State of VFX - Life after Pi

It happened just a few years ago but still with us. Digital Domain and Rhythm & Hues Studios two of the biggest VFX studios in the world bankrupted. They still exist thanks to new investments. But the bankruptcies were the symptoms of an unsustainable business model and that is still with us. Even at Digital Apes a tiny little company in Hungary we can experience the same pressure day by day that the clients want faster and would pay less money for that work with a fix bid.

For me the ultimate question is that: can everybody have similar salary around the world for the same work? Because the global competition of the VFX industry inevitable favors the cheapest labor prices. In the age of open-source movements technology and other factors will equalize in the long term.
Subsidies the other factor of course but it is a very very bad blind practice of governments to galvanize industries. What it means basically they help to make profit for investors by the local taxpayers' money. Okay but it is another topic for another blog...

So here it is the film what I would like to share:

Breakdown / Making Of 1.

There is a lot of breakdown and making of stuff out there. A couple of my favorites below.

Development of the animation for special creatures in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

ILM raised the standards of the breakdown clips. Check this out how it looks about the movie Battleship:

Character design on the film Rise of the Guardians:

Autodesk Vision Series 2015

I think it is time to relax and let Autodesk be our entertainer. Okay, you might think I`m biased (or paid by Autodesk which is not the case unfortunately) I spend  most of my time using Maya. Of course I`m biased. I wish I had more time to do cool stuff with other softwares like Modo, Houdini, ZBrush, Dynamo, Krita and learn more about  Blender, Substance Painter and Designer, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Photoscan, PFTrack, FinalCut, Flix, Mari, Nuke, Hiero, Katana, Arnold, Renderman, OpenColorIO, ShotGun, Tactic, fTrack, USD, OSL, MU, Python, C++, JavaScript, never ending story...

Anyway, just relax and watch these videos:

Virtual production

Rendering and the cloud

The topic is Procedural Content Creation and the software is 3DS Max. I have to admit it is a bit disappointing for me because we waiting soo long ago a system like that in Maya. Okay, there is SOuP so Autodesk bosses think we don`t need proceduralism any more because we already have it.

And last but not least: Editorial

Gooseberry Project aka Cosmos Laundromat - First Cycle

The Blender Foundation released the first part of their open movie project called Gooseberry Project. The film title is Cosmos Laundromat. I think it is giant leap.

We can find tons of materials about this project on youtube and on the site. Via Blender Cloud we can also have access to all the source materials (blender files, textures, etc.) of the film.

A couple of videos I found usefull:

Animation progress

Victor's rig

Intresting mix of asset creation process

 

Digital Production Pipeline

Literally the best video on youtube. I think don't have to append anything to this.

Maya Functions - Removing Plug-in Nodes

To disable or unload a plug-in in maya could be tricky. I had situations when a plug-in could not be unload even if I pushed the 'Force' button on the poping window in Plug-In Manager because nodes of a certain plug-in was in use.

It seems maya can't always (or never) delete nodes that are in use. I had situations when maya crashed when I was loading a scene file which contained unknown nodes (unknown plug-in nodes). Actually I had to find out that the reason of the crashing is that a certain plug-in was not installed on my computer. Scene with Arnold nodes can produce crash when you want to load into a maya without installed Arnold plug-in.
So there is a need to delete plug-in nodes manually...or with a python script.

The main command is:

 cmds.pluginInfo("Mayatomr", q = 1, dependNode = 1)  

With argument "Mayatomr" it will list all the Mental Ray plug-in nodes. Or "mtoa" would list all Arnold specific nodes. Of course even if the plug-in is loaded this command returns something only if there is at least one node of that plug-in in the current maya scene.

Here is a function for removing plug-in specific nodes:

 def RemovePluginNodes(PlugIn = "mtoa", Verbose = 1):  
     '''  
     DESCRIPTION  
     Remove nodes of the given plug-in.  
     INPUT ARGUMENTS  
     - string - PlugIn - Name of the plug-in. You can check the exact (maya) name of the plug-in in the Maya Plug-in Manager. 
                         For eg.: Mental Ray plugin file: Mayatomr.mll -> "Mayatomr"  
     - int - Verbose - provide extra information about the process  
     RETURN  
     None  
     '''  
     plugInNodeTypeList = cmds.pluginInfo(PlugIn, q = 1, dependNode = 1)  
     for plugInNodeType in plugInNodeTypeList :  
         existingPlugInNodeList = cmds.ls(type = plugInNodeType)  
         if existingPlugInNodeList:  
             cmds.delete(existingPlugInNodeList)  
             if Verbose:  
                 print "Deleted nodes:\t%s" % existingPlugInNodeList  

I haven't tested extensively so give it a try and let me know your experience.

Blender For Feature Animation Film

Recently I have been thinking about Blender. Because I never used it I considering things as a professional who might want to learn and / or switch to Blender.
I think to get a job as a professional Blender user is not an option currently especially in my home country Hungary.
I have a lot of personal projects which involves CGI and VFX as well and I definitely don't want to spend money to buying softwares for those. So this motivation is pushing me toward open source softwares like Blender.
To compare 3D softwares and discuss about differences between them is a never ending story. I think it is a very complex thing to claim which software is better then the others (if it is possible).
I started to collect information about Blender and watched films like Big Buck Bunny and Tears Of Steel. For me these shorts prove that Blender can produce decent quality full CGI and VFX. I can't say those are cutting edge like VFX that ILM or other major facilities can do. But it is not just about the softwares they use.
Because I'm involved preproduction of a feature animation I raised the question (for myself): Can Blender be a choice for full CGI feature animation? I know there are current project around the world. At the Blender Conference 2013 "father of Blender" Ton Roosendaal mentioned few of them.
Worth to mention Blender community is now working on an open (online) feature animation project: Project Gooseberry

Recent News - Kenau

I didn't have time to write during the last couple of mouths. It was quite tricky to manage my time. After all our project in the studio where I work was finished.
Kenau is historical film take place at the time of Dutch War of Independence. So at Digital Apes we handled around 300 VFX shots. There were different type effects we did. Mainly set extensions, cg cityscapes, matte paints, clean ups. There were shots we had to add arrows (usually storm of arrows), blood on swords and on amours, fire, smoke, etc. And there were more complex shots where we add a lot of elements like crowd, explosions, demolitions. And last but not least there was the opening full cg shot which was around 1000 frame long and we had to create a cg Great Black-backed Gull and a complete cg aerial view of the city of Haarlem at the time 16th century.
Personally I was glad to work on a movie what makes sense for me. We didn't have to make giant robots or dragons or demolish whole cities. As I wrote before I like movies where the VFX don't lead the story but support it. Kenau is like that. I can't wait to see it in theater.
I was involved just a couple of VFX heavy shots directly. But I supported the whole 3D crew with technical and pipeline stuff as well.
First of all I made the animatic for the opening shot. After we had to clarify our asset pipeline. Basically it meant we had to establish a naming convention for textures, shaders and Arnold StandIns. I wrote dozens of python functions to make it simple but it turned out the issue is more complex so I didn't have time to make a tool what every 3D guy could use. The next pipeline issue was the camera. The idea was that we should use Alembic camera so all the nuke and maya users would use the same asset for their shots.
My biggest challenge was to create the rig and the animation of the seagull. It took around two month. I can't say it could not be better but I like the result very much. I'm biased :) If I have time I will write a whole post about the seagull rig. To summarize I can write only common places: to have good animation, and anatomy references was crucial. Of course we could download a lot of pictures from the net but it was almost impossible to get a good quality footage about a Great Black-backed Gull flying as the camera followed it. The other problematic thing was the skeleton. I found a lot pictures about a bird skeleton but not seagull. We talked about in the studio we should catch a real seagull and did the research for ourselves (if you know what I mean).
Other major challenges were the demolition, explosion scenes. There were 4 large scale explosion in the movie I had to create. I create maya fluid effects and particle and nCloth simulations. I have lot of things to write about this topic so I'm going to continue it (soon)...

VFX Films - Pacific Rim

FxGuide has a great interview with Industrial Light & Magic crew members.
For me it was interesting to hear that ILM just started to use Houdini as a major tool for effects like destruction. Also huge that they switched to use Arnold as a primary render solution. I think they had a couple of TD's on board.

VFX Films

You might read my introduction about VFX. Over the years I had the feeling Hollywood filmmakers went crazy. It might started with Jurassic Park or Godzilla but nowdays the best actor in leading role is VFX. Spectacular visuals were always a requirement for big Hollywood style movies but recently the trends are make it even larger then ever before.
So how big the main evil can be? There were Godzilla (1998) and Cloverfield (we can call it Godzilla II., 2008)  and Clash of the Titans with Kraakan  (2010),  Wrath of the Titans with Kronos (2012). I hope they won't give up here and Pacific Rim can prove it monsters could be even larger. And...oh yes, here they come, Godzilla again (2014). I saw lot of talent sold their soul but I was a bit amazed when I found Juliette Binoche on the Cast list.
I started to thinking about films I have seen and VFX was supporting the story instead of leading that. If we consider VFX could be done not only digitally I have to start my list with Tarkovsky Nostalghia (1983). I'm going to write about jargon of the industry, but right now here is a cutty list about film which have spectacular digital VFX in supporting role:
The Devil's Advocate (1997)
Dark City (1998)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Fight Club (1999)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Tree of Life (2011)