Hasta La Motion!

London, UK, June 1, 2011 – Cinesite, one of the world’s leading film visual effects houses, today announced that it has awarded places on its 2011 Inspire internship program to four exceptional candidates – Luke Armstrong, Ruairi Twohig, Eleanor Bond and Tom Flavelle. The winners were chosen from more than 200 applicants for their exceptional compositing, modeling and texturing skills. The placements will commence in June and run for six weeks.

Luke Armstrong is from Reading, Berkshire, and is graduating from Portsmouth University this summer after studying for a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Animation. He was chosen for his broad range of basic compositing skills. Ruairi Twohig from Sandymount, Dublin, has graduated from the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology with a Bachelor of Arts in Animation. His interest is in compositing, but he was chosen for his good understanding of vfx disciplines across 2D and 3D. Both Luke and Ruairi will be mentored by Cinesite’s compositing team.

Eleanor Bond and Tom Flavelle are both graduating this summer from Bournemouth University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Visualization and Animation. Eleanor, from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, was chosen for the detailed sculpture, realistic shading and textures demonstrated by her showreel. Tom was chosen for his mix of environment and character work. His hometown is Truro in Cornwall. Both interns will be mentored by Cinesite’s modeling and texturing team.

The judging team was overwhelmed by the level of talent demonstrated by this year’s entries. “All of the candidates’ showreels conveyed enthusiasm and hunger to break into the visual effects industry,” commented Antony Hunt, managing director of Cinesite. “We see great benefit for the industry in continuing to grow the Inspire program year-on-year as it’s this next generation of talent that will enable our industry to evolve. I wish Luke, Ruairi, Eleanor and Tom the best of luck with their placements and hope they enjoy their time with us.”

Cinesite’s Inspire internship program is in its second successful year. Last year’s winners, Alex Betancourt and Chris Mulcaster, were both given full-time roles at the company after completing their placements, working on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. They’re both now working on the upcoming Disney/Pixar film, John Carter of Mars.

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.) and John Carter of Mars (Disney/Pixar). The company has recently completed work on 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.

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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.”

“We’re excited to share our new technology as it provides a fun and easy-to-use platform for both our hobbyist and professional customers who want to create high-quality graphics,” said Dan Farr, CEO of DAZ 3D.

DAZ Studio 4 provides an advanced platform for versatile 3D human models. This platform is the basis for the new Genesis series of figures from DAZ 3D. The Genesis series allows for a virtually limitless set of figure variations that can all be built from a common base. These variations can range in both size and proportion while sharing a single joint system.

“Everything from muscle-bound freaks and curvy super-heroines, to toon-style kids or frightfully disgusting monsters can all be created and combined together in infinite combinations, limited only by the artist’s imagination, to form a completely new custom 3D model,” explains Dan Farr.

DAZ Studio 4 utilizes a new file format that is lightweight, easy to transfer and exists in an open format for easy editing. No longer satisfied with the inherent constraints of building upon a third-party platform, DAZ 3D established a new, open platform. DAZ 3D has also announced that they will support any other vendors that offer this file format within their tools.

Key DAZ Studio 4 features include:

• TriAxTM Weight-Map System: Artists now have unparalleled flexibility with our patent-pending weight-map per-axis joint system.

• Auto-Rigging: Artists can now take the base Genesis mesh and push or pull it into virtually anything imaginable. Both proportions and mass of the figure can be altered in a variety of ways. DAZ Studio 4 automatically adjusts the Genesis base skeletal rig to fit within the new shape. http://bit.ly/m0QhAz

• Auto-Fit Plug-in: This tool, available separately, allows customers to up-convert clothes and hairstyles from DAZ 3D’s prior generation of figures for use with the new Genesis series so that their past investments are protected. http://bit.ly/im8s9S

• Smart Content: This new content tells DAZ Studio 4 what type of asset it is, and what other assets are compatible with it. DAZ Studio 4, in turn, can then filter out anything that’s not compatible with what the artist is working on.

• Content Management Service (CMS): This allows customers to easily find their content by keyword, category and/ or compatibility by using a standard meta-data structure. http://bit.ly/iut1Vg

Pricing and Availability

DAZ Studio 4 is available now for free download in both Macintosh and Windows formats. The Auto-Fit plug-in is priced at $99.95 and both are available via the DAZ 3D website at http://www.daz3d.com/studio.

About DAZ 3D

Based in Draper, Utah, DAZ 3D is the leading publisher of personalized 3D digital characters, software and accessories for creative professionals and 3D enthusiasts. Known for its large catalog of inter-operable and versatile 3D models and accessories, DAZ 3D is a growing technology company focused on developing next-generation 3D models and supporting tools. Founded in 2000, DAZ 3D provides a central solution to create, customize and share professional-quality digital creations. More information on the company, its 3D catalog and tools, and the Genesis series is available online at www.daz3d.com

If anyone has any input to this question I’d love to hear.

The free, unlimited-time trial version of finalRender™ 2 forMaya offers full functionality, the software’s complete feature set, and blazing rendering speed. It is ready for download from the cebas website to all registered users. The advanced rendering system is based on the standalone Stage-2 core that enables the same renderer to work with multiple applications. The software is being used by Ghost Studios (Denmark), Das Werk (Germany), Super 78 Studios (Hollywood), Walt Disney, and many others.

finalRender images created by Benjamin Ziegler

Key Selling Points

What makes finalRender for Maya unique in the eyes of its user base compared to competitive and Autodesk-native solutions:

• It offers the only complete integration into the Maya GUI: users never have to leave the GUI when using finalRender (not so with competitive solutions).

• The Render Elements are unique and not available from other vendors.

• It features the best and most complete set of shader materials.

• ShaderGrind™ empowers users to create their own materials.

• It’s faster with global illumination, ray-tracing and many other features.

• It takes less time to learn.

• It’s easier to use.

• It offers the best flexibility for integration into a production pipeline.

• The light transport model is physics based, creating a more photo-realistic and higher quality image.

• It is market tested and robust. The second generation software is available today, including its just released first free Service Pack SP1.

• No need to invest in expensive high-speed graphics cards

• No need for complicated Python or Mel programming in Maya, since finalRender natively supports Hypershade and other Maya shaders.

• What some vendors tout as new and revolutionary, finalRender has offered for years, such as separate options for camera motion blur and optic motion blur, stereo camera support, and Open EXR as used in 3ds Max.

Highly Competitive Pricing

Cebas recently introduced a new pricing scheme that makes finalRender the most cost effective third party Maya renderer on the market today:

• finalRender 2 for Maya, including five render farm licenses: $995

• Additional pack of five render farm licenses: $695

• finalRender R1 to 2 for Maya upgrade, including five render farm licenses: $495

Future-Proof ShaderGrind

In addition to the many custom shaders, finalRender for Maya includes the exceptional ShaderGrind technology. This feature allows users to develop their own materials that can be saved, and used in other and future applications making them perfect for integration into a production pipeline.

http://www.youtube.com/user/cebasVT?…16/Hp5sBigUmJU

finalRender animation by Ghost

Feature Set

• True distributed network rendering

• Updated licensing model: <32 cores per license (16 local plus 16 remote)

• Enhanced multi-core support for even faster translation times

• Network rendering support

• High resolution bitmap rendering >20k

• Particle rendering

• Support for image file formats including OpenEXR, RPF and RLA

• Real-world physical camera exposure model

• Supported polygons, render time subdiv, NURBS

• Advanced fast NURBS tessellation

• Dedicated, ready-to-render finalRender material

• Highly optimized skin shader

• Advanced texture baking

• Particles, including support of per-particle data (even on particle-instanced geometry)

• Ultra fast, flicker free GI

• Photometric and real area light support

• True area shadow support

• Fast 3d motion blur

• Advanced caustic rendering effects

• Special multi-million polygon rendering mode

• Automatic and scene-dependent ray tracing optimization

• Multiple real world cameras

• True micro-triangle displacement support

• Efficient geometry instancing

• Native support for ReelSmart Motionblur (2d)

• Sub-division surfaces at render time

Autodesk Maya Support

• Maya 2010, 2011 and 2012, 32- and 64-bit

• finalRender supports Maya’s Hypershade and nearly all available native shaders in addition to its own advanced ready-to-render shaders, e.g.

• finalRender supports the Architectural Material natively

• Full Maya stereo camera rendering, Shading Network, and hierarchical subdivs without exceptions

finalRender for Maya ships with finalRender shader SDK and a floating license manager. It is available through the cebas online store and more than 60 resellers worldwide, as well as distributors in Russia, Japan, and India.