▲ To give Cushelle’s koala a soft, fluffy look, MPC used its in-house tool Furtility

Project: Cushelle, ‘Cloud Factory’
Studio: The Moving Picture Company

Directed by Jake Mengers, the MPC team were required to continue the brand’s successful campaign, but take the character and project to a new level. “Jake wanted to match the koala to the previous executions, but increase his range of movement and expressions,” explains VFX supervisor Christopher Antoniou. “Enhancing the koala’s fur and creating realistic clouds were crucial.”

Watch Cloud Factory now:

To achieve this, the team used Maya – coupled with their own proprietary in-house tool, Furtility – Houdini, Nuke, Photoshop and RenderMan. “Each piece of software was chosen to strengthen the commercial in different ways,” says Antoniou. “One of the most crucial aspects of the spot was achieving a great fluffed-up look for the koala’s fur – for this we used Furtility, which originated from the MPC film pipeline.

▲ This fully-CG spot was primarily made using Maya

“Additionally, we used Maya for animating, rigging and modelling, and RenderMan was used for lighting and rendering our furry koala,” says Antoniou. “Houdini was helpful for some of the more complicated growing clouds.”

MPC

▲ The results of the tense tache-growing contest between various UK Soho studios are IN!

For Movember 2012, several CGI studios took part and three set up against each other to try and raise the most money. And now, on the 30th, we have a winner!

THE SOHO MO SHOWDOWN

They’ve had 30 days to grow the bushiest ‘taches and to raise the most money and awareness for men’s health (specifically prostate cancer and testicular cancer). The winner, by a country mile, in terms of money raised is the D-Neg Mo-vie Magic team ! They raised over £5,000 during the month, putting them top of the Soho Mo Showdown mini league and a creditable 66th out of the 30,587 teams who entered nationwide. Good effort!

▲ Mo-vie Magic team captain Phil Taylor heads headgear with a moustache this deadly!

Check out the team’s Movember page – you can still donate.

Well done also to the Framestache team from Framestore who raised well over £1,000 and particularly to their star turn Antonio who filled their blog with his off-piste hair designs. Not content with growing a Mo, Antonio also offered to add to the embarrassment by sporting any hairstyle his supporters wished – in return for more donations of course!

More pics available on the Soho Mo Showdown blog!

Coming in in third place is the MPC VFX team of Mo-growers. With some stylish moustaches, this 15-strong team made heroic efforts by holding bake sales to boost their donations.

▲ Antonio from Framestache upped the ante by styling his hair like 'celebrities' to raise extra cash

And there’s mo’…

The other studios who took part in Movember this year:

AARDMAN COMMERCIALS

Website: www.aardman.com/commercials
Twitter: @AardmanAds
Donate to Aardman Commercials’ Dead Squirrels team

EDIT 19

Website: www.edit19.com
Twitter: @edit_19
Donate to the Edit 19 team

ENVY POST & ENVY ACADEMY

Website: www.envypost.co.uk
Twitter: @envypost, @EnvyAcademy
Donate to Envy’s Moustache Envy team

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Website: www.the-neighbourhood.com
Twitter: @neighbourhood
Donate to the Neighbourhood team

UNIFORM

Website: www.uniform.net/
Twitter: @uniformtweets
Donate to the Uniform team

Ridley Scott’s epic thriller Prometheus takes its name from the state-of-the-art spaceship that transports its crew to a distant, foreboding world. Check out a new video showing the spaceship now

Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien terrified the world using tension, shadows and props and now, 33 years later almost to the day, he’s back with Prometheus.

Prometheus lands in cinemas in the US and Canada on 8 June. That’s in just two days! In the UK, we’ve been treated to the film’s release already. If you’ve seen it let us know what you think.

Hopefully you’ve managed to stir clear of all the spoilers that can be found all over the internet. Don’t worry, we’re not about to ruin anything for you – here’s just a little something about the stupendous work on the awesome spaceship to get you in the mood.

Watch production designer Arthur Max and Ridley Scott discussing the design of Prometheus

As Scott says: “It’s opened up the door to get bolder, get better and get your attention…”

It’s certainly done that. We hope you enjoy the film! Don’t forget to let us know what you think of it.

Look out for a special making-of Prometheus article in the next issue of 3D World

Find out how leading effects houses The Moving Picture Company (MPC), Weta Digital and Fuel VFX, and several others helped to terrify the world again in our special making-of Prometheus article in next issue’s 3D World – on sale on 19th June.

For more info see the Prometheus site

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

2011 was a great year for visual effects in commercials – and pleasingly there’s not a talking meerkat in sight. Check out the list and making of featurettes…

As FX Guide takes a look back at some of the year’s best VFX work with its top ten TV spots of 2011, we’re glad to see that our favourites were included here too, and that many were covered in our Projects section of 3D World, which showcases commercial and short-form work.

See what made the list (below) and also check out the breakdowns and behind the scenes featurettes on how the ads were made (via fxguide).

1. Canal+, Bear: Mikros Image (Featured in issue 152)
2. Kia, One Epic Ride: Animal Logic
3. Coca-Cola, Seige: Framestore
4. DIRECTV, Hot House: MPC LA
5. Muller, Wünderful Stuff: The Mill
6. Kia, More Soul: Method Studios
7. NBA, Nash: a52
8. Twinings Tea, Gets You Back to You: Psyop
9. Gears of War 3, Dust to Dust: Digital Domain
10. Réseau Ferré de France: Buf

See FX Guide’s top 10 VFX TV spots of 2011

Find unmissable VFX scenes from films

In the ’150 CG secrets’ article in issue 150, Anders Langlands discusses the need to prioritise specularity in order to achieve realistic materials.

Anders explains: The most important thing with any material is to get the specular properties right. The specular/glossy response of a surface (or lack of it) tells us whether it’s made of metal, plastic or rubber. You know you’ve got a shader right when you can look at an image and instantly know what each surface would feel like to the touch.

This means getting two things right:

1. Your Fresnel settings determine what your surface is actually made of. If you don’t apply a Fresnel falloff, you’re going to be limited to something that looks like metal. Otherwise apply a Fresnel falloff that’s appropriate to your material.

Water: 1.34
Skin: 1.4
Plastic and glass: 1.5-1.7.

If you’re unsure, just set it to 1.5: better to have something slightly wrong than no Fresnel at all. 

For the best metal effects, use measured reflectance data (‘nk data’) to get the subtle shifts in the colour and brightness of reflections as the incidence angle changes. If your renderer doesn’t support this, you can often use a very high IOR with a standard Fresnel to get some of the same effect.

 
2. If specular reflections are the most important part of a shader, bump and displacement maps are the most important part of your texture stack. 

If you’re using ZBrush or Mudbox for overall displacement, make sure you’re happy with your base model and displacement before you start shading.

If you’re going to try extracting bump maps from your colour textures as a starting point, do so immediately after you get a first colour pass. Once you have your bump and displacement down, move on to specular maps. If you’ve done your displacement well these can usually be quite simple. What you want to paint is the ‘exponent’, ‘glossy’ or ‘shininess’ map, depending on what your software calls it – in other words, the one that controls the shape of the specular highlight. You should always use an energy-conserving specular BRDF so that as the highlight gets broader, it also gets dimmer. If your software does not support an energy-conserving BRDF, you can plug the inverse of your shininess map into the specular strength parameter to fake this effect.

Once you’ve got your displacement right and your Fresnel settings correct, you can just tweak your shininess settings until your CG material matches your reference images.

To discover all 150 CG tips by experts from the likes of MPC, Aardman and ILM, get your copy of issue 150 now

In the ‘150 CG secrets’ article in issue 150 of the magazine, Niall Flinn discusses the need to achieve a realistic particle size distribution when simulating granular materials such as soil.

Niall explains: When simulating granular materials like soil, randomise the particle sizes. Don’t just use a rand() function, since you will end up with as many large as small particles. In Maya’s nParticles, you can fix this via the ramp editor under the Radius Scale tab, with the Radius Scale Input set to Randomized ID. Just tweak the curve to give a natural-looking distribution of radii.

The following techniques can be used to achieve this distribution in Maya:

You can use Gaussian noise to create a distribution weighted toward smaller radii. In Maya, this is easily accomplished using the gauss() function. I typically create a particle creation expression that looks something like this:



float $minRad = 0.01;

float $sd = 0.1;

radiusPP = abs( gauss( $sd )) + $minRad;



In this example, $minRad is the smallest radius you want to see, and $sd is the standard deviation of the function.

Another option is to use a simple weighted noise algorithm (again in a creation expression) by feeding the results of successive rand() calls into one another:

$min = 0.01;
$max = 0.1;

radiusPP = $rand;

The above code will produce a distribution overwhelmingly weighted toward smaller values. With 3 rand() calls, it’s relatively expensive, but it generally only needs to be done once for each particle.

To discover all 150 CG tips by experts from the likes of MPC, Aardman and ILM, get your copy of issue 150 now

The app includes past, present and future projects with details of the director, stars, studio and VFX supervisor, alongside movie stills.

There is also a breakdown category so users can watch the evolution of visual effects and learn how they were created with a podcast series.

Users can also learn about new MPC events and browse the studio’s list of job vacancies.

An iPad version is also in the works.

MPC

The fourth installment of the Pirates franchise sees Johnny Depp’s character Captain Jack Sparrow on the search for the fountain of youth.

MPC was along for the ride once more, working on more than 300 full stereo VFX shots including CG waterfalls and environments, mermaid’s tendrils, and a CG ship: Queen Anne’s Revenge, which included sails, ropes and rigging.

The ship, belonging to the character of Blackbeard was the first challenge. MPC’s in-house photographer went to Hawaii to take extensive reference images for the modelling team of the actual ship being built.

The team then created a digital double. MPC’s cloth team replaced the sails, ropes and rigging with detailed CG versions before compositors piece together the dozens of layers of rotoscope with segments of the live action ship.

Crowd simulation

MPC also had to populate another ship, the HMS Providence (belonging to Captain Barbossa) with plenty of CG sailors on board, and the sea around it with attacking mermaids.

Footage from the shoot was processed through MPC’s in-house crowd simulation system ALICE, allowing the team to recreate a range of actions at once.

MPC also designed the tendrils and completed shots of sailor’s being pulled into the sea by the ILM-designed mermaids.

The studio also sank the Providence. The team created a CG boat and crew, while the animators directed performances of the crew running around on the deck and falling from the side of the ship.

The crowd system was used again to throw sailors around using physics simulations as the boat rolled.

Environments

MPC’s artists also created the scene where Jack Sparrow jumps from a cliff into a pool beneath a flowing waterfall.

The environment team reconstructed the edge of the cliff from a mixture of plate and photographic references from the location and then extended it down to create the full height of the cliff.

The waterfall was created using a number of different particle and volume simulations, which were combined with live-action elements and projected textures in order to give the waterfall the right sense of depth.

Finally, using the performance of a stuntman as a starting point, the team animated a digi-double of Jack Sparrow jumping into the waterfall.

In the final version, the only parts of the live-action plate that remain are the water immediately surrounding where Jack lands and the splash as he hits the pool.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is in cinemas now.

Visit the MPC website

The free event, hosted by 3D and video technology providers bluegfx, is designed for professionals, customers and students in the CG industry who will hear from a wide range of speakers from the likes of Autodesk, MPC, Chaos Group and Nvidia.

View the full list of speakers

Attendees will be able to learn about the workflow of major studios, which will include sessions and demonstrations of new tools.

Topics set to be covered on the day include:

• The latest 3D modelling and animation technologies
• How to optimise your render pipeline
• The latest Cloud (CPU & GPU) phenomenon
• The future of graphics card technology
• Storage and management of high volumes of data
• How to optimise your office environment
• What you need for stereoscopic production
• Real production challenges faced in the games, design visualisation and film/TV markets

View the full agenda

“We’re thrilled to have a platform to share our knowledge on stereoscopy,” says MPC’s Damien Fagnou. “It’s an emerging area of any production company dealing in visual effects for feature films, commercials and TV programmes, and we’re really looking forward to learning more from the other specialists across the 3D arena too.”

Date: 12 May 2011
Location: Ravensbourne College, 6 Penrose Way, London, SE10 0EW
Cost: Free

Register for bluegfxexpo