The Pixar lead technical director reveals how crowds were created for Cars, Toy Story 3, Up and Ratatouille

Today and tomorrow, 3D World is at FMX 2012 in Stuttgart. Visit 3dworldmag.com to stay in touch with the conference as it unfolds, with coverage of presentations from the industry’s key figures and a flavour of what it’s like to visit Europe’s leading CG conference.

I’m back in the Gewerkschafthaus for Pixar lead TD Paul Kanyuk, who’s going to take us through the various crowd simulation techniques the company has used over the years. Crowds are important, he says, because they provide spectacle, make worlds more realistic and provide reaction to the character’s action. But they’re also hard to do – “so unless you come up with some technical tricks, you’re doomed”.

For years, Pixar has used two crowd teams: TDs for planning and broad generation, and animators for shot work and fixes. The animators “are the eyes of the audience” – they review the TDs’ work to make sure everything works on screen.

In A Bug’s Life, crowds were Finite State Machines: individuals reacted to events around and triggered set motion clips. Many games use a similar technique. The first tool was called Fred.

Cars was the first film after Bug’s Life to use large crowds. Fred was updated to Barney, establishing an internaal naming scheme for crowd tools based on The Flintstones.

Barney used transition states: walk then stand, for example. But transitions could get complicated, as in the Mexican Wave sequences in Cars. Transitions would respond to triggers.

Kanyuk explains that the cars in crowds were shaped using displacement maps to save on polygons.

A new crowd pipeline was created for Ratatouille, with hundreds of rats in some scenes. Here, crowds have to behave in different ways and often appear in the foreground.

The pipeline was based on Massive, which created agents that have instructions telling them how to react.

The system evolved for Wall-E to allow Pixar to support classes, so character types could behave differently. The robots were made to wobble in different ways, for example. Improvements were also made to agents’ anticipation so they felt more natural.

Pixar created what Kanyuk calls “brain springs” to manage how robots stopped: physics filters to make the robots wobble as they stopped.

Up used the same pipeline as Ratatouille because the only crowd, a pack of dogs, was relatively small and simple to control. They rarely go back to use a previous tool version, but this was an exception.

The scene in Toy Story 3 where the heroes are welcomed to their new home was done with “brute force” – individual rigs for each character. “Sometimes you just gotta animate it.”

For Cars 2, Pixar evolved the ‘shrinkwrap’ displacement map system, with 12 shader maps rather than three. Masks in the shader maps were used to animate eye and mouth movement, saving a lot of data storage. The system is fine for cars, but wouldn’t work for humans.

Designs where elements stuck out weren’t compatible with the shrinkwrap system. Look carefully and you’ll see that crowd-scene cars don’t have wing mirrors for that reason.

Brain springs returned to control car suspension, and there was lots of work put into managing traffic.

Kanyuk can’t talk about crowd animation in Brave just yet, but shows an impressive trailer with a crowd at an archery contest. “You can probably guess what we used,” he smiles.

Fox’s visual effects lead explains how Avatar is influencing a new way to make films, and shows a brief glimpse of Prometheus

Today and tomorrow, 3D World is at FMX 2012 in Stuttgart. Visit 3dworldmag.com to stay in touch with the conference as it unfolds, with coverage of presentations from the industry’s key figures and a flavour of what it’s like to visit Europe’s leading CG conference.

Good morning. I’m back in the Haus der Wirtschaft in Stuttgart for the second day of FMX 2012. Today’s when the programme steps up a gear, with the start of three days’ discussion on virtual production, plus a separate Animation Production Day strand and all sorts of other goodness.

Thanks to everyone who retweeted yesterday’s blog posts, by the way. Please keep doing what you do. Not that we’re attention-seekers or anything.

The virtual production strand consists of 16 speakers over three days. First is a keynote introducing the topic from John Kilkenny, executive VP for visual effects at 20th Century Fox. He played a key role on Avatar and is on his way to Budapest for shooting on a new Die Hard movie.

He’s on the left in my photo. Autodesk’s David Morin is on the right, tapping his inner Parkinson.

Kilkenny says directors and film-makers have more possibilities today. The VFX budget can be bigger than the rest of the production budget, but it has to be managed, he says. Digital film-making can lead to everyone wanting their own changes, which can be dangerous. “Just because you can change something doesn’t mean it should.”

Pre-viz is where virtual production starts. Fox has hired John Griffith from The Third Floor to develop a virtual pre-viz pipeline, with real-time motion capture.

He shows an example of a X-Men: First Class experiment where a fight scene was mocapped and pre-visualised in two days. The pipeline should be ready for the Rise of the Planet of the Apes sequel.

“It helps save money if you know pretty much what you’re going to do on the day.”

But inexperienced directors can take the pre-viz too literally, and expect to recreate every shot literally. It doesn’t always work like that on set, Kilkenny says.

The majority of the VFX budget is still spent on post, but prep work is taking a bigger share. “Sometimes our budgets are driven by how much time we have,” he says.

He cites the Apes movie as an example. Weta was given 10 months to create the shots, so gave them a quote for how many shots it could do. Fox had to change the script to accommodate that.

Fox works with VFX producers, or vendors, all over the world, and Fox keeps looking for new partners. “The talent around the world has caught up,” he says.

With hundreds of artists working on a project, there’s no time to go from workstation to workstation. So lead supervisors are now sitting in a screening room, receiving shots and giving virtual notes.

That means vendors don’t necessarily need big teams in one location. Artists could be contracted from around the world, with a small hub of leads at the vendor.

The next step forward is the next Avatar movie. The first one, he says, was made “guerilla style” – they were working out how to make the movie as they went along. lessons learned there have been taken to other movies as Avatar artists worked on other projects.

He describes seeing James Cameron walking round an empty stage with a camera, walking around the virtual Pandora he could see on the screen to scout locations.

There are some actors who are scared of virtual production, Kilkenny says, but he sees it the opposite way. James Cameron waited until the technology was ready that would let him use actors rather than keyframing. “We prefer to call it performance capture.”

Animators are still important to enhance and adjust the performance.

We’re about to see a scene of Prometheus. Sorry, no cameras. Please, spare me your jealousy.

We just saw a clip where the ship lands on the alien planet, with epic cloud formations and landscapes. Very pretty, but no revelations to share.

The virtual production track continues with a roundtable discussion, but I’m going to check out the Animation Production Day strand downstairs.

Today through Thursday, 3D World is at FMX 2012 in Stuttgart. Visit 3dworldmag.com to stay in touch with the conference as it unfolds, with coverage of presentations from the industry’s key figures and a flavour of what it’s like to visit Europe’s leading CG conference.

Created for the Enhanced Edition of Xbox 360 title The Witcher 2, Platige Image’s polished cinematic has caused quite a stir in both the gaming and CG communities, with getting on for 400,000 views on YouTube so far. And in case you missed it…

The Gewerkschafthaus in Stuttgart is welcoming Maciej Jackiewicz and Lukasz Sobisz from Platige Image, the team behind the cinematic, to show off some their development work.

Animation director Jackiewicz is going first.

He starts by explaining that the character animation relied on motion capture. “We had six actors, but a lot of more characters.”

With mocap complete and the basic animation done, a rough layout sequence was produced. “I consider the layout to be the most important stage in the film,” says Jackiewicz. “It was like the finished movie – a low-poly version of the film.”

The sequence everyone’s talking about is the spectacular destruction of the king’s ship after the ice bomb goes off. The pace is almost balletic despite the chaos. “Most of the destruction is structured with the music,” says Jackiewicz.

Although there are nominally three main characters in the sequence, many of the supporting cast also have their chance to shine. Jackiewicz estimates there are 20 characters that Platige Image had invest effort into developing. “We had to pay attention to each of them and give them the same detail… I thought of the jesters as these really tired guys who don’t like their job.”

Lead simulation TD Lukasz Sobisz steps up to talk a little more about the copious effects in the cinematic. Starting with cloth simulation, he explains how the team made its own cloth sim plug-in for ads Max to resolve all the intersections in the complex costumes. “Every piece of the geometry is constrained somehow.”

The ship destruction was done with ThinkingParticles in 3ds Max. The team chose it, says Sobisz, because of its advanced caching and layer systems. “It is not constrained by any one factor.”

The VFX pioneer is still looking to the future as he attempts to re-invent the movies

Today through Thursday, 3D World is at FMX 2012 in Stuttgart. Visit 3dworldmag.com to stay in touch with the conference as it unfolds, with coverage of presentations from the industry’s key figures and a flavour of what it’s like to visit Europe’s leading CG conference.

FMX has taken a lunch break, which is terribly civilised, and we’re back in the main hall with Douglas Trumbull. He’s looking forward, as ever. He’s looking at making a new movie with a hardcore science fiction basis: “I hope it will take over where 2001 and To the Moon and Beyond left off,” he says.

Trumbull’s firm, Trumbull Ventures, is researching the future of cinema. He believes that there is “the possibility of making a movie that’s indistinguishable from reality”. As well as hyperreal projection, there’s the potential offered by immersive technology, where the viewer is part of the movie. “If you’re in the movie, there’s a new cinematic language we have to develop.”

There are several major problems with conventional cinema, he says. Screens are very dim, and are “killing the industry”. “We’ve got to get movies brighter again.”

Frame rates are also far too low. One solution that Trumbull is working on is a hemispherical high-gain screen, with movies projected at 120 frames per second per eye.

The cameras enabling this are small and lightweight, which makes film-making less laborious. He describes how live-action filming could take its cues from animation, using these cameras to block out the entire film with temporary actors to assess how the staging and script are working.

Trumbull continues to work on this combination of technologies that could result in what he calls “a dense illusion of reality”. “I hope to explore the outer fringes of making a movie that’s like life.”

Discover the production design challenges of DreamWorks’ new animated feature, and how animators solved them

Today through Thursday, 3D World is at FMX 2012 in Stuttgart. Visit 3dworldmag.com to stay in touch with the conference as it unfolds, with coverage of presentations from the industry’s key figures and a flavour of what it’s like to visit Europe’s leading CG conference.

We’ve had a short break, during the sound system has treated us to some some funky bass, and the offical opening speeches have taken place. Now we’re in the company of Scott Peterson, head of effects at DreamWorks Animation. He’s talking about the production design challenges of Madagascar 3.

There were a few laws the team established, although Peterson points that at times they were less laws than suggestions. All elements should demonstrate exaggerated proportions and not use parallel lines, for example, to create the feel of a cohesive world.

Although there are several international locations, the heart of the movie is in Monte Carlo, so that location was built out far more than the others. The buildings followed the film’s laws by having no parallel lines in their design – a style Peterson calls “wack”. Scenes also intentionally showed fewer details in the backgrounds, so each building had to have several versions depending on wherenthey were in relation to the camera.

DreamWorks created a tool called Mod Facade to store individual components to make buildings easier to assemble – essentially prefabricated, says Peterson.

For human characters, the team pushed hard to make the designs more varied than in previous instalments. Peterson shows the dozens of variations developed to diversify the characters. There were 15 body types and six head types, all of which could be mixed and matched.

The variations extend to details like facial hair and spectacles, as well as textures.

The world’s design principles even extended to effects such as explosions. Peterson explains how the well-known broken spiral design, seen in the character noses for example, was replicated in the explosion by taking the gradients of the the explosion and rotating them. This was all achieved in Nuke.

To end, Peterson shows a vivid circus performance where some shots are almost abstract in their simplicity. Challenges include flooring where the lights had to be below the surface.

Pixar’s enchanting short is dissected at Europe’s leading CG conference

Following Seamus Malone, the next treat for FMX early birds is Daniel McCoy, who worked as supervising technical director on Pixar’s latest short, La Luna. McCoy’s talk starts with a screening that’s met with warm applause.

McCoy describes shorts as the roots of Pixar.

The director started by painting watercolours to evoke the feel he wanted. Unusually, says McCoy, these were preserved and used for the story reel.

McCoy talks about the tradition of European TV and film shorts where the characters use their own language – something British readers old enough to remember the imports shown on BBC children’s TV will appreciate.

Actors and circus performers who specialise in speaking gibberish were brought in. McCoy shows an entertaining clip of two actors – “We’ve got hours of the stuff,” he laughs.

I had no idea you could get a job speaking gibberish. I may have found my dream career.

The characters were feeling too young, so they kept casting to find actors who felt older. One actor asked if they wanted him to perform “with teeth or without teeth”.

Prop building and texturing was also evolving at this stage. McCoy shows the plans and textures for the boat among examples, with a full progression of paint layers.

The older characters presented a challenge to animators because their mouths were fully covered by beards. The solution was to set up surfaces under the beard to animate.

The transition from the ladder to the moon “was something we were worried about on a lot of levels”, says McCoy.

The lighting is one of the defining elements in La Luna. The moon seen from the earth is a flat pastel, while parallax layers were used for the stars.

There’s a brief look at the colour script, which shows the transition from blues to yellows during the short.

Light sources had to be managed to avoid any hint of creepy underlighting during the moon scenes.

McCoy also reveals an alternative ending where a female crew heading for the sun is seen behind our heroes’ boat.

In questions, McCoy says this is the longest short they’ve done, but there are relatively few shots – “less than 80″, says McCoy. Some of their shorter projects have half as many again.

La Luna has seen shown at festivals up until now, but will be shown in cinemas with Brave this summer.

Aardman’s Seamus Malone reveals the genesis of the recent animated feature

Today through Thursday, 3D World is at FMX 2012 in Stuttgart. Visit 3dworldmag.com to stay in touch with the conference as it unfolds, with coverage of presentations from the industry’s key figures and a flavour of what it’s like to visit Europe’s leading CG conference.

Before FMX officially kicks off at 12 noon, early birds can enjoy a few initial presentations, starting with Seamus Malone from Aardman. He’s talking about the creation of Arthur Christmas, its enjoyable animated feature from a few months ago. Malone was supervising animator on the production.

Seamus is taking the audience through a set of character development pieces and pre-production video clips, explaining how stages like the Look of Picture process helped the animators work out practical details.

Aardman spent a lot of time casting the voice actors and making sure the voices were right for the characters. As much as possible, they put the actors in the same room so they could feed off each other’s energy.

The production moved from Bristol to LA before too long: “There was a group of about 16 of us,” says Malone. Sony’s pipeline was more developed. A team stayed behind, communicating via video link where necessary.

This was where other departments got involved, including cloth and hair. “Suddenly it got really big,” says Malone.

He shows one of the weeklies the teams assembled, to help everyone keep up with the parallel development work. It’s set to a rather incongruous trash metal track for some reason.

Bitchin’ sound system in the main hall, by the way.

The biggest challenge in the movie wasn’t the million elves or the Mission Control scenes, says Malone, but getting the animation acting right. “We approached it almost as a live-action film.”

Animators were encouraged to look at classic UK TV comedy series such as Only Fools and Horses and Father Ted. Grandpa Santa is “kind of a cross between Uncle Albert and Father Jack”, says Malone.

Most of the storyboarding was done in Bristol. Malone says the animators would work from these to act out the scenes themselves – “I don’t have room to show this,” laughs Malone.

The physical acting helped the animators understand the characters better. A couple of professional actors also helped at this point.

Rough layout is a sequence of static scenes linked together to set the camera placements and compositions, giving a platform to block out the basic movements.

With so many animators working on a scene, says Malone, keeping the acting consistent was a challenge.

Scenes would then go to the lighting department, which could occasionally throw up some problems like intersecting objects for the animators to fix.

Join 3D World as we cover the key presentations and the best of the rest of Europe’s premier computer graphics conference

It’s a bright Spring morning in Stuttgart: the perfect welcome to FMX 2012, Europe’s biggest computer graphics conference. A sprawling programme of events promises talks from leading CG artists, regular film showings and much more. Venue Wi-Fi willing, I’ll be covering some of the events while I’m here, and hopefully give you a flavour of the conference.

Seamus Malone from Aardman has drawn the short straw to give the first talk before most people have found the venue and got their pass – or, in some cases, woken up.

Find out who is going to FMX this year and browse different presentations, workshops and screenings

FMX, which is run by the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg and organised by the Institute of Animation, Visual Effects and Digital Postproduction, was initiated as an event for students labelled ‘Film and Media Exchange’ (FMX) in 1994.

Since it’s inception, FMX has kept up with the developments and trends of the CG industry and has grown to become one of the stand-out conferences for those working with digital imagery.

Even if you just glance at the FMX programme, you’ll see the scope of the conference is absolutely massive.

Variety is the spice of FMX

This year you’ll enjoy talks on VFX extravaganzas such as John Carter and presentations on blockbusters like the upcoming Men in Black sequel, MIB III, plus animation highlights like Ice Age 4, Madagascar 3 and Arthur Christmas, as well as presentations on the popular games series SSX and Mortal Kombat.

For VFX fans…

Among the many world-renowned VFX visionaries at FMX this year are Doug Trumbull - who just received an Honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement and worked as Effects Supervisor on 2001: Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the four-time Academy-Award winner Ray Feeney. Also present will be recent VFX Oscar winner Rob Legato, Hugo’s leading Visual Effects Supervisor.

The VFX talks will focus on films like John Carter, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Red Tails, Hugo, Ice Age 4, La Luna and Arthur Christmas by the top FX and animation houses, such as ILM, Digital Domain, MPC, Cinesite, Double Negative, Prime Focus, Weta Digital, Pixar, Aardman, Blue Sky Studios, New Deal Studios, Framestore, Pixomondo and Sony Pictures Imageworks.

For animation fans…ITFS and APD

The Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film (ITFS) is one of the world’s largest and most important festivals for animated film, showcasing about 1,000 international animations. This parallel event takes place from May 8 to 13.

As well as this, FMX 2012 and ITFS will jointly host the Animation Production Day (APD) on 8 May 2012, a business platform for the international animation industry.

Check out the full programme on the FMX site