Making Movies
Making Movies Concept Storyboarding Sound Character Development Layout and look Effects Animation Lighting
Concept Pixar’s Lasseter is a genius – “Nothing gets in the way of the story”
Storyboarding Explicitly define Used as guide by animators Scenes Camera shots Special effects Lighting Scale Used as guide by animators
Sound Voice recording of talent completed before animation begins Animations must match the voice over A puppeteer once told me that the voice makes or breaks a character
Character Development 300 Drawings
Character Development 40 Sculptures
Character Development Computer Models
Layout and Look Build scenery Match colors
Matchmoving CG camera must exactly match the real camera Position Rotation Focal length Aperature Easy when camera is instrumented Hard to place CG on moving objects on film
Matchmoving
Matchmoving Square patterns in live action made it easier to track – furniture, wall paper 2D – 3D conversion in Maya
Water
Particle Sim and Indentation
Tools
Compositing
Compositing Lighting
Facial Animation
Facial Animation
Fur
Cloth
Buttons and Creases
Texture
Companies Pixar Dreamworks SKG Disney Tippett Studios Sony Imageworks 4/21/2017 Companies Pixar Disney Sony Imageworks Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) Rhythm and Hues Pacific Data Images (PDI) Dreamworks SKG Tippett Studios Angel Studios Blue Sky Robert Abel and Associates Giant Studios
Toy Story (1995) 77 minutes long; 110,064 frames 800,000 machine hours of rendering 1 terabyte of disk space 3.5 minutes of animation produced each week (maximum) Frame render times: 45 min – 20 hours 110 Suns operating 24-7 for rendering 300 CPU’s
Toy Story Texture maps on Buzz: 189 Number of animation ‘knobs’ (450 to show scuffs and dirt) Number of animation ‘knobs’ Buzz – 700 Woody – 712 Face – 212 Mouth – 58 Sid’s Backpack - 128
Toy Story Number of leaves on trees – 1.2 mil Number of shaders – 1300 Number of storyboards – 25,000
Toy Story 2 80 minutes long, 122,699 frames 1400 processor renderfarm Render time of 10 min to 3 days Direct to video film
Toy Story 2 Software tools Alias|Wavefront Amazon Paint RenderMan
Newman! Subdivision-surfaces Polygonal hair (head) Sculpted clothes Texture mapped on arms Sculpted clothes Complex shaders
Devil’s in the Details Render in color Convert to NTSC B/W Add film effects Jitter Negative scratches Hair Static
Images
Images
Images
Stuart Little 500 shots with digital character 6 main challenges Lip sync Match-move (CG to live-action) Fur Clothes Animation tools Rendering, lighting, compositing
Stuart Little 100+ people worked on CG 32 color/lighting/composite artists 12 technical assistants 30 animators 40 artists 12 R&D
Shooting Film For CG Actors practice with maquettes Maquettes replaced with laser dots lasers on when camera shutter is closed After each take, three extra shots chrome ball for environment map for Stuart’s eyes white and gray balls for lighting info
Match-moving Film scanned Camera tracking data retrieved 3D Equalizer + Alias Maya to prepare (register) the digital camera Once shot is prepared, 2D images rendered and composited with live action
Final Fantasy http://www.arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/01q3/ff-interview/ff-interview-2.html
Final Fantasy Main characters > 300,000 polys 1336 shots 24,606 layers 3,000,000 renders (if only rendered once) typically 5 render revisions render time per frame = 90 min Most layers per shot 500 934,162 days of render time on one CPU they used 1200 CPUs = 778 days of rendering
Final Fantasy Renderman (Pixar) used for rendering direct illumination many hacks to fake global illumination Maya used for modeling Hair Modeled is splines Lighting and rendering complicated as well
Making Movies Production Team Production Line Special Effects
Production Team Directors Modelers Lighting Character Animators Technical Directors Render Wranglers Tools Developers Shader Writers Effects Animators Looks Team Security Officer Janitor Lackey
Render-Farms High Density • Up to 132 Processors for every clusters. • Up to 66 cluster nodes with room for networking & switches Pixar's new RenderFarm : 1024 Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz processors (5 times faster old RISC processors). Inside of eight new clusters running Pixar's own RenderMan software. 2 terabytes of memory 60 terabytes of disk space. First product: "The Incredibles" RackSaver BladeRack Systems