By Staff, August 29, 2003
The Hairy Truth
Perhaps starting off at SIGGRAPH with a course on Photorealistic Hair Modeling, Animation and Rendering is too steep a gradient for a non tech-head. It was for me. After a bit on hair dynamics from Yizhou Yu of University of Illinois, I grabbed my morning coffee and headed to the Animation Theater for some material that was a bit less dense.
While SIGGRAPH draws hoards of visual effects and game artists and technologists, what becomes clear as soon as one ventures off of the exhibit floor is that CG films and games aren't all computer graphics are good for. The Challenging Realities session at the Animation Theater featured a CG architectural tour created by IO Media, and a microscopic view of how Osteoporosis effects bones, courtesy of Hurd Studios. Scott Chantler’s “Gone with the Wind in Sixty Seconds,” an abridged, animated telling of Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War saga, got the most laughs at the screening I attended, though the title is a lie: it actually clocks in at a little over one minute.
Wondering if Photorealistic Hair might deserve another chance, I hustled back to room 29 A-D for the applications segment of the course. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann showed real-time simulations that Université de Genève’s MIRALab is doing for a ‘Life in Pompei’ exhibit. Virtual characters complete with cloth, hair and facial expression moved in real backgrounds composed of photography of Pompei’s ruins.
Next, Armin Bruderlin of Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPIW) discussed the company’s hair and fur pipeline, first developed for work on “Stuart Little.” It is difficult to believe how much progress has been made in the technology since 1997, when off-the-shelf software for hair and fur was hard to come by. SPIW’s goals for the pipeline were simple: believable fur, robustness, efficiency and seamless integration into the overall production pipeline. The company is now developing human hair for replacing actors in films like “Spiderman 2.”
Having fought the good fight with Photorealistic Hair, I headed downstairs to face the exhibit floor.
The Woolly Floor
The SIGGRAPH floor is a wild and woolly place, with scantily clad virtual women and sky-high plasma screens as far as the eye can see. Meetings help writers and editors remain focused on the task at hand –- technology and its creative application –- without getting sucked into the seedy underworld of tee-shirt giveaways, convention center fried foods and mesmerizing motion capture demo dancers. I met with a few brave reps for software updates, but had more meetings that served as company introductions.
The Bay Area's Ex'pression Center for New Media and Portland's Oregon 3D took the time to acquaint me with their very different institutions. Both offer compelling options for students at various stages in their careers.
Ex'pression is a young school, with only four and a half years under its belt. It offers two-year degree programs in digital visual arts (design and animation/visual effects) and sound arts. Programs at the school are intensive, year-round endeavors -- hence the quick turnaround -- and there is a focus on real-world skills and career readiness. Ex'pression offers a mentor program and a job placement program with an impressive success rate.
On the other hand, Oregon3D offers professional training -- short classes for artists who are already in the industry. The school boasts state of the art facilities, including a visualization room complete with immersive display wall. Oregon3D's offerings for the summer include intensive training sessions for Maya and live-action production that vary in length from five to twelve days.
NXN Software started Wednesday the 30th off with a breakfast briefing on the visual effects/animation pipeline it is developing for Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI). As the pipeline is still in its early stages, Bill Villareal, vice president of technical operations at SPI, spoke in broad strokes. He outlined the purpose that the asset and production management system would serve for SPI without getting specific about implementation. Villareal foresaw that it would be about a year and a half before a film could be produced entirely within the NXN pipeline.
Eyetronics was on hand demonstrating its facial performance capture software. The Belgium-based company had planned to unveil its Face Snatcher system at the show, but its hardware was damaged in transit; when I visited the booth, a group of engineers was gathered around it, trying to put Humpty back together again. Eyetronics technology has been used in the production of several summer releases, including “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “Freddy vs. Jason,” but it also has medical and archaeological applications.
Bauhaus, a company born in early 2003, gave demonstrations of Mirage, an updated and upgraded version of the French 2D software formerly known as TV Paint. Bauhaus announced that it had acquired rights to develop, market and distribute the software in July, and plans to release it this fall. Mirage is a comprehensive system appropriate for broadcast graphics, visual effects and 2D animation. Bauhaus is positioning the product as a moneysaving software that combines the functionality of products like AfterEffects and Photoshop while drastically reducing rendering time.
NewTek was demonstrating LightWave 3D [8], which is still in pre-beta stages. Improvements in version 8 of the software center around character animation and physical simulation tools, especially hard and soft body dynamics. LightWave, which is used heavily for broadcast graphics and also for television VFX, was recently honored with a 2003 Primetime Emmy Engineering Award.
Big product announcements being few and far between on the floor this year, PR representatives seemed less eager than usual to set up appointments. But the smattering of companies that I met with seemed to say the same thing: business as usual is booming.
Recruiting
Besides the dispersal of promotional tchotchkes at SIGGRAPH 2003, a heavy exchange of resumes and reels is also taking place between conference attendees and company recruiters. Judging by the sea of resumes posted on the wall near registration, the talent pool is quite considerable in the estimated attendee count of 25,000. However, the number of the jobs may actually outnumber qualified and experienced applicants as a great need in CG-artistry appears to have hit. Said one representative at the DreamWorks booth, "We have a lot of interest, but a good amount is from students who will be entering the workforce."
With the success of Disney’s "Finding Nemo" as one of this year's box office winners, many studios seem to be banking on CG-driven comedies in comparison to traditional animation. In the thick of things is DreamWorks Animation and PDI /DreamWorks, both of which hold a considerable slate of totally computer-animated features: "Over the Hedge," "Shrek 2," "Madagascar" and "Sharkslayer." Directed by Bibo Bergeron, Vicky Jenson and Victoria Jenson, "Sharkslayer" will be the first film to be produced out of the studio's new pipeline in Glendale, Calif.
On-site interviews can be witnessed taking place in various booths on the conference floor. Among the many companies recruiting employees is SW Digital, Stan Winston's digital division. Fresh off "Terminator 3," SW Digital is accepting resumes via the Softimage booth (#2414). ESC Entertainment (booth #3446) is also hiring with "Matrix Revolutions" nearing completion and production of "Catwoman" gearing up. In the gaming department, Electronic Arts (booth #3029) is expanding its roster of artists from locations spanning the U.S., Canada and U.K. With big effects films like “Van Helsing,” “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (due in theaters next summer), and “Star Wars: Episode III” to be released summer of 2005, Industrial Light + Magic (booth #3428) is avidly seeking help for a very busy year ahead. Hiring managers from LucasArts are also reviewing portfolios off-site at the Gibbons Room of the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego.
Will this boom end as quickly as it appeared? Only the future will tell
. If you are pounding the pavement, the San Diego Convention Center is the best place to be until SIGGRAPH closes on Thurs., July 31.
Melting the Termanatrix
There’s nothing quite like starting your day with a hot cup of coffee and a SIGGRAPH presentation about ILM’s particle-level-set (PLS) method on “Terminator 3.” The process was used to digitally create the gradual liquefaction of the film’s antagonist, the Termanatrix (or T-X). The scene involved the outer liquid metal shell of the T-X slowly melting and running off her body, exposing her metal endoskeleton. In addition, director Jonathan Mostow was keen on having this molten mixture flow into finely detailed strands, an aspect that Nigel Sumner of ILM noted was a major challenge.
The artists had to consider what was needed to accomplish the shot: physical and plausible motion, high detail, environmental interaction and rendering time. The team looked at a variety of approaches -- shape-animated geometry, displacement/opacity shaders, particle simulation -- but it was PLS that was deemed the most appropriate for the shot. PLS would allow explicit fluid control, accurate fluid generation, complex collisions, texturing and a quick turnaround time.
Other advantages to using PLS was that it makes use of existing technology and a common pipeline format, it allows easy visualization through Maya and it offers a large toolset. The production pipeline began with a background plate and accurate match animation in order to keep the performance of actress Kristanna Loken as T-X. An initial fluid condition was processed to carve out negative space, and in turn, save time. Particle control was implemented along with fluid simulation while rendering involved placing reflections and textures, a chrome pass and volumetric shading with mental ray.
The shot also involved a transition from the liquid metal to the solid metal of the endoskeleton, something the team approached quite differently than they had in the second "Terminator" film. In that sequel, the change was more of a simple fade from metal to fluid. In this film, as the liquid flows, it also cracks. The look was created by injecting particles into the fluid, thereby adding texture.
The Softer Side of SIGGRAPH
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Guerilla Studio
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Though SIGGRAPH has many aspects of a hard-edged tech conference, it also has kinder, gentler facets -- an artsy side, if you will. Take the Guerilla Studio, for instance. It sounds tough, but really it is the big kid equivalent of the arts and crafts table at summer camp.
The studio, complete with laptops, large format printers and a lenticular camera donated by sponsors such as Hewlett Packard, is where students seem to hang at the conference. Here they can get services for free that cost big bucks at Kinko's. They can also try out tools that schools may or may not have in large supply. There are psychadelic digital images being projected on the walls, a still-life surrounded by Wacom drawing tablets, high-end graphics stations and even a few tables with good old paint and caustics for manipulating images.
Vortechs is a kind of in-between space that marks the transition between the two sides of the San Diego Convention Center. It is neither indoors nor out, part lounge and part exhibition space, with a little cafeteria thrown in for good measure
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Artwork on Display
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A large wire sculpture that looks a bit like a flying machine and a bit like a scale dominates the room –- I have not seen it in action, so I can't yet say which observation is more accurate. There is also a high-speed gaming set-up, but it seems that most of the international conference attendees found here are more interested in napping on beanbag chairs than virtual murder and mayhem.
The Emerging Technologies Exhibit is the usual mix of the scientific and the silly, mostly in the service of good fun. The Walk-Through Fog Screen is an idea so cool and apparently uncomplicated that it seems someone would have thought of it before now: a device that emits a layer of "fog" that is thin but dense enough to act as a screen for images projected onto it. Can't you just see ghostly ads for Starbucks and The Gap haunting the malls of the future?
Toshitaka Amaoka's project, +1D, converts 2D real-time video images into 3D computer graphics in the form of dots and lines. In other words, there is a tiny camera and a big computer screen, and when you stand in front of the camera, the screen delivers a kind of topographical map of your face and the objects surrounding it. Not realizing that the intent was purely aesthetic, I asked Amaoka if the technology had any practical applications. He seemed stumped.
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Fog Screen
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Using the sunny, space-age feel of the San Diego Convention Center to its advantage, the Art Gallery committee and chairman Michael Wright wove this year's exhibit into the fabric of the conference. Art hangs between conference rooms and in common areas, sparking conversation and sometimes stopping attendees in their tracks.
The only prerequisite for pieces in the show, says Wright, is that the images included in them must have been manipulated digitally in some fashion. While the digital content in some of the pieces is obvious (a C++ code redrawing of the Bayeux Tapestry created by Michelle Gay), the digital aspect of work by artists like Dona Geib is more difficult to pinpoint. Wright, who knows the artist, informed the group of writers taking the Art Gallery tour that Geib starts with a digital image and builds paint and caustics on top.
Perhaps the piéce de rèsistance when it comes to digital art at SIGGRAPH is the Electronic Theater. The compilation of the year's most impressive animation and visual effects work from short films, music videos, commercials and feature films is a hit with conference attendees every year, and 2003 was no exception. I attended the final screening in San Diego's large, elegant Civic Theater, and the house was packed.
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Waiting Areas
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"After You," created by Christopher Cordingley at Ringling School of Art and Design, was a big audience favorite. The short film got laughs from frame one with two funny-looking characters in a match of manners over who would go through a doorway first. Blue Sky's "Gone Nutty" was another big laugher, and Paul Hargrave's twistedly funny "Eat Your Peas" seemed to be a close third.
Effects clips from "The Matrix" and "Hulk" were impressive; still, it was Weta Digital's conflicted Gollum who seemed to receive the biggest cheers. At the other end of the spectrum, "Molecular Visualizations of DNA," created by Drew Berry at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, was particularly fascinating.
So you see, SIGGRAPH is not all about the software, or the hardware or the plug-ins or the scanners. As every engineer knows, it is the artist who makes a tool great.
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