VizWorld.com

Dreamworks had lots of experience with the characters and environments of the Shrek series that they could reuse in much of the new Puss In Boots film, but the additional new characters required a good bit of new design and development work.  They actually found that their previous fur system used in the Shrek films didn’t scale to having Puss and his companion Kitty as major characters, so they had to find a new system.

On prior films, Dreamworks had relied on a proprietary fur system, but this time around artists used Houdini for much of the fur. “We found that Houdini could handle an order of magnitude number of curves bigger than we’ve been able to in the past,” says Bielenberg. “We had a one to one representation of curves for the fur that were interacting with other objects like the belt. The character FX artists could pull up Houdini and really get a WYSIWYG representation. You could see how the curves were interacting with any forces in Houdini. And four or five simulations could happen in the one package, rather than a serial process.”

via Puss in Boots: head in the clouds | fxguide.

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No surprise that since Avatar redefined the “pinnacle” of 3D cinematography, the overwhelming majority of 3D content to come out since then has been pretty lackluster.  Over at Hollywood Reporter they talk to Pixar’s Dreamworks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg on the recent poor 3D ticket sales to get his opinion:

I think 3D is right smack in the middle of its terrible twos. We have disappointed our audience multiple times now, and because of that I think there is genuine distrust — whereas a year and a half ago, there was genuine excitement, enthusiasm and reward for the first group of 3D films that actually delivered a quality experience. Now that’s been seriously undermined. It’s not in any fashion, shape or form the demise of 3D, but until there are 3D experiences that exceed people’s expectations, it’s going to stay challenged. (He predicts Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon will exceed expectations.) It’s really heartbreaking to see what has been the single greatest opportunity that has happened to the film business in over a decade being harmed. The audience has spoken, and they have spoken really loudly.

I agree with him 100%.  I was amazed to hear that one of my local theaters sold out of 2D showings to the final Harry Potter film, leaving 3D tickets unsold.  People are just unwilling to pay the extra premiums for fancy effects that typically add nothing to the film.

Update 7/19 10pm: Dreamworks, Duh.. don’t know how I screwed that one up.

via Jeffrey Katzenberg on the ‘Heartbreaking’ Decline of 3D (Exclusive Q&A) – The Hollywood Reporter.

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If you pass near the Arizona State University campus next week, you might want to pop in to check out an interesting presentation from DreamWorks Animation scientist Ron Henderson.

“Art-Directed Reality: Tools for Animation and Visual Effects,” will be presented by Ron Henderson, manager of the FX Tools group, at 12:15 p.m. Feb. 25 in the Global Institute of Sustainability, Room 101 (GIOS 101). The talk will cover how a large animation studio works, infrastructure, and staffing and approach to tool development. A case study will be presented on the challenges he and his team face in creating great tools for animation and visual effects.

He’s not just a VFX Junkie either, he holds a doctorate from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace engineering, and was a senior scientist at Caltech.  Most recently, he helped build some of the tools in MegaMind and How To Train Your Dragon.

From a PhD in Aerospace to Flying Dragons.

via DreamWorks Animation scientist to discuss tools for visual effects | ASU News.

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Dreamworks Animation joins the ranks of Walt Disney Animation, Framestore, ILM, and Sony Imageworks by choosing The Foundry’s Nuke as their standard compositing tool, to be first used in their upcoming feature film “The Croods”.

“Nuke is an incredibly powerful tool that will enable our artists to more readily embrace compositing as part of our creative process,” added Darin Grant, Head of Production Technology at DreamWorks Animation, “The Foundry has impressed us with their commitment to advancing the product and we look forward to an ongoing relationship with their team.”

via Dreamworks Animation Selects Nuke As Compositor Of Choice To Be Implemented Into In-House Pipeline Beginning 2012 – SHOOTonline.

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If you’re interested in the inner working of some of the biggest in Hollywood’s CG studios, then you should check out the inside story of the creation and faltering of Dreamworks, Nicole Laporte’s “The Men Who Would Be Kings”.

The rise and then the crash and burn of DreamWorks, created by three of the biggest egos in Hollywood—Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen—is a gripping saga of changing economic times. Wary of corporate inroads and catalyzed by Katzenberg’s troubled departure from Disney, the three had independently come to a point where they wanted to run their own show. In 1994, without even a name for their venture, they announced the formation of a company that would break the mold on corporate ownership of entertainment-making, respecting creativity above all else. Spielberg was coddled and cosseted as the ultimate artiste. Katzenberg, who headed the animation division at Disney, was motivated as much by vengeance against CEO Michael Eisner when he set about luring away Disney’s animators. Billionaire Geffen was looked on as the businessman who would bring together disparate parts of the company. What followed was a clash of multiple cultures and visions, within and outside of DreamWorks. LaPorte, a former film industry reporter for Variety, offers a deliciously detailed look at the trials, triumphs, and fumbles of DreamWorks—from the complicated story behind Shrek, a CGI pioneer, to the courting of stars Nicole Kidman and George Clooney and soothing of Russell Crowe. This unauthorized chronicle of DreamWorks will no doubt seal LaPorte’s status as persona non grata in Hollywood, but readers will love it. –Vanessa Bush

This book and many others is available in the VizWorld Store.

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DreamWorks Animation has just signed a deal with Cerelink to ‘rent’ their cloud computing facilities for use in rendering upcoming projects.  It’s an interesting solution, forgoing the usual kinds of security and access restrictions that Hollywood studios typically require for upcoming films for the lower-cost and elastic nature of cloud computing resources.  So what is DreamWorks getting access to, exactly?

The Cerelink facilities include access to several thousand square feet of secure data centre space located in Rio Rancho, NM. That space is fed by redundant electrical power grids. It has access to LambdaRail (pdf), the 12,000 mile US coast-to-coast fast broadband network, and to a supercomputer at Encanto.

This offers a theoretical peak speed of 172 teraflops (peak theoretical speed) from its Altix ICE 8200 cluster, with 133 teraflops sustained operation. The ICE 8200 consists of 1,792 nodes (14,336 cores) of quad Xeon 3.0 GHz processors housed in 28 racks.

This is in addition to state tax rebates of up to 25% for work done in New Mexico, further reducing the costs.  So they effective get access to up to 14000 cores of compute power without having to deal with IT, cooling, maintenance, or any of the infrastructure costs, and only when they actually need it for work.

via DreamWorks signs cloud computing deal • The Register.

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Shrek and Fiona may have finally ridden off into the sunset for the last and final time, but some of the tricks that Dreamworks integrated into the movie will be talked about for some time.  Over at CGSociety, they talk to VFX Supervisor Doug Cooper about some of the tricks you have to feel to believe.

“For example, there’s a moment when Shrek does his roar at the birthday party and he’s screaming this terror out at the audience. We are playing Shrek’s face large in a close-up, hanging in front of the screen in front of the audience while he’s roaring. When he settles down for a second we let him drift back behind the screen, so subconsciously we are giving the audience some distance from Shrek.” When you watch it you don’t see it, but you feel it. It’s as if the space opens up and there is an uncomfortable silence between you and Shrek.

via CGSociety – SHREK Forever After.

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CGSociety has a great story on how DreamWorks brought both the Dragons and the Vikings to life in their recent hit “How To Train Your Dragon”.  Covering such details as dealing with the hairy vikings and  “How do you show an Emotion under a hair-covered Face?”, to rigging the face of a Dragon, they cover some great inside information.

To animate both the human character and dragon faces DreamWorks turned to its own in-house software appropriately named Rig. Though Rig works like Maya with many animation tools under the hood the DreamWorks Rig system written by Dick Walsh is based on human facial anatomy with variants so it can be used on something like dragon faces too. Rig didn’t drive the faces with blend shapes. The musculature underneath is fit to the design and uses hundreds of controls to feed the appropriate behaviors such as those for a smile. “We’ve done most facial blend shape animation and this kind of musculature based rigging and the later seemed to do a better job for how you got in to the targets. Blend shapes are great once you get to the target but the in-between seemed better when based on what the muscles underneath a real face would do.”"

via CGSociety – How To Train Your Dragon.

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Dreamworks Animation hasn’t even released “How To Train Your Dragon“, and is already releasing teaser trailers for the next animated superhero flick “Megamind”.

In the November 5 release, super villain Megamind (Will Ferrell) defeats his archrival Metro Man (Brad Pitt) and the world should be his oyster. But instead, Megamind falls into total despair. It turns out that life without a rival is life without a point for him. So, he creates a new superhero rival, Titan (Jonah Hill). Unfortunately, the new hero wants to be a super villain, too. Caught in the middle, star reporter Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey) asks the tough questions: Who can we turn to? Who has what it takes to stand up to this menace? Who will defend the innocent? Megamind! That’s who.

Sounds entertaining, in a classic Dreamworks Shrek-like backwards way (Supervillian tries to create Superhero, but winds up becoming the Superhero).  See the trailer below, courtesy of ComingSoon.net and Yahoo Movies.

via The Teaser Trailer for Megamind – ComingSoon.net.

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Dreamworks Animation is on schedule to release 5 new films this year, including 3 CGI animated films.  The news of this ramped the stock price up to $40.46 on Monday after hitting $42.98 on Thursday, the highest since their IPO in 2004.

This year’s three movies compare to the weaker-than-expected “Monsters vs. Aliens,” DWA’ss sole release of 2009. Plus, Morris said he has screened parts of 2010 pics “How to Train Your Dragon” (release date March 26) and “Shrek Forever After” (May 21) and thinks “both look like winners.” A glimpse at the third film, “Megamind” (Nov. 5), during a New York presentation last week earned positive reviews from reporters and advertisers, though analysts expect a weaker performance from that pic.

They expect that 2010 will be Dreamworks’ most profitable year ever.

via DreamWorks Ani gearing up for big year.

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