Visual Effects

Kijottek ma az uj poszterek 9 kulonbozo Guardians karakterrel...termeszetesen a rosszfiuk viszik a primet. "The poster for Zack Snyder’s animated film Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is now online. Legend of the Guardians is based on the first three books of Kathryn Lasky’s series, Guardians of Ga’Hoole. It follows Soren, a young owl enthralled by his father’s epic stories of the Guardians of Ga’Hoole, a band of warriors who had fought a great battle to save all of owlkind from the evil Pure Ones. When Soren and his owlet siblings fall out of their treetop nest, it’s up to him to make a daring escape with the other brave young owls. Together they soar across the sea and through the mist to find the Great Tree, home of the legendary Guardians of Ga’Hoole, who are Soren’s only hope of defeating the Pure Ones and saving the owl kingdoms. The film features the voice talent of Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham, Emily Barclay, Abbie Cornish, Emilie de Ravin, Ryan Kwanten, Jay Laga’aia, Miriam Margolyes, Helen Mirren, Deborra-Lee Furness and Jim Sturgess." En meg leadtam a polo rendelest egy fekete alapon harcolo bagolyparra.

Most, hogy meg ugy ket honap van a bemutatoig, kijott a "Guardians" c. film rendezoi kommentekkel bovitett trailere. Tovabbra sem kommentalhatok, szoval mindent a szemnek :)

Paran kerdeztek, hogy miert nem irok mar VFX-rol, Houdinirol, projektekrol, cegrol, es hasonlo, regebben talan fobb temanak szamitol dolgokrol. Roviden a valasz: a futo, meg nem bemutatott projektekrol nyilvan nem irhatok, Houdinit lassan egy eve nem lattam (Mayas dolgokrol meg nem irok, mert abbol csak anyazas lenne)..mi volt meg? Na, azert egy ropke update. Befejeztuk ugye a Knowingot, ahogy mar a szabadsag kezdeten irtam is, most pedig a Guardians of Ga'Hoole cimu, 17 reszes konyvsorozaton (hello herripotter) alapulo animacios film fut fel. Elore lathatolag (IMDB alapjan) jovo juliusban lesz a bemutato, addig biztosan elleszunk vele, mert igen komplex a kepi vilag. Na, ennyi, remelem nem sertettem meg semmi NDA-t :) A Guardiansrol sokat nem lehet tudni, Zareh Nalbandian, az Animal Logic ugyvezetoje/tulajdonosa a 2008-as Game Connecten beszelt valamennyit a filmrol, illetve az AL jatekfejlesztesbe torteno bekacsolodasarol, a ketto kapcsolatarol (illetekeseknek mondom: ez talan Cgblogra erdemes link), amit a Youtubeon meg is lehet tekinteni (joval egy ora folotti hosszal). Houdini: hogy azert megis legyen..ha visszajottem a turarol, szerintem megint nekilatok mar dolognak. Egyreszt mostanra ki is tisztult a fejem, tudok mar vele foglalkozni otthon is, masreszt meg nem akarom teljesen elfejelteni. A 101-en is van par Houdinis fejleszted, de mar lassan nem is emlekszem, hogy tulajdonkeppen mit akartam, elo kell archivumbol szedni a projekteket, aztan meglatjuk. Na, ennyit a szovegbol, inkabb nezzetek meg, mennyire cool arc (muha) itt mindenki :D

Mivel valami erthetetlen oknal fogva mostanaban megint sokan kerdezgettek a reelem felol, es idokozben felszabadultak a projektek a titoktartas alol, ezert ugy gondoltam, kirakom mar a tavalyi (igazabol 2007 vegi, tehat bo masfel eves) reelem. Nem, nincs ujabb, ne is kerdezd! For some reason way over the top of my head I've recently been bugged about releasing my showreel to public. Because all the featured projects were released and thus cleared from NDA, I thought it might be an idea to release last year's (edited late 2007) reel. No, there isn't a newer one, don't even bother asking! "Old showreel from October 2007, mostly game cinematics, documentaries and commercials that I've worked on as Cg Supervisor and Technical Director in the UK at Axis Animation and Red Vision using Houdini and Maya." HD

Isn't it nice when you see your work (that is not even supposed to be shown in public) shamelessly featured on another artist's reel claiming ownership over not only your contribution but another 2 artists' as well? I mean if you were on the show and your stuff didn't make it because of an editorial decision but you could have done the shot, that's probably fine. But not being present at that time, not even working in that field (fx) at all on the project is a bit too much. Whatever.

While looking after some other kind of information, I've found couple of behind the scenes photos of TV commercials projects I was working on or supervised on set (or in fact, I shouldn't have worked on ;) back around 2001-2002. Interesting experience to look back to not more than 6-7 years ago, yet to see a completely different world. Raiffesen (bank) Matav (T-Online, communications company) AB-Aegon (insurance company) The photos presented here are property of Kreativ.hu.

Let's have a pint at one of the moving forces of the industry: PrMan. It just turned 20, after two decades of hardcore hammering through the most complex stuff seen on the big (and small) screen. Cheers! Hollywood reporter article Pixar's RenderMan is a lasting effect By Carolyn Giardina Aug 11, 2008, 12:00 AM ET RenderMan is celebrating its 20th birthday. Pixar Animation's rendering software first was published two decades ago, and since then it has helped usher in the era of computer graphics in filmmaking. The core technology that led to RenderMan was created by Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull, co-founder and chief scientist Loren Carpenter and vp software engineering Rob Cook. "At that time, CG was nowhere in the special effects business," said Catmull, who will be the featured speaker today at Siggraph, the computer graphics confab, where the newest version of RenderMan will be unveiled. "Special effects were done practically or with models." Many have worked to advance the application during the past 20 years. RenderMan has contributed to all of Pixar's CG feature titles as well as to countless additional animated and VFX-driven films, including "The Abyss," "Jurassic Park," "Titanic," "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films. Rendering is the process of calculating the information in a CG file for final video output -- essentially turning numbers into images. In March 2001, Catmull, Carpenter and Cook received an Academy Award of Merit -- an Oscar statuette -- for the advancements in motion picture rendering exemplified in RenderMan. It was the ...

The first trailer of Knowing, the other movie apart from Australia I will be working on at Animal Logic was just released. In 1958, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time capsule. But one of the students, a mysterious girl who seems to hear whispered voices, fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead. Fast forward 50 years to the present: A new generation of students examines the contents of the time capsule and the girl’s cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Myles. But it is Caleb’s father, professor Ted Myles (Nicolas Cage), who makes the startling discovery that the encoded message predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years. As Ted further unravels the document’s secrets, he realizes it foretells three additional events—the last of which hints at destruction on a global scale and seems to somehow involve Ted and his son. KnowingWhen Ted’s attempts to alert the authorities fall on deaf ears, he takes it upon himself to try to prevent more destruction from taking place. This gripping supernatural thriller charts one man’s faltering steps towards belief in the ultimate order of the universe even as he finds himself surrounded by mounting chaos. With the reluctant help of Diana Whelan (Rose Byrne) and Abby, the daughter and granddaughter of the now-deceased author of ...

Looking at some ways of making shader writing easier in vim, I bumped into dotfiles.com that contained a surpisring amount of example config files related to a number of *nix editors and tools. Might be handy if you need to do a lot of dev work without an IDE.

Lucio asked on the SESI list if there was a Houdini history timeline on the SideFX site..y'know to show what features where introduced when, just a bit of nostalgic fever. Anyways, I did a bit of digging in the area and found (again) this goldmine called Archive.org. Couple of quotes you might find interesting, if you're follower of the H. Whether it's procedural animation, modeling, or motion and audio editing---Side Effects Software have proven time and time again to be industry innovators. Did you know that Side Effects Software was the first to introduce these breakthroughs in a high-end commercial 3D animation package: 1987 first to put a GUI on a procedural modeling system 1988 first to incorporate an expression language in the user interface 1989 first to add metaballs first to have a polygon reduction tool (greduce) 1992 first to include a particle system first to have a morphing package (mojo) 1993 first to have integrated motion capture (moca) first to include time frame sampling (tima) 1995 first to support NURBS, polygons, and Beziers as "equal citizens"including the ability to skin these mixed primitive types first to integrate all components (modeling, animation, rendering, compositing) into one executable 1998 first to have audio editing (CHOPs) first to put a GUI on a procedural particle system first to have audio synthesis first to have localized 3D sound first to introduce hierarchical splines 1999 first to announce plans to port to the Linux O/S And the year when I got on board with the software and started my roughly 10 years of occasional fiddling somehow managing to avoid ...

A fellow od[Force] member, malexander posted this article, I found it a great resume of the $SUBJECT: There's been a lot of talk about threading & GPGPU, so I thought as a developer with a fair amount of experience in both I'd write up a bit of what's going on, both in the hardware industry and software development. I've tried to be as non-techie as possible. Hopefully it'll shed a bit of light on what's involved in developing software using these techniques. Cheers, M.

The Academy annouced both their nomination shortlist but more interestingly the winners of the Sci-Tech awards. It looks quite surprising how many fluid related research projects they found to be worthwile. Essentially they did a round over all the leading VFX companies (ILM,D2,R&H,Scanline) but also developers of commercial software (Autodesk, Scanline) and awarded them all to the same extent. Let's see this impressive list: "To Victor Gonzalez, Ignacio Vargas and Angel Tena for the creation of the RealFlow software application. RealFlow was the first widely adopted, commercially available, easy-to-use system for the simulation of realistic liquids in motion picture visual effects. To Jonathan Cohen, Dr. Jerry Tessendorf, Dr. Jeroen Molemaker and Michael Kowalski for the development of the system of fluid dynamics tools at Rhythm & Hues. This system allows artists to create realistic animation of liquids and gases, using novel simulation techniques for accuracy and speed, as well as a unique scripting language for working with volumetric data. To Duncan Brinsmead, Jos Stam, Julia Pakalns and Martin Werner for the design and implementation of the Maya Fluid Effects system. This system is used to create simulations of gaseous phenomena integrated into the widely available Maya tool suite, using an unconditionally stable semi-Lagrangian solver. To Stephan Trojansky, Thomas Ganshorn and Oliver Pilarski for the development of the Flowline fluid effects system. Flowline is a flexible system that incorporates highly parallel computation, allowing rapid iteration and resulting in detailed, realistic fluid effects. To Dr. Doug Roble, Nafees Bin Zafar and Ryo Sakaguchi for the development of the fluid simulation ...

"Thomson today announced that its Technicolor Services division has formed a strategic alliance with DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (NYSE: DWA) to develop world-class animation capabilities in India. The alliance leverages Thomson’s recent investment in Paprikaas Animation Studios, a leading animation and game content provider in Bangalore, India. Paprikaas Animation Studios offers creative, technical and production capabilities to design and produce computer-generated animation for feature films, television programming, commercials and video games, with a strong focus on digital 3D content [...]" - sais the press release. Interesting how much Technicolor (Thomson) invests recently in VFX and positions itself as one of the most important companies that span across the globe. Last year they opened a facility in Beijing trying to leverage the Asian highend VFX market, then they announced the rebranding and upsizing of TCS Vancouver (under the flag of MPC) and now buying into an already established studio in India - Paprikaas Animation Studios isn't exactly unknown if you kept your eyes open last couple of years. This, together with Dreamworks means a lot of connections brought in the country and on the continent (they also operate a DI facility in Singapore and Shanghai). Now, you could say they're just bringing the gruntwork. Think again. Some places do that. Make almost thousand people work 100+ hour weeks or in three shifts doing roto/spot removal/touchups. On the other hand, studios like R&H India are already into the heavy lifting and as experience accumulates, this is going to be more and more the case. ...

And an announcement before the yanks wake up: mental images, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDA and operates under its brand and leadership team, including founder Rolf Herken as the CEO/CTO, from its headquarters in Berlin, Germany as well as its other worldwide locations in Europe, North America, and Australia. The combination of mental images and NVIDIA united some of the greatest talents in the visual computing industry. Yes, you heard it. mental images is now officially owned by nVidia. Couple of questions: - What's going to happen to Gelato? My bet is that they will have an inhouse team at nVidia's working together with the mr team in Germany. - What's going to happen with the Cell development announced in August? My bet is that it will go down the drain. - How does it stand up against Larrabee? On one hand, they have a mature product (mr) that's ready to launch, it's already industry standard..so it definitely will on the rendering side (at least for the short/medum term) but from what I see Larrabee is a lot wider range of applications..we have yet to see this. Exciting times.

I always find a bit awkward when I run into a CEO's blog..especially if it has a personal taste. Somehow I feel like if it was giving away secrets that no one else should be aware of...or maybe point out how unstable and quick changing your situation might be. On the other hand I enjoyed spending last hour reading Marc Bourbonnais' blog about setting up his feature VFX startup: Modus. Maybe because I was in the same boat for a while when launching Droidworx, the short lived post house but I find his real life comments encouraging still full of worries...which is a good thing when you're in your first year, never sit back and look backwards for too long when you're in this business. Goog luck to them! PS: while trying to link in our old Droidworx website I managed to find our Demoreel from 2002...it's a weird experience to watch it again. [QUICKTIME http://droidworx.hu/demo/droidworx.mpg 530 390]

For those who might not know, PRISMS was the predecessor of Houdini from SideFX. Michael Fuchs/CAMF Productions posted this old tutorial on the odForce website, I found it an interesting read. If already in a nostalgic mood, you could check this out as well. Archive.org snapshots more popular sites on a monthly basis and makes it available surprisingly as archives. It's interesting to roll back to as early as 1997 and see the content of the SESI site back then. And finally a user manuals from the old Sydney VisLab website: PRISMS.

I tried the demo couple of days ago on my bro's not so great PC and my jaw just dropped. Mind you I'm not a games dude, I hardly ever play anything else last couple of years than driving games. Only because that's the only kind of game that let you to just drive couple of laps without spending ages trying to get into it but also you can spend the occasional 3-4 days gaming session just by trying to perfect your laps and unlock cars. Ok, you also got to be a car addict to do so but hey.. Anyways. If you're curious what makes such a good game, read this post mortem article about COD4 that seem to spread like fire on industry/gaming related website. Accidentally it happens to also describe quite precisely where most companies go wrong with productions. Now my perfect Chrismas gift would be COD4 on the 360. Please.

Looks like a day full of industry related posts. I've just got this press release from a friend of mine and I was astonished by the amount of development/money that goes into this two projects: Korda Studios and Colorfront. One of the most modern studios teaming up with maybe the best DI facility in a 1500 miles circle..not a bad move. Today they announced that CF will deploy some satellite offices wired to their headquarters in the city providing onset services to big productions coming to shoot in Hungary. I can't add more to this but welcome their cooperation and hope it will give that huge push to the Hungarian VFX market that it was starving last couple of years. To be honest I can hear a lot of people whining about this subject but if I look around in similar countries, we are miles ahead when it comes to infrastructure, salaries..and maybe even know-how in some areas. I guess we just need some big projects such as Hellboy2 that is being shot at Korda's but also some of the (simpler) post work is done at CubeEffects. From what I've seen at another facility (FocusFox) that also had a connection to the film processing services of Kodak Cinelabs, I'm expecting the following pattern: - most of the films shot at Korda's will be scanned/transferred at CF: rushes, telecine..etc will be a common practice - less of it will also run through the final grading (hopefully more than at Fox) - not many but some will use the VFX ...