The Lion King in 3D made a huge splash in theaters the last 2 weeks, showing that the Disney classics still hold our attention and that classic Cell animation still holds a special place in our hearts. Of course, the original Lion King wasn’t in 3D so converting it was a large affair taking the talent of hundreds of animators, and FXGuide has the details of how.
One of the other things we developed was an intelligent depth painting tool that would allow the artist to give little gray scale hints at different points of the character. They could put a little dab of gray of varying values at different points on the character and they would begin to blend to form a depth map that strikingly begins to look like the character as you add more locations.
Autodesk and Walt Disney Pictures have signed a 5-year exclusivity agreement that brings WDAS’s “XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator” (known as XGen) to Autodesk’s Digital Entertainment Creation Community. XGen was most recently responsible for the great hair and foliage work in Tangled. It’s based on technology demoed at SIGGRAPH back in 2003, and now 8 years later it’s coming to the public after being featured in Bolt, Up, Toy Story 3, Car 2 and more.
“Twenty years ago, visual effects artists creating computer graphics were mostly mathematicians and scientists using highly technical and complex software tools that required significant amounts of custom programming,” explained Chief Technology Officer Andy Hendrickson, Walt Disney Animation Studios. “Back then, off-the-shelf software could not create the required details of nuance and emotion. Today, we were able to create XGen as an effective artistic tool because Autodesk provides studios like ours with comprehensive tools and a flexible, extensible platform to develop on. The Autodesk customizable toolset helps visual effects artists do their best work.”
No details on what this means immediately, but the technology should show up in upcoming Autodesk products just like WDAS’s PTex system.
A new trailer from “DisneyToon” studios, not to be confused with Pixar, seems to be a Cars spinoff called “Planes”. Via a short film, probably accompanying next weekend’s “Cars 2″, the scene is set for this direct-to-DVD release.
Apparently Pixar has made a new short linking Cars 2 to Planes, but that seems to be their only official involvement — if you look closely at that logo above it says “Disney,” not “Disney-Pixar,” and I think that is a very telling sign of what to expect from this money-grabbing tie-in. Where will they go next? Jonathan reckons Trains, Anton then suggested they could go for a remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Z says he’s, “…holding out for the inevitable DreamWorks knockoff: Helicopters.”
Update 4pm: Looks like Disney is trying very hard to take the trailer down.. Best bet is to just search youtube or google for “Disney Planes”.
The Walt Disney Animation Studios has just added two new software tools to their open-source offerings. The first is a new tool called ‘Reposado’ that will probably appeal more to your Systems Admins than your graphics guys:
Reposado is a set of tools written in Python that replicate the key functionality of Mac OS X Server’s Software Update Service. Reposado, together with the “curl” binary tool and a web server such as Apache 2, enables you to host a local Apple Software Update Server on any hardware and OS of your choice. Reposado is licensed under the new BSD license.
Second is a new tool called ‘SeExpr’:
SeExpr is a simple expression language that we use to provide artistic control and customization to our core software. We use it for procedural geometry synthesis, image synthesis, simulation control, and much more.
It looks very much in the “Made for Engineers by Engineers” stages, but could be a great tool to use with massive geometry & object instancing systems.
Last night I took my children to see Tangled, which was a great movie. It was especially great because we were the only ones in the theater. It looks like that Tangled will be released on March 15, 2011 in 3-D on Blu-Ray. In addition to Tangled, Disney has also said that they will be releasing other movies in 3-D on Blu-Ray. These include such 2-D favorites as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. Since these two movies were originally released in 2-D, they will have to be converted by post-production into 3-D. Hopefully they take the time to do it right. Unfortunately, no dates have been announced yet. One might guess that most of these movies will be released for the 2011 Christmas shopping season.
Some of the movies that Disney has said that they will be releasing include:
If you work with Particle effects and rendering but find yourself trapped by proprietary file formats, Walt Disney Animation Studios may have the solution for you in their new Partio library. With support for several of the most popular formats, it’s a combination library and application to not just translate between the file formats but enable some computation, and it’s all open-source.
Supports Houdini’s GEO and BGEO, Maya’s PDB and PDA, RenderMan’s PTC
Arbitrary back end in-memory/cached formats can be supported from a single interface
A Python API for easy scripting of particle manipulation
A C++ API for high performance particle manipulation
Nearest Neighbor Lookups for density estimation, Voronoi computation, etc.
Next month, Disney will release their next non-Pixar CG Animated film ‘Tangled’, featuring a fun retelling of the classic Rapunzel story. Over at the Wall Street Journal, they talk with the directors and discover just why they decided to go with CG over Disney’s classic hand-drawn animation.
“Tangled” directors Nathan Greno and Byron Howard say that CGI technology allowed them to capture the Rapunzel story’s most essential element: her flowing locks. In the original Brothers Grimm tale, Rapunzel is a long-haired girl imprisoned in a tower by a witch. In “Tangled,” Rapunzel’s tresses can act as a ladder, a whip or a third arm. “We could have drawn the hair in 2-D but it would have been just a yellowish shape on screen,” Mr. Howard says. “With CGI, we can render 100,000 strands of hair—it’s almost a character in itself.”
Nice to see the CG used as a way to enhance & reinvent the story, and not as just ‘CG Rendering is faster than Hand Drawn’ or ‘People don’t like Hand Drawn anymore’. Of course, we’ll have to wait a month to see if the CG really helped any.
For the new ‘World of Color’ show by Disney, Motion Theory got the job of creating the commercial mixing the water fountains with classic Disney characters and imagery from years gone by. They used an impressive mix of Maya, RealFlow, Houdini, AFter Effects, Nuke, and several other tools to bring it all together, and discuss the whole process in detail with FXGuide.
fxg: How did you then integrate those characters with the fluids and particles?
Cochrane: Well, firstly, our previs, which was done in Maya, actually became the layout. We used those cameras from the previs and they became our hero final cameras. So the match-moves were modeled, rigged and animated in Maya to the Maya cameras. We then got the geometry from Maya over to Houdini. Sometimes you have to scale geometry up or down when it goes into RealFlow in order to have it at the right scale for the simulation engine, so all that geometry conforming was done in Houdini. We used dozens of different techniques for each of the characters – there were between at least five to ten different fluid simulations for each. All those different fluid sims were layered on top of each other and rendered together in Houdini all at once or in groups. What you’re seeing is no single technique at a single time, it’s a real mix.
Fragomeni: There were actually over 150 simulations for this 30 second spot and I think we amassed about 12 terabytes of data.
Cochrane: And that doesn’t include revisions and techniques that we didn’t use!
Disney’s latest CG Film ‘Tangled’, based on the story of Rapunzel, comes to theaters in November and is Disney’s latest attempt at merging their huge assets in hand-drawn animation with CG animation, this time using non-photorealistic rendering techniques.
Previous director Glen Keane developed a new look for this computer animated film, which is said to look and feel more like a traditional hand-drawn Disney Classic, but in 3D. Apparently the film uses a non-photorealistic rendering technique which will make the surface look like it is painted but still containing depth and dimensions. The movie’s visual style is being based on French Rococo artist Jean-Honore Fragonard’s painting “The Swing”.
A new featurette on on YouTube shows some of the concept art and how they translated it into the CG models.
Another big win for The Foundry as Walt Disney Animation Studios announces their choice to begin doing all of their workflows in Nuke.
“Nuke is a powerful and flexible program that has become the industry standard in compositing for films involving complex visual effects, and state-of-the-art computer animation,” said Dan Candela, director of technology for Walt Disney Animation Studios. “It provides the best available foundational toolset for making stereoscopic animated films. We’re thrilled to be able to adopt this advanced toolset.”
The Lion King in 3D made a huge splash in theaters the last 2 weeks, showing that the Disney classics still hold our attention and that classic Cell animation still holds a special place in our hearts. Of course, the original Lion King wasn’t in 3D so converting it was a large affair taking the talent of hundreds of animators, and FXGuide has the details of how.
Autodesk and Walt Disney Pictures have signed a 5-year exclusivity agreement that brings WDAS’s “XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator” (known as XGen) to Autodesk’s Digital Entertainment Creation Community. XGen was most recently responsible for the great hair and foliage work in Tangled. It’s based on technology demoed at SIGGRAPH back in 2003, and now 8 years later it’s coming to the public after being featured in Bolt, Up, Toy Story 3, Car 2 and more.
A new trailer from “DisneyToon” studios, not to be confused with Pixar, seems to be a Cars spinoff called “Planes”. Via a short film, probably accompanying next weekend’s “Cars 2″, the scene is set for this direct-to-DVD release.
The Walt Disney Animation Studios has just added two new software tools to their open-source offerings. The first is a new tool called ‘Reposado’ that will probably appeal more to your Systems Admins than your graphics guys:
If you work with Particle effects and rendering but find yourself trapped by proprietary file formats, Walt Disney Animation Studios may have the solution for you in their new Partio library. With support for several of the most popular formats, it’s a combination library and application to not just translate between the file formats but enable some computation, and it’s all open-source.
Next month, Disney will release their next non-Pixar CG Animated film ‘Tangled’, featuring a fun retelling of the classic Rapunzel story. Over at the Wall Street Journal, they talk with the directors and discover just why they decided to go with CG over Disney’s classic hand-drawn animation.
For the new ‘World of Color’ show by Disney, Motion Theory got the job of creating the commercial mixing the water fountains with classic Disney characters and imagery from years gone by. They used an impressive mix of Maya, RealFlow, Houdini, AFter Effects, Nuke, and several other tools to bring it all together, and discuss the whole process in detail with FXGuide.
Another big win for The Foundry as Walt Disney Animation Studios announces their choice to begin doing all of their workflows in Nuke.
VizWorld.com 
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