VizWorld.com

Autodesk has a a nice case study online from Double Negative, discussing how they were able to use Autodesk Maya to create many of the effects in the Harry Potter franchise, focusing heavily on the latest and final chapter.

“We had a Dragon Team and a Hogwarts Team,” says Vickery. “They were almost like 2 separate production facilities in many ways. The complexity of the work on this film was so massive, with this incredible white dragon and a fully CG Hogwarts that had to be destroyed in epic fashion. It was such a big operation, in fact, that the filmmakers held a lot of the work back for the first installment of Deathly Hallows, mainly so we could build a well-oiled machine for the second part. Maya, of course, was a big part of that machine.”

via Autodesk – Film – Double Negative: Harry Potter Finale.

Graphics autodesk, doublenegative, harry potter, maya

In the new SciFi film “Paul”, Double Negative got the fun job of bringing a classic “grey” alien to live as a rag-tag group travels the desert in a rusty RV.  Voiced by Seth Rogen, complications with his schedule and a fully-CG character in a live action movie proved a challenge, documented in a new article on fxguide.

Although Seth Rogen lent his voice to Paul, the actor was not available during shooting of principal photography in New Mexico. Instead, Double Negative used a number of sources of reference for Paul’s speech, mannerisms and general behavior. Firstly, Rogen attended a rehearsal period in May 2009 on the Culver City soundstage. “Seth was there with the other actors and they did a dry run-through of all the lines,” explains Beer. “We had a number of witness cameras and facial cameras on him and we also got him into a Xsens MVN suit for motion capture.”

Using the mo-cap data and video footage as a baseline, Double Negative could immediately attach that to the Paul rig and use it as reference for the entire animation process. “It also allowed the editor to cut the film with footage of Seth dropped into the picture,” adds Couzens. “And it provided us with a great library of Seth-isms. By referring back to these nuances we were able to make Paul seem Seth-like.”

via Paul: Double Negative’s alien adventure | fxguide.

Graphics doublenegative, movie, vfx

A new press release from Dell covers the user of Dell Poweredge blades and Precision workstations that were used in the creation of some of 2010′s biggest films such as “Iron Man 2″, “Inception” and “Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows pt1″.  Dell talks about their new cluster technologies great for render farms, as well as their 24×7 support model and reliability numbers.

Double Negative relies heavily on server clustering to render computer-generated imagery (CGI). Rendering involves the computer-generated construction of a three-dimensional digital image from a model and contains geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information. That takes a ton of computer horsepower. Double-Negative requires an IT infrastructure with immense capacity and power to meet project demand. That’s why they deployed an architecture consisting of more than 300 Dell™ PowerEdge™ M610 blade servers and 19 Dell™ PowerEdge™ M1000e blade enclosures.

Get the full release, including details of Pixomondo’s setup for Iron Man2, after the break.

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware dell, doublenegative, pixomondo

Another win for NVidia in the VFX and CUDA space comes from Double Negative, who found their proprietary fluid simulation system “Squirt” getting a nice 20x performance boost.

“Moving our fluid solver onto the GPU allows our artists to get the results of their simulations back much faster, without any impact to their workflow,” explained Dan Bailey, lead GPU developer, Double Negative. “By default, fluid simulations are now sent to a specialized GPU farm, affording the artists more time to iterate and ramp up the complexity of a shot to achieve a more believable result for the big screen.”

It took 6 months of hard work to complete the transition, and the 20x number they’re seeing isn’t even using a Quadro4000 (Fermi-based).  Just wait until they upgrade to see the numbers then.

via DNeg Accelerating Visual Effects with NVIDIA Quadro and CUDA « NVIDIA.

Graphics, Hardware cuda, doublenegative, nvidia, vfx

Asylum VFX is closed, but that really just means there’s another wave of great talent on the streets.  One of them, Nathan McGuinness, just got a job with Double Negative as Creative Director at their Singapore shop.

“We’ve admired the work Nathan and the team at Asylum did for a long time, and enjoyed the collaboration our two companies had in working on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice this year,” says Double Negative managing director, Alex Hope. “We recognized kindred spirits during that process and were incredibly sad when we heard of its demise. We are so excited that Nathan is now joining Double Negative to creatively head up our operation in Singapore. Nathan’s enthusiasm and talent will assist us in continuing to grow the technical and creative capabilities of the company both in London and Singapore.”

via Post Magazine – Nathan McGuinness joins Double Negative.

Graphics asylum, doublenegative

CGSociety has a great behind-the-scenes look at the visual effects of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, including the work of Asylum and Double Negative.

There were a variety of rigs to deal with, everything from simple car rigs to eight legged dragons. And for animation, Asylum uses a transformation based blending system, “essentially like a pose-based deformation system, but we have direct control of all the inputs, which you don’t typically get with a pose-based system,” explained Rick Grandy, Asylums’ Rigging and Pipeline Supervisor. “We control the x-forms and all the individual blends, and it’s layered, so each one can be independent geometry or components of the geometry, so it’s much more scalable than applying a giant PSD through a muscle system.” This was used in most of the characters, with the dragon using this technique the most.

via CGSociety – SORCERER’S APPRENTICE.

Graphics asylum, doublenegative, movie, vfx

Scott Pilgrim is a great combination of anime, manga, and comic book cliches with videography and cinema classics that required an incredible amount of VFX work.  Over 1,200 VFX shots are in the film, and fxguide has an interview with the folks at Double Negative and Mr. X about some of their contributions that required not only your typical post-processing work, but some clever physical work on-set to get the desired results.

“Michael Cera would punch a blue pad which would trigger off photo flash bulbs that would illuminate everything at the same time. So there’s a photo flash bulb going off when they make a connection but there’s also a ‘lightning strike’ light which has 70,000 watts of power as Patel spins across the club.” Double Negative performed a morph transition between two shots in the Patel fight to create a crash zoom out as Scott punches his adversary, adding camera and ‘colour shake’ that cycled through frames of block colour for a stylised look.

via fxguide – after effects vfx – Scott Pilgrim and VFX Against the World.

Graphics doublenegative, movie, mr x, vfx

FXGuide has a great article up on the visual effects of The Price of Persia, discussing how Cinesite, MPC, Framestore, Double Negative, and NVizage all worked together to create the many VFX shots in the film.  In particular, I love the part about the similarities between crowds and cities.

Drawing on the underlying structure of MPC’s existing proprietary ALICE crowd system, Town Planner gave MPC an initial pass at the city that could be augmented with other surrounds like gardens, streets and trees, as well the surrounding mountainous environment. “Buildings are pretty much a crowd that doesn’t move,” noted Ceretti. “We already had layout tools for the crowds – why not make it similar? In the end, we stripped out everything we wouldn’t need in terms of simulation of crowd motion and just used it for layout, but it was still a huge render so we had to split up parts of the city and bake out different renders in RenderMan to make it possible.” In the end, this amounted to about 20,000 buildings and 180,000 props – things like canopies, piles of wood and pots. For shots of the invading army and other crowds in the city, the ALICE software was used to generate 10,000 agents made up of soldiers, flags, citizens, horses and camels, and then integrated into the city shots. Further projection work was done in both Shake and Nuke to allow for 3D space adjustments and other details to be added, along with the layering of atmospheric dust, mist and rays of light.

via fxguide – vfx knowledge – Prince of Persia.

Science cinesite, doublenegative, framestore, movies, mpc, nvizage, vfx

The major plot point in The Prince of Persia is the “Dagger of Time” that can rewind time for the wielder up to two minutes, allowing them to change recent events.  While older studios may have simply rewound the film wheel to create the effect, that’s not sufficient for today’s discriminating audience.  Double Negative was called in to find a better way to do it, and wound up creating a a new technology called ‘event capture’ that combines photography, video, live action, CG, and a lot of math.

To accomplish this, multiple locked cameras were set roughly along the path of the final camera. “It’s sort of set up like bullet time,” said Ellis. Up to nine witness cameras were used, with each requiring the delivery of precise calibrations, lens, and set details. This was used to record the live action scene. Taking the resulting footage, Dneg roto’d out the character or characters, resulting in nine shots of roto per character which were intersected with each other in 3D, providing a cookie-cut of that person mapped on basic mesh which was accurate to the roto and camera positions with the real-world textures. The technique required a sharp image with little motion blur, but a maximum depth of field. Selection of the appropriate texture per frame was handled by transitioning from one of the nine cameras to the next.

via CGSociety – Prince of Persia.

Graphics doublenegative, movie, vfx

Double Negative got the job of recreating the 2003 Iraqi invasion that search, fruitlessly, to find the Weapons of Mass Destruction Saddam had stashed away.  Through frequent reporting and hindsight, the region is well known to many in the world, making the job of recreating the landscape that much more difficult.

Getting proper results meant data had to be properly collected and visualized. To accomplish this, DNeg’s FX supervisors gathered on-set information during filming, taking set measurements and extensive photographs to bring back to the artists. The order was to create over 650 shots and accurately portray the early stages of the Iraqi war, starting with the ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign.

via CGSociety – Green Zone.

Graphics doublenegative, movie, vfx