digital domain buys site license of katana

http://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/di…nse-of-katana/

The Foundry announced today that Digital Domain has purchased a site license for KATANA, making them the first customer of the product since The Foundry took over development in 2009. We caught up with Bill Collis for an update on this news as well as more info about open source and support of the recent deep compositing spec that’s part of OpenEXR 2.0.

The first sale of a product is always significant and the fact that the first customer is a facility with a stature as Digital Domain. Digital Domain is currently using a pre-release version of KATANA, since the product isn’t shipping at this point in time. While DD has been testing the software since the very first alpha releases, Bill Collis, CEO of The Foundry, says that “a number of other large post houses are now working with KATANA and are quite interested in the software.”

Work on KATANA by The Foundry began back in November 2009, after acquiring it from Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI) in a deal which included a site license of NUKE. Rob Bredow, CTO of SPI, referred to KATANA as “a pretty fully featured suite of tools that handles almost all the backend of our pipeline – everything after the animation is done and any processes are simulated – really KATANA takes over from there. It gets everything ready for the renderer and then does all the compositing”.

fxguidetv episode #111 includes a primer on KATANA with Jeremy Selan of SPI and The Foundry product manager Andy Lomas. The episode also includes a discussion regarding Open Source software with Weta digital’s CTO Sebastian Sylwan. At FMX2011, Sylwan announced that they were contributing their deep opacity tech to the upcoming OpenEXR 2.0 specification. In addition, they are licensing their deep opacity compositing tools to The Foundry for inclusion in NUKE.

“We’ve been following the deep opacity tools since Weta had been using them in Shake,” says Collis, “and they were interested in us putting them in NUKE but it didn’t make sense at the time. Peter Hillman then implemented them as NUKE plugins.”

However, The Foundry wanted to wait until file format specifications were nailed down as it didn’t make sense for them to develop support for several different types of files. “We had implemented some very basic deep opacity plugins….the basic operators…but Weta had pushed the technology much further,” says Collis. “They had put a huge amount of effort into the tech, so it made sense for us to improve and build upon what we had done in house.”

The relationship that The Foundry has with Weta in developing Mari has certainly helped facilitate this process, but is even simply the fact that they are also a NUKE customer. “The idea of The Foundry just staying really close with its customers and listening and watching and being part of what they’re doing. And then when it makes sense to try and bring that to the mainstream NUKE or some other mainstream product.”

It’s these two separate items — the open source OpenEXR 2.0 file format/deep opacity spec and the licensing of tools — that have served to bring deep composting to the wider masses. Tools will be available in NUKE 6.3 which is due to ship before the end of June. This is actually before the final OpenEXR spec is released, so there will be an additional release shortly afterwards that supports the open source format.

At the FMX2011 open source discussions, one thing that was mentioned time and time again is that the best open source contributions are developed in use at facilities on productions. Effectively, battle tested. Bredow and others at the talks said they feel it is incredibly unlikely to have open source software adopted by facilities that hasn’t been used in production. “We believe the best technology is made in the head of a film,” says Collis. “It’s where the best ideas come up. And if we can take those ideas that have been created when time is pressing and you’re just getting the job done…and then later spend the time to commercialize them…that just works brilliantly.”

Another common thread of the FMX panels was that it was clear what works best as open source and what doesn’t work so well. Standards, file formats, and specific tools work; large scale applications don’t. This is why we’re seeing open source offerings such as OpenEXR, Ptex, and Alembic, and others.

For applications, there are several issues that serve as roadblocks. First, there are legal issues: can a company ensure that every single line of code is 100% their IP. This isn’t to say that the code isn’t theirs…it’s simply that the time and cost of vetting the code is prohibitive.

Second, it takes time to clean up and comment code to the level that makes it useful for other programmers to contribute to it. Code at facilities is written in production and under tight pressure….this means structure and commenting sometimes isn’t up to the level needed and when there are comments maybe they’re not the best things. Cleaning up this code takes a tremendous amount of time as well…it’s one reason it takes time to get the tech out of facilities and into open source.

In addition, managing large scale applications and the interaction between various modules is a very complex process. In addition, one generally needs a strong personality leading development of a software product — the key product manager. This is much more difficult to have happen when working with open source software.

As far as developing and maintaining applications in house, the industry has trended towards moving continued app development out of house and to a third party such as The Foundry. You see this reality with Nuke, Mari, and Katana. Collis says all of these facilities are “trying to get away from the idea of massive in-house engineering teams. And I’m sure if you ended up with an open source compositor you’d end up with a very large in-house engineering team. We have source code licenses of NUKE out there and no one touches it. What people actually want is a supported, developed, maintained, documented bit of software with people they can shout at when it doesn’t work to have them help make it work.”

Senior Shading TD / Fur Specialist

Fin Design and Effects is looking for a Shading TD who has specific experience creating photorealistic fur for feature films or high end TVCs.

The applicant will be responsible for all aspects of look development for a photoreal animal similar to a cow or horse for use in a high profile 60 second TVC. The animal will be seen in solo situations and Massive crowd shots so a level-of-detail system of some kind will be required. Familiarity with Shave and a Haircut and Renderman shading language is strongly preferred. A showreel of some kind demonstrating that you have delivered convincingly real furry animals on past projects is essential.

Project Duration: 6-8 weeks starting 13th June

We are based in Sydney, Australia, but remote work will be considered based on the applicant.

Please email: billy@findesign.com.au with reel and resume.

http://findesign.com.au/

Senior Character Rigging TD

Fin Design and Effects is looking for a senior character rigging TD. The project involves rigging a photoreal animal similar to a cow or horse for use in a high profile 60 second TVC. The animal would be used in both shot-specific keyframe animations and Massive-driven crowd scenes. In addition to rigging the creature, the applicant will be closely involved with integrating it into the massive pipeline and creating level-of-detail assets for interactive animation, distant crowd shots, etc.

Due to the scrutiny that the animal will receive over many shots, it is essential that the applicant has a proven track record working with muscle/skin systems either at a feature film or high-end TVC level. A showreel demonstrating this level of ability is a prerequisite for consideration.

Project Duration: 6-8 weeks starting 13th June

We are based in Sydney, Australia, but remote work will be considered based on the applicant.

Please email: billy@findesign.com.au with reel and resume.

http://findesign.com.au/

London calling for Pirates 4 at Cinesite

London calling for Pirates 4 at Cinesite

Pirates4cinesite_featured

On Stranger Tides is the fourth film in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. This time around Jack Sparrow and Barbossa are searching for the fountain of youth, but so is their foe Blackbeard and his daughter. fxguide talks to Cinesite about their visual effects contribution to the film, which was the studio’s first full stereo 3D project, with the work spanning a carriage chase sequence through London, CG toads and the creation of Barbossa’s peg leg.

Canon 60D vs canon 600D(t3i)

hi guys, i suppose many of you guys have heard about the those two DSLR, so i have searched in many forums trying to find winch one is the best for shooting video ,cause basically i will be shooting a lot of video…
some places they say that the 600d(t3i) its better cause its cheaper and in has the 10 x digital zoom in video mode but others say that the 60d its a better camera …So i don’t really know winch one to buy…and its that 10 X digital zoom such a big thing ??
can you guys give me a hint?
:thanks:

No Caffeine! – Short Film

This is a one minute film I did for my end of year university project, with the theme ‘game’. I’d love to hear some feedback about what people here like and dislike about it 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_F3VPHZ9A8

Spring CGI Reel

Hello!

Here’s a new Spring 2011 3d Generalist demo reel. Modelling, animation, texturing done with Autodesk Maya 2011, Adobe Creative Suite Cs5

thanks for watching it!

_____________
I’ll keep diggin’
’til I feel something…

Russell Weekes On Cubism

London-based, multi-talended director, illustrator and one-third of Lie-Ins and Tigers, Russell Weekes drops a cleverly-crafted piece of cubism for Vadoinmessico’s ‘Pond’.

Posted on Motionographer

Hellohikimori: Universeries

Paris based Hellohikimori, leading the way in design, 3D and interactive content, recently launched Universeries.com; The Brief: Create the new online reference providing unmatchable information about TV Shows creators. Universeries presents more than 140 profiles of series creators and covers more than 1000 TV shows from the 40’s to the latest productions, from Alfred Hitchcock […]

See No Evil: June event

For those in London: See No Evil’s next event is coming up on June 7th, this time with Chris O’Reilly, co-founder of the giant Nexus Productions which has produced and directed some of the most impressive commercials and music videos I’ve ever seen. Honda Grrr comes to mind as possibly one of the […]