Remember all those ‘calls for submissions’ a few months back? Well, that was all in aid of getting showreels ready for Siggraph 2012: View Side Effects Software’s awesome Houdini showreel 2012 here…

Siggraph kicks off next week and all the developers have been getting their showreels ready for the big event. And it looks like 2012 has been a very busy year for Houdini artists!

From feature films to commercials to student projects and video game cinematics, it is really cool to see what can be accomplished with Houdini’s VFX and animation tools.

Watch the Houdini Demo Reel 2012

“From Dreamworks Animation in LA to Blue Sky Studios in New York, to Image Engine in Vancouver and Axis Animation in Scotland this has been a busy year for VFX,” says Side Effects.

The Mill US showcases it VFX prowess in its 2012 showreel. Check out the spectacular reel of work and read about some of The Mill’s projects…

The recently released showreel demonstrates the very best of The Mill US’s work in 2012.

It includes commercial work, animation, television and award-winning VFX from The Mill’s New York and Los Angeles visual effects studios.

Read about some of The Mill’s best projects and watch the reel below.

Johnnie Walker ‘Rock Giant’

The Mill NY turns Rio’s Sugarloaf Mountain into a gentle giant in a spot for Johnnie Walker

The Mill’s New York office put its best foot forward in this spot for Johnnie Walker.

Responsible for all of the VFX on the project, the team worked tirelessly to transform Rio’s iconic Sugarloaf Mountain into a giant man. Directed by Peter Thwaites, the 60-second spot follows city residents as they watch the mountain come to life.

The Mill used a wide range of software to achieve the intricate effect, including Softimage, Maya, ZBrush, Mudbox, Realflow, Houdini, mental ray, Arnold and proprietary software

“The R&D department developed in-house software to ‘up-res’ our simulations, going from a couple of thousand particles to millions,” explains lead 3D artist Vincent Baertsoen. ICE in Softimage also proved to be particularly useful.

“We were able to set up the tree system with many layers of interaction in a couple of weeks, a flocking system for the birds in just two days, and a debris set-up for rocks falling in a mere couple of hours,” says Baertsoen.

“It was so much fun to set up in ICE because it had so much flexibility and control.”

The Mill's R&D department developed in-house software to ‘up-res’ simulations, going from a couple of thousand particles to millions

Gaga Constellation

The Mill LA created a stylised galactic 3D version of Lady Gaga in one of her stage dresses

The Mill LA reached for the stars in this short film, which was recently living as an interactive installation in the holiday windows of Barneys on Madison Avenue.

The studio received the brief from the project’s director, Tim Richardson, and Nicola Formichetti, creative director of the entire Gaga Workshop at the store.

The idea was to create a stylised galactic 3D version of Lady Gaga in one of her stage dresses, designed by Formichetti himself.

After receiving a storyboard from Richardson, The Mill went on to supervise the photoshoot before creating the entire two-minute full-CG film.

To achieve the unique piece, the team turned to Maya for modelling, animation and simulations, Houdini to shatter the model, mental ray for rendering and Nuke for composition

The most challenging aspect of the project, however, was not the CG but the continuous two-minute camera move.

The Mill’s shoot and CG supervisor Andre De Souza explains: “To get the camera work exactly the way the director wanted and to animate, simulate and render everything in two and a half weeks was tough. Dividing the sequence into chunks and seamlessly sewing them together was the trick.”

Watch The Mill’s showreel

The Mill is up for a CG Commercial Award

With just 30 seconds or so to grab your attention, be memorable and get their message across, this award is for the team that’s produced the highest-quality, innovative and most eye-catching CG ad work. Check out our CG Awards site and vote for you favourite.

The projects here have previously been published in the Projects section of 3D World

Submit a project to 3D World

If you would like to see your studio’s work featured in 3D World, email us at the address below, including brief technical details and at least three print-resolution stills. Please note that we can only feature commercial projects released to the public within the last few months.
enquiries@3dworldmag.com

See all the images from The Mill’s projects featured here:

We’ve got three full conference passes to Siggraph Asia 2012 up for grabs. For your chance to gain access to this massive event in Singapore, simply enter the prize draw today!

The 5th ACM Siggraph Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia will take place in Singapore at the Singapore EXPO.

Win a Full Conference pass to Siggraph Asia 2012

You could win one of three full conference passes, valued at SGD 1,000, that’s about £500 each!

The Full Conference pass gives you access to all programmes and events (networking reception included) of Siggraph Asia 2012, 1 Electronic Theater ticket, and 1 Full Conference DVD.

Enter the prize draw

This year, the line-up of conference programmes will include the inaugural Technical Briefs, the continuation of the inspiring Symposium on Apps, the Art Gallery, Computer Animation Festival, Courses, Emerging Technologies, Posters, and Technical Papers.

There will also be a trade exhibition from 29 November to 1 December 2012, offering participants from hardware and software vendors to studios and educational institutions a platform to market their products and services to computer graphics and interactive techniques professionals and enthusiasts from Asia and beyond.

Watch the Siggraph Asia 2011: Computer Animation Festival trailer

Watch the Siggraph Asia 2012: Computer Animation Festival trailer

Enter the prize draw

Siggraph 2012 announces the Computer Animation Festival’s Best in Show, Jury Award, Best Student Project, and Well Told Fable Prize recipients. Watch the animated shorts here and discover how some of them were created…

CG short animated films are among our favourite things to see created using 3D software. We love learning about how certain sequences were achieved and getting the technical lowdown.

Unfortunately the festival entry restrictions are such that animators can’t show their work online in full, so you’ll have to revisit us when we have the lowdown on the animated shorts up online some time next year!

But we do have access to some of them and you can watch them below, and check out our great feature on Réflexion, the Best in Show Award winner. (Student films are exempt from the entry restrictions.)

There’s also a WTF award… It stands for Well Told Fable!

Check out our online article CG animated shorts you must see

Visit the 3D World Shorts page more of the best animations online

Search for Friday Animation Fun

As you can see, we simply can’t get enough of CG shorts here at 3D World! And here are some more gems that have just been announced as Computer Animation Festival winners.

BEST IN SHOW AWARD

Réflexion

In a boutique in Paris, Louise looks at her reflection in the surrounding mirrors. Tonight, she has a rendezvous with Jules, her fiancé. Suddenly she notices that she’s late, and goes off in great haste to her flat to get ready. Réflexion is a description of women’s concerns about the way they look.

• Find out how Réflexion was created in an interview with Yoshi Tamura and Planktoon

JURY AWARD

How To Eat Your Apple
Directed by Erick Oh, Independent; USA

Here is a delicious apple. How would you eat it?

BEST STUDENT PROJECT PRIZE

Estefan
Directed by Jeff Call, Brigham Young University; USA

BEST STUDENT PROJECT PRIZE RUNNERS-UP

Globosome
Directed by Sascha Geddert, Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg; Germany

In the vastness of space, a small speck of rock is inhabited by the most peculiar lifeforms: Dark little dots that start to replicate fast and begin to show signs of intelligence. “Globosome“ tells the story of the rise and fall of these little creatures.

Herr Hoppe und der Atommüll
Directed by Jan Lachauer and Thorsten Löffler, Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg; Germany

A barrel of nuclear waste drops into the living room of Herr Hoppe, an average suburban German. He has to get rid of it and does it in his own wacky way.

WELL TOLD FABLE (WTF) PRIZE

Rosette
Directed by: Romain Borrel, Gaël Falzowski, Benjamin Rabaste, and Vincent Tonelli, Supinfocom Arles; France

In a cured meats deli, a customer starts fantasising about the butcher. She takes us into a clichéd vision of couple-hood, transcribed, for better or for worse, within a universe of pork products. Disgusting but very, very funny!

Fancy learning some animations basics?

Read our free training article by Weta Digital’s animation director Steve Lambert: Master Disney’s 12 principles of animation applied to 3D

Nike’s ‘Biomorph’ spot, recognised as one of the best commercials of 2012, will become part of the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Film Collection! Find out how Mothership’s director David Rosenbaum delivered an advert as seamless as the shoe itself…

Digital Domain and Mothership were honoured at the 20th annual Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Show held at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City a week ago.

Nike Biomorph – a 51-second short conceptualised, designed and directed by Mothership’s David Rosenbaum for Nike, with visual effects by Digital Domain – was recognised in the Visual Effects category.

We’re not surprised. It’s very, very cool.

One of the best commercials of 2012

Find out how Mothership’s director David Rosenbaum delivered an advert as seamless as the shoe itself as he discusses the ‘Biomorph’ TVC for Nike’s new Flyknit technology.

You can view the Biomorph commercial and watch a making-of video at the link below.

• Discover how Mothership and Digital Domain created the Nike Biomorph commercial

Want to see more awesome commercials?

If you liked this, check out some more cool commercials on our Commercial Showcase page.

Price: £3,700 / $3,995 / €4,400 | Developer: Autodesk | Platform: Windows

The new stereocam is a cool feature, but won’t be a selling point for everyone

Main features:

• Enhanced HumanIK
• Performance boosts
• Single-step interoperability between 2012 apps
• Updated UI and improved F-Curve editor
• Stereoscopic camera support

—

MotionBuilder has always been something of a double-edged sword.

It provides a rich set of tools for character animation and editing motion-capture and it enables you to do all your work in real time.

On the other hand, the program is notoriously quirky and frequently unstable.

MotionBuilder 2011 wasn’t particularly groundbreaking: if anything, it felt more like a step backwards.

Small changes to areas such as materials and animation layers didn’t make up for the fact it had a number of frustrating bugs and seemed particularly prone to crashes.

Indeed, there hasn’t been much that has distinguished any of the past few MotionBuilder releases from one another.

Some have been more stable than others, but for the most part, you could get by on MotionBuilder 2008 and not feel like you were missing out on much.

With MotionBuilder 2012, there’s no doubt you’re in for something new from the moment you fire it up.

The first difference you’re likely to notice is the performance boost.

The 2012 version launches much quicker, and it seems to be about twice as fast across the board.

Plotting, saving, and opening files are all noticeably quicker.

In addition to the increased horsepower, this is the most stable release of the software I’ve used, though it may still have a few crashes in store for you.

Updated UI

The new layout and look of MotionBuilder 2012, with all the windows docked to the main viewer

The most obvious change to even the casual user will be the whole look of the program.

The user interface has been overhauled with a new colour scheme, new icons and new layout options.

The old surfer dude from the Kaydara FiLMBOX days is long gone and has been replaced with a sleek Tron-like fellow in the Character Control window.

Layouts are now fully integrated with the Qt UI framework, so panels can be re-sized, torn away, docked and dynamically scaled within a single window.

It’s a nice addition if you’re using a single monitor. If, though, you operate in a dual-monitor environment, you won’t really be able to take advantage of this feature, given that the only window you can dock to is the main viewer, which you’ll likely want to place by itself on a single screen.

There are a couple of minor downsides to the updated UI.

The first is that long-time users will initially find it tricky to navigate, so there will naturally be a small ramping-up period as you get used to different icons and new layouts.

Second, the new colour scheme lacks contrast in places, and it can sometimes be difficult to know what you have selected.

One of the biggest changes to the UI is the new Characterization tool.

The old way to go about characterising in MotionBuilder is still there, but the new tool is more visual, more intuitive and a bit more efficient as well.

One handy new trick is it can now mirror selections so when, for example, you add the right arm to a character, the left arm will automatically be added in the appropriate slot.

File exchange

The same scene built in MotionBuilder 2012 and sent to Maya 2012. Note the green connection status in each program

Autodesk has a large family of creative tools, and the visual updates to MotionBuilder are part of an effort to unify the user’s experience across its multiple offerings.

In support of this effort, the 2012 release has another new feature called single-step interoperability.

This purports to allow users to send files back and forth between different software with the click of a button.

I tested it out with Maya 2012. (It’s important to note that to take advantage of single-step interoperability, you need the 2012 versions of both pieces of software – in this case, Maya and MotionBuilder).

If you’ve got the proper versions, this new feature works pretty well.

Selecting the Send To Maya option from the File menu will open up Maya and load your FBX scene into it (including your fully functional control rig).

Any items that are affected by a constraint that Maya doesn’t recognise are simply plotted down.

Single-step interoperability is good, but not perfect.

To export a modest scene (say, one character and a small set), it still takes time for MotionBuilder to package it all up.

Then it takes Maya a while to bring it all in. (Both programs still perform import and export operations in the background.)

The feature also isn’t a cure-all for some of the problems that can arise from trying to get MotionBuilder scenes perfectly into Maya.

You’ll still need to be smart about how you set things up on either side to get them to play nicely.

Once your scene has gone across successfully and the two pieces of software are ‘connected’, it works well.

You can make changes on one side and push the changes across to the other.

If you’re careful with your selections, these changes will shift easily and quickly from MotionBuilder to Maya and back again.

Overall, single-step interoperability eases the communication between different Autodesk packages without complicated FBX import/export options.

All it needs now is to be able to work between two separate workstations on a network.

MotionBuilder’s new Characterization tool is more intuitive

Another positive addition to the 2012 MotionBuilder toolset is the new Profiling Center.

With this, you can change the way the program handles and evaluates such things as constraints, animations and deformations.

The profiler gives you options to help you boost performance on the fly, enabling you to make small trade- offs in order to keep larger, more complex scenes running smoothly.

Advanced users can access the corresponding Python scripts and SDK classes so that they can set up scene-specific profiles and monitor where performance bottlenecks occur.

The Profiling Center is especially useful in virtual productions, where smooth performance during real-time capture sessions is critically important.

In summary, the 2012 version of MotionBuilder is a welcome release after a run of indifferent updates.

Whether or not it’s a must-have will naturally depend on the specifics of your production.

Most of the new features speed up or simplify tasks that MotionBuilder already does.

Other new features (such as the new stereo cameras) will only be useful for certain projects.

Ultimately, it’s the performance upgrades and increased stability that make this version worth considering for any motion-capture or character animation pipeline.

Verdict

PROS
• Fastest and most stable release yet, with more performance-boosting options
• Better characterisation workflow
• Improved Autodesk integration

CONS
• Some ramping-up time for long-time users who are used to the old look and layout
• Aspects of the UI are difficult to read
• Single-step interoperability doesn’t quite feel finished

This is one of the strongest releases of MotionBuilder yet. If you’ve been waiting to upgrade or buy the software, now is the time to take the plunge

Viewport enhancements: now offers a range of full-screen effects

3D software giant Autodesk has announced a range of new features for leading 3D animation tool Maya.

Alongside enhancements to the Viewport and the addition of editable motion trails, is a focus on interoperability with other software including MotionBuilder, Mudbox and Softimage.

Maya 2012 contains single-step workflows, enabling users to move 3D data directly between the latest versions of Autodesk’s 3D product line.

Do more with less

Speaking to Autodesk prior to the announcement, 3D World was given a preview to a number of new features. It was said that a significant amount of the new features were implemented as a result of what senior product marketing manager Rob Hoffman labelled “The Avatar Effect”.

“Artists need to do more with less,” he says. “They are being asked to do a huge amount of work for less time and money. It’s something all artists are struggling with today.”

Hoffman went on to note that Autodesk recognised that users were using more than one piece of software, and that efficiency between different platforms has become a key focus.

Summary of new features:

• Viewport 2.0 Enhancements — now includes full-screen effects: motion blur, depth-of-field and ambient occlusion, component and manipulator displays, batch rendering capabilities and a high-performance API
• Node-Based Render Passes — create and edit node-based representations of render passes and render the composited output directly using the mental ray renderer
• Editable Motion Trails — Edit animation directly in the viewport, without needing to switch context to the graph editor
• Sequencer Enhancements — A Sequencer Playlist with a configurable spreadsheet view to reorder clips, edit In and Out points and change camera assignments; as well as support for multi-track audio and the ability to output multiple shots as a single sequence for easier game cinematic rendering or export to a games engine.
• Substance Smart Textures — dynamic, animatable and editable resolution-independent Substance smart textures and filters
• Craft Animation Tools — Four new camera rigs from the Craft Director Studio animation tool for creating complex camera movements. Also – four pre-rigged models
• New Simulation Options — Incorporates the multi-threaded NVIDIA PhysX engine (Windows only) for static, dynamic and kinematic rigid-body simulations in the viewport and the Digital Molecular Matter plug-in for shattering simulations from Pixelux Entertainment

“With Maya 2012, we have continued our long-term focus on improving production efficiency as well as real-time creative iteration,” says Marc Petit, senior vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment.

Editable motion trails are a long overdue feature, but it's been delivered extremely well within the viewport

Pricing and availability

Autodesk has stated that it expects Maya 2012 to be available in April 2011. The software costs $3,495 for a standalone licence, and $1,795 for an upgrade from Maya 2011.

Maya is also expected to be part of the Entertainment Creation Suite Premium 2012 – together with Softimage, Mudbox, and Motion builder at a price of $6,495.

For more information, visit the Maya product page on the Autodesk website.