Computer Graphics World 2009 06

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June 2009 1

ON THE COVER

SEE IT IN

Pixar set the bar high for CG animated feature fi lms whenit released Toy Story in 1995. Fourteen years and nine fi lmslater, the studio, in conjunction with Disney, once again hascarried computer animation to new heights with the spec-tacular fi lm Up, this time releasing it in stereo 3D, pg. 12.

What makes the Hannah Montana show work?

Red shoots on the rise. Trends in broadcast design. J.J. Abrams on Star Trek.

Features

The Shape of Animation

12Geometric shapes refl ect the artistic direction and story line for Disney/Pixars Up, the fi rst stereoscopic 3D fi lm from Pixar. By Barbara Robertson

Living Art

22 Rhythm & Hues creates some lively effects for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, bringing art and artifacts to animated life. By Barbara Robertson

Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, MadWorld

26 A group of distinguished game developers form a new company and create MadWorld, a title with an unusual black-and-white, graphic-novel style. By Martin McEachern

A Bit of Difference

32 When it comes to imaging, is 10-bit that much better than 8-bit? A growing number of users think so, and are willing to pay the price to have it. By Alex Herrera

Elemental Effects

38 VFX studios create some devilishly diffi cult scenes, including soaring virtual sets and large crowds, for the live-action fi lm Angels & Demons. By Barbara Robertson

Adding POW! to Prime Time

42 Working on a tight television production schedule, Mechnology gives a new team of superheroes their powers in the now-defunct TV series The Middleman. By Debra Kaufman

COVER STORY

Whats on your mind?Have a question about a product? Curious about how an effect was done? Want to get peer opinion about something you are working on? Or, do you just want to voice your opinion about something, anything, pertaining to the digital content creation industry? If so, start a string in the new Forum section on cgw.com.

June 2009 Volume 32 Number 6 I n n o v a t i o n s i n v i s u a l c o m p u t i n g f o r t h e g l o b a l D C C c o m m u n i t y

DepartmentsEditors Note Courting Controversy

2Is artistic freedom at risk in the gaming industry, particularly with recent government and special-interest group involvement? Spotlight

4 Products Nvidias Quadro FX 5800, 4800, and 3800, and NVS 295, and SLI Multi-OS technology. The Foundrys Nuke 5.2. Eyeons SWAT certifi cation program. Blackmagics routers, converters, and other offerings. Havoks Havok AI. Caustic Graphics CausticRT. Autodesks Flare and other offerings. Allegorithmics Substance Air. News Outsourcing in the gaming industry is on the rise.

Viewpoint

10 Gimbal lock in the CG industry.

Careers

45 How animators can grow their skills. Back Products

47 Recent software and hardware releases.

12

26

22 32

August 2008

GuestEditorsNote

Immediately upon its release, the graphic-novel styled video game MadWorld (see Its aMad, Mad, Mad, MadWorld, pg. 26) became a lightning rod for the outrage of mediawatchdog groups the world over. John Beyer, director of the UK conservative special-interest pressure group mediawatch-uk, was quick to vocalize his disgust over the gamescontent, even urging the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) to deny the game arating, which would have effectively banned it from being sold. On March 10 of this year,the day the game was released, the National Institute on Media and the Family issued apress release lashing out at Nintendo for tarnishing the family-oriented image of the Wii by opening its doors to the violentvideo game genre. (The game is played on the Wii platform.)The games publisher, Sega, already buckling under pressure, an-nounced late last summer that it would not release the game inGermany, fearing a backlash from local media watchdog groupsand an ill-informed public there.

The game is, without question, graphically violent. Literally.All the action centers on killing and dismembering, though itis done in a black-and-white comic-book style, with red accent: blood. The moral outrage, however, almost seems laughable con-sidering the violence plays out with all the realism of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Nonetheless, these media watchdog groups, hy-per-sensitized to game violence, are a threat to artists, their livelihood, and the artistic ma-turity of the medium, especially if developers and publishers concede to their wishes in fear of stoking their ire. They have the power to foment public opinion, influence mainstream media, and pressure ratings boards, such as the ESRB and the BBFC, to strip games of their classifications, essentially crippling their marketability and distribution.

Even worse, with the economy fighting its way out of the recession, Bloomberg.com is reporting that Activision Blizzard, the worlds most powerful publisher reportedly with $3 billion in cash and no debt after the merger with Vivendi, is now looking to gobble up smaller developers as cheaply as possible. This follows in the footsteps of another gaming giant, EA, which has in recent years acquired Mythic Entertainment, Phenomic Game Development, Hands-On Mobile, Digital Illusions CE, and Headgate Studios, while still holding a 15 percent controlling interest in Ubisoft. With the industrys wealth and power consolidating in the hands of a few gaming conglomerates, the opportunities for creativity and innovation could only dwindle under these pressures. What could result is a gaming industry that looks much like the film industry, where media conglomerates crank out safe, generic, homogenized art, carefully assembled in a boardroom, where every creative decision is driven by market demands and the need for maximum profitability. Needless to say, anything that would threaten a market-friendly classification would be avoided.

We understand there are differences among the ethical sensibilities of each country, says Atsushi Inaba, one of the four famed developers who founded Platinum Games, cre-ator of MadWorld. However, we believe that adults are capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality, and understanding that a game is a completely virtual experience. And only in this virtual world are we given opportunities to do things that are not acceptable in the real world. At the same time, adults have to communicate to their children that a game world is totally different from the real world. The media and [these watchdog groups] have to think about this. Yes, MadWorld is a violent action game, but the violence is not gratuitous; its not like you can do anything you want to do. In fact, if you take the time to play to the end of the game, the story line delivers a very strong anti-violence message, so we just want the media to understand and report the contents of the game accurately.

Inaba remains vehement in justifying the games violence and protesting the media cas-tigations of his art. Whether MadWorld s story delivers an anti-violence message or not is ultimately irrelevant to the majority of game artists. For centuries,

Courting Controversy The Magazine for Digital Content ProfessionalsEDITORIAL

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[email protected] (603) 432-756836 east nashua roadWindham, nH 03087

Contributing EditorsCourtney Howard, Jenny Donelan,

Audrey Doyle, George maestri, Kathleen maher, martin mceachern,

barbara robertson

WIllIAm r. rIttWAGe Publisher, President and Ceo,

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2 June 2009

continued on page 48

Contributing editor Martin McEachern

LightWave 3D

Eyeon Forms SWAT Teams

PRODUCT: TRAINING

Eyeon Software, maker of the Fusion compositing appli-cation, introduced its new SWAT certifi cation program to ensure that new and established VFX artists receive the training and support they need to realize their full creative potential.

With the new SoftWare Artist Training (SWAT) umbrel-la program, the company has expanded its international network of trainers, colleges, online resources, and in-house product support personnel to ensure that every Eyeon artist is up-to-speed on the latest versions of Fusion, Generation, Rotation, and Vision.

Eyeon will deploy trainers to assist new customers on-site to ensure that their artists are able to transition seam-lessly to the new software. In addition, the SWAT umbrella consolidates all the available training options for Eyeon applications through Eyeons VFXPedia.com resource Web site. Training partners on track to become SWAT-certifi ed include Class-on-Demand, cmiVFX, Digital Tutors, NADS, NYU, Seneca College, Sheridan College, and others.

Innovation is no longer just about the technology; its about knowledge of the tools, says Joanne Dicaire, direc-tor of business development and marketing at Eyeon. Seasoned veterans dont want to feel like beginners when they move to a new application. Shake artists, for example, have done some of the best VFX work in the world, and when they move to Fusion, we want them to produce work that refl ects their true abilities right away.

The SWAT program goes beyond the compositors work. With Eyeons new Generation products, facilities now have a means to visualize and manage their whole pipeline with a degree of ease not previously available.

4 June 2009

During the past several weeks, a number of companiesintroduced major new hardware and software productsat the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and at theNational Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show. Wehave highlighted some of those here in the Spotlightand Products (pg. 47) sections. Additional product andcompany news from these conferences can be foundonline at www.cgw.com.

New Quadro FX Offerings

PRODUCT: GRAPHICS CARDS

Nvidia recently introduced its most advanced top-to-bottomline of Quadro professional GPU solutions in the companyshistory, including the fl agship Quadro FX 5800.

Spanning from sub-$100 entry-level to stand-alone visualcomputing systems, this series includes: the 4GB, ultra high-end Quadro FX 5800 ($3499) and FX 4800 ($1999); theFX 3800 ($1199) at the high end; the mid-range FX 1800($699); the entry-level FX 580 ($199) and FX 380 ($149),and the NVS 295 ($159) business solution. The Quadrocards are available through system manufacturers such asDell, HP, and Lenovo, and Nvidia channel partners.

Separately, Nvidia introduced its SLI Multi-OS, which allows users and visualization applications, for the fi rst time, to take full advantage of multiple Nvidia Quadro GPUs from a single graphics workstation in a virtualized environment.

Built into the new Quadro FX 3800, 4800, and 5800, SLI Multi-OS allows users to tap into the advanced visu-alization and compute capabilities of the Quadro GPUs for full graphics performance within a virtualized system. SLI Multi-OS works with Parallels Workstation Extremes virtualization software and Intels VT-d technology, assign-ing both the host and the guest virtual machine their own dedicated GPU.

Available in the new HP Z800 workstation, these tech-nologies deliver application performance nearly identical to systems confi gured with a dedicated OS and GPU. The SLI Multi-OS supports selected combinations of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux operating systems.

PRODUCT: COMPOSITING

The Foundry Unveils Nuke 5.2 The Foundry announced an upgrade version of its Nuke compos-iting software. Nuke 5.2 features new pre-comp tools that facili-tate collaborative workfl ow, Python UI improvements, metadata support, and the ability to register multiple Viewer Process Gizmos for user-defi ned viewer LUT processing, including new support for 3D LUTs and OpenGL GLSL shaders.

Additionally, Nuke 5.2 enables video monitor output through Blackmagic and AJA Kona and Xena devices, and introduces a RED R3D Redcode format reader that brings the full range of picture information into a full 32-bit fl oat-processing envi-ronment. Nuke 5.2 is priced at $3500.

Multibridge Pro is the most sophisticated editing solution available. With a huge range of video and audio connections and the worlds first 3 Gb/s SDI. Advanced editing systems for Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X are now affordable.

Connect to any Deck, Camera or Monitor

Multibridge Pro is the only solution that features SDI, HDMI, component analog, NTSC, PAL and S-Video for capture and playback in SD, HD or 2K. Also included is 8 channels of XLR AES/EBU audio, 2 channels of balanced XLR analog audio and 2 channel HiFi monitoring outputs. Connect to HDCAM, Digital Betacam, Betacam SP, HDV cameras, big-screen TVs and more.

Advanced 3 Gb/s SDI Technology

With exciting new 3 Gb/s SDI connections, Multibridge Pro allows twice the SDI data rate of normal HD-SDI, while also connecting to all your HD-SDI and SD-SDI equipment.

Use 3 Gb/s SDI for 4:4:4 HD or edit your latest feature film using real time 2048 x 1556 2K resolution capture and playback.

Worlds Highest Quality

Multibridge Pro includes 3 Gb/s SDI and Dual Link 4:4:4 SDI for connecting to decks such as HDCAM SR. Unlike FireWire, Multibridge Pro

has a 10 Gb/s PCI Express connection for powerful HD real time effects in compressed or uncompressed video file formats.

Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X

Multibridge Pro is fully compatible with Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Fusion and any DirectShow or QuickTime based software. Multibridge Pro instantly switches between feature film resolution 2K, 1080HD, 720HD, NTSC and PAL for worldwide compatibility.

Multibridge Pro

$1,595

New Multibridge Pro has SDI, HDMI and Analog editing with multi channel audio for only $1,595

Learn more today at www.blackmagic-design.com

The Drawn Together images are courtesy of Comedy Partners.

6 June 2009

Think Services Game Groups Game Developer Research has revealed the results of its 2009 Game Development Outsourcing Report, which fi nds that the proportion of respondents whose studios use outsourced game develop-ment rose 10 percent between 2007 and 2008, from 76 percent to 86 percent.

Almost 200 professional game developers were polled anonymously to construct a comprehensive look at the segment. The developers were asked questions about their studios use of outsourcing, their outsourcing budgets and plans, regional factors, and more.

The report fi nds that game development outsourcing is on track to grow to be an even larger practice than it is now. Half the participating developers who do not yet use outsourc-ing say they plan to begin doing so, and 95 percent of those who already use outsourcing expect to continue. Other fi nd-

ings include the fact that a major contributor to the growth of outsourcing is the increasing cost and bandwidth required to create a high volume of assets for modern console systems. Respondents reported that Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony Play-Station 3 are the two platforms for which elements of game creation are most often outsourced.

The report also fi nds that outsourcing is on the rise in terms of overall budget allocation. The high end of outsourcing budgets increased nearly twofold, with the proportion of companies planning to spend $2 million or more on outsourcing rising to almost 20 percent in 2008.

Additionally, the report discusses overall budgets, reasons for outsourcing, the selection process for choosing fi rms to out source to, and the regions of the world with which the respondents worked. The report can be purchased at www.gamedevresearch.com.

Outsourcing within the Gaming Industry Is on the Rise

NEWS: OUTSOURCING

Blackmagic ReleasesHost of OfferingsBlackmagic Design recently unveiled several new products, including two new Videohub routers: a compact 16x32 model for under $5000, and the Enterprise Videohub, a 144x288 model for the largest broadcast and postproduc-tion facilities that sells for under $30,000. Both sport 3Gb/sec SDI, built-in deck control routing, redundant power and switchable SD, HD, and 3Gb/sec SDI, and re-clocking. In addition, Blackmagic updated the Videohub router software to 4.0, which includes a new design with touch screens. The update is free to all Videohub customers.

The company also rolled out OpenGear Converters with SD/HD auto switching, DashBoard network control, and 3Gb/sec SDI, which are selling for $495. It also unveiled DeckLink Optical Fiber, the fi rst 10-bit SD/HD broadcast capture card with both optical-fi ber SDI and regular SDI, for $495; HDLink Optical Fiber, a 3Gb/sec optical-fi ber SDI and conventional SDI monitoring solution for SDI, HD, and 2K monitors for $795; and new, bi-directional Mini Convert-er Optical Fiber for $495. Aside from a number of other releases (which can be found on cgw.com), the fi rm also introduced Ultrascope, a combination PCI Express card and software waveform monitor for $695.

PRODUCT: VIDEO CARDS

Havok Reveals NewMiddleware SDK

Havok, known for its physics software, rolled out a new offering, Havok AI, which provides developers with solutions for pathfi nding and advanced character interaction in highly dynamic game environments.

Havok AI meets the challenge of pathfi nding with its new platform-optimized SDK that features a robust automatic nav mesh generator that creates the nav meshes in seconds from complex game levels of hundreds of thousands of trian-gles, allowing for the rapid iteration of level content. With Havok AI, the pathfi nding is fully integrated and dynamic, not static, with additional layered dynamic avoidance technol-ogy to handle thousands of moving obstacles in real time with high fi delity. Fully extensible and customizable, the solu-tion includes a hierarchical pathfi nder that is multithreaded and works on all the major gaming platforms. Furthermore, with a predictive local steering module, characters predict the movement of obstacles and adapt accordingly, moving plausibly through the complex and often congested situa-tions that arise when environments become dynamic.

Havok AI features out-of-the-box integration with Havok Phys-ics, Destruction, Animation, and Behavior. Havok AI can be purchased as a stand-alone product or with Havok Physics.

PRODUCT: GAMING AI

**

Intensity Pro introduces professional HDMI and analog editing in HD and SD for $199

Intensity Pro is the only capture and playback card for Windows and Mac OS X with HDMI and analog connections. Intensity Pro allows you to upgrade to Hollywood production quality with uncompressed or compressed video capture and playback using large screen HDTVs.

Beyond the Limits of HDV

HDVs heavy compression and limited 1440 x 1080 resolution can cause problems with quality and editing. Intensity Pro eliminates these problems and lets you choose from uncompressed video, Online JPEG and Apple ProRes 422 for full 1920 x 1080 HDTV resolution. Now you can capture in 1080i HD, 720p HD or NTSC/PAL video.

Playback to your Big Screen HDTV

Use Intensity Pros HDMI or analog output for incredible big screen video monitoring. Unlike FireWire based solutions, Intensity uses an uncompressed video connection direct to Final

Cut Pros real time effects renderer. No FireWire compression means all CPU processing is dedicated to more effects and video layers!

Connect to Anything!

Intensity Pro includes HDMI and component analog, NTSC/PAL and S-video connections in a low cost plug-in card. Capture from HDMI

cameras, VHS and Video8 decks, gaming consoles, set-top boxes and more. Playback to large screen televisions and video projectors.

Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X

Intensity Pro is fully compatible with both Adobe Premiere Pro on Windows and Apple Final Cut Pro on Mac OS X, as well as Motion, Color, DVD Studio Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Encore DVD, Combustion, Fusion and many more.

Intensity Pro

$199

Learn more today at www.blackmagic-design.com

NEW PRICE!

8 June 2009

PRODUCT: RAYTRACING

Newcomer Caustic Graphics introduced CausticRT, a massive-ly accelerated raytracing system for achieving breakthrough levels of quality in interactive, cinema-quality 3D computer graphics. The Caustic development platform, which includes a raytracing accelerator card and SDK, is now available to quali-fi ed developers.

Raytracing duplicates the natural physics of light, creating stunning images by meticulously tracing the path of light to and throughout any given scene. Light rays naturally scatter in many different directions (incoherent rays), and tracing and shading them require memory access to many disparate parts of the scene, a previously impossible caching task. CausticRT, based on a new algorithm that addresses this issue, organizes incoherent rays into a data fl ow that takes advantage of the full computational power of CPUs and GPUs. CausticRT does not displace a GPU or CPU in a graphics system; rather, it acts as a co-processor that traces rays and schedules the results in a

manner that allows GPUs or CPUs to shade them as effi ciently as they do with rasterization.

Caustic Graphics is working with an emerging developer community, such as Splutterfi sh, to create new or to port existing renderers and applications to Caustic so artists and designers can take advantage of the photorealism and visual effects that make raytracing more compelling than rasterization.

CausticRT includes the CausticOne raytracing accelerator card and the CausticGL programming API thats based on OpenGL. CausticOne, an optional co-processor that works with Caustic-GL, unlocks the ability of the GPU/CPU to shade effi ciently and allows it to render 3D imagery up to 20 times faster than it current-ly can. A supporting SDK includes documentation, access to the support portal, and a one-year subscription to hardware and soft-ware updates, as well as technical support. The CausticRT plat-form is priced at $4000 and includes CausticGL, a CausticOne card, and one year of fi rmware and software updates.

PRODUCT: COMPOSITING

In addition to announcing the 2010 releases of its Flame and Inferno visual effects systems, Autodesk presented Flare, the new creative software companion to those hardware offerings. The company also released a new version of Smoke, and 2009 Extension 1 releases of Lustre and Incinerator.

Flare 2010s aim is to bring the productivity of the Flame artist to a new level without sacrifi cing any of the creative tools to which users are accustomed. Flare bridges the gap between

2D and 3D, enabling artists to handle some of the Inferno and Flame work via software while those systems are occupiedat a fraction of the price of the hardware. Featuring the core creative tool set of Flame and Inferno, the software is designed to boost creativity, expand capacity, and develop talent for Flame and Inferno customers. The product is intended for advanced creative tasks, such as compositing and interactive design, as well as support tasks, such as rotoscoping and keying.

PRODUCT: TEXTURINGPRODUCT: TEXTURING

Allegorithmic recently rolled out Substance Air, a new texturing middleware for the development and distribution of online and downloadable games (MMOs, Free2Play, and XBLA/PSN). The offering enables game developers to dramatically reduce the size of downloadable applications, while providing a solution for advanced user-generated content.

According to the company, Substance Air will improve the online game development and delivery process by creating new opportunities for artists in regard to user-generated content and in-game asset customization.

Substance Air is part of Allegorithmics new generation of

middleware for authoring and generating textures that feature visual quality and graphical detail. It enables users to create detailed graphics that are only a few kilobytes in size, thus increasing the amount of high-quality content without over-weighting the games client size. Substance Air also features a new run-time engine optimized for generating textures at high speed, even on low-spec devices, and a fl exible authoring tool to improve ease of use, with unique features designed to help artists optimize their production pipeline.

Substance Air pricing models vary based on the type of game and gaming platform.

Allegorithmic Releases Substance Air

Caustic Graphics Readies New Raytracing System

Autodesk Launches Flare

June 200910

Avoiding Gimbal Lock

To place an object in 3D space, its transformation proper-ties need to be specified: position, scale, and orientation. The first two attributes are easily definable by three numbers for each. The meaning of the x, y, and z positions and scale parameters are easy to understand, visualize, manipulate, and animate for art-ists. However, that is not the case for orientation.

Using an xyz triplet (three angular values) to manipulate an objects orientation may become impossiblefor instance, during some configurations of the three angles, such as gimbal lockand lead to major problems when animating these values. Gimbal lock is a phenomenon known for a long time, and it has caused se-vere problems long before computer graphics emerged. According to NASA documents on the Apollo space program, pilots had to keep a close eye on the Gimbal Lock warning light while maneu-vering the spacecraft in order to avoid unwanted and dangerous malfunctioning in the guidance and control systems.

The orientation, or angular position, of a rigid object has three degrees of freedom. By holding a camera in our hands, for ex-ample, we can pan left and right, tilt it up and down, or roll it without changing the point of interest. The most common and in-tuitive way to define these attributes is the use of Euler angles: The orientation is represented by three consecutive rotations around the main axes of a reference frame. However, the order of the ro-tational axes is something the industry has never agreed on, so it is essential to supply this information if we transfer animation data using Euler angles. Each major 3D application has a way to change the order of rotations.

Using three gimbals, it is possible to construct a physical device, a gimbal system, based on the principle of Euler angles. A gimbal

is a pivoted device, most often a ring, which rotates around a single axis. By mounting a gimbal inside another one, the inner ring ro-tates around an additional axis, increasing the degrees of freedom by one. Defining the orientation of an object with Euler angles is like putting it inside a virtual three-gimbal device, and then rotat-ing each ring by the corresponding angle. (Once again, the order of rotations and the coordinate frame axes must be agreed upon.)

The outer ring can represent the tilt, the middle ring the pan, and the innermost ring the roll. However, most of the publications on Euler angles refer to the three attributes as yaw, pitch, and roll, as used in aerospace applications.

Having full control over the three degrees of freedom, one could conclude that Euler angles (or gimbal systems, in general) are the perfect way to describe orientation. Unfortunately, there are con-figurations wherein we lose one degree of freedom: the gimbal lock. In this state, one of the gimbal rings is rotated such that it aligns perfectly with another. In this situation, the entire range of rotations is unreachable, and we may need to first re-orient the locked gimbal in order to rotate the ring arbitrarily. If the angles are near the gimbal-lock state, the gimbal system becomes unsta-ble, as even small rotations (or round-off errors of the numerical representation) may yield unexpected results.

CGBy GerGely Vass

A former Maya TD and instructor, Gergely Vass eventually moved to the Image Science Team of Autodesk Media and Entertainment. Currently he is developing advanced postproduction tools for Colorfront in Hungary, one of Europes lead-ing DI and post facilities. Vass can be reached at [email protected].

Astronauts, like animators, try to avoid gimbal lock. Shown here is the Apollo 15 control panel with the eight ball indicating the gimbal-lock danger zone with red.

June 2009 11

Viewpoint n n n n

Avoiding Gimbal Lock

To place an object in 3D space, its transformation proper-ties need to be specified: position, scale, and orientation. The first two attributes are easily definable by three numbers for each. The meaning of the x, y, and z positions and scale parameters are easy to understand, visualize, manipulate, and animate for art-ists. However, that is not the case for orientation.

Using an xyz triplet (three angular values) to manipulate an objects orientation may become impossiblefor instance, during some configurations of the three angles, such as gimbal lockand lead to major problems when animating these values. Gimbal lock is a phenomenon known for a long time, and it has caused se-vere problems long before computer graphics emerged. According to NASA documents on the Apollo space program, pilots had to keep a close eye on the Gimbal Lock warning light while maneu-vering the spacecraft in order to avoid unwanted and dangerous malfunctioning in the guidance and control systems.

The orientation, or angular position, of a rigid object has three degrees of freedom. By holding a camera in our hands, for ex-ample, we can pan left and right, tilt it up and down, or roll it without changing the point of interest. The most common and in-tuitive way to define these attributes is the use of Euler angles: The orientation is represented by three consecutive rotations around the main axes of a reference frame. However, the order of the ro-tational axes is something the industry has never agreed on, so it is essential to supply this information if we transfer animation data using Euler angles. Each major 3D application has a way to change the order of rotations.

Using three gimbals, it is possible to construct a physical device, a gimbal system, based on the principle of Euler angles. A gimbal

is a pivoted device, most often a ring, which rotates around a single axis. By mounting a gimbal inside another one, the inner ring ro-tates around an additional axis, increasing the degrees of freedom by one. Defining the orientation of an object with Euler angles is like putting it inside a virtual three-gimbal device, and then rotat-ing each ring by the corresponding angle. (Once again, the order of rotations and the coordinate frame axes must be agreed upon.)

The outer ring can represent the tilt, the middle ring the pan, and the innermost ring the roll. However, most of the publications on Euler angles refer to the three attributes as yaw, pitch, and roll, as used in aerospace applications.

Having full control over the three degrees of freedom, one could conclude that Euler angles (or gimbal systems, in general) are the perfect way to describe orientation. Unfortunately, there are con-figurations wherein we lose one degree of freedom: the gimbal lock. In this state, one of the gimbal rings is rotated such that it aligns perfectly with another. In this situation, the entire range of rotations is unreachable, and we may need to first re-orient the locked gimbal in order to rotate the ring arbitrarily. If the angles are near the gimbal-lock state, the gimbal system becomes unsta-ble, as even small rotations (or round-off errors of the numerical representation) may yield unexpected results.

Astronauts, like animators, try to avoid gimbal lock. Shown here is the Apollo 15 control panel with the eight ball indicating the gimbal-lock danger zone with red.

It is fairly easy to get close to gimbal lock: We simply need to rotate the middle angle, or gimbal, by 90 degrees. Because two of the rotational axes have become aligned, chang-ing the first or the last angle in the chain re-sults in a rotation around the same axis (see images above). The only way to leave this locked state is to adjust the middle rotation again and move it out of the danger zone.

Gimbal Lock in CGComputer animators controlling charac-ters body parts or any kind of object us-ing only three angular values should try to avoid gimbal lock. Investigate your setup before you start to animate, and change the order of the axes so the middle axis is the least one used. If all three degrees of free-dom are needed, hierarchical transforma-tions (parenting an additional node) may help. If readability and human interac-tion are not important, such as under the hood of game engines, then quaternions and rotational matrices are used instead of Euler angles. Quaternions are four-dimen-sional representations, ideal for computing smooth transitions between poses. While gimbal lock never happens when using quaternions, they are hard to read and con-ceptualize. In spite of all the issues of lock-

ing gimbals, Euler angles are the industry standard for describing rotations.

Real-world gimbal systems have been known and used for a very long time now. The gyroscopeinvented nearly 200 years agois a fine example: At the heart of this device is a platform, with one or more spin-ning wheels or disks mounted in gimbals. The large angular momentum of the spin-ning elements forces the central platform to remain almost perfectly fixed, regardless of the motion of the devices shell, as the gimbals let it rotate freely. By installing sen-sors to detect the rotation of each gimbal, we can measure the relative orientation (or attitude) of any object as it relates to a fixed reference system. That is how the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) of air-craft, spacecraft, and watercraft, including guided missiles, works. The three gimbals hold the central stable platformwith the spinning elementswithout introducing any notable external torque, which would force the platform to lose its original orien-tation. That is where gimbal lock becomes a real problem: By losing one degree of freedom near this state, the fixed platform

cannot rotate freely, thereby risking the loss of reference.

This may be a good time to finish read-ing the magazine and begin watching the 1995 movie Apollo 13 featuring Tom Hanks (and some great visual effects). You will be surprised how much they talk, or yell, about avoiding gimbal lock and losing the reference of the Inertial Measurement Unit. The IMU of the Apollo space program was a three-gimbal system, and pilots were required to navigate the spacecraft so they did not approach the 10-degree danger zone around gimbal lock. The current attitude of the vehicle was displayed on the Flight Di-rector Attitude Indicator, or the eight ball, as pilots referred to it. If the indicator entered the red danger zone centered at yaw 0 and 180-degree poles, and the stable member lost its attitude reference, the gimbals had to be re-aligned in-flight against star references.

So, the next time you are fighting gimbal lock in a 3D animation package or game engine, dont panic. Just think of the Apollo 13 crew members, who were losing oxygen and electrical power in a crippled spacecraft at the same time. n

A three-gimbal system is analogous to the Euler angles. In the above left image, all the axes are at their default positions. If the middle (red) gimbal is rotated 90 degrees, as seen in the above right image, the blue and the green axes become aligned, losing one degree of freedom.

June 200912

Character ModelingAnimation

The Shape of

AnimationPixar Animation Studios once againredefines CG animated features withits 10th film, Disney/Pixars Up

By Barbara Robertson

square. A circle. Two fundamental shapes in geometry, twoiconic shapes in computer graphics. And, the simple basis for the visual stylethe shape languageof Disney/Pixars 10th animated feature, Up, one of the most sophisticated ever in terms of story, design, and technology. Directed by Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.), co-directed by Bob Peterson, and

written by Docter and Peterson, Up is an action-adventure, a comedy, a most unusual buddy fi lm, a circle-of-life story, and Pixars fi rst fi lm in stereo 3D.

Carl Fredricksen, 78 years old and voiced by Ed Asner, is the square and the fi lms central character. His default expression is a scowl. But, thats now. When the story begins, hes eight years old and enchanted by the exploits of the pilot Charles Muntz, who he sees in a black-and-white newsreel claiming to have found a prehistoric bird, a missing link, in Paradise Falls, South America. On his way home from the movies, little Carl meets Ellie, a bouncy tomboy, who is also a fan of Muntz and his motto, Adventure is out there. Ellie is Carls fi rst circle. ey marry, and we watch their lives spool forward. Carl becomes a balloon salesman. ey save money for an adventure out there, but something always stops thema fl at tire, a house repair, medical bills. Even so, theyre happy as they grow old; life

is colorful. And then, Ellie dies. e color fades from Carls life. He stays in his house and talks to Ellies picture. He becomes rigid.

But, two events happen. First, Russell, an eight-year-old Wilder-ness Explorer, shows up on Carls doorstep, much to the grouchy old mans annoyance. Russell is a round little boy, full of joyful en-thusiasm. He needs to help an elderly person to earn his last badge.

Second, Carl fi nds himself sentenced to life in a retire-ment home. at spurs him to fulfi ll his promise to

Ellie. As the retirement home orderlies wait at the curb for Carl to emerge from his house,

10,000 balloons rise up from be-hind the house and lift it from

its foundations. Carl is on his way. He sits back,

The personalitiesof Dug, Russell, and Carl

show on their animated facesas they hang onto Carls balloon-powered house, while Kevin thebird catches an unruffl ed ride

on the roof.

June 2009 13


Images 2009 Disney/Pixar.

June 200914


content, in his easy chair as his house fl oats past skyscrapers. And then, Russell knocks on the door.

When Pete and Bob pitched the story, with Bob reading, it brought John to tears, says Jonas Rivera, producer, referring to the directors Docter and Peterson, and to John Lasseter, Pixars chief creative offi cer.

e idea originated with Docter and Peterson noodling around with an escape fantasy, of just fl oating away. ey wanted to fi nd a unique character, one they hadnt seen before in an animated feature. Docter drew a grouchy old man holding a bunch of brightly colored balloons. ey laughed, the brainstorming began, and soon the balloons were fl oating the old man in his house.

All they needed to do then was discover why the old man was in a fl oating house, where he would go, and what would hap-pen when he got there. It took three years or soPeterson, Docter, and story artist Ronnie del Carmen

started in 2004. When the Ratatouille pro-duction pulled Peterson off the Up project for a while, Docter brought in omas McCarthy, writer and director for e Sta-tion Agent, who took notes for six to eight months, as Rivera puts it.

We spent a lot of time on the story, Docter says. e actual production was only during the last year and a half. Its our 10th fi lm now, and we have really good people who have honed their craft. We could push the production schedule.

SimplexityAs Docter, Peterson, and del Carmen worked to refi ne the story, production de-sign began developing the visual language. e story is about a house pulled by bal-loons fl oating in the sky, Docter says. We needed to create a world where that was possible. e story pushed us to a level of stylization wed never done before.

Ricky Nierva, the production designer, named the resulting look simplexity. is is a movie about age, about the au-thenticity of life, Nierva says. Our big challenge was not to make it too photo-

real. Otherwise, why not make it live action? On the other hand, if you pull too much detail away, it looks like cheap CG. So we looked for

the sweet spots for characters, en-vironments, and details.

For design inspiration, the character and production designers

chose the work of Mary Blair, a Dis-ney artist who developed the color

and style for Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan,

Russells multiple layers of clothing and Carls thick jacket and boxy trousers created unique problems for the cloth-simulation team to solve. At fi rst, character developers tried making Carls hair thick, but it was too distracting.

Hes three heads tall and square. H

is head is square. His trousers are

big

and boxy. Even the age spots on h

is hands are square. But, he didnt

start

life that way. When he was only eig

ht and fi rst met Ellie, his face had a

little

roundness. Still, he and his family a

re obviously more rigid than Ellie a

nd

her family, as we see at their weddin

g. In their house, pictures of Carl are

in

square frames, while pictures of the

two together are

in square frames with an oval matte.

After Ellie dies

and Carl stops selling balloons, all th

e circles are

gone from his life, and his design be

comes total-

ly square. He withdraws from life. H

es boxed in,

stuck in his ways. That is, until som

eone threat-

ens his reclusive life in his homesp

un memo-

rial to Ellie; and then, with the help o

f 10,000

balloons, he soars. For his adventu

re, Pixar

provided a family of enthusiastic cir

cles to

soften the grouchy old guys edges

.

The technical challenges for Carl we

re in

rigging a cubes facial expressions to

show

emotion, and in creating the silhou

ettes

animators wanted despite his over

sized

jacket and boxy, wide pant legs. As a

result,

Pixar calls him the most complex ch

aracter it

has created.

stylization wed never done before.Ricky Nierva, the production designer,

named the resulting look simplexity. is is a movie about age, about the au-thenticity of life, Nierva says. Our big challenge was not to make it too photo-

real. Otherwise, why not make it live action? On the other hand, if you pull too much detail away, it looks like cheap CG. So we looked for

the sweet spots for characters, en-vironments, and details.

For design inspiration, the character and production designers

chose the work of Mary Blair, a Dis-ney artist who developed the color

and style for Wonderland,

square frames, while pictures of the

two together are

in square frames with an oval matte.

After Ellie dies

and Carl stops selling balloons, all th

e circles are

gone from his life, and his design be

comes total-

ly square. He withdraws from life. H

es boxed in,

stuck in his ways. That is, until som

eone threat-

ens his reclusive life in his homesp

un memo-

rial to Ellie; and then, with the help o

f 10,000

Pixar calls him the most complex ch

aracter it

June 2009 15

Character ModelingAnimation n n n n

and who was art supervisor for such films as The Three Caballeros and Saludos Amigos, set in South America. They also looked at George Booth cartoons, and Hank Ket-chums Dennis the Menace.

To create storybook backgrounds, the artists used simple shapes for bushes in the jungle, eliminating any leaf that didnt face

the camera, and stylized the shading and modeling for Carls house. We wanted Carls house to feel small, like a dollhouse, notes Steve May, supervising technical di-rector, as if big hands made small pieces and placed them by hand.

The trim around the fireplace doesnt quite line up. The fireplace has soot, but if

you look closely, you see that the soot is ac-tually brush strokes made with a dry brush, as are the bark on the trees and the dirt on Russells face. Youll see this style everywhere in the movie, May says. We used a variety of procedural and paint components in the shaders, but generally we had a painted brush stroke in a paint pass with every shader.

In addition to Carl, Ellie, Russell, and Charles Muntz, the main characters include a 13-foot-tall bird that emerges from the jungle after the balloon-driven house lands on a tabletop mountain in Venezuela. Rus-sell names the bird Kevin, but the dog that also pops out from the brilliant jungle names himself: Dug wears a collar that translates his thoughts into words. Sud-denly, Carl now has two family members circling him. Kevin is colorful and silly, with a round body and long neck, and Dug is an enthusiastic, overweight golden retriever/lab mix that loves everyone. Carls a tough old cookie. It takes more than one buddy to bring him back to life.

For the characters, modelers working in Autodesks Maya adopted a less is more philosophy. Carl is three heads tall with stocky arms and legs. Russell is a little egg. Dug has a big, round nose. We removed anything extra, May says. The characters dont have ear holes or nostrils, for exam-ple, not even Dug.

It was character supervisor Thomas Jor-dans team of approximately 30 people who had first turned the concept art, maquettes, and expression sculpts for characters into 3D models that could move and that met the design goals. Each of the main charac-ters had its own unique problems to solve. It was more of a challenge than usual to finalize these characters, Jordan says. No one can tell you what simplexity means. We had to find it. The sketches and maquettes didnt work in 3D once we started animat-ing them.

Animators gave the riggers drawings of expressions they wanted to hit, and the riggers, working in Pixars proprietary soft-

Carl and Russell travel in Carls balloon-powered house through skies filled with clouds in approximately 150 shotsfluffy, white clouds and dark, stormy clouds. The clouds are volumetric, constructed from spheres using a system developed by TD Alexis Angelidis. In the entire film, 400,000 different spheres create the clouds; the storm alone uses 85,000.

Alexis can place a sphere, maybe even as large as a football field, explains Gary Bruins, effects supervisor, and then run a script that breaks it into a fractal distribution of spheres with different radiuses. The scripts helped with general modeling, but Alexis built the clouds by mostly adding sphere onto sphere. The various-sized large spheres described the overall cloud shape; the smaller spheres added detail.

Each cloud model had two shader versions, one for the surface and another for the interior. The interior allowed object mattingthe house, for instancebut no camera motion blur. The surface supported camera motion blur but didnt allow embedded objects. We had a switch that we could flip on a per-shot basis, Bruins says.

To scatter light within the clouds, TD John Pottebaum created a 3D density map. In addition to lighting artists using their tools and Johns 3D density map, Alexis replicated, in the shader, the lighting response of water droplets in the cloud, Bruins explains. And, his volumetric caching system was a huge help in optimizing rendering. Barbara Robertson

Clouds In the Skies

June 200916

n n n n Character ModelingAnimation

ware, shaped the mesh topology created by the modelers to match. We set up the mesh so the rigging controls created the shapes the animators wanted, Jordan says. But in the case of Carl, we spent quite a bit of time and a lot of trial and error to give a square the ability to have human emotions that are not symbolically square.

One problem was Carls mouth, which stretches in a hard line across his huge bot-tom jaw. We had to make some compro-mises, Jordan says. We softened the cor-ners, but we tried to do it in a subtle way so you would feel it without seeing it.

Cranky Old CarlAnimators working with Carl discovered that economy in motion matched his sim-ple style. Wed put his face in a pose and let the pose speak for the character, says Scott Clark, animation supervisor. Carl feels more alive if you dont animate him than if you do. Sometimes, wed just put a blink on him and not much else. Hes old. He doesnt bend or twist too much.

Animating Carls clothes, however, be-came a technical problem. To give view-ers the feeling that he lives in a miniature world, the designers increased the size of the weave on Carls herringbone wool jacket to look as if someone had scaled up a dolls jacket to fit someone five feet tall. And, it isnt just the textures, says Jordan. Its the way the fabric moves, as if someone cut a dolls jacket from a life-sized jacket. But nothing in real life looks like a scaled-up dolls jacket. So we had to guess. Then, we worked with animation to do walk cycles, have him sit and stand and interact with Russell to see if he was believable and fit the design of the film. We didnt want him to feel like a doll.

In the end, Carl looks like a little old man in an oversized suit, a square, boxy shape with wide pant legs. And that caused problems with cloth simulation. We wanted the miniature look with the over-sized clothing, and to see the lines of ac-

Carls wife, Ellie, is a circle. She

has a tiny body with a

balloon head, a little button no

se, a beautiful smile, and bare f

eet.

Shes bouncy. She wears hand-

me-down clothes and has dirt

under her

fingernails. Shes Carls playm

ate and soul mate. Her photos

in their house

are in round frames, and eve

rything about her is loving. W

e meet

her as a young girl in the begi

nning of the film, during Carls b

ack

story, and we follow her life

with Carl in

one of the most emotional se

quences

ever created for an animated f

eature.

Carls adventure begins afte

r Ellie

dies: She is the underlying mot

ivation. To

carry Ellies spirit through the

movie, pro-

duction designer Ricky Nierv

a gave her

a symbolic color, magenta, t

hat shows

up in flowers and skies, to rem

ind us of

her, and composer Michael Gia

cchino cre-

ated a waltz as Ellies theme t

hat plays

with twists and turns until at th

e end,

when it becomes an action

-

adventure theme.

The effects departments role was to create the believable elements that connect the audience to the stylized world. By animating the balloons in a realistic way, the audience more easily believes the house could float, maintains Steve May, supervising TD. When they buy that concept, they believe Carl is going some-place. And, when Russell shows up on his front porch, they believe he really is in peril. Our primary goal is to help tell the story. Our secondary goal is to make something beautiful.

At first, knowing it would be difficult to run a rigid-body simulation on 10,000 balloons, Pixar tried to float the balloons procedurally within a modeled canopy. They had no notion of each other, though, says Gary Bruins, effects supervisor.

And, they intersected all over the place. It didnt look good. TD John Reisch did tests using rigid-body

dynamics with Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) through Autodesks Maya that produced the believable motion they wanted, but the sys-tem was able to simulate only 500 balloons. When Eric Froemling split ODE away from Maya, though, and created an improved,

stand-alone version that ran in Pixars pipeline, they upped the number. Considerably.With ODE installed in Pixars pipeline, Reisch

created a system in Maya that generated the initial state of the balloon simulation, then moved that state to

ODE as a stand-alone without using data communication. Releasing it from communicating with Maya released the bot-

tleneck, says Bruins. We could do 50,000 balloons, but because they werent intersecting, we needed only 10,000 to fill the canopy.

The canopy provided artistic control for the overall shape of the grouping. The simulation can push the balloons out of that shape,

but when the rigid-body sim was in its rest position, it had the same topology as the canopy, Bruins explains. Thus, to maintain the art-directed shape, the team decided to move the strings that tied each balloon to Carls chimney in a separate simulation.

The strings are more complicated than the balloons because getting them to bend and conform around the balloons requires more control points, Bruins says. If all the strings had to avoid the balloons along their paths, they would become tangled and twisted.

So, in the first pass, the crew simulated the balloons with strings that didnt know about other balloons. Then, they brought that simulation in as baked data and simulated only the strings. We thought about reducing the number of strings, but as it turned out, we didnt have to, Bruins says. The strings col-lide and interact with surrounding balloons, but they dont influence the behavior of the balloons. For close-up shots, though, they would simulate balloons and strings together, and hand dress the hero balloons. Barbara Robertson

Beautiful Balloons

June 2009 17


tionthe bends of knee, the lines of the elbow, the position of the shoulders relative to his head, May says. But, when Carl bent his little legs inside his big trousers as he walked, you didnt see the knee bend with normal cloth simulation; it looked like he was walking with straight legs.

Our animators got really upset, May relays. eyre used to doing subtle and important diff erences in poses to sell the acting of the scene. To fi x that problem and to give Carls clothes a thick look with a minimum number of wrinkles that the artists wanted, the cloth-simulation crew used targeting with modeled surfaces that the simulation would approximate, and shapes based on baked simulation that they isolated to certain areas of the body.

Holding onto Russell e problem with Russell was his egg-shaped face. Hes basically a balloon, Jor-dan says, and, my gosh, that was challeng-ing. e smallest facial expression would change him and make him look too old, or too young, or not appealing. Giving him

a chin to separate his head from his neck helped, but often the riggers would make their best guess and then adapt the rig based on notes from the animators and directors.

Russell is very caricatured, Clark says. And, hes a kid, so he has to jump around and be active. But, if we moved his neck too much, hed feel gummy, so we built limitations into the model.

When Russell jumps around, he moves several layers of clothinga shirt, a sash on

top, a neckerchief on top of that, his back-pack straps, and the backpack itself with between 20 and 30 Wilderness Explorer gadgets hanging from it, all animating inde-pendently. For cloth, we have a two-stage process, May says. Animators perform the character without clothing, and then simulation does the clothing after theyre done. But the backpack is a rigid-body simulation that runs nearly in real time. As the animators put Russell through his poses, they could see the backpack and all its parts moving, and because the software converts the dynamic movement into key-frame data, they could change the simu-lated movement.

is is the most complex clothing weve ever done, says May. And then,

we attach these two complicated characters, Carl and Russell,

by a hose and a rope to each other and to a house thats attached to 10,000 balloons. e animation rig is amaz-

ingly complex. Depending on how hard Carl pulls on the

hose, it might move the house, the wind might push the balloons,

and Russell is pulling, too. is is the situation: Carl has wound the

hose attached to the house, fl oating above, around his shoulders. Hes tied a rope from Russells backpack to a knot on the hose.

Carls wife, Ellie, is a circle. She

has a tiny body with a

balloon head, a little button no

se, a beautiful smile, and bare f

eet.



under her

fi ngernails. Shes Carls playm


in their house



e meet


nning of the fi lm, during Carls b

ack


with Carl in


quences


eature.


r Ellie


ivation. To


movie, pro-


a gave her


hat shows

up in fl owers and skies, to rem

ind us of


cchino cre-


hat plays


e end,


-

adventure theme.

Special shaders accented the ability of lighters to change host Charles Muntzs expression from kindly to sinister.

weve ever done, says May. And then, we attach these two complicated

characters, Carl and Russell, by a hose and a rope to each other and to a house thats attached to 10,000 balloons. e animation rig is amaz-

ingly complex. Depending on how hard Carl pulls on the

hose, it might move the house, the wind might push the balloons,

and Russell is pulling, too. is is the situation: Carl has wound the

hose attached to the house, fl oating above, around his shoulders. Hes tied a rope from Russells backpack to a knot on the hose.



under her

fi ngernails. Shes Carls playm


in their house



e meet


nning of the fi lm, during Carls b

ack


with Carl in


quences


eature.


r Ellie


ivation. To


movie, pro-


a gave her


hat shows

up in fl owers and skies, to rem

ind us of


cchino cre-


hat plays


e end,


-

adventure theme.

June 200918

Kevin is a rare, 13-foot-tall fl ightless bird, colorful andsilly. Carl and Russell happen across her after they fl y

inside Carls house to South America. A supposed missing link, she is the ob-ject of (Carls hero) Charles Muntzs 50-year-long quest. In Kevins

shape and coloration, she, too, reminds us of Ellie: Kevin has around body, a long neck, and brilliant iridescent feathers.

The technical challenges for Kevin were those bril-liant iridescent feathers.

e tethers form an upside down y withthe house on top. Because animators want-ed control, they used a sophisticated rig to move the tethers, rather than rely on a simulation to create the motion. e house moves independently, sometimes reacting to balloon simulations, sometimes moving with keyframe animation with the balloons reacting to that.

In most shots, we didnt see

all these things at once, but when we saw all three, generally animators performed the characters sans clothes and with the tether in a rough position for the house, May says. Simulation ran dynamics for

the clothes and, if

necessary, improved the animation of the tether. And, eff ects ran the simulation for the balloons and sometimes for the house. In other words, animation fi rst, then cloth simulation and eff ects working in parallel.

Iridescent KevinKevin, the bird, needed to be a characternever seen before and dramatic enough to

give Muntz, the pilot who was Carl and Ellies hero from the newsreel footage,

a reason to spend 50 years looking for her. She was the hardest char-acter because we walked the fi ne line between too unreal and too cartoony, Jordan says. Pete said that when the audience fi rst sees her, he wanted her to look like shes made of gold

when the sun hits her, but that she really could exist in nature. e art department found im-

ages of a Monal pheasant from the Himalayas that has iridescent feathers

in metallic green, purple, red, and blue colors, a copper-colored tail, turquoise blue skin, and a blue crest like that of a

Eight-year-old Russell, a Wilderness Explorer who inad-vertently stows away on Carls adventure, takes Ellies place as

a circle in Carls life. Russell rolls joyfully through life, excited, constantly circling around. He looks like a little egg with stubby arms and legs and no

neck, and he wears a backpack loaded with Wilderness Explorer camping gear, a neckerchief, and a sash

covered with Wilderness Explorer buttons. The technical challenges for Russell were in

creating facial features and expressions that looked appropriate on his smooth, young,

oval face, and in simulating all his layers of clothing and gadgets.

June 200918

never seen before and dramatic enough to

in metallic green, purple, red, and blue colors, a copper-colored tail, turquoise blue skin, and a blue crest like that of a

Eight-year-old Russell, a Wilderness Explorer who inad-vertently stows away on Carls adventure, takes Ellies place as

a circle in Carls life. Russell rolls joyfully through life, excited, constantly circling around. He looks like a little egg with stubby arms and legs and no

neck, and he wears a backpack loaded with Wilderness Explorer camping gear, a neckerchief, and a sash

covered with Wilderness Explorer buttons. The technical challenges for Russell were in

creating facial features and expressions that looked appropriate on his smooth, young,

oval face, and in simulating all his layers of clothing and gadgets.

Carl tied a rope from Russell to a hose hes using to pull the fl oating house. Creating the fi nal image at top required water simulation (above, far left), character animation with rigid-body simulation for Russells pack and a sophisticated rig for the tether (above, second from left), cloth simulation (above, second from right), and shading and lighting (above, far right.)

June 2009 19


peacock. e crew was able to see a pair ina nearby animal sanctuary, and those birds served as reference material for Kevins col-ors. Kevin became a 13-foot fl ightless bird with an orange beak, a long, iridescent blue neck, and purple feathers. John Lasseter always says that before you can caricature reality, you have to understand reality, Jor-dan explains. To be believable, it has to be inspired by something that could exist.

For animation inspira-tion, the studio brought an os-

trich to the campus, and the animators took pictures as it walked around outside, but they werent bound by the real birds physi-cal limitations. Kevin is a made-up crea-ture, and probably the character we had the most liberty with, says Clark. Russell uses her like a pogo stick. Pete always said that if you could hear the sound her brain made, it would be like a dial tone.

For Kevins feathers, the technical direc-

tors used one Ri curve for the quills, with hundreds more coming off the sides to produce each barb. For Finding Nemo, we modeled feathers using wide hair or a single piece of geometry with a clever shader, May points out. For Kevin, we wanted more geometric complexity. And, because we used individual pieces of ge-

ometry, we could model a range of feather types from fl at feathers that we might have done with the shader before, and also fl uff y under-feathers.

To color Kevins feathers, the artists cre-ated a shader that gave the directors the ability to choose which colors turned on and off , and at which angles, as well as tex-ture maps painted with a ramp of all the colors the feathers could exhibit, to control the iridescence. e order in which colors appear in the map is the order they shift as the angle changes between the camera and the light source, Jordan says. Its a fairly big cheat, but Pete wanted the ability to turn the iridescence off .

Barking Is So 20th CenturyFor the dogs, the character supervisors andanimators spent time in a doggie day-care

Kevin is a rare, 13-foot-tall fl ightless bird, colorful andsilly. Carl and Russell happen across her after they fl y

inside Carls house to South America. A supposed missing link, she is the ob-ject of (Carls hero) Charles Muntzs 50-year-long quest. In Kevins

shape and coloration, she, too, reminds us of Ellie: Kevin has around body, a long neck, and brilliant iridescent feathers.

The technical challenges for Kevin were those bril-liant iridescent feathers.

In one sequence during the fi lm, a character gets caught ina bolo net. To create that net, rather than using a sheet of cloth with a texture or geometry attached, TD Eric Froem-ling drew on the same rigid-body simulation system used to fl oat the 10,000 balloons carrying Carls house.

I had fi rst played with this idea on a promo spot for Cars, says Gary Bruins, effects supervisor. Theres a shot where Mater runs into a velvet rope, and I tried connecting spheres to approximate the rope. I talked to Eric about the idea, and he gave it a shot.

Heres how it worked. Eric strung together a series of spheresrigid bodieslike a string of beads hanging in a doorway, Bruins says. With enough spheres, we could ap-proximate the behavior of a rope. He made a net by knotting

the ropes into a 2D grid. Any time a character interacted with the net, we got a more believable response from the rigid bodies than we would have with cloth. Because it had open squares, if a limb went through an opening, there was no motion on the net.

To render the net, TDs ran Ri curves through the centers of the spheres and shaded the curves with rope textures.

Similarly, Froemling stitched together a series of triangles and made a quilt of rigid bodies to create a tarp that dropped onto the balloons. As a result, the TDs could more easily make the tarp interact with the rigid-body simulation for the balloons than if they had used cloth simulation for the tarp.

Bruins intends to keep exploring this use of rigid bodies to do soft-body simulations. The nice thing is that you can easily detach the strings of spheres and get ripping and rup-turing, so it has a lot of potential for large-scale cloth and special cases. Barbara Robertson

For animation inspira-tion, the studio brought an os-

ject of (Carls hero) Charles Muntzs 50-year-long quest. In Kevins shape and coloration, she, too, reminds us of Ellie: Kevin has a

round body, a long neck, and brilliant iridescent feathers. The technical challenges for Kevin were those bril-

liant iridescent feathers.

Net Knots

June 200920


center, consulted a behaviorist nearby, and,of course, studied their own dogs. If you look at their designs, Clark says, Dugs nose is really big, almost a Snoopy nose. But we do things with the behavior of the rig to fl avor the animation more toward re-alism. We have controls to give them that little fl avor, but we consciously chose to do dog behavior.

In addition to the happy-go-lucky Dug, the fi lm features Muntzs pack of hunting dogs, which he trained to serve himeven to the point of serving dinner, albeit somewhat sloppily. Where Dug is round and happy, the pack dogs are an-

gular and serious. Alpha, a Doberman, leads the pack with Beta, a Rottweiler, and Gamma, a bulldog, right behind him. All the dogs talk via a high-tech col-lar that, among other things, translates their thoughts into spoken words. Peter-son voices Dug and, with some technical tricks, Alpha.

Pete and I are lifelong dog lovers, Peter-son says. So we looked for a unique way to have Carl and Dug talk. e collar allowed us to get the behavior of a real dog and hear its thoughts; Dug could be scratching his ear while hes talking.

e real behavior of Alpha, Beta, and Gammas pack, on the other hand, is often frightening, especially when they turn their hunting prowess toward Carl, Russell, and Kevin. But as we learn and Peterson affi rms, ere are no bad dogs, only bad masters.

e bad master in Up is Charles Muntz, voiced by Christopher Plummer, whose design is as angular as that of his hunt-ing pack. Petes challenge to us was he wanted the audience to feel like Muntz was a warm, loving grandfather, who could become sinister at the drop of a hat, Jordan says. e crew accomplished that, in particular, by rigging his eyes and eyebrows to be

appealing or scary, and through shading.

Athena Xenakis was able to fi nd the right shading details on his face, such as crows feet, that could be enhanced or hidden, and to make his eyes look sinister when com-bined with certain lighting, Jor-dan points out. When hes hold-ing a lantern and talking about his obsession with Kevin, we goosed the lighting to bring out

the creepy details.MuntzCarl, and Ellies childhood

heroforces the climax of the fi lm. Carl learns what a well-rounded adventure in

the circle of life really is, and always was.And, Pixar reminds us, for the 10th time, that the medium is deep enough to hold any story, whether funny, adventurous, scary, emotional, heartwarming, heart-breaking, heartpounding, or, sometimes, all of that rolled into one. at is, one meticulously designed and accomplished fi lm named Up.

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and acontributing editor for Computer Graphics World. Shecan be reached at [email protected].

Like all the dogs in Up, Dug wears a high-tech collar that translates his thoughts into spoken words, but Dug is different from the rest of the pack. Hes round; theyre angular. Hes the happy-go-lucky nerd of the hunting pack, sent out by the others on a hopeless mission to get him out of the way. And thats when he adopts Carl and Russell. For the animators, the goal was to give all the dogs realistic behavior, yet still have them fi t within the caricatured style

of the fi lm.

sinister at the drop of a hat, Jordan says. e crew accomplished that, in particular, by rigging his eyes and eyebrows to be

appealing or scary, and through shading.

Athena Xenakis was able to fi nd the

theyre angular. Hes the happy-go-lucky nerd of the hunting pack, sent out by the others on a hopeless mission to get him out of the way. And thats when he adopts Carl and Russell. For the animators, the goal was to give all the dogs realistic behavior, yet still have them fi t within the caricatured style

of the fi lm.

Russell, Dug, and Kevin helped soften Carls edges, but meeting his childhood hero Charles Muntz gave Carls adventure its most exciting turn.

For Pixars fi rst adventure in Disney Digital 3D-land, the studio focused inward,turning stereo into a window, rather than lobbing gags out from the screen and into the audience. We used [stereo] 3D to help tell the story, says director Pete Docter. When Carl is stuck in his house, we kept it fl at, but when hes standing on a cliff, we wanted to feel the wind on his face.

Stereoscopic supervisor Bob Whitehill devised a depth script based on the color script. When Carl and Ellie are young and life is colorful, the images have depth. When Ellie dies and the color fades from Carls life, the images are fl at. Then, Russell shows up. The scenes get deeper and deeper. Notes supervis-ing TD Steve May, Everything [at Pixar] has always been 3D, so, technically, it was just matter of adding a camera and rendering. Barbara Robertson

Deep Emotions

CGW :808_p 7/16/08 11:45 AM Page 1

Finally, someone shot a feature fi lm insidethe Smithsonian Museums. And, such a fi lm. Directed by Shawn Levy, the 20th

Century Fox feature magically brings tolife works of art, historical fi gures large and small, creatures, statues, and Einstein bob-bleheads in a sequel aptly named Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

e battle features, as did the fi rst Night at the Museum, Larry Daley (Ben Stiller), the museum guard from the earlier fi lm, now an entrepreneur and inventor; Jede-diah (Owen Wilson) as a miniature cow-boy; Octavius (Steve Coogan), another miniature; and Teddy Roosevelt (Robin

Williams). Introduced in the sequel are Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria) and Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams). But, enough about the actors. e fun in this fi lm centers on watching familiar inanimate objects and iconic artifacts take on a life of their own.

Rhythm & Hues (R&H) was the pri-mary visual eff ects house for the fi lm, and

a crew of approximately 300 in its Los An-geles and Mumbai and Hyderabad, India, studios created an animated octopus, the Einstein bobbleheads, various sculptures, airplanes, falcon heads for the Horus, a squirrel, and digital doubles. CafeFX con-centrated on bringing paintings to life.

Co-visual eff ects supervisor Raymond Chen, along with Dan Deleeuw, led R&Hs work on the 535 shots. e fun of this project was that we had diff erent kinds of work. It wasnt like having an orange cat for 500 shots, says Chen. We had a furry creature but also hard surfaces, metal, marble, and octopus fl esha lot of diff er-ent problems to solve.

e octopus was the most diffi cult char-acter, the bobbleheads the most fun. At Rhythm & Hues, artists model with Au-todesks Maya, and for displacement, they use Pixologics ZBrush and Autodesks Mud-box. For most other tasks along the pipeline, the crew uses the studios proprietary tools.

To handle the eight octopus tentacles, which were like limbs without bones, char-acter riggers created a system that included procedural animation. e director wanted something anthropomorphic and not too cartoony, Chen says. e rig had splines controlled with lots of knobs, automated vol-ume preservation so that if you extended a tentacle, it would get thinner as it stretched, and methods that helped the tentacles and suckers slide over each other.

To prevent interpenetration, geometry on the ground or another tentacle could dis-place a tentacle overtop. When animators dragged one tentacle over the top of another, they didnt have to worry about the contact, Chen says. e rig would cause the bottom tentacle to push the top one up.

After the animators completed their work, the eff ects department slimed the octopus based on proximity to other surfaces, us-ing geometry rendered with transparency. When the tentacles wrap around Ben Still-er, we tracked in geometry for him, Chen explains, and put slime in the areas closest to the tentacle. As a tentacle got farther away, the slime would stretch and then snap.

e marble statue of Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, had an opposite challenge: It couldnt look stretchy or rubbery. e animation


Co-visual eff ects supervisor Raymond Chen, along with Dan Deleeuw, led R&Hs work on the 535 shots. e fun of this project was that we had diff erent kinds of work. It wasnt like having an orange cat for 500 shots, says Chen. We had a furry creature but also hard surfaces, metal, marble, and octopus fl esha lot of diff er-


To handle the eight octopus tentacles, which were like limbs without bones, char-acter riggers created a system that included procedural animation. e director wanted something anthropomorphic and not too cartoony, Chen says. e rig had splines controlled with lots of knobs, automated vol-ume preservation so that if you extended a tentacle, it would get thinner as it stretched, and methods that helped the tentacles


Co-visual eff ects supervisor Raymond Chen, along with Dan Deleeuw, led R&Hs work on the 535 shots. e fun of this project was that we had diff erent kinds of work. It wasnt like having an orange cat for 500 shots, says Chen. We had a furry creature but also hard surfaces, metal, marble, and octopus fl esha lot of diff er-


To handle the eight octopus tentacles, which were like limbs without bones, char-acter riggers created a system that included procedural animation. e director wanted something anthropomorphic and not too cartoony, Chen says. e rig had splines controlled with lots of knobs, automated vol-ume preservation so that if you extended a tentacle, it would get thinner as it stretched, and methods that helped the tentacles

To prevent interpenetration, geometry on the ground or another tentacle could dis-place a tentacle overtop. When animators dragged one tentacle over the top of another, they didnt have to worry about the contact, Chen says. e rig would cause the bottom tentacle to push the top one up.

After the animators completed their work, the eff ects department slimed the octopus based on proximity to other surfaces, us-ing geometry rendered with transparency. When the tentacles wrap around Ben Still-er, we tracked in geometry for him, Chen explains, and put slime in the areas closest to the tentacle. As a tentacle got farther away, the slime would stretch and then snap.

e marble statue of Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, had an opposite challenge: It couldnt look stretchy or rubbery. e animation

R&H animators could cut loose with the Einstein bobbleheads and have fun creating facial expressions for the cartoony characters.

June 200922

CGLive Action CGLive Action

A constrained animation style and limitations in the rig helped animators create a performance for the statue of Lincoln without losing its marble essence.

style was more constrained, but even inthe rig, we limited the area of infl uence for

movements in the mouth, says Chen. Similarly, to stiff en the cloth, the simulation artists hid the move-

ment inside the folds.In one scene, Lincoln smashes

through a window and attacks the Egyptian god Horus, a humanoid with the head of a falcon. Horus emerges from an eff ects-heavy

netherworld fi lled with particle smoke and mist. Transforming

fl ocks of these bird-like creatures from the mist and chaos of the underworld

was a healthy amount of work, even though its a handful of shots, Chen says.

We did some things with procedures to warp and transform the geometry.

e creatures bodies were stunt ac-tors fi lmed on greenscreen, onto

which the artists fi t

the bird-like heads using a rig that helped lock down the feathers in the transition zone. To create the feathersa number of which are metallic and inlaid with jade, sev-eral are dreadlocks with metal claws at the end, and many others are like more typi-cal hair and furthe crew used multiple techniques. Some were cards of geometry with opacity maps, Chen says. Some were hair or fur groomed in layers to look like feathers. e dreadlocks and metallic feath-ers used simulationscloth sims to swing the dreadlocks and rigid-body dynamics to swing the metallic feathers.

e challenges for the squirrel and the bobbleheads centered more on animation artistry than on technology, for the most part. e squirrel is a scale gag, Chen says. We see him most of the time from Octaviuss point of view, and hes one of the miniature diorama guys. So, part of the joke is that the squirrel rears up and ap-pears to be roaring, but hes still a small, cute squirrel. e studio used its well-developed fur tools to keep the critter look-

ing fl uff y, even when it interacts with the White House lawn, which the crew created with CG hair.

e animators had the most free-dom in animating the Einstein

bobbleheads. Modelers worked from scanned practical mod-

els to create the caricatured versions of the renowned scientist. e bobble-


e challenges for the squirrel and the bobbleheads centered more on animation artistry than on technology, for the most part. e squirrel is a scale gag, Chen says. We see him most of the time from Octaviuss point of view, and hes one of the miniature diorama guys. So, part of the joke is that the squirrel rears up and ap-pears to be roaring, but hes still a small, cute squirrel. e studio used its well-developed fur tools to keep the critter look-

ing fl uff y, even when it interacts with the White House lawn, which the crew

e animators had the most free-dom in animating the Einstein

bobbleheads. Modelers worked from scanned practical mod-

els to create the caricatured versions of the renowned scientist. e bobble-

style was more constrained, but even in the rig, we limited the area of infl uence for

movements in the mouth, says Chen. Similarly, to stiff en the cloth, the simulation artists hid the move-

ment inside the folds.In one scene, Lincoln smashes

through a window and attacks the Egyptian god Horus, a humanoid with the head of a falcon. Horus emerges from an eff ects-heavy

netherworld fi lled with particle smoke and mist. Transforming

fl ocks of these bird-like creatures from the mist and chaos of the underworld

was a healthy amount of work, even though its a handful of shots, Chen says.

We did some things with procedures to warp and transform the geometry.

e creatures bodies were stunt ac-tors fi lmed on greenscreen, onto

which the artists fi t


e challenges for the squirrel and the bobbleheads centered more on animation artistry than on technology, for the most part. e squirrel is a scale gag, Chen says. We see him most of the time from Octaviuss point of view, and hes one of the miniature diorama guys. So, part of the joke is that the squirrel rears up and ap-pea

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