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W O R L DComputer

T H E M A G A Z I N E F O R D I G I T A L C O N T E N T C R E A T I O N A N D P R O D U C T I O N

$4.95 USA $6.50 Canada

April 2006 www.cgw.com®

Commercial BreaksSuper spots from the Super Bowl

Graphics to GoThe state of 3D in mobile games

Making WavesPoseidon’s new simulation technique

Ice Age’s evolutionary breakthroughs in water and fur effects

Freeze Frame

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© 2006 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Product, features, specifications, system requirements and availability are subject to change without notice. SOFTIMAGE, Avid and Face Robot are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. in the United States

and/or other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

Lifelike facial animation that puts a smile on your face. Create, solve and animate. In days, not weeks.

Come and find out more about the future of facial animation at softimage.com/face_robot

Introducing

Face the Future

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Character building



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Image created by Meats Meier (www.3dartspace.com)

© Copyright 2005 Alias Systems Corp. All rights reserved. Alias, the swirl logo, Maya and MotionBuilder are registered trademarks and the Maya logo is a trademark of Alias Systems Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

Maya® 7, the latest release of the award-winning 3D software, is packed with innovative new features allowing you to realize your creative vision faster and more easily than ever before.

Capitalizing on Alias MotionBuilder® technology, Maya 7 makes character animation easier and more accurate. Other improvements such as advanced render layering and new modeling, texturing and effects tools help you achieve more with Maya.

To find out how the new and innovative features of Maya are changing the face of 3D, visit www.alias.com/maya7.



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W O R L DComputer

T H E M A G A Z I N E F O R D I G I T A L C O N T E N T C R E A T I O N A N D P R O D U C T I O N

Also see www.cgw.com for computer graphics news,

special surveys and reports, and the online gallery.

w w w . c g w . c o m APRIL 2006 Computer Graphics World | 3

Departments

Editor’s Note 4Computer Graphics World’s new owner, COP Communications, outlines its plans for the magazine.

Spotlight 6

Products

ATI’s FireGL and CrossFire

Softimage’s Face Robot

NaturalMotion’s Endorphin, Euphoria

Boxx’s GoBoxx 1400

News

Dell to Acquire Alienware

Digital Video Viewpoint 8High Dynamic Range Displays

Brightside’s HDR display technology is new and expensive, but it offers a glimpse at what is possible for monitors and displays in the near future.

Portfolio 36E frontier’s image gallery

Products 39

Product news from NAB2006

Backdrop 44Casual Approach

Interview with Jason Kapalka, of PopCap Games, who reveals the secrets of his company’s success in the growing casual games market.

Features

Cover storyThawsome 12CG ANIMATION | Using new tools and

techniques, Blue Sky evolves Ice Age’s

primitive characters and effects.

By Martin McEachern

Top Spots 20BROADCAST | Post facilities use digital

effects to score high in this year’s Ad

Bowl commercial showdown.

By Debra Kaufman

Small Screens Run Deep 28MOBILE GRAPHICS | Getting 3D

mobile content is a waiting game:

developers waiting for handsets,

handset manufacturers waiting for

apps, and end users...well, just waiting.

By Jenny Donelan

Size Matters 31MODELING/SIMULATION | ILM makes

a big splash in Poseidon with a novel

approach to making water and waves.

By Barbara Robertson

On the cover:Blue Sky makes an evolutionary leap

in graphics technology for Ice Age:

The Meltdown. See pg. 12.

12

20

31

28

April 2006 • Volume 29 • Number 4



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KAREN MOLTENBREY : Chief Editor

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:Jenny Donelan, Audrey Doyle,

Evan Marc Hirsch, George Maestri, Martin McEachern,

Stephen Porter, Barbara Robertson

SUZANNE HEISER: Art Director

DAN RODD: Senior Illustrator

MARI RODRIGUEZ: Production Director

KATH CUNNINGHAM: Production [email protected]

(818) 291-1113

MACHELE GALLOWAY: Ad Traffi c Manager

CHRIS SALCIDO: Account [email protected]

(818) 291-1144

COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLDEditorial Offi ce:

620 West Elk Avenue

Glendale, CA 91204

(800) 280-6446, x1105

SALES

TIM MATTESON : Publisher/West Coast [email protected]

(310) 836-4064

JEFF VICTOR : Midwest/East Coast [email protected](847) 367-4073

LA Sales Offi ce:

620 West Elk Avenue

Glendale, CA 91204

(800) 280-6446

WILLIAM R. RITTWAGE President and Chief Executive Offi cer

Computer Graphics World Magazine is published

by Computer Graphics World, a

COP Communications company.

Computer Graphics World does not verify any claims or

other information appearing in any of the advertisements

contained in the publication, and cannot take any

responsibility for any losses or other damages incurred

by readers in reliance on such content.

Computer Graphics World cannot be held responsible for

the safekeeping or return of unsolicited articles,

manuscripts, photographs, illustrations or other materials.

Subscriptions: Address all subscription correspondence to

Computer Graphics World, 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale,

CA 91204. Subscribers may also contact customer service at

(818) 291-1100. For change of address please include the

old and new address information, and if possible, include

an address label from a recent issue. Subscriptions are

available free to qualifi ed individuals within the

United States. Non-qualifi ed 1 year rates: USA $4.95.

Canada & Mexico $6.50. All Airmail Delivery is available for

an additional $75.00 annually.

Postmaster: Send address changes to

Computer Graphics World,

620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204.

4 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2006 w w w . c g w . c o m

editor

’sno

te

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated…” —Mark Twain

The demise of Computer Graphics World has also been greatly exaggerat-

ed while the magazine has been going through a change of ownership. We

happen to believe that Computer Graphics World is exactly where it should

be—home. For an incredible publication like Computer Graphics World, “home” is

being part of a publishing group that understands the value of its assets and its value

to the ever-growing computer graphics industry.

These are very exciting times for Computer Graphics World, which has been pur-

chased by COP Communications, the publishers of Post magazine. For some time,

COP Communications has been courting PennWell, Computer Graphics World’s long-

time publisher, in an attempt to acquire the graphics industry’s leading publica-

tion. We are very excited to have Computer Graphics World joining the family. We

have assembled an incredible team to bring the enthusiasm and excitement back into

Computer Graphics World.

Having been a part of this market for more than 15 years, I understand that join-

ing with such a well-respected title like Post magazine offers our readers and adver-

tisers content and market reach that is simply not offered through the legacy publish-

ers, which have decided to make publishing much more about

bottom-line numbers and less about the markets they serve.

I believe that it should be all about understanding and pas-

sion—both of which are essential if your editorial focus is on

the professionals of the market, who take immense pride in

what they do, along with the manufacturers, which offer the

razor-edged technology that helps these creative profession-

als perform their magic. Computer Graphics World has the pas-

sion and understanding that both Karen Moltenbrey and I bring

with a team that will continue to celebrate the core of Computer

Graphics World and all that has made it a fi rst-class publication.

We invite you all to join us in our re-energized quest in serving the worlds of enter-

tainment, gaming, industrial design, science, CAD, and simulation, and nurturing the

crossroads of innovation among disciplines. It’s no secret that CAD designers want to

learn about the newest modeling techniques used in the latest blockbuster effects fi lm,

while scientists are interested in the real-time rendering advances coming from the

gaming industry. We intend on celebrating these professionals, and are committed to

extending our coverage of the 3D graphics community. And, we look forward to your

continued support in the years to come.

Sincerely,

Tim Matteson

Publisher

We are

committed to

extending our

coverage of the

3D community

across the varied

disciplines.



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mailto:[email protected]










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spotlightG R A P H I C S B O A R D S

F A C I A L A N I M A T I O N

Your resource for products, user applications, news, and market research

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Softimage, a subsidiary of Avid Tech-

nology, has unveiled Face Robot, its

software solution for creating realis-

tic facial animation for high-end fi lm,

postproduction, and game applications.

Designed to enable more lifelike ani-

mation of digital faces in less time than

previously possible, Face Robot aids art-

ists in producing emotive expressions

with natural skin and soft-tissue move-

ments in as few as six steps. The soft-

ware, compatible with popular 3D pro-

grams and work fl ows, provides precise

control over anatomical features such

as the mouth, eyebrows,

and jaw.

The integrated facial

soft-tissue “solver,” mean-

while, offers a corrective

sculpting system and

helps simulate the ways

in which facial tissue

deforms as expressions

are formed. Additional

features include a visual

animation interface, animation retarget-

ing, iterative performance refi nement

utilities, and support for the importa-

tion and exportation of Autodesk 3ds

Max and Maya fi le formats.

Softimage Face Robot current-

ly is shipping in two confi gurations:

Designer and Animator. Face Robot

Designer, priced at $94,995, provides

the tools necessary to prepare, solve,

and animate faces, including those

for defi ning wrinkles, placing tendons,

and fi ne-tuning the mouth. Priced at

$14,995, Face Robot Animator presents

a hybrid environment for keyframe

animation and motion capture, as well

as features a retargeting algorithm and

advanced tuning controls.

Softimage Delivers Face Robot

Extending the company’s workstation graphics line, the

1GB FireGL V7350 and 512MB FireGL V7300 are designed to

be ultra-high-end boards for digital content creation, imag-

ing, and CAD professionals. Both take advantage of an ultra-

threaded parallel processing GPU and ATI’s Avivo video and

display technology. The new graphics cards deliver a large

color palette and increased detail, given their graphics pipe-

line of 10 bits per RGB component and two dual-link con-

nectors in support of high-end displays. Priced at $1999

and $1599, respectively, the FireGL V7350 and V7300

are based on 90-nanometer process technol-

ogy, 512-bit ring bus memory architecture,

and 128-bit precision.

ATI has released its Cross-

Fire Xpress 3200 chipset, devel-

oped from the ground up with multi-GPU gaming in mind.

Engineered with two true x16 PCI Express interfaces, the

CrossFire Xpress 3200 is designed to deliver ease of use, accel-

eration, advanced overclocking capabilities, and stability.

The company also revealed that Hewlett-Packard has

selected the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 to power the new

HP Compaq nx9420 Notebook PC. The business notebook

also benefi ts from a 17-inch widescreen display and

Intel’s Centrino Core Duo. The Mobility

Radeon X1600, offering multimedia

functionality and power manage-

ment, delivers ATI’s Avivo tech-

nology for refi ned video capture

and playback, and PowerPlay 6.0

tech nology for long battery life.

ATI Expands Its FireGL and CrossFire Products



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W O R K S T A T I O N W O R K S T A T I O N

3 D A N I M A T I O N

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NaturalMotion, Ltd. has unveiled the

latest version of its 3D animation soft-

ware solution, Endorphin 2.6, and a new

run-time technology for next-generation

game development.

Newly updated, the Endorphin 2.6

suite of tools is designed for the creation

of realistic, interactive 3D character ani-

mation in games, fi lms, and broadcast.

Its new network licensing enables mul-

tiple licenses to be shared across a net-

work from a single dongle, whereas new

reference and training material provide

up-to-date information, more-detailed

tutorials, and a number of tips and

tricks. At the same time, NaturalMotion

has enhanced such Endorphin features

as its adaptive behaviors, char-

acter edit mode, and integration

with popular 3D and animation

work fl ows. Endorphin 2.6 is

available now for $9,495.

The company also intro-

duced its Euphoria run-time ani-

mation technology for gameplay

and development on next-genera-

tion platforms. Euphoria utilizes

the company’s Dynamic Motion

Synthesis technology to develop

interactive animations on the fl y. The

solution is based on fast simulations of

game characters’ motor control, mus-

cles, and biomechanics, rather than on

canned data recall.

Shown behind closed doors at the

recent Game Developers Conference,

Euphoria is being implemented in next-

generation game titles and is available

through NaturalMotion’s co-develop-

ment program.

NaturalMotion Upgrades Endorphin, Debuts Euphoria

Dell Inks Agreement to Acquire AlienwareDell has entered into an agreement to acquire Alien-

ware, known for its unique, high-end workstations.

Alien ware’s PC product line for gaming and multimedia

DCC and management will complement Dell’s high-per-

formance workstation offerings. Alienware will operate

as a wholly owned subsidiary to Dell, and will be head-

ed by Alienware’s current management and founders.

Meanwhile, Dell recently unveiled its XPS 600 Rene-

gade, a limited-edition, custom-painted desktop comput-

er. Designed to deliver immersive gaming experiences,

the Renegade benefi ts from the industry’s fi rst dedicated

physics accelerator, the Ageia PhysX processor. The PhysX

processor lends to lifelike gaming environments given its

ability to power real-time dynamic motion and interac-

tion on a large scale. The Renegade system also employs

Nvidia Quad-SLI graphics

and the Intel Pentium 965

Extreme Edition processor

at up to 4.26 GHz.

The XPS 600 Renegade

is offered in limited quan-

tities, priced at $9930 with

Dell’s 30-inch 3007WFP

fl at-panel monitor.

Boxx Launches a New Version of Its GoBoxx Boxx Technologies has unveiled a new edition of its

GoBoxx 1400 mobile workstation sporting AMD’s

Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors. The GoBoxx 1400,

suited to mobile 2D/3D graphics and animation profes-

sionals, has a 17-inch WSXGA+ (1680x1050 resolution)

GlassView-type Active Matrix display and Nvidia Quadro

graphics with a PCI Express

FX Go 1400 GPU, OpenGL,

and 256MB of video memory.

Rounding out the offering

are two DIMM slots with up

to 2GB of memory, dual HDD

support with RAID 0 and 1,

dual-channel DDR2 memo-

ry, and a built-in 1.3-mega-

pixel digital video camera.

The company additional-

ly debuted the Boxx Apexx 8

workstation targeted at visu-

al effects professionals. The system is designed to han-

dle 2K and 4K fi lm, as well as to deliver real-time func-

tionality when working with very large fi les, through

the use of 16 processing cores.

Pricing for the workstations vary with confi guration.



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view

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ideo

Jeff Sauer is a contributing editor of Computer Graphics World and director of the Digital Video Group, an independent research and testing organization for digital media. He can be reached at [email protected].


By Jeff Sauer

could display the full quality of imagery would be so much better.

Now there is at least one such monitor. Brightside Technologies is a small Western

Canadian company with the fi rst HDR-capable display. Unfortunately for most of us,

Brightside’s high dynamic range display—priced at $49,000—isn’t likely to show up on

our individual desktops very soon. But, the technology is eye-opening and, hopefully, it’s

a glimpse at the future.

Lighting It Up, and Down

On the surface, Brightside’s DR37-P uses a fairly straightforward LCD panel, similar

to any other higher quality 37-inch LCD TV/monitor. But there are a couple of critical

variations: First, Brightside uses a much different backlight; and second, that back-

light doesn’t just turn on and off with the power switch.

LCD monitors typically create brightness by shining a large, defused backlight

through a matrix of liquid crystals. Electric charges cause the liquid crystals to “turn

out” to allow some or all of the light to pass through, thus creating different levels

of brightness and varying shades of gray. The light then passes through red, green,

and blue color fi lters to create different colors. Since the “white” backlight is theoreti-

cally made up of red, green, and blue light blended together, this subtraction method

should yield all possible colors.

Yet, as the saying goes, “in theory, there is no difference between theory and prac-

tice. But in practice....”

Consider the difference between a typical tungsten light bulb and an overhead

offi ce fl uorescent lamp, or even one of the newer fl uorescent bulbs designed for

house lamps. While both are called “white,” most people recognize a difference

and describe the tungsten bulb with words like “warmer” or “softer.” That creates a

pleasant environment, but the actual “white” leans toward red and orange. Formally

The human eye is an incred-

ible instrument. It has the abil-

ity to process a very high range

of colors and even a larger

range of luminance variations.

Indeed, when we hear display

contrast ratios like 500:1, 2000:1, or even

50,000:1, they ultimately pale to the

roughly 1,000,000:1 luminance range of

our eyes. Similarly, the 24-bit color pro-

cessing (or 32-bit, including alpha chan-

nel) that seemed pretty

good a decade ago now

feels unsatisfying in the

quest to produce lifelike

images and video.

And that is just why

a small but growing

number of applications,

some as common as

Adobe Photoshop CS2,

and computer games

are moving toward high

dynamic range imag-

ery (HDRI) and creating

HDRI with as much as

16 bits per color.

Of course, while

the software can pro-

cess more data, you

probably don’t have a

monitor that can show

it. Naturally, “quality

in” begets “quality out,”

and maintaining a high

dynamic range through-

out the creation and

editing processes will

reduce rounding errors

and yield a better image

even on a low dynamic

range monitor.

Still, a monitor that

While costly,

Brightside’s

HDR display

technology

may offer a

glimpse at

the future.

Brightside Tech-

nologies recently

introduced the fi rst

HDR display, its

DR37-P, which uses

a different backlight

compared to typical

LCD monitors. While

the technology is

highly desirable, the

monitor’s price,

$49,000, may prove

to be too steep for

the average user.

High Dynamic Range Displays



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speaking, tungsten bulbs have a lower

color temperature than white that is

made up of equal parts of red, green, and

blue light. The Cold Cathode Fluorescent

Lamp (CCFL) backlights of traditional

LCD monitors similarly diverge from

“pure white.” And, when red, green, and

blue are subtracted from less than 100

percent white, the result is a mathemati-

cally limited range of possible colors.

Several companies, including

Brightside, have been experimenting

with LED backlights instead of CCFLs

and other fl uorescent lamps. NEC, for

example, now has a 21-inch desktop monitor, the LCD2180, that employs two defused

arrays of red, green, and blue LED as the backlight. The combination of red, green,

and blue LEDs act like the red, green, and blue light guns of old CRT projectors,

blending the primary colors to produce that pure white and, in turn, a wider range of

other colors. NEC reports a range of saturated colors that exceeds Adobe RGB color

by 9 percent and NTSC color by 4 percent.

Similarly, a development partnership between Samsung and Sony has yielded a

small number of products, including Sony’s Qualia 005 (a 46-inch LCD panel) and

Samsung’s LN-S8297DE (a gigantic 82-inch LCD panel). Samsung has also been work-

ing with Texas Instruments’ DLP (Digital

Light Processing) technology to build a

DLP rear-projection TV that uses LEDs

instead of a traditional projection lamp.

Those products all, like NEC’s, use

an array of red, green, and blue LEDs

to create a pure, adjustable white back-

light, and the visible results in each

case are impressive.

Still, the technology ultimately only

improves color accuracy and not neces-

sarily contrast.

The Bright Side of LED

To create a true HDR display, Brightside

exploits another critical characteristic of

LEDs. As solid-state devices, LEDs can

be turned on and off extremely quickly—

within nanoseconds. They can also shine

at reduced power levels to produce a

gray light. Most importantly, Brightside

modulates the LEDs individual on the fl y,

adjusting for each display image and even

Several companies

have been

experimenting with

LED backlights

instead of CCFLs

and other kinds of

fl uorescent lamps.



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each “fi eld” of 60 fi eld/sec motion video. That fi elds two

important improvements over traditional LCDs.

First, turning the LED backlights off while the liquid crys-

tals are changing state (turning) helps minimize the image

ghosting that remains a negative LCD stereotype with video.

Second, the DR37-P actually looks ahead a handful of video

frames to analyze the picture, then adjusts the LEDs indi-

vidually to accommodate light and dark scenes and light

and dark areas of the scenes. That’s where Brightside really

reaches the full potential of high dynamic range.

As I stated earlier, our eyes can distinguish contrast in the

1,000,000:1 range, but that’s not the whole story. At any given

instant, we are much more limited—in the order of just 100:1.

That’s why you can’t, for example, go to a bright, sunny

beach and expect to immediately see something inside a

dark tote bag. Our pupils need to dilate and adjust to the new

luminance range of the inner tote bag to allow us to discern

objects. Similarly, we can readily differentiate objects in dark

evening shadows (a survival defense mechanism) because

our eyes have adjusted to a different overall luminance.

In order to create a similar range, Brightside uses an

array of 1380 LEDs with mildly defused pixels behind the

1920x1080 LCD matrix. Analyzing a given image allows

the DR37 to adjust each individual LED, thereby exploit-

ing a full LCD contrast ratio in the various sectors of a sin-

gle image. Dark areas can have smartly defi ned shadows

and highlights, while still allowing bright areas to shine

enough to create the painful glow of looking at the sun.

In that way, Brightside has given an LCD panel some-

thing like dilating LEDs that act much like our eyes,

adjusting to the brightness and allowing us to see both

dark and bright environments clearly. And that, leverag-

ing such a high dynamic range, creates a far more lifelike

viewing experience.

Brightside’s technology is still new and quite expen-

sive, but it does offer an attractive glimpse at what is

possible for future displays. Minimally, the work of

Brightness, NEC, Sony, and Samsung has piqued the

interest of LED manufacturers and has yielded some dra-

matic performance increases during the last couple of

years, with more on the horizon. And, that bodes well for

the future of HDR displays.

Brightside’s panel adjusts the bright-ness levels so that dark and bright environ-ments can be seen clearly.



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. . . . CG Animation


In the 2002 prehistoric

animated adventure Ice Age, a

melancholic mammoth (Manny), a klutzy

sloth (Sid), and a stoic saber-toothed tiger

(Diego) form an uneasy bond to return a

human child to his family. The story of

the mismatched trio venturing across the

frozen tundra warmed the hearts of fi lm-

goers across the globe, making $382 mil-

lion worldwide, earning an Oscar nomi-

nation for best animated feature fi lm, and

setting the stage for the climate-changing

follow-up, Ice Age: The Meltdown. Making

$70.5 million during its opening weekend,

the CG sequel was another mammoth

success for Fox’s Blue Sky Studios, eclips-

ing the original Ice Age’s weekend take

by almost $25 million and becoming the

year’s fi rst box-offi ce bonanza.

As the story opens, the animals are

reveling in the virtual water park that

global warming has made of their once-

frozen habitat, frolicking on water slides

and ignoring the apocalyptic warnings of

Fast Tony, a con-artist turtle voiced by Jay

Leno. But, Manny, Sid, and Diego soon

learn that Fast Tony’s dire

forecast is about to

come true. The tow-

ering glacial cliffs

that loom over

their home,

holding back

the melt-

ing ocean,

are about to burst

and fl ood the valley—and

drown all the creatures in it. Their

only hope is to journey to the other end of

the valley and escape on a primitive ark.

From above and below, their trek is

fraught with perils and predators. A sla-

lom course of bursting geysers, teetering

rock formations, sharp-toothed amphib-

ians attacking through cracks in the ice,

and a fl ock of hungry-eyed vultures, who

break into a Busby Berkeley rendition of

“Food, Glorious Food,” are but a few.

Along the way, they meet two manic

possums, Crash and Eddie, and their “sis-

ter” Ellie, a mammoth who believes she’s

a possum. Still pining for kinship with a

fellow mammoth, Manny fi nds hope in

Ellie, and begins a fumbling courtship.

Meanwhile, Sid’s desire for self-worth is

kindled by a race of miniature sloths who

worship him like a god—until, of course,

they try to sacrifi ce him in a pit of lava. Sid

also peels away Diego’s false bravado and

forces him to confront his fear of swim-

ming. And, fi nally, the beleaguered Scrat

continues his quest for the ever-elusive

acorn in wildly inventive comic interludes.

The simplest one involves a botched pole-

vaulting attempt using a pole that’s a bit too

short to reach the far edge of deep crevice.

You can imagine what happens.

If the stark icescape of the fi rst fi lm

refl ected Blue

Sky’s initial trepidation at

embarking upon a feature fi lm, then the

verdant playgrounds, gushing fl oodwaters,

ultra-realistic fur, and elastic character ani-

mation of the sequel are a sure sign that

those fears have been washed away.

“We’re a lot more confi dent now,” says

lead animator Dave Torres. “But it still

wouldn’t be any fun if we weren’t con-

stantly pushing ourselves technically and

artistically. And on this fi lm, we had huge

hurdles to overcome, specifi cally in the

form of complex water and fur simulation.”

To achieve that, Ice Age: The Meltdown

would not only require the development

of new tools for water and fur simulation,

but for simulating froth and splashes, as

well. Character animators also set a goal of

pushing smear frames, squash and stretch,

follow-through, and overlapping action to

extremes. To do so would require the build-

ing of new meshes and rigs for all the char-

acters to handle the extremes of motion.

Character Evolution

Because only handful of the sequel’s 60-

plus animators had worked on the origi-

nal Ice Age, Blue Sky conducted seminars

at the start of production to establish guide-

By Martin McEachern

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CG Animation. . . .

ThawsomeFox/Blue Sky bring a

f lood of innovation to

Ice Age: The Meltdown



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lines for the animation of each char-

acter, giving examples of expressions

and showing what director Carlos

Saldanha did or did not want. The ani-

mators also created internal Web pages

geared to each character, and spent a

day of team building at the Bronx Zoo,

studying tigers and elephants.

Led by lead modeler Mike Defeo,

artists discarded the NURBS meshes

used for the fi rst fi lm and resurfaced

all the characters using subdivision

surfaces in Autodesk’s Maya. “Except

for the eyes and teeth, all the charac-

ters were a single-surface sub-D mesh,”

says Torres. “All the problems we had

on the fi rst Ice Age, with tears and

seams around T-junctions and the convergence of [fi ve or more] sur-

faces, were gone.” Aesthetically, the characters retained their origi-

nal design, except for Diego, whose eyes are now more cat-like.

Working primarily in Maya, riggers outfi tted each of the main

characters with more than 800 controls. These included for-

ward kinematic/inverse kinematic (FK/IK) handles, Maya blend

shapes, Maya Set Driven Keys, corrective blend shapes, and sim-

ple deformers such as lattices for fl attening out a piece of geom-

etry, creating impacts, or adding a hint of squash and stretch to

the beaks of Fast Tony or the vultures. Instead of using Maya’s

Sculpt Deformers for the dynamic animation of wobbling bel-

lies, jostling fat, or bulging muscle, Blue Sky uses a proprietary

tool called Follow Through. While not a fully dynamic solution,

Follow Through is a joint-based system that uses the “gross”

motion of a piece of geometry to calculate overlapping, follow-

through, or other secondary motions that would be tedious for

an animator to keyframe.

Follow Through is most

clearly visible on the more

gratuitously cartoony char-

acters such as Scrat, specif-

ically on his cheeks, ears,

belly, and the spline ani-

mation of his tail.

With multiple animators

often working on the same

character for any given shot,

animators used another

tool—called Pose Tool Box—

to access a wide variety of

recorded poses so they could seamlessly blend with one another’s

animations. “Pose Tool Box lets us record hundreds of physical

expressions, such as sad, angry, mad, happy, and so forth,” says

Torres. “When an animator creates a new pose, we can store all or

any part of it, from the face to various parts of the body. Then, we

can use them as “hookups” between shots. For example, when

there’s a cut on action, on the last frame an animator can snap to

a pose from the Pose Tool Box, so that the next animator knows

where to begin his or her animation.”

Cataloging poses became doubly important when character

animators challenged one another to a smear-frame competition.

Trying to outdo one another with squash and stretch, animators

created wildly exaggerated poses that, without the Pose Tool Box,

could have created a consistency nightmare for multiple animators

working on the same character. To create these exaggerations, the

animators manipulated special squash-and-stretch nodes placed

by riggers at the ends of the joints. “We could extend the nodes,

and it would simulate squash and stretch, preserving volume, thin-

ning out the geometry with extension, or fattening it with compres-

sion. We would scale, rotate, and translate the joints, and essen-

tially try to break the rig,” notes Torres. “We intend to push it even

further on our next fi lm,

Horton Hears A Who!”

Choosing a winner of

the smear-frame contest,

Torres points to a scene

in which Crash and Eddie

are logrolling down a

hill. Sucked underneath,

they’re fl attened and

stretched in true Chuck

Jones fashion.

Animators also took

smear frames to extremes

on Sid. In one shot, in

which the sloth exclaims prematurely, “We’re gonna live,” only to

realize otherwise, and says, “We’re gonna die,” Torres says the pro-

cess was pushed to the point where it didn’t look like Sid. “But it

works for the mood,” he says. “So, while we tried to exaggerate as

much as possible, we didn’t want to violate the look of the charac-

Thanks to a new, volumetric fur tool, called Fur Follow Through, the long mane and woolly coat of

Manny and Ellie sport millions of hairs that respond to wind, inertia, and gravity.

For the many still lakes, ponds, and puddles interspersed across the melting

landscape, Blue Sky used Next Limit’s Real Flow and displacement shaders.



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ters from the previous fi lm or, worse, distort the true personality of

the character.” To that end, animators did not exaggerate heavily

on Diego, whose withdrawn nature demanded a subtler approach.

Ellie’s comic delusions about being a possum also demanded

a highly nuanced performance—one that was broad enough to

capture the humor of her delusion but restrained in a way that

showed those delusions stemmed not from stupidity, but psycho-

logical need. “We didn’t want her to come across as dumb,” states

Torres. “She lost her family when she was young and found a sur-

rogate family in two possums. So we wanted to show she was

brassy, smart, and caring, and that her confusion—much like

that of Tarzan—comes from the way she was raised.” Similarly,

because Manny was the “heart” of the fi lm, animators also

abstained from giving him wide-eyed, cartoonish expressions

that would undercut his emotional weight. To capture the roman-

tic subtext in his interactions with Ellie, animators used eye dart-

ing, stuttering, stammering, and eye-contact avoidance.

Freestyle Animation

Artists built all the sets and props

prior to animation. While layout

artists established most of the block-

ings, the animators did a lot of the

camera work themselves, especially

when their performances exceeded

the scope of a shot. In fact, the ani-

mators had more freedom than ever

before in staging their scenes. Only

a few sequences were prevized,

among them Whack-a-Mole and

Balance. In the latter, all the char-

acters fi nd themselves on top of a

rock that’s teetering precariously on

a bunch of other rocks stacked one

on top of the other in the middle of a giant canyon. “The cho-

reography of the characters was extremely intricate and inter-

connected,” says Torres. “Previzing it was a huge collaboration

among animators, previz, layout, and modeling.”

Meanwhile, in Whack-a-Mole, Diego and Sid are twisted into

knots while trying to snatch Crash and Eddie, who keep popping

in and out of holes in the ground. “Previz artists put placeholders

for where the holes would be, judging how far they had to be apart

so that Sid and Diego could reach from one to the next without

being too far from Crash and Eddie,” says Torres. Using this rough

choreography, modelers modeled the ground plane with the holes

in the correct position, and layout artists created the appropriate

camera movements, all of which was then sent to animation.

Refurbished Fur

Thanks to a new, fully voxelized, volumetric fur tool, all the

animals in Ice Age: The Meltdown sport a new coat of fur, each

bearing millions of hairs that respond to wind, gravity, inertia,

and turbulence. In the fi rst fi lm, Blue Sky employed image cards

bearing the image of one to three hair strands. Though alpha

maps and transparency gave them a sense of dimension, their

motion, even in windstorms, was caused by a jiggling of the

cards and appeared somewhat stiff. In contrast, the new fur sys-

tem procedurally draws millions of B splines on each character.

Each point on the spline carries information about its position in

space, along with color, length, density, transparency, and other

attributes. From these millions of hairs, a couple thousand are

selected to be rig hairs, which are attached to the animator’s char-

acter rig in Maya and drive the animation of the other hairs.

To simulate motion dynamics on these “rig hairs,” technical

director Adam Burr wrote a tool called Fur Follow Through, which

adapts the Follow Through tool for fur animation. Using the tool,

the animators could adjust the hair’s drag, inertia, cycle, and settle

time, as well as assign force vectors for wind, gravity, turbulence,

and other environmental infl uences. “You can see the breezes

running through the hair now. And, when characters move for-

ward, the hair is drawn backward,”

explains Torres. In addition, Fur

Follow Through can recognize

when the fur is partially immersed

in water, automatically selecting its

Underwater Follow Through so that

it appears to fl ow with the current.

However, the fur is still not fully

interactive. If, for example, a char-

acter puts its hand to its chest, the

fur would penetrate the hand rather

than compress under it.

Indeed, because the animators

could only see the rig hairs during

animation, their biggest gripe during

production was fur intersection. To

resolve that problem, the team fed all the Maya animation into its

Grinder system, which translated it into scripts for CGI Studio, its

proprietary raytracer. When the rendering was complete, it was the

job of the technical animators to scrutinize each frame for fur pen-

etrations and then notify the character animators. “Often, they’d

Possums Crash and Eddie were squashed and stretched to extremes

using Blue Sky’s proprietary Follow Through tool.

When Sid’s “rig hairs” intersect with a water body, the

hairs automatically assume their wet look, refl ecting

changes in density as they absorb water.



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CG Animation. . . .

see the fur go right through the hand, and we’d have to go back and

alter the animation to bring the hand out of the fur,” says Torres.

With millions of hairs to process and only four months to ren-

der the entire fi lm, Blue Sky moved to a 64-bit architecture for

Ice Age: The Meltdown, upgrading its renderfarm to 1000 2.4 GHz

processors, increasing its storage capacity to 40TB, and installing

new Angstrom workstations running dual 2.4 GHz processors and

Nvidia-based graphics cards. Under the new system, the average

render time per frame was 13 hours. “We used a primitive form

of the new hair for the humans in the fi rst Ice Age,” says effects

lead Eric Mauer. “However, since CGI Studio is a raytracer, which

means all the geometry has to be in the scene

at render time, our RAM footprint for the voxel

bodies was really prohibitive. Each scene had

to be represented in less than 1GB. Through our

new architecture and advancements to the fur-

voxel rendering made by researcher Maurice

Van Swaaij, our RAM footprint for Ice Age: The

Meltdown was 6GB.” In addition, Van Swaaij

also made advancements to CGI Studio that

enhanced the motion-blur effect on the fur.

For creating matted, bedraggled hair,

the process was twofold. When artists pro-

cedurally modeled the fur, they also mod-

eled its wet look, establishing the frequency

with which the hairs would clump and

the changes in density as it absorbs water.

Then, during animation, when the rig hairs

intersected with a water body, the hair rig

accessed the wet or dry fur description, and

morphed between the two.

“Intersections between water and fur are

always a challenge,” says effects lead Kirk Gar-

fi eld. “Because fur and water are both trans-

parent bodies, you have to boolean one out of

the other any time they’re touching. So, within

our pipeline, we came up with templates to

easily boolean out the fur that was in any other

transparent bodies, such as bubbles.”

Digital Deluge

Blue Sky relied on four primary tools for

water simulation: Next Limit’s Real Flow for

creating the crashing, folding waves of the

dam burst; a proprietary tool developed by

researcher Simon Brown called Wave Synth

for the intense, choppy waters that fl ood the

valley after the burst in the third act; a cus-

tomized rig employing Maya Particles for

creating splashes; and a proprietary Froth

tool developed by Rhett Caulier for saturat-

ing characters in a foamy spray.

Once the dam bursts and the main wave passes, the deluge of

fl oodwaters fl owing through the entire set and through which the

characters must swim is the work of Wave Synth. Falling under

the class of spectrum-based techniques, Wave Synth’s fundamen-

tal building block is called a Gerstner wave, which resembles a

sine wave and has been used for a long time in oceanography.

Using such variables as wave height and speed, and simple equa-

tions for calculating how waves move in deep water, Wave Synth

sums together many waves.

While the same technique has been used for such fi lms as

Titanic, Wave Synth differs by not compressing the calculation of

Artists remodeled all the

characters, including the

acorn-obsessed Scrat, using

subdivision surfaces before

rigging them with Maya IK

controls. Then, with Blue

Sky’s proprietary Follow

Through tool, the team

added secondary anima-

tion, and with the Fur Fol-

low Through tool, animated

the hair.



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thousands of waves using Fast Fourier transform, which tends to

compromise the “peakiness” of the waves. Instead, Wave Synth

builds a wave spectrum, choosing only the best waves to add

together, rather than summing thousands of inferior ones. Simply

stated: It’s quality over quantity. “You can add hundreds of waves,

but if you choose bad ones, with the wrong wave heights, lengths,

and speeds, it won’t look realistic,” says Brown. “So, the spec-

trum defi nes the type and amount of waves that will be used to

achieve the most realistic simulation.”

Wave Synth’s ability to regulate a wave’s level of detail with the

proximity of the camera is one of its greatest advantages. It can

produce complex choppy waves close to the camera, but as the

waves recede into the horizon, it will only calculate what is neces-

sary. However, since Wave Synth is tailored for fast-fl owing waves

that swell and crest violently but do not fold over on themselves, it

was not used for the dam burst. For the calmer waters of the many

ponds and still lakes visible at the opening of the fi lm, the artists

used simple displacement shaders, bump maps, and noise patterns.

For any light disturbances of those waters, they used Real Flow.

Because the characters are constantly thrashing about in

water—especially when Wave Synth was used during the deluge

in the third act—the effects animators led the character animators

by providing an animated NURBS patch showing the troughs and

crests of the waterline, so they could choreograph their charac-

ter animation with it in Maya. On the other hand, when the water

simulation was done in Real Flow, effects animators received the

character animation fi rst, and then ran the simulation to match it.

For splashing and spraying water, the artists used a patch-

based Splash rig employing Maya particles. “The rig would

allow us to pose a NURBS patch representing the water sur-

face, emit particles off it, then turn on dynamics and let grav-

ity take over,” explains Garfi eld. “We could put splashes every-

where without breaking the budget. Sometimes, we’d use our

own in-house mesher to fatten the droplets; in other cases, we

would just render it as spray.” While effects artists could make

the splash particles interact with the separately simulated water

surface, they found that it was rarely necessary.

To envelop characters in froth and foam when they’re close

to a large body of water, researcher Rhett Caulier developed a

proprietary froth simulator that worked with Wave Synth. Using

a point-cloud system to represent the water surface, the charac-

ters, and the environments, the tool calculated the intersections

between the geometry, and then procedurally generated the

froth particles that aerated off the water surface, clouding over

the characters. Constrained to the water surface, the froth parti-

cles became part of the main visual cue indicating the direction

and the speed of the current, and used a laminar fl ow-collision

model to swirl around objects in their path. “It’s a collection of

scripts and C++ code that runs entirely within our proprietary

system. So, only after all the data from Maya was fed into our

Grinder could we apply froth to it,” says Caulier.

Effects Animation

Having abandoned texture maps on Robots, Blue Sky continues

to use a proprietary procedural method for texturing, which lay-

ers materials made of various noise functions (see “Mech Believe,”

March 2005, pg. 22). To create the gauntlet of bursting geysers

that the characters must cross, artists used CGI Studio’s Smog tool,

which simulates smoke, steam, clouds, and other aerosols by defi n-

ing an isosurface within which light is scattered and absorbed.

Finally, for Ellie’s dream-like fl ashback to the loss of her

family, artists created the snow in the scene using Maya par-

ticles, instancing them with larger spheres or ice chunks when

the snowfall thickens. To create the footprints in the snow, the

effects team used Z depth maps taken from an orthographic

camera to produce a set of displacement maps in Apple’s Shake.

Many former Disney artists who Blue Sky Studios hired after the

closing of the Orlando studio painted the beautiful deep vistas

of the tundra and backdrops for the valley scenes. Finally, art-

ists generated the grass in the valley using the new fur tool, ani-

mating the millions of blades with Fur Follow Through.

For Blue Sky Studios, Ice Age: The Meltdown entered theatres

leaving a fl ood of innovation in its wake. In fact, the studio is

currently preparing sketches on Wave Synth, the froth simula-

tor, and its splash rig for this year’s SIGGRAPH. Torres empha-

sizes the importance of making each fi lm a learning experi-

ence—an opportunity to grow technically and artistically.

“Everything we do, we learn from,” Torres says. “With each

fi lm, we search for better ways of working, better tools, and are

constantly developing things to help out work fl ow, not only to

make us faster, but to make our jobs easier.”

Martin McEachern, a contributing editor for Computer Graphics

World, can be reached at [email protected].

Blue Sky’s CGI Studio raytraced the entire fi lm in only four months,

including the millions of hairs and complex water refl ections.



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http://www.qmags.com/clickthrough.asp?url=www.xicomputer.com&id=11526&adid=P19A2





. . . . Broadcast


TOP SPOTS

Digital effects

turn in a

game-winning

performance in

this year’s Super

Bowl commercial

showdown

By Debra Kaufman



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Broadcast. . . .

The Ad Bowl, which takes place during Super Bowl Sunday, is a highlight

of the year for advertising agencies, commercial production companies,

and all the visual effects, animation, and post houses serving them. The

commercials—supposedly Madison Avenue’s best—are as much of an

attraction as the game itself, and this year was no exception.

The 2006 super spots appeared to be a notch up from last year, when

cautiousness prevailed, squelching creative, riskier opportunities. As

expected, humor continued to reign supreme, as did commercials featur-

ing animals, particularly those involving Budweiser’s iconic Clydesdales.

The draws, as well as the duds, were the culmination of the hard-

est work in the shortest time, as agencies, pro-

duction companies, and VFX profes-

sionals raced toward a fi xed deadline,

usually with just days to spare. Aside

from being expensive in terms of

work and time, the spots were also

costly in terms of dollars—with an

average price tag of $2.5 million for

30 seconds of airtime. The cost to air

a commercial far exceeded the cost to

create one, even though some of the

special effects-heavy ads reportedly

cost upward of $1 million to make.

With so much at stake, some advertisers

took a chance with an unusual or risky presentation, while others

played it safe with a variation of their tried-and-true formula from

previous years. And then there were those that just plain missed

the mark. The revolving refrigerator—a clever sight gag in which a

“hidden” refrigerator to some luckless Bud drinkers ends up being a

magic refrigerator to the tenants on the opposite side of the wall—

was the all-round MVP this year. Anheuser-Busch also scored a big

hit with “American Dream,” featuring the little horse that could, and

“Superfan,” in which a sheep becomes a memorable streaker. FedEx

also came out on top with a commercial that put cavemen in a cave

offi ce, replete with a troglodyte boss.

The ever-popular Kermit the frog was another hit, as the fuzzy pup-

pet kayaks, climbs, and fi nally reaches his destination—the Ford Escape

Hybrid—all with a song on his puppet lips. Gorgeous cinematography

took a bow with the Cadillac Escalade commercial, with visuals that drew

attention and almost made you forget that there really wasn’t a story.

Here is a closer look at some of this year’s top spots.

“SPORTS HEAVEN”MOBILE ESPN

Agency: Arnold Worldwide

Director: Jake Scott

Production company: RSA

Visual effects: Brickyard VFX

Mobile ESPN makes the entire world “sports heaven,” the

theme of this successful spot. A young executive walks through

the city, so focused on his new Mobile ESPN phone that he

doesn’t notice the superstar athletes everywhere around him:

a group of motocross racers speed out of a parking garage; a

Chicago Cub steals a base across an intersection; a pro bowler

sends the ball rolling down a driveway for a strike.

Brickyard VFX handled all the effects, and touched every

shot with CG imagery and/or compositing. According to

executive producer Jay Lichtman, who is based in the effects

house’s Santa Monica, California, offi ce, Brickyard VFX

started the job with concept boards. “There were no shoot-

ing boards,” he says. “Director Jay Scott was brilliant. He and

his production company went on location and created a live-

action animatic that was very closely timed, and we followed

that. He framed everything the way he wanted. It did change,

but it was a good starting point.”

During fi lming, Brickyard VFX Geoff McAuliffe and Robert

Sethi supervised, collect-

ing camera and lighting

data, refl ection images, and

reference stills. The ele-

ments changed organically

throughout production—up

to three days before deliv-

ery. “There was an intersec-

tion shot with a one-down

marker, which covered

up a lot of the foreground,”

Lichtman recounts. “It cov-

ered up too much action so

the crew removed it, and

we replaced it with two CG

Formula One cars, one CG

NASCAR car, and 18 to 20

CG motorbikes.”

The CG elements were created in Brickyard VFX’s Santa

Monica facility, while most of the tracking, rotoscoping, and

compositing were done in Boston, where Kirsten Andersen

served as that location’s executive producer on the project.

For the replacement shot described above, says Lichtman,

P POTS

Nearly every shot in the live-action spot

for Mobile ESPN was digitally touched

in some way, including this one, with the

original shown above and the fi nal below.



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. . . . Broadcast

the group also had to re-create the world behind the one-down

marker, which required a CG road and buildings.

In another last-minute change,

one player on the Florida Marlins

baseball team was traded to the

Chicago Cubs during production.

“We had to digitally change his

uniform,” Lichtman recalls. In

addition, the marathon shot was

entirely digital, as well. “There

was no ‘marathon button’ on

the computer,” he notes wryly.

Instead, the Brick yard VFX crew

brought in their running clothes

and, one by one, hopped on a

treadmill and were fi lmed against

a greenscreen.

Meanwhile, the in-house pro-

grammer built a script that allowed

him to take the runners and place

them on sprites, which read the

distance that each person’s stride

would carry them down the road

for a realistic animation.

On PCs running Linux, the team

performed all the tracking for the

spot with 2d3’s Boujou, and all the

modeling and animation within

Autodesk’s Maya 7.0. The artists

also used Adobe’s Photoshop for

the textures and painting, Adobe’s

After Effects for rough 3D compos-

ites, and both Pixar’s RenderMan

and Mental Images’ Mental Ray for

rendering. Final compositing was

done on Autodesk’s Discreet Flame

Version 9.2.6.

“It’s a very busy spot, full of ele-

ments,” says Lichtman. “We had to

prioritize [the work], but we also

had to make everything perfect.

The rule we had was that it had to

pass the ‘pause’ test—if someone

paused the image on their DVR, it

would still look great.”

Lichtman continues: “To make

that happen, we needed to have

the very best communication

between the departments and the

artists and the client. We needed

them to understand the post pro-

cess—and they did.”

“SUPERFAN”BUDWEISER

Agency: DDB Chicago

Director: John O’Hagen

Production company: Digital Domain

Visual effects: Digital Domain

Budweiser’s Clydesdales are a familiar touchstone during the

Super Bowl broadcast, and this year’s offering was particu-

larly good. “Superfan” was one of this year’s most memorable

spots, with a whimsical twist as the iconic horses played ball on

opposing sides of a pasture gridiron.

The spot opens on a wide shot of a golden fi eld with snowy

mountains in the distance. The two teams of Budweiser

Clydesdales approach the line of scrimmage in slow motion,

as the fans on the sidelines—goats, antelope, buffalo, foxes,

wolves, and sheep—wait in anticipation of the play. As the

tension builds for the play to begin, a freshly shorn sheep

sprints out onto the fi eld. It’s a streaker, notes one of two

cowboys watching the game. As the fans cheer, the sheep

runs between the horses and then stands on its hind legs, as

a shot of a fox strategically covers the animal’s exposed body

parts for a G rating.

Visual effects supervisor Jonny Hicks notes that the director

asked the VFX team to be involved in the planning stage of the

commercial, since the spot would require so many new, chal-

lenging actions. “We saw the boards of the sheep standing on

its hind legs, waving its front hooves in the air, and shaking its

booty,” recalls Hicks. “We had four weeks from concept to the

fi nished piece.”

Of that production time, one week was spent shooting on loca-

tion at Lone Pine, a small town nestled in a valley between two

mountain ranges, where several animal wranglers looked after

the real bears, wolves, sheep, and other animals, which were

fi lmed individually against greenscreen. The main shoot involved

Fans from the animal kingdom were composited into this live-

action shot as they watched the Bud horses play football.

Last-minute changes were made to

the spot, such as altering a baseball

player’s uniform (fi rst image set).

Also, compositing work on the

second and third set of images

added water and the Heisman

Trophy to the respective shots.



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the Clydesdales and the hero sheep, while the B shoot—accom-

plished using three cameras to get shots from different angles—

captured all the animals that would make up the crowd scene. The

greenscreen was L-shaped, so the crew could get front-on and side

shots of the animals at the same time. To keep the lighting correct,

the greenscreen setup was regularly moved throughout the day to

keep the sun on the animals’ right side.

But the real challenge was getting the sheep to dance. This

was done by three animal handlers wearing green Lycra suits;

they manipulated the sheep’s forelegs for the waving motion and

hips, to keep its legs on the ground and

create a gyrating movement. “There

was quite a lot of trial and error,” says

Hicks. “Once the director saw the

range of motion he could get with the

sheep, we went through a series of

moves and gesticulations so he could

have more choices in the edit.” (The

ASPCA was on hand to make sure the

sheep were treated well.)

“All the magic happened with a lot

of hard work in the Flame,” says Hicks.

There was a huge amount of cleanup

and [image] removal: for instance,

painting the animal wranglers’ hands

off the sheep and painting sheep tex-

tures back in, painting out the skewer

of meat used to get the bear to run, and

removing the collars that many of the

animals wore.

One of the challenges was that, due

to the enormity of the job, the group

had to start shooting the animals

before the crew shot the background

plates the animals would be set into.

The director and his cinematographer

scouted locations carefully, while the

VFX team took notes of where the back-

ground plate would eventually be shot.

That work, in addition to good green-

screen shots, minimized the challenges the artists faced with the

Flame composite.

Another challenge was designing the lineup of the crowd.

“The considerations were visual,” explains Hicks. “We wanted

to give a shape to the crowd, with a center point. The bison was

the imposing center point, and we also got depth with charac-

ters situated in front and behind.” Some of the shots, says Hicks,

comprise 50 to 60 layers. “It was a good, solid composite job that

involved getting every bit of it right,” he adds, “and doing it all

within a very short period of time.”

This Budweiser commercial required a number of shoots, including

those with the animals and a series with backgrounds. Flame artists did a tremendous amount of cleanup in the spot,

including painting the sheep’s animal handlers out of this shot.



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. . . . Broadcast


“GLIDE”NISSAN

Agency: TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles

Director: Jake Banks

Production company: Stardust Studios

Visual effects: Stardust Studios

In a trio of spots for a Nissan Murano campaign, all directed

by bicoastal Stardust Studios’ owner/executive creative director

Jake Banks, the Murano transforms into a manta ray (in “Glide”),

a bird (in “Soar”), and then a paper air-

plane (in “Fly”), all designed to show

how smoothly the vehicle’s Xtronic con-

tinuously variable transmission operates.

“Glide” was the spot that debuted just before Super Bowl XL and

aired during ABC’s Super Bowl halftime show.

For all three spots, Stardust Studios provided the design, live-

action production, animation, editorial, and visual effects. The

facility also previsualized the camera moves (using Autodesk’s

Maya and 3ds Max) for the live-action shoot, building a 3D car in

Maya and moving the cameras to match the car and helicopter per-

spectives. Director of photography Neil Shapiro captured dynamic

shots that matched the storyboard using a camera-car, helicopter,

and locked-down mounts. “We had to shoot the car in a way that

would be in tune with the elements of fl owing, soaring, and

gliding,” explains Banks. “These extremely dynamic camera

moves allowed us to be more free with the animation.”

“The idea was to keep it simple and clean throughout,” Banks

continues. “The big thing we had to fi gure out was how the car

actually transformed into the manta ray. Do the doors fl ip out

and form wings? We went through dozens of ideas about how

to do it. We wanted it to be stylized, with its own feel and look,

and not seem as if it were transforming into a robot.”

The two-day shoot took place on the tarmac at a local airport

in San Bernardino, California. After the edit was locked and

the crew pulled selects of what worked best, the team tried to

mimic the previs. Six artists did roto and cleanup on the car at

the same time as lead animator/visual effects supervisor Shane

Zucker animated the manta ray with rough-rotoscoped footage.

The 3D manta ray was modeled in 3ds Max and animated in

Maya. But before that was done, the group conducted research

using books, videos, and other sources. “A manta ray’s motions are

similar to those of a bat—very fl uid,” says Banks. “We stylized the

manta rays a bit so they weren’t entirely realistic in their appear-

ance, and then rendered them out two different way—with a cell-

shader render and then a shader render—and mixed them together.

The cell shader gave the image an outline, so mixing the two gave

the model more of a graphic quality, more illustrative.”

The artists also incorporated additional layers of bub-

bles, some water, refl ections, and shadows, all a mixture of

Adobe After Effects and Maya.

Cleanup work for the car, which

had refl ections of the camera-car,

was done in Autodesk’s Discreet

Combustion. Lighting is always

tricky when shooting a car,

because the sun is always moving

and the car itself is a giant refl ec-

tive surface. So, the team shot the

scene with the shadow side of the

car to avoid bright hot spots.

“The live-action footage was

very desaturated, so we had to

pump color into it,” Banks says.

“We blew up the car a little bit,

but also had to make sure that we

stayed true to its real color, which was blue. The manta ray was

also blue, to match it to the color of the car.”

According to Banks, one of the challenges in using CG was stay-

ing true to the spot’s overall design. “The key was to keep it clean

and simple, and not add too much,” he explains.

“THE WAVE”BUDWEISER

Agency: DDB Chicago

Director: Paul Middleditch

Production company: HSI

Visual effects: Method Studios

In this spot, the stadium “wave” becomes a way for thou-

sands of people with placards to create an eye-catching

feat: to open a bottle of Budweiser, tilt it so the stream of

beer goes halfway around the stadium of 97,000 virtual

fans to fi ll a glass with the beer, and then drink it down.

After the shooting boards came in, says Method Studios’

producer Kim Wildenburg, the team went through a care-

ful previsualization stage, done by Pixel Liberation Front,

to determine how the spot would cut together and, just as

In the Nissan Murano commercial “Glide,” digital art-

ists crafted stylized 3D manta rays using 3ds Max and

Maya (above), whose fl uid motion matched the

movements of the vehicle (left).



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Broadcast. . . .


important, that the produc-

tion company, agency, and

VFX studio were all on the

same page.

The two-day shoot took

place at the LA Coliseum

with 300 extras, who would

form the foreground, aug-

mented by thousands of

Massive Software characters

situated in the back rows of

the stadium. Wildenburg,

along with Method Studios’

CG director Laurent Ledru,

attended the shoot, which included eight helicopter plates. For

the shot that pans across the entire stadium, the crew moved the

300 extras en masse around the sta-

dium to get nine separate shots.

“The fi rst test was to build the sta-

dium and place the Massive agents

so they lined up with all the plates,”

says 3D VFX artist James LeBloch,

who handled the Massive Software

shots. To solve the problem of placing

90,000 virtual characters within the

rows and aisles, Method Studios’ soft-

ware developer, Andrew Bell, wrote a

script to export placement of the char-

acters from Autodesk’s Maya (used for

modeling) into Massive. “Ultimately,

what we did was model the stadium

as NURBS geometry, and then the

script gave James some controls that

allowed him to defi ne a region on the

model and say how many rows and

seats were in that region,” explains

Bell. “Then the script would iterate

those specifi cations and come up with

a Massive setup that matched.”

All the placards were also CG, ren-

dered in Maya, and the same place-

ment created for Massive was used to

generate the CG cards and put them

in their proper location. The football

teams are also Massive agents, says

LeBloch, who notes the players were

similar agents with adjusted textures and football uniforms. CG

lights matched the lighting in the background plates.

“There was a lot of ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ in the fi rst stage,”

says Wildenburg. “CG would give us the basic pieces and ani-

mation, and we’d comp it with the live-action plates and send

it to the agency and director to make sure we got the timing

correct. Then it was sent back to the artists, who’d get into tex-

turing, lighting, and rendering.”

The cards were animated in Maya but used a plug-in writ-

ten by Bell, a custom instancer that created a particle system to

represent the cards and then create geometry on the fl y. “The

instancer that we wrote exists as a single object inside Maya, but

it’s generating 90,000 individual pieces of geometry for every

card,” explains Bell. “All the cards were animating indepen-

dently, but were treated as one object, which minimized the time

used.” Another tool created by Bell allowed gray-scale values to

express timing, to control when the placards fl ipped over.

“What was nice about that was that I could turn the tool over to

a less technical artist, and that person could experiment with cho-

reography just by painting a texture in Photoshop,” explains Bell.

“He could see in nearly real time how that would modify his ani-

mation. It allowed us to open up the well-understood 2D toolbox to

CG artists built this digital sta-

dium and fi lled it with Massive

agents. They also made and

placed digital placards in the

stadium to achieve the unique

Bud wave, shown here.



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. . . . Broadcast


Multimedia Campaign Culminates in Super Bowl Spot

“FLIP TO MEXICO”FRONTIER AIRLINES

Agency: Grey Worldwide

CG elements: Cell FX

Editing: WildChild

Graphics: Wildstyle

Frontier Airlines’ “Send Flip to Mexico” campaign reached its anticipated conclusion

during Super Bowl Sunday, when audiences found out whether Flip the dolphin got his

wish to be sent to warmer climates or, as the creature had threatened in the fi rst spot,

“Ultimatum,” if it would quit the business. The blitz of 12 30-second and 60-second TV

and Internet commercials was supported by a Flip Web site (www.fl iptomexico.com),

an online petition, leafl et campaigns, billboards, and even a roving Flipmobile.

Viewers were already familiar with the Frontier animal mascots, all of them created by

Cell FX in New York. According to Grey Worldwide vice president/creative Shawn M. Couzens,

WildChild, along with its sister company, Wildstyle, has been working with the agency on the

Frontier account since 2003. “We consider them a creative partner,” says Couzens.

The “Send Flip to Mexico” campaign attempted to blur the line between reality

and fantasy. The talking dolphin was pure

fantasy, but the campaign built around

him included extremely realistic newsroom

and documentary-style fi lm footage as

“newscasters” covered the ongoing drama

of Flip’s imminent departure—either to

Mexico or to the animal mascot unemploy-

ment line. The realistic news-style graphics

were all created in-house by Wildstyle.

“Though the CG Flip was used in the

campaign, the one for the Super Bowl

actually had the least amount of com-

puter graphics,” reports WildChild edi-

tor Neil Miller. “It was more live action,

which was unusual for the campaign in

general.” When the project arrived at WildChild, voice-over artist Joe Barone, at Bar1,

had already laid down the audio track. Miller then put together a cut based on the

track, “faking” the animation by using some older animation sequences done by Cell

FX’s John Bauman.

In the spots, Flip and the other animal mascots are always 2D. “We found that if

they were 3D, they look a little scary, a little creepy when they come off the plane,” says

Miller. As Bauman worked on the animations, he fed them to Miller as QuickTime fi les,

and Miller replaced the “stand-in” animation with the fi nished segments.

One challenge was fi nding new facial expressions and physical actions for Flip.

“We gave Flip some new reactions and motions,” says Miller. “We created a new

physical vocabulary of new facial expressions, something that’s subtle but ones he

hadn’t done before.” The spot was fi nished in Autodesk’s Discreet Flame. “The big-

gest challenge is that any time we fi nish a spot, our standards go up,” says Miller.

“We’re always pushing ourselves to get the most out of it.” —Debra Kaufman

control time.” An additional function of the custom

instancer was to create appropriate, individual tex-

tural information, which enabled the team to use

one shader for all the cards. Texture placement was

generated procedurally using the NURBS stadium

as a reference.

Meanwhile, compositing was done on the

Autodesk Discreet Inferno system, with Mark

Felt serving as the lead 2D VFX artist. The spot

was rendered in Mental Images’ Mental Ray,

with the exception of the Massive rendering,

which was done in SiTex Graphics’ Air using

several PCs running Windows XP repurposed

to form a Linux renderfarm.

“We’re always in the position of coming up with

solutions on the fl y,” says LeBloch. “And we’re

pretty good at it, but that was ongoing all through

this commercial. It was defi nitely one of the most

challenging projects we’ve worked on.”

The Winners and the Losers

Not all the spots at Super Bowl 2006 were win-

ners. In fact, there were a few memorable bombs.

Hands down, the Ad Bowl critics gave a unani-

mous raspberry to “GoDaddy” (a young, shapely

woman tends to have a clothing malfunction)—a

commercial Ad Week’s Barbara Lippert called “a

$5 million vanity project.” All in all, “GoDaddy”

was a tired idea in a tired performance. Even so,

some college marketing students gave it a provi-

sional thumbs-up for grabbing attention.

That was not the only questionable commer-

cial. You’re either a fan or you’re not of the weird

king in the BK spot, and the fast-food giant’s Busby

Berkeley routine with the Whopperettes left more

than one Super Bowl party cold; although, some

thought the vegetable showgirls in the commercial

were amusing. The idea of a big 1940s-style musical

piece, complete with showgirls, must have sounded

like a good idea on paper, but in reality, it just didn’t

play as it was intended.

In all, Super Bowl 2006 set a rather indifferent

benchmark for the annual ad fest. Although the

commercials were, as a group, a better lot than

its tame counterparts in 2005, we can only blame

for so long Janet Jackson’s show for dimming

innovation and edgy ideas. It’s time to take a risk;

that’s what Super Bowl Sunday is all about.

Debra Kaufman is a freelance writer in the

entertainment industry. She can be reached at

[email protected].

The multimedia “Flip to Mexico”

campaign blended digital

elements into news-style fi lm

footage to achieve a look that

melded fantasy and reality.



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1-877-2-ISILON | www.isilon.com

The Leader in Clustered Storage



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small screen

s

By Jenny Donelan

Rich 3D game content

is starting to flow on

mobile phones

f

. . . . Mobile Graphics

run deep


or several years, the business of

mobile gaming has been a game in

its own right—a waiting game.

In particular, when it comes

to 3D content on handsets, “everybody

has been waiting for everybody else,”

says Michael Schade, CEO of mobile 3D

game developer Fishlabs Entertainment.

Developers have been waiting for hand-

sets powerful enough to support their

applications, while handset manufactur-

ers have been waiting for enough appli-

cations to justify upgrading the handsets

that can handle them. Both parties have

been waiting to see which APIs will reign

supreme, and carriers have been strug-

gling with issues like bandwidth, com-

patibility, and customer interest.

“There hasn’t been critical mass,” says

Schade. “That’s why everybody is waiting.”

The only parties not waiting for 3D

mobile gaming to take off are the end

users themselves, the great majority of

whom seem content to shuffl e through

solitaire games at the bus stop, unaware

that developers are burning the midnight

oil to create richer, more complex content

for them. When that content does arrive,

however—and it is starting to—users

will notice, say experts and vendors alike.

The situation is somewhat analogous to

2D and 3D games on PCs—people weren’t

clamoring for 3D applications, but what

they saw, they liked, and weren’t ever

going back to 2D.

What’s not in question is that users are

playing, or at least willing to play, some kind

of game on their mobile phones. In a recent

survey conducted by Sprint, the carrier

determined that more than half of US wire-

less phone customers use mobile phones for



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Mobile Graphics. . . .

something other than talking, and one-third

of respondents said they at least wanted to

play games on their phones (the survey

included users of voice-only phones that

don’t allow downloads like games).

The global story is even more impres-

sive. According to Robert Tercek, chair-

man of the GDC Mobile conference,

nearly 200 million people worldwide

have downloaded games to their mobile

phones thus far. “This makes the mobile

gaming audience the biggest gaming

audience on any platform, even bigger

than the Game Boy crowd,” he notes.

“These numbers dwarf those of console

game players, which hover around 50

million. And mobile gaming is growing

by 50 percent or more each year.”

Indeed, new mobile titles, most

of them 2D, are announced every

month, so the market is lively. Recent

examples include Prince of Persia:

The Two Thrones and King Kong: The

Offi cial Mobile Game of the Movie from

Gameloft, iWin’s Mah Jong Quest, and a

Dilbert game scheduled to ship this fall

from Namco Networks.

But the 3D aspect is what’s hot. “2006

is all about 3D games,” says Sanette Chao,

public relations manager for Gameloft.

And though not everyone has the phones

to handle the 3D content, there cer-

tainly are a lot of those phones out there:

approximately 100 million 3D-enabled

Java-based handsets worldwide, accord-

ing to Fishlabs’ estimate.

However, it would be a mistake to

view games as the killer app for mobile

phones. Last year, ringtone downloads

exceeded those of games. And accord-

ing to a recent report from analyst fi rm

In-Stat, US consumers have expressed

greater long-term interest in mobile

music service, meaning downloadable

fi les or digital radio, than in gaming.

But of course, they haven’t seen the rich

gaming content of the future, either.

A Mobile Market

There are other changes afoot in mobile

gaming besides the push to 3D. Game

goliath Electronic Arts announced late

last year that it was going to buy Jamdat,

a major mobile game developer whose

titles include Tetris, Bejeweled, Collapse!,

NBA 2006, and many others. Such a move

obviously indicates a strong interest from

the PC and console side of the market. It

also indicates a willingness to try new

approaches.

“[EA’s] acquisition of Jamdat, a mas-

ter at the mobile space, clearly shows

that EA understands the need for a dif-

ferent approach in order to be a success-

ful mobile games publisher—the console-

game business models don’t apply in the

mobile space,” says Paul Beardow, chief

technology offi cer of mobile game pub-

lisher Superscape. “Some have tried to take

the console experience to the mobile space.

Most have failed because the way [mobile]

games are played is very different—gener-

ally, they are arcade-style, fi ve minutes of

fun rather than hours of intense play.”

Another big change for companies

involved in US mobile game develop-

ment involves the relative positions of the

market. The US has always trailed Japan,

Korea, and even Europe when it comes to

state-of-the-art mobile applications and

handsets. But that may be changing as

the US market itself grows and evolves.

According to a recent report from UK-based

analyst fi rm Screen Digest, “Japan and

Korea, once regarded as the powerhouses

of the mobile games industry, have seen

their position eroded. During 2005, the

Western markets of Europe and, in par-

ticular, the US have seen rapid growth—

now accounting for 52 percent of mobile

games revenues.”

Technology-Enabled Evolution

Hurdles for mobile gaming implementa-

tion involve compatibility and reliabil-

ity. The phone you buy from one carrier,

for example, may support that carrier’s

game titles and no others, because some

aspects of content delivery and perfor-

mance are hardwired to the actual phone.

In terms of reliability, long-term play can

be frustrating when you lose a signal,

even if it’s only every now and then.

However, technological advances

that will help overcome these hurdles

are appearing from almost everywhere.

“Today, neither the mobile network nor

the mobile handset presents a signifi -

cant obstacle to 3D mobile gaming,”

says Tercek. “Of course, there are still

hundreds of millions of legacy handsets

in the marketplace today. So, most pub-

lishers of mobile games must address

two segments: the vast number of leg-

acy phones that can only depict a game

in two dimensions, and the growing

number of high-end phones that offer

3D graphics.”

Hardware acceleration and new

processor designs are enabling

those more powerful handsets. One

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (above) is

part of an established title, while King Kong:

The Offi cial Mobile Game of the Movie (below)

is tied to a popular movie, making both more

viable mobile titles than most others.

Imag

e cou

rtesy Gam

eloft.

Imag

e cou

rtesy Gam

eloft.



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. . . . Mobile Graphics

approach to the issue of bandwidth is V Cast, a content-deliv-

ery network from Verizon that is powered by the company’s

EV-DO network. Right now V Cast is enabling the majority of

3D mobile gaming in the US. It’s implemented by a so-called

Brew API on V Cast-compatible phones, which Superscape’s

Beardow describes as “probably the best gaming handsets

out there today.”

Superscape’s own Swerve Client, developed in collabora-

tion with chip developer ARM and mobile software company

Sinjisoft, is a software engine that implements the Java Mobile

3D Graphics (M3G) API, formerly known as JSR-184. One ver-

sion of the Swerve Client is for 3D accelerators, and helps reor-

ganize graphical data for optimal performance on different plat-

forms. Beardow says the company is also working on additional

versions that take advantage of new instruction sets and vector

fl oating-point capabilities found in the latest ARM processor for

next-generation handsets.

“These processors, coupled

with 3D acceleration, will take

mobile gaming to a new level of

performance and end-user expe-

rience over the next year or so,”

predicts Beardow.

As far as APIs go, Java and

Brew have percolated to the top

and are now the two leading plat-

forms used to download and run

applications on mobile handsets.

New Titles

All these advances are making

3D gaming a reality. A recent

title in this area is the Java-based

Massive Snowboarding from

Gameloft. The game comes with

eight slopes in four environments,

all rendered in 3D. The quality of

the graphics is superior to what

was available last year at this

time. “[It’s] the ultimate boarding

simulator that’ll make you forget that you’re on your mobile

phone,” the company literature states optimistically. And in

fact, the title does push the envelope in terms of graphics.

Another 3D game, from Fishlabs, is Galaxy on Fire, a

sci-fi adventure that received an award from the German

electronic magazine Airgame for its graphics, atmo-

sphere, play, and so forth. Fishlabs started out develop-

ing the game for Sony Ericsson handsets with HI Corp.’s

3D Mascot Capsule game engine. However, the company

ended up writing its own middleware to optimize the

play and graphics. The game is based on Java, and a Brew

extension version is in the works.

The Casual Connection

Conventional wisdom has it that the primary audience for the

mobile game market are the so-called casual gamers, who fl ip

open their phones to kill a few minutes. The titles that are popu-

lar, notes Beardow, are racing and other sports games, as well as

brands, meaning popular titles (such as Tetris) from other plat-

forms and tie-ins to media events such as movies.

“Brands will be the key at the end of the day,” Beardow says.

“People recognize a big brand...the mobile game doesn’t have to

be the same as the console game, it just has to preserve the cru-

cial elements of the brand and retain its image quality.”

Moreover, most experts don’t believe that there’s anything

other than a niche audience for a complex, long-playing mobile

game. And, the Sprint survey would seem to support the casual

gamer theory. Out of the participants surveyed, 57 percent said

they had played games in the doctor’s offi ce, 52 percent while

commuting, 37 percent while at the airport, and 32 percent

while in the bathroom.

But while agreeing that the casual gamer

connection exists, Fishlabs’ Schade isn’t so sure

that users, console gamers, and others won’t be

attracted to the right game with a bit more depth

to it. Galaxy on Fire, with graphics quality he

describes as close to that of the Sony PlayStation

1 console, has a fairly involved story line but is

still very popular.

“Everybody told us, don’t make such a long,

complicated game, but it worked,” says Schade.

However, he notes that while there is an overarch-

ing, long gameplay, the title also has short action

sequences for those waiting-room situations.

As far as the future of the market is concerned:

“It’ll grow rapidly, though I think there will be

competition for the end

users’ attention with

games vying against

music and TV,” says

Beardow. “But when the

user has fi ve minutes

to kill at the bus stop or

during lunchtime, then

nothing beats tearing

around a track in a fast

car or blowing things up

while venting the frus-

trations of the day.”

Jenny Donelan is a con-

tributing editor for Com-

puter Graphics World.

She can be reached at

[email protected].

With its fast-paced action

amid 3D rendered

environments, Massive

Snowboarding represents

a major step forward

in 3D mobile game

development.

Galaxy on Fire, from Fishlabs, uses high-

end 3D graphics for a longer-than-most

mobile game that also incorporates short

action sequences.

Imag

e cou

rtesy Gam

eloft.

Imag

e cou

rtesy Fishlab

s.



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Modeling/Simulation. . . .

hen director Wolfgang Petersen

wanted to fi lm a 200-foot wave capsizing

an 1100-foot cruise ship for the remake of

the classic 1972 disaster movie Poseidon,

his visual effects supervisor, Boyd Shermis,

contacted Industrial Light & Magic. Petersen

had previously worked with ILM on The

Perfect Storm, which called for a big wave

as well, but for Warner Bros.’ Poseidon, he

wanted something unique.

“Shermis said [Petersen] wanted to

knock over the boat in a graphic way, this

time using waves approaching the boat,”

says Kim Libreri, visual effects supervi-

sor at ILM. “He wanted to build the shot

in a way that hasn’t been built before: He

wanted a dynamic, destructive wave hit-

ting the boat from many angles.” ❯

ILM builds a giant CG model and new

methods for simulating water to help

create the remake of Poseidon

By Barbara Robertson

SIZEMATTERS

W



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. . . . Modeling/Simulation

The boat’s size meant that the ILM crew couldn’t use a min-

iature boat and real water; they had to create the shot digitally.

“We like to shoot water at quarter scale,” explains Libreri. “It

wasn’t practical when it’s meant to hit an 1100-foot-long object,

so [Shermis] asked if it would be possible to do a digital boat

and digital water.”

This isn’t the fi rst time a visual effects studio has created digi-

tal water or a digital boat. But this time, the amount of water col-

liding with a large object and reacting in complex ways was espe-

cially massive. “We had a giant body of water around the boat,”

says Mohen Leo, associate visual effects supervisor. “Near the

end of the movie, we had to run all the ocean around the ship

through the fl uid simulator to move the water and foam around,

and move all the debris in the water.”

That sequence, during which a 200-foot wave rolls the

Poseidon, was one of three created by ILM, one of several stu-

dios working on the fi lm. (The Moving Picture Company, for

example, handled the water inside the ship.) ILM’s other two

sequences centered on the boat: a long, opening shot in which

the camera rises from underwater to follow actor Josh Lucas jog-

ging around the deck, and nighttime shots of the luxury liner. In

all, it took a crew of 80 visual effects artists at ILM, 12 of whom

were CG supervisors, a year to create the cruise ship, the digital

water, and the three sequences.

S.S. Poseidon

To build the digital ship, modelers worked from concept art and

blueprints provided by the production unit for the required set

pieces; ILM’s art director Wilson Tang refi ned the fi nal ship

design. The Poseidon measures 1106 feet from bow to stern, and

224 feet from hull to funnel. All told, modelers built 181,579 ren-

derable pieces (see “Boat Builders,” pg. 34).

“The triangular face count in the basic ship is 1.3 million

faces,” says Vince Toscano, CG set supervisor. “We used a ref-

erence library system that gave us a 10:1 savings. If we hadn’t,

there would have been 11 million faces.”

When the camera draws close, you can see ashtrays, steam

in the hot tub, cabin interiors, posters on the wall, martini

glasses on tables, cameras, cabling, deck chairs, towels, light

fi xtures, and people walking on the deck—all computer-gener-

ated. “You can even see people watching TV inside their cabins,”

says Libreri. “And at night, with over a thousand CG lights, it

looks like a fl oating Las Vegas.”

Modelers built the ship in Autodesk’s Maya, and set dressers

assembled the luxury liner in ILM’s proprietary Zeno software

system. Meanwhile, painters used Zeno and Adobe’s Photoshop

to create texture—80 percent of the textures were painted, fi ve

percent were photographed, and the rest were procedural.

Toscano decided on a Lego approach to building the Poseidon,

using such modular units as cabins, railings, decks, and interi-

ors that snapped into place. To replicate a bridge interior set that

included a library, a bar, and an exercise room, ILM projected

photographs of that set onto geometry within the digital model.

Inside the cabins, curtains appeared closed and open, set dress-

ers varied the furniture, and CG people walked around. “I could

look at the ship in profi le and never see repetition, even with

200 cabins on the side of the ship,” says Toscano.

The team building the digital sets selected parts from an on-

screen catalog, for example, placing a green cushion on one

style of lounge chair and a red one on another, hanging paint-

ings, and adding light fi xtures. Towels folded in various ways

had pre-set simulations to blow them wildly or slowly. “We

had hot spots where pieces could snap onto each other,” says

The 1106-foot luxury liner and surrounding water are digital,

created at ILM for an opening shot during which the camera

follows actor Josh Lucas as he jogs around the deck.



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Toscano. Set-dressing kits varied depending on the shots. Once

the set dressers fi nished snapping pieces onto the modules, they

could use a second kit for parts, such as cabling, that extended

across more than one module.

Artists could view modules on screen in low, medium,

and high resolution, depending on how much of the behe-

moth boat they needed to work with, and could see the entire

ship in proxy mode. Proxy mode approximated the model—a

lounge chair, for example, would look like a bent square with

arms, while a cabin window would be opaque with boxes

inside that represented the interior.

Scene Lighting

Lighters working inside ILM’s proprietary Lux, a lighting mod-

ule within the studio’s Zeno system, could assign materials and

lights to the proxies that the real geometry would use for fi nal

renders; the artists could click on a proxy element and see it in

full resolution. “Even though it’s referencing an archived piece

for rendering, they can still turn it on and see what it looks like,

drape something on it, or put a light on it for rendering,” says

Toscano. “The model lets the artists open up an entire scene.”

In addition to level of detail, the ship builders and texture art-

ists created variations for each piece of geometry that changed

the look. To help with lighting, the basic surface changed

depending on whether the shot was in daylight or at night. In

addition, anticipating the water simulation, modelers optimized

some pieces by capping parts that didn’t need to have water

fl owing inside. And, because the wave smashes the ship, the

set dressers had a special kit fi lled with damaged pieces. “We

took the original models and broke them,” says Toscano. “We

had broken glass, broken chairs, bent arches, metal panels, and

wooden fl oors that broke away and buckled. We stripped the

boat, exposed the understructure, and ripped it up.”

The most intense shot of the ship appears in the beginning

of the fi lm and, at 4300 frames, it’s the biggest shot in the movie.

“It starts out underwater,” Libreri says. “Sun streams through

the ocean surface, and we see this massive structure move.

The camera lifts out of the water and reveals the 1100-foot-long

cruiser. The shot lasts for three minutes.”

Actor Josh Lucas was fi lmed at Sepulveda Dam near Los

Angeles while running in front of a mas-

sive greenscreen. He’s the only live

element in the shot, and a digital

double replaces him half of the time

as the camera follows his jog around

the deck. During the journey, the

camera zooms in close enough to see

ashtrays and bubbles in the hot tub.

“It took a year to get the shot together,”

says Libreri. “We rendered it all with

global illumination using raytrac-

ing in [Mental Images’] Mental Ray. I

don’t think anyone has run global illumination to this level.”

Philippe Rebours set up the materials and the lighting

method, and was CG supervisor for the daytime shot. “The boat

was like a huge creature made of 400 parts,” he says. “It had to

be completely realistic. There were tons of self-refl ections—it’s

made of painted metal. And, it’s so huge that it becomes the

environment itself.”

Lighting conditions included daytime, underwater, and

nighttime scenes. At night, 1000 CG lights illuminated the ship—

cabin lights, deck lamps, and so forth. Rather than have the ray-

tracer determine where the light bounced from all 1000 lights

onboard the ship, Rebours’ team developed a system that, based

on the intensity of the light, automatically defi ned the geometry

illuminated by a particular light. When the boat was underwa-

ter, the lighters could override previously set parameters.

For the daytime shot, the lighters created materials, environ-

ment lights, and a key light that would work with lighting from

the greenscreen shot. “We’d do a prepass to get all the indi-

rect lighting,” says Rebours, “not just the ambient light coming

from the world, but from the ship. For the nighttime shots, we

needed to gather light coming from those thousand lights. They

all needed indirect lighting—especially along the decks.” The

lighters worked with one of 25 model sections at a time. When

they achieved the look they wanted, they’d duplicate it for the

next section and vary it slightly.

Rendering the daytime shot took three days using 300 twin

CPU dual-core 64-bit machines—the equivalent of 1200 proces-

sors. “The whole shot takes 5TB,” says Pat Conran, digital pro-

duction supervisor. “We needed 1.4TB just to store the fl uid sim-

ulation. It’s such a large boat; we had to see massive turbulence

in the water.”

Making Water

To create that turbulence, ILM used its Physbam simulation sys-

tem. “[Shermis] asked us to take CG water and CG water simu-

lations to the next level,” says Leo. “He wanted us to make sure

our water simulations were at a level of detail and realism that

hadn’t been seen before, so we spent a lot of time working with

Ron Fedkiw at Stanford University and his Ph.D. students, and

with Nick Rasmussen in our R&D department.”

ILM had previously used

the Physbam Particle Level

Set (PLS) system for com-

putational fl uid dynamics

described by Fedkiw and

others in many SIGGRAPH

papers. The simulator had

melted liquid chrome in

Terminator 3: Rise of the

Machines, helped a skeletal

pirate drink a glass of wine

in Pirates of the Caribbean:

681 lounge chairs

456 deck chairs

348 tables

45 umbrellas

32 lifeboats

31 life preservers

31 security cameras

44 fi rst-aid boxes

413 signs with directions and warnings

20 newspapers and magazines

73 miscellaneous towels

37 bar glasses (most used glasses: juice glasses)

2 full bars

8 bar stools

ON DECK:

Imag

es ©2006 W

arner B

ros.



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. . . . Modeling/Simulation

The Curse of the Black Pearl, and poured water off a magical ship

in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (see “A Draconian Test,”

January 2006, pg. 26). Now, the studio needed something that

would create all the key elements of dynamic water—the ocean

surface, splashes, spray, foam, bubbles—from a unifi ed, physi-

cally accurate, high-resolution fl uid simulation. But, ILM had

never used Physbam at a Poseidon scale. “In the past, for some-

thing of this scale, we’d typically fake it by sculpting a shape

and using particle emissions on the crest,” says Libreri.

They faced one problem, however: Physbam had a big

appetite for memory and processors. Simulations are diffi cult

to control, and they’re sequential—that is, they start on frame

one, go to frame two, and so forth to the end. What happens

before dictates what happens next, and that adds up to oceans

of production time. “When you’re simulating a volume, every-

thing scales cubically,” says Conran. “We were scaling by a

thousand; we had to fi nd new methods of working.”

So, the Stanford and ILM teams solved the problem by split-

ting the simulation in a frame into multiple pieces that could

run on different processors; that is, they parallelized the fl uid

solver code. “That gave us fast turnaround,” says Libreri. “The

simulations became scalable, and we got higher detail. We were

able to take two waves, collide them against each other, and

as they interacted, the waves would break and particles would

pour off in a simulated way. It was a real breakthrough. We

started to see things we never thought we would see.”

The key was high resolution. At low resolutions, when the

simulation grid was large, the movement looked like that of a

viscous liquid—more like syrup than water. At high resolutions,

the liquid approximated water, inside and on the surface. And,

when the simulated water became the most turbulent, when it

moved with more force than the high-

resolution grid could handle, it ejected

particles. Conveniently, the solver

spit out those particles in places that

matched those areas in a real ocean

where the surface tension would break: the areas where water

turned into droplets and air into bubbles.

“So, we added gravity and buoyancy to these particles, and

used them to represent spray and bubbles,” says Leo. “By track-

ing where the particles hit the main water surface, we could

defi ne areas for foam particles, which were advected with the

fl uid.” In effect, underwater bubbles followed the churning

water; when spray landed on the waves, it became foam, and

the foam moved with the water surface.

“You automatically get a very good fi rst take of cresting

waves, foam on the surface interacting with the boat, and large

events like a wave crashing down on the boat,” says Conran.

“But, if you have a huge particle splash, there are a lot of dynam-

ics going on that are different from surface foam. The foam is

turbulent. It pulls apart and forms into cellular patterns.” Thus,

Willi Geiger, who helped mastermind the particle-based fi ery

lava for Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (see “Dark

and Stormy Knight,” June 2005, pg. 10), worked on perfecting

the surface foam by feeding the removed particles from the fl uid

simulation into another simulation system in Zeno.

Most of the time, the simulation used “one-way coupling.”

That is, the water moved rigid bodies like fl oating deck chairs,

A proprietary particle system

made it possible for ILM to

hand sculpt and choreograph

a 200-foot wave of water that

moved slowly toward the ship.

BOAT BU ILDERSSome Poseidon Stats:

Size: 1106 feet from bow

to stern; 224 feet

from hull funnel

Cabins: 382 on 6 fl oors,

including 2 lofted

penthouses

Portholes: 876

Cabin interiors: 14 unique

furniture layouts in

220 lower cabins

Swimming pools: 3

Hot tubs: 2

Parts: 181,579 renderable

pieces in the base

ship model; 2117 archived

Mental Ray fi les for the

instantiation of the ship

Texture maps: 11GB of

mip-mapped textures



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but the deck chairs didn’t affect the water’s movement. “We

could have had two-way coupling, but it wasn’t necessary for

the most part,” says Leo. In fact, in some shots, although the

simulator moved the life rafts and debris around, to protect

the director’s framing, the crew treated the boat as a hand-ani-

mated rigid object and splashed water against it.

Physbam couldn’t solve everything, though. The simulation

engine was best at moving water surfaces and objects that dis-

placed water. For white water caused by big splashes, the team

used a new particle system in Zeno. “We upgraded the system

to render more particles than before and to do smooth particle

hydrodynamics,” says Leo.

And for the giant wave, the team started with a hand-sculpted

wave and choreographed the particle system. “You couldn’t sim-

ulate a 200-foot wave that moves slowly and reaches threaten-

ingly for a ship,” explains Leo. “A real wave would break or col-

lapse. But we used the fl uid solver for the interaction around the

boat.” By the end of the fi lm, the crew was using the solver even

for small elements. “It became our Plan A,” says Leo. “It was the

most reliable way to create bow wakes and minor splashes.”

Indeed, the solver worked so well that the crew mimicked

practical methods to control it by setting initial conditions and

velocities and letting it run. They dumped “waves” onto the

ship. They pulled a “plug” to make the water disappear. “In

the early days, sims weren’t at the resolution we needed, so we

had to cheat a lot of things,” says Libreri. “Now we can use all

the same tricks that practical effects technicians use. It gave us

such accurate simulations that when we dumped a million gal-

lons of water into a tank, it wiped out the camera.”

Libreri, who was a visual effects supervisor on The Matrix

trilogy, believes that simulation systems such as ILM’s Physbam

and also the custom system used by Munich-based Scanline

for various projects represent an important evolution in visual

effects. “It’s something I’ve talked about for years,” he says.

“Our industry is evolving from emulation to simulation. We’re

beginning to mathematically model the real world, rather than

cheat and pretend it looks right.”

“It’s not the easiest path,” Libreri adds. “It’s the hardest path.

It’s stressful for the director and the producer, but they stuck by

us. Wolfgang [Petersen] and Boyd [Shermis] really helped us

push the state of the art forward.”

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning journalist and a contrib-

uting editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at

[email protected].

ILM created the fi nal composite (above) by (from top to bottom,

at left): fi rst, previsualizing the animation and camera; second,

simulating the turbulent ocean around the ship; third, render-

ing particles for spray, foam and bubbles; and, last, rendering the

sinking ship using raytracing and global illumination.



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Portfolio

36 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2006

E Fr

onti

er Im

age

Gal

lery

Clockwise from top left:

Sunwave 2 By Cube

Murcielago By Bunbun

Virtual Look By Mike Campau

Fei-Fei By Studio Blue Moon

E frontier’s Poser and Shade are tools for the professional digital artist. Yet, their intuitive

structure and attractive price make them attractive to novices and newcomers to the world

of 3D art and animation. According to Daryl Wise, product marketing manager for E Frontier,

nearly half of all Poser and Shade users are professional artists, as opposed to hobbyists.

“There are a number of artists who create fantasy art of inventive landscapes and fi g-

ures,” Wise says of the user base. “And, some prefer photorealistic, lifelike renderings, and

stylized art that is more painterly.” Wise notes that he is unaware of any “signature” look

in regard to the images created by Poser and Shade artists, since they tend to use the same

types of tools available in other high-end modeling and rendering software—GI, raytracing,

path tracing, radiosity, and more. Yet, many of the characters that are incorporated into the



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APRIL 2006 Computer Graphics World | 37

fi nal scene can be recognized as popular Poser models, including James, Miki, and Jessi, or

specifi c scenes and props that are available in Shade or the company’s Vue landscape-cre-

ator program. “Our users create art, both 2D and motion, that is virtually indistinguishable

from photos or motion pictures. A few years ago, this was not possible,” he adds.

Featured on these two pages are images created by Poser and Shade artists.

Presently, the company is sponsoring a unique contest challenging participants to correctly

choose the real image (a photo) from among four or fi ve highly realistic digital images

created in Poser, Shade, or another E frontier 3D application. More images and

animations can be found on E frontier’s Web site at www.e-frontier.com/go/

community/galleries. —Karen Moltenbrey

Clockwise from top:

Something to Believe In By David Ho

Dark Star By Laura Haskell

Dead City Colony 77 By Robert Czarny



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5 days of real-world, real-time graphic, interactive twingularityThe only conference and exhibition in the world that twingles everybody in computer graphics and interactive techniques for one deeply intriguing and seriously rewarding week. In Boston, where thousands of interdisciplinary superstars fi nd the products and concepts they need to create opportunities and solve problems. Interact with www.siggraph.org/s2006to discover a selection of registration options that deliver a very attractive return 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 Center Boston, Massachusetts USA

Tina Blaine (Bean) | Masters of Entertainment Technology, Carnegie Mellon University | Media Interactivist, Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania | 5-year SIGGRAPH attendee

Doug Roble | PhD, The Ohio State University | Creative Director of Software, Digital Domain, Venice, California |1998 Technical Achievement Award, Academy of MotionPicture Arts and Sciences | 14-year SIGGRAPH attendee

IMAGE CREDITS: TouchLIght: An Imaging Touch Screen and Display for Gesture-Based Interaction © 2005 Andy Wilson; Tentacle Tower © 2005 Yoichiro Kawaguchi; Spore 1.1 © 2005 Matt Kenon, SUNY Fredonia; Tina Blaine photo by Charles Palmer; Doug Roble photo by Deborah Shands



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new improved For additional product news and information, visit w w w . c g w . c o m

+


SOFTWARE

C O M P O S I T I N G

A First Look at Nuke 4.5Win • Mac • Linux • Irix D2 Software, a sub-

sidiary of Digital Domain, demonstrated its Nuke

Version 4.5 at NAB2006. Now shipping, Version

4.5 of the Nuke compositing and effects system

boasts a new image-based keyer (IBK), new

user interface mode, and expanded support for

Open FX. The IBK enables users to adjust color

channels individually, as well as provides tools

for overcoming matte edges and the halo effect.

The latest edition also offers artists the ability

to change 3D elements—through the applica-

tion of multiple independent transforms, shad-

ers, and materials, for instance—directly within

Nuke. Nuke 4.5 costs $4995 for the software

license, and annual maintenance costs $999 per

year. Additional render nodes are offered at a

price of $745 per seat. Version 4.5 is a no-cost

upgrade for customers with current support

contracts. Quarterly lease options, volume dis-

counts, and education pricing also are available.

D2 Software; www.d2software.com

3 D M O D E L S

Have a HeartZygote Media Group has introduced Zygote

Human Heart 3, said to be the only animated

3D heart model available for licensing. Targeted

at graphic designers, animators, and scientists,

the model offers realistic detail gleaned from

MRI and CT data, a reduced polygon count,

and support for such popular 3D applications

as Autodesk’s 3ds Max and Maya, NewTek’s

LightWave, Softimage’s XSI, and Curious

Software’s Shade. Included are two high-reso-

lution exterior texture maps from digital photos

of the human heart and an animation of the

full cardiac cycle with cutaway interior views.

Available for licensing from www.3DScience.

com, Human Heart 3 pricing starts at $1200.

Zygote Media Group; www.zygote.com,

www.3DScience.com

I N T E R A C T I V E M A P S

Traffi c Tool Kit Win • Mac Curious Software, acquired last

year by Vizrt, has released Traffi c Flow for the

design, production, and on-air presentation

of traffi c maps. Traffi c Flow encompasses the

company’s Traffi c Producer and Map Presenter

programs. Traffi c Producer provides users

with a template-driven user interface, drag-

and-drop symbols, and the ability to highlight

roadways. It enables users to search the street

database with street names, house numbers,

intersections, or GPS coordinates, as well as

to produce animation using wizards. The Map

Presenter playback system aids users in build-

ing, or importing from Traffi c Producer, a run-

down of stills or animations. Broadcasters can

change the rundown order, add video clips or

live or recorded telestration, or play through

the full rundown automatically or according to

cues from the presenter. Available now, Curious

Traffi c Flow is priced at roughly $5000, depend-

ing on the exact software confi guration.

Curious Software; www.curious-software.com

V I D E O

VDS UpdateWin Maker of automation and content-

design solutions for the postproduction, broad-

cast, cable television, and Internet markets, VDS

has unveiled Version 7 of its Twister HD soft-

ware program. Twister HD Version 7, the next

generation of the company’s Liberty Paint, pro-

vides broadcasters with paint, work fl ow, and

graphic content-creation tools. Twister HD can

function as a stand-alone application or as a

plug-in to content creation, editing, manage-

ment, and display systems. The software pro-

vides users with a variety of brushes and paint

This month, the editors cast a spotlight on product announcements

made during NAB2006, held at the Las Vegas Convention

Center. The NAB Digital Cinema Summit for profession-

als in entertainment technology, creative and techni-

cal production, and postproduction included a key-

note address by fi lmmaker James Cameron. At the

same time, the NAB Post/Production World Conference

portion of NAB2006 boasted keynote speakers Dylan Tichenor, editor of

Brokeback Mountain, and Hughes Winborne, who won the

2006 Oscar for his work editing Crash. NAB is the

annual electronic media show coordinated by

the National Association of Broadcasters. For

additional information about the association

or its events, visit www.nabshow.com.

Product News from NAB2006



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products

utilities, unlimited lay-

ers, image-processing

and masking tools, and

support for third-party

Photoshop-compatible

plug-ins. New to the

latest version are sup-

port for 3D past image

and mask layers, video

grab to canvas function-

ality, real-time paint show to video in SD or HD, and compatibility with

Chyron, Aprisa, Pinnacle, Avid, ORAD, and Quantel hardware. Now avail-

able, Version 7 is priced at $1500 for the plug-in and $2500 for full stand-

alone software; complete turnkey HD systems begin at $24,000.

VDS; www.videodesignsoftware.com

MTI Film FindingsWin NAB2006 set the stage for the debut of MTI Film’s Control Dailies

2K and Correct DRS (Digital Restoration System) Version 5. The Control

Dailies 2K image and audio-control environment aids users in the delivery

of motion-picture dailies and image transfer, metadata collection, post

synchronization, and output tasks. The new solution sports the Control

Color integrated primary color corrector and built-in Still Store, a utility

that MTI Film co-developed with Silicon Color. Version 5 of the compa-

ny’s Correct DRS fi lm and video restoration and fi nishing software now

provides the ability to record to image fi les (DPX), save and reuse custom

look-up tables (LUTs), and rename and drag and drop clips. Other fea-

tures in Version 5 include a new recording console, three-layer dirt detec-

tion, pan constraints, clip-to-clip rendering, and improved cut detection.

MTI Film; www.mtifi lm.com

Video Authoring for the PSPWin Sony Media Software has updated its Universal Media Disc (UMD)

authoring software suite. UMD Composer 2 is designed to aid fi lm stu-

dios and production houses in the production of UMD Video and UMD

Music titles. Enabling users to format video-based UMD discs, Version 2

includes such enhancements as refi ned distributed encoding for improved

effi ciency and a streamlined setup process. Also new to the software suite

is a stand-alone multiplexer, which enables multiplexing and encoding pro-

cedures to operate on separate

workstations; in this way, UMD

Composer 2 enables concurrent

multiplexing for increased pro-

ductivity and effi ciency. UMD

Composer 2 features documenta-

tion, samples, and tools designed

to provide stream encoding and

multiplexing, playlist composition,

previewing, compiling, image generation, and image checking. Included

in the software suite are the Stream Composer Package, aiding in the pre-

view of the encoded stream fi le and generating a PlayList fi le; the Video

Interactive System, with utilities for testing and validating menus in a PC

environment; and the Image Creator Package, for converting fi les into

UMD disc images and verifying their compliance. Users with a current sup-

port agreement can upgrade to Version 2, now available, free of charge.

Sony Media Software; www.sony.com/mediasoftware

HARDWARE

V I D E O

Northlight 2 DebutsDuring NAB2006, FilmLight demonstrated its Northlight 2 scanner.

Equipped with new sensor technology, optics, and electronics enable, the

upgraded device is able to achieve scanning speeds up to four times faster

than with the previous version. These enhancements allow the system to

input two frames per second at 2K quality and one frame per second at

4K. Also new to Northlight 2 are infrared scanning, archive and restora-

tion features, and support for third-party dust-removal applications.

FilmLight; www.fi lmlight.ltd.uk



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And not having to rely on advertising rev-

enue means that casual game developers

can focus more on the games themselves

without having to build out a sizable sales

staff to sell ad space.

What staff is required?

The combination of a viable sales

model and the growing penetra-

tion of fast ’Net connections that

allow consumers to download an

average-size casual game in its

deluxe form (about 8 to 10MB) has helped

grow this market tremendously. Casual

games are still built by small groups of

developers/artists on modest budgets (three

to eight people, $200K budgets vs. 100 or

more people and $5 million to $10 million

budgets for hard-core games). But the tools

to build the games, the means of getting

those games into consumers’ hands, and

the devices on which those games can be

played all continue to evolve rapidly, keep-

ing the casual games sector vibrant and

innovative in ways that the traditional video

game sector lost or forgot many years ago.

How vibrant is the market?

The casual games sector is a

$500 million to $1.5 billion

industry today, and is expected

to grow to $3 billion to $8

billion in the next few years.

The disparity in these fi gures is due to

some fi rms breaking out certain types of

games, or certain distribution channels

(some casual games are sold at retail, for

example) or platforms (most importantly,

mobile). Figures peg the overall audience

at 100 million people, all playing casual

games on a monthly basis.

Why do you think casual

gaming is an area to watch?

One key reason is the advent of

mobile entertainment. From cell

phones to PDAs and new ‘ultra

mobile PCs,’ consumers are get-

ting more mobile and taking more com-

puting power with them wherever they go,

even if they only carry a cell phone. The

vast majority of tradi-

tional video games don’t

translate well to mobile

devices—the process-

ing power, data storage

capacity, input controls,

and broad appeal of

mobile devices, espe-

cially mobile phones,

make them really well

suited to casual games,

which are fun even in

small time increments

of 5 or 10 minutes. Also,

they don’t require you

to read a manual to play, have basic game

controls that are easily adapted to mobile

handsets, appeal to all ages and both gen-

ders, and much more.

Is there room for creativity

and innovation?

Unlike traditional video games,

with their massive develop-

ment teams, movie and comic-

book tie-ins, and enormous

marketing budgets, casual games must

succeed on their own merit. So casual

game developers must innovate at a very

fundamental, archetypal level—you can

only make so many ‘match three’ type

of games before you’ve exhausted the

subject. Casual game developers are also

in a position to do more experimenta-

tion than traditional game developers

are. It’s a lot easier to shelve a $200,000

project midway through than a $5 mil-

lion project. So we in the casual games

space are always trying new ideas, many

of which never see the light of day. But

those that do work are generally differ-

ent and novel.

Who is the typical casual

game player?

The typical casual gamer is

a 40-something woman. At

PopCap, 72 percent of our

seven million monthly visitors

are female, and fully three-quarters are

over the age of 35. This is refl ective of

the industry as a whole.

What attracts players to

casual games?

The attraction is different for

everyone, of course, but some

of the common themes that

we hear include: great graph-

ics; easy, straightforward controls and

game rules; addictive gameplay; atten-

tion to detail; and the engagement. The

engagement factor behind successful

casual games is the fi ne balance between

challenge and reward—casual game fans

want to jump in and be playing the game

within a minute of purchasing or down-

loading it. But, they want it to remain

fun and challenging for a long time.

Do casual games span

other game genres?

A casual game can really be in

any genre: a puzzle game like

Bejeweled or Tetris, an action

game like Zuma or Pong, or

weird stuff such as rhythm/dancing

games like Dance Dance Revolution or

even The Sims.

Are casual games going 3D?

Visually, the games are becom-

ing more sophisticated, with

megabytes of high-quality, pro-

fessional artwork. Yet, beyond

fl ashy effects, there’s not a

whole lot that 3D can add to a game

like Tetris, Bejeweled, or Solitaire; they’re

just 2D games at heart, and I think a

lot of games will continue to be 2D in

In PopCap’s Insaniquarium for the PC, Pocket PC, and Palm,

players feed the fi sh, fi ght aliens, and solve timed puzzles.

continued from page 44



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the future by their inherent nature. Also,

casual game players have older comput-

ers with substandard video cards, and

for them, 3D isn’t practical.

How long does it take to

develop a casual game?

In theory, they can be done

very quickly—a matter of

months with a small team of

three to fi ve people. In practice,

the dev cycle has been getting longer, for

several reasons. First, the bar for produc-

tion quality has been rising, so you need

to spend more time on art, sound, music,

and so forth.

Is there a key to a

successful casual game?

They need to be addictive and

fun, like any game. But where

a casual game differs from a

traditional console game is

that it is often meant to be relaxing or

soothing instead of energizing or excit-

ing. A lot of casual game players play

games to unwind after a busy day. The

most successful casual games are often

the ones that don’t require too much

concentration.

What are some of your

most successful games?

Bejeweled and Bejeweled 2 are

our fl agship games. They’re

just very simple, elemental

puzzle games. Zuma is

probably our second-biggest hit; it is

more action-oriented than Bejeweled, but

still easy to get started.

What makes some of your

recent titles compelling?

Chuzzle was our big hit from

last year. Like Bejeweled, it’s

a match-three type of game,

where you have to shuffl e rows

of furry critters to get three or more of

them adjacent to one another. The char-

acters are a big part of its appeal; we

worked hard to make the Chuzzles cute

and fun to click on. Also, Feeding Frenzy

2 is our most recent release. It is an

arcade game whereby you control a fi sh

that must navigate an ocean environ-

ment, eating smaller fi sh to grow larger,

while avoiding getting eaten in turn.

What is the longevity

of a casual game?

A hit casual game can be a

solid seller for years. This is

largely due to the fact that

these games can never

be fully mastered; the

game continues to present

increasingly diffi cult decks

or levels.

Is the number

of developers

entering this

space growing?

Developers con-

tinue to enter the

space because it’s

perceived as easy money.

The reality is that because

of the try-before-buy sales model, any

me-too copycats generally don’t suc-

ceed. Developers also continue to enter

the casual games space because they see

the money that’s being made and want a

piece of the pie.

Is the user base growing?

The user base continues to

grow as more people become

aware of casual games and

more people have fast ’Net

connections that make down-

loading a 5 to 10MB game

quick and painless. Also, most peo-

ple’s leisure time continues to become

fragmented; other than while you’re

on vacation, how often does the aver-

age working adult have three hours to

set aside for a session of CounterStrike

or Halo 2? As consumers increasingly

seek short mental breaks while waiting

at the bus stop, airport, doctor’s offi ce,

grocery store, and so forth, casual

games grow in their appeal.

Are there any new trends

in the content?

Along with mobile, one inter-

esting new market is the Xbox

360. While this caters in the-

ory to the hard-core gaming

market, the 360’s Live Arcade feature,

where you can download simple games

for $5 to $10, has been extraordinarily

popular. For the fi rst time it offers con-

sole gamers the chance to buy simpler

games of the sort that PC users have

had access to for years.

What can we expect

in the near future?

There’s a lot more competition

in the market than there used

to be, and that probably means

there will be some consolida-

tion in the fi eld, with some companies

getting acquired or dropping out. Also,

there has been a lot more interest in the

space from bigger media and game com-

panies lately, and they may change the

landscape if they aggressively start buy-

ing or building their own casual game

ventures. Furthermore, Asia is a large

gaming market, and there’s a lot of buzz

around multiplayer or community-based

games, which are prevalent there and

elsewhere. There’s also discussion about

following the Asian lead in basing games’

economics around avatars, subscriptions,

or microtransactions. Nobody has quite

made this work in the West yet, but it’s

probably only a matter of time.

In Bonnie’s Bookstore unique word puzzle game, players

help the main character become a children’s book writer.



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index t

o a

dvert

isers


@XI Computer www.xicomputer.com 19

ACM Siggraph www.siggraph.org/s2006 38

Alias Systems www.alias.com 2

Blackmagic Design www.blackmagic-deisgn.com 5

BOXX Technologies www.boxxtech.com/apexx4 9

D2 Software www.d2software.coom 15

e-Frontier www.e-frontier.com/go/cgwcontest 10

eovia www.eovia.com C4

Isilon Systems Inc. www.isilon.com 27

Metro Orlando Economic Development www.orlandoedc.com C3

Okino Computer Graphics, Inc. www.okino.com 40

Rorke Data www.rorke.com 11

Softimage Avic www.softimage.com/face_robot C2-1

advertiser phone or web page

The ad index is published as a service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.

index t

o a

dvert

isers

April 2006, Volume 29, Number 4: COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD (USPS 665-250) (ISSN-0271-4159) is published monthly (12 issues) by COP Communications, Inc. Corporate offi ces: 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204, Tel: 818-291-1100; FAX: 818-291-1190; Web Address: www.cgw.com. Periodicals postage paid at Glendale, CA, 91205 & additional mailing offi ces. COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD is distributed worldwide. Annual subscription prices are $55, USA; $75, Canada & Mexico; $115 International airfreight. To order subscriptions, call 847-559-7500.

© 2006 CGW by COP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without permission. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specifi c clients, is granted by Computer Graphics World, ISSN-0271-4159, provided that the appropriate fee is paid directly to Copyright Clearance Center Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 USA 508-750-8400. Prior to photocopying items for educational classroom use, please contact Copyright Clearance Center Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 USA 508-750-8400. For further information check Copyright Clearance Center Inc. online at: www.copyright.com. The COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD fee code for users of the Transactional Reporting Services is 0271-4159/96 $1.00 + .35.

POSTMASTER: Send change of address form to COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD, 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204.



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dropbackInterview by

Chief Editor Karen Moltenbrey

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A44 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2006 w w w . c g w . c o m

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Jason Kapalka is chief creative offi cer

of PopCap Games, a casual game

developer for the Web, PC, mobile

phones, and other digital entertain-

ment platforms. Kapalka founded

the company in 2000 along with

Brian Fiete and John Vechey.

When did you get into the

casual gaming space?

Initially, I had been writing for

Computer Gaming World, and

then went to San Francisco

during the dot-com era to join

the Total Entertainment Network (TEN),

which would later become pogo.com. I

was there from 1995 to 2000—the full

boom-to-bust cycle. TEN started out

as a hard-core gaming service featur-

ing subscription titles like Duke Nukem

and Total Annihilation. However, as the

trend for these sorts of games evolved

into offering free play over the Internet,

TEN’s business model changed (several

times) as well.

How did that market change

affect your direction?

I went from producing multi-

player tank games to casual

games such as...Bingo! My fi rst

thought was, how do you make

this not totally boring? The online bingo

games in 1998 were fairly primitive. I

ended up with a design that’s still used

on pogo today...basically slapping a chat

room onto a single-player game. You’re

not directly interacting with other players,

but they still give you a sense of commu-

nity, which is important in online gaming.

Why did you stay in the

casual game space?

Like most of the casual games

people, I started in the hard-

core gaming space, and at

fi rst wasn’t sure about these

seemingly mindless little games. But as

I started working on them, I began to

understand several things...that making

a simple game was actually a lot harder

than making a complex one, and that

making games accessible to everybody

was more challenging and rewarding

than making games for a niche audience

of hard-core gamers.

How have casual games

changed or evolved?

When I fi rst got involved in 1997,

it was a very young fi eld, with

numerous dot-com start-ups

viewing the casual games space

as a source of ad revenue. At PopCap,

we even tried the ‘free games supported

entirely by ad and sponsorship dollars’

approach at the outset, only to watch the

ad-supported model crumble as the dot-

com boom ended. We believed that there

was a lot of opportunity in the area of

more sophisticated, original game concepts

in genres like puzzle games, word games,

and classic arcade-style action games, but

the business model for casual games—unil

then, ad revenue—was looking grim.

How did you respond?

We decided to try the shareware

model fi rst used in the earliest

days of PCs: try the game for

free, and if you like it, send us

money. We refi ned this a bit by

making the deluxe versions of the games

more involved, with additional bells and

whistles, so the consumer could further

justify paying for something that he/she

could essentially get for free.

That model was successful?

This try-before-you-buy model

has been extremely effective, and

is now used by nearly everyone

in the casual games business as

the primary source of revenue.

The genre may be called ‘casual gaming,’ but with a large

user and revenue base, it is serious business

Casual Approach

Casual gaming is big business, and getting bigger all the time, as Web-based developers

like PopCap are now porting their games to other platforms, from cell phones and PDAs to

the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade aspect of the third-generation game console. While the types

of games in this space are expanding, most are still puzzle and card titles. Designed for

people of all ages and gaming experiences, casual games tend to draw more women than

other gaming genres. Most appealing about casual games is they do not require a large

time commitment from players. Also, many are fully downloadable from the Internet, so

their fi le sizes tend to be small, so casual games do not have the breathtaking aesthetics

of compelling PC or console titles. However, that doesn’t mean that the new generation of

casual games is not focused on graphics. For instance, PopCap’s extremely popular Bejew-

eled 2 puzzle game includes some impressive 3D animations that are used primarily as

cut-scenes as the player advances to a higher level of play, while only modest changes have

been made to the graphics in each basic game level.

continued on page 41



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C A L L 8 8 8 . T O P. C I T Y O R V I S I T O R L A N D O E D C . C O M

where companies dream in hypercolor.

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Arts, specialized higher-ed training programs, and the

world’s largest concentration of simulation developers,

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