Hasta La Motion!

Dear Friends of 3DE!

One of our old friends recently wrote to me:

"There is a major irony that the optical quality of modern cinema is dropping rapidly. Anamorphic is coming back in and even digital cameras proudly advertise that they are ready for anamorphic lenses. The beam splitter alignment on stereo rigs are problematic and rolling shutters are becoming common. The distortion software is improving, but the optical quality is getting worse faster than the software can keep up. "

Indeed, it seems that we all entered a new era of lens distortion, which we thought would be a good idea to address asap. Therefore, we changed our development plan for 3DE4 and added a plugin infrastructure for lens distortion, available now in 3DE4 R1b10!
You’re now free to add your own, custom lens distortion models very easily (new documentation how to do this is on its way).
For the beginning we provide three new, buildin models. A pure radial ("spherical") model which takes lens decentering into account, a higher degree radial model for fisheye lenses and a higher degree anamorphic model (18 parameters). More to come in the future…
In addition, we worked very hard on our calculation routines which extract lens distortion parameters out of a set of matrix points. We realized that optimizing pixel aspect, which usually is not exactly 2.0 for anamorphic lenses, has a great impact on precision. So, it can now be extracted out of a grid shot, as well – please use this feature!

Finally, we added a lot of python scripting commands and fixed numerous calculation core related bugs…

Please see changelog below for more details!

Cheers,

Rolf

www.3dequalizer.com /Dev_Blog

Now in their 38th year, the Annie Awards honor excellence in 26 categories in the field of animation and are presented by the International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood. The awards will be presented on Saturday February 5 at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles, California.

Among the fearsome beasts that Perseus encounters on his perilous journey to defeat Hades in Clash of the Titans are giant scorpion-like creatures known as Scorpiochs. Six of these creatures take part in one of the film’s main battle scenes – a 15-foot fighter, two 30-foot fighters, two 40-foot travellers and a 60-foot mother.The battle evolved from being three separate battles to one huge six-minute-long fight sequence, consisting of 97 shots involving photorealistic CG creatures interacting in a highly complex fight scene.

Miles is an Emmy and VES award-winning character animator whose long credit list includes Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, The Golden Compass and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, as well as numerous television and commercials projects. As animation supervisor on Hallmark’s DINOTOPIA, he won an Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects and a VES Award for Best Character Animation in a Live Action Televised Program.

“We’re very proud of Quentin’s nomination for the Annie Awards’ first ever Character Animation in a Live-Action Production award,” said Antony Hunt, managing director of Cinesite. “He’s one of the industry’s leading character animators and his work on the Scorpioch battle sequence was outstanding.”

About Cinesite

With one of the largest and most comprehensive facilities in Europe, Cinesite’s visual effects team has the capacity and creativity to produce all manner of effects, both digital and physical, for feature films and broadcast projects of all scales. Their award-winning team of highly talented visual effects artists take filmmakers’ ideas and turn them into spectacular cinematic reality.

Cinesite is currently working on Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Warner Bros.), John Carter of Mars (Disney/Pixar), Battle: Los Angeles (Sony/Columbia), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Disney/Bruckheimer) and X-Men: First Class (Twentieth Century Fox).

For more information please visit www.cinesite.com.

cmiVFX Releases New Houdini Smoke and Dust Simulation Training Video
High Definition Training Videos for the Visual Effects Industry

Princeton, NJ (January 25, 2011) – cmiVFX launches its latest full feature training video on SideFX’s Houdini, premiere Visual Effects Animation Package called "Smoke and Dust Simulations". This video covers topics in producing large scale simulations within Houdini using the latest tools and custom techniques in the industry. The learning structure used in this video, gears all users up to be able to follow its contents from start to beginning. This is one of the few videos made that allow a novice or experienced Houdini user the ability to learn on the same level. The degree of quality, of the produced results only vary by a few settings in the software, so we created this entire video with the learning addition of Houdini, called "Apprentice", so that even the Master Magician himself could learn this technique if he were still alive today! We leave no man, woman, or child behind! With cmiVFX nearby, EVERYONE can learn the answers to the most complicated problems in the visual effects universe.

Here at cmiVFX we maintain a current training library for the latest versions of popular software titles. When it comes to high end CG and VFX training, there is only once choice… cmiVFX! This video is available today at the cmiVFX store for a Special Introductory Offer Price!

Don’t forget about the cmiSubscription plan! Get one today. cmiVFX launched the most affordable subscription plan in Visual FX Training History for only $299 USD, and if you were a subscriber, this New Training Release would already be in your account. This video is also available a-la-cart in our brand new HTML5 player system.

Houdini Smoke and Dust Simulation Training Video
http://store.cmivfx.com/tutorials/vi…Smoke+And+Dust

Layout – Preparing Collisions and Emission Objects
The Pyro material’s interface may appear intimidating at first, so we will help reduce it down to its basic components, smoke, fire, and scattering. The first chapter will explain of the preparation of emitters and collisions objects before plugging them to the dynamic world. It will cover key points that needs the attention before starting your simulation.

Basic Smoke Simulation Set-up
In this section of the video, we insert a dynamic smoke solver simulation, tweaking the different elements for the desire chimney smoke effect. Adding Custom forces and overview the key aspects of the simulation. This will allow for the artist to start visualizing what our system will look like. Its important to run these systems in a lower resolution to get the basic fluid moment working in the way that is desired from you or your supervisor.

Basic Up Res Simulation
To "Up Res", is a technique used to increase the detail of a low resolution simulation. This is where you take a basic smoke design fluid motion and start adding the detail in order for it to look more like a smoke cloud and less like the hot steamy shower you might have taken this morning. This chapter covers each step from a low-res behavior to an Up-Res Smoke Volume cached to disk.

Auto Resize Fluid container
This section of the video will discuss the technique of Auto Resizing the boundaries of your simulation based on density of it self. This method will optimize any simulation to its quickest simulation time and will set you free with no need of simulation boundaries container. The Smoke will only occupy as much space as needed to help reduce overall calculation of a formerly larger dynamic field.

Large Scale Pyro Simulation in depth
Up until now, we have been working with a smaller scale, atypical "enhancement scene" in which the hero of the shot would not be the smoke. However in this Blockbuster Film style, large scale hero smoke effect shot, we take what you have learned so far to the next level by increasing everything! Below is a simple breakdown of the steps used in the project. For more information, you will need to watch the video itself!

========= Large Scale Project ===========

PROJECT: New Mexico Dust Storm Project
The shot for this project was taken at our New Mexico Studio Lot location in Albuquerque. This particular plate was acquired during the production of "Book Of Eli" during our LIDAR scanning collection for the movie.

1) Layout – Creating a layout HIP file based on the image of our New Mexico facility background, matching the ground and camera as well as adjusting scene scale for simulation a large scale dust storm effect.

2) DustStorm Driving Simulation Setup – Setting up the initial pry simulation and implementing the AutoResize technique to it.

3) DustStorm Pyro Tweaks – Tweaking the initial simulation Turbulence forces, Custom Forces and movement behaviors.

4) DustStorm Advect to Particles – Advecting the movement of the initial dust simulation on to a particle network, copying velocity attributes on to points and prepare them to be imported back to DOP’s

5) DustStorm Driven Simulation Pyro Setup – This chapter will show you how to lay down a secondary pry objects and solvers, as well as importing the advected particles as a custom velocity field onto this driven secondary simulation.

6) DustStorm Driven Pyro Tweaking – Adjusting the methods of affecting the driven simulation, using micro solvers, turbulence and custom forces in order to increase the detail level of the Driven Low-Res Pyro Object.

7) DustStorm Driven Pyro Caching To_Disk – Firing the driven by particles Pyro Low Res simulation to disk.

8) DustStorm Driven Pyro UP-Res – Tweaking Up-Res Turbulence forces and voxel resolution to achieve the desire level of detail movement in the Up-Res stage, as well as matching boundaries to the Low Res method object and caching to Disk the final high resolution volume for rendering.

9) DustStorm Shading And Rendering – Lighting, Shadow Map Generation, assigning volume shaders and rendering of the final Up-Res Volumes on disk, also covering quick compositing overview in Houdini and IPR shader tweaking workflows.

=====================================

This video is available today at the cmiVFX Store: http://store.cmivfx.com/

About cmiVFX
cmiVFX is the leader in High Definition Video Training for the Visual Effects Community. Register for FREE and receive hours of FREE content at the cmiVFX Video-on-Demand Player. ( http://store.cmivfx.com/login ) For additional information about cmiVFX, visit http://www.cmivfx.com. © 2010 cmiVFX | cmiStudios. All rights reserved.

as many of you have surely seen we had some internal changes here. A flamewar left its mark and we are using this opportunity to clean house so to speak.

Our owner and Administrator Jah has transferred control over the forum to myself and Gentle Fury. We are are going to be your point person now for all questions of moderation and questions about vfxtalk. While I hope I speak for Gentle Fury, I want to say that we dont pretend to be the know it all’s. It will be a transitional period but I hope that we make an impact in cleaning up vfxtalk. We will watch the idle forums more and may merge/delete some of them, we hope to build the twiki for new users here (or in the upper right corner menu). We will make an efford to keep this forum flame war free and hope to up the quality of answers more. New users should fees as welcome as old professionals. I realize this is a tall order but together we can make it work.

CGnews will still provide us with news and Challenges, the site is in process of being sold to sputnik7 our sponsor so that will boost our technical resources immensely.

I also wanted to point out we have a vfxtalk group on linkedin.com , if your an (upcoming) industry professional please add yourself to the group there as well.

We will still need some forum moderators I think so if you feel your up for it, PM us and we can talk.

If anybody has any questions, dont hesitate to contact either myself or Gentle Fury.

Andreas Jablonka

Gentle Fury

Vancouver, BC, Canada, January 18, 2010—Global visual entertainment services group Prime Focus has contributed more than 120 visual effects shots to the much-anticipated Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures stereoscopic release TRON: Legacy. The film, which is directed by Joseph Kosinski and stars Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde, hit theaters on December 17, 2010.

TRON: Legacy tells the story of Sam Flynn (Hedlund), a rebellious 27-year-old haunted by the mysterious disappearance of his father Kevin Flynn (Bridges); a man once known as the world’s leading video game developer. When Sam investigates a strange signal sent from the old Flynn’s Arcade – a signal that could only come from his father – he finds himself pulled into a digital world where Kevin has been trapped for 20 years. With the help of the fearless warrior Quorra (Wilde), father and son embark on a life-or-death journey across a cyber universe.

Prime Focus completed three highly immersive CG-based sequences under the VFX supervision of Chris Harvey, DFX supervision of Jon Cowley and VFX producer Randal Shore. The team completed nearly 13 minutes of stereoscopic work that featured grand, sweeping vistas of the digital grid landscape, detailed matte paintings from within TRON city and a plummeting out-of-control elevator sequence.

Once clear of the city, Sam, Flynn and Quorra travel across the Grid aboard an updated version of the Solar Sailer – an enormous yet elegant tanker-like ship. The ship carries the three characters effortlessly through an all-CG world; over giant canyons and under starry skies. Teams in both Los Angeles and Vancouver crafted the look and details of the Solar Sailer and generated all the incredible environments.

According to Cowley: "Working with Eric Barba at Digital Domain, our goal was to help Joe [Kosinski] visually realize this grand world he had crafted while pushing the boundaries and expanse of what is possible in 3D."

Prime Focus has an extensive history working on stereoscopic projects and continues to be an industry leader in developing new stereo VFX and conversion technologies. This project paired the talent at Prime Focus with Academy Award®-winning VFX Supervisor Eric Barba and his team at the lead facility, Digital Domain.

Harvey and Cowley oversaw a team of more than 60 artists in the Vancouver and Los Angeles offices over the course of eight months of production. The team’s software toolkit included Maya, V-Ray, Nuke and Terragen.

About Prime Focus
Prime Focus is a global Visual Entertainment Services group that provides creative and technical services to the film, broadcast, commercials, internet and media industries.

The group offers a genuine end-to-end solution from pre-production to final delivery – including previsualization, equipment hire, visual effects, video and audio post-production, digital intermediate, digital asset management and distribution.

Prime Focus employs more than 2,250 people with state-of-the-art facilities throughout key markets of North America, the UK and India. Using its ‘worldsourcing’ business model, Prime Focus provides a network that combines global cost advantages, resources and talent pool with strong relationships and a deep understanding of the local markets.

Prime Focus is a public stock company with shares traded in the Mumbai and National Stock exchanges in India (Symbol – PRIMEFOCUS). Prime Focus also owns and operates Prime Focus London plc (Symbol – PFO), which is publicly traded in the LSE’s AIM market. For more information, please visit www.primefocusworld.com.

About TRON: Legacy
Walt Disney Pictures’ TRON: Legacyis a 3D action-packed adventure set in a digital world unlike anything captured on the big screen. Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), a rebellious 27-year-old, is haunted by the mysterious disappearance of his father Kevin Flynn (Oscar® and Golden Globe® winner Jeff Bridges), a man once known as the world’s leading video-game developer. When Sam investigates a strange signal sent from the abandoned Flynn’s Arcade—that could have only come from his father—he finds himself pulled into a world where Kevin has been trapped for 20 years. With the help of the fearless warrior Quorra (Olivia Wilde), father and son embark on a life-or-death journey across a visually stunning universe—created by Kevin himself—which has become far more advanced with never-before-imagined vehicles, weapons and landscapes, and a ruthless villain who will stop at nothing to prevent their escape.

TRON: Legacy is directed by Joseph Kosinski and produced by Sean Bailey, Jeffrey Silver and Steven Lisberger. The story is by Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz and Brian Klugman & Lee Sternthal, and the screenplay is by Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz, based on characters created by Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird.Presented in Disney Digital 3D™, RealD 3D and IMAX® 3D and scored by Grammy Award®–winning electronic music duo Daft Punk, TRON: Legacy hit theaters on December 17, 2010.