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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

Harry Potter Movies By The Numbers, An Infographic – CinemaBlend.com.

infographics harry potter

In the new Harry Potter movie, there’s a great sequence that explains the origin of the “Deathly Hallows”, three enchanted objects given to three brothers in a deal with death.  The sequence is a great piece of animation, expertly woven into the tale and the live-action movie, presenting some fantastic detail and style to the wizarding fairy tale.

fxg: The detail in the characters is quite amazing, but what I liked is that you don’t actually see it at first because I think initially you notice them only as silhouettes.

Newton: Yes, it was actually a key thought to make things appear very clearly just by using tonality from light and shade, but we were still conscious of the fact that we didn’t want it to look simple. One of the things we worked out very early on was whether it should be a true three-dimensional production or whether it was to have a fake two-dimensionality to it. A few years back we did a sequence for The Tale of Despereaux, where we created this very interesting flat storybook sequence. We built flat rigs but played with perspective. So we were toying with doing a similar thing here.

via fxguide – vfx knowledge – Framestore: Deathly Hallows Animation.

Graphics animation, framestory, harry potter, vfx

MPC helped to bring the latest Harry Potter installment to life, with additions to the initial “escape” sequence and many others.  Get an overview of their work in this short articl eon CGNews.

MPC’s concept artists explored different combinations for the transformed characters, blending features, sizes and skin textures from Harry and the other characters to create six different hybrid designs. The seven actors were shot motion control and a facial motion capture shoot was organised to obtain extra detail. MPC’s 3D team had to create digi-doubles for each of the actors, modeling and texturing photoreal heads and blending them with a CG model of Harry’s head. A custom rigging system was used to blend the data from the facial capture shoot, allowing animators to keep control of the fine details.

via Latest MPC Work for Harry Potter ‘The Deathly Hallows’ | CGnews.

Graphics harry potter, movie, mpc, vfx

HPC provider ‘Steam Engine’ has been making waves recently, with only 3 months under its belt, and most impressively they’ve even managed to rope in some big clients like Rising Sun Pictures who used their resources for the new Harry Potter film.  Of course, paramount when talking about ‘cloud computing’ is security.

“We obviously have concerns about security and we need to be satisfied by what’s offered. We wouldn’t use computers from this random place that we couldn’t see or inspect. Our clients are incredibly security concerned, given the sensitive nature of films in production and the sizable investment at stake,” Clark said.

Fortunately, they overcame security concerns

Stefan Gillard, Steam Engine’s commercial director, said that its HPC model is ideal for film development given that the data is stored in the tier-three-rated Global Switch facility, secured deep within the Harbour MSP datacentre in Sydney.

How do they manage all this computing horsepower?

Rising Sun Pictures runs 300 nodes in its render farm during the day, with an extra 150 available to it at night, as well as the extra grunt provided by Steam Engine, meaning that render jobs go quicker with fewer errors.

“We have a batch computer management system. You give it jobs and finds the best place to run them on our own computers and we then bolt nodes onto our existing render farm. Our program will push data onto the rented nodes as required,” Clark said.

Be sure to read the full article, it’s got lots of great detail on the storage scenario and how they managed to justify the cost.

via Harry Potter effects gurus turn to cloud – Business – News.

Hardware cloud, harry potter, hpc, rising sunk pictures

Last week we reported that USA Today would feature a page with an Augmented Reality marker. This marker would allow you to interactively explore the upcoming ‘Wizarding World of Harry Potter’ theme park. You can now download the map on-line. Above you can see a short YouTube video of the augmented reality map. From the information bar posted to the side of the video.

The first-ever augmented reality map of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter will allow you to rotate the map and take a closer look at the 20-acre themed area from all sides and angles. You can hold the map closer to your webcam and explore Hogsmeade and see the Hogwarts Express. Blow on your computers microphone and the banners on the map will wave.

After the break is a longer video of the experience.

Read more…

Science augmented reality, harry potter

USA Today and Universal Studios Orlando have partnered up to turn a page from next week’s USA Today (January 28th) into an Augmented Reality marker, allowing you to use it to explore the upcoming ‘Wizarding World of Harry Potter’ theme part interactively.

By rotating the map, you can take a closer look at this 20-acre magnificently themed environment from all sides and angles. Hogwarts castle will appear before your eyes. Hold the map closer to your webcam and explore Hogsmeade and see the Hogwarts Express. Blow on your computer’s microphone and the banners on the map will wave.

No details or screenshots yet.

via MuggleNet | The World’s #1 Harry Potter Site – Deathly Hallows, Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling, and much more.

Science augmented reality, harry potter, usatoday

Rising Sun Pictures has posted a pair of new VFX breakdowns for Harry Potter 6 and Terminator Salvation.

Rising Sun Pictures Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince VFX Breakdowns. and Terminator Salvation

Graphics breakdown, harry potter, movie, rising sun pictures, terminator salvation, vfx

Christopher Horvath from Industrial Light & Magic has an impressive history in the VFX world, working at Weta on ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘King Kong’, but had to go in a different direction for the latest work with Harry Potter.

For ‘Harry Potter: The Half-Blood Prince,’ he torched bits and bytes into an amazing 100-foot-tall wall of swirling fire that surrounded Dumbledore, again using the GPU. The system was such hot stuff that SIGGRAPH accepted a technical paper that he wrote with ILM’s Willi Geiger describing the calculus that fueled the fire. It was one of 78 papers accepted from 439 submitted.

via CGSociety – CHRISTOPHER HORVATH.

Graphics harry potter, ilm, interview, vfx, weta

Things are happening in Orlando!

Set to open some time in 2010, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter is a “new themed environment … comparable in size to other islands within Universal’s Islands of Adventure … a fully immersive experience that will draw from all of the books and movies.”  See artists’ mockups at the picture gallery in the link below.

Also, Organic Motion has expanded to Orlando:

The Manhattan high-tech company, a developer of advanced computer-vision systems, was drawn to Central Florida by the potential for business opportunities within the region’s defense-training, entertainment and medical simulation industries

… The company has been recognized within the industry for creating the world’s first wireless motion-capture system for video-game development … Organic Motion’s system eliminates the need for the sensors and bodysuits. Experts say that slashes the costs and opens the way to a whole new generation of computer simulations — not just for video games, but for military training, education and a variety of other applications.

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Orlando and Organic Motion Has Chosen Orlando As The Site Of Its First Expansion

Graphics "motion capture", harry potter