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www.cgw.com August/September 2012

Animators use CGI to create Hotel Transylvania’s graphic look

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1August/September 2012

ON THE COVER

SEE IT IN

The artists at Sony Pictures Animation used non-photorealistic rendering throughout the fi lm for characters and backgrounds, including Dracula’s immense castle in the clouds, home to the Count and his family, as well as a montage of monsters seek-ing refuge from humans. See pg. 8.

• Editing FX’s Wilfred. • A look at cameras and post. • Director Todd Solondz on Dark Horse. • Student to Pro: Making the transition.

Features

Pose by Pose

8 Artists at Sony Pictures Animation create a unique, cartoony look for Dracula and his friends at the monsters-only resort Hotel Transylvania.

By Barbara Robertson

Back in Style

17 A pair of 2D games uses new technology to revive the retro look. By Karen Moltenbrey 18 Fine Tooning 21 Second Act

In Harm’s Way

24 Digital humans are playing major roles in industrial and scientifi c applications, performing tasks that help keep their human counterparts safe. By Kenneth Wong

Face Forward

32 The ParaNorman team uses CG for a range of tasks on the stop-motion fi lm, including designing and outputting facial expressions via a 3D printer. By Barbara Robertson

One Frame at a Time

38 The crew augments the stop-motion feature Frankenweenie with digital environments and CG effects. By Barbara Robertson

The Hunger Game

42 Storage companies try to keep up with the demands of studios. By Douglas King

COVER STORY

August/September 2012 • Vol. 35 • Number 5 I n n o v a t i o n s i n v i s u a l c o m p u t i n g f o r D C C p r o f e s s i o n a l s

DepartmentsEditor’s Note What’s Old Is New Again

2 Classic-style animation seemed to have gone out of fashion when CGI became the de-facto medium. However, that does not mean that today’s audiences lack the appreciation for traditional animation.

Spotlight

4 Products Maxon’s Cinema 4D Release 14. Side Effects Software’s Houdini, Orbolt Smart Asset Store. News Graphics Shipments Increase in Q2.

Portfolio

30 SIGGRAPH 2012 Computer Animation Festival.

Back Products

48 Recent hardware and software releases from SIGGRAPH 2012.

Computer Graphics World reveals its best-of-show winners from SIGGRAPH 2012.

See Page 6

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2 August/September 2012

The Magazine for Digital Content Professionals

EDITORIALKAREN MOLTENBREY

Chief [email protected] • (603) 432-7568

CONTRIBUTING EDITORSCourtney Howard, Jenny Donelan, Kathleen Maher,

George Maestri, Martin McEachern, Barbara Robertson

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COP Communications

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Editor’sNote

Recent awards:

Not long ago, I was searching for an extension cord and came across a stash of VHS movies that I used to watch with my son when he was young: 101 Dalmatians, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Mulan, Cinderella .... I even found our old VHS/DVD

player. It was a rainy Saturday, so I decided to watch some of these old favorites. I tried to get my now-teenage son to join me, but he was far more interested in shooting up something on the Xbox. I have to admit, I enjoyed my trip down Nostalgia Lane, despite the fact that, for

years now, I have focused my attention on the very best that CG has to offer.

My little diversion seems especially appropriate now, given the unplanned theme of this issue, as many of the stories seem to take a twist or turn back to a more classical style of animation—albeit still using current cutting-edge technologies.

For the past decade or longer, “animation” to me, as well as most, has come to mean CGI. And we have come to love the bright, bold imagery of Toy Story, Ratatouille, Up, Finding Nemo, Monster House, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The Guard-ians, and more. Yet, that does not diminish our appreciation for the hand-drawn beauty of traditionally animated features or stop-

motion films. When CGI features took over at the box office, every now and then they were joined by a stop-motion production, such as Chicken Run (2000), Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), Corpse Bride (2005), and of course, Coraline (2009) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). Things really started getting interesting when stop-motion filmmakers incor-porated computer graphics to enhance certain scenes, using the best of both worlds to achieve their vision. This year alone we are being treated to a bevy of stop-motion films: The Pirates! Band of Misfits, which we covered in the April/May issue, and ParaNorman and Frankenweenie, which are detailed in this issue. Each has a different look and feel, illustrating just how diverse stop motion can be today, particularly when present-day methodologies and techniques are incorporated into the mix.

Then we have Hotel Transylvania, a thoroughly modern CGI film, created with the latest tools, that has a hand-drawn, cartoony aesthetic. For this animated feature, it wasn’t about making something physically believable (the crux of CG) but more about design. In fact, the task for animators on this project soon became more about stretching characters (and technol-ogy) beyond their limits to achieve what could be described as something visually unique.

Next, we move into the interactive realm with a pair of 2D game titles that use new tech-nology to bring a graphic style from the past to today’s high-tech gaming platforms. Ubisoft’s Rayman Origins and React Entertainment’s The Act take players into rich worlds created by hand, for a different type of gaming experience compared to what we have grown accustomed to of late.

The theme of “What’s Old Is New Again” can also be used to describe some of the offer-ings at SIGGRAPH 2012, as vendors demonstrated new developments in motion capture, 3D printing, head-mounted displays, and more. Of course, we were also treated to new offerings from some first-time SIGGRAPH exhibitors, as well as impressive upgrades to industry-stan-dard software and hardware. Be sure to visit www.cgw.com for a recap of the show, and read about what impressed us the most as we reveal our annual Silver Edge awards in the Spotlight section of this issue.

What’s Old Is New Again

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Graphics Shipments Increase in Q2

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) revealed its findings for the estimated graphics chip ship-ments and suppliers’ market share for the second quarter. And, the news was good—

for most. Intel had gains in both desktop (13.6%) and notebook (3.8%), led mostly by Sandy Bridge. Nvidia gained in the notebook discrete segment (6%), and AMD saw gains in the discrete desktop category (2.5%).

This was a good, if not a great, quarter for the suppliers. Graphics shipments during Q2 ’12 bucked the downward PC trend and rose 2.7% from last quarter as compared to -1.5% for PCs overall.

The popularity of tablets, combined with the persistent five-year recession, have been contributing factors that have altered the nature of the PC market. None-theless, the CAGR for PC graphics from 2011 to 2016 is 6.3%, and JPR expects the total shipments of graphics

chips in 2016 to reach 688 million units. The 10-year average change for this quarter is a growth of 2.27%. This quarter is ahead of the average, with a 2.5% increase.

The Quarter in General■ AMD’s total shipments of heterogeneous GPU/CPUs, ie APUs, dropped 13.8% in

the desktop from Q1 and 6.7% in notebooks. Ironically, the company had a 55.8% increase in notebook IGPs, but it was only 300,000 units.

■ Intel’s desktop processor graphics EPG shipments increased from last quarter by 6.3%, and notebooks showed double-digit growth of 13.9%.

■ Nvidia’s desktop discrete shipments dropped 10.4% from last quarter; however, the company increased mobile discrete shipments 19.2% largely due to share gains on Ivy Bridge, which included ultrabooks. The company will no longer report IGP shipments.

■ Year to year this quarter, AMD shipments declined 1.6%, Intel shipped almost 20% more parts, Nvidia shipped fewer parts (-22.0%) but that was because it exited the IGP segment, and VIA saw shipments slip by 18.2% over last year.

■ Almost 126 million graphics chips shipped, up from 122 million units in Q1 and up from 118 million units shipped in Q2 2011.

■ Total discrete GPUs (desktop and notebook) increased a modest 0.5% from the last quarter and were down 7% from last year for the same quarter due to the same problems plaguing the overall PC: continued HDD shortage, macroeconomics, softness in Western European market, and the impact of tablets. Overall the trend for discrete GPUs is up, with a CAGR to 2015 of 5%.

■ Ninety percent of Intel’s non-server processors have graphics, and over 68% of AMD’s non-server processors contain integrated graphics.

Maxon has unveiled Release 14 of its Cinema 4D, which includes a new, fully integrated sculpting system, new camera matching functionality, the debut of exchange plug-ins to

two key applications (The Foundry’s Nuke and Adobe’s Photoshop Extended), and improved integration with Adobe’s After Effects. Packed with other workflow enhancements, R14 will enable creative professionals to produce 3D content more fluidly and collaborate more efficiently.

Maxon is offering four versions of Cinema 4D, each geared to 3D artists in different industries.

Multiple enhancements in R14 offer artists a more flexible tool set to achieve greater rendering realism and compositing control. New and improved shaders and materials are now available for simulating wood grain, weathering effects, and normal mapping. Global Illumination has been enhanced with new technolo-gies, such as Radiosity Maps and the unified sampler from the Physical Renderer. Also, new algorithms in R14 provide up to twice the speed for caustics; the software also contains further enhancements to subsurface scattering render materials.

Pricing varies according to pack-ages, with the most robust version, Cinema 4D R14 Studio, selling for $3,695.

Maxon Rolls Out Cinema 4D R14

The quarter’s change in total shipments from last quarter decreased 0.8%; the 10-year average is 3.1%. Source: Jon Peddie Research

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Change from Q4 to Q1, 10-year av: -3.16%

Change from Q1 to Q2, 10-year av: 7.15%

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SIGGRAPH. There’s no trade show quite like it. It truly is the one place where art and technology merge, where right-brainers

and left-brainers are in sync. Where else can a techie speak geek to a director while the two are united in a meaningful conversation?

This year, the conference returned to its “home base” of Los Angeles, which meant more—more attendees, more booth space on the show floor, more discussions…just more, in general. This year saw more than 40 first-timers on the exhibit floor—among them, The Foundry, Unity Technologies, and VanGogh Imaging—showing their technologies alongside others that are considered SIGGRAPH veterans.

No question, the exhibition floor at SIGGRAPH 2012 was bustling with activity. Motion capture remained a popular technol-ogy, with a number of vendors setting up capture volumes in their booth, as a model danced and pranced on stage while a monitor showed the resulting animation after the acquired data was applied to a CG character. Making a return were companies offering head-mounted displays for exploring virtual environments. Included in this category was Infinite Z with its zSpace, which received a CGW Silver Edge Award earlier this year from GDC 2012. Having an increased presence this year on the show floor and outside the Emerging Technologies area were 3D printers, from the inexpensive (MakerBot was showing its $1749 Replica-tor), to the novel (MCOR, whose Matrix 300 uses regular copier paper as the printing medium), to the higher end (such as those from 3D Systems and Z Corp.). Of course, graphics boards and 3D content creation software were on full display, as they are every year. And as contributing editor Kathleen Maher points out, “the number of raytracing companies are multiplying like rabbits,” as evidenced by a large presence at the show. One vendor whose tech was particularly intriguing was Imagination, with its Caustic Visualizer plug-in for Maya.

So, what did the staff of Computer Graphics World find espe-cially interesting and deserving of the magazine’s Silver Edge Award for best in show at SIGGRAPH 2012? Here’s our picks.

Maxon’s Cinema 4D Release 14. For years, Maxon’s Cinema 4D has offered some great tools for 3D content creation. But with the latest version of the 3D motion graphics, visual effects, painting, and rendering software application, which the company is calling “a milestone release,” Maxon has established itself as a very serious contender in the DCC space. New features for the 3D suite include a new, fully integrated sculpt-ing system that is based on the company’s production-proven BodyPaint engine. The package continues its tight integration with compositing by adding a seamless connection to Nuke, along with an exchange plug-in to Adobe Photoshop Extended.

Side Effects Software’s Houdini. Side Effects, like its 3D content creation software, Houdini, is hardly new to the indus-

try—it is celebrating its 25th anniversary. And throughout this time, the software has been a workhorse. Not long ago, the company released Version 12. Built on a new geometry engine, Houdini 12 includes targeted optimizations to dynamics and rendering, and a reworked OpenGL 3 viewport. The big news, though, is the significant price cut and subsequent rebranding. Houdini FX (formerly Houdini Master) includes all the popular Houdini features, including some of the best particle, fluid, and cloth tools in the industry. It is now priced at $4,495. Houdini (formerly Houdini Escape), which is the base product and includes modeling, rendering, and animation tools, costs $1995.

NewTek’s LightWave 3D. In the past, it took quite some time for NewTek to get a new version or release of LightWave 3D out the door. Not so now—and these are not your small incremental releases, either. Just announced and soon to be released is Light-Wave 11.5, featuring the new Genoma modular character anima-tion and instant rigging system for quickly rigging a simple biped or quadruped before animating it in Modeler—no special rigging tools are needed. The update also contains flocking tools, instances, soft-body bullet dynamics, and more, including interexchange support for Adobe After Effects and Pixologic’s GoZ Fiber Mesh. Rivaling this news was the announcement of the newly formed LightWave 3D Group under the watchful eye of its president, Rob Powers—news that excited current (and, no doubt, future) LightWave users. NewTek remains the parent company, but now the software has its own dedicated group to oversee develop-ment. I am not sure if it was the software update or the corporate news, but LightWave 3D was a popular destination at the show. No doubt it will be a revitalized force to be reckoned with.

AMD’s FirePro W cards. For years, Nvidia and AMD have battled it out in the DCC space. But in this graphics arms race, AMD seems to have pulled ahead for the time being with its next-gen FirePro W cards (W9000, W8000, W7000, and W5000), offering up to four teraflops of graphics computing power on the high-end W9000. The new FirePro GPUs are based on the company’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.

Canon’s MR (Mixed Reality). Maybe it was the cool factor, or a technology that took us back to the booming SIGGRAPHs of the 1990s, but it was a treat to have a vendor that is not a SIGGRAPH regular exhibit some fantastic technology. The Canon MR is an augmented reality application of sorts, and at the show, the company was demonstrating its capability of combining 3D objects with real-time video imagery. At the booth, a user would don a Canon head-mount display, and suddenly a virtual image of a car would appear where there was only a set of actual car seats. With AR proliferating, this technology holds a lot of potential.

CGW Reveals Its SIGGRAPH Silver Edge Award Winners


August/September 2012 7

For more information contact us at:Motion Analysis Corporation3617 Westwind BoulevardSanta Rosa, CA USA 95403

(T) +011 707 579 [email protected]

The Raptor-12 from Motion Analysis

The first camera with components designed

and manufactured specifically for

motion capture capability

Christie’s 3D projection technology. Christie has always been a major player in the visual display realm, and at this year’s show, the company was “virtual everywhere.” In the exhibit area, Christie set up its latest offering: the HoloStation, a personal visualization system that displays up to 15 megapixels of data in a 3D stereoscopic and interactive tracked environment. Best of all, it fits in a self-contained, compact, 6 x 6-foot area—a closet-sized CAVE, if you will. Christie also gets extra points for moderating the popular Production Session Panel “High Frame Rate Cinema,

Impacts on Art and Technology,” a topic which generated a great deal of discussion in the conference halls.

Honorable Mentions: TeamUp’s Multi-Optics renderer for real-time 3D collaboration powered by the cloud. Motion Analysis’ Raptor-12 mocap camera, with components manufac-tured specifically for motion-capture capability. Fabric Engine’s Creation Platform, a framework for building custom high-perfor-mance graphics applications (built using Python and Qt) for any software package.

Side Effects Updates Houdini

Toronto’s Side Effects Software has introduced new pricing for its

Houdini 3D animation tool. Also, the firm has simplified branding for the two Houdini workstation products and integration with the Orbolt Smart Asset Store, giving artists access to the Houdini community.

Side Effects has rebranded its two workstation products as Houdini and

Houdini FX. Houdini FX, formerly known as Houdini Master, includes all Houdini features, with a focus on particles, fluids, Pyro FX, cloth, and rigid-body dynamics.

With the new version, Houdini FX is now available for $4,495, while Houdini will remain priced at $1,995.

In other news, Side Effects unveiled Houdini 12.1, which is the first version to integrate the Orbolt Smart Asset Store, where members of the global Houdini community combine their knowledge and expertise to create customizable 3D assets.

About to be launched into beta as of press time, the Orbolt store offers assets that have been reviewed and tested before being offered for sale. The assets will work with both Houdini and Houdini FX.

Houdini 12.1 is available now for download at www.sidefx.com.

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■ ■ ■ ■ CG Animation


POSEPOSEPOSE by

POSEPOSEPOSEPOSEPOSEIf the director of Hotel Transylvania weren’t so inspiring, if the animation style he embraced hadn’t been so unique, if the shots hadn’t been so hilarious, the poses so dramatic, things might have turned out entirely di� erently at Sony Pictures Imageworks. � ere, a crew of approximately 300 artists worked on 1,250 shots for the ani-mated feature.

Directed by multiple Emmy-award winner Genndy Tartakovsky, Hotel Transylvania is a monster movie with an inventive, comedic twist: Count Dracula owns and operates a luxury resort hotel where monsters can escape the demands of the human world. � e idyllic surroundings give the vampire count a perfect safe haven for Mavis, his teenage daughter—until a human teenage backpacker named Jonathan accidentally crashes Mavis’s 118th birthday party.

� e � lm stars the voice talents of Adam Sandler as Dracula, Sele-na Gomez as his daughter Mavis, Steve Buscemi as the werewolf Wayne, Kevin James as Frankenstein, CeeLo Green as Murray the Mummy, David Spade as Gri� n the Invisible Man, Jon Lovitz as Quasimodo, Andy Samberg as Jonathan, and many others.

� e idea of a hotel for monsters had been in development at Sony Pictures Animation for six years before Tartakovsky moved into “Hotel T.” Previous directors had approved character designs. Artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks had created the CG characters. � e technical team at Image-works had set up a pipeline based on Arnold, a physically accurate renderer. � ere was just one problem.

Tartakovsky wanted a graphic style for his animated feature that




Hotel TransylvaniaHotel Transylvania weren’t so inspiring, if the animation style he embraced hadn’t been so unique, so inspiring, if the animation style he embraced hadn’t been so unique, if the shots hadn’t been so hilarious, the poses so dramatic, things might if the shots hadn’t been so hilarious, the poses so dramatic, things might have turned out entirely di� erently at Sony Pictures Imageworks. � ere, have turned out entirely di� erently at Sony Pictures Imageworks. � ere, a crew of approximately 300 artists worked on 1,250 shots for the ani-

Directed by multiple Emmy-award winner Genndy Tartakovsky, Directed by multiple Emmy-award winner Genndy Tartakovsky, is a monster movie with an inventive, comedic

twist: Count Dracula owns and operates a luxury resort hotel where monsters can escape the demands of the human world. � e idyllic surroundings give the vampire count a perfect safe haven for Mavis, his teenage daughter—until a human teenage backpacker named Jonathan accidentally crashes Mavis’s 118th

� e � lm stars the voice talents of Adam Sandler as Dracula, Sele-na Gomez as his daughter Mavis, Steve Buscemi as the werewolf Wayne, Kevin James as Frankenstein, CeeLo Green as Murray the Mummy, David Spade as Gri� n the Invisible Man, Jon Lovitz as

� e idea of a hotel for monsters had been in development at Sony Pictures Animation for six years before Tartakovsky moved into “Hotel T.” Previous directors had approved moved into “Hotel T.” Previous directors had approved character designs. Artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks had character designs. Artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks had created the CG characters. � e technical team at Image-created the CG characters. � e technical team at Image-works had set up a pipeline based on Arnold, a physically works had set up a pipeline based on Arnold, a physically

Tartakovsky wanted a graphic style for his animated feature that

CGW0912-Hotel Transfin.indd 8 9/11/12 1:26 PM

CG Animation ■ ■ ■ ■


POSEPOSEThe crew at Sony Pictures Imageworks creates a CG animated film with a graphic, hand-drawn, cartoony look and feel

Count Dracula opens the door of his castle resort to Frankenstein (at far left), one of many monsters seeking refuge from the human world.



Images ©2012 Sony Pictures Animation, Inc.




pushed beyond the previous preparations. “I was on the show for a year, maybe a

year and a half, before it went on hold for a rewrite,” says James Crossley, senior anima-tion supervisor at Imageworks, who led a team of 90 animators. “� e characters were built and ready to go. But, we had set up the characters for a naturalistic style, and Genndy wanted a di� erent style of animation. We hadto achieve what he wanted with what we had. We didn’t have time to start over.”

Tartakovsky, known for the Cartoon Net-work shows Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack, had not worked with CG characters; he had not directed a feature � lm. He and the Imageworks crew had about a year to create this � lm. � ey had to hit the ground running.

Off ModelAll told, the � lm has 40 main characters, plus variations of each to populate the resort ho-tel—a castle. “� e castle is so immense, we

needed to � ll the lobby with a lot of variety,” says visual e� ects supervisor Dan Kramer, who joined the project about the same time as Tar-takovsky. “We couldn’t have 100 skeletons and zombies.”

By the time Tartakovsky arrived, the crew had already built and rigged those characters for the most part. “� ey were 80 percent done,” Kramer says. “Maybe more. We tend to build to about what we think the animators will need to do in the shots, but there’s always a little bit of room for animators to work on characters during shot production.”

� e director asked for changes to Dracula’s face and a complete redesign for Jonathan. “Jonathan was a di� erent character before,” Kramer says. “A simple character. Nothing special. Genndy likes to make his characters look more special, and in Jonathan’s case, he wanted him to look goofy.”

Otherwise, the crew used the existing assets for the most part. For those charac-

DraculaLike most of the characters in Hotel Transylvania, the Imageworks crew had modeled and rigged Dracula before director Genndy Tartakovsky entered the picture. Dracula was so important, though, that he was one of the few characters that changed to accommodate Tartakovsky’s style. “He is older than the most recent model had been,” says Dan Kramer, visual effects supervisor. “And a little scarier. The new Dracula is more cartoony, simple, and likeable. And, he has some resemblance to Adam Sandler.”

The changes to his model and rig helped animators polish his performance. “We could really shape-change and go crazy with him, and that was fi ne,” says James Crossley, senior animation supervisor.

pushed beyond the previous preparations. “I was on the show for a year, maybe a

year and a half, before it went on hold for a rewrite,” says James Crossley, senior anima-tion supervisor at Imageworks, who led a team of 90 animators. “� e characters were built and ready to go. But, we had set up the characters for a naturalistic style, and Genndy wanted a di� erent style of animation. We hadto achieve what he wanted with what we had. We didn’t have time to start over.”

Tartakovsky, known for the Cartoon Net-work shows Dexter’s LaboratoryJack


, had not worked with CG characters; he had not directed a feature � lm. He and the Imageworks crew had about a year to create this � lm. � ey had to hit the ground running.

Off ModelAll told, the � lm has 40 main characters, plus variations of each to populate the resort ho-tel—a castle. “� e castle is so immense, we

DraculaLike most of the characters in modeled and rigged Dracula before director Genndy Tartakovsky entered the picture. Dracula was so important, though, that he was one of the few characters that changed to accommodate Tartakovsky’s style. “He is older than the most recent model had been,” says Dan Kramer, visual effects supervisor. “And a little scarier. The new Dracula is more cartoony, simple, and likeable. And, he has some resemblance to Adam Sandler.”

The changes to his model and rig helped animators polish his performance. “We could really shape-change and go crazy with him, and that was fi ne,” says James Crossley, senior animation supervisor.

Artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks used creative lighting

to give a fi nely detailed castle a graphic style

to complement the character design that

director Genndy Tartakovsky preferred.




ters, Tartakovsky wanted the animators to push the rigs further than anima-tors had ever pushed them before. “For his style, it made sense to hit extreme poses momentarily,” Kramer says.

Some poses were so extreme, in fact, they took the characters way “o� model.”

“Genndy hated the term ‘on model,’ ” Crossley says. “He wasn’t worried about whether Dracula’s eyes were di� erent sizes in

the same shots. It wasn’t important to make sure we didn’t pull a mouth corner too high. � at was � ne. His view-

point was, ‘Yeah, we’re changing the

design. � is is the drawing I want.’ ”

� us, during shot production, the crew

often found themselves trying to update characters

and make them more pliable. “� is was Genndy’s � rst CG

feature,” Crossley says. “He did hand-drawings. He’d say ‘I don’t

know if we can get near this, but this is what I’m hoping for.’ Mostly, we never said no.”

Tartakovsky gave animators notes via a Wacom tablet and a proprietary, frame-by-frame player with custom plug-ins, by draw-ing over keyframes exactly the pose he wanted the animator to hit.

For example, the � rst character Crossley

had tested, helped build, and set up for anima-tors was Frankenstein. He had created a per-formance using the character for a couple of shots. “� e performance was subtle and natu-ral,” Crossley says. “And then Genndy came on the show and had an animator do a shot. Genndy did a drawing over the pose when Dracula is screaming. He drew the jaw literally three times more open and broader than we had ever planned to do. If we had tried to do that, we would have broken the character. His jaw would have crashed into his chest.”

Jury Rig Stretching the rig beyond what the character TDs designed it to do and � xing problems with the geometry caused by an extreme pose became a standard modus operandi for the animators.

“� ere’s always room for the animators to work on a character during shot production,” Kramer says. “We set up the characters to survive rig upgrades. � e only issue is that it was painstaking work for the animators. To hit the poses, they sculpted a character frame by frame, rather than letting the rig do its job. But no one wanted to hold back; we all fell in love with the animation style. So, we just went for it. And, if a problem came up often enough, if it was a consistent note, something the animators tweaked every time, we’d put it into the rig.”

Animators working in Autodesk Maya would start with sliders preset by the character TDs. � en, to manipulate a character’s pose to match Tartakovsky’s drawings, they would begin sculpting.

“We’d go into the control points,” Cross-ley says. “We used lattices, clusters, blend-shapes, and a Maya deformer called Sp-WrinkleFree. If you push pieces of geometry together and your vertices overlap, making the model jagged and messy, SpWrinkleFree

MavisThe animators were more re-served in performing Dracula’s daughter than the other char-acters. “You can’t get as silly with heroines,” says James Crossley, senior animation supervisor. “With a guy, you can get goofi er than with a girl. But, we kept trying.”

Like Dracula, gravity doesn’t affect Mavis, so she can walk up walls. She can also transform into a bat. Animators would create the character transition from bat to vampire or vice versa, and the effects art-ists would spawn vaporous fl uid particles from the characters to create a magical effect. For these transformation effects, the artists used Imageworks’ proprietary fl uid system. To render the volumes, Arnold. “Before, we would composite the effect and the environment,” says Dan Kramer, visual effects supervisor. “Now, we can get global illumination within the volume. We can defi ne the vapor to have light, and that becomes an area light for the environment.”

ters, Tartakovsky wanted the animators to push the rigs further than anima-tors had ever pushed them before. “For his style, it made sense to hit extreme poses momentarily,” Kramer says.

Some poses were so extreme, in fact, they took the characters way

the same shots. It wasn’t important to make sure we didn’t pull a mouth corner too high. � at was � ne. His view-

point was, ‘Yeah, we’re changing the

design. � is is the drawing I want.’ ”

� us, during shot production, the crew

often found themselves trying to update characters

and make them more pliable. “� is was Genndy’s � rst CG

feature,” Crossley says. “He did hand-drawings. He’d say ‘I don’t

know if we can get near this, but this is what I’m hoping for.’ Mostly, we never said no.”

Tartakovsky gave animators notes via a Wacom tablet and a proprietary, frame-by-

had tested, helped build, and set up for anima-tors was Frankenstein. He had created a per-formance using the character for a couple of shots. “� e performance was subtle and natu-ral,” Crossley says. “And then Genndy came on the show and had an animator do a shot. Genndy did a drawing over the pose when Dracula is screaming. He drew the jaw literally three times more open and broader than we had ever planned to do. If we had tried to do that, we would have broken the character. His jaw would have crashed into his chest.”

Jury Rig Stretching the rig beyond what the character TDs designed it to do and � xing problems with the geometry caused by an extreme pose became a standard animators.

“� ere’s always room for the animators to work on a character during shot production,” Kramer says. “We set up the characters to survive rig upgrades. � e only issue is that it was painstaking work for the animators. To hit the poses, they sculpted a character frame by frame, rather than letting the rig do its job. But no one wanted to hold back; we all fell in love with the animation style. So, we just went for it. And, if a problem came up often enough, if it was a consistent note, something the animators tweaked every time, we’d put it into the rig.”

Animators working in Autodesk Maya would start with sliders preset by the character TDs. � en, to manipulate a character’s pose to match Tartakovsky’s drawings, they would begin sculpting.

“We’d go into the control points,” Cross-ley says. “We used lattices, clusters, blend-

MavisThe animators were more re-served in performing Dracula’s daughter than the other char-acters. “You can’t get as silly with heroines,” says James Crossley, senior animation supervisor. “With a guy, you can get goofi er than with a girl. But, we kept trying.”

Like Dracula, gravity doesn’t affect Mavis, so she can walk up walls. She can also transform into a bat. Animators would create the character transition from bat to vampire or vice versa, and the effects art-ists would spawn vaporous fl uid particles from the characters to create a magical effect. For these transformation effects, the artists used Imageworks’ proprietary fl uid system. To render the volumes, Arnold. “Before, we would composite the effect and the environment,” says Dan Kramer, visual effects supervisor. “Now, we can get global illumination within the volume. We can defi ne the vapor to have light, and that becomes an area light for the environment.”

Director Genndy Tartakovsky drew on top of poses created by animators to show how far he wanted them to take the pose. As a result, animators often had to deform geometry beyond the standard rig setup.




will average the points and relax them.”Although one animator ended up reshaping

a witch’s hand, the animators more typically used the tools to reshape faces, especially the areas around mouths and eyes.

“� is show turned animators into model-ers,” Crossley says. “I think they probably spent about 30 percent of their time model-ing. We’d model a pushed shape for one frame. � ere were even times when we were making

characters as we went. We had to � ll the en-vironment with a lot

of characters. If we had a zombie and needed

another, skinnier one, we’d reshape the face.”

Graphic MovesMoving the characters from pose to pose gave the � lm the hand-drawn feel that Cross-ley wanted and that suited Tartakovsky’s style. “A lot

of people in CG do a layered approach in animation,” Cross-

ley says. “� ey move the body, smooth the motion, and then add

legs and arms. � at’s � ne for a lot of

situations, but this show was all about char-acter and design. I asked the animators to give me poses for the � ve main drawings, make sure they were nice and strong, and we’d break it down from there.”

It was a new style and an interesting learn-ing experience for the classically trained ani-mators on the crew, and those used to a more naturalistic, subtle type of animation. “It was easy to hire animators for this � lm because Genndy was a big draw, the character designs were great, and everyone knew it would be fun because it’s about monsters,” Crossley says. “But this style is more complicated than most. � ey couldn’t rely on making things physically believable. � ey had to know how to design and pose. People have a tendency to over-animate and over-complicate. A lot of times on this � lm we’d simplify the animation to make nice, clear reads.”

For animators who learned to create a be-lievable walk for a character by paying atten-tion to weight shift, to the way the character’s hips move, it was a new way of working.

“[Weight shift] wasn’t important on this show,” Crossley says. “We’d start with minimal movement. Take Dracula, for example, walk-ing con� dently with a proud, sti� back. We’d do just the Z channel of him moving forward.

MummyBefore Tartakovsky arrived, model-ers had wrapped a scary-looking Mummy in bandages. Because it was important that the ban dages didn’t stretch as the Mummy moved, the riggers created a com-plex system that slid the bandages one on top of another.

“If we pushed it too far, though, it would crash,” says James Cross-ley, senior animation supervisor. “He was an energetic character. And then Genndy [Tartakovsky] comes onto the project and tripled what we did before. We would shape-change him a lot, and use deformers to fi x anything that was breaking.”

To help nail a performance that met Tartakovsky’s style, Crossley asked the animators to spend a week doing Mummy tests. “I asked them to be really graphic and treat the poses as graphic shapes,” Crossley says. “One of the anima-tors tucked all the Mummy’s limbs into a ball, had him go into a roll, and then had him pop out and land on his feet again. Inevitably, Genndy had us put that in the fi lm. The animator had the Mummy move so fast we couldn’t see what broke during the transition.”


will average the points and relax them.”Although one animator ended up reshaping

a witch’s hand, the animators more typically used the tools to reshape faces, especially the areas around mouths and eyes.

“� is show turned animators into model-ers,” Crossley says. “I think they probably spent about 30 percent of their time model-ing. We’d model a pushed shape for one frame. � ere were even times when we were making

characters as we went. We had to � ll the en-vironment with a lot

of characters. If we had a zombie and needed

another, skinnier one, we’d reshape the face.”

Graphic MovesMoving the characters from pose to pose gave the � lm the hand-drawn feel that Cross-ley wanted and that suited Tartakovsky’s style. “A lot

of people in CG do a layered approach in animation,” Cross-

ley says. “� ey move the body, smooth the motion, and then add

legs and arms. � at’s � ne for a lot of

into a ball, had him go into a roll, and then had him pop out and land on his feet again. Inevitably, Genndy had us put that in the fi lm. The animator had the Mummy move so fast we couldn’t see what broke during the transition.”

Above, animators on this fi lm had to learn how to design and pose; they couldn’t rely on making perfor-mances physically believable. At right, sometimes characters such as these werewolf pups moved so fast the rendering team used multi-segment blurring to keep them visible.




We had his legs moving, but we resisted doing anything that gave away weight, the up and down. He almost slides across the screen.

When animators would point out that this was not how to create a believable walk, Crossley would answer, “� at’s how you do a caricatured walk.”

“We traded physics for design,” Crossley points out. “We might lean a character on a 45-degree angle or move to a fast stop. Cloth simulations would � y all over the place. We’d push to get the energy and caricature the di-rector wanted, pass everything o� to cloth and hair, and hope they could deal with what we gave them. � ey had a great challenge on this show.”

Between the FramesHair, which grows from base geometry, wasn’t as much of a problem as cloth simula-tion. � e cloth simulation team had to con-sider sub-frames.

“In the blurred areas between the frames, if a character took a di� erent path and the cloth didn’t take that into account, the characters could come out of their clothing,” Kramer says. “So the cloth simulation team had to go in and make sure the simulation worked on the sub-frame, on, for example, may-be four samples per frame.”

Fortunately, it wasn’t always necessary to have cloth simulation be quite that ac-curate and subtle. “When we animate a char-acter, we bind the clothes to follow along, and sometimes we’d use that version of the cloth since it tracked perfectly,” Kramer says. “If the character moved incredibly fast, it wasn’t no-ticeable. We’d turn the simulation o� for the sub-frames, then switch it back on after.”

� e snappy animation style presented an in-teresting rendering challenge, too. Often, the animators moved characters so fast they dis-appeared. “We use Arnold, a physically-based

renderer that tries to mimic the real world,” Kramer says. “When characters moved fast, we had issues with motion blur. A character moving 100 miles per hour completely disap-pears; a hand becomes transparent.”

But, Tartakovsky wanted to see the charac-ter, the hand, in the motion-blurred frames, no matter how fast anything moved. We had fast animation on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” Kramer says. “� is � lm pushed us further. We had to massage motion blur throughout the � lm.”

One solution was to reduce the motion blur, which produced strobing images. An-other was to render two versions—one with full motion blur to produce a streak, and one

WerewolvesWayne the Werewolf has a preg-nant wife named Wanda and a lit-ter of hell-raising pups that make a grand entrance. “A hearse bus pulls up to the castle and 30 crazy wolf pups come storming out, and then Wanda,” says James Crossley, senior animation super-visor. “She’s happy. She doesn’t see that kids destroying things is a problem. But, Wayne has the weight of the world on his shoul-ders. No energy. He huffs. The dynamic of that family was really fun. We kept Wayne minimalistic in terms of how we animated him. He’s the opposite of the Mummy. He stands there and moves his eyes. One solid drawing.”

Modelers built the wolves and pups as bipeds, but the crew later changed the rig so that the pups could run around on all fours.

Hair, which grows from base geometry, wasn’t as much of a problem as cloth simula-tion. � e cloth simulation team had to con-

“In the blurred areas between the frames, if a character took a di� erent path and the cloth didn’t take that into account, the characters could come out of their clothing,” Kramer says. “So the cloth simulation team had to go in and make sure the simulation worked

curate and subtle. “When we animate a char-acter, we bind the clothes to follow along, and sometimes we’d use that version of the cloth since it tracked perfectly,” Kramer says. “If the character moved incredibly fast, it wasn’t no-ticeable. We’d turn the simulation o� for the

� e snappy animation style presented an in-teresting rendering challenge, too. Often, the animators moved characters so fast they dis-appeared. “We use Arnold, a physically-based




with low or no motion blur—and composite the two together, which produces a solid lead-ing edge and blurry trail. � e third option was multi-segment blurring.

“Normally, we start at one frame and blur to the next,” Kramer explains. “If there’s mo-tion between, it gets lost unless you sample the object between the frames, on the sub-frames.”

Kramer uses a car wheel spinning fast as an example. If we see the top of the wheel on frame one and the bottom on frame two, the renderer doesn’t know the wheel traveled in a semi-circle, so it renders streaks between. “You need to sample the wheel at the sub-frames, between the frames, to � nd the path, and ac-curately do the blur,” Kramer explains.

As in the example, the animated charac-ters often moved so quickly that the only way to keep them visible was with multi-segment blurring. But, there was a cost. It took longer to render the scenes, and it re-sulted in more data.

“When we translated the characters out, rather than baking on frames, we baked on sub-frames,” Kramer says. “We might have six versions of a character. We could control how many depending on how fast the character moved and how much � delity we needed in the blur.”

Non-photorealistic Raytracing� is wasn’t the � rst animated feature for which the crew had used Arnold. � at hon-or goes to Sony Pictures Animation’s Oscar-nominated Monster House, released in 2006. But, the graphic style Tartakovsky wanted

for Hotel Transylvania pushed the lighting and rendering crew in new directions.

Imageworks artists use � e Foundry’s Nuke for compositing and Katana, developed in-house, for lighting.

“� ere are lots of cases when the lighting is not photorealistic,” Kramer says. “We suppressed de-tail. Suppressed light.”

One sequence that was especially striking takes place during a party. Dracula stands in full color amidst hundreds of characters all rendered as dark silhouettes, whether in the background or foreground.

“To do that with Arnold, we used AOVs [auxiliary output variables],”

Kramer says. “When Arnold lights a character, it has information about all the lighting components and com-bines them into a � nal image. We use

AOVs on live-action shows as well, but on this � lm, we used them to sculpt the frames in non-photorealistic ways.”

� us, in addition to asking for a � nal, com-bined image, the crew had Arnold write out separate, multiple images. Compositors work-ing in Nuke could then put selected and per-haps tweaked images back together.

“We’ll get one frame plus maybe 50 oth-ers,” Kramer says. “Each is a di� erent com-

JonathanJonathan was the one charac-ter that artists at Imageworks changed completely for the di-rector. The teenage backpacker, who started as a simple, normal character, became goofi er. A more fl exible rig gave animators the abil-ity to create extreme performances for Jonathan more easily than for many of the other characters. Non-photorealistic Raytracing

� is wasn’t the � rst animated feature for which the crew had used Arnold. � at hon-or goes to Sony Pictures Animation’s Oscar-nominated Monster House, But, the graphic style Tartakovsky wanted

for Hotel Transylvaniaand rendering crew in new directions.

Imageworks artists use � e Foundry’s Nuke for compositing and Katana, developed in-house, for lighting.

“� ere are lots of cases when the lighting is not photorealistic,” Kramer says. “We suppressed de-tail. Suppressed light.”

One sequence that was especially striking takes place during a party. Dracula stands in full color amidst hundreds of characters all rendered as dark silhouettes, whether in the background or foreground.

“To do that with Arnold, we used AOVs [auxiliary output variables],”

Kramer says. “When Arnold lights a character, it has information about all the lighting components and com-bines them into a � nal image. We use

AOVs on live-action shows as well, but on this � lm, we used them to sculpt the frames in non-photorealistic ways.”

� us, in addition to asking for a � nal, com-bined image, the crew had Arnold write out separate, multiple images. Compositors work-ing in Nuke could then put selected and per-haps tweaked images back together.

“We’ll get one frame plus maybe 50 oth-ers,” Kramer says. “Each is a di� erent com-

for Jonathan more easily than for many of the other characters.

Kramer uses a car wheel spinning fast as an example. If we see the top of the wheel on frame one and the bottom on frame two, the renderer doesn’t know the wheel traveled in a semi-circle, so it renders streaks between. “You need to sample the wheel at the sub-frames, between the frames, to � nd the path, and ac-

As in the example, the animated charac-ters often moved so quickly that the only way to keep them visible was with multi-segment blurring. But, there was a cost. It took longer to render the scenes, and it re-

“When we translated the characters out, rather than baking on frames, we baked on sub-frames,” Kramer says. “We might have six versions of a character. We could control how many depending on how fast the character moved and how much � delity we needed in

Non-photorealistic Raytracing

or goes to Sony Pictures Animation’s Oscar-released in 2006.

But, the graphic style Tartakovsky wanted pushed the lighting

and rendering crew in new directions.

Quasimodo“As soon as Genndy [Tartakovsky] came onto the show, he wanted to change Quasimodo’s design,” says James Crossley, senior anima-tion supervisor. “He was four heads high, but Genndy wanted him to be two heads high. He didn’t want to change his costume, but he wanted his nose bigger, his eyes closer, and he wanted him to have more of an egg shape. So that was a drastic change, but we couldn’t change the model. The animators would hit a pose, scale the values, and shape-change toward the new design.”

In one shot, Quasimodo hangs from a chain. “Genndy drew him like an egg with little limbs,” Crossley says. “We tucked his neck in. If you squint, his body has an egg-ish shape.”

Although in retrospect it might have made sense to remodel this character, the decision wasn’t only a matter of effi ciency. “He was a bit of a moving target,” Crossley says. “He wasn’t always one way.” With his design changing in the begin-ning of production from one shot to the next, it would have been diffi cult to settle on a model.




ponent. It might be the lighting component, or a matte we de� ned, the hair on his head, his clothes, his face. � at gives us tons of extra images we can control in the composite. Nuke loads in the main frame, and sort of automati-cally loads up the AOVs as options to be used in the comp. We customized it a bit. Rather than 50 nodes, we had one that’s aware of all the � les that go with it.”

� is tweaking took place on a large scale, as for the party, and on smaller scales, too, to achieve the graphic style Tartakovsky wanted. “One thing we often did was for Dracula,” Kramer says. “He had a shiny cape, but Genndy [Tartakovsky] wanted the cape to feel like a black mask. Dark, with no wrinkles, no light. So, we would go through our AOVs, � nd the specular light, and subtract it from the � nal image.”

Learning ExperienceNon-photorealistic rendering also helped bring Tartakovsky’s style to the backgrounds as well as the characters. “We were constantly mitigating detail to focus on silhouettes and the portion of the frame Genndy wanted to focus on,” Kramer says. “� e castle [re-sort hotel] was really detailed. So we ended up throwing backgrounds out of focus and dumbing down the textures. If the action was in mid-frame and the foreground was dis-tracting, we’d darken it way down to get rid of the detail.”

As with the characters, modelers and tex-ture artists had already built Dracula’s resort hotel and the immense lobby before Tarta-kovsky arrived.

“It was basically done,” Kramer says. “[� e crew] had built a lot of areas for the previous version of the script. � e reception desk was perfect. But, the castle is immense. We had other areas that hadn’t been touched much at all. Genndy tweaked the design as much as he could to � t his own style and taste.”

And that happened, sometimes, even after the shots were in production. Layout artists might have already designed camera moves and were ready to send the shots into anima-tion and lighting when the shots went back for changes in texturing and modeling.

“It was a challenge to push look-develop-ment, model building, and environments fur-ther into production than on previous shows,” Kramer says. “We were building the bridges as we were going across the canyon. We kept pace, but we were much closer to lighting than we’re normally comfortable with. We were do-ing look-dev on characters and environments a month and a half before we wrapped.”

� ere was a good side to this, however. � e result was stunning, and the crew learned from the process.

“We often knew exactly where the cameras were,” Kramer says. “So rather than building whole environments and over-building, we could build more e� ciently, which was im-perative when we were so close to lighting. I’m going to think about this system for the next � lm—decide how much we build ahead of time, how much to hold o� on. We might need to crew the � lm di� erently, but I think some sort of hybrid might work. Sometimes we were too close to the metal. But other times it was more e� cient.”

When you look at the character animation and clean graphic design of this � lm, you might

think, “Oh, simple.” It wasn’t. Creating the look and feel of a hand-drawn, 2D animated � lm with 3D tools, especially with characters and environments designed for another style, was di� cult. It was a creative process, as well.

“I was looking for something di� erent,” Crossley says. “� is � lm was a creative, fun project. It had a unique energy. And, I could see on the faces of the animators, ‘Wow. � is show is di� erent.’ � is project changed so much, but in such a positive way, and in ways I didn’t expect. I’m really proud and glad to have been a part of it.” ■

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and contrib-uting editor for Computer Graphics World. She can a be reached at [email protected].

Crowd ControlAnimators at Sony Pictures Imageworks typically use a proprietary crowd sys-tem to control simple crowds and Massive software for more sophisticated gatherings. But, in Hotel Transylvania, the crowds—mainly monsters in the lobby or at parties—were somewhere in between.

“Animating 60 characters would have been too much,” says Dan Kramer, visual effects supervisor, “but so would the overhead in setting up a sophisti-cated crowd system.”

So, for a shot in which a variety of monsters dance in odd ways, the crew generated simple cycles, applied them to characters, and baked out animated characters. Then, to create the scene, they pulled in the charac-ters, placed them in the shot with simple translations and rotations, and let them dance.

“We had a system in which an animator could bring up a little user interface, browse through animated cycles, see a character move in real time, and then drop it into the scene,” Kramer says. “It was incredibly light. There was no rig, just polygonal data that we put into Maya. We used ‘Sparrow’ to stream 100 characters at once. Sparrow is an OpenGL plug-in we wrote to store polygo-nal data on graphics cards in an effi cient way and stream it back. It’s similar to the now-public Alembic cache. We could have 100 characters in the scene, and the animators could scrub in real time, grab characters, rotate them, place them, and change the offset.”



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Gaming ■ ■ ■ ■


StyleWhen Pixar released Toy Story in 1995, the box o� ce was abuzz over this animated full-length � lm crafted in the new CGI medium. For several years after, classical 2D animated movies co-existed quite nicely alongside their 3D animated cousins, but it didn’t take long before 3D computer-animated features became the norm rather than the exception. � e same can be said of the gaming world: � e 32-bit/64-bit � fth-generation consoles ushered in the era of 3D gaming. By the time the seventh-generation systems (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii) hit the market, realistic, complex 3D game char-

acters occupied robust 3D worlds—a trend that continues, even on handhelds. Today, 3D CGI dominates the entertainment realm. Every once in a while, though,

a 2D � lm or game will pop up and garner attention that is well deserved. At the 2012 Oscars, the 2D animated � lms A Cat in Paris and Chico & Rita caught the eye of critics, the latter giving the CG movie Rango a run for its money. In terms of gaming,

2009 appears to be the year when 2D titles began making a comeback. But these are not the primitive, pixelated games of yesteryear. Rather, they utilize sophisticated tools and

take advantage of present processing power to make beautiful art interactive.Here we look at a pair of 2D games that implement new technology to make 2D

images pop.

Back ınStyleStyleWhen Pixar released

StyleStyleover this animated full-length � lm crafted in the new CGI medium. For several years after,

Styleclassical 2D animated movies co-existed quite nicely alongside their 3D animated cousins,

Styleclassical 2D animated movies co-existed quite nicely alongside their 3D animated cousins,

Stylebut it didn’t take long before 3D computer-animated features became the norm rather than the exception. � e same can be said of the gaming world: � e 32-bit/64-bit � fth-generation consoles ushered in the era of 3D gaming. By the time the seventh-generation systems (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii) hit the market, realistic, complex 3D game char-

acters occupied robust 3D worlds—a trend that continues, even on handhelds. Today, 3D CGI dominates the entertainment realm. Every once in a while, though,

a 2D � lm or game will pop up and garner attention that is well deserved. At the 2012 Oscars, the 2D animated � lms critics, the latter giving the CG movie

2009 appears to be the year when 2D titles began making a comeback. But these are not the primitive, pixelated games of yesteryear. Rather, they utilize sophisticated tools and

take advantage of present processing power to make beautiful art interactive.Here we look at a pair of 2D games that implement new technology to make 2D

images pop.

CGW0912-2d Gamesfin.indd 17 9/11/12 1:32 PM

n n n n Gaming

August/September 201218

Video games of late, particularly first-person shooters, strive for realism. Realistic characters. Realistic environments. Realistic physics. Realistic simulations. Realistic action. Sometimes, though, players want a break from reality, even if it’s virtual “reality,” to escape into a fun, fantastical universe that is as far from real as one can get —like that of Ubisoft Montpellier’s Rayman Origins.

Rayman Origins, a retro 2D side-scrolling game, is set in a lush 2D cartoon world. The rich, hand-drawn environments are brimming with objects and color, and each unique setting looks as though it were lifted from a 2D animation cel. The characters, meanwhile, appear to have stepped out of a Saturday-morning cartoon—or from the pages of an artist’s sketchbook.

TooningFine

Ubisoft Montpellier’s Rayman Origins sports a retro 2D look created

with a new graphics engine that simplifies the

animation process By Karen Moltenbrey


Gaming n n n n


The main character, the quirky Rayman, has evolved only slightly over the years since Ubisoft Montpellier introduced the character in 1995 for a sprite-based game played on the original PlayStation. During the decade that followed, Rayman, his friends, and his worlds would be ported to 3D as new consoles were introduced, while the titles for the various handheld devices retained the property’s 2D style. With Rayman Origins, however, the game has shifted back to its 2D ’toon roots, despite its release on a range of the latest platforms (including the PS3, Xbox 360, and the new PlayStation Vita).

Nevertheless, the character does have an updated look in Ray-man Origins, thanks to a new animation engine and high-resolution graphics that are stunning and vibrant. But the more things change, the more they remain the same. Rayman is still limbless—he has no neck, legs, or arms, so his simply shaped head, his large, white-gloved hands, and his oversized sneaker-clad feet float in midair. He

is joined in this new adventure by his longtime friend, the blue, blobby Globox—another squash-and-stretch character.

In addition to Rayman and Globox, the game features two addi-tional main characters, the Teensies, as well as more than 100 others with which they can interact. In addition, there are 12 diverse en-vironments (60-plus levels), all filled with rich, hand-drawn imag-ery—whether a steampunk-type of factory, a lush jungle, a candlelit temple, a snowy mountain, or a pond teeming with fish. Each envi-ronment proposes a different type of immersion and emotion based on its imagery, theme, music, and friends and enemies.

“We began the project with the idea of going back to the artistic dimension of Rayman’s universe. We wanted to work with artists outside the video game industry—people in animation studios, traditional painters, and illustrators,” says Creative Director Michel Ancel, who created the Rayman franchise. “We believe that the com-bination of art and gameplay can create the kind of surprises that every player would like to experience.”

While Ancel and a team of artists at Ubisoft Montpellier are actu-ally responsible for Rayman’s universe, the game’s lore purports that it is created by the title’s highly sensitive supreme being, the Bubble Dreamer, who conjures up the so-called Glade of Dreams world into existence each time he falls asleep. When the Bubble Dreamer begins to have bad dreams, players must ease the being’s fears and stop the nightmares with hilarious antics.

“While there is a deeper story to be unearthed, much of the ex-perience in this immersive platform is about visual storytelling: the hundreds of different stories players will tell one another as they romp through this cartoon playground, interacting with the envi-ronment,” says Gabrielle Shrager, lead story writer.

More specifically, the game pits the baddies, the Darktoons, against the good Electoons. Players must battle enemies and try to

rescue imprisoned Electoons, which is done by gliding in midair, shrinking in size, and even riding on the back of a mosquito. If an enemy or obstacle hits a character, it will inflate into a ballooned state until another player can bring the character back into the game by slapping it. Sound ridiculous? It is. But that’s all part of the game’s charm.

Creating ArtWhile Rayman Origins’ visual and play styles are based on those of the original 2D release, this is by no means a game built upon a 17-year-old game format. “The first Rayman was really art-oriented. So we worked with artists from the cartoon industry, and painters and illustrators, and developed new tools that enabled us to recon-nect with those people,” says Ancel.

One of the tools that Ancel is referring to is the new UbiArt

Framework, a proprietary graphics engine that allows artists to easily create content and use it in an interactive environment. “With Ray-man Origins, we tried to get rid of the constraints and let the artists work easily, without thinking about polygons or textures or sizes, so they could just concentrate on the art,” says Ancel.

UbiArt Framework’s flexible architecture limits the repetitive tasks required in making a game, enabling artists to create HD ani-mation and imagery from limited original artwork, without having to worry about the technical aspects of game development. Rayman Origins is the first title to use it.

“As the engine and the technology came together, it became clear that this was the right approach and time for Rayman to make his comeback,” says Ancel. “When we saw what we could do in 2D, the worlds we could create [with the engine], I naturally thought of Ray-man. For the first Rayman, a major focus was on the art. Rayman was born in 2D, so this seemed like a great way for him to be reborn.”

With the UbiArt Framework, artists can create animated images from any kind of artwork that can be scanned, photographed, or digitized. The engine separates the imagery into individual pieces, and applies a skeleton and bones to the assets to provide pivot points for animating movements. Then, the animator simply poses the model and edits the silhouette, and the system deforms the image automatically.

As a result of the UbiArt Framework, Ubisoft Montpellier was able to keep the Rayman Origins team small and nimble. “I believe

TooningFineRayman Origins is part of game series developed by Ubisoft Montpellier in 1995. Conceived first in 2D, the franchise eventually migrated to 3D as new game consoles were introduced. Recently, though, the developer returned the series to its 2D heritage, a move that became easier with the new UbiArt Framework engine.


n n n n Gaming


that smaller teams are more flexible,” says Shrager. “Then, if that small team has the level of talent, creativity, and innovative thinking that we put together, you can make something really special.”

According to Shrager, the new engine offered the group a great deal of creative free-dom. It is optimized for high-def resolution, allowing the game to run in full 1080p HD at 60 frames per second. “We could iterate on concepts with high-definition graphics and gameplay assets in real time, which is one of the major keys to emerging concepts and cre-ative, innovative gameplay,” she adds.

Living a DreamWork on Rayman Origins began approxi mately two years ago by a team of artists and engineers with a so-called garage-game mentality. As Ancel contends, the reactive approach to game development enabled by the UbiArt Frame-work platform helped promote creative energy and innovation within the group.

“The ability to use the gorgeous hand-drawn artwork of our artists directly in-game is one of the reasons Rayman Origins looks

so fresh and different,” Shrager points out. While the UbiArt Framework simplified

the 2D animation process, that didn’t mean that the game creation was without challenges. According to Ancel, it is easier to create con-tent, characters, and levels in 2D as opposed to 3D, but on the other hand, “you cannot hide poor game design behind Hollywood-type sequences,” he says. “2D shows every collision, mistake, and control error. It’s a precise kind of game that forces us to manage a lot of details.”

Just one look and it is clear that Rayman Origins is an artist-created universe, a perfect choice for a 2D game.

“After a long time spent on complex 3D games, it’s cool to jump into a full gameplay experience with no turnarounds,” says Ancel.

While 3D may be the standard for console games these days, there’s something that can be said for a compelling art-focused 2D game that utilizes the power of these machines. “The 3D consoles of today support incredible graphics and sound in 2D,” Ancel points out. “It’s amazing to be able to create a universe with the quality of the best animated features, but in an interactive experience.”

The game rollout began with titles for the PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360, and continued through the summer for Windows, the Vita, and the 3DS.

So, choose your platform and ’toon in. n

Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics World.

Rayman Origins contains bright, bold 2D cartoon images created by painters and illustrators. With the UbiArt Framework graphics engine, animations can be made from flat artwork or photographs.


Gaming n n n n


ActSecondMultidimensional characters shine in

a unique interactive story

By Karen Moltenbrey

In the early years of the new millennium, computer game developer/entre-preneur Omar Khudari began looking for a new adventure and founded the game company Cecro-pia, mixing his experience with PC racing titles from his former company Papyrus (known for Grand Prix Legends and the NASCAR Racing series) with 2D animation. At Cecropia, the technical team was based in the company’s Boston headquarters, while 2D animation veterans (many formerly employed at Walt Disney Feature Animation prior to its closing) were situated at the firm’s animation and produc-tion studio in Orlando. The objective was to create an interactive film in which players could perform an animated character, controlling his or her behaviors and expressions.

The timing could have been better.


n n n n Gaming


Computer gaming was taking off, fueled by increasingly powerful PCs with robust graph-ics cards and by souped-up consoles. CGI was taking over the animation industry—even 2D animation giant Disney was heartily em-bracing the medium. Nevertheless, Khudari believed that 2D was the ideal genre for Ce-cropia’s project, a video arcade title called The Act, since it would make the characters more expressive and bring out their personality more than CGI could at the time. After all, this was in the early days of CGI, and many 2D films shared theaters with computer-generated features, as audiences showed their apprecia-tion for both mediums: the unique look of CG animation and the timeless beauty of hand-drawn cel animation. Dan Kraus among them.

Scene I: SerendipityWhile working in the 2D animation field at Bauhaus Software, Kraus visited the Florida studio of Cecropia and was immediately taken by the aesthetics of the game under develop-ment there. “This was during the dark days for 2D animation, in 2003/2004, when there were tons of layoffs and CG was taking over everything,” he says. “The industry hadn’t come to realize how unbelievable classical ani-mation really was.”

Kraus later learned that the Cecropia game more or less had been completed (about the time that the video arcade revolution was end-ing) but had never launched, “despite having a tremendous animation team and building a great game.” So the title was shelved, and Ce-cropia turned its attention to other projects (before eventually shutting its doors).

Fast-forward to 2009, when Kraus, along with 2D/3D game technologist Alain La-ferrière, formed React Entertainment as a next-generation game studio focused on “transforming classical 2D animation into an interactive gaming experience.” The first order of business was to develop the technol-ogy necessary for creating and delivering 2D animated games. The second order of business was to deliver React’s first title. The Act offered opportunities in both areas.

Kraus and Laferrière approached Khudari, who now serves React in an advisory role, hop-ing to resurrect The Act for the next generation of gaming on mobile devices. “The mobile revo-lution wasn’t really there yet [in terms of gam-ing], but we believed it would eventually come,” Kraus says, noting this was prior to the rise of the iPad and tablets. “We wanted to evolve and transform The Act to run on new platforms.”

As Kraus explains, The Act had not lost its at-tractiveness; the timing just wasn’t right before,

as it fell between the market gap for waning arcade games and rising mobile titles. And the game’s underlying technology could be used to ultimately transform almost any 2D art and animation into an interactive experience.

Scene II: The StoryThe Act is a classically animated romantic comedy that requires active participation rather than static viewing. It stars Edgar, a well-meaning window washer, and Sylvia, the woman of his dreams. The goal is for players to control Edgar as he attempts to rescue his hap-less brother, save his job, and romance Sylvia throughout the various scenes.

The game contains many different “scenes” (levels) in which Edgar must complete a task. For instance, in the first scene, the Dream Sequence, the player’s task is to maneu-ver close to Sylvia in a bar. If the player acts too quickly, Sylvia is turned off and moves away; too slowly, and she becomes bored. The next sequence challenge requires Edgar to en-sure that his brother does not fall asleep on the job and to keep the boss from firing them both. Between the scenes are interstitials that help complete story threads. The challenges become more difficult as the scenes progress through a cartoon world that is rich in detail. However, through it all, players can see the character develop and learn.

“You are building a relationship between the characters,” explains Kraus. “From a gameplay standpoint, it feels like you are ‘playing’ a movie [in the active sense] and guiding the expressions and emotions of the character. What happens in the scenes is totally predicated on what you do with your character, the actions and emo-tions you invoke—whether you get to take her hand and dance with her, for example.”

This interactive comedy can be “played” in a little over one hour—less for those who have played it before. “Each scene has a number of variables and variances depend-ing on the reactions between the characters,” explains Kraus. “I’ve been playing with this for a while and am still discovering some of them. I saw Sylvia do something recently that I never saw her do before. It’s fun to explore the depth of the characters.”

Scene III: The TechnologyNot only were Kraus and Laferrière in-trigued by the game design and gameplay, they were also taken by the proprietary tech-nology used to integrate and manage all the elements of the 2D interactive title—tech that would be extremely useful to React. “It was propriety, built from the ground up, and integrates all the art, music, video, and game logic into one platform,” says Kraus. The challenge, however, was re-writing the technology inside the game engine, which he says was “incredibly complicated.”

There are two components to the technolo-gy: the authoring platform, which is the inter-active editor for the 2D content and the game logic, and the runtime engine. Both had to be revised before this game—and others like it—would work on the new mobile platforms.

And that was the first order of business for React. “There are many more elements needed for a modern mobile game than for an arcade

React Entertainment resurrected The Act using its new, commercially available technology suite, including an advanced state-defined editor specially tuned for 2D artwork.


Gaming n n n n


video game. The technology elements had to be rewritten, and that required an enormous ef-fort,” says Kraus, noting that the company spent nearly a year and a half working on the produc-tion tech. “The touch interaction, the graphics design … all this had to be restructured.”

In terms of building assets, the processes of editing them, exporting them, and pulling them into the runtime engine are basically the same as with any game. According to Kraus, there are four steps to creating game content us-ing React’s technology. First, of course, involves authoring the assets for the character animation and music/sound. Here, teams can use vec-tor images or hand-drawn art that is digitally scanned into the computer. Using the React au-thoring tool, users then create and load the vari-

ous scenes, define the sequences, and build the logic between the characters. Next, they export the data, and then the runtime engine loads the game logic, assets, and so forth, which enables the triggering and interaction.

The runtime engine is a compositing system with an integrated game engine that combines backgrounds with various characters and trig-gers music and sound effects. The biggest dif-ferentiator in React’s technology is in the ad-vanced state-defined editor, which is designed for 2D artwork. “Specifically, the system allows you to draw characters and character interactions, and express those and interrela-tionships between two characters,” Kraus says.

Kraus explains the way the engine handles two characters meeting. “You have two sets of character loops containing actions and inter-actions. Each loop you create contains a few hundred frames, and the engine ties those loops of action/reactions together according to the logic that is assigned,” he says. “For ex-

ample, in the first scene, if Edgar moves too far forward too quickly, Sylvia backs away.”

From a modern production perspective, studios likely will create the imagery in a vec-tor animation system, like Flash, Toon Boom, or their own proprietary software. Cecropia, meanwhile, had hand-drawn every frame of The Act and later scanned them into the com-puter—230,000 drawings in total, and React had to come up with a solution for compress-ing all that artwork while maintaining its high visual quality.

As Kraus points out, this is a completely proprietary platform, and React continues to look for opportunities for the tech suite, such as in professional animation studios where the artists could quickly and cost-effectively pro-

duce and deploy interactive 2D titles or de-velop interactive episodics.

Scene IV: Mobile DebutSo, what made Kraus and Laferrière decide to embrace classical animation in the age of C GI? Kraus says there are two reasons why this style works and pulls people into The Act. First is the animation itself, which was created by the original artists—the simplicity and elegance, the beauty and motion that goes beyond 3D. Second is how the game is played.

Rather than moving between scenes, in The Act the player is moving the character’s posi-tion. This is done simply by swiping left or right on a tablet or iPhone, or via a mouse for the Mac version—the controls are so simple, Kraus says, that a five-year-old can learn how to do it in a matter of seconds. “You are con-trolling the position of Edgar during the game, and by that interaction, you cause dynamic interactions with other characters,” he says,

noting that one of the more powerful aspects of The Act is the sound—the system triggers music to coincide with the game states. “Many classical animations are tied to music themes. That relationship is very important,” he adds.

Kraus believes that if The Act, which was re-leased at this year’s E3, had come out a year and a half ago, most phones wouldn’t have been able to push it. “Now they can, for the most part,” he adds. React hopes to tune its technology for other delivery platforms as well.

Again, it’s all about timing. Kraus contends that because of the way the characters are drawn, the iPad is especially conducive to this type of game experience. “We were ecstatic when the iPad came out. We believed that was where Edgar and Sylvia would truly shine, and we were right. There is so much depth and rich-ness to the original color scheme. The fluidity and transitions … you fast become the charac-ter. The suspension of disbelief happens quickly. Our biggest challenge was to make sure the user experience was as beautiful as it could be.”

Despite using all the inherited artwork for the game, some additional graphic design was needed to fill in gaps left by the new technol-ogy, and Khudari made sure that the crew re-mained true to the spirit and intention of the game as established by the Cecropia team.

Kraus points out the obvious, that mobile games have grown in epic proportion, and adds, “This is a new genre of mobile game, building on the legacy of Dragon’s Lair. It’s a character-fo-cused game with much more interactive game-play [than most current mobile games].”

Khudari’s vision, a few years ago, was for The Act to be a game for consumers, and React was able to adhere to that vision, albeit on tab-lets and the iPhone rather than a coin-operat-ed machine. So while the game’s hand-drawn animation style may be traditional, it certainly looks in vogue on these new platforms.

“We are excited about what the authoring pipeline can let us do in terms of expanded content for serious production, and how that opens the door for cloud-based gaming,” Kraus says.

So it seems that the sky is potentially the limit for hand-drawn animation. Or, at the very least, React has opened the door once again to this traditional art form. “Omar’s ini-tial vision was that 2D would become inter-active, and you could preserve the legacy and extend it to other genres. We agree, and with The Simpsons and Family Guys of the world, there are many possibilities.” n

Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics World.



n n n n Simulation

To explore ergonomic setups, design possibilities, and safety measures, digital humans boldly go where no man has gone before

BY KENNETH WONG

S everal years ago, professor Karim Malek had a small lab in the University of Iowa, staffed with approximately 10 students working on a research project. They wanted to see if they could predict and simulate human movements by applying robotic prin-

ciples to human anatomy. As their project gained momentum, the US Army came knocking on their door, with a check for $2.7 million.

Malek explained why the military took an interest in his work: “You can do a lot of testing [on a tank design] in the virtual world. Thermodynamics, aerodynamics, stress tests—all these can be done on a computer. The only time you must build the tank is when you want to put a soldier in it, so you can ask him or her, ‘How does it feel inside there? Can you assemble this system? Can you engage the target or see through the visor from where you’re sitting?’ But what if you can put a virtual soldier into the virtual tank?”

With a robust bank account to attract top talents, Malek assembled a team comprising nearly 30 experts from all over the world to take on the Virtual Soldier Research project for the Army. Then contracts began rolling in, from Caterpillar, Rockwell Collins, the US Marines, Ford, GM, and many more entities. Nearly a decade later, having invested close to $30 mil-lion to refine the technology, the professor’s humble lab gave birth to Santos and Sophia, a digital duo for the commercial market. Malek is now part of a team that oversees SantosHuman, Inc., a company spun off from the lab.

The young firm (formed in 2010) represents and licenses the intellectual property of the University of Iowa. The university conducts research and development; the company markets and distributes software suites.

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Virtual humans play an important role in keeping their human counterparts safe.


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Simulation n n n n


Santos and Sophia are part of a new outsourcing trend. This time, the jobs are not shifting from high-salaried, skilled workers in the First World to low-cost laborers over-seas. Instead, they’re shifting from human workers to digital workers. But you may take comfort in the fact that the types of operations ceded to digital humans are the works many of us would consider too dangerous, stressful, or painful to perform to begin with. (Sometimes, they’re literally back-breaking jobs.) When the Army needs to figure out how a 10-pound vest would affect a sniper’s agility and fatigue level, when an automaker needs someone to crawl into a tight space previously untested, when a plant manager needs someone to perform a series of ergonomically risky maneu-vers, they may now turn to digital human models (DHMs).

Working with CAD GeometryDHM-incorporated simulation exercises often involve 3D CAD files because the human-machine interaction usually takes place in a virtual environment, detailed and populated with standard CAD objects (3D models of armored vehi-cles, mechanical assemblies, and plant layouts, for example). Studying product designs (how a driver might navigate inside a smaller-than-average electric car) and manufactur-ing operations (how a repair technician might install an exhaust pipe) invariably require a mix of files created in different CAD programs. Therefore, for DHM-incorporated simulations, a solution that can ac-commodate—in other words, import—not just the software maker’s proprietary format, but also many different CAD formats, is preferable.

Many design, engineering, and simulation software makers have been developing and perfecting their own technologies to cater to this relatively new field. Siemens PLM Software’s digital humans, called Jack and Jill, are part of the company’s Tecnomatix digital manufac-turing software suite and integrated with the company’s NX CAD package. A basic version of PTC’s digital manikin is included in the company’s flagship product, Creo Parametric (formerly Pro/Engi-neer). Another version with greater functionalities, dubbed PTC Creo Manikin Extension, can be purchased from Dassault Systemes’ Virtual Ergonomics Solutions suite, which includes male and female digital manikins called Teo and Sia, and are integrated with the company’s CATIA (CAD), DELMIA (computer-aided manufacturing), and ENOVIA (product lifecycle management) software packages. San-tosHuman partners with Okino Computer Graphics, a CAD trans-lation technology developer, to make its DHM software compatible with industry-standard 3D file formats.

Human Constraints Unlike the type of semi-autonomous extras and player-controlled char-acters commonly found in video and computer games, digital humans used in simulation are designed with significant motion restrictions. In virtual environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft, an av-atar could be a 9-foot-tall, blue-skinned elf archer with superhuman strength. After a few quests, he may even be permitted to wield a club twice the size of his body mass or fly through the clouds. After all, doing what’s not physically possible in real life is one of the main attractions of the virtual world.

In simulation applications, it’s important to prevent digital humans from performing moves and maneuvers that are outside of what is pos-sible within the human population. The restriction is deliberate. It’s meant to give users—army engineers, facility managers, plant designers,

and ergonomists, among others—confidence that the digital humans’ reaches, crouches, and bends accurately represent an average soldier’s or employee’s range of motion, along with his or her limitations.

“The breadth of things our digital humans [Jack and Jill] can do cov-er the breadth of things real humans can do,” explains Tom Hoffman, director of Tecnomatix Global Marketing for Siemens PLM Software. John Buchowski, vice president of product management at PTC, notes, “The degrees of freedom available to our manikin are the same ones available to real humans.”

“In the movie Avatar, the Na’vi characters are 10 feet tall,” notes Julie Charland, product manager of Virtual Ergonomics at Dassault Systemes. “In our applications, the manikin has to be no bigger than [typical] humans, with accurate anatomy and kinematics controlling their movements. If you pull on our manikin’s arm, for example, it will only stretch as far as a human arm will—it can’t go farther. Game ava-tars don’t need to know where their center of gravity is. Our manikins need to know that.”

“The difference between 3D characters in games and DHMs in engi-neering software is the difference between making something look good and making something right,” notes PTC’s Buchowski. “When you’re dealing with human behavior simulation in product design, there’s actually a library of typical body types you need to use as reference: for instance, 50 percentile North American male or 30 percentile Asian female. I challenge you to find a woman who matches Lara Croft’s pro-portions in real life.”

The Science of AgonyDHM simulations produce more than visual references for movements, reaches, and lines of sight. They’re designed to collect other data, such as the amount of force applied to joints (often called joint torque), joint strength capabilities, internal muscle forces, and intervertebral disc compressive force. This allows army engineers, product designers, and ergonomists to address questions such as, How long can a pilot remain in a small cockpit without feeling stress on his or her back? How long can an average person continuously lift and drop a 50-pound part in an assembly line? How far would a repair technician need to bend to

Some manufacturers use digital human models to identify and correct ergonomic issues in tight-fitting vehicles, like the cockpit of a plane. The simulation shows Siemens PLM Software’s Jack and Jill.

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■ ■ ■ ■ Simulation


remove a cap? Is it ergonomically safe for the technician to execute such a maneuver?

On the Virtual Soldier Research project, Malek once received directives from a colonel in the US Army. “He said, ‘I want to be able to � nd out how long and what distance I can have [a virtual squadron] walk before I allow them to sit down, chew on ca� einated gum, and have a drink of water.’ � ese are the type of questions they want answered,” Malek says.

� at meant Malek and his programmers had to embed in their digital human, Santos, certain biomechanical intelligence, including his energy expenditure, the rate at which his fatigue increases, and the impact of the armor’s weight on his mobility over time. For valida-tion, programmers review motion-captured data of real humans performing similar tasks to make sure Santos’ simulated behaviors and bio-mechanical feedback re� ect the same outcome.

If you ask Santos to perform something that’s not humanly possible, Malek explains, “Santos will come back and say, ‘You’re asking me to carry something that’s too much for my elbow joints and muscles—the load is much higher than what I’ll ever be able to carry.’ ”

Issuing DirectivesIn games and movies, all the behaviors and movements of a character, from its facial ex-pression to its distinct walk, are governed by a skilled animator’s script. In simulation,

however, DHMs must come with a software interface accessible to those with little or no animation skills. It’s safe to assume that most DHM users will not know how to set up char-acter rigs and de� ne paths. For these users, commanding the DHMs has to be as straight-forward as selecting a manikin and choosing a standard action (Walk, Go Here, Reach, and so forth) from a menu. To perform these tasks, digital humans must rely on the built-in ki-nematics, with little or no intervention from software users.

“One of the advancements made in the DHM technology is to move away from the

keyframe-based animation used by [movie and video game]

animators,” says Sie-mens PLM Software’s

Ho� man. “Here, what we’re doing

is instructing

the digital human to perform a task. If we say, Reach for this object,’ it can � gure out on its own how to move there.”

Dassault’s Charland points out that 10 years ago, that was much more di� cult. “Now, it’s much easier. � ings that took about 10 clicks now take about three clicks, because when you tell the manikin to grab something, it knows exactly how to reach for it and grab it,” she says.

Most of the experts hired by Malek came with biomechanical and simulation expertise. But two years ago, Malek hired two senior programmers with experience in video game interface design. � eir task was to revamp Santos’ interface so it would be more acces-sible to non-technical users. “Our mandate is that after three days of training, people should be able to use the [Santos] software,” he says.

Use-Case ScenariosAccording to Dassault’s Charland, some pro-gressive airplane manufacturers are begin-ning to consider end-of-life disassembly pro-cedures: How should a plane be dismantled when it has reached its retirement? “In these cases, they use [DHMs] to simulate the pro-cess because they want to know how people might get to di� erent parts of the plane and remove them,” she explains.

DHMs prove to be particularly useful in simulation exercises where a certain stress-ful or dangerous action must be performed repetitively in order to understand its impact on human anatomy. “If you use real people to simulate [an assembly operation], you cannot possibly run tests on an entire cross section

The CG Santos digital human is versatile; here “astro” Santos provides vital information to real-life researchers and technologists.

capt

Images courtesy S

antosHum

an, Inc.


keyframe-based animation used by [movie and video game]

animators,” says Sie-mens PLM Software’s

Ho� man. “Here, what we’re doing

is instructing

Santos’ interface so it would be more acces-sible to non-technical users. “Our mandate is that after three days of training, people should be able to use the [Santos] software,” he says.

Use-Case ScenariosAccording to Dassault’s Charland, some pro-gressive airplane manufacturers are begin-ning to consider end-of-life disassembly pro-cedures: How should a plane be dismantled when it has reached its retirement? “In these cases, they use [DHMs] to simulate the pro-cess because they want to know how people might get to di� erent parts of the plane and remove them,” she explains.

DHMs prove to be particularly useful in simulation exercises where a certain stress-ful or dangerous action must be performed repetitively in order to understand its impact on human anatomy. “If you use real people to simulate [an assembly operation], you cannot possibly run tests on an entire cross section

captSophia is the female counterpart of Santos. Both are virtual models created by Karim Malek at the University of Iowa.


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n n n n Simulation


of the population,” says Dassault’s Charland. “That is something you can do with DHMs. The technology is so powerful you can answer a lot of what-ifs: What if we move this part from here to there? What if we move the open-ing another foot?”

Fifteen years ago, plant managers and er-gonomists had no easy way to identify cer-tain repeated motions that, in the long run, prove hazardous. Today, using DHMs, they can reasonably predict the long-term impact of certain operations on workers. The aim is to prevent and reduce injuries by designing a safe, risk-free environment for manufacturing.

All Shapes and SizesLooking back at earlier incarnations of Sie-mens PLM Software’s Jack and Jill, Hoffman admits that, originally, figures were much chunkier, more rigid, and didn’t deform well. “Now, a mesh network covers the figure,” he

says. “That lets us represent the shapes of dif-ferent people more accurately than before.”

Accurate representation of body types is important not just for aesthetics, but also for accuracy of the analysis results. In many cases, designers employ DHMs to understand how people in the far ends of the spectrum—those who are extremely tall, heavy, thin, or short—will react to their products. For example: How much legroom should be engineered into a cockpit to accommodate the tallest pilot? Is the lawn mower seat big enough to fit the heaviest potential user? Being able to adjust and customize the DHMs gives users a bet-ter understanding of the hazards posed by the design, the risk of injury involved in a certain factory layout, or the discomfort a consumer may suffer when using a product.

“Our [DELMIA] manikin is resizable to match different segments of the human popu-lation,” notes Dassault’s Charland. “This is important because, today, a product designed in one place of the world might be used some-

where else in the world. So if you are manufac-turing your design in Malaysia, for example, you’d want to resize your manikin to match the typical Asian population there. By default, we keep our manikins within average sizes, with normal range of motions, but if someone knows something about the target user, they can tweak the manikin further to get the right range of motion with DELMIA software.”

Although currently it is not the primary fo-cus of DHM technology developers, academ-ics and researchers have now begun studying and compiling data on under-represented segments of population, such as disabled people. Ron Hamameh, who authored the pa-per titled “Digital Human Models of People with Disabilities” (Digital Commons, Wayne State University, January 2010), observes, “With the injured veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars returning home and the baby-boomer generation exceeding retirement

age, there is an increase in the disabled popula-tion, the elderly population, and the need by both those populations for assistive technolo-gies. With DHM software programs being utilized by more and more industries, includ-ing the medical device and assistive technology industries, it only reinforces the notion that DHM software use will increase dramatically over the next few years.”

Demand for Realistic Visuals“Five or six years ago,” recalls Dassault’s Char-land, “the manikin looked more like a robot.” The complaint the company often got from users was that kids’ $50 video games had bet-ter-looking humans than the high-end profes-sional engineering software.

“The DHM figures are going to be much more lifelike,” says Siemens PLM Software’s Hoffman. “Things are definitely going that di-

rection. [Researchers] may focus on ergonom-ics, on answering specific questions, but the people they present their findings to—upper management—are usually influenced by the visuals they’ve seen in the games their kids are playing. So they find it difficult to trust analy-sis results where figures look inferior to what they’re used to seeing in video games. That’s a challenge we recognize.”

Some DHM software allows users to in-corporate scanned 3D data (usually saved as point-cloud data) and high-res images. They can be used much in the same way as texture-mapping on 3D volume to create video game characters with realistic skin and clothing.

The Next FrontierMalek currently serves as president of the Inter national Human Simulation Society, a relatively new industry group. Design and simulation software developers have quickly

jumped on board; founding members include Siemens PLM Software, Autodesk, and Das-sault Systemes. At the Society’s first Interna-tional Summit on Human Simulation early last summer, Ulrich Raschke, Siemens PLM Software’s director of human simulation prod-ucts, was named vice president.

“I’m working with Ford, GM, and Chrys-ler,” Malek says. “Human modeling is such an important issue for them, particularly to reduce injuries on the assembly line.” One of the society’s objectives is to establish industry standards for digital human modeling.

Although better graphics and increased power in computing now enables Santos DHMs to show results in real-time animation for straightforward scenarios (for example, predicting posture when reaching for a certain lever), the more complex jobs—like asking a digital marine to perform a series of tasks

(Top left) A basic version of PTC’s manikin is included free of charge with its flagship CAD software Creo Parametric. An advanced version, Creo Manikin Extension, is available for purchase. (Top right) As shown in the Sequence Editor dialog window in Siemens PLM Software’s Tecnomatix, digital human software makes it easy to construct a series of actions the model needs to perform.

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Simulation ■ ■ ■ ■

Professor Karim Malek’s research project led to the development of SantosHuman, Inc., specializing in using digital soldiers to simulate military operations.

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with a certain load, then generate a detailed report of the force, torque, and fatigue—can take some time, from three hours to two days. Santos software can take advantage of parallel processing for most jobs, so users with a high-performance computing server running many cores simultaneously will see greater perfor-mance. But optimization formulation remains an area that cannot be parallelized due to the algorithm involved.

At the present time, DHM technology em-ploys a mix of robotic, simulation, and biome-chanical principles. But the demand for more accurate results may push developers to incor-porate a dose of psychology, as well. Malek has a daunting list of requests from his clients in the military; they want him to add cognitive parameters into the software code.

“� ey want to load the digital marine with [inputs such as] being scared, his mood this morning, and whether he’s battle-hard-ened,” explains Malek. “� ese soft [inputs] are important to the client, but they are dif-� cult to model.”

� e challenge for Malek as well as other digital human model developers is to � gure out a way to represent fear, anxiety, state of

mind, and combat experience through a series of equations and algorithms.

In case you’re open-minded enough to be-friend a digital human model, Santos has a Facebook page (you can add him as a friend at www.facebook.com/people/Santos-VersionOne/1777013781). Don’t be o� ended if it

takes him a while to respond. He may be in the middle of performing a very crucial task for a client. ■

Kenneth Wong is a freelance writer who has covered the digital video, computer gaming, and CAD industries. He can be reached at [email protected].

Image courtesy SantosHuman, Inc.

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Each year, art and technology, innovation and craft converge at the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival (CAF), featuring animations from various genres—full-length and short fi lms, music videos, real-time projects, visualizations/simulations, and more.

“We are proud to have presented an eclectic array of pieces, ranging from the visually stunning animated shorts and VFX breakdowns to gorgeous and informative scientifi c visualizations,” says The Creative-Cartel’s Josh Grow, who returned once again as the CAF chair for the second consecu-tive year at SIGGRAPH 2012. “Our jury reviewed hundreds of entries from all over the world and created a selection of works with the highest level of originality, craft, storytelling, and technology.”

For the past several conferences, SIGGRAPH has opted for a more fi lm-festival-like atmosphere. While the 2012 CAF still embraced those elements, the organizers brought back the classic Animation Theater to the program. Now called the Daytime Selects, these reels consisted of “amaz-ing content that we just couldn’t fi t into the two hours of the Electronic Theater,” notes Grow.

More than 600 pieces were submitted for consideration to this year’s festival. Of those, nearly half were from students. A jury of industry professionals then selected 29 projects for the evening Electronic Theater program. More than 60 projects (divided into three reels) were part of the Daytime Selects, as were three additional reels of content (animation, entertainment, and art) from the Japan Media Arts Festival.

“The content gets better and better. This year’s show was particularly diffi cult to put together due to all the amazing content we received from every stretch of the industry,” says Grow.

“The CAF is the best of the best from all over the world,” Grow continues. “And it’s the one place to see all the greatest minds in our industry come together and celebrate their hard work and achievements.”

A selection of images from this year’s Computer Animation Festival (courtesy of ACM SIGGRAPH 2012) appears on these two pages. –Karen Moltenbrey


SIGGRAPH 2012Computer Animation Festival

Release Your Imagination by Stuart Bailey and Alexis Van de Haeghe of Real-timeUK (computer-animated short fi lm—Electronic Theater)

The Colors of Evil by Alex Glawion, Phillp Simon, and Alyse Miller of Ringling School of Art + Design (student project—Animation Theater)

Divine Intervention by Yen-Chi Tseng of the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (student project—Animation Theater)

CGW0912-Portfoliofin.indd 30 9/11/12 2:13 PM


Rising by Lionel Juglair of Groupe Mikros Image (computer-animated short fi lm—Electronic Theater)

Fertilization by Thomas Brown of Nucleus Medical Media (visualization/simulation—Electronic Theater)

Great Expectations Title Sequence by Nic Benns of Momoco (animated feature fi lm—Animation Theater) Bon Iver We Are Music by Dan Marsh and Ryan Knowles of The

Moving Picture Company (television commercial—Animation Theater)

Encounter by SeeHun Jeon of the School of Visual Arts (student project—Animation Theater)

CGW0912-Portfoliofin.indd 31 9/11/12 2:14 PM

n n n n Stop-Motion Animation


FACEForwardTo create ParaNorman, a stop-motion animated feature, the crew uses state-of-the-art technology By Barbara Robertson

Images ©

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Stop-Motion Animation ■ ■ ■ ■


HHe’s little, but this boy with a thousand faces has a mighty presence in a big, wide world. Eight thousand faces, and more than a million expressions, in fact, when animators arrange and re-arrange Nor-man’s tiny mouth and eyebrow pieces like a jigsaw puzzle to create happy faces and sad faces, and lip-sync his dialog.

As for the big, wide world, we see the star of Laika’s stop- motion feature ParaNorman at home and at school, in chase sequences through a well-populated town, in a graveyard and a forest, and a variety of other locations.

“Historically, stop motion has felt like it was shot on a tabletop,” says Laika President, CEO, and Animator Travis Knight, who re-ceived Annie and VES nominations for animating the star of Cora-line. For ParaNorman, Knight was producer and lead animator. “We wanted ParaNorman to feel more expansive. We did that through set design and animation performances.”

Computer graphics tools and techniques helped make this pos-sible in two ways. First, designers worked with Autodesk’s Maya, Pixologic’s ZBrush, and Adobe’s Photoshop to shape and color facial expressions before sending digital models to 3D Systems Corpora-tion’s full-color ZPrinter 650 for outputting the face parts.

Second, the visual e� ects crew used a combination of Maya, Side E� ects Software’s Houdini, and Pixar’s RenderMan to extend back-grounds, swirl witch-infested tumultuous skies, populate the town with CG puppets, and, in general, help make it possible to create an action/adventure � lm in stop motion. Compositors put it all to-gether with � e Foundry’s Nuke.

Pushing the Envelope� e Focus Features comedy tells the story of an 11-year-old boy named Norman, who is normal in every way but one: He can see and talk to the ghosts of dead people. And, that makes Norman an outcast.

Norman lives in the town of Blithe Hollow, which was the site, 300 years earlier, of a famous witch-hunt. He has one friend, the chubby Neil, also an outcast, and both boys su� er bullying. Even at home, Norman is misunderstood. He makes his father angry when he talks to his grandmother’s ghost. His older sister is an-noyed, his mother forgiving. Norman doesn’t care.

He bonds with Neil by talking to the ghost of Neil’s dog, which Norman can see but Neil can’t. He pins zombie badges on his backpack, and decorates his room with zombie posters. When zombies invade Blithe Hollow and ghosts rise from graves

in response to a centuries-old curse, Norman becomes a hero. “� e epic � nale of the movie is an amazing blend of old tech and

new tech, 2D, stop motion, CG, compositing,” says Sam Fell, who directed the movie with Chris Butler. “� at was a high point in terms of pushing the envelope. And, we have a dynamic chase sequence that tops every action seen in stop frame. Action was a big ambition. I thought at some point we’d be reined in, but we never were.”

“We had a very ambitious style of acting, with extreme close-ups and reaction shots,” adds writer/director Butler. “We wanted to do proper � lmic acting, not just pose to pose. Part of the reason we were able to achieve that is we asked a lot of our animators on set. But, the technical innovations of face replacements gave us a degree of acting in the faces we haven’t seen before. Pushing the envelope is almost Laika’s brand. Push and push and push, and if can’t be done, that’s a reason to try.”

Face OffLaika � rst used rapid-prototyping machines to print small face parts for Coraline. Animators popped mouth and brow shapes onto Cora-line’s face, rather than create her facial expressions by sculpting pli-able silicon models with armatures inside.

Rapid-prototyping printers are similar to ink-jet printers, but rather than applying ink to paper, multiple print heads spray a UV-sensitive resin in layer after layer onto a powder-based supporting material to build the model.

“� ey look like sugar cookies from the oven when they emerge,” says Brian McLean, creative supervisor of replacement animation and engineering, and director of rapid prototyping. � e crew re-moves the face parts from the supporting material, and cleans and sands them. � en, rinses and repeats. � ousands of times.

For Coraline, the groundbreaking technique worked so well that the studio took it to another level for ParaNorman, creating more parts for more characters, and using the machine for new purposes.

Coraline, for example, had approximately 200,000 potential fa-cial expressions created with combinations of mouth and eyebrow parts. Norman has 1.5 million. For Coraline, artists painted color onto the parts. � is time, the crew used full-color printers that could build color into the model. � ey put the printers to work creating props as well as face parts. And they even printed visual e� ects. For example, to simulate motion blur, they printed Norman’s face with his nose in triplicate.

Images ©

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Visual effects artists painted out the seams caused when animators applied face parts to change Norman’s expression.


■ ■ ■ ■ Stop-Motion Animation


Making Headway Each character starts as a pencil design on paper, followed by interpretations drawn in Photo shop. Once the artists and directors narrow the choices, modelers create clay ma-quettes in key poses for each character, and the armature department begins working on the tiny skeletons with ball and socket joints that will � t inside the bodies.

� e heads and faces for ParaNorman’s characters took two shapes. One, used for the zombies and some background characters, had silicon � esh with a mechanism inside, a tradi-tional method of creating facial expressions, al-beit with new, softer silicon over foam latex for

added � exibility and longevity.� e second technique, used

for the main characters, employed the use of rapid-prototyping machines to print face parts. Much as they would if they were creat-ing a CG character for a � lm, the artists be-gan the process by scanning the head of the clay maquette. “We captured tool marks in the clay, facets, everything that made the clay sculpt handmade,” McLean says. CG model-ers created the rough topology from the scan in Maya, moved the result into ZBrush to exaggerate the details, and sent the � le to the printer for a test run.

“� e printer softens edges, grooves, and val-leys,” McLean says. “We needed to see what to push in terms of color and texture. We would never want to show the directors the ZBrush model or a rendering of that � le because it’s so exaggerated.”

Once the printed head received an artis-

tic buy-o� , the dense ZBrush mesh moved into PixelMachine SRL’s TopoGun software, where modelers redrew it with a lower-reso-lution topology.

“We produce each face thousands and thousands of times,” McLean says. “If the to-pology is too dense or the � le size too great, we can’t produce very many parts at one time. 3D printing is a new art form; there’s no es-tablished work� ow. Our rigging supervisor, Michael Laubach, had to � gure out how to produce high-level detail with low � le sizes.”

At this point, a character’s CG head is still a complete shell; there are no removable parts yet. � e shell moves in two directions—to two

di� erent groups working with Maya on the inside and outside of the characters’ heads. For the outside, a CG modeler creates face masks. For the inside, a CG modeler designs and engineers the elabo-rate mechanical system. For Norman, it had 78 parts that animators could set in motion to move his eyes, eyelids, and

ears. Some parts are printed plastic. Others are tiny metal bolts and screws.

“People often think we’re printing whole faces and eyes,” McLean says. “But we build heads to be transformers.” Norman’s face is a mask held in place by magnets, as are all the characters’ faces that use this system. When an animator removes the face mask, Norman’s eyeballs are still inside the shell of his head. Animators move his eyes using the internal mechanical system. � ey close his eyelids and move a blade of his hair with an X-Acto blade. Once moved, the parts stay in place until the animator moves them again.

On the outside, eight thousand faces com-posed of snap-together eyebrows, foreheads, mouths, and cheeks give Norman his facial expressions. His buddy Neil has 3,000.

“We build the faces in kits,” McLean ex-plains. “One series of faces in a kit might allow Norman to say any line of dialog with a smile. With another kit, he could say any line of dia-log with a frown. We create each of his emo-tions with phonemes to build a foundation for the whole � lm.”

Making Faces To build the kits, Laubach rigs the CG charac-ters in Maya. � e rigs give animators the abili-ty to do poses and create each character’s range of facial expressions, as they would with any CG character. � e di� erence is that Laubach must be cognizant of printing limitations.

“We print physical objects, so there are real-world limitations,” McLean says. A lip stretched too thin might break when printed, for example.

CG animators shape the facial expressions by moving control points predetermined by the rig, working from dialog samples and 2D drawings that provide a blueprint for each

character’s range of expressions and phonemes. “� ey’ll take a line of dialog from Norman with a good range, for example, and use that to build his kits,” McLean says. “� ey digitally sculpt his faces. � e di� cult part is making sure each shape is unique and will be used in the � lm. � ey have to be as economical and considerate of printing as possible.”

Before a stop-motion animator puts a Nor-man puppet into a set, he or she builds expres-sions for the shot using the CG face kit. “� e animator will sit with a facial animation spe-cialist,” McLean says, “someone who knows every face. � ey listen to the dialog together and create a playblast with the digital faces.”

Animators typically move the bodies on “ones” and faces on “twos.” � at is, they posi-tion the body in a unique pose 24 times per

Digital skies and set extensions helped set builders add details and open Norman’s world beyond the tabletop.


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second, and change face parts to create facial expressions 12 times per second.

“Animating on twos gives us more pop,” Knight says. “If we want more subtlety, we might animate the faces on ones.”

When the animator and facial animation specialist have assembled all the digital face parts into the series of expressions they want—per-haps of Norman screaming as he runs from zombies, or frowning, laughing, or smiling—they show the playblast to the lead animator or director. “If he approves the playblast, we cre-ate a shopping list of face parts,” McLean says. The shopping list goes to a face librarian, who picks all the physical face parts for the shot.

These go into a box that the animator takes to the set, along with an X-sheet that lists expres-sions and face parts frame by frame.

“Because this might be the first time these faces appear in sequence, we run tests to be sure the color and registration are accurate,” McLean says.

Printing MakeupColor was the major difference between the process used at Laika for ParaNorman and Coraline. “For Coraline, we used the plastic printer,” McLean says, “the same one we use now to print eye parts. So we hand-painted her face. That’s why she has five freckles on each cheek. We needed to keep the paint re-ally simple.”

When 3D Systems’ new color printers became available, they considered new possi-bilities. “Color printing had been around for a while, but the new machine had rich blacks

and white whites, which had been the Achilles’ heel,” McLean says.

The studio decided to test the printers with a little model of a zombie head. “When we got it back, it looked fantastic,” McLean says. “The yellows were vibrant. The greens, consis-tent. We purchased the machine.”

Thus, rather than hand-tinting each face part, the artists could use Photoshop to paint one digital part and print multiple copies in color. They would soon learn there were other advantages as well.

It wasn’t easygoing in the beginning, though. When they first tried printing faces, the skin tones looked terrible. What the painters saw on

screen was not what the machine printed. Except for the zombies.

“We asked if our machine was bro-ken,” McLean says. “They told us that the machine prints green and yellow really well, but other colors can be a problem.”

Character painter Tory Bryant took the problem in hand. “She went through

the Pantone book, the thousands of colors, and printed each as a physical chip,” McLean says. “That became her palette.”

As they tested the machines to calibrate the color, the crew’s excitement about this new pro-cess grew. “We realized the printer puts color one-sixteenth of an inch deep into the model,” McLean says. “That was unlike anything we’d seen before. In addition to getting wonderful colors, this technique gave us subsurface scat-tering for free. The model didn’t look like a thin shell; it looked and felt like skin. We realized we could put color where we wanted, so we put a little red inside Norman’s ears, and they looked like real ears. And that broke us free to do a lot of other things.” Most important, they could change the characters’ designs.

McLean explains that the characters in stop-motion films that use faces animated with replacement parts have lollipop heads—big heads on little bodies—for a reason. “It’s a wonderful design, but it’s also a side effect,” McLean says. “The bodies are made of sili-con, which is translucent and has color all the way through, so you have subsurface scatter-ing. But, you can’t put a hand-colored, hard, printed face next to the translucent body, so you need a long neck.”

But now, with the color printer, they could put the translucent, color-printed face next to a soft silicon body. “We created Alvin the bully with a thick neck,” McLean says. “We could never have done that before. That’s one reason why the designs in ParaNorman are so unique.”

A big inventory solved any problems with continuity. Although each printer outputs slightly different shades of red, the colors fade through the life cycle of the printer heads, and humidity and temperature affect the color.

“When you have 10 or 15 copies of a smile,

you can find faces that match,” McLean says. “Tim Yates, our face librarian, can look at hundreds of face parts and pick the ones that work well together for color.”

Once an animator finishes a shot and the shot has made its way through editorial, the faces move back into a CG pipeline where artists on the visual effects crew paint out the seams between all the face parts. They also work on the entire shot, removing rigs and, sometimes, reconstructing sets.

“We do all the traditional, invisible effects,” says visual effects supervisor Brian Van’t Hul. “Sometimes an animator will have to cut away a portion of a set to reach the puppet. We shoot a clean plate and tell them to go for it. These are paint and roto tasks no one will no-

At left, the physical tornado and layers of tulle (middle) created and manipulated in the art department provided reference for the CG stormy skies in the image above. In that shot, when the witch moves her face, volumetric CG clouds react.


Stop-Motion Animation n n n n


tice, hopefully, but they are extremely impor-tant and allow animators to stay in a creative-performance mode.”

Big, Wide World But, the most dramatic role the visual effects crew played was in opening up the world for the filmmakers. “Ninety to 95 percent of the film has stop-motion puppets and miniature props and sets,” Van’t Hul says. “Things people made. But, occasionally, we remind the audience of the bigger world. Stop motion can feel claustropho-bic. Travis [Knight] gave us the task of expand-ing the world and opening the environment.”

Visual effects artists typically paint skies for stop-motion films. For ParaNorman, they cre-ated a volumetric storm. They also extended roads and streets in the town and populated it with digital extras. “We have a lot more CG elements in this film than in Coraline,” Van’t Hul says. “There was a conscious decision to open up the production value and make the world feel bigger.”

They did so in much the same way a vi-sual effects crew would enhance a live-action film. Despite the painstakingly slow, frame-by-frame performances, stop-motion is live action, and the visual effects crew needed to match the materials and scale of that stylized world. “We have to balance photorealism with what the directors want in style,” Van’t Hul says. “But the tools make it easier.”

As they might for a live-action film, the crew shot HDRI images of the sets to better match digital environments and characters with the practical sets and puppets. For HDRIs, they used exactly the same type of camera, a Canon 5D Mark II, that the animators and cinema-tographer used.

During a chase sequence in which a blue van rockets through the town, for example, the crew extended the set with digital back-grounds and composited those backgrounds into the shot. Then, they tracked the practi-

cal van in the shot, match-moved a CG ver-sion, lit and rendered the shot with the CG van. Lastly, they removed the reflections of the digital background from the CG van and ap-plied them to images of the practical van.

The most dramatic environment the crew created, though, was for the climax of the film in which an enormous face of a witch appears in turbulent storm clouds.

“It would have been easy to have told the visual effects department that we needed a super natural storm,” Butler says. “But our reference was an imperfect, handmade storm that [production designer] Nelson Lowry had come up with.” To match the design, the artists created storm clouds out of tulle, material typi-cally used for ballerina costumes, animated the material clouds, and lit them. Then, the CG artists needed to match the practical element.

In the sequence, volumetric CG clouds fill the sky. “We used shapes and shaders and cloth simulations,” Van’t Hul says. The effects artists started building the sky using a series of curves in Houdini to construct the cloudscape, put hundreds of pieces of twisting cloth material based on the weave in tulle on top, and added the volumetrics. The cloth simulations gave the clouds a tactile feel, the volumetric effects added scale. A giant, greenish witch’s face appears in the clouds, and as it moves through the sky, it impacts the volumes.

Eventually, the witch resolves into a pup-pet that animators perform, but with CG enhancements. “They wanted her dress to be flowing and electric,” Van’t Hul says. “So we tracked and match-moved the puppet. We put a CG dress on her and gave her Tesla-coil-like hair. We didn’t base the Tesla electricity on real electricity. We used a drawing that looked like someone had blown through a straw at ink spilled on paper. We wanted it to look like we had paid an animator to do an intricate, time-consuming thing for six months.”

The crew rendered the clouds in Side Effects’

Mantra. For the characters, they used Pixar’s RenderMan.

Digital PuppetsIn addition to the digital environments, an-other way in which the visual effects crew expanded the puppet’s world was by mixing digital characters with real puppets in the school and in town.

“We created digital ghosts, background adults for a mob sequence, and kids in the school,” Van’t Hul says.

Eleven real puppets sat in the foreground of the school auditorium; the rest of the charac-ters in the background were CG. In the mob, puppets intermingled with CG characters.

“The CG characters had to match the pup-pets, even their skin texture,” Van’t Hul says. “We had multiple versions of skin. Background characters had rubber heads, which has a slight-ly different look and feel than the face-replace-ment heads. Our characters had to match each type. Our shader writers would hold a puppet and see how the light played off it.”

The effects artists also put a CG owl in a school play, moths in a teddy bear’s mouth, and butterflies in the sky. “We really tried to use the computer to enhance the film,” Van’t Hul says.

For the directors, the combination of CG and traditional effects is what gives the film its own identity. “We didn’t want to make just another stop-frame film,” Fell says. “There’s no point going round the same track.”

Butler adds, “Years ago, CG was in danger of killing stop motion. Now the approach is to embrace the age-old technique and drag it into the next century through innovation. The scope, the set extensions, the digital back-ground characters, the face animation we can get with CG don’t detract from stop motion. They add to it.”

By pushing the state of the art, the artists at Laika kept the tangible—real light, real textures, real photography. But with the help of computer graphics, they were able to take stop motion off the table and animate puppets with smoother, subtler performances.

“I think we’ve got the best of both worlds,” Fell says. n

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can a be reached at [email protected].

Use your smartphone to ac-cess a video interview with ParaNorman VFX supervisor Brian Van’t Hul.





For Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, a visual effects crew surrounds stop-motion puppets with digital environments and sparks the action with CG fire, water, and electricity


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TThe good news is that the visual effects crew working on Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie didn’t need to create CG characters that matched puppets for the stop-motion film or remove seams from puppet faces. The bad news—or the interesting challenge, if you pre-fer—is that they still ended up producing 1200 visual effects shots.

The reason was unique.“With every stop-motion film, much of the work, like rig re-

moval, is hidden,” says Visual Effects Supervisor Tim Ledbury. “The difference between Frankenweenie and other films was the scale of the puppets. They had to be big because of the mechanics in Sparky [the dog]. And that meant we ran out of stage space. So we had to do more digital environments.”

More, as in nearly everything. The sets included houses for the main character and a neighbor, and the school. “Everything else is CG,” Ledbury says, “houses, streets, lampposts, cars.”

A crew that topped 40 artists at peak worked for more than two years on the show creating the environments. They also swam invis-ible fish through digital water, cast light from torches and flashlight beams, ignited various electrical effects that appear throughout the film, and burned a windmill with digital flames. Of the 1200 visual effects shots, only around 200 had rig removals alone.

Size MattersThe stop-motion animated feature, a remake of Burton’s 1984 live-action short, stars a young boy—a child scientist named Victor Franken stein (voiced by actor Charlie Tahan). It’s a parody of and homage to the 1931 film Frankenstein: When Victor’s dog Sparky dies in a car accident, Victor revives him.

“The story is based on something so dear to Tim [Burton],” says producer Allison Abbate, who has produced numerous animated films and worked with Burton on Corpse Bride. “It was born of a time when he lost his beloved dog. And, he loved horror movies.”

In the animated feature, Victor is an outcast. Sparky is his only friend. “The whole film is about a boy and his dog,” says Super-vising Animator Trey Thomas. “It’s about the purity of their re-lationship. Victor drives the story. But, Sparky is Victor’s reason

for doing all the stuff that gets him into trouble.” All the puppets are silicon with mechanical steel armatures inside.

The animators performed the puppets on “ones,” that is, they moved the puppets into unique poses for each frame; 24 poses for each sec-ond of film. Sparky determined the scale.

“You base the scale on the smallest important actor,” says Rick Heinrichs, production designer. “And that was the dog.”

Although “revived,” Sparky still acts like a dog in the film. He isn’t an anthropomorphic character or a monster. “Tim wanted a dog that was dog-like, and to get a happy, charming little guy with personality was a real challenge,” Thomas says. “The animators had to make this little puppet that has only dog emotions come off like a living thing. We had to make him larger to get expressions.”

To fit Sparky with an internal armature complex enough for these precise performances, the puppet needed to stand three-and-a-half inches high from his head to his toes, and five inches long. That meant the boy Victor was a foot tall, and Victor’s parents grew to 16 to 18 inches tall.

“So when you do a house scaled to a character that size, you’re talking about a fairly large house,” Heinrichs says. “And we had a whole neighborhood.”

More than one whole neighborhood. During production, in-dividual animators worked simultaneously on 35 sets. Thus, the neighborhood became the province of a visual effects crew that cre-ated set extensions and, for some wide shots, an entire digital town. “We had 800 greenscreen shots,” Ledbury says. “And, we had differ-ent scales of miniatures that we had to comp.”

In one shot, for example, a Godzilla-like turtle monster stomps on a miniature of the town center, and crowds of puppets run away. “We decided to make the miniature go with the turtle and compos-ite puppets shot on greenscreen for the crowds.” To rotoscope the puppets, the artists used The Foundry’s Nuke and Autodesk’s Maya.

The crew also used Maya to build the town, creating a “New Hol-land” kit based on 18 house styles. “This is suburbia,” Ledbury says, “clean, flat, and boring. So you’d immediately say it would lend itself to CG. But, it only makes it look more CG and stark. We added a

ONE FRAME

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Skies painted by visual effects artists lifted the storytelling into the environment.

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bit of grime and wonkiness. Threw in a few trees. Put water stains on the buildings.”

Textures and set dressing changed the look of individual streets. “We had the real houses on set to follow in terms of style, and we photographed swatches and material samples from the art department, as if we were doing a fantasy live-action film,” Ledbury says. “We clipped sections of streets together, put a curve in the road, added a junction, and dressed the streets with bushes, trees, cars to change the look.”

When the camera was higher, the crew

composited lower-polygon versions of the town. For a wide view from the windmill on the hill, the artists put mountains be-hind the CG town. A rooftop shot also needed a big environment extension.

“It’s a shot with a kid on roller skates on top of a roof,” Ledbury says. “They built only one side of the roof, so we ex-tended that, too. He’s doing experiments with fizzy water. We had to do fluid sim-ulations, and CG spray and steam com-ing out of a bottle.”

Water and fire are never easy to simu-late with computer graphics, and this film has both. In stop motion.

Frame-by-Frame SimAt one point in the film, Victor shines a flashlight beam into water to highlight an in-visible fish. “That was harder than it sounds,” Ledbury says. “It took a lot of versions before Tim [Burton] picked a final one.”

Creating a fluid simulation with stop- motion characteristics was difficult. To shine a light on the water rippled by the invisible fish, the crew blended rendered passes of the water. But first, they had to create the water.

The effects artists started with a CG fish and a water simulation created with Next Limit Technologies’ RealFlow software. “We simu-lated the fluid really slow, brought the meshes

into Maya, and roughed them up,” Ledbury says. “Sometimes we tweaked the mesh by hand to get rid of perfections. We might plus two frames together and get a jump. We’d change the order of the frames. There weren’t many procedural ways to do this, so we did it by hand.”

Similarly, it turned out that there were no procedural ways to create the electrical effects and the lightning.

Throughout the film, lightning shoots through the sky and electricity dances across

metal objects. When Victor revives Sparky, the entire attic becomes electrified.

“There are lots of ways to create electrical effects with CG, but you can spot them,” Ledbury says. “We wanted something that would fit more into the stop-motion look. So, we painted all the effects frame by frame for something like 100 shots.”

In other words, they achieved the stop-motion look by mimicking the technique, by moving the electricity frame by frame. “It was quite painful,” Ledbury says. “I did a couple myself, and it drives you up the wall. But the

results are head and shoulders above the stan-dard approach. A group of four or five people had a go at it and got the right look. By the end of production, they could do a shot the first time. They got used to how fast the elec-tricity should move.”

Burning WindmillSitting on a hill above the town is New Hol-land’s monument, a wooden windmill. At the end of the film, it catches on fire and

collapses. “Those were the shots that kept me awake,” Ledbury points out. “We were all concerned about how we would achieve the fire. We toyed with using live-action el-ements, but in the end, we went full CG using Maya Fluids.”

The animators used windmills in various sizes appropriate for shots ranging from close-ups to wide shots. For example, one full wind-mill used for wide shots stood four-and-a-half feet tall; a separate top was in puppet scale. There were interior sets, as well.

The visual effects crew built CG versions of

Left to right across the page spread: VFX artists built much of New Holland with CG. Victor in his attic pre-paring to revive Sparky. Painters inserted hand-drawn electrical effects frame by frame. Tim Burton, puppet master. Sparky the dog established the scale.



Stop-Motion Visual Effects n n n n

each set using surveys for measurements. Then they match-moved the sets and camera posi-tions in the final images with CG versions and CG cameras to position the fire in approxi-mately 60 shots.

“We’d talk to an effects TD, decide where the fire should go, lay it in, tweak it, and en-hance it,” Ledbury says.

The effects TDs started by using Maya Flu-ids to simulate several versions of fire, for three

shots to start, giving Burton options to consider before set-tling on a final look. “His main concern was the speed of the fire,” Ledbury says. “We started too slow. Faster fire put more energy into the scene.”

Once the fire was in place, the artists lay-ered in other CG elements, such as falling debris, bits of digital wood, planks that hit the wall and splintered, and smoke. “For smoke, we went half and half,” Ledbury says. “Smoke is notoriously difficult to get to work in CG, even when you have all the time and money you need. So, we enhanced the CG smoke with live-action elements. Then to develop that Frankenweenie look, we tweaked. The fire took a lot of tweak-ing. It was weeks of pain.” At the end, with all the elements rendered out, compositors could drop out frames for a final bit of tweaking as needed.

One of the most challenging windmill shots moved into the visual effects department after all the sets were gone. “They filmed the pup-

pets against greenscreen, and we built a CG interior, part of the windmill exteriors, and the sail,” Ledbury says. “We couldn’t use a previ-ous image of the set because we needed to have flickering light from the fire. I hope no one can tell.”

The effects crew also put fire into CG torches held by a crowd of puppets that chase Sparky through a CG town. They tracked each torch in the crowd and inserted fire in the appropriate scale. And, they tracked in 3D flashlight beams for shots in a pet cemetery. “Doing five of those shots would have been fine,” Ledbury says. “But we had 20 torch-beam shots in a misty scene with lens flares.”

Shine a Light Although Frankenweenie is a black-and-white film, the artists worked in color. “The art de-partment painted some of the sets in black and white, and some in color,” Ledbury says. “The grass is green. But the matte painters worked in color for their own sanity.”

This was true for the skies as well as ele-ments on the ground. “We created a whole raft of assets for the artists to study,” says Heinrichs. “In a movie like this, the sky is an important character; it’s part of the storytelling process. The people who did the backgrounds were incredibly skilled at extending the look and feel into the environment.”

Without color to put depth into a scene, the artists needed to experiment with the tone. “People soon learned what would happen

when they went to black and white,” Ledbury says. “They could apply the black-and-white lookup as they went along, but by the end of production, it wasn’t an issue. We all kind of forgot whether we were working in black and white or color. It was just the movie.”

Digital environments and set extensions, water, fire, and smoke simulations, electricity, rotoscoping, greenscreen shots, match-mov-

ing, compositing. It all adds up to

Ledbury calling Frankenweenie an effects film. “I think we had close to 800 more visual ef-fects shots than we had on Corpse Bride and twice the shots I worked on for Fantastic Mr. Fox. It worked out to between 600 and 700 shots per year, which is a lot for 40 people, but we pushed through. We had to be quite fast and efficient. We didn’t have a massive techni-cal infrastructure.”

But, the approval process was quick. “We were quite low on layers of management,” Ledbury says. “We didn’t have CG supervisors or a compositing supervisor. It was just me. And, I went directly to Tim.”

Ledbury has worked as a visual effects art-ist on several live-action films as well as stop-motion features, and he finds himself drawn to the stop-motion world.

“It seems to be more special in a way,” Led-bury says. “The process is grueling. Compared to six months on a live-action shoot in Soho, 70-odd weeks on a shoot can wear you down. But the end product can be more satisfying. The shelf life of some live-action films is short. This feels like something that might last. And, the artists at this studio have more ownership, as well. We can wander around at lunchtime and have a look, see the puppets in the work-shop. It’s a lot of work. But it’s fun.” n

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at [email protected].



■ ■ ■ ■ Storage


Many of us who have worked with computers for years can remember a time, not so very long ago, when hav-ing 100mb of storage on a disk was considered impres-sive; when we were amazed by the � rst 1gb storage devices. Now, however, studios are creating that much data in one frame of animation or one scene of a game.

Storage needs have grown exponentially with the advent of more re-alistic gaming systems, 3D stereoscopic � lms, not to mention 4k and now 6k single-� lm-frame resolutions and 48 frame-per-second (fps) � lm rates.

� e storage needs of studios, large and small, no longer deal in megabytes or even gigabytes. We are now talking about daily produc-tion of terabytes and petabytes of data.

How are studios dealing with this increasing need and the various challenges that come with it, such as latency and accessibility? Com-puter Graphics World asked Tom Coughlin, Pete Schlatter, and Jason Danielson, all leaders in the storage industry, questions that are on everyone’s mind, to see what options studios of all sizes have today, and what they can expect in the future.

With more than 30 years of experience with magnetic recording engineering, fl exible tapes, and fl oppy disk storage and rigid disks, Coughlin, founder of Coughlin Associates, has written market and

As studios produce even greater amounts of data in keeping up with the latest formats in media and entertainment, their need for more storage seems insatiable By Douglas King

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technology analysis reports and articles, including the “Digital Entertainment” series focus-ing on data storage and the creation, distribution, and reception of entertainment content.

Schlatter is the product marketing executive/brand evangelist at G-Technology by Hitachi. He has been with G-Tech since 2005 and has worked to support the unique needs of the entertainment industry while gathering information for next-generation products.

Danielson, along with his product team at Digital F/X, won an Emmy for Technical Achieve-ment for the development of the video workstation. Prior to leading NetApp’s worldwide mar-keting for the media and entertainment industry, he launched Omneon’s broadcast-specific Media Grid storage system, and at Silicon Graphics he developed solutions for more than 100 of the leading editing, compositing, animation, and graphics application companies.

Let’s jump right in. In the near future, what will the storage requirements be for studios?Coughlin: As the resolution and frame rate of video

content increase, the total quantity of content storage as well as network bandwidth needs increase. Also, as multi-camera projects increase due to stereoscopic and even free viewpoint workflows, the to-tal storage and bandwidth requirements will continue to expand. Movie projects can accumulate total con-tent storage of several pet-abytes in size, and this will increase with time.

Schlatter: When it comes to storage, larger film studios are really looking for capacity, performance, and sharing. The higher-resolution films produced nowadays are increasing the amount of space needed to store them, and in larger production studios, you have multiple people working on the same project at the same time, which means that being able to collaborate and share these files with one another quickly and easily is extremely important. Smaller studios are more about getting one workstation set up with faster storage that then can be shared to other users. [Apple’s] Thunderbolt benefits smaller production studios because it provides quick storage transfer rates using new Apple gear and direct-attached storage.

Danielson: The storage demands for media companies are increasing at an unprecedented rate, with the adoption of digital cameras and on-set, file-based workflows and the proliferation of delivery platforms. On the production side, video formats such as 3D stereoscopic and 48-fps shoots are driving up bandwidth and capacity needs, which is why we have focused on increased bandwidth and non-disruptive scalability for our production storage systems. Bandwidth drives productivity by reducing file transfer times and the number of file transfers needed to move content through the workflow or pipeline.

On the distribution side, with anywhere, anytime access, the strategy for monetizing older as-sets is becoming clearer. This opportunity, along with the evolution of object stores and the cost reduction for terabytes, is building the case for deeper digitization of library assets. As a result, global distributed content repositories are emerging. With this trend, object store technology will become more important. We will also see continuing interest in the analytics of consumer behavior for the Internet, broadcast media, film content, and other formats. Therefore, storage architectures that accelerate big data analytics will be another focus.

You mentioned Apple’s Thunderbolt high-speed I/O technology. What impact do you foresee this technology having on the industry?

Schlatter: Thunderbolt breaks performance bottlenecks and enables laptop expansion by bringing PCI Express (PCIe), the system bus found inside the computer, to the outside. This will allow Thunderbolt-enabled systems, like Mac laptops, iMacs, and Mac minis (and soon, PC

37%

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Percentage of various recording media in professional

video cameras.

Source: The 2012 Coughlin Associates Report.


n n n n Storage


systems), to engage in professional, uncom-pressed workflows by allowing fast RAID stor-age systems to be directly attached, supplying up to 1000mb/sec data rates! Thunderbolt also enables the direct connection of professional video I/O devices to these systems—all this with one small, high-performance connection.

Coughlin: Thunderbolt is the first in a se-ries of PCIe-based storage interfaces that will remake the industry over the next several years and allow aggregate BW of 64gb/sec or higher.

Danielson: Because Thunderbolt-enabled laptops are getting performance that previ-ously only desksides could get, there will be wide adoption of the Thunderbolt standard, particularly for on-set use. Frankly, on-set, file-based workflows sorely need more bandwidth. The bottleneck between on-set storage and the shared storage in the facility will be stream-lined by various solutions, such as ATTO’s Desklink family. With Thunderbolt on-set storage, ingest streams will more fully saturate the SAS, Fibre Channel, and 10-gig Ethernet ingest paths into shared storage.

Which storage devices work best and within which type of video production environments?

Coughlin: The storage hierarchy for video production and postproduction will include Flash memory, high-performance HDDs (hard disk drives), high-capacity/low-cost HDDs, and optical or magnetic tape storage for archiving. Note that Flash memory is be-coming dominant in professional video cam-eras, and this trend is expected to continue in future years.

Schlatter: RAID subsystems work best in

large studio environments. Smaller studios will use direct-attached RAID and Thun-derbolt. Thunderbolt will be used in the field, as well.

Danielson: Our customer feedback is that customers would like to get the most band-width possible in the least amount of rack space, so we focus on bandwidth per rack unit: for mixed read/write bandwidth, a 2RU enclosure with 1.6gb/sec and a 4RU enclosure with 2.8gb/sec. For production environments, there are many different sizes, so there is no

perfect storage device. The best solution is an agile and intelligent architecture that does not burden the production facility with unneces-sary costs, yet has the ability to scale infinitely to meet growing production needs without disrupting operations. We focus on modular-ity to allow scaling down to entry-level systems and to allow granular scaling in easily digest-

ible increments along with non-disruptive upgrades so that users have constant access to existing data while upgrades are performed.

In regard to animation and special effects creation, what are the requirements?

Coughlin: Modern video rendering has similarities to HPC (high-performance com-puting) and engineering simulation and mod-eling, and tends to involve bursts of data trans-fer that the storage systems and network must accommodate. The use of clustered computer and storage, with many nodes for processing the rendered images, is common. Very-high-speed InfiniBand connectivity for computer nodes and storage in not uncommon for these applications. Of course, as the resolution of the finished product increases—and there are projects now using 6k or higher rendered resolution—both the bandwidth and stor-age requirements increase. The high costs of building a modern rendering facility have led to a strong market for outsourced rendering. Because much of this work can be done trans-ferring the initial input and the final result through the Web, rendering could be seen as a good example of the use of cloud resources for professional video production.

Danielson: We have seen our customers [in large film animation and special effects facili-ties] find great value in non-disruptively scal-able storage systems. With effects and anima-tion rendering occurring 24/7, it’s imperative

that these companies have a unified infrastruc-ture in place to bring every ounce of efficiency out of their renderfarms. For instance, they need to be able to move their datasets, rebal-ance their network ports to any node in the cluster, add storage nodes, and apply software patches—all non-disruptively and without downtime—because downtime costs money.

The chart above offers an example of storage and bandwidth requirements from the Coughlin “2012 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report.” Note that stereoscopic content can increase these numbers by 2X for raw content and approximately 1.5X for lossless compressed content.

Format

SDTV (NTSC, 4:2:2, 8-bit)

HDTV (1080p, 4:2:2, 8-bit)

Digital Cinema 2K (4:2:4, 10-bit) YUV

Digital Cinema 4K (4:4:4, 12-bit) YUV

Digital Cinema 8K

Resolution (width x height)

720 x 480

1920 x 1080

2048 x 1080

4096 x 2160

7680 x 4320

Frame rate (fps)

approx. 30

24

24

48

120

Data rates (MB/sec)

6.25

49.8

199

1,910

23,890

Storage capacity per hour (GB)

22

179

716

6,880

86,000

Mac Guff Studios (Paris, France), a division of Illumination Entertainment, was the primary facility that created Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, an animated film released in 2012, which, according to box-office Mojo, generated nearly $200 million in its first 45 days of worldwide release. The Lorax was rendered on HNAS storage by Hitachi Data Systems.


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What are the storage and bandwidth requirements for stereoscopic and high-definition content capture?

Danielson: The storage and bandwidth requirements are exceptionally high, and, for years, the industry has wanted higher-band-width capture capabilities. I do not foresee this trend stopping. Producers and directors will continue to push the bounds of what’s possible—I think that is part of their job. We no longer have one number to depend on for bandwidth per stream. You have to review spreadsheets of formats, frame sizes, frame rates, and color depth to derive megabytes per second. So, 230mb/sec, 380mb/sec, 1.2gb/sec, and even 2.4gb/sec come to mind.

Schlatter: At the high end, many movies are being produced in 4k resolution. There’s an incredible amount of data in a 4k image, especially uncompressed, where data rates are upwards of 1,000mb/sec at 24 fps—that’s 1gb a second! For 3D work, multiply that by a fac-tor of two! That said, the amount of storage needed would be tremendous if you’re work-ing in a 4k, uncompressed environment. In addition, some directors are now experiment-ing with shooting at higher frame rates, which further increase the amount of storage needed.

Can you name some of the solutions for dealing with latency of storage systems?

Coughlin: Fast-cache storage is providing ways of dealing with latency issues. Increasing-ly, systems are using Flash memory in addition to DRAM for these caches. Faster interfaces that can use Flash-memory storage bandwidth are another important element. Note also that fast metadata servers can help with faster access to stored content, and these are increas-ingly moving to Flash memory as an impor-tant storage system component. In modern postproduction workflows, cloud storage may be used for collaborative workflows that span time and space, even though the latency might be too long for direct video streaming (one example is the viewing of proxies and dailies through the Internet).

Danielson: Just below bandwidth and above capacity, latency is one of the most criti-cal aspects of a storage system. There are many strategies for dealing with reducing latency. There is a choice of drives (SATA, NL-SAS, SAS, FC, SSD), a choice of storage interfaces (SAS, InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Eth-ernet), as well as tiering strategies for moving less-used content off to cheaper drives. There are also staging strategies for bringing copies of most-used content ‘forward,’ closer to the CPU, for processing or delivery of content.

Are there trends you foresee in storage devices?

Coughlin: Studios will need to look at faster direct-attached and storage network connec-tions and speedier storage systems. Higher-speed Fibre Channel (up to 16gb/sec) might become common for FC-based SAN facilities. Also, lower-cost 1gb Ethernet and the avail-ability of 40gb Ethernet will increase file-based NAS connections as well as iSCSI and other protocol SANs. Flash memory devices, includ-ing PCIe, as well as SATA and SAS express in-terface devices will be more common in storage systems as caching layers and system perfor-mance enhancements. Direct-attached and in-ternal connections using Thunderbolt, NVMe, SATA, and SAS express will become common. Basically, PCIe-based connection storage will enable many high-speed media and entertain-ment applications. HDD and even magnetic

tape (especially LTO tape with the LTFS file system) will remain in the background as near-line and archive storage, respectively, for the large library of accumulated content.

Schlatter: In the large production studio setting, I see the need for more capacity and shareability. For the smaller studio setting, I see the need for technology like Thunderbolt.

Danielson: In addition to the trends I mention earlier, other trends I foresee are the digital acquisition of higher bit-rate formats and greater emphasis on media assets across the range of distribution channels/delivery platforms; global distributed content reposito-ries; and analytics to drive better business de-cisions regarding release windows and release platforms. From a storage perspective, I see a consolidation of production workflows due to the greater scale-up and scale-out bandwidth

of storage systems, larger distributed libraries to more efficiently repurpose content, as well as lower-latency and more secure storage sys-tems for big data analytics.

How will cloud storage be used?Coughlin: Cloud storage is assuming an

important ancillary role in the M&E storage hierarchy.

Danielson: For the past decade, media companies have been figuring out the ‘make-versus-buy’ model for managing and storing media assets. The question for these compa-nies is: Can a cloud provider offer storage that can scale more cheaply and more securely than if it is managed internally? However, the deci-sion about whether to employ a public, pri-vate, or hybrid cloud is less important than making sure that the underlying storage archi-tecture supports distributed content reposito-

ries and allowing everyone in the organization to see a federated view of the object store. A distributed content repository trumps the cur-rent capabilities of cloud storage because it can span dozens or hundreds of locations. Eventu-ally, we will have cloud storage offerings sup-porting CDMI. This will make a hybrid cloud and multi-cloud offerings real.

Do you believe SSD usage will become a trend?

Coughlin: SSDs and Flash memory in gen-eral will grow for usage in speeding content transfers and also for content capture.

Schlatter: While SSDs provide amazing performance, the cost per gigabyte is still sig-nificantly more than spinning disks, which makes them cost-prohibitive. In some appli-cations, the advantages of SSDs—ruggedness,

ATTO’s Celerity 8gb/sec Fibre Channel HBAs allow Arc Productions to screen uncompressed film images in mono or stereo, which requires huge bandwidth and higher density storage with fast data transfers.

Image from

Gnom

eo and Juliet; courtesy Arc P

roductions Ltd.


■ ■ ■ ■ Storage


for example—may outweigh the cost. You can get some amazing data rates in a very small footprint (portability).

Danielson: SSDs are now a trend with both positive and negative attributes. SSDs were the panacea for a while. Now their value and where the data storage devices sit on the cost/bene� t curve are better understood, and SSDs are not going to replace all the hard-drive technologies in play. However, some use SSDs as staged and tiered storage to re-duce latency on most-used content, and this trend will continue and grow. Customers use SSDs for latency-critical usage cases, like � lm animation and e� ects rendering, to reduce the unused clock cycles in any given 24-hour period. SSDs for cached content are very ef-fective in these instances and, therefore, are worth the cost.

What do you think of new developments, such as the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) in Linear Tape-Open (LTO)?

Coughlin: File-based tape is assuming an important role in the professional M&E en-vironment. Already cloud-based archive ser-vices, such as the Permivault solution from Fuji� lm, point the way to creating low-cost and accessible media archives using LTO tapes with LTFS � le systems.

Danielson: LTFS supports the tape argu-ment by providing a � le system that applica-tion vendors can leverage for MAM (Media Access Management) functionality. So LTFS is great in that regard since the ecosystem can develop e� ciency at the software application layer. But LTFS does not change the user’s per-spective of tape in and of itself. � e user still has the latency of accessing � les, which means that tape remains a tier-two or tier-three stor-age alternative.

Looking at the latest developments for object-based workfl ows, what advantages do they present?

Coughlin: Object-based work� ows are the logical extension of � le-based work� ows as � le metadata moves to even more granular levels—each frame can be a separate � le. � is allows more accurate indexing of the metadata and, as a consequence, can speed up digital work� ows and make them more convenient.

Danielson: One advantage is that object stores support billions of objects and hundreds of sites. Global media and entertainment companies will build out true distributed content repositories, which the industry has been discussing since the mid-1990s. Another advantage is the Cloud Data Management In-

terface (CDMI), which enables object-based work� ows to span tiers and brands of stor-age as well as the cloud. � ere are over 100 smart vendors, end users, and academic ex-perts working to make this standard a reality. Distributed content repositories will be able to span on-premise infrastructures, privately hosted cloud infrastructures, and public in-frastructures with security. Assets can be des-ignated for geographic dispersion, quality of service, security, legal rights, retention, and, of course, next steps in the work� ow. � e bene-� ts of object stores will tip the cost and bene� t scale so that more companies will move to a consolidated enterprise-wide repository for all their media assets.

Is a 40TB hard drive possible? Coughlin: Within 10 years time, we will

likely see common HDD capacities of 60tb or greater, SSDs with multiple terabyte capaci-ties, and magnetic tapes with tens of terabytes of storage capacity.

Danielson: We are talking to a company, NanoScale, that is working on a prototype 10tb platter that will be in a product a few years from now. � eir non-magnetic technol-ogy has big upside potential, but it will take a while to get into production. So, yes, we will see 40tb drives eventually, and with higher data transfer rates than we have today.

How much storage does our industry ex-pect to use over the next several years?

Coughlin: In the 2012 Coughlin Associ-ates report, we stated that between 2012 and 2017, we expect about a 5.6x increase in the

required digital storage capacity used in the entertainment industry, and about a four-fold increase in storage capacity shipped per year (from 22,425pb to 87,152pb). Total media and entertainment storage revenue will grow more than 1.4x between 2012 and 2017 (from $5.6 billion to $7.8 billion).

Danielson: It’s clear that storage demands in the media and entertainment industry are rapidly rising. According to a 2012 survey by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers members, within � ve years the digi-tal storage needs of the media and entertain-ment industry will increase 5.6 times. Howev-er, all sectors of the industry—� lm, broadcast, cable/satellite/telco TV, Internet TV, and social media—are growing at varying rates. Each is driving unique demands for storage in bandwidth, latency, topology, reliability, appli-cation interoperability, and capacity. Film and broadcast TV have been growing at a steady rate, while cable TV is growing much more rapidly. Social media is expanding at an im-measurable rate. It is evident that the amount of storage we are going to use in the next three years will be more storage than we’ve used in the past 30 years. It’s estimated that between 2011 and 2016, the media and entertainment industry will see about a 7.7 times increase in digital storage. ■

Douglas King is a freelance writer and producer based in Dallas. He has worked in the entertainment industry for more than 20 years, including time spent as a creative direc-tor for a game developer, product development manager, and writer/director for fi lm and television, currently writing/producing for the Web comedy series “For Export Only.”

Postproduction Storage Capacity Annual Demand

Tota

l Cap

acit

y (T

B)

Source: The 2012 Coughlin Associates Report.

2010

1,600,000

1,400,000

1,200,000

1,000,000

800,000

600,000

400,000

200,000

02011 2012

NLE Cloud Capacity (TB)

NLE Local Capacity (TB)

NLE Local Network Capacity (TB)

2013 2014 2015 2016 2017


Call 1-877-293-6255 or visit macmall.com

Although we do our best to achieve 100% accuracy, occasionally errors and inaccuracies do occur. Should you encounter an error or inaccuracy, please inform us so it can be corrected.


http://www.macmall.com

MOBILEKepler ArchitectureNvidia has released a new line of Quadro professional graphics solutions for the latest leading mobile workstations. These new Quadro GPUs feature the fast, efficient Kepler GPU architecture. Kepler delivers large performance gains over previous generations, albeit with the same power budget as those Quadro mobile graphics solutions. These latest Quadro mobile GPUs offer at least double the number of Nvidia CUDA cores of previous gener-ations. The new mobile lineup includes the Quadro K5000M, Quadro K4000M, Quadro K3000M, Quadro K2000M, Quadro K1000M, and Quadro K500M. Nvidia; www.nvidia.com

MOCAP CAMERAEye on Raptor-12Motion Analysis has announced a new camera in its Raptor motion-capture camera lineup, the Raptor-12 with a resolution of 12 megapixels (mp). Varied resolutions include 150 fps with 12mp, 200 fps with 9.4 mp, 300 fps with 6.3mp, 500 fps with 3.8mp, and 900 fps with 2.0mp. The Raptor-12 features a new processor, firmware, sensor, and ring light, creating the first camera

with components manufactured specifi-cally for motion-capture capability. With a high-speed electronic pipelined global shutter, each pixel measures 5.5 x 5.5 μm. The camera’s grayscale processing enables outdoor capture capabilities that are not possible with optical filtering methods. The Raptor-12 will be available this fall.Motion Analysis; www.motionanalysis.com

More VolumeOptiTrack has expanded to the high-end motion-capture market with the introduc-tion of the Prime Series, a new family of motion-capture cameras tailored specifically to large-volume capture. Offering capture volumes that extend up to 150 feet, the 4.1mp Prime 41 provides VFX studios and game developers with the tracking tech-nology necessary for the most ambitious motion-tracking and capture applications. The Prime 41 enables capture volumes of up to 75 x 150 feet. The 4.1mp cameras offer a camera-to-marker range of more than 80 feet, and their infrared strobes are usable with other film/video/photography gear. The cameras have a capture rate of 180 fps, and offer simultaneous body and finger tracking. The system can even be used outdoors and features a simple and quick single-user setup. The Prime 41 is available now and is priced at $4,999 each.OptiTrack; www.optitrack.com

ANIMATIONNot an IllusionReallusion has released the iClone Anima-tion Pipeline, a creative suite for real-time production and development. The iClone Animation Pipeline features a real-time viewport with pixel-shader preview during

creation of character animation and motion capture. The iClone Animation Pipeline is a trio of character creation, facial, and body-motion animation production and motion-capture tools with exportable results for use with game engines, such as Unity3D or UDK. Character animation with iClone5 is a new approach to animation and offers short-cuts to creating walk cycles or basic human gestures using the Motion Puppet tools and library of various emotion- and action-based character puppeteering modes. Custom 3D content comes to life with iClone’s anima-tion tools through the import capability of 3DXchange 5. Reallusion; www.reallusion.com

RENDERINGTeam EffortTeamUp, a new company focused on making 3D more accessible, has unveiled its Multi-Optics renderer with real-time 3D collaboration. The TeamUp platform is completely cloud-powered, so no software download or install is necessary. Typically, the tools and workflows for collaboration are all tied to desktops, renderfarms, and so on; as a result, 3D rendering has been slow in this type of setup. TeamUp improves this experience so creative teams and their clients can see the same render live, edit and make decisions in real-time on multiple devices, and arrive at the look they want for any 3D asset. TeamUp is available as a monthly-paid service subscription. TeamUp; www.getteamup.com

For additional product news and information, visit CGW.com

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HARDWARE

August/September 2012, Volume 35, Issue 5: COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD (USPS 665-250) (ISSN-0271-4159) is published bi-monthly with special additional issues in January and July resulting in 8 issues per year by COP Communications, Inc. Corporate offices: 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204, Tel: 818-291-1100; FAX: 818-291-1190; Web Address: [email protected]. Periodicals Postage Paid at Glendale, CA, 91205 & additional mailing offices. COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD is distributed worldwide. Annual subscription prices are $72, USA; $98, Canada & Mexico; $150 International airfreight. To order subscriptions, call 847-559-7310.

© 2012 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 specific clients, is granted by Computer Graphics World, ISSN-0271-4159, provided that the appropriate fee is paid directly to Copyright Clearance Center Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, 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, P.O. Box 3296, Northbrook, IL 60065-3296.


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Numerous vendors introduced products and services at

SIGGRAPH 2012. These can be found on the CGW website by

selecting the News button on the left side of the home page.

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http://www.nvidia.com

http://www.motionanalysis.com

http://www.optitrack.com

http://www.reallusion.com

http://www.getteamup.com


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