FMX Chronicles: Part IV

Due to Blogger going down and me realising I hadn't actually finished writing about Friday yet this one's a little late.

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Friday

"What do you mean Fish & Chips aren't German?"

Friday I arrived at the conference halls early for screenings from the neighbouring animation festival. While these were entertaining it wasn't until the Dobby & Kreacher talk at 10am that the day really started. Framestore's work on Dobby and Kreacher in the latest Harry Potter film is really stunning, to the point that (spoilers) Dobby's death is the most moving scene in the film and the CG Dobby is, obviously, an integral part of it. The fact that a CG character can now deliver a compelling performance and move an audience is a testament to the level of detail and nuance Framestore were able to capture.

This talk was followed directly but The Harry Potter Accolade, a tribute to all the studios that have worked on the visual effects for the franchise. It was like a retrospective on how some of Soho's biggest effects studios have come from small start-ups to industry giants through their involvement with the Potter films, expanding to tackle the challenges of each new film, free to take risks and invest in proprietary technology safe in the knowledge of the repeat gig that Potter was. Oh, and ILM were there.

Konig Saal

Each professional representing their studio would give a brief talk on their work in the films for the films in groups of three, and then the final two films. As one audience member pointed out in the questions afterwards: it was like a history of visual effects. What surprised me was how work was passed between studios, irrelevant of who had previously worked on what. For example ILM did Dobby in The Chanber Of Secrets, but since then its been Framestore's role. Double Negative started doing simple 2D work mostly, but then transferred to fully 3D scenes with digi-doubles and in Part 2 they're working on the dragon escape sequence from Gringotts. This was the scene we got to see a previously unreleased clip of, complete with unrendered playblasts!

The Free Elf

After lunch I attended a highly technical talk on "next generation graphics on Intel's Sandy Bridge". It was from one of Rockstar's technical leads who worked on GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption, and while it was interesting to hear about the implementation of lighting in those two games, the presentation he had prepared was pretty hardcore and included a demo of a game that was the epitome of 'programmer art', it was hideous.

Next, in the same room was a talk on the look of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit. I was, at this point, trying to cram as much game stuff in as possible and (perhaps foolishly) passed up cinematography at Pixar for this talk. It was great though and his focus on simple methods of achieving a great look in terms of both graphics and aesthetics was really helpful. He talked about colour correct textures and a gamma correct pipeline, focus technology where it would serve the imagery, and not just push for 'more hi-res textures'.

IBL in Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit

He tore apart some screenshots of Gran Turismo and then showed some side by sides of car commercials and Need For Speed screenshots- they really have done a great job at mimicking that style. They even have a realtime version of image based lighting, in order to light the cars separately from the scene to maximise prettiness, they needed to add image based lighting to help reintegrate the car back into the image, also the addition of contact shadows and ambient occlusion help really sell the car's presence in the world.

I left this talk 5 minutes early very reluctantly in order to catch 'Animation Tech In Crysis 2', in the hope it would be better than the talk Image Metrics did at the beginning of the week. Unfortunately I was already too late and the small room was full, luckily I managed to rush to the making of Megamind. Here they talked about procedurally generating their city with tools that reminded me of The Sims, or Spore's building creator. One of the most interesting points he made was in terms of lighting the glow of the city at night, one lighter though of doing an ambient occlusion pass (so darkening all the bits where buildings were closely packed) and inverting it and colouring it orange, so now all the small alleys and packed streets where filled with an orange night glow that, when combined with a height map, created a convincing city-at-night effect.

"Revange!"

I was glad I'd caught the Megamind talk because it secured me a place for the last talk of FMX and it wasn't one I wanted to miss: 'Animating Tangled'. Here we were taken through the process the Disney animators went through discovering the characters for the film and the massively lengthy pre-production phase that ended up allowing them to make the film itself in 6 months! When I saw Tangled in the cinema I had no issues with the main character and her function as a princess archetype, but after seeing the road they took to reach the final design I feel acutely aware that the only reference they used were other Disney films, the only look they tried was a traditional cartoony look and the result now feels like an incestuous amalgamation of Disney princesses repackaged for a modern CG-centric audience. Perhaps I've been spoiled by Rango...

I feel cynical for saying it, and hypocritical because I loved Flynn who- though less incestuous, is just another rogue-ish archetype. I feel this says volumes about the animating itself though, as despite these stale and tired designs the characters completely come to life on screen. We were shown some the early tests that animators did with prototype rigs and there was one where Rapunzel hears a noise whilst sitting on her bed and jumps up to investigate. The vitality of the movement so completely resembled the euphoria of a little girl that it didn't matter that she had giant Disney eyes, a waspy Disney waste, or flowing Disney hair because I was utterly convinced there was a very alive character inside. I exited as the applause died away and questions began; to catch a screening of the film itself.

"Frying pans! Who knew, right?"

The end-of-FMX party that night was a lot of fun, new cocktails were discovered, dances were had, trains were missed, and at around 5am we all made it home.

The next few days were spent enjoying the extra sunny weather exploring Stuttgart with Kebaps and recovering in readiness for what was to be a particularly gruelling journey home (how can it take 2 hours to get from Stuttgart to Stansted, but 10 hours to get from there to Falmouth?!

Skyscape

The End

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FMX Chronicles: Part III

Thursday

FMX. Obviously

Its 8:25pm and I just came back from a panel with the best people in the industry at creating 'virtual humans'. To sit in a room with 40 others and listen to the discussion of people who created the CG characters in Tron, Benjamin Button, Pirates of the Caribbean, Terminator and Paul, is insane and it took a few minutes to dawn on me. They opened the floor up to questions and it was all a bit like speaking to deities. Topics ranged from interpretation of an actors performance, to procedural character performance, to sub-surface scattering and each member of the panel had an opinion or insight to express. They all agreed that Davy Jones was one of the first characters that really blew them away, Bill Nighy for prime minister!

"Do you fear death, Jack Sparrow-ah?"

Thursday was always going to be a slow day from what the timetable promised. This meant that the first event I attended was 'Sea Rex', which was surprisingly good in a kind of dinosaur-reconstruction-pseudo-scientific-historical-fiction-spectacular way.

Look how awake we all are

Double Negative did a talk on how they developed the alien character Paul for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's most recent film. Their facial rig was driven entirely by a massive library of blend shapes that their artists were able to model a dozen of each day, so that the rig evolved in complexity throughout production to meet the needs of the animators. The animators would use “accelerometer” motion capture suits to get a rough base for the scene they were animating and using that reference helped them speed up their work-flow massively.

Paul

Later that afternoon I attended a talk on Uberstrike, touted as facebook's top FPS. Unfortunately the guy from Cmune was part of the business side of the company so the talk focused mainly on business models of social games and how Uberstrike filled a massive gaping hole in the gaming market by catering to social gamers with hardcore gameplay that was presented in an accessible manner. Despite this less than stimulating subject matter the talk was engaging and I got to ask a question about what he thought of the Unity game engine and they're experience of using it. This was the point where he revealed his involvement in the managerial side of things and confessed to a lack of knowledge of the development itself. Ah well.

This is what I was doing in between talks :)

This was followed by the 'Virtual Humans' panel I mentioned previously. I'm so glad I went to it, after the stale and uninspired business minded talk on Uberstrike- it was refreshingly focused on what is important when it comes to human performance and communication, rather than money, or technology. There was an annoying guy asking questions in the front who stated he was from the games industry numerous times, and every dumb question he asked he got more verbally dominated by the assertive guy from Digital Domain. I wanted to shake his hand afterwards, but I didn't.

I got very lost in Stuttgart after making my way to the top of this hill.
Well worth clicking for fullscreen, its giant.

 Part IV

The Post-Men

Post production looks to be the next exciting project and I've started mudboxing Hugh's island model, so effectively he worked from his design and then I took the base mesh into Mudbox to add cracks, stalactite type details and general rockiness. Amazingly Maya loves working with Mudbox's displacement maps, it exports them in 32bit Open Exr by working out the difference between the base mesh and the sculpting I added through a process of either "raycasting", or "subdivision". Don't ask how either of those work, because I only understand the principles of both.

Floating Island Mk.I

There are some minor issues with the UV's which, while they work, they are the default cube UV's and there are some lines appearing in the displacement where the seams are. I've re-unwrapped it with RoadKill (the wonderful UV unwrapping tool, it uses Blender's open source UV algorithms so its free!) and luckily Mudbox allows you to import new UV's onto the base mesh whilst hopefully maintaining all the sculpting I've already done.

Floating Island Mk.II, fixed UV's

Those hard working animators making the The Last Trophy have been slightly preoccupied with dissertation work recently but I managed to fix the problem with the sky and finally make a decent night lighting set-up in my Monday/Friday sessions. After endless tweaking to make sure the matte backgrounds that I plucked from Google weren't overexposing due to being included in final gather or receiving light from anywhere else I managed to get a simple sky which really completes the image.

Background now shows through but no image yet for night lighting.

The physical sky makes a nice caramel effect for some reason when no image is provided.

This one has the correct colouring, shadows, and background matte.

The shadows no longer fall across the trophies on the wall which I might have to tweak but otherwise this feels close to completion.

 On top of all this we had Double Negative give a talk to us about their role in the visual effects industry (which is pretty integral seeing as they have worked on all these films and are in talks with the various software vendors to get their tools to better meet their needs). Some of the stuff they showed I'd seen on the Inception bonus features but other bits were totally new and it was fascinating hearing it explained by their head of 3D Alex Wuttke, I got to ask why they use Renderman, and whether they've overcome UV's yet and both questions yielded informative and entertaining answers. We even got to chat to him in the studio briefly along with their recruitment manager, it was surreal and humbling.

Me: pointing a gun at something...

Nelson my beast PC has opened new doors into the gaming world and I've finally managed to complete Half Life 2, Episode II. For a four year old game, damn is it pretty, makes me realise what a big deal resolution is when it comes to showcasing a game's art, everything sparkles at 1080p. Also in terms of storytelling I just continue to fall more deeply in love with Half Life's style of unrestricted player movement during key plot sequences. It goes some way to diffusing the conflict between authorial intent and player expression. For example the player can interact with the environment in fairly limited ways in any game, most of all first person shooters, so when the player is constantly pointing a weapon at what's in front of him its hard to create emotional experiences when the protagonist is a mute who points his gun at everything, psychopathic right?

Me: pointing my gun at something else...

Valve attempt to address this by having Gordon Freeman lower his gun every time the cross hair passes in front of a friend or ally. But this doesn't really solve anything because the player can still fire it right through them with no consequence, effectively breaking the illusion of agency the game has worked to build during gameplay. So I found myself switching the to crowbar during the more dialogue heavy parts of the game in order to avoid firing a shot that should blow the characters head off, why is the player not equipped to express himself in non-violent ways besides puzzle solving? This renders all the emotive aspects of the story slightly redundant as they can only flow one way. While Half Life has the decency to be self aware of these things: "you don't talk much do you?" -Alyx Vance, I feel its the one thing missing from an otherwise exceptional interactive experience. Why make a character silent if you're not going to encourage the process of the player using the character's actions as a cypher for their own? Why not create a character as a developer if you're deny the player the right to do so.

My one find recently has been series of blog posts by the founders of Naughty Dog on the making of Crash Bandicoot. It's a great insight into the process of squishing a hugely ambitious game into restrictive hardware, and then knowing when to battle with the corporate machine, and when to submit to it.