in graphics and multimedia, and editor in chief of soft-The Pieces of the Production Adobe’s newest release of Production Studio is available in two versions: Standard, which includes A
Trang 2Maya® 7, the latest release of the award-winning 3D software, is packed with innovative new
features allowing you to realize your creative vision faster and more easily than ever before
Capitalizing on Alias MotionBuilder® technology, Maya 7 makes character animation
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new modeling, texturing and effects tools help you achieve more with Maya
To find out how the new and innovative features of Maya are changing the face of 3D,
visit www.alias.com /maya7.
Trang 3T H E M A G A Z I N E F O R D I G I T A L C O N T E N T C R E A T I O N A N D P R O D U C T I O N
W O R L D
Computer
Also see www.cgw.com for computer graphics news,
special surveys and reports, and the online gallery
w w w c g w c o m FEBRUARY 2006 Computer Graphics World |1
D e p a r t m e nt s
Editor’s Note 2
French Inspiration
France has always been known for art,
and today, the country has carried over
that tradition to the CG realm, teaching
and inspiring digital artists to pursue
their passions and dreams
Spotlight 4
Products
Silhouette FX’s Silhouette Paint
Autodesk’s Discreet Combustion 4
for the Mac
Dosch Design’s Viz-Image series
Video Viewpoint 6
Adobe’s Suite Production
As video turns digital, a host of new
applications are becoming available
With its Production Suite, Adobe is
ready to help users migrate to these
new markets
Portfolio 34
Jiri Adamec
Digital Training 36
A wide range of virtual tutoring
and training options allow artists to
master software at their own pace
Reviews 38
Bauhaus’s Mirage 1.5
Fe a t u r e s
Cover story
Short and Sweet 10
ANIMATION | Artists and fi lmmakers test new styles, equipment, and ideas with animated short fi lms, some of which may end up on this year’s Oscar short list
By Barbara Robertson
Point Person 20
SCANNING | 3D scanning technology
is proving itself as an important studio modeling tool, and service providers are helping the facilities get this job done
By Debra Kaufman
The Fast Track 26
GAMING | Bizarre Creations revs up
its Project Gotham Racing 3 franchise,
injecting the title with fi lm-like effects running on the new Xbox 360 engine
By Karen Moltenbrey
Starting a Small Studio 30
BUSINESS TRENDS | Ready to hang your own shingle? Don’t forget the importance of location Some other things to consider: planning for expenses,
fi nding clients, and pricing your work
By William “Proton” Vaughan
On the cover:
Pixar’s “music men” told the story of the
studio’s animated short fi lm “One Man
Band” with music, not words See pg 10
10
See www.cgw.com for a more in-depth version of this article
NEW @ c g w.c o m
Web story exclusives:
The French Student Revolution
E-Magiciens in Valenciennes, France, showcases animation from some of the most creative students in the country
See the winning entries from this annual event
Trang 4COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD
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it is a way of life—even for the local government
On a recent trip to Lille and Valenciennes, two cosmopolitan towns near Paris, I was introduced to a new way of teaching and inspiring artists to pur-sue their passions while helping them to “achieve the dream.”
It all starts in the schools, where artists are put through rigorous testing to prove their
talents long before they are accepted into an art program One such school, Supinfocom,
which I visited in Valenciennes, requires students to work on a project, such as a brand
identifi er for a mock company, creating a unique artistic treatment based on a strict list
of criteria This type of project is a pre-qualifi er for admittance, and only a handful of
students will make the cut—space is limited, and only the crème de la crème students
will be fortunate enough to add the school to their resume While it would certainly be
easy for the school to expand and admit students who have more promise (and money)
than talent, it’s pretty obvious the school’s leaders value a solid reputation more than a
hefty bank account Also at Supinfocom is SupinfoGames, which offers similarly
struc-tured admittance requirements, but with a focus on game creation and development
During the fi rst and second year, students at Supinfocom focus on design and
ani-mation using programs such as After Effects Teamwork becomes vital in the third year
as groups of three and four students are challenged to use the latest 3D modeling and
animation software to create animated projects Team-based learning is certainly not a
new concept The challenge for the small team of students is to work together to create
an animated short—from start to fi nish—and compete against other classmates and
stu-dents from other schools at E-Magiciens, a small trade show and conference similar to
SIGGRAPH in the early days, only with an enormous animation festival/competition
While there are certainly many training facilities in the US that offer team-based
learn-ing, most are focused on instructor-driven projects and ideas that utilize large groups of
students to produce an animated project At Supinfocom, the average team size is three
students, and everyone is involved in each phase of the production pipeline—from modeling and animation to compositing and edit-ing of the fi nal project Clearly, as the teams establish a rhythm, the individual strengths of the team members are identifi ed, and the team divides and conquers to meet their deadline The ultimate goal for the students is to be on the winning team at E-Magiciens;
winners are quickly recruited to join top studios
Perhaps the most inspirational part of my trip was realized while visiting with The
Valenciennes Chamber of Commerce, and seeing fi rsthand its commitment to the DCC
community The Chamber funds a business incubator with self-contained offi ces, where
content creators can move right in and get right to business, utilizing their talent
with-out worrying abwith-out overhead, business equipment, etc The incubator has everything
you need—a boardroom, a small television studio, and even a cafeteria—to get business
off the ground But the gravy train doesn’t last forever There is a three-year time limit to
get established, and once companies are successful, they must move on to allow for new
businesses to incubate It’s a commitment to the DCC community that cities in the States
Pretty pictures
help launch
small business
in France.
Trang 5_
Trang 6Combus-ation of motion pictures, episodic television shows, and commercials
New features in Combustion 4 in -clude a diamond keyer, time warp, B-spline vector shapes and group pointing, custom capsules, an optimized Gaussian Blur, merge operator, and enhanced paint tools Combustion 4 for the Mac is
Ready for Combustion
4 on the Mac?
Silhouette Paint from Silhouette FX offers a nondestructive motion-sta-bilized paint tool for image resto-ration, dust busting, and wire and rig removal that the company says can handle the demands of motion-picture and television visual effects
The product is available as an add-on
to Silhouette’s Roto application, a alone tool, or a plug-in for Adobe’s Final Cut Pro and After Effects
stand-In addition to multi-layered moving capabilities, Silhouette Paint can nondestructively apply color, tint,
match-erase, blemish, mosaic, and grain brushes to 8-bit, 16-bit, and fl oating-point clips To match a foreground ele-ment, paint sources can be transformed
on the fl y by rotation, corner pinning, and scaling in addition to being offset
in time or XY space Four independent clone sources are maintained simulta-neously for added fl exibility
Silhouette Paint can be integrated with Silhouette Roto’s Shape tool for motion tracking, variable-edge soft-ness, and realistic motion blur Brushes can be applied to shape layers and auto-
matically matchmoved Blemishes, for example, can be automatically erased over time Silhouette Paint is priced at
$495 and Silhouette Roto sells for $595
Silhouette FX Introduces Nondestructive Painting
See the Forest, the Trees, and the Signs
Dosch Design has introduced fi ve new collections in its Dosch Viz-Images series, offering everything from road signs and streetlamps to plants and trees Three new Road Sign libraries each have 500 images that include hazard, right-of-way, speed limit, construc-tion and tour-
ism signs and symbols in JPEG format
The Forest Trees collec-tion features
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The images in these two collections are supplied in uncompressed TIFF, PSD, and JPEG formats All col-lections support CAD, 3D design, and image-process-
Trang 7The Powerful, Approachable, Complete 3D Solution experience it at eovia.com
Inspire
You are the creator You look for inspiration
everywhere You want your work to inspire others
You constantly desire something that will take
your designs to the next level, keep you competitive
Productive You want to lead, not follow
Something great is here now.
W
Trang 8in graphics and multimedia,
and editor in chief of
soft-The Pieces of the Production
Adobe’s newest release of Production Studio is available in two versions: Standard, which includes After Effects 7.0, Premiere Pro 2.0, and Photoshop CS2 ($1199) and Premium, which adds Audition 2.0, Encore DVD 2.0, and Illustrator CS2 ($1,699)
One of the guiding principles for Adobe’s development is that the use of Photoshop and Illustrator is almost universal among creative professionals, making back-and-forth compatibility a built-in advantage for Production Studio users right from the start Expanding on this, Adobe has created consistently similar environments for Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition
Taking intercommunication between the software programs even further, Adobe has added Dynamic Link, which enables users to work smoothly within modules with-out having to perform intermediate rendering I talked to people who were already using the Production Suite as beta testers for Adobe and they universally tipped their hat to the power of Dynamic Link
For example, Michael Kolowich of Diginovations in Concord, Massachusetts, works with Adobe’s video products to create corporate videos for the area’s universities
Someday video might replace
newspapers, e-mail, and even magazines Not that this would necessarily be a good thing, but video is becoming a signifi cant form of mass communication
And, as video goes digital, it becomes a
more fl uid medium, moving from the TV,
to the PC, to handheld devices And it will
have to shape-shift accordingly Adobe’s
latest lineup of video tools and utilities
is designed to keep up with new applications for video and to simplify the lives of Adobe’s custom-ers, which is not a simple task by any stretch of the imagination
There are plenty of contenders for the atten-tion of video profession-als, including Avid’s Pinnacle line of products, Sony’s Vegas+ DVD suite and a swarm of upstarts led by Sonic and Ulead, Adobe appears to be aim-ing directly at Apple
Yet, Adobe is exploiting several advantages—its ownership of creative tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator (which are ubiquitous in the indus-try), its possession of PDF (the de facto standard for document exchange), and its acquisition of Macromedia’s Flash, a leading format for small form animation used widely in phones and
Adobe’s Suite Production
Trang 9w w w c g w c o m FEBRUARY 2006 Computer Graphics World |7
Pro and After Effects is “incalculable.”
Interoperability, notes Kolowich, actually
makes the programs more powerful than
they would be on their own For example,
he says that one of the aspects of video
that separates professionals from amateurs
is the skillful use of animated titles He
has been able to take advantage of Adobe’s
inclusion of text animation and presets in
After Effects since the last introduction of
Adobe’s Production Suite, but now feels
like it is an embedded utility “It’s like the
Adobe Titler on steroids,” he says
Other work fl ow improvements in
the Production Suite include Bridge,
Adobe’s name for its centralized fi le
browser with media management that
helps users fi nd and work with all the
fi les related to projects within any of the
Production Suite modules Also, Adobe
has added DVD creation to its Premiere
Pro program, recognizing that users
may need to quickly output a DVD with
good-looking menus rather than go to
Encore to create a professional-level DVD
designed for distribution
Adobe’s attention to work fl ow issues
speaks to some of the challenges its
cus-tomers face A large part of the video
professional market is made up of small
studios—owners are very often the
cre-ative director, the videographer, and the
IT person For the small house, work
fl ow and communication can be
particu-larly challenging because it involves the
shooting and editing of sound and video,
delivery, client input, and so on
Chris Randall of Edit 1 Media specializes in wedding eos and corporate videos In fact, he fi nds that one business often feeds the other Most of the time, Randall and his team will shoot the video while Randall’s wife takes over the editing tasks Randall favors the new multicam features in Premiere Pro to simultaneously view and work with multiple sources, since the workloads at small production houses can be stagger-ing In fact, he recently was editing 15 video projects simulta-neously Randall notes anything that helps make his job easier and reduce editing time goes straight to his bottom line
vid-Videographers are also coming to grips with the tion to HD Interestingly, video producers are fi nding that even their wedding clients are becoming interested in HD video because they’re buying high-def large screen TVs and looking ahead Corporate clients are likewise moving
transi-to HD, and, of course, the broadcast industry is racing transi-to get transi-to HD But the other reality of video is that it’s big and demanding Luckily, hardware manufacturers are coming to the rescue To keep up with the trend, Adobe has added support for the Aja Xena HS and also native support for HDV In addition, Adobe’s support for OpenGL gives hardware graphics boards the ability to accelerate processes One
of the most obvious advantages will be support for high dynamic range imagery, thanks to OpenGL, and also support for effects and plug-ins
Adobe was among the fi rst to spawn a plug-in community with its SDK for Photoshop
Encore DVD’s fl owchart simplifi es organization when creating interactive
menus, multiple audio tracks, subtitle tracks, and more.
W
Trang 11
w w w c g w c o m FEBRUARY 2006 Computer Graphics World |9
and, later, for After Effects It is
continu-ing the effort by reachcontinu-ing outto third-party
partners in video hardware, such as Aja,
for example, and also audio hardware
partners, third-party software developers,
training program developers, and expert
support The evolution of OpenGL and
Adobe’s enthusiastic exploitation of the
API defi nitely opens up new opportunities
for hardware and software developers
Adobe has made several signifi cant
improvements to Audition and, as a
result, believes many customers will be
able to work totally within Audition, and
not rely on additional products for audio
work Features, such as support for ASIO
(Audio Stream Input/Output) for
multi-channel hardware, puts Audition more
fi rmly within the realm of professional
audio products, and Frequency Space
Editing lets users zero in on a particular
sound, or frequency, to actually see the
area that needs work
The Bottom Line
As always, it’s not about the pieces, it’s
about the whole Much of the Adobe
Production Studio has been evolving to
this point—some of the features, such
as presets, titles, frequency space
edit-ing for Audition, and so on, were
actu-ally included in earlier versions of the
software Nor are these features unique,
but they are necessary Apple’s Final Cut
Pro, for example, has multi-cam features,
Apple introduced Motion to compete with
After Effects, and Apple has very strong
audio editing tools What’s most
impor-tant is the way the pieces fi t together and
the way in which they enable people to
work with each other creatively Perhaps
one of the most revolutionary additions
to the Creative Suite Production Studio
won’t even be realized until the
prod-uct is used in the creative
commu-nity Adobe has enhanced its Acrobat
PDF format to work with video content,
allowing collaborators and customers to
attach notes for items such as sequence
fi xes, additions, deletions, etc
And, some of the real changes in
the use of video are just taking shape
Kolowich is aged by the poten tial
encour-of the wide-ranging hosts for video and the merger between Adobe and Macromedia As a former executive with Lotus and publisher at Ziff-Davis Kolowich
is also a veteran of the vast changes in work habits caused by digi-tal technology and the arrival of the Internet
In his work with college marketing he sees giant change coming as kids who grew
up swimming in digital media reach college and the workplace “It’s a tsunami,” he says of the change in media that’s on the way As a video producer, he sees that radi-cal new ways of working will have to be developed to create content suitable for HD and content that can be sent to mobile phones, media players, and online Kids, he believes, will treat video just like they treat words, pictures, and music
With Production Studio, Adobe is concentrating on the professional side of the equation but with key technologies in video and communications, Adobe is well positioned to ride the wave as it changes our concept of media
Audition’s Spectral View can be used to apply effects or edits to select frequencies of a particular time span.
W
Trang 12
Short For many, the art of animation rea and
hich won the Grand P
rix at the pre
stigious 2
édric
Babouche
hich has taken honor
Trang 13w w w c g w c o m FEBRUARY 2006 Computer Graphics World |11
Animation
Pixar rarely enters its short fi lms in
com-petition these days Instead, the
Oscar-winning studio releases a short with each
feature fi lm and showcases the fi lms at
festivals, albeit out of competition To
qualify for this Oscar race, the studio
qui-etly screened its “One Man Band” in a
commercial theater The short’s world
pre-miere, though, was at Annecy, and its US
premiere during the December opening
of the Pixar exhibition of artwork at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City
Directed by Mark Andrews and Andrew
Jimenez, “One Man Band” takes place
in an old-world piazza There, a peasant
child about to toss a coin into a fountain
becomes the focus of a musical sparring
match between a tired, tune-making
regu-lar and a charming, fl ashy new performer
Bass, the piazza’s one-man band
regu-lar, has his arms fi lled with an accordion,
drum, tuba, clarinet, cymbals, and a few
horns Treble, the energetic upstart, wields
bows and piccolos At fi rst, each upstages
the other in turn, but soon the
compe-tition for the little girl’s coin turns into a
cacophony, with both musicians playing at
the same time, one on each side of the girl,
until she well, that would be a spoiler
Sometimes Pixar creates short fi lms to
exercise new technology; sometimes the
fi lms exercise new talents This fi lm gave several artists, from lead animator Angus MacLane to the directors, their fi rst supervi-sory opportunities “Our biggest gain on this
fi lm is that we had new people in every ership role,” says producer Osnat Shurer
lead-The fi lm originated as a challenge from
Ed Catmull, Pixar’s founder and dent, to Andrews and Jimenez
presi-The pair had followed
di rec tor Brad Bird to the studio to create
storyboards for The
In cred ibles Before
that, both had worked on Bird’s
The Iron Giant
“He a sked i f we’d l i ke to do a short,” says Andrews
of Catmull’s challenge
“So, we did lunch and tried to come up with an idea But we kept coming
up with ideas for features
We had to define the parameters for a short.” In addition to length, they listed the following: a single idea that an audience can get in 10 to 15 seconds, variations on that idea which predict an outcome, a twist on the pre-
dictable outcome, one or two characters, and one environment With this list in mind, they developed three stories: one from Andrews, one from Jimenez, and a third, which became “One Man Band.”
“We’re both musicians, so we dered what we could do with music,”
won-says Andrews “That’s how we came up with the image of a one-man band.”
Then, they added a second character
“Our idea was to have one character who is good at something (but doesn’t try very hard) challenged by someone younger and better,” says Jimenez “We showed the ideas to John [Lasseter, the executive producer] and he lasered in on this one
He said, ‘I can see Andy in that character [Treble] and Mark in the other one [Bass].”
At fi rst, the directors sketched boards that had the musicians perform-ing for a crowd Eventually, the crowd began to shrink until the audience com-prised a mother and a little girl, and then, only the child One reason for the change was the budget “The short-fi lm directors learn to work within creative boundar-ies,” says Shurer “There are per-charac-ter costs and set costs.”
story-Adds Andrews: “We had to focus on the center and go for that, and work with economies of time and emotion.”
Once the crowd shrank, the story changed “When we got rid of the crowd,
it gave the fi lm heart,” says Jimenez
“Before that, it was just two guys fi ght-ing.”
Because the “dialog”
in the story is the music played by the two per-formers, the directors needed a musical score before they started produc-tion Michael Giacchino,
who scored The Incredibles, composed
two themes that escalate and then lap when the one-man bands play simul-taneously An orchestra of 38 musicians played the music
over-Sweet C G s h o r t s e n a b l e digital filmmakers to explore
n o v e l s t y l e s , s t o ries, and techniques
One Man Band
The character Tinny holds the coin that prompted a battle of the one-man bands in Pixar Animation Studios’ latest short.
Trang 14live music,” notes Jimenez, “like real
people were playing it So, we recorded
the sounds of fi ngers sliding on metal.”
Although the animators sometimes
had the characters accurately play the
notes from the sound track, the two
one-man bands don’t have enough
fi ngers to match the music
through-out the fi lm Instead, judicious use of
close-up shots of fi ngers on strings and cheeks puffed out to
blow horns convince the audience that the characters are
creat-ing the complex sounds
The number of instruments became an interesting challenge
for the technical team: Each character had many surfaces “Each
surface needs a shader, a texture map, and application space,”
says Bill Polson, supervising technical director “You’d open up
a character, and the list of shaders would scroll up and down
the page—10 kinds of brass, the felt on the keys for the
trum-pet plungers, 10 kinds of wood it goes on and on.” Although
the studio has built an infrastructure to handle that complexity
for the upcoming feature Cars, that infrastructure didn’t exist for
Finding Nemo or for “One Man Band.”
“Our pipeline at that point hadn’t handled characters with 400
or 500 shaders attached to them—it’s not like a fi sh that has four
or fi ve,” Lucas says, “so we just carried around big data fi les.”
To create the city surrounding the piazza, the team began
with six buildings “If you look at a building from one angle,
you see one arrangement of windows and doors,” says Polson
“If you turn it 180 degrees, you see a different arrangement.” So,
by rotating the six buildings, they created 12 variations Five
different roofs and three types of shutters randomly placed in
open and closed positions created additional variations, as did
a mixture of shaders
“A savvy CG person will see that it’s a parts kit, but the age viewer will probably see a city,” says Polson
aver-The crew also used matte paintings in the background and
in the foreground “If you see shrubbery, that’s a matte painting,”
says Polson “Our rule is that if we model a building, that’s how
we make a building, and we’ll use it all the way into the ground for continuity If it’s too heavy, we’ll decimate it We don’t have near buildings one way and far ones another way, because then we’d have to worry about matching.” There is one exception:
back-The tile roofs on distant buildings were rendered onto cards
For lighting, the directors made a painterly choice “The Zen of lighting was that we had light over dark over light over dark,” says Polson That is, they’d place a brightly lit character
in front of something dark, such as a building, and that building would be in front of something bright, which would be in front
of something dark To make this lighting seem logical, they ated a cloudy day, which made it possible to place the characters
cre-in pools of light Haze fi lters softened any brightly lit buildcre-ings
Pixar uses its own RenderMan for rendering, outputting the scenes in numerous layers, which were composited in Apple’s Shake
“With this fi lm, we had a wonderful opportunity to work with an existing, stable pipeline rather than the latest, greatest stuff,” says Polson “I’m becoming a real advocate for that in the
studio.” —Barbara Robertson
Australian animator Anthony Lucas of
3-D Films turned 2D cutouts,
stop-motion animation, and 3D backgrounds
into a 28-minute Gothic horror/mystery/
adventure that has taken the festivals by
storm It’s a science-fi ction fi lm set in
the past and fi lled with Victorian Rube
Goldberg machines—steam-powered
“It’s a ‘steampunk adventure,’” says Lucas “William Gibson did a steam-punk book set within an alternate uni-verse in Victorian times It doesn’t come from that, but having fi nished the fi lm,
I fi nd myself in that genre.” Instead, Lucas was inspired by writers Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne
stop-motion characters, the stars of this
fi lm are silhouettes: 2D cutouts “The adventure takes place in an alternate uni-verse where light doesn’t refl ect,” Lucas explains “That’s why the characters are silhouettes Also, I like the look of it I guess I worked out a reason for why this world is like it is.”
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations
of Jasper Morello
The “One Man Band” musicians Treble (at left) and Bass (at right) were modeled after directors Andy Jimenez and Mark Andrews, respectively Each character required several hundred shaders.
© 2006 Pixar.
Trang 15Ultimate Dream Machine.
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Trang 16aerial navigator who embarks on a
dan-gerous voyage and, along the way, must
take desperate measures to save his wife
Lucas started with a script and
story-boards—600 drawings by storyboard
artist David Cook From those, the crew
created animatics Then, they redid the
storyboards “We photographed bits of
made the backgrounds out of that in [Adobe’s] Photoshop,” says Lucas “Then
we put proxies of our characters over these backgrounds to create new storyboards
As the scenes came up, I’d print the pages and throw them in front of the animators.”
The animators used those ated for about every 12 frames—to com-plete the animation Animators worked with CelAction’s CelAction2D software
poses—cre-to create the characters, animating them
on white backgrounds as if they were action actors on greenscreen stages “You make a fi gure as a 2D object, and hinge
live-it like a puppet,” explains Lucas “It’s classic cutout animation We give it a 3D spin—they look 3D when they turn their heads, but they’re not.”
Because the characters are always houetted, they’re always jet-black, although the fl at planes have a bit of texture to cre-ate such detail as buttons The posed sil-houettes are output as Photoshop fi les “We slide the Photoshop fi les on top of each other to make it look like the characters turn around,” explains Lucas
sil-To create the iron fl yingships that fl oat through the sky, the crew used Autodesk Media and Entertainment’s 3ds Max; to create the clouds, they used (Autodesk)
bined all these images in Autodesk’s Discreet Combustion, and added glows and color tints to the scene “We put a tint throughout the fi lm, and the tint changes,”
says Lucas “Because this is an alternate universe that echoes Victorian times, or maybe even longer ago because there’s still a plague, we wanted a sepia look all the way through But, we changed the tint
to echo locations.” Jungles are green, for example; ice is cool blue
The characters, however, are always black “I didn’t want the characters to look like normal CG things,” Lucas says “I adore Pixar fi lms As a short fi lmmaker, I loved ‘Boundin’.’ My kid loved ‘Boundin’.’
Anything with hope in that abundance should be promoted But we aren’t Pixar
This is an independent fi lm We were going for a graphic style If you do cheap, low-level 3D, it’s not very sexy.”
At 28 minutes, Lucas’s short tion is rather long, yet its cinematic quality has caused reviewers to ask for more And, Lucas has begun working on ways to con-tinue the story—with more half-hour seg-ments and, perhaps, as a feature
anima-It certainly sounds like hope has found its way to this animation studio in
Australia, too —Barbara Robertson
For “Jasper Morello,” director Anthony Lucas
created an environment using photographs
and 3D clouds, made 3D machines, and then
placed animated 2D “cutout” characters into
the environment.
The Moon and the Son
Film historian, author, teacher, animator, and director of the
animation program at New York University’s Tisch School of
the Arts, John Canemaker created a 28-minute animated
imagi-nary conversation with his father that recently won the Fabrizio
Bellocchio Prize for Best Social Content at the I Castelli Animati
animation festival in Genzano, Italy Film historian Leonard
Maltin calls the animation, titled “The Moon and the Son,”
Canemaker’s “most personal work ever—and his most brilliant.”
Canemaker writes, “I made this fi lm to resolve ing emotional issues I have with my late father I wanted to fi nd answers to our diffi cult relationship, to understand the reasons
long-stand-he was always a feared fi gure in my childhood, why long-stand-he was always angry and defensive, verbally and physically abusive, and often in trouble with the law.”
“The Moon and the Son,” which features the voices of actors Eli Wallach and John Turturro as father and son, respectively, was traditionally drawn
Even so, the fi lm was cut and sound effects were added with an Avid system; the composure used Apple’s Logic Pro
to compose, print, and mix the music, and Adobe’s Photoshop
to scan and edit three of the scenes Apple’s Final Cut Pro
Animator John Canemaker uses drawings to per- sonify emotions
on the screen and make what’s in the mind become alive in his fi lm
Trang 17, Í {\{\{Í ĂÍ Ó Í `}Ì>Í wÍÍ ĂiÊÕÌÊ°Í
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Trang 18Created by Cédric Babouche of Sacrebleu
Productions in Paris, “Imago” tells the
story of Antoine, who lost his father in a
plane crash “He loved his father so much,”
says Babouche, “that he created his own
world to share secret moments with him
Because he is a child, his perception of
reality comes from fairy tales So, he
transforms the special moments he spent
with his father into metaphorical dreams
Because they spent a lot of time near a
tree at the seaside, the tree became a
sym-bol, and when it disappears in a storm, he
understands that he has to grow up.”
The inspiration for this fi lm came from
Hayao Miyazaki’s fi lm Porco Rosso, in
which a plane crashes into a tree “When I saw that beautiful
pic-ture of the plane crash, I said I would like to use the spirit of that
image for a project,” Babouche says “Also, my father is a very
special person who I don’t see a lot and don’t really know So this
fi lm talks about the feeling of missing somebody and the way we
can create our own world to fi ll loneliness.”
The characters in “Imago” are 2D; the backgrounds, 3D
Babouche used Crater Software’s CTP software for the 2D
ani-mation line tests, Adobe’s Photoshop for painting the scanned
drawings, Cambridge Animation Systems’ Animo for timing,
Autodesk Media and Entertainment’s 3ds Max and the
com-pany’s Maya for 3D, and Adobe’s After Effects and Autodesk’s
Discreet Combustion for compositing
The fi lmmaker started with a drawn storyboard, which he scanned into Photoshop to work on the lighting
hand-“It’s really important for me to show what the light will look like as soon as I can,”
draw-Babouche began working on the script in October 2003, and began production in July 2004 He fi nished the following April
He now plans to use the same process to create a feature fi lm for which he’s nearly completed a script
“I don’t want to use only 3D because I like the freedom color offers,” Babouche says “I want my future projects to look like illustrations.”
water-Barbara Robertson is an award-winning journalist and a
contrib-uting editor for Computer Graphics World She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.
Imago
The junkyard world inhabited by the
lit-tle burlap-covered characters of Shane
Acker’s short fi lm, “9,” is a large and scary
one Though it offers the characters plenty
of opportunities for scavenging—which
seems to be their principal occupation—
it’s also home to a malevolent predator
that hunts them relentlessly How the main
character, 9, responds to this challenge is a
triumph of reason over instinct, or brain over
brawn Or, just possibly, good over evil
A thoughtful plot, with
edge-of-your-seat action and richly detailed and
origi-“9” numerous awards—including Best in Show at SIGGRAPH’s 2005 Electronic Theater—making it eligible as an Oscar contender in the short-fi lm category The nine-minute CG fi lm has attracted so much attention, in fact, that it is going
to be developed into a feature fi lm, with Acker directing and Tim Burton and oth-ers aboard as producers
Success of this magnitude seemed worlds away during the four and a half years that Acker spent working on “9.”
He began the fi lm as his thesis project
Workshop He started out with a bit of a handicap, however: His background was
in drawing and 2D animation, and “9”
marked his fi rst exposure to 3D Thus, it was a case of baptism by fi re
“I bit off more than I could chew with
‘9,’” Acker admits In fact, the fi lm proved
so diffi cult and time-consuming that Acker ended up taking periodic breaks
from it (including a stint working on The
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King for
Weta Digital) in order to earn a living
One thing that kept Acker going over
For “Imago,” French animator Cédric Babouche placed hand-drawn animated characters on 3D and painted backgrounds.
Trang 19C A L L 8 8 8 T O P C I T Y O R V I S I T O R L A N D O E D C C O M
where companies dream in hypercolor.
Business is busting at the seams for Orlando’s digital
media sector Home to top-notch studios like Electronic
Arts, specialized higher-ed training programs, and the
world’s largest concentration of simulation developers,
it’s no wonder companies around here are so animated
W
Trang 20
doll creatures that would pick through
their environment,” he explains That
environment would be more or less
post-apocalyptic, and the rag dolls would
rep-resent the beginning of a new civilization
In a rough parallel to the way life might
have been for our primitive
hunter-gath-erer ancestors, the rag doll characters look
fairly helpless, but they get by using their
wits “They’re diminutive in scale,” says
Acker, “and they’re living in an oppressive
world, yet they’re sort of good-natured.”
Another source of inspiration for Acker
was stop-motion animation, especially the
surreal and sometimes downright creepy
works of artists such as the Brothers Quay,
Jan Svankmajer, and the Lauenstein
broth-ers Acker admired their style, but viewed
it as a jumping-off point
Acker began work on “9” with the story
itself—an 18-panel storyboard that started
with the main action scene, in which 9 is
pursued by the fi lm’s villain, a
mechani-cal cat-beast At that point, Acker decided
that a lot more setup was required in order
to invest viewers in the action, so he added
another character—a mentor, called 5—
and also a fl ashback scene that would help
explain the challenges and motivations of
the fi lm’s hero, 9
Then, Acker created an animatic that
was so highly detailed, “it was almost a
true 2D fi lm—or something in between a
traditional animatic and a 2D fi lm.”
The next step was learning to use 3D
modeling and animation tools—albeit while
he was creating the fi lm Acker maintains
that “drawing is at the heart” of his fi lm,
though he very much wanted to make use
of CG animation to suggest the stop-motion
look he admired The fi lmmaker estimates
that he spent about two and a half years
in the preproduction phase of the movie,
doing modeling, rigging, matte paintings,
and so forth, all the while learning to use
Autodesk Media and Entertainment’s Maya
When it was fi nally time for
anima-tion, that original animatic proved
invalu-able Acker used it as a kind of road map,
replacing the 2D animation with 3D In
on it between paying gigs, it was good for him to be able to have the animatic as a guide so he wouldn’t lose focus
Acker employed keyframing for all the animation in the fi lm The cat-beast and its movements are among the achievements
in the fi lm of which Acker is proudest The character is made of cat bones, including a cat skull, that are interlaced with a metal armature The cat-beast moves with a cat’s sense of purpose, but there is something a
bit reptilian about it as well Like the rag doll creatures, the beast is a scavenger, but also collects living things, and has a grue-some way of using them literally to add onto itself Whatever the creature’s moti-vations, it clearly wants something that the rag dolls have “It recognizes their souls
in them, and is attempting to become like them,” explains Acker
In order to create the variety of tures that are an important part of Acker’s artistic achievement, he became
tex-a sctex-avenger himself He collected items with interesting textures that he could photograph, scan, and then manipu-late in Adobe’s Photoshop He also pho-tographed broken-down parts of Los Angeles that would add interest to his CG environment of urban decay
Acker employed Maya for lighting and rendering “I didn’t use a lot of raytrac-ing,” he says, explaining that he was aim-
quite a few large matte paintings used in the fi lm To composite the imagery, the
fi lmmaker used Adobe’s After Effects
Since “9” has no dialog, the characters’
actions must tell the story And though the main plot is simple enough in scope, the fi lm is full of many small and telling details—actions that seem random at the time but turn out to have great signifi cance later on Moreover, there are some little jokes throughout the fi lm The cat-beast,
for example, hunts for nine characters, or nine lives And there is the almost requisite Pixar-type lamp, albeit a rusty version
All in all, though, says Acker, he is happy with the decayed, down-and-out look and feel of the fi lm “It’s hyper-detailed, but it’s also stylized and paint-erly,” he says Certainly his attention to the grit and grime of urban decay has paid off in that despite its bleakness, there’s a lot to see in this junkyard world
In the end, the hero’s brains, and his use of tools, win the day The 9 character rescues the souls of his predecessors, and
in the fi nal scene, seems to be leaving his bleak world, traveling alone It’s a hope-ful scene, and it also sets him up for fur-ther adventures that just could happen in the forthcoming feature fi lm
Jenny Donelan is a contributing editor
for Computer Graphics World She can be
Like the characters he created for “9,” fi lmmaker Shane Acker himself became a scavenger
of sorts, collecting various textures for the bleak setting of his animated short
Trang 22lthough modeling and tion software—and the images they create—tend to be the stars of the computer graphics industry,
anima-3D scanning plays a quiet but integral
role in the origin of many digital
mod-els, from props and maquettes to
celeb-rities and stunt actors Initially, the CG
industry had been fairly slow to embrace
the technology Today, however, the use
of 3D scanning is prevalent throughout
the entertainment realm, and new
appli-cations continue to emerge
Cyber-scanning technology was
devel-oped over two decades ago by Cyberware
(Monterrey, CA) as a family hobby,
the brainchild of a retired space engineer, his artist wife, and their computer programmer son
aero-“My dad wanted
to make a kind of
sculpting machine that measured the human face accurately and quickly,” says Cyberware vice president Steve Addleman, another son of the inventor “The device was hooked to a computer-controlled mill-ing machine that would carve an image
of what was scanned.” A head scan took
17 seconds, and the resulting carved foam bust could be completed in a few hours
What started as a small venture aimed
at artists and sculptors took a huge leap forward thanks to powerful Silicon Graphics computers, which, for the fi rst time, enabled the scanned data to be ren-dered as a surface “You could actually see the data,” recalls Addleman Soon after, Hollywood came knocking—in the form of
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in 1986 For
a special effects scene in which the heads
of the bridge crew rolled out of the fog, a seamless look required computer graphics, and the project began with scans of the
Star Trek crew’s heads After that
success-ful experience, Hollywood became a fairly
The US Air Force was one of the fi rst groups to identify the value of digital scan-ning outside the entertainment realm The Air Force worked with physical anthropol-ogists to achieve precise measurements of the human body, to arrive at standards for helmets and suits To achieve this goal, the military branch provided the money for Cyberware to develop a full-body scan-ner that could get the job done quickly—
“a person can only stand still for 15 to 20 seconds,” Addleman points out
The resulting full-body scanner prised a precise motion system and four scan heads mounted onto horizontal arms on tall towers The new device also scanned color and, per the Air Force’s requirement, was “portable” (large trucks could transport it)
com-With its focus on designing new 3D scanners, Cyberware transitioned from
a service provider to a scanning ment manufacturer; the company continues to sell customized
equip-Point Person S e r v i c e p r ov i d e r s g i ve s t u d i o s
to acquire scanned data
of actor Michael Caine (top
of page) for the effects in the
Ima ge co u
sy Gentl Gia n t.