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spotlightYour resource for products, user applications, news, and market research3D MODELINGPRODUCTSLuxology Delivers Modo 201Luxology rolled out Modo 201, its unique 3Dmodeling, painting, and rendering softwarebuilt on the Modo code base. Modo 201 combinesment. “Modo provides a fused work flowso artists can spend less time focusingon the mechanics of 3D content creationsignificant modeling advancementsand more time on realizing their artisment.with cutting-edge 3D painting and renderingtechnologies in a work flow customized toenhance productivity for 3D artists working ingame development, film effects, video production,graphic arts, and design visualization.Designed to fit easily into existing tool pipelines and worksmoothly with other leading 2D and 3D software applications,Modo 201 accelerates the creation of models, associatedcolor and normal maps, and ultra high-quality renderings,while providing a comfortable and intuitive working environticvision,” says Brad Peebler, Luxologypresident. “It also offers an enhanced 3Dcreation experience by combining modeling,painting, and rendering technologiesin a unique and complementary way.”Among the new features are: advanced modeling, integratedpaint tools, accelerated rendering/baking technology, andwork flow accelerators.Modo 201 is available now for $895. Current Modo userscan upgrade to the new version for $395.PROCESSORSPRODUCTSAMD Unfolds Energy-Efficient RoadmapAMD unveiled a top-to-bottom energy-efficientdesktop processor roadmapthat will satisfy the requests byconsumers and businesses for smaller,more elegant PCs that aestheticallycomplement office and home environments,yet deliver the same performanceas larger systems.To that end, energy-efficient AMDAthlon 64 X2 dual-core, AMD Athlon64, and AMD Sempron processors,based on the upcoming socket AM2,are configured for new freedoms in PCform-factor design by offering significantperformance-per-watt advantagesover standard processors for commercialand consumer markets. Energy-efficientcomputing is a crucial step for thecomputing industry as large businessesseek to reduce operating costs, says BobBrewer, corporate vice president of thecompany’s Desktop Business.Building on the company’s successin the blade and general-purpose servermarkets with the AMD Opteron processor,energy-efficient AMD desktop processorscan deliver greater performanceper-wattover standard-power AMDdesktop processors and can reduce overallpower consumption. For instance,AMD purports that these desktop processorscan provide up to 37 percentgreater performance-per-watt than standard-powerAMD processors, whileenergy-efficient small form-factor AMDAthlon 64 X2 dual-core desktop processorscan provide up to 154 percent greaterperformance-per-watt than standardpowerAMD desktop processors.The introduction of the roadmapfurther demonstrates AMD’s commitmentto an improved global environment;the new line will complementAMD’s Cool‘n’Quiet technology.The processors are available now andrange in scale. At the high end, theAMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processorscosts $671 for the 4800; theAMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor3800+ costs $364, and the AMDSempron processor 3400+ costs $145.4 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

VIDEO • 3DACQUISITIONPRODUCTSNewTek Unveils NewVideo Editor, 3D OfferingNewTek, manufacturer of video and 3D animation products, announcedSpeedEdit, a resolution-independent video editor that works quickly andefficiently on any video project, from Web streams to HD. The companyalso beefed up its 3D product line with the addition of 3D Arsenal, a collectionof 3D content, plug-ins, and training material.Rather than emulating the old-school film-cutting work flow found inmost nonlinear editors, SpeedEdit streamlines the process by eliminatinga number of unnecessary steps. For instance, it enables all editingfunctions to be performed directly within its timeline and storyboardinterface, so users canbypass the intermediatesteps of transcodingor pre-trimming content.It further accelerates theprocess by dynamicallylinking Storyboard andTimeline, which allowsthe performance of manycommon functions infewer steps. As a result, ripple edits, clip replacement, segment repositioning,3D video rotation, color correction, animated titles, and Targasequence playback are just a few of the tasks that can be done faster.SpeedEdit will ship this summer for $495.Meanwhile, 3D Arsenal and the 3D Arsenal suite simplifies the creationof custom motion graphics and logo animations for video editors.Based on NewTek’s LightWave 3D software, 3D Arsenal ships with morethan 750 pre-created scenes and templates. A content-only version isavailable to current LightWave owners.3D Arsenal is available now for $495. LightWave users can purchaseit for $295.NEWSDesignCompanieson Buying SpreeFollowing the close of first-quarter financials,a number of CAD/CAM/CAE companiesannounced mergers and acquisitionsof various companies in an attemptto create economies of scale and to reacha broader audience with their tools andtechnologies.Computer-aided design softwareindustry giant PTC announced itsintention to buy Mathsoft, developer ofMathcad, which is engineering calculationsoftware for manufacturing, architecture,engineering, construction, andeducation. Meanwhile, Adobe completeda deal that now gives the company controlof France-based TTF, which focuseson CAD data and multi-CAD digitalmock-up. Also, Dassault Systems completedthe mandatory waiting time andhas been given approval by the Germangovernment to purchase MatrixOne, aPDM company.In other moves, CAE vendor Ansysis buying Fluent, which offers computationalfluid dynamics solutions. And,Autodesk purchased Constructware,which manufactures collaborative technologyfor the construction industry.ACQUISITIONNEWSInvestment Group Purchases Digital DomainDigital Domain, the Academy Awardwinningdigital studio and productioncompany responsible for visualsequences in such films as Titanic, TheDay After Tomorrow, and I, Robot, hasbeen acquired by South Florida-basedWyndcrest Holdings, LLC, a group ledby director Michael Bay and investorHoldings, has been elected chief executiveofficer and a member of the boardof directors at Digital Domain, replacingScott Ross, who is stepping down asCEO and remaining a consultant to thecompany. C. Bradley Call will remainas president and chief operating officer.Bay and Textor will co-chair the boardtunities in the entertainment business.Rapidly evolving digital visual effectstechnology is going to allow motion-picturedirectors to tell even more compellingand visually stunning stories inthe future, and Wyndcrest believes thatDigital Domain is uniquely positionedto take advantage of these new technologies,John Textor.of directors. According to Stork, theas well as new distribution chan-Carl Stork, a long-time senior Microsoftexecutive and principal of Wyndcrestacquisition will allow Digital Domainto capitalize on the expanding oppornelsand platforms, a spokesman for theinvestment firm says.www.cgw.com JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World |5___________

spotlightCAD DESIGN • VIZUSER FOCUSStudent Engineers Aim Highin Robotics CompetitionHigh school students from across the globe spent six weeksdesigning and then building a robot that had to performa set of designated tasks as part of a national engineeringcontest. In the end, a team from Rolling Meadows HighSchool and Wheeling High School in Schaumberg, Illinois,along with professional mentor Motorola, took home the topChairman’s Award for their invention.Backed by a host of corporations and educational institutions,including official championship sponsor Autodesk,the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science andTechnology) Robotics Competition challenges future engineersto push the boundaries of innovation with leadingedge3D tools. This year’s challenge theme, “Aim High,”tested the students’ and their robots’ abilities to fire foamDuring competition, students cheer on their respective inventionsthat they designed using Autodesk software.balls through hoops, plow the balls into floor goals, andprogram a robotic vision system to navigate the robot.This year’s FIRST competition marks the 15 th anniversaryof the event, founded by inventor/entrepeneur DeanKamen in 1989 to inspire and foster an appreciation of scienceand technology in young people through accessible,innovative programs that build self-confidence, knowledge,and life skills. To this end, Autodesk has been working withthe FIRST Robotics Competition since 1992, providing studentswith donations of high-end engineering and visualizationsoftware to use in the competition.“Autodesk continues to encourage students to learnabout these disciplines and inspires the inventors andengineers of tomorrow,” says Kamen. “Partnering withmentors, developing relationships, and working as a teamto achieve a common goal are elements for success both inengineering and in life.”As Rob Hoffman, senior entertainment product marketingmanager for Autodesk, points out, “Every year these studentsare recruited and given scholarships to prestigious schoolssuch as MIT and Virginia Tech, so participating in the competitionreally does open doors. Plus, the life skills they takeaway—teamwork, leadership—will enable them to pursueany career they want, be it science-related or not.”Design IntentThis year, 1130 teams from seven countries designedand constructed robots using Autodesk’s Inventor (3Dmechanical design software) and 3ds Max (3D modeling,animation, and rendering software). Using a standard“kit of parts” and a common set of rules, the teams,with help from their mentors, solved a common problemduring a six-week timeframe by building robots from theparts. Then the teams put their projects to the test in 33regional competitions, where they entered the inventionsin a series of competitions designed by Kamen and a committeeof engineers and industry professionals. The game“rules” vary yearly, so students are constantly challengedto come up with new, inventive ideas.Students are judged on various criteria that correspond to anumber of awards. Yet, teams are also rewarded for excellencein design, demonstrated team spirit, gracious professionalismand maturity, and the ability to overcome obstacles.As part of the competition, Autodesk sponsors two designcontests: the Autodesk Inventor Award and the AutodeskVisualization Award. The Inventor Award, this year presentedto Team Cybersonics from Palisades High School (Kintersville,PA), is given to the team that best understands, documents,and communicates the distinct phases of the design process,from concept to production, using Inventor software. The teamused a combination of AutoCAD and Inventor for its submission.The group’s robot was a sophisticated machine that wasbuilt on the success of last year’s entry, which depended onspeed and maneuverability of the robot chassis.Honorable mention in this category went to the BurningMagnetos team from Summerville High School, FortDorchester High School, and Dorchester Country CareerSchool (North Charleston, SC). Receiving the Rising Star(rookie) award was the NASA Fresta Valley Robotics Team6 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

from Fresta Valley Christian School (Marshall, VA).Meanwhile, the Visualization Award recognizesexcellence in animation that illustrates theconcept of “Ideas Realized.” Student teams used3ds Max to create a 30-second animation about Receiving Inventor Awards were these designs from Team Burning Magnetos (left;how the FIRST Robotics Competition has helpedsecond place) and the NASA Fresto Valley Robotics Team (right; third place).them realize their ideas. The Grand Prize winner in this category power of team strategy, and the collaboration and determinationwas Gunn Robotics Team from Henry M. Gunn High School (Palo of students. In the contests, entrants played short games with theirAlto, CA), for its 3ds Max animation “Building a Better Future.” remote-controlled robots by piloting them on a course.Honorable mention was given to the Eagle Strike Team from Los More than 85 percent of the high schools and their companyAltos High School (Los Altos, CA), which used Max and Inventor mentors have stayed involved with the competition year afterfor “Dreams to Design.” The Rising Star winner was Team Argos year. Longer term, a Boston research firm in 2000 found that thefrom Peoria Area High School (Peoria, IL), which used 3ds Max students had an improved attitude toward science, math, teamwork,and the working world, while a Brandeis University evalu-and Inventor for the animation “How to Create a FIRST Robot.”Teams are formed in the fall at the beginning of each school ation found that participants were nearly twice as likely to majoryear, and Autodesk provides the software that students can use for in science or engineering as their peers. —Karen Moltenbreythe robot design, engineering, and animation. In January, FIRSTannounces the competition theme, after which students have sixweeks to complete their projects. Then, the robots are packed intocrates until the regional competitions are held.In April, the regional winners gathered at the Atlanta GeorgiaDome for head-to-head competition among 340 teams (comprising15 to 25 students each), for a total of 8500 students. As Kamenpoints out, that number is outstanding when compared to the 1992FIRST championship that involved just 28 teams gathered in a NewHampshire high school gym near where FIRST is located. Teamsearned their invitations to this year’s championship by excelling incompetitive play, sportsmanship, and various awards, includingAutodesk’s two design accolades. The competitions involve highintensityevents that measure the effectiveness of each robot, theThrough 3D tools, hands-on work, and mentors, high schoolersare introduced to science, math, and engineering at a high level._____________________________www.cgw.com JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 7___________

spotlightATMOSPHERIC EFFECTSUSER FOCUSEffects of Global WarmingWhen executive producer and environmentalactivist Laurie David teamed withHBO and Lovett Productions on a documentaryshowing the devastating effectsof global warming, they needed to illustratetheir point with CGI that blendedseamlessly into the live action for a realistic,rather than exaggerated, look.The documentary, titled Too Hot Notto Handle: A Global Warming Premier,featured in-depth descriptive discussionswith some of the nation’s top scientistsand explored the immediateplanetary effects of global warming; italso focused on positive actions by businesses,local governments, and individualsto counter the growing threat.To help visually depict thecomplexities of global warming,Vincent MacTiernan, animatorand founder of Extreme DigitalProductions, created climatic andatmospheric visual effects usingWondertouch’s ParticleIllusionsoftware, which ran alongsideAdobe’s After Effects andNewTek’s LightWave in his studio’spipeline. The majority of theUsing a range of digital tools, Extreme DigitalProductions created CG imagery to illustrate theeffects of global warming for a documentary.effects sequences involved theEarth spinning, with plumes of greenhousegas rising from the surface. It alsofeatured digital smog, water evaporation,air pollution, and more.The fact that MacTiernan wasof the Earth that included theirrequest for photorealistic smoke andsmog elements.”Impressed with the results, theHBO team brought Extreme Digitalawarded this projectElements onboard in a graphics andoccurred by hap-penstance. He hadbeen visiting a facilityfor which he oftendoes work when heencountered the HBOproduction staff asthey were reviewinggraphic shots for thedocumentary. Whenanimation capacity.In a particular sequence involvinggreenhouse gas emission, ExtremeDigital Production created a 3D modelof the Earth slowing spinning with realisticplumes, representing toxic carbondioxide that gradually increased in volumeand rose from the Earth’s surface.“We started out by selecting basicParticleIllusion smoke presets. Withit appeared that just a few changes to the color andthe elements werenot quite what thegroup had in mind,MacTiernan offeredto provide samples ofatmospheric effects.“Because of theimmediacy requiredto turn around thesamples, using a 3Dparticle program wasout of the question,”size, we were able to easily customizethe plume effects without having to goback to square one or to a new 3D scene,”explains MacTiernan. “Next, we showedthe client real-time, full-resolution previewsof just how the plumes wouldlook. The client appreciated being ableto approve the look of the effect rightaway without having to wait hours oreven days to see a render.”The approved plumes were thenrendered out with an alpha channelDigital artists were challenged to generate visualeffects that illustrated the conceptual issue of globalwarming only in a realistic way. To accomplish the effects,they used ParticleIllusion software from Wondertouch.MacTiernan says. “Butwith ParticleIllusion, Iknew I could quicklygenerate a 3D imageand imported into After Effects. Thisgave the group better control whilemanipulating the effects with the 3Dbackplate. —Karen Moltenbrey8 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

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. . . Character Animationcar talkPixar’s seventh feature animation sends a stock car racing down Route 66By Barbara Robertson10 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

Character Animation. . . .From day one, Pixar has put CG animationon Hollywood’s fast-track. Now, themultiple-Oscar-winning studio puts pedalto the metal with Cars, a Walt DisneyPictures/Pixar Animation Studios featurefilm that stars an ensemble cast of hot rods,stock cars, sports cars, and rust buckets.The drama begins at a fast and flashyNASCAR night race on the East Coast, andthen follows one participant, LightningAll images © 2006 Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios.McQueen (actor Owen Wilson), afterwardas he takes a trip to the big PistonCup Championship in California. On theway, he crashes just outside RadiatorSprings, a desert town along Route 66 inCarburetor County where he must spendtime repairing a little damage. There, helearns that while achievements are fine,the journey in life is the reward.Cars was directed by John Lasseter,the driving force behind Toy Story andToy Story 2 who has overseen all Pixar’screative endeavors, and co-directed bythe late Joe Ranft, who also served asstory supervisor for the film and voicedseveral incidental characters.The ambitions of the character McQueencenter on beating his main racing competitors:The King, a 1970 Plymouth Superbirdvoiced by Richard Petty, and Chick Hicks,voiced by Michael Keaton. McQueen’sepiphany arrives via Radiator Springs’notable citizens. Doc (Paul Newman), a1951 Hudson Hornet, is a quiet countrydoctor (mechanic) with a secret past. Sally,a 2002 Porsche 911 (Bonnie Hunt), is aCalifornia refugee now operating the CozyCone (traffic cone) Motel. Fillmore (GeorgeCarlin), a 1960 VW Bus, is the resident hippie.Sarge (Paul Dooley) is a 1942 ArmyJeep, and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) is agood ol’ boy tow truck. These are but a fewof the town’s four-wheeled residents. Thereare no human characters in this film. Infact, with the exception of a few bugs (flyingVWs with wings), the only charactersin the film are cars.Any other studio given a “car” theme foran animated feature might have created acar-toon. Not Pixar. To the animators, theCars stars aren’t cartoon characters.“John [Lasseter] wanted a story inwhich the cars are humans,” says ScottClark, supervising animator. “The doorsdon’t open; you don’t look inside theirheads. They become humans; a humandrama unfolds in front of you.” At thesame time, Lasseter had another requirement,one born of the 3D medium inwhich they’d be working. “John’s edictwas ‘truth to material,’” Clark says. “So,on the one side is realism—we knew wecould animate a car that looked believable.But, the car had to emote.”So, the Cars characters couldn’t be ascaricatured as, say, Disney’s short animation“Susie the Little Blue Coupe,” but theyhad to come alive. “We do exaggerate,”Clark says. “But because the medium hassuch dimensionality, a car doesn’t get on itsback tires and gesture with its front tires.”To turn the cars into characters, Pixarmade the front of each car the head and puteyes on the windshield. Any yet, althoughthe eyes have an iris, sclera, and dimensionality,they still look like they’re madeof plastic and glass. The metal above thewindshield acted as a mix between an eyelidand an eyebrow, and provided a hint ofa furrowed brow. The mouth, where a grillmight be, became the most plastic facialfeature. The cars pivot from their backaxels and steer with the front. “So theback became the hips,” Clark says, “andthe front tires became hands. By steeringor tipping, the tires became gestural, andthen, by pivoting the car’s front from theback axel, the whole car became a head.”Male cars had angular shapes; femalecars had softer curves. Sally, the Porsche,for example, has a small, cute mouth.“Humans are the hardest characters toanimate because there are so many layersof believability,” says Clark. “We hadto strip away the noise and find the simplestand most elegant way to get acrossthat this is a car, but it’s alive, and this isa male or female car. It was almost a Zenlikeway of animating.”Body ShopA team of between 35 and 40 animatorsworked on the ensemble cast, each personanimating all the characters in a scene.All the cars used the same basic rig. “Wedidn’t want to spend forever creating variations,”says Eben Ostby, supervising technicaldirector. “We needed to produce largenumbers of different models from one kindwww.cgw.com JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 11___________

. . . Character Animationof rig. We could take the facial rig for one car, move it to anothercar, and it would still work. We’d just stretch it to fit.”Built into the rig were two systems that helped the cars actlike real cars. By using a path-based driving system installed inevery car, animators could create a line through space, and thecharacter would follow it. While the car was moving down theroad, ground maps showed the road’s elevation. So, whether theroads were curvy, hilly, or bumpy, the system locked the wheelsto the ground and handled the physics. Tires squished and thecars bounced as they drove over bumps; they swayed around corners,and behaved like real cars when they screeched to a stop. “Itwould have been impossible for animators to look at that in everyframe,” says Clark. “But we had the choice to use it or not. Wecould even run the simulation and adjust the animation later.”As with a real car, the suspension system could be changedby the animators to suit the character. Thus, Sarge lumbersand rolls, while racy McQueen stays low to the ground andgrips the road.A spatial weighting system for various car parts provided theperformance controls. “By and large, many of the controls haveanalogs in creatures,” says Ostby. For example, the crew riggedthe cars’ facial animation system using controls similar to thosethey might devise for animating a creature’s face. “The cars havea jaw and cheeks,” he says. “But there are also differences. Forexample, the eyelids are on a sliding panel on the windshield.”To animate the stadium crowds for the races at the beginningand end, Pixar used Softimage XSI’s Behavior software and aproprietary system. Behavior handled cars with such particularactions as queuing up in line. The proprietary system managedthe massive crowds and allowed the animators to give individualcars specific actions that they would perform on cue. “Making acrowd look alive and not planned is an art in and of itself,” saysClark. “The crowd has a personality. We didn’t just create a bunchof cycles and hit the random button.” The animators discovered,for example, that if they multiplied an eye-blink cycle and appliedit to the stadium cars, thousands of cars all blinked at the sametime. “The windshields are bigger than people’s eyes,” explainsClark. “We couldn’t have that. There was a lot of really carefullyconsidered animation done by artists in the art department.”Pixar used custom crowd-simulation software to cue specific actionswithin the thousands of cars in the stadium, and Softimage XSI’sBehavior software to control cars queuing up in line.In the DustThe opening stock car race happens on a small track at night. “Itgets the movie off to a rip-roaring start,” says Ostby. “As the carspass through all the light sources around the track, we see tinyshadows. It looks almost like the light is strobing. It helps makethe start of the film energetic.” By contrast, the middle act inquiet Radiator Springs is relaxed. And then the last act puts usback at the track—this time, in California. The California racetrackhas a different feel,” adds Ostby. “Accidents happen. Wehave smoke and dust, and McQueen races through the smoke.”To create the smoke and dust, Pixar developed a new renderingmodel for the aerosol fluids. “That wasn’t the key thing,though,” says Ostby. “The key thing was that we used a lot of it,and we art-directed it.”Effects supervisor Steve May led the teams that created theseeffects and others. “The main effects were dust,” he says. “John[Lasseter] gave us reference footage from rally racing in Europe,with cars on large expanses raising huge clouds of dust that couldThousands of tiny Maya particles rendered with PRMan pointprimitives kicked up dust behind the 1951 Hudson Hornet, Doc. Largeparticles rendered volumetrically formed distant, billowing dust clouds.be hundreds of meters long, but at the same time, had this complexbehavior in them.” With that footage in mind, the effects team createdgiant dust trails for the cars racing through Cars’ deserts.To do this, the crew tried, at first, putting 3D car models intovirtual wind tunnels and running full fluid-dynamic simulations,but the lack of control over the simulations persuaded them touse two types of particle simulations instead. To create the bigclouds of dust, which would have required too many particles toproduce the fine details in the reference films, the effects teamgenerated between 20,000 and 40,000 large particles that theyrendered volumetrically. “Some of the particles were as big asthe car, but most were the size of a wheel,” says May. “We used asophisticated shader written by Erdem Taylan first for underwaterexplosions in Finding Nemo, and then for explosions in TheIncredibles. It can add nice details that create a rotational feel.”For smaller scale dust, the effects crew generated as manytiny particles in Autodesk’s Maya as they could push throughthe system using small point primitives in Pixar’s PRMan torender them. Disk space, not rendering memory, limited the12 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

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. . . Character Animationnumber of particles. The crew produced turbulentparticle dynamics for the dust clouds andfor the smoke in the car crash scenes by usingMaya hair dynamics to set up the fluid flow. “Weattached hairs to the bottom of the cars, and theygave us overlapping dynamics as a basis for generatingthe particle dynamics,” Ostby points out.Road CrewAnimators handled the car crash at the beginningof the film without help from a simulation.Instead, aptly named animator John Khars mastermindedthe physics. “We could have hit the‘simulate’ button and gotten something interesting,” says Clark.“But we wanted to be in control. We wanted caricatured jokes.”Procedural animation helped, though, when McQueen crashesthrough Radiator Springs. He’s out of control, runs through abarbed wire fence, and becomes attached, literally, to a statue ofthe town’s founder. When that happens, he pulls so hard that thestatue topples off its pedestal and the post that held up the statuelands in front of him. He’s still attached to the statue, but it’snight, he’s scared, and he’s not sure what’s going on, so he keepsdriving. As he heads down Main Street pulling the statue behindhim, he wreaks havoc. The statue rips up the road like a knifepulling through brittle icing on a cake.To tear up the street, the effects group used Voronoi tessellationto procedurally break the road into little chunks of asphalt.“Ferdi Scheepers created a clever algorithm that uses McQueen’spath,” explains May. “The chunks are smaller on the center line,and get bigger as they get farther away. Then he placed all thetiles back in an unbroken state and seamed up all the shadingso you can’t tell it’s pre-broken.” As McQueen drives on a longpath that winds for blocks through the town, animated forcesSally Carrera, a 2002 Porsche 911, drives past a waterfall that usedso many particles the simulation shut down the renderfarm. Particlesemitted in layers simulated water falling at different speeds.The Fiat Luigi, the stock car racer Lightning McQueen, and the Italian forklift Guidohave the same basic suspension rig, individually adjusted, that helped animators keepthe cars’ tires on the road in the film.push the pieces away, starting with the smaller pieces near thecenter and then the larger pieces later. “It’s like a zipper,” saysMay. “And, it goes on for at least a football length or two, kickingup rubble and spray that hits the buildings.”The effects team also created a waterfall. In a scene thatMay describes as particularly majestic, Sally and McQueendrive up a mountain and come upon a magnificent waterfall.“John [Lasseter] wanted this to be an awe-inspiring moment,”says May, “one of the most beautiful things McQueen hasever seen.”For reference, Lasseter sent the crew photographs that hehad taken in Yosemite of a waterfall that showed the distinctivestrands of water he wanted. By emitting particles from layersof maps, technical director Jason Johnston simulated the waterfalling at different speeds in the huge waterfall. “One level ofparticles became a generator for other levels,” May says. “Wedidn’t want anything viscous. We wanted distinct parts—independentgroups that moved as a group.”To generate the waterfall, the crew used so many particlesthat the simulation shut down the renderfarm. “It was the networktraffic,” points out May. “We have an adequate renderfarm,but bringing the data to the renderer made the systemgrind to a halt.” To reduce the load, the group quarantined theshot so that only a few frames would render at a time.In addition to these large particlesimulations, the effects teamalso modeled individual pieces ofgeometry to create a fine layer ofdust in Doc Hudson’s garage. Theydistributed the geometry usingshaders, although sometimesLasseter wanted the individualbits of dust backlit.“It’s fun to develop new technology,”says May, “but it’s alsogreat to focus on artistic aspects.The dust clouds are beautiful. It’snot just dirt; it’s like clouds risingfrom the cars during the goldenhour of the day.”

eyeon continues its tour de force.From acclaimedfeature film finishing...To high definitiongame creation...The Da Vinci Code © 2006 Columbia Pictures.All Rights Reserved. Image courtesy of Rainmaker.To film qualityeffects for television...Armies Of Exigo image courtesy of Digic Pictures.© 2006 Cinergi Interactive LLC. All rights reserved.Fusion delivers.© Copyright ABC, Lost image courtesy of Digital Dimension.eyeonline.comCopyright © 1988-2006 eyeon Software Inc. All rights are reserved.All trademarks, company names and products are the property of their respective holders.

. . . Character AnimationDetailingFor the first time, Pixar rendered withraytracing throughout the film—the carsdemanded it for the reflections. “We usedambient occlusions to help bring out theshapes and crevices in diffusely lit objects,”explains Ostby. “And, we used raytracingfor diffuse radiance—to spill colored lightfrom one object to another.”The studio renders with the commerciallyavailable RenderMan software,PRMan, although Ostby points out thatthey tend to be early adopters. “The trickiestthing for us was in using these techniquesin a film with as much stuff asin this one,” he says. “We used a multiprongedapproach to get our renders to beStochastic pruning reduced the amount of geometric complexity in the sagebrush-littereddesert. Note the tail fin-shaped mountains rising from the plains behind Lightning McQueen.reasonably cheap.”The studio calls one of those approaches “shrink-wrapping,” cal, lighting also helped tell the town’s story. “We contrast the townwhich is a texture-mapping technique that reduced the complexity from the way it used to be in its heyday to how run down it is nowof rendering fully detailed cars in a scene. “We bake information through the use of neon lighting,” says Ostby. To do that, the crewonto the surface of the cube so the process becomes, essentially, used new area light sources for particular neon tubes, along withthe process of rendering the cube,” Ostby says. Displacement maps RenderMan light shaders. “It was a lot of work making the neonmade the cubes render as if they were a fully detailed cars. lights look right and cast the right light on the set,” Ostby says.The rendering team also helped speed rendering, particularlyof raytraced reflections, by becoming early adopters of PRMan’s Motoring Down Route 66brick maps. “We baked out whatever we could into brick maps,” In 2001, the two directors, producer Darla Anderson, and othersays Ostby. “We baked raytraced reflections, occlusions. You members of the production team drove a caravan of four whitecompute the reflections only once, but you can filter them when Cadillacs on a nine-day trip along Route 66 from Oklahoma toyou read the map in. So you can add an extra layering of filtering.”That helped them more easily repair any aliasing and they went to meet the people on Route 66,” says Clark. “TheyCalifornia. “When John went on the road with the story guys,noise problems that occurred.knew the story they wanted to tell about the cars. They didn’tTo reduce the amount of complexity in the desert, with its know the through-line. There’s a lot of Joe Ranft in this movie,miles and miles of sagebrush, the crew used what it calls “stochasticpruning.” “We wanted to build the sagebrush accurately, towns were forgotten when the interstate system was built inand he felt there was something really human about how thewith thousands of leaves on each,” says Ostby, “but we also the ’50s. Route 66 is a physical representation of American culture,and one of the stories is about the town. It’s kind of anwanted hundreds of thousands of plants in the desert valley.”With stochastic pruning, the sagebrush plants didn’t lose volume;they became less complex. “As the object becomes small With Cars, Pixar took a risk by sticking to John Lasseter’s man-appropriate story to tell.”on the screen, we drop off leaves, but we compensate,” Ostby date “truth to materials.” Turning the cars into cartoon charactersexplains. “We dropped them off stochastically across the surfaceso we didn’t have bald spots, then we compensated the size have been as engaging; people wouldn’t have become as immersedmight have been easier, but the crew believes the result wouldn’tof the leaves, the amount of surface area, and the shader, which in the world. In any animated feature, the technical sophisticationneeded a different response to light as the leaves changed size.” and animation skill all goes to waste if the story doesn’t captureFor Cars, the R&D group wrote a new lighting tool dubbed people’s hearts, but Pixar always has a story to tell. That’s whyLumos that allowed the lighters to manipulate much of the lightinginteractively. “We could change light directions and shad-Oscar winners. And that’s likely to be true for Cars, as well.the studio’s films have been box-office hits, Oscar contenders, andows, all those good things, but not the final touches,” says Ostby. Let the races begin.The crew rendered out a small number of passes—usually threeor four, sometimes as many as 10. Using Apple’s Shake, the compositorscould dial the intensity of reflections up or down. ing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached atBarbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contribut-In addition to making the cars look real and the landscape magi-BarbaraRR@comcast.net._______________16 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

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. . . Digital SetsOn VirtualEpisodic television opensa new frontier for effectsartists setting a sceneBy Martin McEachernA revolution is under way, and it is beingtelevised. Only, no one has noticed—even asit unfolds before millions of eyes each weekon such hit shows as Crossing Jordan, CSI,and Las Vegas. And, it’s happening, quite literally,in the background of every show.Look closely at the detectives on Fox’sprime-time drama Bones as they passthrough Arlington National Cemetery orat the military officers on NBC’s E-Ringas they stride through the parking lot ofthe Capitol Building, for example. In fact,wherever you find your favorite characterseach week—be it near Boston Harbor, theLas Vegas strip, Central Park, the LincolnMemorial, even in Afghanistan—chancesare they were filmed in a backlot, parkinglot, or studio in Los Angeles. The worldsthey inhabit are increasingly virtual.Overwhelmed by shrinking budgets,narrowing production schedules, andrising viewer expectations, TV producersare in desperate need of a new productionparadigm—one that can transportactors each week through virtualsets and set extensions created within amatter of days, not weeks. But with largereffects companies tailored to handle longterm,high-budget effects, these producersare pinning their hopes on smaller,“boutique” houses to fulfill the promiseof a brave, new virtual world—companieswith production pipelines thatemphasize speed and simplicity, whichcan unshackle the imaginations of writersand production designers while stillreducing costs. With that goal, they’veturned to facilities such as Zoic Studios,Look Effects, and Stargate Digital.As these companies rise to the challenge,a new and potentially lucrativefrontier for the industry hangs in the balance.At stake is a future where digital setasset libraries become a valuable commodity,and digital set design and productiondesign become intertwined. Butchanging the channel on the future willnot be easy. Artists must learn to workmuch faster than their counterparts infilm, who often labor for months, sometimesyears, on a single shot.They also must learn to use simple,all-purpose software packages. NewTek’sLightWave, for example, shines on theepisodic stage; rarefied and highly specializedtool sets do not. And becausethere’s no time to fix mistakes on an episodicschedule, the artists are investedwith a level of trust and creative responsibilityfound nowhere else in the industry.Moreover, they must learn to collaboratewith directors, production designers,actors, and cinematographers, assuminga far more active and integrated role.Capitol-izing on ZoicWhen producers for NBC’s E-Ring (aboutthe top-secret missions of two Pentagonmilitary officers) asked Zoic Studios totransport the actors from a Los Angelesparking lot to the parking lot of the USCapitol, the crew sprung into actionon multiple fronts, sending an artist toWashington, DC to gather reference photosfor texture mapping, another to the LA setto gather lighting and camera data, whilethe rest of the team began the modelingprocess using LightWave and AutodeskMedia and Entertainment’s Maya.For Zoic, which also does virtual setsfor CSI: Miami and Battlestar Galactica,E-Ring was a golden opportunity to showcaseits talents because the production wasseverely limited in its travel budget, makingvirtual locations a necessity. “Usually, setdressing would furnish the live-action setswith foreground elements or anything elseinteracting with the actors,” says visualeffects supervisor Andrew Orloff. “But forthe Capitol shot, there was no dressing atall, not even cars in the lot. We had to createeverything in 3D because the directorplanned to shoot the action with moving,panning, tilting, and craning cameras—not lock-offs. We couldn’t just put a mattepainting back there and track it in [Adobe]After Effects or [Autodesk Discreet] Combustion;it wouldn’t look real. We neededthe parallax to sell the shots.”With only a week to complete the composite,the team arrived on set with a 360-degree camera to gather high dynamicrange imagery for reflection mapping. As itrotates on a special tripod mount, the cameratakes a picture every 20 degrees along18 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

Digital Sets. . . .ocationWith a limited travelbudget, E-Ring reliedon Zoic to dress asparse greenscreenset (left) using 3Delements, resulting inthis final shot (right).Images © Bruckheimer Television, Warner Bros.the x and y axis, allowing artists to stitchthe exposures together to form a sphericalimage of the location. The entire processtakes about 15 minutes, and when done,the resulting image is mapped to a spherein Maya. Zoic uses proprietary tools andHDR Shop’s free Lightgen plug-in for Mayato “read” the sphere and place directionallights across the virtual sky dome thatapproximate the on-set lighting. Artiststhen use these lights to create reflectionmaps and shadows for the scene.The studio constructed the Capitol as alight, polygonal mesh in Maya. Using thereference photos, the artists refined thetextures in Adobe’s Photoshop, and projection-mappedthem to the building inLightWave. For UV mapping, or stretchinga texture map across a piece of geometry,the team also used Maya. To enhance thelighting and detail of the concrete surfaces,the artists used Pixologic’s Zbrush to paintnormal maps, which encode informationfor all three axes. “With Zbrush, we’reable to create normal maps very quickly,getting a massive amount of detail withoutupping the geometry, which can cripplework flow and protract renderingtimes,” says Orloff.Prior to arriving on set, Zoic will createa previz in Maya to block out shots, creatingvirtual dollies, cranes, and other rigsfor the CG camera, and constraining it tothe speeds and motions of the real camera.Taking the previz to the set, the team couldmake certain suggestions as to what wasneeded, such as a 50 mm lens and so forth.Once the director and director of photographyexecute the shots, the groupworks closely with the assistant cameracrew to gather precise information aboutthe camera lens. This data is then fed into2d3’s Boujou. The goal on set, accordingto Orloff, is to be minimally invasive,never imposing restrictions on the camerawork that could undermine the signaturevisual style of a show. “When you seethe shot, you want it to feel like they shotthe Capitol, not like they made a hundredconcessions to composite the Capitol intothe scene,” says Orloff. “Our effects have toconform to the visual style of the show.”Using Boujou and artistic finesse, theteam allows both the cameraman anddirector to work unfettered, tracking thecamera movements and applying them tothe 3D camera in Maya. This same camerais used by the compositors in AfterEffects and Combustion to add clouds,trees, telephone poles, flocks of birds,and other set dressings in 2D. Allowingthe 3D and 2D artists to work in parallelwith a synced-up camera is crucial to finishingshots on an episodic schedule.Once the modeling, camera tracking,and texturing are finished, Zoic uses aproprietary system to export the Mayascenes to LightWave for rendering. Thein-house software translates everything—from rigged characters and hair dynamics,to camera and particle data from Maya—into LightWave. “LightWave has this toolcalled background radiosity, which doesimage-based radiosity lighting,” saysOrloff. “It’s fast, and looks great.”Crime-Scene WorkThe Capitol shots were completed in justunder a week, but for the crew at Zoic,there was no time to rest on their laurels.For in the episodic world, where jobsare short and fast, juggling multiple projectsis key. So at the same time, the teamplayed musical chairs with other projects,including regular work for CSI, E-Ring, andBattlestar Galactica.According to Orloff, Mental Images’Mental Ray, Maya’s Fluid Effects, andNext Limit’s Real Flow are crucial toolsfor the group’s work on CSI—in all itsincarnations—especially when the camerawhooshes through a body, down hairshafts, pushing through capillaries, connectivetissues, and bodily fluids. CSI notonly relies heavily on Zoic’s previz workfor staging virtual set shots, but for doingmotion-control shots as well. “We handlethe motion-control shooting for CSI, sowe’ll swap data from the laptop and actuallyprogram the motion-control rig usingthe data from the 3D file,” explains Orloff.In addition, the producers of CSI: LasVegas depend so heavily on virtual setextensions that, at the beginning of everyseason, they send Zoic to that city to shootwww.cgw.com JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 19___________

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10Gb NASwith a lotof SAS...Rorke Data & Fujitsu deliver cost-effectivemulti-user, multi-stream NAS storage solutionsToday’s dynamic Digital Media networks typically demand ultrafastnode-to-node interconnections to support a high bandwidth ofdata transfer.That’s why Rorke Data has partnered with Fujitsu.We integrate Rorke’s Galaxy series of high-performance, scalableNAS solutions with a blazing combination of Fujitsu XG series10 Gbit switch infrastructure and Fujitsu’s MAX series 3.5,"15K rpm SAS drives.Cost-effective 10Gb connectivity, the unparallel performance of SASdrives, with Rorke’s service and support – It’s revolutionary disk storage,without the spin.The first image is from raw footage shot for the show CSI: LasVegas. The team at Zoic digitally removed some trees to the left andadded the top of a Las Vegas hotel, as seen in the second image.Images © CBS Productions, Bruckheimer Television, Alliance Atlantis.Galaxy NASCapacity: 2TB to 12TB*Drives: SAS-based over1GB/sRAID: Level 3, 5 or 6OS: EmbeddedMicrosoft or Linux*Capacity determined by number of enclosures• The world’s first non-blockingsingle-chip 10Gb Ethernet switches• Offers industry’s lowest latency in10Gb Ethernet Switching (450nsfall-through latency)• Delivers 240 Gbps throughput performancewith compact form factor• Includes link aggregation, IGMPsnooping and port securityFujitsu XG SeriesFujitsu MX SAS drives• 3.5-inch RoHS compliant EnterpriseHard Disk Drives offer 15K RPMspindle speed and feature storagecapacities up to 147GB/hdd• Mean-time-between-failure (MTBF)of 1,4000,000 power-on hours• Native Command Queuing (NCQ),providing faster execution ofoperation commands_______________Rorke Data, Incorporated9700 W. 76th Street • Eden Prairie, MN 55344800.328.8147 • 952.829.0300Rorke Data is a Subsidiary of Bell Microproducts.360-degree panoramic plates. This way, the studio remains upto-datewith the ever-changing sprawl of hotels. “They give usour own camera crew and location manager. We go to the top ofbuildings with a miniature version of a 360-degree rig and shootpanoramic moving plates on 35 mm, so we have the entire stripfrom the east, west, north, and south stitched together on multiplemoving film plates,” says Orloff. “You can seen these platesin the backgrounds of panning shots, especially when the buildingsare in the far distance.”Over the years, Zoic has witnessed the tides of change in TVland. “Somehow, in the last few seasons, VFX shots have gottenreally long,” muses Orloff. “For a typical TV show, we used to do60 90-frame shots; if we got a 200-frame shot, we’d look sidewaysand say, Wow! Now, we’re doing 1500 900-frame shots as a matterof course. Every single pilot this season had multiple shotsthat were over 1000 frames.” In the past, VFX shots would be governedby the rule of “get in and get out,” he notes. But those daysare long gone; effects shots are now interwoven into pivotal plotpoints that demand close attention and expanded screen time.On Sacred GroundIn one such pivotal plot point for an episode of Fox’s Bones, thedetectives discover the charred remains of a body lying againsta headstone in Arlington National Cemetery. The studio couldnot get permission from the government to shoot on the hallowedgrounds. So, they turned instead to Look Effects, whosecredits include Criminal Minds, CSI: NY, Malcolm in the Middle,and The OC. “Because they didn’t just want to put somethingidentifiable in the image, like the Chrysler Building, to ‘tag’ it,they needed all of Arlington Cemetery so they could have totalSAN • Fibre Channel • RAID • Archive Libraries • Servers • Installation • Service & MaintenanceRorke Data reserves the right to change product specifications without notice.All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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. . . Digital Setsfreedom in blocking the shots,” says visual effects supervisorMax Ivims.With just under two weeks to complete the shot (which Ivimsconcedes is much longer than usual), the crew arrived at thearboretum in Arcadia, California, where set dressers had improviseda small military cemetery using 100 Styrofoam headstonesand a fake fountain. The cemetery had to be digitally expandedto 5000 headstones for various day and night shots. In the 900-frame opening shot, which was completely greenscreened, thecamera moves with the main characters as the entire cemeteryfills the background. To keep rendering times low, artists constructeda simple polygonal model of Arlington in Maya. Becausethere was nothing in the shot to enable matchmoving, the artistsused a combination of eye-matching the 3D and doing 2Dadjustments in Apple’s Shake and After Effects. For panningand craning shots, the crew used Boujou and The Pixel Farm’sPFTrack to synchronize their virtual cameras.For texture mapping and re-creating the on-set lighting in itsvirtual cemetery, the team did extensive photography of the area,including the fake headstones, trees, grass, and other plant lifein the arboretum. However, the group did not go to Arlington;Ivims says it was more important for the textures to be consistentwith the faux cemetery than the real one. Unfortunately, the teamcould not use the texture maps derived from the Styrofoam headstones.“The set-dressing headstones looked fine when we wereon set and in practical photography, but when we took photos ofthem and tried to map them to the virtual ones, it just registersin your subconscious that something is wrong. Real headstoneshave a little stain on the bottom from rain splashing up from theground. The fake ones don’t have that.”To solve the problem, Look Effects took photographs ofgravestones at a local cemetery. The secret to virtual environments,argues Ivims, lies in the little details that take the “curse”off it. Those details include color depth, texture-map complexity,and, in the case of the gravestones, undoing the perfect geometricorder in which the digital ones had been arrayed acrossthe virtual field. “When we had them all lined up, they lookedmechanical, so we had to angle them just slightly, so they’re notin perfect rows and not perfectly vertical,” explains Ivims. “Forthe grass, we didn’t use repeated texture maps, and we addedSurviving Pilot SeasonZoic worked on a slew of pilots for this season, including The Way, Ultra, andEureka, a sci-fi original series airing on the Sci-Fi channel July 18. In one complexshot for Eureka, in which the camera descends from the clouds into a townskirted by tree-topped mountains, artists created the entire geography virtually,using Maya’s Paint Effects for close-up plant life, such as trees and grass, andLightWave’s Vue 5 Infi nite (from E-on Software) as a terrain generator for thesweeping expanses of mountains and densely treed forests.“Unlike feature work, where you tend to use one specific functionality of a softwarepackage, in episodic work, where you’re doing everything under the sun, youneed a flexible package that can handle the full gamut of effects very rapidly,” notesVFX supe Andrew Orloff. That includes particle effects. So to generate the cloudsfor the shot, the artists used the new Dynamite hypervoxel engine for LightWave, athird-party particle and dynamics volumetric renderer. “Since the clouds were relativelystatic, we could just move the texture around inside them to generate someinternal motion.” LightWave’s volumetric rendering power is also behind the fire,smoke, explosions, and other particle effects of Battlestar Galactica.For another pilot next season, called October Road, the company used PaintEffects to dress all the bare trees lining a road with bright orange leaves, employingMaya’s Dynamic Fields to make all the branches and leaves shudder in the wind withvarying turbulence. For simple shots like these, involving one, discreet image createdin Maya, the team uses Mental Images’ Mental Ray for rendering. —MMpatches of greener grass interspersed with swaths of burnt anddying grass. The more little details you add, the less your brainrecognizes it as a synthetic environment.” The artists preparedall the texture maps in Photoshop. While the crew normallyuses Maya’s Paint Effects to generate foreground trees, becausemost of the trees were confined to the far background, it waseasier to project the tree images onto cards.Later, the team adds as much depth of field as possible inMaya before rendering the scenes in Mental Ray and sometimesin LightWave. According to Ivims, prodigious use of depth offield is integral to the extreme micro close-ups in CSI:NY. Whenthe shot shows a substance being absorbed through the skin,the camera quickly zooms in to a real arm, then Zoic uses amotion blur to dissolve into a CG arm. After applying a photorealtexture map, artists composite multiple renders using transparencyto give the illusion of subsurface scattering.Images courtesy Look Effects.For this scene from the new hit show Bones, the team from Look Effects filmed at an arboretum, where set dressers had added Styrofoamheadstones, which were digitally multiplied, to simulate Arlington Cemetery. CG elements and greenscreened actors were also added later.24 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

Digital Sets. . . .After Look Effects proved it could reproduce ArlingtonCemetery, the producers of Bones returned with an even biggerchallenge: re-create Washington, DC for an elaborate aerialpullout from the Washington Monument that lands in the lapof the Lincoln Memorial. The nighttime aerial originates froma polygonal model of the Washington Monument sculpted inMaya, and then flies over an entire virtual set of Washingtontoward the Lincoln Memorial. “We built everything, includingthe Memorial, the malls on either side, and the reflecting pool,”says Ivims. The water was a simple polygonal mesh to whichthe artists applied a sine wave to make the surface ebb and flow.It was then mapped with a highly reflective shader and raytracedin Mental Ray to create reflections of the world above.Stargate to the Virtual BacklotWhile Zoic Studios and Look Effects have become adept at assemblingdigital sets in a matter of days, the ability to offer clients alibrary of ready-made virtual sets is what many experts argue willbecome the next big step in streamlining episodic production. Andthat’s exactly what’s being tried at Stargate Digital, where founder/CEO Sam Nicholson and his crew have been building 360-degree,high-resolution mega-mattes of every conceivable environment adirector could want. It’s called a Virtual Backlot, and Nicholsonlikens it to shooting a movie without actors. “By shooting thoseimages at extremely high resolutions (8000 lines), the directorsand DP can visit the environments from the positions we’ve shotthem and go in much further if they want to,” he says. “They canplan their own camera moves within the environment, and no twopeople would create the same sequence with the same footage.”Nicholson estimates it takes about two hours of footage to create avariable-resolution, 360-degree environment.Rather than dollying around a circular set surrounded by agreenscreen, which Nicholson says creates too much bouncebacklighting, the team places the actors on a rotating turntableas the lighting grid above turns with them. Using the VirtualBacklot and nested 3D geometry, Stargate has built virtual setsand set extensions for ER, Las Vegas, CSI, and Steven Spielberg’sInto the West. “Crossing Jordan also uses them a lot because it’seasier to re-create Boston on a greenscreen than it is for theactors to fly there,” says Nicholson. “Moreover, time stands stillin the Virtual Backlot. Because magic hour lasts forever, you canafford to perfect a background and add CG foreground elementsand put actors and partial set work in between.”Stargate’s most recent Virtual Backlots were created for the TNToriginal film Battleground, starring William Hurt. For the movie,Stargate created scores of digital characters using a combination of_____________________www.cgw.com JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 25___________

. . . Digital Sets© NBC Studios, Inc. Crossing Jordan Fridays 8 pm, 7 pm Central.greenscreened live actors and virtual people created in Maya andmapped with motion-captured data. All the shots were composedon the circular turntable at Stargate’s Van Nuys, California, stage.For creating and lighting nested 3D geometry, such as the massivedigital layout of ancient Rome for the miniseries Spartacus,modelers rely primarily on Maya and occasionally on LightWave;compositors use After Effects and Shake; texturers and mattepainters work with Photoshop exclusively; and matchmoverstrack shots in Boujou. “With Boujou, we don’t have to waste timeon set gathering lens information,” says Nicholson. “Indeed, notwo lenses are the same, so it’s better to let Boujou determine the[focal length] of the lens. Instead of 24 mm, it will say 23.75, andit processes it—and it’s pixel perfect.”Stargate’s renderfarm houses approximately 200 processorsrunning primarily in Boxx computers and some Dell machines.The studio also maintains about 100TB of storage to efficiently runits proprietary VOS (Visual Operating System) software, whichorganizes visual information and disseminates it to a number ofartists in various countries. “Transparently tracking all our effectsshots, VOS provides real-time access to, and playback of, an extensivestock-footage library as well as every rendered effects shotfrom any desktop in our facility,” adds Nicholson.The Digital Road AheadLooking to the future, the three companies are widely optimistic,not only about the prospects for small effects houses tailored forepisodic work, but the ability for virtual sets to expand the creativehorizons of television and completely redefine the role of the digitaleffects artist. “With the absence of sci-fi shows, visual effectsartists have to change from a bunch of guys who can render spaceshipsto heads of departments who interface with TV productionand collaborate on set,” says Look Effects’ Ivims. “We get to bemore creatively involved with all the other departments.”Moreover, television’s reliance on virtual sets could serve as aseedbed for change in the film world, as well. Vlad Bina, a digitalset designer from xyBlue Design, whose credits include theMatrix films, agrees:“Stargate’s VirtualBack lot is one of thefirst attempts to createa system and pipelinefor acquiring andorganizing digital setFor Crossing Jordan,Stargate Digital utilizesits Virtual Backlot tore-create a Bostonbackdrop, since it is fareasier to generate avirtual version of thecity than it is to filmthe actors there.These images are from Stargate Digital’s Virtual Backlot Russia location,for a project the group completed last year. The first image is agreenscreen shot, with the digital set applied to the final (below).assets. Surprisingly, such a system is missing in most of the largecompanies doing million-dollar digital set shots. Sometimes theyend up re-inventing the wheel for every new project. To make acomparison, modern architecture today is an assembly processbased on huge catalogs of ready-made construction componentsthat are assembled according to a design grammar. An architectworks with custom elements only sporadically; most of thedesign vocabulary is based on a library of tried and trusted components.I see the same thing happening in the future, to someextent, for virtual sets.”And Bina’s vision of the future gets even brighter. With z-depth cameras and crossover technologies from advanced renderingengines for games and video card chips, real-time virtualset compositing could be only 10 years away, he says. Indeed, aprimitive system has already been successfully tried on Disney’sThe Book of Pooh TV series. Stargate’s Nicholson also emphasizesthe importance of standardized, workhorse software likeMaya and LightWave, which can deliver the “good, fast, andcheap” triangle, and shorten the learning curve for new artists.And, it’s the artists themselves who will profit the most from thegrowing market, says Orloff.“TV tends to be dominated by smaller companies becausewe’re able to harness the collective talents of a small group ofartists better than larger companies can. When we get a project,I’ll tell four guys to put their heads together and pitch me thebest solution that exploits everybody’s talents,” says Orloff. “Onthe episodic stage, everybody gets to shine.”Martin McEachern is an award-winning writer and a contributingeditor for Computer Graphics World. He can be reached atmartin@globility.com._____________Images courtesy Stargate Digital.26 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

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. . . Modeling TechniquesFaceoffArtists turn back the clock for actorsPatrick Stewart and Ian McKellenBy Barbara RobertsonTM & © 2006 Twentieth Century Fox. X-Men character likenesses TM and © 2006 M arvel Characters, Inc.Artists at Lola gave actor Patrick Stewart a digital face-lift foran opening scene in the newly released X-Men using techniquessharpened during the past eight years on music video divas.28 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

Modeling Techniques. . . .X-Men: The Last Standopens with a flashback,an event that tookplace around 25 years in thepast: The mutants Xavier (actorPatrick Stewart) and Magneto(actor Ian McKellen) meet fellowmutant Jean Gray as a child. Typically,such flashback sequences rank low on adirector’s list of favorite scenes. To turnback the clock, a director’s options havebeen to plaster their stars’ faces withmakeup and prosthetics or, if the age differenceis too great, substitute youngeractors. Neither solution is perfect.Now, there’s a third choice. Thanks toa stealth studio called Lola, director BrettRatner filmed Stewart and McKellen performingthe flashback as if it were anyother scene. Later, Lola reversed theactors’ ages digitally in postproduction.“We filmed the sequence unhindered,”says John Bruno, visual effects supervisor.“The opening sequence is a bit of agroundbreaker.”Ratner filmed the actors on stage—an interior set with a greenscreen window—andin exterior shots. “We dida no-holds-barred process,” says GregStraus, co-founder of Lola and its sisterstudio, Hydraulx. “We didn’t have trackingmarks. We didn’t limit the actors’motion, blocking, expressions, or anything.The DP [director of photography]used the lighting he wanted to use. Theydid everything in-camera the way theywanted. And, we ended up with extremeclose-ups: forehead and chin full frame.That meant our work had to hold up on a40-foot screen.”Lola specializes in what the studiocalls “digital cosmetic enhancements.”But X-Men pushed the state of its art. “Wehad to take 20 to 25 years off these guys,”Straus says. “We pushed into a realmwhere makeup can’t go. And, that’s theexciting aspect of it.”The studio initially began performingdigital touch-ups for music videos. “In themid-’90s, music video directors came upwith the idea to make their singers lookbetter,” Straus says. “We even out skintexture, take out bumps. Now the divaseven request people by name to do theirdigital makeup as if they were requestingmakeup artists.” Soon, models in cosmeticscommercials also wanted digitaltouch-ups—a bit of blurring here andthere to soften flaws and make the actorslook better. Recently, Lola began marketingthe flattering techniques to the feature-filmworld.___________________“We had one or two films the first year,four or five the next, and have 12 thisyear,” says Straus. “I can’t give examples,because most of the work is strictly confidential—theydon’t want people to knowwho looked good and who looked bad.That’s why X-Men is so cool. We took avanity tool set and applied it to supportthe story.”Digital Skin GraftingParticularly for film, Lola developed a proprietarytechnique it calls “digital skingrafting.” “The approach we took for musicvideos and commercials—blurring out theskin pores and throwing grain on top—makes everyone look younger, but it won’twww.cgw.com JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 29___________

. . . Modeling Techniquescut it in a feature film,” says Straus. “It makes people look likethey’re wearing masks.”Straus describes digital skin grafting as a 2D and 2.5D techniqueand three years working on film, and in having built the skingraftlibraries over the years. In the case of X-Men, the crew alsodid extensive research.that utilizes a pipeline based on Autodesk Media andEntertainment’s Discreet Flame and Inferno systems. The process,according to Straus, maintains the actor’s expressivenessand performance, as well as such skin details as pores, lines,and subtle wrinkles. “One thing we’ve learned after workingon a dozen movies or so is that maintaining the texture of theskin is the most important aspect,” he says. Not necessarily,however, the skin from the actor getting the makeover.Lola artists can draw from a proprietaryThe Years Melt AwayIt was easy to discover what Stewart and McKellen looked likeas younger men: Each actor has a large body of television andfilm work, plus portfolios of numerous photographs, magazinecovers, and so forth. But, in addition to reference photography,Lola artists worked with a plastic surgeon. “Looking at a photographis subjective,” says Straus. “You don’t know if someonelooks younger because of their expressionlibrary of skin elements for thesmooth 2.5D high-resolution skin patchesthat they place on footage of an actor’sface to, for example, fill in deep lines.See the July issue of ComputerGraphics World’s sister publication,Post Magazine, as X-Men:The Last Stand director Brettor a physical change. The plastic surgeonhelped us understand what happens to facesas they age.”The surgeon also helped the artists avoidAlthough painters might refine individualpatches, the age reversal process Lolareal-world plastic surgery: making a facean important mistake that even occurs inRatner talks about taking overa successful franchise as well asused for X-Men does not involve frame-byframelook androgynous. “Men and women agehand painting. Rather, artists graftthe skin patches and change facial topographyusing warping techniques.the editorial and visual effectsprocess for this film.differently,” says Straus. “In an early test,we had made one of the actors look younger,but he looked weird. The surgeon taught us“It’s parametric,” says Straus. “We didn’t write custom software.We built everything as an Inferno batch setup. We’re ableto make tweaks by moving sliders.”The trick, Straus believes, is in knowing how to apply theInferno tools in the right order—experience gained from eightit was because we had made a masculine feature feminine. It’svery easy to make someone look gender-nonspecific.”Although the artists used photo documentation of the actors,they didn’t scan the 60-year-olds to create their youthful faces.“Using their own skin wasn’t going to get us there,” says Straus.years of digital touch-ups for commercials and music videos, “We had to go to our library of skin.”Digital skin grafts drawn from a proprietary library of skin elementshelped smooth actor Ian McKellen’s craggy face, and warpingtechniques applied in Inferno changed his facial topography. Theend result is a younger version of the mutant character Magneto.Each actor presented unique challenges. For example,one trick for making someone look young is to add hair, butStewart’s character had to be bald. “We had to go to 30 yearsyounger to have the audience believe he was 25 years younger,”30 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

Artists applying the digital skin grafting techniques used to make Patrick StewartStraus says. McKellen’s craggier face, on the other(at left in images) and Ian McKellen (at right in images) look younger consultedhand, required more digital skin grafting.with a plastic surgeon to avoid making the men look androgynous.Lola artists produced light, medium, and heavyversions of each actor’s rejuvenated faces, with “heavy” the shift,” Straus says. “Writers have stayed away from flashbacksmost altered—cheekbones raised higher, nose or ears smaller, because directors don’t like casting other people. This couldlines erased. “We could ask the director which version he liked break open a fresh wave of ideas that had been off-limits.”best,” says Straus. “If we were painting, there’s no way we couldhave had as much back and forth.”Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributingeditor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached atThen, working with scanned live-action plates, they createdfull-motion tests for nervous studio executives who were BarbaraRR@comcast.net._______________ready to cut the sequence if the age reversalwasn’t convincing.As the shot begins, the technocranebooms up over Stewart, who is spinning.Then, the camera backs up. “Where it getstricky is when the guys move their heads in3D and the lighting responds and moves overthe work we’re doing,” says Straus. “That’swhat separates the men from the boys. Inthe opening shot, there is full 3D movementof patches tracked onto the actors, and thepatches respond to the lighting. That’s thereal trick—obeying the lighting in the scene.That’s what makes this stuff not easy.”The quality-control work is exacting;the work can be tedious. Although the processdoesn’t demand unique tools—it’sbased on the clever use of existing tools—Straus believes that the Lola artists’ wealthof experience gives his studio a competitiveadvantage, one they’ll need now thatthey’ve opened the door to new possibilities.Artists using digital tools can deform andchange the shape of actors’ faces; they canmake them look gaunt and thin—somethingimpossible to do with prosthetics. And, thatmakes new kinds of stories viable.“I think this could cause a fundamental____________________www.cgw.com JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 31___________

. . . InteractivitySI 3DinAnimators solve the technical mysteriesbehind CSI: 3 Dimensions of MurderBy Karen Moltenbreyinthe top-rated television drama the crimes, players must visit the scene, in real time, so players can walk aroundCSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the interview suspects, and collect and ana-the crime scenes at will, and the game’scrime-solving team of John Grissom and hisgroup of criminalists use the latest tools andmethodologies to solve some of Las Vegas’smost perplexing crimes. Similarly, for theUbisoft/Telltale Games CSI: 3 Dimensions ofMurder PC title, based on the TV show, CGartists and animators applied the latest digitaltechniques that enabled them to bringthe crime story into the interactive space.Although the third interactive iterationof CSI, this title is the first to bring thegameplay into the full 3D space, and asa result, mimics the television show moreclosely than the previous releases for amore immersive experience.lyze physical evidence using puzzle-solvingand interrogation skills to establish arelationship among the suspect, the victim,and the crime scene.With the game’s new 3D graphics,players can move around the crimescene and zoom in for a close-up look atrelevant hot spots in the game and arenot limited to doing so simply withinthe same axis. However, they will notbe able to walk around the space freelyin the game space in the style of a firstpersonshooter. Still, all the objects andscenery are fully modeled and renderedadvanced interactivity makes it seem asif players are actually using the tools forcollection and detection of the evidence.As a result, it feels as though players areactually solving the case, rather thanhaving the computer solve it for them.And, if they are successful, they can thenmake an arrest.It’s the Way that You MoveFurther supporting the game’s realismare the motions of the characters. Toaccomplish this, Telltale Games teamedwith mocap studio House of Moves, whichrecorded approximately 75In the game, players use theactual motions involvinglatest forensic science andcrime-solving equipment—including Mikrosil castingmaterial, magnetic powderfor enhanced fingerprintanalysis, and Luminol fordetecting traces of bloodevidence—as they workalongside Grissom and thecast to solve five caseswith deep plot lines. Todiscover the truth behindThe game CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder brings the characters from the hittelevision drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, including supervisor JohnGrissom, into the interactive 3D space, enabling players to solve crimes.an array of props—knives,guns, jars, books, garbagebags, and so on—that lentsome authenticity not onlyto the cinematic sequences,but also to the in-gameplay. These movements wereacquired via single- and multiple-personcapture with a100-camera array of 4 megapixel,grayscale Vicon MX 40motion-capture cameras.32 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

According to David Felton, productionmanager at Telltale Games, using fullbodymotion capture enabled the group torecord a set of specific, believable actions.“Especially in our cut-scenes and reconstructionsequences, where you see scenariosof what happened or might havehappened, the characters ‘talk’ with theirbodies rather than with words,” saysFelton. “Using motion capture allowed usto have our 3D characters communicatethrough their actions.”As Felton explains, it was importantto capture realistic human motion, especiallyfor the game’s cinematic sequences.Because motion-capture animations comefrom real human motion, there is a lot ofsubtlety in the data that cannot be as easilyachieved with hand animation.All the cinematic sequences in the gamewere almost entirely mocapped. These wereprimarily crime re-enactments accompaniedby a voice-over, so the character’sbody language had to convey the action.The rest of the game used hand-animatedsuites that were designed to blend with thecharacters’ idle poses. Yet, the group didwork in some of the mocap data for someof the character idles, as well.Most of the mocap data, however, wasfor specific, complicated, full-body characteracting. “It doesn’t makesense to hand animate thissort of thing because it wouldtake a long time, and you probablywould not have as muchdetail. In addition, it wouldAlthough the game is the thirdbased on the TV series, it isthe first to bring the gameplayinto the full 3D space, resultingin a far more realistic andimmersive experience.Body language is often the key to uncovering the truth from suspects (left); for realistic andsubtle character motions, the crew used a great deal of motion capture. Mocap data alsoenhanced some of the hand-animated movements of the investigators themselves (right).be a lot of work for something that wouldonly be used once,” explains Felton.and cleaned up, it was delivered as AutodeskMedia and Entertainment MayaAs Christopher Bellaci, production scene files, where marker informationmanager at House of Moves, points out,the group captured everything from gesturesand idle motions like leaning on atable, sitting, and walking. The crew alsomocapped specific sequences of actionthat were later applied to a character who,for example, is hit with an object andthen gets up, or a person wielding a knifein a threatening manner. This was donewithin a capture volume of 35 by 40 feet.In all, Felton estimates that the animatorsachieved a 5:1 time-savings usingmocap data instead of hand animation.“We captured all the mocap animationsthat we used for the game in oneday. We then had two animators ‘clean’the data in a little less than a week. Thiswas to adjust the generic character sizeof the mocap data to the specific proportionsof the final character models it wasbeing applied to,” he says. “ It would havetaken two animators about five weeks toaccomplish the same thing by hand.Once the mocap data was acquiredwas applied to Maya skeletons; the characterswere modeled in Maya and texturedin Adobe’s Photoshop to look likethe actual actors in the show. This wasaccomplished by “revisions,” says Felton.“Actually, we used reference photos providedby the show to model all the CSIs.Some of the characters were easier to get[correct] than others. LVPD detective JimBrass, Dr. Al Robbins, and investigatorNick Stokes came together very quickly.We revised investigator Warrick Brownabout four times before we were happy.”Yet, the biggest challenge in terms ofthe content creation and aesthetics wasachieving a realistic look while at thesame time keeping a low minimum spec(the game does not require a high-endPC), since the more polygons that are onscreen, the lower the game’s performance.So, the art team had to convey a lot ofrealism without using a lot of details.“This game was going for gritty realism,and using motion capture provideda way to add a level ofhyper-realism to the characteranimation,” saysBellaci.Like in the televisionshow, technology andteamwork helped solvethe case.Karen Moltenbrey is thechief editor for ComputerGraphics World.www.cgw.com JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 33___________

PortfolioSIGGRAPH Electronic TheaterClockwise from top:458nm (Special Jury Honors winner) Created by Jan Bitzer,Ilija Brunck, and Tom Weber from the Institute of Animation,Visual Effects, and Postproduction at FilmakademieBaden-Wurttemberg in Germany, this project caught theeye of the judges for its intricate detail and elegance.Bubble Girl This compelling animation, from Psyop, was createdfor a television commercial for its client Aero.Brush Lei Chen, a student at Bournemouth University in theUK, crafted this highly stylized film for a master’s degreeproject in 3D computer animation.Considered one of the premiere animation events, the annual SIGGRAPH Computer AnimationFestival showcases the best CG works from students and professionals around the globe. Andjudging from the caliber of the works accepted into this year’s festival, the event surely willnot disappoint audiences. “The SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival is an internationallyrecognized event that engages and inspires artists and technologists alike,” says DigitalFauxtography’s Terrence Masson, chair of the 2006 Computer Animation Festival. “Each year,it serves as a mirror of what is possible today and a window into what can be achieved in thefuture. It provides equal merit to films from independent and major studios as well as students.”The 2006 event is the culmination of nearly two years of planning and preparation by thefestival committee, which comprises industry volunteers who committed thousands of hours tobring this presentation to the SIGGRAPH audiences and beyond, during special post-SIGGRAPHscreenings at selected locales.34 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006

The committee received a record 726 entries from six continents and 37 countries, includingAustralia, Germany, Iran, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and Spain, resulting in a 25 percentincrease over the number of submissions from last year. Moreover, the entries represent arange of computer graphics from across many disciplines. In all, 97 pieces were accepted: 34into the prestigious Electronic Theater and 63 into the Animation Theater. Of those, 51 are animationpieces, five are scientific pieces (including scientific visualization, medical imaging, andtechnical submissions), 10 are art pieces, 16 are broadcast pieces, three are computer gamecinematics, 12 are visual effects pieces, and 38 are student works.Each year, two Electronic Theater submissions are singled out for special recognition. Thisyear, the animated short film “One Rat Short,” from Alex Weil of Charlex, received the Best ofShow award. This film, which uses computer graphics for a more dramatic and cinematic lookas opposed to a cartoon look, follows a New York City rat from his gritty world to the interiorClockwise from top left:Dairy Crest “Cityside” In this TV spot, created by artists atFramestore CFC in the UK for client Dairy Crest, hungry digitalcreatures blend into a live backdrop.Everyone’s Hero This upcoming CG animated feature is fromdirectors Christopher Reeve, Dan St. Pierre, and Colin Brady ofIDT Entertainment.Flow Presented by head of R&D Stephan Trojansky from ScanlineProductions, this project features a digital Megalodon jumpingout of water, which was further enhanced with Scanline’sproprietary fluid-simulation techniques.Guinness “noitulovE” This fish-out-of-water animation wascreated by Framestore CFC for Guinness.Doll Face This project was done by Andrew Huang from USC.JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 35

PortfolioClockwise from top left:One Rat Short (Best of Show award) An emotional piece,this film-noirish animated short from Charlex and director AlexWeil uses CG imagery in a unique way; rather than presentthe medium in the typical shiny style, the group used CGIfor a dramatic, cinematic look.Into Pieces This stylized selection is from directorGuilherme Marcondes in Brazil.Rexona Go Wild This is yet another unique spot fromFramestore CFC for one of its clients.The Inner Life of the Cell One of the show’s technical presentations,this scientific animator is presented by John Lieblerfrom XVIVO.of a futuristic laboratory (for more on this project, see “Oh, Rats!,” May 2006, pg. 16).“This piece immediately stood out to the jury for many reasons,” says Masson. “The film’semotional tone, cinematography, and technical realization melded wonderfully into a simple yettouching short film. Repeatedly, the two lead characters transfixed our gaze with extreme closeups,and we instantly wondered what they were thinking. Our ability to clearly empathize withthe main characters’ desires is one of the film’s single greatest achievements.”The other award-winning film was “458nm,” by Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck, and Tom Weber ofFilmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Germany, which received Special Jury Honors. The film is aromantic story of two mechanical snails that find each other under the moonlight. “The initial submittedartist’s description in no way prepared us for the stunning impact of this film. The grace, beauty,and power conveyed with such humble subjects are only more appreciated upon multiple viewings,”says Masson. “Intricate details and subtle animation build layer upon layer of simple elegance.”36 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006

Other notable Animation Theater pieces, as singled out by the jury, include “Robin HoodFlour,” from Richard Rosenman of Red Rover Studios in Canada. In this animation, it is a holidayevening and the main characters are being interviewed at their dining room table. They arefuriously wrapping gingerbread cookies in gift boxes. The table shows various gift-wrappingaccessories, the freshly baked cookies, a glamorous candle ornament, and a kitchen cloth withthe Robin Hood logo. The cold winter setting outside contrasts with the warm dining roomlighting inside and helps develop a cozy holiday atmosphere.These projects, along with many others, will be featured in the Electronic Theater, held duringthe conference in Boston. Evening performances and matinee performances are scheduledthroughout the conference.A sampling of still images being shown in the Electronic Theater is presented on thesepages. —Karen MoltenbreyClockwise from top left:Robin Hood Flour—Giving This warm animation fromdirector Richard Rosenman and Red Rover Studios in Torontoearned special kudos from the judges.Tread Softly A unique animation from director Heebok Lee ofCarnegie Mellon University combines multicultural imagery intoone compelling visual.Warhammer This image, from the opening cinematic of thecomputer game Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, was crafted bydirector Istvan Zorkoczy of Digic Pictures in Hungary.Wojna Directed by Agnieszka Kruczek of the Institute ofAnimation, Visual Effects, and Postproduction Filmakademie inBaden-Wurttemberg in Germany, this stylistic presentationscores for its unique look.JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 37

productsFor additional product news and information, visitwww.cgw.com__________________________SOFTWAREDESIGNThe Power of NWin nPower rolled out Power TranslatorsPro, an extension to its Power Translators pluginfor Autodesk’s 3ds Max, for importing largeCAD models and assemblies into 3ds Max andAutodesk’s Viz software. The product offersimproved productivity for professional designvisualization engineers who need to rendernumerous large, complex CAD models accuratelyand efficiently. With Power Net, the productmaximizes the design visualization throughputby leveraging distributed computing powerand network optimization for the large modelsand large volumes of data typical of the CADindustry. Complex data translation processing,which used to take days or even weeksto accomplish, can now be done in a matterof hours. And Power Translators Pro maintainsthe high-quality surface definitions required toobtain the most accurate rendering. Instead oftranslating their high-quality surface modelsinto imprecise polygonal models or intermediateformats and then generating high-qualityrenderings, design visualization professionalscan transfer the precise surface definitions generatedby the CAD designers. Power TranslatorsPro sells for $1995 and includes a free one-yearsubscription to Power Net.nPower; www.npowersoftware.comVISUAL EFFECTSJahshaka VFXWin • Mac • Linux The Jahshaka Project hasreleased the Jahshaka 2.0 RC3, an open source,real-time editing and visual effects application.The tool is distributed under the GNU GeneralPublic License, and the software and its sourcecode are available for public download at www. ____Jahshaka.org. Designed for editors and otherprofessionals involved in digital content creation,Jahshaka is a postproduction suite thatwill ultimately include modules for video andaudio editing, compositing, animation, visualeffects, graphics, and paint. Hardware-acceleratedusing OpenGL and built using cross-platformtechnology, the software runs equallywell on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. TheJahshaka 2.0 release also includes JahPlayer, across-platform media player that eliminates theneed to install multiple media player software.The tool supports 2K and 4K playback of mediafiles to raw image sequences, and maintainsthe aspect ratio of the sourceJahshaka Project; www.jahshaka.orgKnoll Spark Pack Lights UpSGI • Linux Digital Anarchy announcedVersion 3.0 of its Knoll Spark Pack, offeringincreased control over the look of hundreds oflighting effects and furthering the creative abilitiesof broadcast designers and visual effects artiststo deliver innovative effects in 2D composites.The Knoll Spark Pack was originally writtenby John Knoll to create the Photon Torpedosin Star Trek: First Contact. The pack containsthree filters, the centerpiece being Knoll LensFlare Pro, designed to create lens flares andother lighting effects, including lasers, explosions,and suns. The other two filters are KnollUnmult, for matte generation, and Knoll Min/Max, for matte adjustments. The pack supports64-bit SGI and 32/64-bit Linux, and hasbeen updated to take advantge of Autodesk’snewest systems. Knoll Spark Pack 3.0 is pricedat $1295; upgrades from 2.0 cost $249. KnollSpark Pack works on Autodesk’s Inferno, Flame,Flint, Fire, and Smoke.Digital Anarchy; www.digitalanarchy.bizVIDEOEdius Enhances its NLE SoftwareThe Grass Valley business within Thomsonannounced Edius Pro Version 4.0, the latestin the company’s real-time, multi-formatvideo editing solution. New features such asmulti-cam support, nested sequence editing,improved trimming tools, and keyframe supportfor color correction maximize the editingsystem’s productivity. To meet the high standardsand fast-paced environments of broadcastand postproduction facilities, includingsupport for new tapeless acquisition and storagesystems, the new features found in EdiusPro Version 4.0 will also be included in the company’sEdius Broadcast software solution.The new multi-cam feature supports up toeight cameras and provides real-time monitorpreview, as well as a master channel previewthat displays all eight camera angles. The multicamfeature provides users with the feel of alive switcher, but with the flexibility of a nonlinearediting environment.Edius Pro Version 4.0 software is availablethis month for $699. Version 3 users canupgrade for $199. Edius Broadcast Version 4.0software will also be available at the end ofJune for $999, and $199 for upgrades.Grass Valley; www.thomsongrassvalley.com38 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

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productsPROJECTIONMaestro VRX Plays to the CrowdOrad Hi Tec Systems demonstrated for the firsttime its new Maestro VRX system designed toprovide a high-resolution, multi-channel, scalablereal-time graphics solution for backdroprear-projection systems. Backdrop rear-projectionsystems are becoming more popular asa high-quality replacement for conventionalvideo walls or bluescreens.Maestro VRX merges between the VRXtechnology and the Maestro on-air graphics system.The Maestro VRX is a template-based 3Dand 2D real-time graphics system. The graphictemplates are produced using Orad’s 3Designerauthoring software. During production, thetemplates are filled in with real-time informationthat can be typed in manually or alternatelypumped from external databases. The MaestroVRX can work as a stand-alone system or aspart of a larger setup with interfaces to all majornewsroom and automation systems.One of the unique features of the MaestroVRX is its ability to output graphics either byDVI or VGA with configurable resolution output.Furthermore, multiple Maestro VRX systemscould be chained together to create asingle output channel with enhanced graphicsperformance.Pricing and availability were not announced.Orad Hi Tec Systems; www.orad.tvHARDWAREMOBILE64-bit on the GoAMD introduced AMD Turion 64 X2 mobiletechnology, a family of 64-bit dual-core processorsfor thin and light notebook PCs thatoffers long battery life and outstanding performance,even when using multiple applicationssimultaneously, including demanding digitalmedia applications. AMD also is bringing 64-bit computing to the Mobile AMD Sempronprocessor family. Now AMD delivers the onlycomplete mobile product portfolio offeringthe ability to seamlessly transition between 32-and 64-bit computing. Moreover, the processorwill be ready to run the upcoming 64-bitversion of Microsoft Windows Vista.The AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technologyis based on the same Direct ConnectArchitecture featured in the AMD Opteron andAMD Athlon 64 X2 processors, providing highspeedlinks between cores, memory, and I/Ofor increased system performance. Notebooksbased on AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technologyshould be available in retail stores andthrough commercial distribution channels thisquarter. AMD Turion 64 X2 models TL-50, TL-52, TL-56, and TL-60 are available now. Pricingfor the family ranges from $184 to $354.AMD; www.amd.comSLI-Powered Mobile SystemsAlienware has introduced two new ultra-powerfulmobile systems loaded with dual NvidiaGeForce Go 7900 GPUs: the 17-inch Auroram9700 and the 19-inch Aurora mALX. AsAlienware’s most powerful desktop replacementsto date, the Aurora m9700 and AuroramALX provide up to twice the graphics performanceof a single-GPU mobile system and arethe first to feature groundbreaking True MIMOwireless technology from Airgo Networks forfaster, more reliable Wi-Fi performance overgreater distances. Pricing starts at $1999 for them9700 and $4499 for the mALX.Alienware; www.alienware.comEDITING SYSTEMRT.X2 Gets PremiereWin • Mac Matrox Video Products Groupannounced Matrox RT.X2, a high-performance,real-time native HDV and DV editingplatform bundled with Adobe’s Premiere Prosoftware. Matrox RT.X2 provides high-qualityMPEG-2 4:2:2 I-frame codec so users cancapture other HD and SD formats using thesystem’s analog inputs, and mix all types offootage on the timeline in real time. Priced at$1,995 and including Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0,Matrox RT.X2 will be available this month.Matrox also unveiled Matrox Axio LE,a real-time HD/SD editing platform. It featuresno-render HD and SD finishing incompressed and uncompressed formats,real-time color-correction tools, advancedreal-time effects, and a full complement ofanalog and digital video and audio inputsand outputs. It also lets users work seamlesslywith the other Adobe ProductionStudio applications. It supports AdobeDynamic Link and provides WYSIWYG videooutput support for Adobe After Effects andPhotoshop CS2, as well as other animationand compositing packages. Matrox Axio ispriced at $4495, and is available now.Finally, Matrox unveiled its MXO, a DVI-toaudio/videooutput adapter for the Mac thattakes the DVI output from a Mac computeror laptop and converts it to broadcast-qualityvideo. Users can preview Apple Final CutPro projects or the output of other QuickTimebasedapplications such as Motion, Shake, orDVD Studio Pro from Apple, or Adobe AfterEffects, as they will actually appear on TV, andthen record them, frame accurately, to tape.Matrox MXO can be used to provide a flickerfreevideo output of the computer desktopwith any application, allowing the user torecord and display Keynote and PowerPointpresentations, Web browser sessions, andsoftware application training.Available in June, MXO will be pricedat $995.Matrox; www.matrox.com40 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

John Knoll | BA University of Southern California | VisualEffects Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic, San Francisco,California | Co-creator Photoshop | 20-year SIGGRAPHattendeeTobi Saulnier | PhD Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |CEO, 1st Playable Productions, Troy, New York | 3-yearSIGGRAPH attendee5 days of real-world, real-timegraphic, interactive twingularityThe only conference and exhibition in the world that twingles everybody in computer graphics andinteractive techniques for one deeply intriguing and seriously rewarding week. In Boston, wherethousands of interdisciplinary superstars find the products and concepts they need to createopportunities and solve problems. Interact with www.siggraph.org/s2006to discover a selection of registration options that deliver a very attractivereturn on investment.The 33rd International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive TechniquesConference 30 July - 3 August 2006 Exhibition 1 - 3 August 2006 Boston Convention & Exhibition CenterBoston, Massachusetts USAIMAGE CREDITS: Diamond Age © 2004 Jeff Prentice; Khronos Projector © 2005 Alvaro Cassinelli,Monica Bressaglia, Ishikawa Masatoshi; Rogue IV © 2004 Eric Heller; John Knoll photo by Tina Mills

ackdropInterview byChief Editor Karen MoltenbreyLiving a NightmareDigital compositors bring the frightening digital world ofSilent Hill to life in the film adaptation of the game seriesSilent Hill began in 1999 as a survival horror video game from Konami that has since growninto a lucrative franchise; currently, there are five Silent Hill video games. Each unfoldslike a movie, with several possible endings, as a person’s choices during play determinewhich ending is revealed. Recently, Sony Pictures released a film version of this eerie series,maintaining its visual film-noirish design depicting dark, fog-enshrouded, decaying environmentsenhanced by chilling (and very sudden) sound effects and thoroughly unnatural,disturbing, and surreal/absurd creature designs. The main storyline, cinematography,and set designs for the live-action film adaptation follows the original CG game. The plotcenters on Rose Da Silva, a married mother whose life takes the unexpected turn towardSilent Hill as she tried to discover the source of her adoptive daughter’s nightmares, whichhave her crying out “Silent Hill.” Among the facilities that worked on the 619 effects shotswas Mokko Studio, which completed 50 of the shots in two months.QAWhat work did you doon Silent Hill?I supervised our 3D artists as wellas the compositing team, andalso created key composites. Themost exciting part of my job wasto work hand-in-hand with our artists atcreating the mood that Christophe [Gans,the director] was looking for, from the conceptall the way to the final composites.QAPertaining to theeffects, what was thedirector’s goal?He was looking for the mostrealistic results possible, andI think we did a good job ofdelivering that, especially consideringthe time constraints.QAWhat was your directive?We actually began work on theshots without any directive. Wefocused on rotoscoping the charactersand creating all the necessarymasks needed for compositingimmediately after receiving the plates.Having all of this work done before wereceived any initial direction enabled us tobegin adding elements into the shots theinstant after speaking to the director.QAHow did your experiencehelp you achieve this?As an editor and then as a digitalcompositor, I have workedon many high-end projectswithin both the commercialand film industries. In addition, I havean extensive background in commercialwork with clients such as: Coke, Nestlé,Labatt, Fido, and Budweiser. When I amnot in the studio supervising the digitalteam, I’m usually on set to assure thatwe have everything necessary for theteam at Mokko Studio to create the mostbreathtaking shots possible.QCan you detail some of theAlain Lachance is the seniorcompositor, VFX supervisor, and oneof the founders of Mokko Studio inMontreal. His latest accomplishmentincludes the recently released SilentHill from Tri-Star Pictures/Sony PicturesEntertainment.more impressive effects youdid for this film?We did some massive set exten-Asions for many of the shots. Weeven created entirely virtual environmentsfor some shots where allwe received from the client was just a characteror a vehicle shot against a greenscreen.QAHow did you achieve that?With most of the shots, webegan tracking the charactersand cameras. We then useda combination of 2D mattepaintings, 3D elements fromAutodesk Maya combined with 3D mattepaintings. We used a lot of Maya fluidsfor the smoke and fog effects, and Mayaparticle systems for ash falling like snowthroughout the film. Most shots had over10 layers in the final composite.QAWhat other software andhardware did you use?Autodesk Maya animation softwareand Autodesk Toxik collaborativecompositing softwareformed the backbone ofour pipeline for Silent Hill. We also used[Adobe’s] Photoshop for matte paintings,[2d3’s] Boujou for tracking, andsome Autodesk Discreet Combustion. Ourhardware is fairly average among otherproduction facilities. Production workis more about software these days asopposed to a few years ago, where youneeded the fastest machines available.QOf the backgrounds,how many were CGversus live action?On most of the shots, the42 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

Alive-action background wasonly the immediate surroundingsof the character. Everythingelse was set extension and matte painting.In many shots, we had to zoom out andend with a very wide shot that involveda combination of tracking, set extension,matte painting, and, of course, a hugeproportion of the background in CGI.QAQAQAHow many shots requiredroto and compositing ofthe characters?Ninety percent of the shots.Roto was done on most of thecharacters to add ash effectsaround them. In one shot, we completelyrebuilt the road in CGI. For the bridgeshot, we had to create a huge dolly out—the live-action car didn’t work, so we hadto rebuild a 3D car with complex fluid,fog, and ash trailing behind the car. Ofcourse the bridge that magically appearsin front of the car was CGI as well asmost of the décor surrounding the action.Why was the work onthis film more complex thanother roto/composites?Challenges for this projectincluded a short deadline (50shots in two months) as well asquickly matching the look of the other studiosalready onboard (fog, ash, ambiance).The ash look was quite unusual and wasa cool challenge, especially with very longshots. The ash was Maya particles with aunique behavior on each particle.Did you devise anyspecial techniques?Not particularly; I suppose forSilent Hill, the work was moresoftware-related. This was ourfirst real production experienceusing Autodesk Toxik. We certainlylearned some good lessons in efficiencywhile working on this film.QCan you elaborate?We implemented some Pythonscripts into Toxik to import andQAQAQAQHow did you handle that?Aother was doing. We showedAcache the layers for shots overnightso that in the morning,both designs to the director sowe could do our dailies and allhe could choose which look hethe layers for a particular shot would liked best. In the end, we mixed their ideasplay out in real time, even at 2K.together, creating a composite design fromtwo artists; the director then approved that.What were the biggesttechnical challengesWas any of the workyou ran into?on the film unique?Our biggest constraint was time.We had a particularly uniqueWe also had some concernsshot with a jeep driving acrossabout asset management—havinga lot of layers to deal with for eachfrom the client was simply a jeepa bridge where all we receivedshot was daunting.driving about 10 meters on a greenscreen.The shot wasn’t really working with theHow did you overcome this? source material, so we matched the cameramovement, created a 3D jeep in Maya,Again, Toxik was very helpfulhere; due to the collaborative and then projected the texture of the jeepnature of the work environment from the original footage back onto the 3Din Toxik, we were able to have model of the jeep. That was an interestingtwo and sometimesthree compositorsworking on a shot at thesame time. One artist couldwork on the first sectionof the comp while anotherworked on the middle orfinal section. The wholesequence was updatedinstantly on each machineas the artists workedtogether. There was noMost shots by Mokko entailed rotoscoping andsearching for images to addcompositing actors into eerie backdrops.into the composite. Thiswas very much a time-saving feature. shot, and in the end, this method offeredus much more control. We added reflectionWhat were some of the layers to the jeep and other interactive layerslike swirling fog with Maya that wouldbiggest creative challenges?When working with other studioson a film, the most impornalfootage of the jeep against a greenscreen.have been difficult to simulate in the origitantgoal is to achieve the moodthe director is looking for whileAny other highlightsalso matching the look of the shots fromabout your workthe other studios. The director was lookingfor an ominous foggy atmosphere andAs with any new software on afor this film?almost surreal mood for the shots.production, you are always a bitnervous because you will haveunknown factors to contend, and there isWe initially had two concept artistsworking on ideas for the on a tight schedule. With Toxik, we actu-not a lot of room for error when you arelook independently of each other, ally saved time by implementing a newmeaning neither artist knew what the product into the pipeline for Silent Hill.QAQAImage courtesy Silent Hill Films, Inc.www.cgw.com JUNE 2006 Computer Graphics World | 43___________

advertiser phone or web pageindex to to advertisers@XI Computer www.xicomputer.com 39Academy of Art University www.academyart.edu 23ACM SIGGRAPH www.siggraph.org/s2006 41AJA www.aja.com 9Blackmagic Design www.blackmagic-design.com 3BOXX Technologies www.boxxtech.com/apexx4 CV2Ciara-Tech www.ciara-tech.com 20-21DAZ Productions www.DAZ3.com CV4Dell www.dell.com/DCCsolutions CV3e-Frontier www.e-frontier.com/go/cgwcontest 25Eyeon www.eyeonline.com 15Isilon Systems, Inc. www.isilon.com 13NewTek www.lightwave3d.com 27Nvidia www.ibm.com/intellistation 29, 31Okino Computer Graphics, Inc. www.okino.com 7Rorke www.rorke.com 22The ad index is published as a service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.June 2006, Volume 29, Number 6: COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD (USPS 665-250) (ISSN-0271-4159) is published monthly (12issues) by COP Communications, Inc. Corporate offices: 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204, Tel: 818-291-1100; FAX: 818-291-1190; Web Address: ____________info@copprints.com. Periodicals postage paid at Glendale, CA, 91205 & additional mailing offi ces. COMPUTERGRAPHICS WORLD is distributed worldwide. Annual subscription prices are $55, USA; $75, Canada & Mexico; $115 Internationalairfreight. To order subscriptions, call 847-559-7500.© 2006 CGW by COP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without permission. Authorization tophotocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by Computer Graphics World,ISSN-0271-4159, provided that the appropriate fee is paid directly to Copyright Clearance Center Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA01923 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 91204.44 | Computer Graphics World JUNE 2006 www.cgw.com___________

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