Continue reading »]]> The Khronos Group used the setting of the 2011 Game Developers Conference to launch its final WebGL 1.0 specification for enabling hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in HTML5 Web browsers without the need for plug-ins. WebGL defines a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0, allowing rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the industry-standard OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics APIs.

WebGL has the support of major silicon and browser vendors, including Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Opera, with multiple browsers already shipping with WebGL implementations, including the beta releases for Mozilla Firefox 4.0, all channels of Google Chrome 9.0, an Opera preview build, and Apple Mac OS Safari builds. Tim Johansson, lead graphics developer at Opera Software, says “Once WebGL becomes pervasive, we can look forward to a new era in creativity on the Web.”

WebGL leverages the pervasive availability of OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics on almost all browser-capable desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms, as well as the recent developments in Web technology, including the massive increases in JavaScript performance. The ability for Web developers to directly access OpenGL-class graphics directly from JavaScript and freely mix 3D with other HTML content will enable a new wave of innovation in Web gaming, educational and training applications, and graphically rich user interfaces to make the Web more enjoyable, productive, and intuitive (see “Universal Appeal,” pg. 18).

There is already a thriving middleware ecosystem around WebGL to provide a wide diversity of Web developers with the ability to easily create compelling 3D content for WebGL-enabled browsers. These tools include: C3DL, CopperLicht, EnergizeGL, GammaJS, GLGE, GTW, O3D, OSG.JS, SceneJS, SpiderGL, TDL, Three.js, and X3DOM.

In addition to the WebGL specification, Khronos has created a comprehensive WebGL test suite that can be downloaded free of charge at

www.khronos.org/implementers/webgl. Implementers of WebGL-capable browsers can run the test suite and upload their passing test results in order to designate their implementations as conforming to the WebGL specification.

“WebGL enables an entire new class of applications on the Web. Being able to take advantage of first-class 3D hardware acceleration in a browser on both desktop and mobile [platforms] allows Web developers to create compelling and immersive experiences for their users,” says Vlad Vukicevic of Mozilla and chair of the WebGL working group.

In addition, Khronos also announced the formation of the WebCL working group to explore the possibility of defining a JavaScript binding to the Khronos OpenCL standard for heterogeneous parallel computing. WebCL creates the potential to harness GPU and multi-core CPU parallel processing from a Web browser, enabling significant acceleration of applications, such as image and video processing and advanced physics for WebGL games. Companies interested in participating in the definition of WebCL should contact Khronos at info@khronos.org.

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL, OpenGL ES, WebGL, OpenCL, OpenMAX, OpenVG, OpenSL ES, OpenKODE, and Collada.

Incoming search terms:

• virtual cinematography webgl

Continue reading »]]> “It was one of those secret-passion projects,” says Blue Sky Studios’ Carlos Saldanha, who destined a Twentieth Century Fox Animation underline Rio. “That’s where I’m from, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. we suspicion it would be a good place to set an animation. It has culture, color, a city, a forest, a jungle. So, we started to emanate an thought there as early as 2002.”

News articles about penguins that remove their signals and rinse adult on a beach in Rio sparked Saldanha’s initial idea. He had usually finished co-directing Ice Age and “Gone Nutty,” a brief film for that he perceived an Oscar nomination. “I desired a judgment of a impression that’s a fish out of water, that moves from a cold to a tropics and finds his heart in Rio,” he says.

But, Robots (2005), that he co-directed, and a sequel,
Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), that he directed, intervened. So, a story set in
Rio landed on a shelf. When Saldanha finished a second
Ice Age, he picked adult a story again, nonetheless by that time, penguins had starred in so many films, a studio nixed a flightless birds as categorical characters. If that weren’t enough, a third sequel,
Ice Age: Dawn of a Dinosaurs (2009), that he directed, sent a story behind to a shelf again.

“I was so certain it could be a fun project, though, that we kept a thought alive,” Saldanha says. “There was a macaw impression that we desired in a strange idea, so we motionless to make him come from a cold in America.” And, when Saldanha detected a singular Spix’s Macaw, creatively from Brazil nonetheless now alive usually in captivity, he had a judgment he could work with for Blu, his star (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg).

“Blu is an roughly human-like bird, lifted in a bookshop by Linda,” Saldanha explains. “He can review and investigate books.” One day, Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro), an ornithologist, comes into a emporium and tells Linda (Leslie Mann) that Blu is a final masculine of his kind. But, there is a womanlike blue macaw in Rio. “He says to Linda that she contingency come to Rio to accommodate her,” Saldanha says. So, they induce their plan.

Once in Rio, Blu meets Jewel (Anne Hathaway), a street-smart blue macaw. And then, a feathers fly. When a abductor nabs Blu and Jewel, Tulio and Linda contingency hunt a city for a birds. “It is a together romance,” Saldanha says. “And, a tour for both Linda and Blu to find their wings and their heart in a story.” Bruce Anderson wrote a screenplay, that takes a characters from a beach to a jungle and into Rio’s famous Carnival and Sambadrome, stuffing a film with song and color.

“I was unequivocally picky,” Saldanha says. “I attempted to keep a film unequivocally constant to a city so it felt authentic. But many of all, we wanted to constraint a vibe, a state of mind. As shortly as a film was greenlit, we brought in a gazillion books about Rio and gave lectures any day to douse a organisation in a culture. But it wasn’t enough. People missed a point. So, we grabbed 6 people, including a conduct of story, a art director, and cinematographer, and we went to Rio for Carnival. We all had costumes, and we paraded. We went to all a locations, and we explained how to get from indicate A to indicate B. No one had been to Rio before, so everybody was Blu. When we came back, we had 6 allies to assistance disseminate a story.”

Although many of a organisation on Rio had worked on Blue Sky’s prior films, this journey supposing 3 new technical challenges: birds, humans, and crowds.

Birds and their Feathers

For a birds, a thought was to emanate characters that could fly and speak during a same time, and were comedic nonetheless defended a spirit of reality.

“We brought in bird experts and schooled that macaws are unequivocally constant and unequivocally smart, so that influenced Blu’s communication with Linda,” Saldanha says. “We also schooled that cockatoos adore eating chicken, that is creepy nonetheless a good thing to do with Nigel given he’s a villain.” Because cockatoos fume adult and recover powder when they get angry, Nigel (Jemaine Clement) does, too.

As for flying, nonetheless a trained Blu hasn’t flown in his Minnesota bookstore, a birds in Rio do. “We wanted a birds to use their wings like arms, nonetheless we didn’t wish them to be cartoony,” Saldanha says. In addition, a drawings from prolongation engineer Sergio Pablos showed birds regulating moody feathers during a ends of their wings like fingers.

“Wings are rather like arms, nonetheless a bird anatomy is so different,” says paraphernalia administrator Adam Burr. “The bone structure is different. But, a executive wanted a birds to overlay their wings into a physique and benefaction a neat silhouette. Our snarl was in defining one supply that could do both, to make a transition well-spoken within a shot.”

The trickiest partial of a paraphernalia complement to solve was a folding. Modelers operative in Autodesk’s Maya built a wings, nonetheless given they weren’t nonetheless rigged, they couldn’t overlay them. “When we demeanour during many birds, when a wing is folded, a physique has one purify silhouette,” Burr says. “You competence not be means to tell where a wing is. If a wing is too prolonged or too short, it doesn’t overlay right.” So, a modelers and riggers worked behind and onward within Maya on prototypes to ideal a proportions.

To accommodate a second challenge, of carrying feathers act like fingers, a riggers total controls for any plume during a tips of a wings. “We fraudulent a moody feathers so they could twist adult as if they were fingers on a palm and still lay cleanly,” says paraphernalia administrator Justin Leach.

Feather geometry gathering a position of all a hairs on a feather. “You can see that quite on a cockatoo, that has settlement feathers as good as fingers,” says Eric Maurer, fur supervisor. “The animators could squish and stretch, and all a small plume barbs would follow. Usually, when we do feathers, we lift any dart as fur hair. But, carrying quills with all a small hairs was unmanageable for animators who wanted genuine geometry they could poise with normal tools.”

That and a array of feathered friends stirred a organisation to rise new methods for describing a feathers. Previously, a fur organisation drew any dart on any feather, even when that meant sketch millions of small barbs. For this film, they placed quills for any plume regulating a studio’s fur bathing tools, and then, with a plug-in grown within Blue Sky’s digest module CGI Studio, employed that needle to place and twist a “fur file.”

“You could consider of a quills as homogeneous to beam hairs, nonetheless we don’t instance feathers,” Maurer says. “We have a fur record that describes a quill, and a fur record that describes opposite forms of feather. We mix a two. We use a needle to place and twist a plume description, and afterwards reinstate a needle with a suitable plume macro. We can also mix between other plume descriptions.”

At Blue Sky, rather than describing beam hairs and interpolating them, a fur complement interpolates usually a motion. “Historically, a fur artists report any singular hair, and we solve any hair [feather] uniquely,” Maurer says. “The fur artists have a coherence to emanate what they want, and we consider it gives us a brilliance to a fur descriptions. But it has also total some overhead. The macro plume complement lightened that bequest workflow and reduced a array of singular hairs we were drawing. We used to prepare a fur husband with 10 million hairs overnight. Now, we’re cooking 10,000 quills in reduction than an hour.”

For comparison animator Pete Paquette, a birds arrange among a many formidable creatures he has animated. “We paid a lot of courtesy to how they flew from one support to a next,” he says. “Because we had control of literally any plume on a wing, it took a lot of courtesy to detail. If we didn’t hold a feather, we could tell.”

The faces presented riggers with a same plea of anticipating a right change between realism and cartoon. “Birds talk, nonetheless we can’t see countenance in their faces,” Burr says. “We wanted them to do more. We detected that saying a dilemma of a mouth where a bill transitions into a impertinence was important; we could give them a grin that picturesque birds don’t have.”

An pragmatic brow shallow also helped with facial expressions, and, of course, so did a eyes. “We have eyelid controls for hand-sculpting shapes opposite a eyeball,” Leach says. “And rigs that squish and widen a eye nonetheless keep a student and iris in ideal circles.”

A Bully Solution

Among a other vicious non-human characters in a film is a bulldog named Luiz (Tracy Morgan). Paquette was lead animator for Luiz, one of Saldanha’s favorite characters. “I can’t collect one favorite,” Saldanha says, “because that would not be honoring a other characters in a film. But, Luiz is one of a surprises in a movie. And, I’ve always wanted to play with a impression that had a drooling problem.”

The displaying and paraphernalia plea for a bulldog was in handling a mechanics for a fat dog with prolonged jowls. “His neck area was a biggest challenge,” Leach says, “especially when he was looking around. Rigging collisions are time-consuming; it means sculpting visible shapes.”

Working with a riggers in pre-production was Paquette, who describes a pursuit of a lead animator as: “Fostering a impression to get it prepared for production, anticipating out what works and what doesn’t work,” he says. “If it doesn’t work, we have to go behind to a sketch board, and that happened with Luiz. He was a delegate character, and afterwards suddenly, he had a vital purpose in a film.” At initial Paquette attempted to use a strange model, nonetheless that dog hadn’t been designed to talk. “I did a discerning lip-sync test, and it looked rudimentary, roughly sub-video-game quality,” Paquette says. “We knew we couldn’t do this.”

The redesign took scarcely dual months. The modelers altered a dog’s face to make him seem some-more appealing, relocating a eyes closer together, creation a pupils bigger and a brows thicker. They altered his mouth, and they done him fleshier. “It took a while to pinpoint a things that would make him feel some-more like a dog, nonetheless we got to a indicate where, station by himself, he felt like an organic bulldog,” Paquette says. “And afterwards once we altered a model, we had to re-rig it from blemish to make certain a skin was weighted rightly to a skeleton.”

As for a drool, “we did hearing and error,” Paquette says. “We attempted to see if it would be inestimable for a animators to do it, nonetheless it became too time-consuming.” Instead, a animators incited a drool over to a make-believe team, that sent it elsewhere. “It’s usually fume and mirrors from a effects department,” says Keith Stichweh, impression make-believe supervisor.

With a new supply and new indication in place, Paquette total pivotal poses for Luiz’s performance. He started by looking during video anxiety of bulldogs and during friends’ bulldogs. Then, he pitched pivotal shots to a executive regulating pencil tests. “I like to draw, and a pencil tests cut a time in half or some-more given it’s such a discerning approach to do gestures, choreography, poses, blocking,” he says. “I can go by mixed iterations, while someone operative on a indication competence take double a time to get one.”

And all that work gave Luiz a event to play a vicious role. Although a kidnappers have cumulative Blu and Jewel together, they conduct to accommodate Rafael (George Lopez), a toucan. “When Raffi saw a dual birds cumulative together, he knew to take them to Luiz,” Paquette says. “Luiz doesn’t unequivocally know what he’s doing, nonetheless he frees them, and Blu rides on his behind to a Carnival. Luiz’s purpose is to assistance Blu and Jewel get to a place they need to be faster.”

Camera Moves

To assistance emanate a live-action feeling of Rio, executive Carlos Saldanha’s crony Renalto Falco, a Brazilian-born live-action cinematographer, worked with a blueprint artists who total Rio’s camera moves. “Having a executive of photography is new to Blue Sky,” says Rob Cardone, blueprint supervisor. “The initial thought was that he would deliberate on camera, lighting, and story arcs like a live-action DP would. But as prolongation went on, a concentration for a DP became some-more in a camera phase.”

Layout artists set a initial camera and staging, operative from storyboards and a low-resolution, exploratory chronicle of a set that was mostly as elementary as cubes and cylinders. They work with camera rigs and lenses that impersonate live-action cameras.

“We have a barrow lane a camera can follow, a crane” says Karyn Monschein, blueprint technical lead. “We can supplement camera shake and pointed movements. And on this film, we total things to feign abyss of margin in a playblast.”

Once a executive approves a camera moves in a low-resolution set, a files pierce to set settlement and modeling. When genuine geometry for props and set pieces are in place, a blueprint organisation checks a camera and a sets, and sends a sequences for approval. At this theatre a cameras indicating to a movement in one set competence extend over several shots, so once a executive has authorized a sequences, a blueprint artists mangle a large files into sold files for animation. “Each animator gets one camera per record with usually a characters and set pieces in their shot,” Monschein says.

Two camera artists attend all a animation dailies and take records so that if a camera moves need to change, a blueprint artists can make those changes. “We’ve schooled that if everybody can change a camera, everybody will change a camera,” Cardone says. Once a executive approves a shot in animation, all is sealed down so a rest of a tube can finish.

“I consider that a camera in this film is a many sparkling we’ve produced,” Cardone says. “We’ve had a many freedom, and it shows. The camera is

really dynamic.” –Barbara Robertson

Chain Reaction

Before Luiz frees a dual birds, a animators had to emanate performances for Blu, Jewel, and a process between them. For a chain, they relied on a complement designed by a impression make-believe department, a new dialect total for this film. Because a studio uses Maya, a make-believe dialect motionless to start with nCloth and customize it as needed. “We didn’t have a cloth-simulation solution,” says Stichweh. “We had 8 months to put it together and confederate it into a tube a association had grown over a past 20 years.”

One customization rubbed a chain. “Think of a badge done with polygon faces cumulative together, a 50×1 badge of polygons,” Stichweh says. “I can spin this badge into cloth, control stretching and sheering and a center, and constrain links. It’s like a bad man’s RBD (rigid-body dynamics).”

In addition, an IK-based paraphernalia complement gave animators a ability to poise a chain. “But we indispensable a third routine that was a mix between a dual systems,” Stichweh says. “And a mix indispensable to demeanour natural.” The thought was to give animators a ability to insert dual shackles, run a make-believe in that a process would act normally, and afterwards send that suit to a keyframed ribbon. “When we achieved that, we bridged a dual worlds,” Stichweh says. “Animators could squeeze a territory of a process that is a hand-animated joint. We had ramps and blends from that indicate on to transition linearly or with a spline into a simulation. It was roughly like picking a necklace off a ground.”

In other words, a collection authorised a make-believe to pass by a set of pivotal poses. “I knew it would be great,” says CG administrator Rob Cavaleri, “when in a exam shot a animators had Blu and Jewel burst over a car, and in a center of a jump, a process made a heart and afterwards loose and was smooth.”

The Human Touch

The Carnival—during that a throng of 50,000 people watch a impetus with thousands of costumed dancers roving on floats and behaving between—represented a outrageous technical feat for a crew, as did Linda and Tulio, a tellurian stars of a film. “We did a small bit of work on humans for a initial Ice Age,” says Saldanha, “the baby and a family. But they were wanton in terms of elements. They couldn’t talk. And we didn’t do cloth simulation. In this film, a humans play out a together story with behaving performances and cloth simulation, that was technically severe for us. So, we unequivocally built some-more controls to give a animators leisure to emanate pointed eye movements and facial expressions.”

The riggers started with indication sheets drawn by Pablos that showed several facial expressions, formulating blendshapes that done it probable for animators to compare those expressions, and afterwards they designed a supply to concede more.

For animators used to pulling facial expressions on a prior cartoony films, that leisure was an emanate during first—cartoony expressions on humans can demeanour grotesque. “We had a lot of behind and onward with animation to learn what done a many appealing faces,” Burr says. But, a riggers didn’t extent a animators—they had to extent themselves.

“We build a lot of functionality into a rigs,” Leach says. “The animators can flattering many carve a characters on a shot-by-shot basis; they can use a controls to carve a supply formed on a camera angle. And, on tip of that, a animators can supplement in shot deformers. They can lift a supply distant over what it is ostensible to do.”

Creating a humans’ skin also pushed a organisation into new investigate areas. Blue Sky is justifiably unapproachable of a exclusive programming denunciation and renderer, CGI Studio (also called “Studio”), a raytracer designed to copy light accurately. Studio produces suit blur, reflection, refraction, tellurian illumination, disband reflection, and abyss of margin regulating beliefs of physics. Furthermore, rather than formulating formidable and minute surfaces with hardness maps, artists during Blue Sky rise many materials procedurally.

Mathematical Materials

“We’ll use hardness maps for graphics on signs, permit plates, things like that,” says materials administrator Brian Hill. “But we generated 98 percent of what we see on a shade procedurally. It’s a opposite approach of coming surfaces that we started with Robots (see “Mech Believe,” Mar 2005), and have kept going that approach since. We like it. Because it’s mathematically driven, it’s resolution-independent—if we procedurally beget a slope between dual points for a strike vigilance and wizz into it, it’s still gradating from 0 to one between dual points.”

However, given a organisation had nonetheless to emanate procedural skin shaders for humans, they incited to Carl Ludwig’s RD department  for help. Ludwig, now clamp boss and  CTO during Blue Sky, co-founded a studio in 1987 with a organisation of people who had worked  on TRON during MAGI/Synthavision. He and physicist Eugene Troubetzkoy grown a exclusive module and renderer.

“To emanate a skin shader, Carl [Ludwig] used a same transmittance formula bottom we had been regulating to give leaves and leaflet a unclouded look,” Hill says. “It’s kind of a homogeneous of what other studios call subsurface pinch or translucency. Carl rewrote a software, plussed it up, and handed this new extraordinary underline to us. One of a comparison materials technical directors set adult a core skin we used on any singular tellurian in a movie.”

The transmittance constructed a subsurface heat for a skin. To emanate a surface, materials artists used procedural tools, dialing parameters that total pores, shininess, and so onward to a simple material. “The materials properties are a script, a hulk content record total in a Studio scripting language,” Hill says. “In that file, we report a color, specularity, roughness, density, transmittance, all those things.”

In practice, a materials artist competence start with a bottom color, supplement three-dimensional sound to allay that tone channel, adjust a magnitude of noise, and allay a hue, saturation, and value of a color. Then, a artist competence supplement another procession that altered that result, and a third that modulates a outcome of those two, and so forth.

“To emanate pores, we chuck on a cell-noise procedure, flip it around, and play with tangents and constants to get it to demeanour like pores,” Hill says. Another procession mixes dual materials to create, for example, flushed cheeks. And, regulating volume procedures, they can supplement freckles and moles in specific areas.

“Imagine a round volume with all inside as a one and all outward as a zero,” Hill explains. “I can cocktail Linda onto a screen, locate her impertinence in space, and put a globe there that we scale, rotate, and interpret to a specific location. Then we can carve some dungeon sound to make freckles, and put small cells inside a sphere. We mix procedures in all sorts of ways.”

An interactive renderer creates it probable for a materials artists to see a formula of their tinkering quickly. “You can work particularly with a script, or, if we wish to demeanour and correlate with an image, we can bucket adult a discerning render,” Hill says. “It grabs 10 or 15 machines to be your slave, and distributes a digest opposite those machines so we can describe an area over and over as we tweak a numbers.”

Rio in Stereo

The stereo organisation starts laying out their cameras during a same time as a blueprint artists emanate a initial camera moves. “As shortly as blueprint completes a sequence, we emanate a left eye,” says Dan Abramovich, lead stereoscopic technical director. “We have special collection all opposite a pipeline—proprietary module for a camera and how it interacts with a renderer, collection for setting  adult a camera and determining a variables, sequence-based tools, observation tools, digest tools. We’re means to perspective stereo imagery all a approach from [Autodesk’s] Maya to [The Foundry’s] Nuke.”

The vital change with this film was in how a artists used abyss of field. They began experimenting with a technique in a third Ice Age film nonetheless private it, and afterwards approached a thought again with Rio.

“We defocus a background,” Abramovich says. “And, we use a lot of shelve focus. In some sequences, defocus became a visible effect. Instead of re-adjusting a defocus, we’d let it stay and equivalent colors to emanate a enchanting shimmering effect. We leapt off into a new artistic area. We had a defocus and a depth. Now we had pleasing light blooms. We charcterised colors between a left and right eyes. The slight equivalent gives a picture a pixie-dust feeling that we see usually in stereo.”

The sorcery happened accidentally. “We detected a slight disproportion between left and right, and we motionless to keep it if a credentials was de­focused given it felt magical. If they were in focus, it could be a problem. The shimmering lends itself to rarely contemplative material, like water. We also used it to emanate a nightclub feel, formulating a stylized defocus with a bar lights. It feels magical, nonetheless there’s a hugely technical routine behind it. It’s never a home run. We had to put a lot of work into it.” –Barbara Robertson

Cloth Simulation

To pierce a characters’ costumes, a make-believe organisation evaluated several cloth simulators before settling on Maya nCloth. “We’re a Maya studio for a many part,” says Stichweh, “so staying within a same 3D package was a certain thing.”

Then, they blending a module to Blue Sky’s character of animation. “Our character is cartoony with squish and stretch, nonetheless simulation, by default, follows physically formed rules,” Stichweh says. “We total a lot of pre-simulation and post-simulation collection to adjust a sim to a animation style. Our bar for either a make-believe was successful was either something reads as cloth nonetheless isn’t distracting.”

In sum, a complement a organisation total used panoply fraudulent to pierce with a character’s physique so that a animators could spin a switch and see that silhouette. “The cloth had a supply weighting of a physique so, for example, a shirt focussed with an arm,” Stichweh explains. “It wasn’t unequivocally simulation; it looked like Saturday-morning animation cloth.”

Then, a complement called “Anim to Cloth” ran a book that automatically prepped a wardrobe for simulation. “We satisfied a charge lists were a same all a time, so we programmed a prep,” Stichweh says. “The complement could even squeeze a default library for a sold garment, contend Linda in a raincoat, and contention a make-believe but anyone touching a file.”

The supply had a switch that would send wardrobe that didn’t need simulation—costumes ragged by credentials characters in a crowd, for example—straight on to rendering. “If there was a make-believe cache, it went to simulation,” Stichweh says. “No one had to keep track. If we cared about 5 characters out of 50 in a shot, we’d tab those adult front.”

Stichweh likes to consider of a complement they grown as a set of on/off ramps to a highway that is a studio’s bequest pipeline. “Our communication in and out was usually caches,” he says. “That way, we could do flattering many what we wanted but worrying about complying with a pipeline.”

Road to Rio

Systems such as that done it probable to move Rio alive. “The charge was incomparable than we expected,” Saldanha says. “We had a swarming beach. We had a impetus with thousands of people partying. The animators had a list of we don’t know how many cycles. we was tender with a work a organisation put into it. It felt like we were sharpened live movement in Rio.”

Modelers operative from constant topology and maps simplified a landscape to embody a categorical landmarks and afterwards built a city with a multiple of procedural collection and hand-built models. “I wanted a city to demeanour from distant like you’re there,” Saldanha says.

To supplement such sum as a mosaic-tiled path on a Copacabana Beach, a materials artists again used procedural techniques rather than hardness maps. “It’s harder than creation something organic,” Hill says. “We had to fit together small black-and-white tiles into an conscious pattern. Procedurally generating that to a grade of handmade-ness that Carlos [Saldanha] wanted was difficult.”

In fact, it took a collaborative bid between RD, effects, and a materials dialect to emanate a routine that worked. “Imagine a curvy spline in a center of a box, with all to a left black and to a right white,” Hill says. “We fed a array of these curves and pointless tile shapes into a stacking algorithm one of a effects TDs wrote. It fit a tiles together like a puzzle, gripping a slightest volume of grout between.” The same technique paved a streets with cobblestones.

The organisation also grown procedural methods for a forests and jungles. “We couldn’t use banishment to emanate trees during a stretch given a RAM footprint would have been too much,” Hill says. “But we wanted that grade of detail. So RD and a materials artists came adult with an substantial aspect duty that total little substantial surfaces made like trees.” Procedural manners commanded that a plants would grow usually on plane surfaces, and several parameters tranquil magnitude and scale. “We could shower trees all over Rio with no RAM footprint during all,” Hill says. “But in a impassioned foreground, a procedural displaying organisation did all a work.”

Similarly, a H2O soaking onto a beach total procedurally charcterised materials and molecule effects. “Most of a shots were sincerely distant away, so we didn’t have to emanate super-close waves,” Cavaleri says. “The crowds, though, were an huge task. It takes so many bid opposite so many departments to get a information to a reasonable number, and a lot of up-front task to lift together a assets, place a opening cycles, and pass them by a Maya tube into a renderer in an fit way. And then, we indispensable a accumulation of techniques to describe all efficiently. We heavily leveraged a voxel technique.”

A throng of approximately 50,000 people enter a stands of a Sambadrome, and afterwards a parade-goers impetus through. “There are maybe 100 on floats, and we had 10 or 12 floats, and afterwards of impetus we had parade-goers in between distant by dress and color,” Cavaleri says. “They could be guys wearing alligator costumes, people on stilts with palm trees. We had extraordinary costumes.” The organisation stored animation cycles for any dance in containers that enclosed 3 to 5 cycles. For many of a costumes, any cycle went by a make-believe pass.

To describe a trees, crowds, hair, fur…entire landscapes, a organisation relied on a exclusive voxel complement grown by Maurice Van Swaaij. “We devise a kind of camera-space voxel grid over a scene, cut adult all into voxel-sized pieces, and filter into any voxel,” Maurer says. “Instead of a raytracer tracking to hairs or leaves, it outlines to a voxel body. For fur, we’d store a normal orientation, color, and firmness in any voxel. For geometry, we store a normal normal. In addition, for this show, we started to voxelize element properties, specular, roughness, and transmittance.”

The voxel digest routine supposing dual advantages in particular: pre-filtering and RAM efficiency. “When we’re stuffing those voxels, we competence have partial of a hair land in one voxel and partial in another, for example,” Maurer says. “So we finish adult with a 3D voxel physique but sudden changes from voxel to voxel.”

As for RAM efficiency, Maurer points to shots in a Sambadrome. “With a raytracer, we need all in RAM all a time,” he says. “It isn’t like [Pixar’s] RenderMan where we can mangle adult a stage into tools and understanding with packets. So, 30,000 characters would need 30g of RAM or some-more for a scene, and we had an 8g RAM bill per frame. By pre-processing all that information into a voxel body, we reduced a RAM to 5 or 6 gigs, and a digest wasn’t noisy. The trade-off was a pre-processing time, so we’re always balancing that.” Compositors operative in The Foundry’s Nuke fabricated layers of a impetus rendered independently.

The final stage to breeze a approach by digest and into compositing was a regretful sequence. “The dual birds are commencement to tumble in love,” Saldanha says. “The stage takes place in a mountainy area with mill streets. There’s a trolley and petals drifting around. It’s a super-expensive process to put together, and we was satirical my nails, fearful it wouldn’t happen. But, it was value a wait.”

Saldanha, who had hold his passion for Rio and Rio during brook given 2002, could good have pronounced that about a whole film.

Rio outlines a transition for a crew, too. “We changed brazen on so many fronts, so many areas of new technology,” Burr says. “It’s a biggest step this studio has taken in terms of movies.” And a organisation promises that this is usually a first.

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning author and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached during BarbaraRR@comcast.net.

Article source: http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2011/Volume-34-Issue-4-April-2011-/Stepping-Out.aspx

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Unwrella is the new automatic and optimal unwrapping plug-in for Autodesk™ 3D Studio Max™. It was developed for the high demands of graphics designers in real world production environments and provides a fast, simple and reliable unwrapping solution.

It is the first tool of this kind on the market, allowing the unwrapping of 3d models to be done with a single mouse click while simultaneously providing optimal results that combine the minimized texture stretching of automated unwrapping techniques with the efficient space utilization and chunk distribution of UV space that is achieved with manual pelt wrapping methods. This allows users to quickly solve complex tasks like the creation of seamless 3d models, more accurate lightmaps and productive subsequent processing of the UV maps in other 3d applications like ZBrush™ or Mudbox™

Key features

Automatic one-click solution

The manual labor necessary to properly unwrap multiple 3d models during a production takes significant amounts of time. Unwrella replaces this process with the simple application of a modifier to the objects modifier stack. Unwrapping of dozens or even hundreds of objects can be done on the fly and delivers results of optimal quality.
Space efficient

The size of chunks is maximized as much as possible and they are arranged to utilize maximal space on the available UV map. This optimal distribution prevents a significant part of texture memory from being wasted due to padding between chunks.

One-to-one surface to texture ratio

Texture stretching and scaling on surfaces is removed almost completely. Every pixel translates to the same size and aspect ratio on the model surface and creates a uniform visual appearance without reductions in texture sharpness on some areas. Additionally this feature makes texture seams invisible, even under careful inspection.
Versatility

Unwrella consistently delivers quality results with all kinds of 3d models from 3d game objects to industrial designs to complex, irregular organic shapes.

Igor Posavec Graphics Design » Unwrella Plugin: Open Beta Release!

Official Website: http://www.unwrella.com

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