MAXON has issued a new press release congratulating the guys behind District 9, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and 2012 for their Academy Award Nominations, and is not so careful to point out their use of various MAXON software packages.
“We’re thrilled again this year to see our customers recognized at the highest levels for creative excellence in digital filmmaking,” said Paul Babb, president, MAXON USA. “This year’s nominees pushed the boundaries of 3D technology to new heights delighting audiences with both fantastic and realistic effects. We deeply appreciate their reliance on our professional 3D animation toolset to achieve these well-deserved milestones.”
Several studios are mentioned across the various projects, but it really looks like BodyPaint and CINEMA4D are getting a lot of use out of the major studios. Read the full release after the break.
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Graphics 2012, academy awards, bodypaint3d, cinema4d, cloudy, crazy horse effects, district9, image engine, imageworks, maxon, uncharted territory
VFX companies “Uncharted Territory” and “Scanline VFX” combined to create over 500 shots for cataclysmic “2012″, and utilized NVidia Quadro GPUs to both render and simulate the apocalyptic scenes.
“In creating the cataclysmic events of 2012, we couldn’t risk our own catastrophic failure or delays, and that’s why we rely on NVIDIA GPUs,” said Marc Weigert, co-founder of Uncharted Territory, “All of the 100 plus workstations custom-built for this project include an NVIDIA Quadro FX processor, selected for both the high reliability and ultra-high performance required in our line of work.”
via NVIDIA Technology Drives Earth-Shattering Visual Effects in Blockbuster Hit “2012”.
Graphics 2012, movie, nvidia, scanline, uncharted territory, vfx
The popular gaming physics engine “Bullet” (a competitor to Havok & PhysX) was instrumental in some of the effects shots created by Digital Domain for the destruction of Los Angeles in 2012. In an article on Millimeter they discuss how they first had to create the tool, before they could create the scene.
“It was obvious that off-the-shelf rigid body solvers wouldn’t work for this,” Leo says. “Hundreds of objects needed to tumble and shatter and break. To make the scale of that destruction believable we’d have to put in so much detail.”
This challenge led DD to develop a new simulation system called Drop. “Our software team built it around a fast, open-source engine called Bullet,” Leo says. “Bullet was the core solver, but we established a system for generating and breaking constraints and for assigning material properties to objects. That allowed us to do things that are very difficult for rigid body solvers, such as concave objects and organic shapes where collisions become very complicated. Drop is tremendously fast, and it allowed artists to iterate on a fairly long simulation in an hour or two. We were able to simulate tens of thousands of colliding objects.”
via 2012 Step by Step.
Graphics 2012, bullet, digitaldomain, movie, vfx
In an exclusive 3-part interview with 30Ninja’s, the VFX guys of 2012 talk about some of the biggest effects and some of the happy accidents they stumbled upon along the way.
MW: Because you look at something sometimes and say, “Wow, it’s not quite right, the scale doesn’t fit right,” so we would watch it at half-speed, and then suddenly it would be, Aha! That’s it. Now the wave looks bigger …
30 NINJAS: And you would leave it in the finished product at half-speed?
MW: Yes. What we’d have to do then, unfortunately, is redo it. You can’t just say, Well, we’ll do it at half-speed. It’s literally, if it’s water and so on, it has to be resimulated; it’s a big deal, but it happened a lot and we had to do that. And very rarely something happens like with this one shot in Yellowstone, where something comes back that looks so cool that we didn’t expect it that way.
via 30ninjas » Video » Exclusive Interview: 2012’s VFX Wizards Reveal How They Flattened the White House With an Aircraft Carrier and Scared the Bejesus Out of Director Roland Emmerich (Part 3).
Graphics 2012, vfx
Roland Emmerich’s latest disaster porn film, 2012, comes to theaters soon, and features some amazing visual effects that destroy the planet over the 158 minute feature. The scale of the effects is massive, and in a new article on PCAuthority we get some details into just how much data they had to manage.
“A building has to be cut apart into millions of little pieces, so then a physics-based simulation can be done on that building and shows how a building would crumble when the ground would move under it,” says effects supervisor Volker Engel.
There was over a petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of information going to disk. So big were some of the destruction sequences, that a render farm consisting of 250 computers was set up to handle two of the major effects scenes – particularly the destruction of Vegas sequence.
via Movie tech: Why nobody destroys the world better than Hollywood – the effects behind 2012 – News – PC Authority.
Graphics 2012, movie, vfx
A new featurette for the upcoming 2012 shows some of the behind-the-scenes work that went into building, and subsequently destroying, Las Vegas. From the massive terrain deformations to the high-quality CG plane used to evacuate the ruins, it’s got some great details.
See the clip after the break.
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Graphics 2012, makingof, vfx
One of the many natural disaster you get to see in the upcoming 2012 is Tidal Waves caused by undersea earthquakes. In a new video on Yahoo, Roland Emmerich and his visual effects team talks about the difficulties in modeling and animating water on that scale. The work was done by Scanline (website).
See the video after the break.
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Graphics 2012, movie, scanline, vfx
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