This new 30-second animation from international media studio Kompost introduces Viggle

Viggle is a new smartphone app that collects redeemable points while customers watch their favourite television shows. Created for US digital TV provider DirecTV, Kompost came on board with the project after the company’s creative director approached the studio’s US representative, Duck.

“The guys at DirecTV wanted to work with us on this commercial,” says Kompost creative director Oliver Conrad. “They loved our style, and felt we were an exact match for the brief.” So the team went on to design, direct and animate all aspects of the ad, using Maya and Arnold to fully achieve this.

This was the first large project the team rendered completely in Arnold, and they weren’t disappointed by its capabilities. “No production depends on anything more than its renderer,” says Conrad. “We can put in weeks of time and energy into modelling, animation and surfacing, but all that goes down the drain if the final images are not produced on time and to a high standard. We chose Solid Angle’s Arnold because it simply gets the job done. Though this piece was not in a style usually associated with physical ray tracers, it was flexible enough to produce a highly stylised look without any problems.”

Discover 20 top free 3D models at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

In Oz the Great and Powerful, Sony Pictures Imageworks conjures a CGI vision of an iconic fantasy world. James Clarke discovers the magic behind the effects

The entertainment industry has been adapting and creatively mining L Frank Baum’s Oz books ever since a 1901 Broadway musical. The latest movie version, Oz The Great and Powerful, directed by fantasy-film veteran Sam Raimi, explores the origins of the enigmatic wizard from Baum’s original novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Sam Raimi’s prequel plays to his strengths as a director, with Oz portrayed as a rich, imaginary world that’s both bright and dark, full of fantastical characters and exciting events.

To help create this immersive world, Raimi brought in two-time Oscar winner Robert Stromberg, the production designer behind Avatar and Alice in Wonderland. Instead of relying on greenscreen technology for every scene, they decided to construct physical sets so the actors could have a visual reference. “Robert worked with artists to build things on set very early on as an art-directed stage aesthetic,” says visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk, who has worked with Raimi on several projects – most notably the Spider-Man trilogy, sharing an Oscar for his work on the second in the series.

To build the digital versions of all the locations and lands in the movie, the visual effects team had laser-scanned versions of the physical sets. For example, in the scene where Oz first sees the Yellow Brick Road in the company of the witch Theodora, the team scanned the environment and modified it. “The topography gives us great visual cues, which we cherry-pick and re-art direct,” says Stokdyk. The team accumulated digital assets, such as greenery, and then were able to re-dress the set digitally.

“It is harder to combine live-action and CG, but we resisted the trend to go all-CG,” says animation supervisor Troy Saliba. In all there were 1,105 shots, and Raimi demanded only the best for each. “One of the things I love about working with Sam Raimi is that he keeps you on your toes,” says Stokdyk. “He was constantly challenging us to incorporate everything he wanted, and to create a consistent tone.”

THE LANDS OF OZ

Principal photography on Oz The Great and Powerful took place in Detroit, Michigan in the second half of 2011. During this phase, Sony Pictures Imageworks gathered information and data on-set to eventually refer to in post-production, which ran for a year from January 2012.

The visual effects team laser-scanned the physical sets in order to build the digital versions of all the locations

Balancing the on-set lighting with CG lighting was an overall aesthetic goal for the movie. In collaboration with Peter Deming, the film’s director of photography, the team gathered all the necessary data for the CG lighting in post. Sony Pictures Imageworks used a Spheron HDR camera to gather its extensive library of 360-degree photographs of the set; from these they made detailed records of on-set light positions and light intensity values to translate into the CG realm.

As well as building the surreal world, the team was tasked with creating digital characters and landscapes, such as a city of teapots. “We were doing flying monkeys and bubbles flying through beautiful landscapes,” says Stokdyk. The team used the original books for reference to the surreal world, and took visual cues from the original illustrations by WW Denslow for the fantastic characters.

Stokdyk admits that they didn’t even scratch the surface in terms of creatures they could have featured. One wonderful character they decided to bring to the big screen was China Girl, but creating her was fraught with technical difficulties.

A SMASHING LITTLE DOLL

China Girl presented a unique animation challenge. After seeing the first pieces of animation for the character, animation supervisor Troy Saliba recalls how he had to tell a rather surprised animator that the animation was too articulated, and that it had to be dialled back in its expressivity, which is rather counterintuitive. Saliba explained how the creative trick with China Girl was in capturing “a childish preciousness in a little porcelain doll, with her face all one piece”. They had to address the character’s movement, but also how to best make her face move without drawing the audience away from the illusion that she was made of china. “Because of the limitations, China Girl is really unique – there’s no recognisable animation formula for her,” Saliba explains.

Animating her was not only technically challenging, but also extremely time-consuming. For a ten-second shot, such as the one of China Girl interacting with Oscar Diggs (played by James Franco), the crew would typically commit ten to 12 hours per day over four weeks to the process of solving the dynamics of movement. With work on this part of the character animation completed, animation would then be produced for the cloth simulation and the interaction of the characters.

The animators were asked to ‘dial back‘ the expressiveness of China Doll’s face to keep the illusion that she was made of china

To keep the interaction of the digital and live characters believable, Stokdyk devised the Puppetcam, a pole attached to a marionette that allowed the actors on the set to see the face of the voice actor. “Puppetcam really helped with ad-libbing and vital performance,” says Saliba. Unfortunately, China Girl was too small to use the ingenious Puppetcam, and so a marionette was used on the set, operated by talented manipulator Phillip Huber.

Getting eye levels was just one of the issues. Saliba recalls how the film’s animated character work also included significant efforts to generate a wide range of digital doubles for the human characters. Additionally, thousands of digi-doubles were generated as extras to populate the land of Oz. “The toughest ones were stunt doubles for hero characters, because they were closer to the camera than we expected,” says Saliba. The team found creating digi-doubles of the witches particularly troublesome, because they had to try to capture the attitude of each witch when they were in flight around Oz.

“For the 3D characters, we were infusing a bit of the actor into the performance,” says Saliba. “Once we have a model, we start rigging and doing the facial poses. There’s some back and forth on modelling, depending on the topology of the face.” Animation tests of each character were produced once the rigging was developed, which would then go to Raimi for approval.

STEREOSCOPIC MAGIC

By January 2012, edits of live-action footage began reaching Sony Pictures Imageworks. Simultaneously, work began on some of the film’s more complex digital environments. It was an evolving process, and part of this creative evolution was in terms of the film’s 3D demands. Scott Willman, the film’s stereography supervisor, came on board immediately after the principal photography was complete, for which the on-set 3D stereographers had been Ed Marsh and James Goldman. One of Wilman’s key responsibilities was to oversee how animated characters would tie in with the movie’s 3D aesthetic. Willman recalls that Raimi’s feedback upon reviewing the 3D footage was to “make it bigger”.

FLEXIBLE DESIGN DEPTH

Oz The Great and Powerful had always been intended as a stereoscopic film, and so it had been shot natively in 3D rather than being converted to 3D in post-production. As such, the stereo element of the film was essentially set in stone by the time the footage from principal photography reached Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Willman explains that across the film there was lots of flexibility to design depth, making sure that multiple camera depths still worked with the native photography.

“Shooting native on-set was James Goldman, and it was his call to set the interaxial for the on-set camera. We’re used to seeing everything in binocular, and it’s important that things have a basis in reality, so in matchmoving we make sure that the CG has the same distance from the camera as the live action. There’s a higher degree of fidelity in stereo,” he says.

The film was shot natively in stereoscopic 3D rather than being converted to 3D in post-production

The Sony Pictures Imageworks team was able to enhance the native footage with new visual effects elements and stereoscopic adjustments. Being able to direct various aesthetic choices after principal photography was a great boon.

As the crew grappled with the climax of the film, they went back to the source material. “There’s a big effects sequence at the end of the film with a giant projected holographic head,” explains Stokdyk. “We wanted it to be an original-looking creation, so we looked back at the books – and there’s a floating head over a throne graphic. That’s what we went with.”

So, in a bright new digital world the old-world inspiration endures, and as the animators and visual effects crew become more comfortable with the technology, so their creative choices expand and unfold like a Yellow Brick Road.

Discover the best 3D movies of 2013 at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

The message ‘helping make dreams come true’ is brilliantly encapsulated in this new spot

Created by London-based independent production company and animation studio Nexus Productions, the 30-second ad features a young girl who dreams about the things most people take for granted in life: love, security and comfort.

Directed by Ben Hibon, the team was responsible for the overall design, animation and direction of the film. A fully CG spot, the team opted to use 3ds Max and Nuke to bring the narrative to life. “The most useful piece of software we used was the 3ds Max plug-in Hair Farm,” says CG supervisor Michael Greenwood. “It allowed us to model the girl’s hair to a very specific design from the director, then use the powerful simulation tools for animation of the hair. Nuke was also incredibly important to the production of this commercial, with look development being done from the start directly within the software,” he explains.

“The geometry from 3ds Max was very simple for all environment objects, which were imported into Nuke to project matte paintings onto. This allowed for relighting and effects work to happen all within Nuke. This kept our 3D render times relatively light, with the girl’s passes also put together in comp, changing the look completely from the original lighting and rendering.”

What’s next for Augmented Reality? Find out at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

Zeitguised used Cinema 4D and V-Ray in tandem to create this seamless spot for Banque Populaire

This most recent spot for French financial institution Banque Populaire created by visual art and graphics studio Zeitguised is all about seamless motion graphics. The fifth spot in a series created for the bank, Zeitguised became involved with the project after being approached by ad agency Euro RSCG and production company Stink. The team was responsible for the direction, design and production of the 25-second 3D animation, for which they used Cinema 4D and V-Ray. Here’s a making-of film you can watch on the spot.

Director of Zeitguised Henrik Mauler explains: “C4D lets us work creatively and openly. Many parts of the animation and modelling stay parametric and can be reshuffled, and are only collapsed for better handling in the renderer in the end. V-Ray gives us everything necessary to create a nice-quality GI look, while the render times are below that of the normal non-GI C4D renderer.”

The team also used third-party plug-ins to solve some of the project’s more complex issues. “The entire film is one camera moving around a bicycle without a rider,” says Mauler. “It’s all one take, and it’s one file that was rendered in the end. We used a lot of optimisation tricks, provided by third parties, our own programming scripts, and our intensive work-around experience to make this work.”

Discover 30 Cinema 4D tutorials to boost your skills over at Creative Bloq.

The latest in the Ice Age series adds action movie mayhem to the cartoon mix. Blue Sky talks to Mark Ramshaw about the sun, the sky and the sea

Ice Age has always been one of the more intriguing CG-animated franchises. The original movie filtered old-school cartoon style through the beautiful glow of proprietary renderer CGI Studio. The second went bigger, furrier and funnier. By rights the series should have been petering out by Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, yet this one possessed a script sharper than a Tyrannosaur’s tooth. Now Ice Age: Continental Drift ups the ante again, tearing lands apart, casting our heroes adrift on unfeasibly treacherous seas, and adding a few new, technically challenging misfits for good measure.

“My role means I get to read the scripts as soon as they’re available,” says Kirk Garfield, CG supervisor at Blue Sky. “It was immediately obvious that Continental Drift was going to provide many challenges for many departments, including the effects and character simulation teams.”

In stark contrast to the first Ice Age film, which had virtually no effects budget and just 35 animators onboard, the effects team alone on this one comprised 21 people at peak, with another four working on character simulation. Blue Sky has its own robust fur system for general hair and feather requirements, but the character simulation team handled longer fur using Maya’s nCloth in conjunction with more custom tools. “Their work was crucial to some of the new character requirements of the film, including Granny Sloth’s shawl and Captain Gutt’s beard,” says Garfield. Granny, in particular, posed multiple challenges. “The character sim team developed a technique that allowed the animators to get close with the neck animation, but relied on simulation to get the waddle and wrinkle compression we were looking for,” says Garfield.

The furry old sloth was also required to wear a shawl, also made of fur. This required a new pipeline and toolset to accommodate the workflow between animation, character simulation and fur/ procedural modelling. “The character simulation team also made its own custom collision objects to better control the outcome of the simulations and avoid hair penetrations,” adds Garfield.

“We used the interior faces created by shattered geometry to emit voxel dust, which got pushed around by the motion of rigid body simulations,” says Kirk Garfield

The lighting in the earlier Ice Age movies erred on the realistic, but the skies were much simpler affairs. For the latest film, however, they were created as 3D sets.

“We have more rigorous aesthetic needs on a shot-by-shot basis than a ‘realistic’ sky model would support,” explains Matt Wilson, skies lead. The new system has a basis in reality, but it allows the artists to craft something more painterly, with time of day and sun direction available as important storytelling tools.

“If you used a tool locked on the Preetham sky model, for instance, then erratic shifts in elevation, and even perceptual pitch and roll of the sea-level plane, would cause large shifts in overall colour and solar placement,” says Wilson. “You can colour-correct the plate, but that eats up time. Instead, our tools create a complex relationship between discreet levels of atmosphere only where they affect the specific constituents in the image, such as solar haze, anti-solar attenuation, and smog. Once those are created, you have a complete world.”

“The major shift this time has been pulling forward where we use shot-level rendering of true volumetric clouds, while still running them through the sky lighting system,” says Matt Wilson

Wilson says that around 80 per cent of the time it’s possible to drop a camera into any shot and get close to a final shot. “In addition to quickly propagating out to individual shots, we can also automatically generate other images that can be used to further incorporate the sky with our complex ray-traced sets and characters. HDRI lighting environments and reflection/ refraction environments that exactly match what’s seen through the camera, even with shot-level tweaks, are generated for every sequence in production.”

All at sea

Back at ground – or rather sea – level, Garfield and his team also needed to come up with an efficient method to produce more than 500 ocean shots, and all within specific RAM and render time requirements established early in production. “Houdini’s Ocean Toolkit gave us a good start, but there was a lot of custom development required,” says Garfield. “In several sequences, the effects team needed to drive the underlying shape of the ocean surface. They made their own custom deformers to allow the scene-planning department to pre-visualise the gross wave shapes. Eventually, the effects team would then provide high-resolution local patches for the animators to refine.”

Rendering the oceans with deformed polygonal meshes, it quickly became apparent that the resolution required would make the task massively memory intensive. Garfield says they dealt with this by developing a Houdini-based camera-dependent system for building and subdividing the ocean meshes to the camera frustum. “Once the main surface was approved out of Houdini, we would then extend and close the surface in order to take advantage of scatter absorption and physically correct refractions from CGI Studio.”

A split-screen preview showing splash elements. “We established presets for the water surfaces to be visualised in Maya by the scene-planning, camera and staging, and animation teams,” says Garfield

Only when it was absolutely necessary did they reflect the entire scene, 3D clouds and all, onto the surface. “Usually, most of the scene was still there in the pass, but occasionally the fur would be turned off in the ocean reflection/refraction if it wasn’t clearly visible,” says Garfield. “In some cases, comped reflections and refractions were fully ray-traced renders in CGI Studio that were just separated into passes so that the lighting or compositing teams could dial them in as needed.”

What’s perhaps most impressive is not that Blue Sky’s effects team was able to generate such convincingly dramatic physical phenomena, but that it was able to integrate it so successfully into a world that really owes as much to Tex Avery as it does to Silicon Valley. “Stylising effects is always a challenge,” acknowledges Garfield. “Push it too far and it becomes too obvious, and similarly, when you simplify the look too much, the result appears outdated or low-res. We try to find a middle ground that gives our film the desired look, but is also achievable with the resources and time given. CGI Studio, and the ability to customise it to fit our needs, definitely gives us an advantage.”

VITAL STATISTICS
Title Ice Age: Continental Drift
Released 10 December 2012 (UK), 11 December 2012 (USA)
Formats Blu-ray/DVD
Distributor 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment/ 20th Century Fox
Watch out for… The early land destruction shots, the Perfect Storm-esque waves, and don’t miss Scrat’s mishaps in a nutty version of Atlantis

Discover what’s next for Augmented Reality at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

Take a trip around a 3D paper world in this new spot for marketing communications firm Keiler & Company

After receiving storyboards depicting a car travelling around a crumpled map, which unfolds as the spot progresses, the team at Texas-based visual design and postproduction company Impossible Engine started production on the complex project using Cinema 4D and a selection of third-party plug-ins.

Impossible Engine owner and creative director Scott Oliphant explains: “Besides C4D itself, the most useful piece of software was a plug-in called Control4D, which provided an interface between a PlayStation 3 controller and the car rig. We connected it up so that we could control the steering, breaking, accelerating and steering wheel. This allowed us to drive in real time over the terrain we built.”

The team relied on another plug-in to help them overcome a huge hurdle. “Probably the biggest challenge was the paper ball at the beginning,” says Oliphant. “The basic ideas came from crumpling real paper by hand, paying special attention to what our hands and fingers were doing. As much as we like using Cinema 4D, it leaves a little to be desired with regard to cloth self-collisions – especially for paper-thin geometry – and we ended up using a third-party plug-in called Uniflex that made the self-collisions manageable.”

Discover what’s next for Augmented Reality at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

From arch-viz to visual effects, Mark Ramshaw meets the studios that made their mark on the CG industry in the last year. This week, The Senate…

Unsung hero syndrome invariably accompanies specialisation in ‘invisible effects’. Nevertheless, boutique facility The Senate has been quietly building up an enviable reputation in the last few years, delivering seamless environment and visual effects work on a series of films, while continuing to push the boundaries in the higher end of the broadcast market – an area that spawned the company in the first place when several independent artists teamed up to work on Steven Spielberg’s 2002 mini-series, Band of Brothers.

▲ All-digital library and snow (top) and Kings College Cambridge gate house, created for The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“It’s been a conscious decision to specialise in this sort of work,” says Sarah Hemsley, CEO at The Senate. “Sadly, you often see companies take on anything and then sometimes they just can’t deliver. The best thing in business is to know your strengths and play to them, and that’s very much what we do.”

While Hemsley has been working to forge strong relationships with the major studios over the last few years – building to a recent body of work that includes 215 shots for Voyage of the Dawn Treader and 180 for Captain America: The First Avenger – she stresses that the UK remains a vital touchstone.

“We’re very keen to work on smaller UK projects. We’re currently involved with a British movie called Fast Girls, and have also worked on TV projects like Downton Abbey and Luthor. We have the ability to scale down or up to 50 seats, and so can work well with any size project and be very economical for the studios.”

This scalability, says Helmsley, also enables The Senate to avoid subcontracting. “Many people now outsource things like roto work, which is harming our talent pool. We take the approach of bringing people in-house at a roto/junior level, and then give them the chance to work up through the company.”

As for the upcoming year, the studio already has a raft of high-profile projects lined up. “2012 brings Wrath of the Titans, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows – which has some really great work in it – and a few things I sadly can’t discuss yet,” says Hemlsey. “It’s going to be a very busy year. The future is looking rosy.”

Visit www.senatevfx.com to discover what the studio is working on right now.

Master the secrets of leading 3ds Max artists with our 228-page guide to essential 3D principles and techniques: available worldwide now

3D World has teamed up with 3DTotal to produce 3ds Max Essentials: Volume 2, a comprehensive guide to core 3ds Max techniques.

Inside, some of the world’s leading designers and animators reveal their trade secrets, enabling readers to build up their skills in easy stages.

New 3ds Max tutorials for 2013

The sequel to the original 3ds Max Essentials, now long since sold out, Volume 2 contains 228 pages of new training for 2013.

The twelve 3ds Max tutorials are divided into themed sections covering characters, environments, vehicles and animations, and are supplemented by downloadable project files and video walkthroughs, providing over 14 hours of modelling and animation training.

Individual walkthroughs cover key tools introduced in recent releases of 3ds Max, including the Graphite modelling tools and MassFX physics.

Learn from 3ds Max masters

Tutorial authors include Michael McCarthy, recipient of Autodesk’s 3ds Max Master award in 2011; games industry veteran James Horn, currently Head of Art at Kwalee; former Framestore senior character artist Jose Lázaro; and architectural visualisation and mental ray expert Jamie Cardoso.

3ds Max Essentials: Volume 2 is available now, price £14.99. Our online store, My Favourite Magazines, will ship copies anywhere in the world.

Order a copy of 3ds Max Essentials: Volume 2 online

From arch-viz to visual effects, Mark Ramshaw meets the studios that made their mark on the CG industry in the last year. This week, Storm Studios…

Formed in 1996, Storm Studios is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, animation facilities in Scandinavia, although it wasn’t until 2006, with Free Jimmy (the region’s first CG-animated movie) and Peter & the Wolf, that the studio began to attract serious attention in its native Norway and abroad. Since then, feature film visual effects work has been Storm’s bread and butter, with a merger between Storm and Nordisk Film in 2010 further strengthening its industry position.

▲ Storm’s matte painting expertise at work in Mathias Calmeyer’s movie Captain Sabertooth

“Merging Storm’s effects knowledge with Nordisk Film’s long traditions and post-production expertise, we’ve achieved our dream of creating a one-stop shop,” says managing director Kristin Hellebust. “We’ve also helped design one of the finest post-production facilities in Europe, in the form of Nordisk Film Shortcut, which has recently expanded to a second studio in Stockholm.”

While there are some foreign projects currently in development, Hellebust says that tangible results from acclaim for internationally well-known projects such as Max Manus and The Troll Hunter have yet to appear. The Norwegian film industry, meanwhile, remains very budget-conscious.

“It’s also often expected that the visual effects company invest 50 per cent of the honorarium in the film, with the risk of never getting a direct return on this investment,” explains Hellebust. “Of course, with a population of just five million, it’s understandable that budgets are small, and one positive consequence is that we’re used to being extremely efficient and creative.”

Following a year of investment on internal R&D, and the development of efficient pipelines, Hellebust says one of the next things is going to be to enjoy the benefits of the brand-new facilities shared with Shortcut. On the work side, in 2012 Storm will continue its recent push into commercials, while feature work will include CG environments for three children’s movies, plus a sizeable contribution to the Scandinavian/British production Kon-Tiki.

Visit www.stormstudios.no to discover what the studio is working on right now.

We take a first look at the newly released animation and rendering software from pmG. Find out if version 6 will suit your needs

pmG Worldwide has just released messiahStudio6.

We asked Vegard Myklebust, Technical Director at useful slug / Thuristar for his first impressions:

This release has brought about a number of user requested features and production driven improvements. pmG fixed and tweaked a number of things, and gave amazing support for the production of the animated short 850 Meters (on festivals this year).

One of the nice new features is that you can do sub-division at one or more points in the deformer stack, enabling you to control deformers to occur on different levels of detail while maintaining point order predictably.

Skelevision: an interactive rigging view

Skelevision is also the talk of messiah town.

Messiah has always had very powerful automatic bone weighting, now you can have a split view of your setup tab and animated poses, and adjust the setup position of the bones with immediate feedback of what deformation the automated weighting process will give you.

This gives a great amount of control to the user and enables you to do even less tedious weight painting.

There’s a lot of great improvements under the hood as well, resulting in speed increases, stability improvements, more custom control of where the anti aliasing will spend time (Noise caused by GI? Hair?).

Many of these features and improvements may be less flashy, but they are certainly noticeable if you do your day to day work in messiah.

Overall, a great release from pmG.

About the author

Vegard Myklebust is a freelance character modeller, rigger, animator, programmer and TD. In addition to working on the short film 850 Meters, he is currently creating advertising, TV and music videos for Darkside Animation.

Compatibility and pricing info

messiahStudio can be used standalone or with Maya, 3ds Max, Modo, ZBrush, Lightwave and Unity.

pmG is offering a limited time special on new purchases of 6.0 for $299 (regularly $1195), and upgrades for just $99 (regularly $249).

Read a review of messiahstudio 5