eye on upcoming versions of OpenGL, DirectX, and PCI ing into greater performance for the end customer. Express, the latter of which is intended to double the bandwidth Shapiro raises physics processing as an example. “This speaks between the graphics card and the system. to the gaming market that has a lot of engineering applications For Brown, the future of 3D graphics cards is easy to pre- whereby collision detection, cloth simulation, or other types of dict. “You can look at the future APIs—OpenGL 3.0 and DirectX 10—and from those forecast what the next GPUs will look like. Of course, they put out more performance and functionality, but what they really provide is a lot more scalability, increased image quality without a performance hit, the ability to han- dle more windows interactively, and more programmability for developers and ISVs so more sophisticated real-time effects can be run on the GPU. Those defi ne a lot of the future features that you’ll see in GPUs, and, in turn, that you’ll see applications use, but it starts really with the content—the user need.” Image courtesy Amilton Diesel. More GPU power means that digital artists can more easily create Courtney E. Howard is a contributing editor for Computer Graphics
and manipulate large and complex data for scenes like this one. World. She can be reached at [email protected].______
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Storage in the Studio
VFX require high Advanced storage systems speed and capacity and networks enhance ✼ Pixar puts the work fl ows at digital pedal to the metal content creation studios ✼ The Orphanage accelerates work fl ow
✼ DNA meets the need for speed
✼ Tweak relies on RAID
Storage technologies meet studio needs Facilities can benefi t from relatively new technologies and network interfaces
✼ Shadowtree Studios gets Mac relief
Produced in conjunction with magazine
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VFX Require High Speed and Capacity
Studios such as Pixar, The Orphanage, DNA, herein lies the potential traffi c jam. As Kirkman says. “We would much pre- and Tweak Films leverage McQueen screeches around a curve fer to get data out of memory than off a variety of new storage during the Piston Cup Championship a disk drive.” technologies to meet the race in the beginning of the fi lm, sta- Pixar installed a 12-node Ibrix clus- high-end requirements dium lights strobe off his fl ashy red ter. Eight servers fed the renderfarm, of recent feature fi lms paint job. The camera follows his bat- all talking to the same SAN storage tle to the fi nish line while thousands device to get data, and four servers and animation projects of cars in the crowd cheer and light- maintained the metadata for the fi le bulbs pop; thousands of points of system. Each of the eight “heads” had By Barbara Robertson light bounce off fenders and hoods. “If 32GB of memory. That meant the work- McQueen is in most of the frames, you ing set of data could fi t in RAM. have to read his data across all 3000 “We got a huge multiplier from being CPUs,” says Kirkman. “The challenge able to serve data out of RAM,” says is providing data for 3000 CPUs all try- Kirkman. “We expect 100 percent utili- All animation studios rely on ing to go after the same piece of data.” zation of our CPUs at all times. If we’re superhighways to transport the huge For previous fi lms, Pixar relied on waiting on I/O, we see the difference amounts of data needed to fi ll 24 Network Appliance’s NetCache sys- between the machine time and the wall frames a second (fps) in a 90-minute tems, which worked well. But to repro- clock. If something we think should feature fi lm. But Disney/Pixar’s ani- duce the refl ections bouncing off the take one hour to render takes three mated blockbuster Cars pushed that chrome, glass, and steel bodies of Cars’ hours, we know we’re wasting time studio’s system to the limit. At Pixar, stars, Pixar used a raytracing method waiting for I/O. Before [we installed] a 3000-CPU renderfarm comprising 64- of rendering that simulates the paths of the Ibrix system, the wall clock time bit Intel Nocona-based “pizza boxes” light rays hitting an object from various was six to 10 times what we expected reads data in, runs the algorithms, and sources and angles to reproduce the because we didn’t have enough mem- generates the new data—that is, the effect of real light in a scene. “With Cars, ory. With Ibrix, we reduced that down rendered frames. because we were doing raytracing, the to 15 percent. We want to complete The data comes from a model number of reads needed to calculate a reads in less than half a millisecond, farm that’s typically 3TB to 4TB in size. frame increased dramatically,” Kirkman and we were achieving that as long as “That’s our most valuable data,” says explains. “When you’re tracing rays of we could get data out of RAM.” John Kirkman, Pixar’s director of sys- light, sometimes you’re reading data For Pixar’s next fi lm, Ratatouille, tems infrastructure. “It’s where we that’s not in the frame. You’re reading scheduled for release in June 2007, the store the hand-built models, the shad- light hitting a mailbox a mile down the studio is installing a second Ibrix sys- ers, the textures created by the techni- road before it hits McQueen’s fender.” tem, this one a 16-node cluster. “We’re cal directors, and the animation data.” The data needed for the render- recycling parts of the Cars system, but In other words, the model farm is farm to do its work at any point in time we’re going to end up with two [clusters] where the characters live, and in Cars, is usually between 100GB and 200GB. that we rotate between our current and all the characters are vehicles—race With the previous technology, Pixar next fi lms,” says Kirkman. The Ratatouille cars, transport trucks, family sedans, was limited to 1.5GB of internal memory. system has eight servers feeding data to sports cars, and even tractors. But, by switching to Ibrix’s Fusion par- the renderfarm: four serving users and So, when Lightning McQueen, the allel fi le system software, Pixar could four managing metadata. star of Cars, appears in a scene, the pull more data out of RAM. “We’re very “The thing we fi nd most attrac- renderfarm needs to read his data, and sensitive to having to wait for data,” tive is that Ibrix is a software solution,”
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existing SAN storage as a shared net- work resource. McNamara says the studio is getting 340MB/sec to 360MB/ sec throughput. “We haven’t had to add storage; we just move the data faster to the [artists].” The Orphanage had planned to evaluate several systems, and Blue- Arc’s Titan was the fi rst one they tried. “I wish I could tell you we evaluated several systems and here’s all our raw
Image © 2006 Disney/Pixar. numbers,” says McNamara, “but the Behind the sophisticated effects in Cars, produced by Disney/Pixar, is a 3000-processor Titan exceeded our expectations. It renderfarm and Ibrix’s Fusion parallel fi le system. supports CIFS natively [as well as NFS], Kirkman says. “With traditional NAS, pieces that had to be woven together.” so that was fi ne. It met our needs.” you have to buy a big box. If you’re only At the same time that The Orphanage The studio hasn’t regretted the deci- interested in adding memory, you’re artists were leaping over tall data require- sion. “When you push some storage sys- paying for other stuff you don’t need. ments for Warner Bros.’ Superman tems, you hit a cliff and fall off,” says With Ibrix, we can scale everything Returns, a second effects fi lm—the McNamara. “With this system, you don’t independently, whether we want more South Korean monster movie The Host— have issues when you really push it.” CPUs, memory, networks, or spindles.” had its own set of fi endish requirements. As The Orphanage’s needs grow, In addition to the parallel fi le system The Orphanage created the fi lm’s Han McNamara expects the studio will pur- (also called a segmented fi le system), River mutant, a 45-foot-long digital crea- chase a second Titan storage server and Ibrix’s Fusion software includes a logi- ture that looks like a cross between a evaluate the new clustering software cal volume manager and high-availabil- T. rex and a fi sh. The fi lm, which received BlueArc is developing. “Our biggest [con- ity features. The software allows users rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival cern] is giving the artists interactivity,” to build fi le systems that can scale up and broke box-offi ce records in South says McNamara. “We don’t want them to 16 petabytes of capacity in a single Korea, made its North American debut to wait for scenes to load. This business namespace. Fusion runs independent at the Toronto Film Festival this month. is about creativity, and we want to make of specifi c hardware and/or network “It was intense,” says McNamara of sure our artists are happy.” platforms, and supports the CIFS and the visual effects work. “We had com- BlueArc’s software that runs on the NFS protocols. Ibrix claims aggregate plex scenes with people fi ring weapons Titan storage servers includes a fi le performance of as much as 1TB/sec. at the CG creature, and the shots were system with a cluster namespace for a really long. We wanted to make sure unifi ed directory structure and global The Orphanage that the large fi les the artists required access to data for CIFS and/or NFS Accelerates Work Flow loaded as fast as possible.” clients. The object-based fi le system Superman might fl y faster than a speed- Now the studio’s 11.5TB of data sits supports up to 512TB of data in a single ing bullet, but when The Orphanage behind a BlueArc Titan 2000 series pool. The disk array can be confi gured needed to aim a bullet right at the Man storage system. The Titan system’s with high-performance Fibre Channel of Steel’s baby blues, the studio’s need open SAN back-end views the studio’s and/or low-cost, high-capacity Serial for speed sent them looking for a new
storage solution. Orphanage. The and Pictures Bros. Warner courtesy Image “Our artists and our renderfarm machines were starved for fi le system I/O,” says Dan McNamara, vice presi- dent of technology at the San Francisco- based visual effects studio. In addition to the bullet shot, The Orphanage han- dled a bank job and wild car chase. “The complex scenes for Superman
Returns really tested [the system]. We The Orphanage’s work on Superman Returns involved more than 11.5TB of SAN-based data had lots of complex elements—lots of behind a BlueArc Titan storage system.
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4IRED OF FORCING DIGITAL CONTENT ONTO TRADITIONAL STORAGE .OW THEREgS A BETTER TOOL )SILON )1 CLUSTERED STORAGE WAS DESIGNED FROM THE GROUND UP FOR MISSION CRITICAL DIGITAL CONTENT )SILONgS /NE&34- DISTRIBUTED FILE SYSTEM ACCELERATES YOUR BUSINESS WITH MASSIVE THROUGHPUT UNSURPASSED AVAILABILITY AND PERFORMANCE THAT SCALES WITH YOUR NEEDS A SINGLE FILE SYSTEM CAN SEAMLESSLY GROW FROM TO 4ERABYTES )F YOU WANT TO STOP STRUGGLING WITH AND START CELEBRATING YOUR DATA GROWTH CONTACT )SILON AND PUT THE POWER OF CLUSTERED STORAGE TO WORK FOR YOU
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ATA (SATA) disk drives to create a tiered storage architecture. BlueArc claims performance to 10Gb/sec.
DNA Meets the Need for Speed When DNA Productions moved from creating the episodic animated TV show The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron to the full-length animated feature fi lm The Ant Bully, everything changed. In Warner Bros.’ The Ant Bully, a boy takes out his frustration on some ants (see “Faces in the Crowd,” pg. 24). The ants fi ght back by shrinking the boy to their size and teaching him the ways of the ants. Ultimately, the boy helps save the colony. Creating a few CG characters for
a full-length feature, plus backgrounds Pictures. Bros. Warner courtesy Image and props is diffi cult enough, but creat-
Rendering for The Ant Bully feature fi lm required a 1400-processor renderfarm and a 42-node clustered storage system and software from Isilon Systems.
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ing an entire colony of characters would 42 nodes. “The clients, the renderfarm, glue that ties the cluster together.” tax most server/storage systems. and the artist workstations all mount Each node handled between 25 and “We changed our whole infrastruc- across that cluster,” Himeise explains. 30 clients. Because DNA used Isilon IQ’s ture,” says Rich Himeise, director of “Mounting the clients across the cluster SmartConnect feature, the number of network operations at DNA. “We had increases the throughput to the system.” nodes assigned to artists and to the ren- to upgrade everything to go from the Each node has a processor, 4GB of derfarm changed as needed. “We could TV show to a movie.” That upgrade memory, and a Gigabit Ethernet con- dedicate 30 nodes to our renderfarm included converting from a Windows- nection. That, in effect, gave the studio when it became busy and the remaining based system to a Linux-based system, a 42-processor computer with 168GB of 12 nodes to the artists, and then, if the buying a 1400-processor renderfarm, memory and a 42Gb/sec connection to artists complained, we could give them and installing a new 42-node Isilon the fi le system. “You can think of the more nodes,” says Himeise. “It was easy; Systems clustered storage system that cluster as one big, robust machine,” says it just took a couple of clicks.” provides 80TB of raw storage capacity. Himeise, “with 42 Gigabit [Ethernet] The power failed in DNA’s build- “We run our entire production on the pipes into the cluster.” ing twice during the production of Isilon IQ systems,” says Himeise. The processors handle the fi le trans- The Ant Bully. “One time, we could “We render to the system, and our actions like a typical server, moving shut down safely,” says Himeise, “but assets live on the system. The entire data to hard drives. At the back-end of the other time the system went down movie lives on the system.” With each the cluster, Infi niBand switches tie all hard. With a cluster this size, it was a frame of the animated fi lm requiring from the nodes together. “Node number one nerve-racking experience, but the sys- 1MB to 10MB of data—some even more— knows what’s on the hard disk of node tem came back up with no problem. throughput and load balancing were criti- 42 and what’s in the memory cache of We didn’t lose a fi le.” cal. Isilon’s OneFS clustered, distributed 42, and 42 knows what’s in node one and Even with the new system in place, by fi le system spread the load across the everywhere else,” Himeise says. “It’s the the end of production the studio began
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running out of storage space. “Isilon deliv- Single Visual Effect of the Year. The stu- goal is to have each render node access ered 15TB of storage to get us through the dio also crashed military tanks on an its local drive rather than access data fi nal months, and when we were done, aircraft carrier deck for a sequence in on the server. “Say we have a 5GB data- we shipped them back,” says Himeise. XXX: State of the Union, helped destroy set of texture maps for rendering New Isilon’s IQ series of storage arrays Barad-Dur in The Lord of the Rings: The York City that all the rendering nodes uses Gigabit Ethernet for front-end con- Return of the King, and, more recently, need to access,” explains Root. “Rather nections and can be confi gured with worked on water-simulation shots for than having all 50 machines try to suck either Gigabit Ethernet or Infi niBand Superman Returns and Monster House. that data all at once, each machine connections for intra-cluster commu- Thus, even though the studio is gets its own copy.” That speeds the nications. The storage nodes (IQ 1920, small, the shots are big. Simulating rendering process. It also means the 3000, 4800, and 6000) are available in nature takes huge amounts of data and data that rendering nodes access isn’t a variety of models, enabling users to processing power. And that means “precious,” it’s only a copy. meet capacity/performance require- the small studio needs smart storage Root uses Rsync, an open source ments. The OneFS distributed fi le sys- solutions. “When you’re dealing with utility, to manage the fi le transfers. tem creates a single, shared global images, the data adds up fast,” says “Rsync checks on the server and local namespace and supports NFS and Mike Root, a compositing supervisor drives of the render nodes,” he says. CIFS. Isilon’s SyncIQ replication soft- and software engineer at Tweak Films, “During the process of rendering, it ware distributes data between clusters. “but when you’re a small shop, you can’t picks up local information off the local buy massive network bandwidth.” A drives. If anything has changed, it cop- Small Shop, Big Jobs standard fi lm frame, he explains, is ies and moves only the changed part.” Cutting-edge technology developed by about 12MB; the 5464x4096-resolution For distributing the render jobs, the two-time technical Academy-Award IMAX fi lms, rendered with 10 bits per studio uses Condor, a queuing system winner Jim Hourihan helps Tweak pixel rather than 8 bits, require approx- developed for academic and scientifi c Films, a San Francisco-based visual imately 100MB per frame. computing at the University of Michigan. effects studio that Hourihan recently For centralized storage, Tweak uses “It gives us fi ne-grain controls for select- co-founded, compete with larger, well- an Apple Xserve RAID server with 5TB ing which machines to run on,” Root established studios. of capacity. “We also have a hard drive says. “When we have a big job to render, Some small-effects studios sur- on each render node and on the desk- we turn all the desktop machines into vive on scraps thrown to them by the top machines,” Root says. “In some of the render machines as well.” major studios—easy wire-removal work we did for The Day After Tomorrow, Eventually, Tweak Films plans to move shots, paint “fi x-its,” and so forth. Not the textures and geometry added up to to a SAN, hooking multiple servers to Tweak. This studio gets the hard shots: gigabytes. If we had 50 machines try- more Xserve RAID arrays. “Then, our ren- water simulations, rigid-body simu- ing to suck from one server all at once, we der nodes and desktop machines would lations, fi re, and smoke. For example, would have had a giant bottleneck. So we all talk to the servers,” Root explains. Tweak created a tidal wave that surged sync render data to all our render nodes.” “We’ll still have the same philosophy: through the streets of New York in The Each of the Linux-based render Rather than having all of our machines Day After Tomorrow, which won the nodes has a processor, 4GB of memory, talk to one server, we’d have one server Visual Effects Society’s award for Best and an 80GB or 160GB hard drive. The group for render nodes, another for our desktops, and so forth, and all those serv- ers would talk to the same data storage on RAID with extremely high bandwidth. We’ll still be as effi cient as we can.” Apple’s Xserve RAID arrays can include up to 14 Ultra ATA disk drives, and Fibre Channel external connections, for a total capacity of up to 7TB. Pricing is typically less than $2 per gigabyte.
Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Com- Image courtesy Fox and Tweak Films. Tweak Films, which has done work on movies such as The Day After Tomorrow, uses Apple’s puter Graphics World. She can be reached Xserve RAID array for most of its storage needs. at [email protected].
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Visit http://emgz.blogspot.com for more Your G5’s Dream Date
The 3ware Sidecar & Your Apple Power Mac G5: The Perfect Match
The 3ware® Sidecar by AMCC is a powerful SATA RAID desktop storage solution designed specifically for the Apple® Power Mac® G5. At speeds 4-8x faster* than Firewire or USB, it can store and protect tons of your photos, songs, videos, illustrations and web pages.
Whether you’re editing and archiving digital photo shoots or snapshots, home movies or future Academy Award® winning films, garage jam sessions or professional mixes — rest assured your data will always be protected. The 3ware Sidecar is designed for creative professionals and enthusiasts who care about their data and just can’t risk losing it! With the 3ware Sidecar, your data is RAID protected, so a failed drive won’t mean the loss of hours of creative output.
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AMCC and 3ware are registered trademarks of Applied Micro Circuits Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders. Copyright © 2006 Applied Micro Circuits Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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Meeting Studio Needs
Facilities can benefi t from new technologies and network interfaces need for extremely fast storage devices A variety of storage vendors now By Mark Brownstein on the write path. However, there may support 4G Fibre Channel host connec- be a signifi cant need to access these tions. For example, iQstor’s iQ2880 disk fi les rapidly so they can be reviewed, array provides four 4G Fibre Channel processed, or viewed in real time. This ports on the front-end and four 4GB/sec often requires a “tiered” storage hierar- Fibre Channel loops on the back-end. Today, all aspects of fi lmmaking and chy that includes relatively low-cost, low- The iQ2880 allows users to mix Fibre distribution are changing. In fact, much speed storage for frames that are being Channel and SATA drives in the same of the ongoing “fi lm” production uses held but not worked on, and a transfer system. With 500GB SATA drives, total fi lm at only two stages—shooting the to more-expensive, high-speed storage capacity is about 120TB. original footage and creating the fi nal systems for work that is performance- Furthermore, digital assets usually reels. Also, original footage can be cap- intensive. It may also involve moving the must be accessible to a variety of fi le tured using digital cameras, and pro- required frames onto direct-attached systems on different operating systems. cessed, edited, and delivered digitally. storage for fastest access. To this end, SGI’s CXFS 64-bit shared- For movies still using fi lm (and Because rendering and scanning are fi le system supports virtually all operat- most do), dailies are scanned in at 2K relatively slow processes, the need for a ing systems, as the journaling system (2048x1556 pixels) or 4K (4096x3112 fast pipe to move the fi les to storage is makes it appear to users as if all storage pixels) resolution. One second of 4K relatively low. However, reads from the is local and available, and fi le recovery images (24 frames) can require more disks and transferring the frames to edi- can be done in seconds. The system is than 1.2GB of storage capacity. And tors and others working on the fi lm are also scalable to millions of terabytes. for special effects or image overlays, considerably more demanding. Storage Coraid also supports many operat- the working fi les can be much larger. of the rendered frames does not have to ing systems, albeit in a different way. “Creating a movie involves far more dig- be on expensive storage devices, and The company has developed a pro- itized frames than are used in the fi nal often a NAS or SAN, or both, is used. tocol it calls “ATA over Ethernet,” or release,” says Bob Eicholz, vice president Providing fast access to fi les is AoE. “AoE is similar to iSCSI; it’s basi- of corporate development at EFilm, a DI another story. Pacifi c Title & Art Studio cally direct storage over Ethernet with- studio in Hollywood. “At 4K, a two-hour in Hollywood upgraded its storage infra- out TCP overhead,” says Glenn Neufeld, movie might require more than 40TB.” structure to 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel in who used AoE when he was the com- A completed fi lm, created at 4K, July, says CTO Andy Tran. “We added a puter graphics and digital supervisor typically requires 9TB to 10TB, whereas 4G Brocade 48000 Fibre Channel switch on the animated fi lm Hoodwinked. a fi lm done at 2K (in the decline) only and an S2A 8500 storage device from requires 2.5TB to 3TB, Eicholz notes. DataDirect Networks (DDN),” he says, New Interconnects The result is huge storage capacity “with the goal of maintaining several 2K Today, 4G Fibre Channel is the primary requirements at studios of all sizes. streams playing simultaneously.” Pacifi c interface for production storage at most Title is using DDN’s S2A 8500 storage studios. Most Fibre Channel disk array Storage Challenges system primarily for DI and real-time play- vendors support 4G front-end connec- The new digital studio must create an back, and uses disk arrays from LSI Logic tions, and 4G host bus adapters (HBA) increasing number of large fi les faster for secondary storage. According to DDN, are available from vendors such as than ever, and one basic issue becomes the S2A 8500 storage servers can deliver ATTO Technology, Emulex, LSI Logic, where to store those fi les. The answer up to 3GB/sec, while the DataDirect stor- and QLogic. ATTO, which special- depends on how the fi le is to be used. For age arrays support Fibre Channel and/or izes in the entertainment market, has fi les coming from a scanner, there’s little Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives. been shipping 4G Fibre Channel HBAs
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US THEM
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Everybody loved their first NAS device. But lacking performance and scalability, you're seeing the devices multiply to sustain your applications and handle changing requirements – it's like herding cats! BlueArc's Titan storage systems offer industry leading performance and scalability to enable real-world consolidation, sustain high performance applications, simplify management, and deliver faster results. Hundreds of customers in all industries, from today's growing enterprises to those developing tomorrow's cures, cutting-edge Internet services and the visual effects powering Hollywood's biggest hits, have already found a better way of doing things through deploying BlueArc.
You too can finally fulfill the promise of NAS. Go to: ______www.bluearc.com/usvsthem or call 866 864-1040 to learn more.
Copyright © 2006 BlueArc Corporation.
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Sidecars Expand Power Macs
Although Apple is becoming one of the leading storage vendors, many PCI Express host bus, the Sidecar storage array includes four 500GB, Mac users need storage expansion options that aren’t available from 3Gb/sec Serial ATA (SATA) II disk drives, and a 4X multi-lane connector Apple. Recognizing this need, Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) this cable. It costs $1299. month began shipments of the 3ware Sidecar, a high-speed external Burich cites the primary benefi ts as high capacity (2TB) in a single disk subsystem that can store up to 2TB of content. device, as well as high performance. “I’ve recorded up to 16 24-bit Stephen Burich, owner of Shadowtree Studios and Maya Productions tracks, and I haven’t exceeded what it can do,” says Burich. (San Jose, CA), uses the Sidecar disk array, attached to a Power Mac AMCC—which acquired storage controller manufacturer 3ware G5 system, for primary storage of audio and video fi les, as well as for last year—claims performance of more than 200MB/sec with RAID-5 backing up those fi les. Before installing the Sidecar storage subsystem, read operations and more than 150MB/sec with RAID-5 write opera- Burich used the Power Mac’s internal disk drives along with external, tions on the Sidecar arrays. This is due to a four-port SATA-II RAID stand-alone disk drives. controller, which resides in the Power Mac, and AMCC’s non-blocking “I had to back up to either DVD or a separate PC with a tape drive,” switched fabric architecture, dubbed StorSwitch. Burich says. “I had drives all over the place. The 3Gb/sec (approximately 300MB/ It was a mess.” Also, some of Burich’s sec) performance of SATA II exceeds the video fi les exceeded 25GB, “making it dif- performance of the Firewire (800Mb/sec) fi cult to back up to tape,” he says. and Hi-Speed USB (480Mb/sec) interfaces. As his primary storage device now, In addition, using a hardware-based Burich uses the Sidecar array for record- RAID controller frees up the Power Mac ing and editing, and has the device set up CPU, as opposed to software-based RAID in a RAID-5 confi guration. (Sidecar also approaches that tie up the host CPU and supports RAID 0, 1, and 10.) Compatible memory. —Dave Simpson is the chief edi- with the Mac OS X operating system and tor of InfoStor magazine.
for about a year. Sherri Robinson Lloyd, Although SATA disk drives don’t have nodes. “Infi niBand allows us to network ATTO’s director of markets, reports that the performance or reliability of Fibre 16 CPUs in a single room with very high there is a rapid shift to 4Gb/sec, particu- Channel drives, they’re now available bandwidth,” says EFilm’s Eicholz. “With larly in the DCC market, and during the in capacities up to 750GB and are inex- networked Infi niBand systems, we can past three months, ATTO’s HBAs sales pensive relative to Fibre Channel or SAS do complicated color manipulations, were about 83 percent 4Gb and only 17 drives. “SAS will generally replace SCSI hit play, and it plays. Infi niBand allows percent 2G. “The digital content cre- and erode Fibre Channel’s market share,” artists to be more creative, to do more ation market has been enabled by 4Gb/ says Michael Ehman, CEO of Cutting ‘what-ifs,’ and not worry about waiting sec because it gives studios the band- Edge. Recently, Cutting Edge introduced for the computer to do the work.” width to run high-defi nition video and storage systems that use the emerging Some storage vendors provide a audio,” she says, “and most have moved Infi niBand interconnect. variety of interface choices, whether to HD and are moving to 4K.” “A big advantage of Infi niBand is it’s Fibre Channel, SAS, or SATA for Although the front-end may be Fibre price,” says Laurent Guittard, product disk drives, or Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Channel, the disk drives can be Fibre manager for infrastructure at Autodesk, or Infi niBand for external connec- Channel, SATA, SATA-II, SCSI, or the which is using Infi niBand internally. tions. “We have Infi niBand on our newer Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). “The price per port is advantageous Infi niteStorage 4500 line,” says Louise SAS is the successor to the parallel compared to 10Gb/sec Ethernet. The Ledeen, segment manager (media, SCSI interface and an alternative to throughput is also high compared to global marketing) at SGI. “We support Fibre Channel disk drives. SAS shares 10GbE. And the latency of Infi niBand 10GbE, too, but on storage devices we connectors with SATA. “SATA has is much lower than Ethernet.” primarily offer 2G and 4G Fibre Channel medium performance but a low cost. Storage systems vendors such as or Infi niBand. The whole idea is to offer With a SAS backplane, a company can DDN and Isilon Systems offer Infi ni- users a choice.”. run high-performance SAS drives and/ Band connections, increasingly becom- or high-capacity SATA drives in the ing a viable choice for DCC studios. In Mark Brownstein is a Los Angeles-area writer same environment,” says Tim Piper, the case of Isilon, Infi niBand can be specializing in storage and technology. He can
director of marketing at Xyratex. used to cluster the company’s storage be reached at [email protected].
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Network with the creators and commissioners of serious games at the Opening Night Reception and the Developers Showcase. DON’T MISS THE LEADING CONFERENCE DEDICATED TO SERIOUS GAMES—REGISTER TODAY!
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Visit http://emgz.blogspot.com for more Portfolio Part 2 Part SIGGRAPH Art Gallery,
Clockwise from top: In last month’s Portfolio section, we highlighted images from Intersections, the Vladimir Sierra: Still Life #2 The artist’s work is heavily infl uenced SIGGRAPH 2006 Art Gallery. This month we continue to look at this exhibit, which by Japanese ukiyo-e prints from the 1800s and by Spanish modernista included 88 wall-mounted pieces that ranged from digital paintings and collages to architecture. Though the piece appears abstract in design, it is in fact a loose rendition of a still life featuring a close arrangement of pottery. new forms of art such as “motion painting,” algorithmic images, LED optical art, robot- Tim Borgmann: Shape.53a#2 This piece is the result of merging ics, electronic fi ber art, and 3D animated Lenticular prints. traditional and modern work fl ows. The images were created with Other Intersections highlights were interactive art installations that allowed visitors Realsoft 3D, with some post work in Photoshop. The artist created all the materials and shaders procedurally. to use their bodies to control various aspects of the artwork. Viewers were encouraged Carlo Séquin: Hilbert Cube This 3D work, which was later rapid- to step on virtual puddles to cause fl owers to grow, use their heart rate to affect the prototyped, emerged from a recursive procedure that started with a simple movement of virtual people, control the movement and lighting of a balloon ballet, feel path along the edges of a cube, and each corner was replaced with a temperature changes in an abstract animation by touching a thermally reactive table, copy of the path, scaled down by a factor of two.
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splash water on a water fountain that lights up when it senses the water, and use Clockwise from top: Internet chat sessions to control the growth of a robotic plant. Dennis Miller: Introspection This piece represents the artist’s attempt to bring the principles of organization and development drawn from musical The art gallery also contained experimental Web art and interactive programs that composition into the visual world. It was created in 3D using POVRay, a pushed the boundaries of what can be done using the Internet and computer program- public-domain image compiler, and Cinema 4D. ming. In addition, there were sculptures created using digital processes. The pieces Zack Booth Simpson: Moderation An interactive algorithm project, it ranged from abstract to representational and static to dynamic. Some began as mathemati- extends the infrared touch-screen technology presented at SIGGRAPH 2004, which used multiple, diffuse infrared light sources cast from oblique angles. cal models and others as artistic ideas; one was triggered by sound to create moving spikes Here, the image-processing system detects where a person is standing, of liquid metal that climb up and down a spiral cone. Other sculptures were the result of 3D thereby generating a fl owering of colorful images at the participants’ feet. computer models that are output on 3D stereolithography printers. Toshihiro Kamei: CODE_LINE_Yellow Here, the artist observed real plants to understand their form and structure, and then wrote an algorithm to A selection of Intersections images appears on these pages. —Karen Moltenbrey express the data. The process was performed in LightWave and LScript.
SEPTEMBER 2006 Computer Graphics World | 45
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For additional product news and information, visit www.cgw.com______
Beantown Burgeons with SIGGRAPH Solutions This month’s Products segment highlights several product introductions made during SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston last month. For additional information about SIGGRAPH
product news, visit ww______w.cgw.com.
SOFTWARE Body, Cloth, and Wire solvers in a single simulation.
Side Effects Software;______www.sidefx.com ANIMATION Do the Robot Houdini Upgrade Win Softimage unveiled Face Robot Version 1.5, an update to its soft- Win • Linux Side Effects Software announced the release of Houdini ware for creating lifelike facial animation. The new release offers a game 8.1, which features an animator-friendly Auto Rig, Muscle System, export solution, allowing artists to deliver high-quality, in-game acting with Character Picker, and Pose Library. The Auto Rig furnishes animators detailed facial nuances, with support for all major game platforms. Version with controls, such as FK/IK switching, for creating production-quality 1.5 also contains a number of significant performance improvements and biped rigs to which proxy geometry can be added. The solution’s new support for the new Mova Contour Reality Capture system. Now, artists metaball capture and metaball-based muscle tool aid users in setting can take a face mesh, up skin sliding and muscle deformations more quickly and easily. Also apply motion capture included in this latest release are enhancements to the Rigid Body and or keyframes, edit and Wire dynamic solvers, and support for Collada, an open digital asset tune the acting, and exchange schema for interactive 3D applications. Version 8.1 enables then transfer it into users to import Collada files while keeping the geometry, lights, cam- a game-ready asset. eras, transformations, and keyframe animation intact. Side Effects And, with the new Software has improved Houdini’s Dynamics tools with a faster Wire game export pipeline, solver and a new Rigid Body auto-freeze feature, as well as enhanced users have a scalable Houdini’s Dynamics environment, which aids users in integrating Rigid solution for adding and
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removing detail from the their images on demand. Face Robot 1.5 is avail- enhancements. Among them is a faster and more accurate tracker able able this month. Pricing for Face Robot Designer, a complete environment, to detect and adjust to subtle changes in the values of a tracking source. is $94,995, while Face Robot Animator, a hybrid keyframe and mocap envi- Optical fl ow retiming, an updated fl oating-point Primatte Keyer, user ronment for animating faces prepared using Designer, is priced at $14,995. interface improvements, an updated color picker, and support for pop-
Softimage; ______www.softimage.com ular fi le formats, such as QuickTime, HDR, and CRW, round out the future offering. D2 Software is bundling FrameCycler Professional 2006 Massive Upgrade with the new version, providing Nuke users with uncompressed play- Win Massive Software has back and various review and analysis features.
unveiled Massive 2.6, an D2 Software; ______www.d2software.com upgraded version of its arti- fi cial life-based 3D animation MODELING solution for creating realistic performances with autono- Modeling to a T mously responding charac- Win • Mac • Linux • Irix T-Splines, maker of 3D modeling software, ters. Version 2.6 has been has released the beta version of its T-Splines Rhino plug-in. The soft- upgraded with faster and ware plug-in is designed to solve 3D design challenges by providing more effi cient rendering on greater surface control and seamless merging. The plug-in, which the GPU, render passes that enable fl exible pipeline inte- gration, more detailed characters, and smarter agents. Massive also has expanded its Ready-to-Run Massive Agent Library with mayhem and ambient agents. Ready-to-Run Agents include the attributes needed for locomotion, combat, spectators, and other crowd scenarios.
Massive Software; ______www.massivesoftware.com
New CAT Owner Win Avid recently acquired Character Animation Technologies, Ltd., which offers CAT, a complete character animation system that provides artists in game development, fi lm, and post industries with a unique tool set to produce animations more quickly and within a more fl exible envi- ronment. Following this acquisition, Softimage released CAT Version 2.5, a plug-in for Autodesk’s 3ds Max software. The new version includes logical rig components for manipulating rigs faster and easier, and ani- mation layers for quicker keyframing of CAT characters. The release also features a unique procedural walk-cycle system that allows artists to design a wider range of cycles. CAT 2.5 is priced at $995.
Softimage; ______www.softimage.com
COMPOSITING
Nuke Niceties Win • Mac • Linux • Irix D2 Software, a subsidiary of Digital Domain,
revealed new features being integrated into the latest version of its ______Nuke compositing software, scheduled to be released later this year. The upcoming edition of Nuke will include creative and work fl ow
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enhanced system setup capabilities. Vicon; ______www.vicon.com NEWS
HARDWARE Kerner Optical Goes Solo Production company Kerner Optical (San Ra- DISPLAYS fael, CA), the former Industrial Light & Mag- ic model shop and physical production unit, On the BrightSide has offi cially opened its own doors following BrightSide Technologies launched its latest its purchase from ILM, a Lucasfi lm company. high dynamic range (HDR) innovation during Kerner Optical will be managed by Mark An- SIGGRAPH 2006. BrightSide, in collabora- derson and several of his colleagues, all vet- integrates with NURBS and polygons, enables tion with research partners at the Max Plank erans of ILM, with many decades of experi- designers to add control points anywhere on Institute, has developed a video fi le-compres- ence among them. The new company includes a 3D surface, without changing the surface. sion technique that enables the distribution a model and creature shop; special effects and The plug-in also works to merge surfaces of HDR video content—fi les considered to pyrotechnical effects; fully operational stages seamlessly, resulting in more effi cient mod- be too large to be distributed using conven- for interior and exterior fi lming; stereoscopic eling for industrial design and CAD profes- tional media. BrightSide’s new compression 3D and bluescreen/greenscreen capabilities; sionals. T-Splines also benefi ts the 3D mod- method enables full HDR content to be dis- and fully customizable camera, motion control, eling industry by eliminating gaps between tributed in fi les comparable to such existing lighting, and grip packages. Kerner Optical was objects, which historically has been a chal- formats as MPEG. founded by Anderson, Kevin Duncan, and Yus- lenge to the modeling process. BrightSide Technologies; ______www.brightsidetech.com ka Siuicki. The company is based on several for- T-Splines; www.tsplines.com ______mer departments within ILM that were known Barco News as its physical production group, and much of MOTION CAPTURE Barco, a provider of display solutions for virtual the staff is made up of artists and technicians and augmented reality, has presented its new from those departments. More Mocap VR Workroom environment and XDS-1000 Win Vicon has partnered with House of modular external desktop system. These solu- Moves to deliver a new software package tions enable users to project simultaneously and tap into a company’s network to display targeted at real-time motion capture, full- information from various data sources in mul- multiple, high-resolution mono and 3D stereo performance capture, and on-set visualiza- tiple windows and in high-resolution mono information windows on a large 16:9 screen. tion applications. The solution is designed and 3D stereo formats on a large screen. Using Barco’s new XDS-1000 external desktop sys- to make processing and applying motion- the Windows XP interface, the VR Workroom tem is designed to work with an array of Barco capture data for the 3D animation pipeline is powered by two Barco iCon stereo-enabled mono or stereoscopic projectors. The XDS-1000 simpler and more direct. Among the soft- projectors that deliver high-defi nition informa- can display an unlimited number of mono win- ware’s features are scalable real-time motion tion (HDTV 1920x1080 pixels) without the need dows and up to six stereo windows on a single, capture, kinematic solving and re-targeting, for blending. An onboard processor and a range large projection canvas with high-quality resolu- post-processing for full-performance capture, of inputs at the rear of the projector enable it tion ranging from SGXA+ to UXGA.
on-set playback and visualization tools, and to accept external computer and video sources Barco; ______www.barco.com
September 2006, Volume 29, Number 8: COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD (USPS 665-250) (ISSN-0271-4159) is published monthly (12 issues) 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 subscription prices are $55, USA; $75, Canada & Mexico; $115 International airfreight. To order subscriptions, call 847-559-7310. © 2006 CGW by COP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without permission. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specifi c clients, is granted by Computer Graphics World, ISSN-0271-4159, provided that the appropriate fee is paid directly to Copyright Clearance Center Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 USA 508-750-8400. Prior to photocopying items for educational classroom use, please contact Copyright Clearance Center Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 USA 508-750-8400. For further information check Copyright Clearance Center Inc. online at: www.copyright.com.______The COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD fee code for users of the Transactional Reporting Services is 0271-4159/96 $1.00 + .35. POSTMASTER: Send change of address form to COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD, 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204.
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