YouTube has a great video showing much of the behind the scenes motion tracking work that went into the new Adventures of TinTin movie. A huge mocap studio with markered actors and lots of virtual cameras and monitors all work together to make filming a CG movie almost identical to filming a traditional live-action film.
Weta Digitla: The Adventures of Tintin – Making of. – YouTube.
Peter Jackson’s Weta Studios is busy working on the new “Rise of the Apes” film, but having difficulty dealing with the ape’s hair. They’ve just reached out Eitan Grinspun, who we mentioned last week, to lend a hand after seeing his work in Tangled and hearing about his expertise. In addition to the Apes, they also need his expertise in the upcoming Steven Spielberg movie ‘Tintin’.
The software uses discrete differential geometry which is so new that the first textbook on the subject was published only two years ago. The same tools are also being used for computer simulations to predict how needles move through human flesh, so that doctors can train to surgery on “virtual” bodies instead of the real thing. Or stick swords into bodies in Fantasy flicks.
Math nerds are striking it big in the movies these days.
via Peter “Ring Lord” Jackson recruits hair expert – Tries to avoid bad hair days | TechEye.
Weta has updated their website with around 8 different breakdowns of their contributions to the visual effects of Avatar. Showing the multiple passes and plates used in the shots, they showcase not only their CG work but the motion tracking work used for the mech robots.
VFX studio Weta has just announced that they’ll be integrated StudioGPU’s MachStudio Pro into the production line for their television work.
“Improving 3D workflow throughout our facility is an ongoing priority at Weta Workshop,” says Andrew Smith, Business Advisor for Weta Workshop Ltd. “MachStudio Pro will fit nicely into our television pipeline, giving our team more tools to keep pushing the limits of creativity. The ability to work together with StudioGPU to continue developing MachStudio Pro with respect to our specific pipeline needs will allow us to continue improving efficiency and content delivery for future Weta Workshop television projects.”
This is interesting in that MachStudio has a strong partnership with AMD, but Weta just wrapped up an impressive new product with NVidia called PantaRay. Maybe the Weta deal will allow for some hybridization of the two technologies.
Read the full release after the break.
No doubt one of the best features in Avatar was the planet Pandora itself, with the lush terrain and beautiful junglescapes. Weta talks on CGSociety about how they created the forest, and reveals that it was a largely procedural design using simulated plant and forest growth algorithms with the popular large-scale asset management tool Massive.
Allitt wrote a system that allowed Weta’s artists to plant (programming) seeds in Massive that accomplished this, as explained by VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon. “It was very interesting. You could actually watch a forest grow in real time with this solution, and any TD could grow just by painting colors on the terrain.” With this elegant solution, the big trees would grow first, then the smaller trees would die off as the big trees took away the light, the smaller trees would fight for position, the ground cover would fill in where it could get light.” This offered the ability to have variants built in easily by simply changing the random number seed, a programming term that means when you do a random call, there is a number you can pass through to offset the results.
And the individual plants, once the simulations were complete, were of startling detail:
The plants also had to have the resolution to hold up at any distance and all plants had to hold up in the foreground. The simplest plant had on the order of 1,000 to 5,000 polygons, relatively low resolution. The average plant was closer to 20 to 100,000 poly range, but some of the high resolutions plants, one called “fernRekA” that looked like a fern whose leaves hadn’t unfurled yet, had 1.2 million polygons. Each leaf was modeled.
via CGSociety – Avatar.
When Weta began working with the VFX of Avatar, they quickly realized that requirements, 800 fully CG characters in highly stylized digital settings, required such immense computational power that they had never attempted it before. Then turned to NVidia for some help, and together they created a pre-computation system for rendering called ‘PantaRay’.
A shot that exemplifies the advantages Weta achieved with PantaRay can be seen in the movie’s promotional trailer . The shot from a helicopter looking over a huge flock of hundreds of purple creatures flying over water, with a massive tree-covered mountain in the background was pre-computed in just a day and a half using PantaRay. “That shot would have taken a week with previous methods,” said Weta’s Fascione. “The fact that it was so much faster with PantaRay meant that we were able to create a much more beautiful shot – you can see fine detail on every bush, every leaf. The color separation between distances is clean and clear. The computational power of PantaRay made the difference.”
The final ‘beauty’ renders were still created with RenderMan, but PantaRay allowed an almost real-time manipulation of lighting and various scene elements that proved invaluable. Read the full release after the break.
30ninja’s has been publishing an exclusive interview with John Bruno, the Oscar-winning VFX master who has worked on all of James Cameron’s movies since 1989, and the latest segment discusses the process used to create and animate Colonel Quaritch’s giant Amp Suit.
And what was so cool about that was, you can take the animation, you take those Maya [software] files, you’d have the animation move, and you’d have the motion-control move or the camera move, you could feed that into a motion-control system, put an actor in the [giant] amp suit torso that was rigged by [Virtual Production Supervisor] Glenn Derry on a motion base that would actually move based on the approved animation. So the actor was in for a ride! And the camera system would follow the camera move that was done. Now, the genius thing that I loved about this thing is, it’s a Simulcam system: There was a system that would show you the animated scene, the template—Jim could see that through his camera lens—the camera was synched up in the same volume, Jim could actually line up, knowing which lens was used, in stereo. He would walk [on the stage] with the actor … and he could see Stephen Lang as Quaritch in the amp suit with the animation amp suit locked together and the background that was around them.
30 NINJAS: So in a sense, he’s actually watching the film through the lens of the camera, and walking around to find the angles he likes.
Information Management has some new information to add to yesterday’s data about the power of Weta, including details of the cooling, queue management, and frame render times involved in Avatar.
The queueing system is a Pixar product called Alfred, which creates a hierarchical job structure or tree of multiple tasks that have to run in a certain order. In any single job, there might be thousands of interdependent tasks. As soon as CPUs on the render wall are freed up, new tasks are fired at idle processors.
At the peak of AVATAR, Wilkie was wrangling more than 10,000 jobs and an estimated 1.3 to 1.4 million tasks per day. Each frame of the 24 frame-per-second movie saw multiple iterations of back and forth between directors and artists and took multiple hours to render.
via Processing AVATAR.
Here’s the links for today, including several of the “12 days of” contests running on TutsPlus.
Some new information about Weta’s handling of the massive data within Avatar discusses their huge data center, which recently got a huge redesign and hardware upgrade.
The Weta data center got a major hardware refresh and redesign in 2008 and now uses more than 4,000 HP BL2×220c blades (new BL2×220c G6 blades announced last month), 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking gear from Foundry and storage from BluArc and NetApp. The system now occupies spot 193 through 197 in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers.
Thirty four racks comprise the computing core, made of 32 machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory. Weta systems administrator Paul Gunn said that heat exchange for their servers had to be enclosed. The “industry standard of raised floors and forced-air cooling could not keep up with the constant heat coming off the machines,” said Gunn. “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local.” The solutions was the use of water-cooled racks from Rittal.
This massive data center was pushing a massive 7-8 gigabytes of data per second, 24 hours a day. The final copy of Avatar was equivalent to 17.28 Gigabytes per minute of storage.
You can hit WETA’s page on the Top500 to see their 7 entries.
via The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ « Data Center Knowledge.
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