FurryBall, a GPU accelerated renderengine for Autodesk Maya boasts real-time simulation of lighting effects and physics inside the native Maya Environment. From their website:
Have you ever dreamed of a 3D renderer implemented directly into Maya 3D that has the capacity to light, rotate, or change parameters in real-time in scenes that contain textures, bump maps, soft shadows, reflections, refractions, and dynamic hair? Your dreams have come true – introducing FurryBall!
Demonstration videos on their website do a good job showing the capabilities, and a 30-day trial (registration required) is available on their website. The full version sells for $490 – $2200, depending on the feature set.
See a commercial rendered entirely via FurryBall on a GeForce GTX285, 1 minute per frame, after the break.
Visual Effects Supervisor Andrew Orloff sits down with vfxblog to discuss the contributions Zoic has made to ABC’s scifi drama ‘V’, and gets into the details of how they were able to render so much of the environment in CG and seamlessly match it to the actual photography and video. The secret: lipstick cameras.
The way that it works is we get all the designs from production, we add the lighting details by working with the DP, and then we use Lightcraft’s realt-time 3D graphics engine, like what you would find in a video game. We convert our digital sets, which would normally take hours to render, into something that works in the graphics engine much faster. There’s a little tiny lipstick camera attached to the main camera on set which shoots up into the ceiling to read a bunch of tracking markers and give us a real-time track of the set. It will make the set move around in the exact same way as the main camera is moving. We map all the lenses to give us real-time lens distortion and depth of field. It also does a real-time composite with the greenscreen. So what we're seeing on the day is real-time feedback of what the final shot is going to look like.
The annual Hess Holiday Toy commercial got some attention from digital studio Speedshape, who used CG animation, matte paintings, and 3d renderings to bring the classic formula one racecar duo to life.
“We created the 3D renders of the racecars with a combination of HDRI environments for distant environmental reflection and lighting, and built full 3D environments for closer proximity reflections — not forgetting the great key and fill lighting from the team,” comments VFX Supervisor Connor Meechan. “This combination coupled with our compositing pipeline made it possible to bring to life our client’s vision and then exceed it.”
The full press release is available after the break, and the commercials can be seen on Speedshape’s site.
Stanislaw Klabik has recreated Clint Eastwood’s Thomas Highway from the movie Heartbreak Ridge with amazing detail, and wrote up how he did it for a great article on cgarena.
I used a simple head model for the first modeling. When I was satisfied with the result, with the base proportions of Eastwood´s face, I used this high-poly model for modeling a new topology with using the great Polyboost scripts. I used a bit heavy polycount for his head to achieve all major proportions of his face, because I planned to make some facial animations.
Last week Band Pro Film & Digital offered a free all-day seminar on stereoscopic 3D, including several companies in the industry offering equipment and services. Silicon Imaging was there demonstrating the SI-3D camera nd software, as well as Cineform talking about their compression-based workflow and Neo 3D Image Development Subsystem. Steve Crouch from Iridas was on hand as well:
Steve Crouch from Iridas began by talking about how tedious it can be to work with RAW and stereoscopic images. “People don’t understand RAW,” he noted, showing a RAW image. “With CineForm, the amount of data is small compared to uncompressed RAW DPX file.” He also noted that Iridas has been “supporters of Silicon Imaging from the beginning.”
StudioDaily has a great writeup on the whole event.
Some new information about Weta’s handling of the massive data within Avatar discusses their huge data center, which recently got a huge redesign and hardware upgrade.
The Weta data center got a major hardware refresh and redesign in 2008 and now uses more than 4,000 HP BL2×220c blades (new BL2×220c G6 blades announced last month), 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking gear from Foundry and storage from BluArc and NetApp. The system now occupies spot 193 through 197 in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers.
Thirty four racks comprise the computing core, made of 32 machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory. Weta systems administrator Paul Gunn said that heat exchange for their servers had to be enclosed. The “industry standard of raised floors and forced-air cooling could not keep up with the constant heat coming off the machines,” said Gunn. “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local.” The solutions was the use of water-cooled racks from Rittal.
This massive data center was pushing a massive 7-8 gigabytes of data per second, 24 hours a day. The final copy of Avatar was equivalent to 17.28 Gigabytes per minute of storage.
A cute little girl walks the streets of a quiet french town and finds a strange store full of beautiful dolls, and enters the open door. She struggles to reach the one doll she loves, and finds herself getting more than she bargained for.
An eerie tribute to countless Twilight Zone episodes, Pixar Animator Rodrigo Blaas has published his animated short film ‘Alma’ for all to view. I first saw it at SIGGRAPH2009 in New Orleans, and found it both beautiful and haunting.
Avatar made $73 Million in it’s opening weekend in the US, and over half of that was in the 3D version provided by RealD.
We congratulate our colleagues at 20th Century Fox on the tremendously successful release and spectacular campaign for ‘Avatar’” said Michael V. Lewis, Chairman and CEO of RealD. “This landmark weekend with over half of the box office coming from RealD-equipped theaters demonstrates that audiences have both discovered and are becoming loyal fans of RealD’s new generation of 3D.”
A good sign of more and better 3D films coming to theaters in 2010.
I don’t usually include videos from CollegeHumor here, but this new video showcasing the sad truth of what really happens to the ‘I’ in the Pixar Intro is just too good to pass up. Poor little Luxie, he was so young.
FurryBall, a GPU accelerated renderengine for Autodesk Maya boasts real-time simulation of lighting effects and physics inside the native Maya Environment. From their website:
Visual Effects Supervisor Andrew Orloff sits down with vfxblog to discuss the contributions Zoic has made to ABC’s scifi drama ‘V’, and gets into the details of how they were able to render so much of the environment in CG and seamlessly match it to the actual photography and video. The secret: lipstick cameras.
Here’s the links for today, including several of the “12 days of” contests running on TutsPlus.
The annual Hess Holiday Toy commercial got some attention from digital studio Speedshape, who used CG animation, matte paintings, and 3d renderings to bring the classic formula one racecar duo to life.
Stanislaw Klabik has recreated Clint Eastwood’s Thomas Highway from the movie 
Last week Band Pro Film & Digital offered a free all-day seminar on stereoscopic 3D, including several companies in the industry offering equipment and services. Silicon Imaging was there demonstrating the SI-3D camera nd software, as well as Cineform talking about their compression-based workflow and Neo 3D Image Development Subsystem. Steve Crouch from Iridas was on hand as well:
A cute little girl walks the streets of a quiet french town and finds a strange store full of beautiful dolls, and enters the open door. She struggles to reach the one doll she loves, and finds herself getting more than she bargained for.
Avatar made $73 Million in it’s opening weekend in the US, and over half of that was in the 3D version provided by RealD.
I don’t usually include videos from CollegeHumor here, but this new video showcasing the sad truth of what really happens to the ‘I’ in the Pixar Intro is just too good to pass up. Poor little Luxie, he was so young.
VizWorld.com 
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