CGW :209_p 1/29/09 3:23 PM Page 1

Kung Fu Panda & 2009 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.
VI SUALLY
ARRESTI NG. . .
The story uidly integrates gorgeous,
impressionistic ourishes with the kind of
hyper-real details one has come to expect
from computer generated imagery:
photorealistic textured stone and fur so
invitingly tactile you want to run
your ngers through it.
Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Academy Award

NOMINEE
Best Animated Feature
Golden Reel
NOMINEE
Best Sound Editing
Be s t Ani mat e d F e at ur e
Annie Award
Nomi nat i ons 17
I N C L U D I N G
3
Visual Effects Society
NOMINATIONS
CGW :209_p 1/29/09 3:07 PM Page 1
February 2009 2
ON THE COVER
SEE IT I N
Disneys CG short lm Glagos Guest, set in 1920s Russia,
features wide open spaces and minimal forms, all of which help
convey the story. The project served as a test bed for a new
animation pipeline, pg. 17.
The industry goes green.
The state of broadcast monitors.
Gus Van Sant discusses the Oscar-
nominated Milk.
Creating models.
Features
Short Subjects, Big Ideas
17
Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios each unveil a unique
animated short lm on the heels of their feature lm successes.
Simple Truths: Disney tries out a streamlined pipeline to create the stark
Russian landscape for Glagos Guest.
Change-O: Pixar creates some magical moments, including new grooming
and clothing processes, for Presto.
By Barbara Robertson
A Clear Vision
26
Those in the manufacturing and science industries are opening their eyes to
the advantages offered by 3D visualization, which can facilitate collaboration
and decision-making.
By Kathleen Maher
Fit Crew
34
When Digital Domain created a unique CG universe for a Honda Fit
campaign, the team stretched its creative muscle with a super-stylized
looka far cry from some of the more recent realistic work the studio has
done for a number of blockbuster features.
By Karen Moltenbrey
Everything You Ever Saw
38
Pixars Ed Catmull offers a past and present look at the studios RenderMan
technology, and its impact on the CG industry.
By Barbara Robertson
Get Recruited in a Recession
42
Theres no way to deny it: The US is in a recession. Experts offer tips that
should give job seekers a competitive advantage.
By Courtney E. Howard
Dancing with the
Ghosts in the Ma-
chine
26
Advances in computer
graphics technology has
helped shape and expand 3D
virtual worlds, where people
assume unique identities and
Bold Camera, Sub-
tle Animation,
Tactile World
18
What happens when the typical
animation process is turned upside
down? You get Despereaux, a computer-
generated fairy tale with stunning epic
environments and detailed characters both
big and small.
By Barbara Robertson
COVER STORY
February 2009 Volume 32 Number 2 I n n o v a t i o n s i n v i s u a l c o m p u t i n g f o r t h e g l o b a l D C C c o m m u n i t y
Departments
Editors Note Entertaining Thoughts
4
What can we expect from the lm industry in 2009? Well, if you consider
whats happening at Sony Pictures Imageworks, we can expect a great deal.
Tim Sarnoff, president of Imageworks, outlines the studios priorities for the
year and comments on industry trends.
Spotlight
6
Products Autodesks Toxik 2009, Mudbox 2009, and ImageModeler
2009 for the Mac platform. Pixellexiss LXGD351SC. Blackmagics DeckLink
Studio ad DeckLink SDI. NewTeks LightWave 9.6. Boxxs 3DBoxx 4850
Extreme Workstation. News Total Immersion shows augmented reality
applications for home use. Ars Electronica Center expands its interactive
museum. From France: E-Magiciens spawns E-Creators game conference;
changes at Supinfocom.
Viewpoint
14
Realistic, emotive digital characters are coming of age, so why arent more
studios taking advantage of this digital movie revolution?
Back Products
46
Recent software and hardware releases.
The films real breakthrough
is technological. Digital and
other screen wizardry made it
possible for Pitt to play a character
from withered old age to
adolescence. Its nothing less
than the discovery of the cinemas
Fountain Of Youth.
This Button changes everything.
James Verniere, Boston Herald
It was Thanksgiving 1930,
I met the person who changed
my life forever.
F OR YOUR CONS I DE RATI ON
F O R Y O U R C O N S I D E R A T I O N
F OR YOUR CONS I DE RATI ON F OR YOUR CONS I DE RATI ON
BES T VI S UAL EFFECTS
2009 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
PARAMOUNTGUILDS.COM
B E S T V I S U A L E F F E C T S
CGW :209_p 1/29/09 3:24 PM Page 1
August 2008
EditorsNote
T
he year 2008 was a good one for visual effects and animated films, especially
in terms of variety. And, 2009 looks promising, as well. What is in store for us?
Are there any big, new trends? Recently, Tim Sarnoff, president of Sony Pic-
tures Imageworks, provided a glimpse into the studios current and near-future plans
as it gears up for another year of what it does best: entertain.
As 2008 was winding down, Imageworks remained in
high gear, releasing the fast-paced Eagle Eye, the spy thriller
Body of Lies, and the World War II drama Valkrie. 2009
starts off super, with the film adaptation of the comic-
book series Watchmen, followed by heroes of a different spe-
cies in G-Force. The animated feature Cloudy with a Chance
of Meatballs will be served up at the beginning of 2010. We
are active and fully engaged, says Sarnoff, who adds a num-
ber of other projects to the list, including Tim Burtons Alice
in Wonderland (2012) and Cats & Dogs 2 (2010).
As Sarnoff points out, some of those films will be stereo-
scopic, including Alice and G-Force. In fact, there are more 3D films in the Image-
works pipeline than ever before, a trend that began with The Polar Express and contin-
ued with Monster House and Beowulf. We are doing more 3D because Imageworks
has been one of the innovators in stereo work for animation and live action, he says.
We are utilizing our tools and technology so we can do 3D while we are doing our
visual effects. It is a lot easier to do 3D when you are already doing the visual effects
work on the film in the first place.
While 3D has come and gone in the past, Sarnoff sees 3D as an industry trend,
not a fad, this time around. Because theaters no longer have to drastically change
their screening environments to show stereo, there is more opportunity to show ste-
reo. While Sarnoff does not think stereo will completely replace 2D movies, he does
believe that 3D will be around from now on. And it will not just be relegated to
theaters; it is spreading to the consumer level, on stereo monitors for computers and
televisions, and soon cell phones. With these distribution options, 3D in theaters is
just a starting point, not an ending point where it was before, he adds.
Another trend that will continue in 2009, according to Sarnoff, is process innova-
tion. The innovations are more subtle these days than in the past. Someone was
always innovating and doing something new for every film, he explains. This year
and for the foreseeable future, we will be looking to become innovators in terms of the
processes by which we create the work. All the shots we are seeing today from everyone
are goodthe critics arent even mentioning most of the invisible visual effects work
anymore because it is getting so good. People can no longer look at a movie and criti-
cize the work because it is embedded in the movie itself.
Sarnoff attributes that to the slow, gradual process by which visual effects are no
longer considered postproduction; they are now considered production. I do not
think there is a film now where we are not in on the very beginning conversations
when the film is being set up, he says. There was a time when a film was set up
and, after the shoot, they would get the visual effects done as sort of an afterthought.
I think this change has been the best part of what we have been able to accomplish as
an industrythat visual effects is a production thought, not an afterthought. Its also
now a script thought, where writers are involved in that conversation. Were no longer
talking about what can be done, but how it can be done.
At Imageworks, Sarnoff believes the next level of innovation will be in changing the
studios global processes. That includes improved efficiencies and extending the use
of assetsa growing trend throughout all walks of life today. We are looking to im-
Entertaining Thoughts
The Magazine for Digital Content Professionals
EDITORIAL
KAREN MOLTENBREY
Chief Editor
karen@cgw.com (603) 432-7568
36 East Nashua Road
Windham, NH 03087
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Courtney Howard, Jenny Donelan,
Audrey Doyle, George Maestri,
Kathleen Maher, Martin McEachern,
Barbara Robertson
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4 February 2009
continued on page 47
CGW :209_p 1/29/09 3:25 PM Page 1
6 February 2009
PRODUCT: CONTENT CREATION
To coincide with the annual Macworld Conference & Expo held
recently, Autodesk announced that it has expanded its port-
folio of Macintosh 2D and 3D software tools for entertainment,
multimedia, and design professionals. The three new 2009
products for the Mac OS X platform include Toxik procedural
compositing software, Mudbox digital sculpting and texture
painting software, and ImageModeler image-based modeling
and photogrammetry software.
These offerings complement the 2009 versions of Maya
3D modeling, animation, and rendering software as well as
Stitcher photo-stitching software, which are already available
on the Mac. The rollout of the products for this platform was
in response to the growing adoption of Mac OS X within the
Mac community.
Mac OS X Leopard, combined with our Mac hardware, offers
creative and design specialists a compelling platform for creat-
ing everything from stunning 2D visual effects to advanced 3D
models for digital entertainment, says Ron Okamoto, Apples
vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.
Toxik 2009 is a node-based digital compositing software
that brings integrated compositing and effects capabilities to
independent 2D visual effects artists and large-scale lm and
broadcast facilities. Toxik 2009 facilitates efcient, collaborative,
iterative workows, and offers a suite of new tools to support
stereoscopic productions and the creation of set extensions with
real-time, interactive, high-resolution compositing. Toxik 2009 for
Mac OS X is expected to be available in March for $3495.
Mudbox 2009, meanwhile, gives 3D modelers, artists, and
designers an intuitive, organic application for painting, textur-
ing, and re-touching 3D models. Mudbox 2009 for Mac OS X
is expected to be available this month for $745.
ImageModeler 2009, image-based modeling and photogram-
metry software, generates 3D models from photos, giving archi-
tects, designers, and entertainment-industry content creators a
different approach to 3D modeling with real-world accuracy. The
Mac OS X version is set to be available in March for $995.
Pixellexis Introduces Single-Card Solution
PRODUCT: VIDEO CARDS
Pixellexis introduced the LXGD351SC, geared to imaging
users who want to speed up their JPEG2000 encoding/decod-
ing (compression/decompression) throughput.
The LXGD351SC is a single PCI Express card with four
lanes holding one MPPA device with 332 processors capable
of 1.2TB/sec operations. Forming part of the Pixellexis LexiGrid
product line, the LXGD351SC card is a fully integrated hard-
ware and software solution supporting lossless (and lossy)
compression/decompression.
The LXGD351SC is available now for an introductory price
of $1999. After this period, the offering will carry a price tag
of $2999.
Autodesk Grows Its Mac Portfolio
February 2009 7
Blackmagic Opens Doors with
Low-Cost DeckLink Studio
PRODUCT: VIDEO CARDS
Blackmagic Design unveiled a new capture card model, Deck-
Link Studio, which replaces the entire Blackmagic standard-
denition product line while adding HD support at a lower cost.
The card also offers increased analog connectivity, making it
compatible with older analog equipment, as well as SD and
HD-SDI for the latest digital equipment.
DeckLink Studio features independent connections for SDI,
analog component, S-Video, and composite video, so all types
of external video equipment can remain connected without re-
cabling. DeckLink Studio also includes SDI connections that
switch between SD and HD, as well as an SD-only output via
a built-in hardware down converter, even when running in HD.
The SD down-converted output is useful when monitoring work
in both SD and HD simultaneously.
The built-in 10-bit hardware down converter is selectable
between letterbox, anamorphic 16:9, and center-cut 4:3 modes,
and operates when running in all HD video formats as well as in
capture and playback modes. Embedded SDI audio is support-
ed via the hardware down converter and output on the SDI.
When running HD video formats, both S-Video and composite
video are output from the down converter, so video is always
present, independent of the video standard being used.
While the card boasts HD features, its $695 price and the
fact that it works in lower-cost computers (via a one-lane PCI
Express connection) make it attractive to those who need only
SD support but who may need to move to HD.
Also, Blackmagic rolled out DeckLink SDI, a new model of
capture card that combines high-quality 10-bit SD/HD-SDI
capture and playback with a cost of $395.
DeckLink SDI is designed for high-end broadcast and post-
production customers working in large SDI-based facilities and
needing numerous creative workstation seats. The card, which
can instantly switch between SD-SDI and HD-SDI formats,
replaces the companys original SD-only DeckLink model.
CGW_Half_HOR:CGW_Half_HOR 9/15/08 10:17 AM Page 1
8 February 2009
PRODUCT: 3D MODELING PRODUCT: WORKSTATIONS
NewTek Turns On LightWave 9.6
NewTek released LightWave Version 9.6, a major update to its
3D modeling and animation software featuring increased stabil-
ity, hair and fur cloning, nodes, and workow acceleration.
LightWave 9.6, the latest free update in the LightWave
Version 9 series, boasts improvements to animation, render-
ing, and workow. The product also contains FiberFX cloning,
for placing multiple instances of hair on an object; layout snap-
ping, for quickly connecting one item to another; and automat-
ic drag-and-drop le loading, for opening an object or scene
icon by dropping the icon into the modeler or layout module.
All told, more than 625 feature requests and resolutions have
been implemented and resolved between LightWave Versions
9.5 and 9.6.
A free trial edition of LightWave 9.6 is available by down-
load from www.lightwave3d.com/lwtrial. LightWave 9.6 is the
fth free update in the LightWave Version 9 series for regis-
tered users. Version 9 can be purchased for $895. Registered
owners of LightWave 3D (Version 8 or earlier) can upgrade
for $395.
Boxx Technologies rolled out the single-processor 3DBoxx
4850 Extreme Workstation. Powered by new Intel Core i7
technology running at 4GHz, the 3DBoxx 4850 Extreme is
equipped with features such as liquid cooling to withstand the
rigors of intense digital content creation workows.
Intel Core i7 architecture with DDR3 provides outstand-
ing memory bandwidth that allows the 4850 Extreme
to rival and often outperform the fastest dual Intel Xeon
processor workstations for specic 2D compositing and
image processing tasks in applications such as Autodesks
Combustion and Adobes After Effects and Photoshop.
With system-integrated design backed by Boxx technical
support, the new 4850 Extreme uses the Microsoft Vista 64
operating system and offers digital artists and studios the
benet of true desktop rendering and multitasking with several
creative software applications.
The 3DBoxx 4850 Extreme is available now and is priced
starting at $4377.
Boxx Unwraps Single-
Processor Workstation
CGW_Half_HOR:CGW_Half_HOR 1/29/09 8:07 AM Page 1
February 2009 9
PRODUCT: WORKSTATIONS
NEWS: AUGMENTED REALITY
At Home with Augmented Reality
In terms of computer graphics technology,
a lot can happen in just one short year.
During Intel CEO Paul S. Otellinis
keynote address at CES last year, a
colleague, standing in a set designed to
look like a street in China, pointed a cell
phone at a menu posted on the outside
of a restaurant and saw a translated
menu appear on a screen in real time.
The demo was real, created with Total
Immersions DFusion software, but a
few off-stage processors helped the cell
phone produce the illusion.
Total Immersion returned to CES this
year with a different but equally dramatic
demonstration of augmented reality. This
time, at Pat Meiers legendary Lunch @
Pieros for innovators and media, there
was no magic box behind the curtain.
Instead, there was a KNex toy box, a
personal computer, and a Webcam.
When anyone pointed the front of the
small toy box at the Webcam, the live feed
of the person holding the box appeared
on the computer screen. And, heres the
magic: On top of the box, CG objects
representing all the parts inside the box
assembled themselves into the toy. The
CG toy stayed put even when the box
moved around in front of the camera.
The proprietary technology in the marker-
less tracking software recognized the side
of the toy box, looked at the contrast data,
interpreted it, and knew what interaction
to produce based on what it recognized. It
all happened in real time: the calculations
and the compositing of the CG animation
with the live video. In a second demo, a
spaceship levitated over a box and then
ew to a table in the composited image
10 feet away.
Usually when you think of augmented
reality, you think of permanent installa-
tions in museums and kiosks, says Greg
Davis, general manager. But we have
a second area designed around the
average consumers PC. Its one of our
newest R&D developments.
Among the earliest adopters of DFusion
@ Home solutions is Nissan, which is
using the technology to promote its new
Cube car. Potential customers can e-mail
Nissan from the Cube Web site to receive
a card. If they have a Webcam attached
to their computer and Microsofts ActiveX
running, they can load a disc that comes
with the card, point the card at the camera,
and a CG Cube will pop up on top of the
card on the computer screen. They can
change colors, the trim on the dashboard,
and so forth. As they turn the card, the
hatch opens and they can see a refrig-
erator inside. When they turn it again, they
might see a water bed inside.
In addition to toys and marketing, Davis
anticipates applications for DFusion in
education and publishing. But, its the
home usage that he predicts will grow
most quickly. Theres a shift in how
consumers want experiences, he says.
The Wii has set a metaphor, and Skype
is driving Webcam usage.
Total Immersion has no plans to sell its
technology; its business model is based
on custom applications for clients who
license the technology. It offers services,
as well, such as 3D art development,
engineering, and project management.
Whether used for museums, to delight
a child holding a picture book in front of a
Webcam, or to help market a new car, one
thing is certain: This is not your fathers
augmented reality. Barbara Robertson
For this augmented reality installation, Total Immersions markerless tracking software
helped turn children into little monsters.
In real time, Total Immersions markerless
tracking software interprets an image
on the card held up to a Webcam (top),
calculates where to place a model of
Nissans Cube, and then composites the
3D car onto the card in the video (bottom)
playing on the computer screen.
CGW_Half_HOR:CGW_Half_HOR 1/29/09 8:07 AM Page 1
10 February 2009
NEWS: CG TECHNOLOGY
A Museum Unlike Any Other
One of the most eye-popping, mind-
expanding public facilities in the world,
the Ars Electronica Center in Linz,
Austria, has unveiled a remarkable new
facility. With 3000 square meters of
exhibit space and another 1000 devot-
ed to its R&D facility, the Future Lab,
the interactive museum offers visitors
a view inside their bodies as well as a
peek into the future. If youre familiar with
SIGGRAPHs Emerging Technology
exhibits, imagine a four-story building
lled with more sophisticated and fully-
realized interactive installations, and youll
have a small idea of what the Ars Elec-
tronica Center offers.
This physical manifestation of the
philosophy of the Ars Electronica, known
in the US largely for its annual Prix Ars
electronic and interactive art and anima-
tion competition, the center furthers Ars
Electronicas research into the conver-
gence of technological innovation, art,
and human society. On the buildings
faade, 40,000 red, green, blue, and
white LEDs turn the glass shell into
animated art using preprogrammed
patterns; the colorful light show is reect-
ed in the waters of the Danube River
below. In the lobby, artist Julius Popps
22-meter-high Bitow, a gigantic eye
formed from thousands of thin tubes that
snake through the building, introduces
visitors to Ars Electronicas current focus
on life sciences. Drops of red uid ow
through the tubes like blood in arteries.
Within the exhibition space, eight
projectors can display 4K stereo 3D
images on a 16- by 9-meter wall and
150 square meters of oor area in Deep
Space. The system is based on a PC
cluster running Nvidia Quadro cards.
Among the Life Science exhibits is
a camera used in ophthalmology that
photographs visitors retinas and projects
the images onto a screen. A functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
machine connected to Linz General
Hospital reveals which neurons re when
a subject feels certain emotions. Seekid
makes it possible to write using glances
of your eye. HoloMan lets visitors appear
to peer inside themselves.
Inside RoboLab, Philip Beesleys
Hylozoic Soils meter-long transparent
tentacles react to people who approach
them. Inside BioLab, visitors can experi-
ment with their own DNA, clone an
orchid, and, using an electron raster
microscope, enlarge the cells of their
own body 10,000 times until they trans-
form into fantastic sculptures.
Its difcult to describe how multilay-
ered these and the other exhibits are.
The center isnt solely about innovation,
or art, or society. Rather, its goal is to
illustrate the reciprocities taking place
among them. But, why not see for your-
self? Linz is Europes capital of culture
in 2009an especially good time to go.
Barbara Robertson
At top, 40,000 LEDs light up the Ars Electronica museum of the future in Linz, Austria, to
celebrate a recent expansion. (Bottom) At left, new interactive life-science exhibits show
visitors graphical representations of the internal workings of their brain and body. At
right, visitors interact with CG images projected in stereo 3D on a wall and oor.
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CGW :209_p 1/29/09 12:37 PM Page 1
12 February 2009
NEWS: DCCEDUCATION
The French Evolution: Digital Reigns
The E-Magiciens festival in Valenciennes,
France, always highlights the work of
talented student animators, but this year,
for its 10th anniversary, the citys Cham-
ber of Commerce brought something
new to the party. First, a new and sepa-
rate conference, called E-Creators, that
took place in nearby Lille. An outgrowth
of last years game development recruit-
ing effort at E-Magiciens, E-Creators is a
combination trade show and job fair that
attracted video-game developers, design
rms, animation studios, and others
focused on digital creation.
Second, the French government
announced that it designated the Nord-
Pas de Calais region, which includes
Valenciennes and Lille, as a region of
excellence for serious games. That
spells money in the form of immedi-
ate grants to budding serious games
developers, as much as 30,000 euros
for prototypes and 150,000 euros for
stage-two development. The Valenci-
ennes Chamber of Commerce is
spearheading the effort and is
now soliciting proposals targeted
toward applications in transporta-
tion, health, and civic law.
In addition, the
Chamber is continuing
its incubation program
for all digital content
creators by providing
a well-equipped space
at low rent to edgling
companies, nancial assistance through
the Chamber, help nding other funding,
and a variety of consulting services. The
Chambers goal is to foster companies
that will increase the number of available
jobs in the area.
In other news, Supinfocom, the herald-
ed animation school founded by Marie-
Anne Fontenier through the Chamber,
has expanded into a ve-year program.
The rst two years, as before, provide
the students with a foundation in art
and animation, and during the last year,
as before, the students work together in
teams to create a short animated lm.
But, year three has now split into two.
We wanted to give the students
more experience with 3D and one more
chance to make a lm, says Anne Brotot,
deputy director. Now, in year four, they
will each make a one-minute short lm.
Yankee Gal, a 3D animation by a team
of fourth-year graduation students took
the top prize for animated lms at the
November 2008 E-Magiciens. But, the
transition means there will be no gradu-
ates or graduation lms competing from
Supinfocom in 2009.
The other big change at Supinfocom is
that Fontenier is retiring. Brotot, who direct-
ed Supinfocom Arles, will replace her.
Supinfogame is also revamping its four-
year program to give students a deeper
education. Here, though, rather than
creating a new ve-year program, the
school is offering separate upper-level
branches for the students last two years
of the four-year program, with one branch
bending more toward game design,
which would include level design, and
the other reaching primarily toward visual
creation. Barbara Robertson
Among several groups showing serious games at E-Creators was 3Dduo, which brought a
not-so-serious MMO called Leelh, as well as a serious stop-smoking application developed
for a French health department and an advergame designed for viral marketing.
(Above) At E-Creators, game developer IDEES-3Com demonstrated an interac-
tive application for serious shoppers (left) and a training program for delivery-
service drivers (right). 3Dduo created the whimsical critter at far left.
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CGW :209_p 1/29/09 3:05 PM Page 1
February 2009 14
Realistic Digital Characters
I
s it possible to have expressive digital characters that are sincere,
intense, and subtle? And, why would you care?
Te term realistic digitally created movie (also called 3D
or CG) appeared on the scene a few years back with the release of
Final FantasyTe Spirits Within. Since then, however, the concept
largely has been ignored, like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in
the room. Te arrival of digital movies is a momentous develop-
ment in the art of cinema that is practically going unnoticed. Yes,
there is a buzz among the people who work in the eld, but the
general public is pretty much unaware of their existence and to-
tally confused about the nature of the medium.
Te digital movie is much more than a technical curiosity; it is
the birth of a totally new medium. Its not animation. Its not con-
ventional cinema. Its not just slick special eects or weird mon-
sters. It is a whole new ball game.

A Personal Foray
Coming from conventional movies, Ive spent the last few years ex-
ploring the possibilities of this new mode of expression. I found the
experience to be nothing less than total freedom. Te progress in
motion pictures through its century of existence was about control-
ling what the spectator sees and hears, and using that control to bet-
ter communicate what the authors want to express. From Grith,
Gance, and Eisenstein, through Welles and Kurosawa, to Spielberg,
Lucas, Scott, Jackson, and Cameron, artists and technicians have
contributed advances to the control of lms various aspects: staging,
camera work, editing, makeup and costume, sets, special eects, and
sound. Tese were giant steps in the right direction, but now there is
a new kid on the block: realistic digitally created movies.
With digital movies, you control absolutely everything, and can
do absolutely anything. You actually reconstruct reality from your
own imagination.
For a director, this is terrifying, and unbelievably exciting. Only
a few brave souls have tried their hands at this so far. For their
courage, Hironobu Sakaguchi and Robert Zemeckis deserve our
unmitigated admiration, and so do their producers.
But more directors and producers need to get into the game.
More lms need to be made and more commercial successes
achieved for the public to really take notice of this new medium.
Weve only started to exploit the innite possibilities of digital
movies. Yes, it has brought dinosaurs back to life. Yes, it has cre-
ated dream worlds and weird creatures. Yes, it has realized slick and
impossible special eects. But we are only scratching the surface. We
need great scripts (this goes without saying). We need original de-
sign and concepts. But more important, we need better, more com-
plex, more subtle, and more compelling virtual characters. When we
learn to create real human beings, the medium will explode.
I created a short demo (prototype) called Kyra, aiming to prove
CGI
By JEAN LAFLEUR
Jean Lafleur has worked in the film
industry, both in Canada and in the
US, for quite some time, starting
out as a film editor on commercials,
documentaries, and features, before
moving on to directing features and
specialized VFX projects.
Jean Laeur created the digital character Kyra as a test, to push her
emotional limits.
February 2009 15
Viewpoint
nnnn
Realistic Digital Characters
that indeed digital characters (with expressions) that have sincerity,
intensity, and subtlety are possible. Te aim, for my rst crack at
this digital world, was to create a realistic character with emotions.
I tried not to cheat, and elected to create a young woman (because
young women are more dicult than males or older people in
that they have less wrinkles to hide the faults), to design her as a
normal girl (no heavy makeup or incredibly long legs), to put her
in an everyday situation (again, more dicult than fantasy situa-
tions because we have more references), to shoot her in close-up
and fully lit (no cheating in the dark), and to write a script that
makes her go through a gamut of emotions in a short amount of
time (not just a walk-on but a real performance).
Tis was not gratuitous bravado. I was trying to see how far we
could go in creating a believable human being.
Making this short demo has aorded me the opportunity to
go through the complete process of a major production (special
eects excluded). Indeed, it is a demanding medium. I took many
wrong turns, some due to my edgling knowledge of the medium,
and some forced on me by limited resources. But I learned a lot. I
had the chance to study the current working
methods (including some that were ecient
and some that could still be improved). I
learned the importance of a well-thought-
out pipeline (the order in which things
should be done), and dened in my mind
which tools each artist and technician needs
to do the best possible job: clear directives,
appropriate visual documentation, ecient
software, and enough computing power.
And I now also know how important
good groundwork islittle things like validating your main char-
acters thoroughly before putting them into production.

The Technology Debate
If there is one thing that is evident to me, it is that quality will not
come from better technology alone. Technology can give us better
tools. Mainly, we need more immediate feedback in modeling,
texturing, lighting, and animating, and, one day, hopefully, better,
simpler, less obtrusive, more precise mocap.
But the best technology in the world will not create more realis-
tic human beings, more sincere emotions, more expressive move-
ments, or more drama and intensity. Only skilled technicians and
talented artists will do that.
If we forget about digitally scanning movie stars and instead
design our own characters, we will reap many advantages. We
can choose the way our character looks. In movies, appearances
matter. It is a great asset to have the characters look t the scripts
requirements and then have the opportunity to cast a talented ac-
tor for the part, regardless of his or her physical appearance.
Te business of creating human faces is fascinating. Faces have
subtle and interesting variations. An innite number of choices
have to be made: variations in proportions, degrees of symmetry,
expressive wrinkles, skin blemishes, and so forth. Creative choices
and subtle departures from the boring Ken and Barbie look-alikes
will give digital humans personality, drama, and charm.
Before there is animation, though, there is rigging. It is the heart
of expression, the way you infuse life, personality, and soul into a
character. A character without good rigging will be an actor with-
out talent. Good rigging will create the all-important charm of your
character. You should devote all your attention, creativity, and care
to make each muscle twitch reveals your characters personality.
Which is the better choice, live actors or CG? Well, this one was
clear to me from the start. If you are looking for hilarious carica-
tures, go for animation. But if you are aiming at realistic characters
with depth, only talented, expressive, and creative actors will do
the job. Tey will inject life and feelings into your characters in a
way no animation ever can.
Another important factor is that when a performance is ap-
plied to a character that has a dierent morphology from your ac-
tor, an interesting and complex translation has to be achieved.
You must preserve the quality of the performance, but adapt it
to the characters personalityan interesting challenge, and no
mean feat!
If I sound passionate about all this, its because I am. I truly be-
lieve that realistic digitally created movies will become a legitimate
art form and an important part of the entertainment industry.
Tis was my rst stab at this type of undertaking. I believe it is
a step in an interesting direction, and I would like to pursue this
work further, and, hopefully, with the right partnership I will be
able to do so. True, there are a few obstacles we must rst overcome,
and that includes telling a story that will connect with the specta-
tor, and breaking the walls of indierence and incomprehension
that surround digital movies. Yet, these are not insurmountable.
Te future for this great new medium is just beginning, and it
indeed looks bright. n
Kyra was an ideal test subject: It was difcult to hide modeling aws with her young face.
Visit GDConf.com for the latest sessions, keynotes, and news
Game Developers Conference

March 23-27, 2009 | Moscone Center, San Francisco
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CGW :209_p 1/29/09 3:06 PM Page 1
Last year, under the direction of Ed Catmull, president,
and John Lasseter, chief creative o cer, Disney Animation Studios and
Pixar Animation Studios each released a feature and a short animated
lm. Whether by design or happenstance, the short lms are com-
pletely dierent in style from the features, which themselves pushed
the studios in new directions.
Disneys Bolt (see Back to the Future, November 2008) is a CG lm
that begins with a rousing superhero action sequence, followed by a comedic
road trip and coming-of-age story. Its adorable stars are a CG dog, cat, and
hamster in a glass ball. On the other hand, Disneys animated short
Glagos Guest, which is directed by Bolt co-director Chris
Williams, is a thought-provoking lm in a bold, minimalist style.
Its a far cry from what most people think of as a Disney lm.
Unlike either of those lms, in Pixars science-ction feature Wall-e
(see Rampant Risk-Taking, July 2008), the robot wanders through
dusty, rusty CG scenes that are dierent from any weve seen before, as
he collects trash on an abandoned planet and then follows his super-modern
Eve to a weird and brightly colored world. But, Presto, Pixars animated
short about a magician and his rabbit, set in 1912, is as wild and wacky as a
Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, or Tex Avery cartoon.
At one time, people seemed to think there was a CG style, that 3D ani-
mation was a genre. Te lms competing for various awards this year, not
the least of which are the Disney and Pixar shorts, prove that CG tools do
not dene the art. Artists do. Barbara Robertson
Above, the arrogant
magician is about to get
his comeuppance in Pixars
Presto. At far left, the Rus-
sian soldiers gray silhouette
against a snowy background in
Disneys Glagos Guest empha-
sizes a stark loneliness that shifts
when an unexpected visitor arrives.
February 2009 17
CG Short Films

Short Subjects,
Big Ideas
A Russian soldier marches from his outpost
into a vast expanse of snow-covered tundra
every day. He guards nothing. He keeps his
eye on nothing. His name is Glago, and
hes the star of Walt Disney Animation Stu-
dios short lm Glagos Guest. And yes,
he does have a guest.
Im being very careful about protecting
exactly what happens for those people who
havent yet seen it, says writer and director
Chris Williams. In the second half of the
lm, a bunch of aliens confront him and
give him a new outlook on life. He learns
that even when it seems like your life is in
a rut, you never know what might happen.
He has to make a judgment, and he
could be wrong.
Unlike Glago, Williams life
wasnt exactly in a rut. Te 14-year
veteran at Disney had worked as a
writer for Te Emperors New Groove
and Mulan. But, he couldnt have
predicted what happened next.
Even though Williams had not
directed a lm before, he found him-
self directing Glagos Guest and co-
directing the feature lm Bolt simul-
taneously. Glagos Guest has received four
Annie nominations: Best Animated Short
Subject, Production Design (Andy Hark-
ness), Storyboarding (Chris Williams),
and Writing (Chris Williams). Bolt has
received an Oscar nomination for Best
Feature Animation.
When John Lasseter took the reins
at Disney Animation, he asked Wil-
liams to pitch short-lm ideas. John
sees short lms as a sign of vitality
within a studio, Williams says. He
pitched six ideas, and of those, Las-
seter picked the most unusual.
Because Williams had already storyboard-
ed the lm Glago, it moved quickly into
production. But soon after, Lasseter asked
him to work on Bolt. I was excited about
Glago, and I could see the enthusiasm on
the part of my crew, so I asked John if I could
make both at the same time, Williams says.
He okayed the idea, so I split my time.
The Deep Empty
Williams had always envisioned Glago as
a CG lm. Te vast emptiness is an im-
portant element, and 3D allows you to feel
the huge open space better than 2D can,
he explains. To help reinforce that feeling
of empty loneliness, Williams set the story
in 1920s Russia. Im from Canada, so I
know what its like to be in a snowy, empty
environment, William says. I think peo-
ple sense that Russia is a huge land mass
with large areas that are not heavily popu-
lated, especially back then.
Setting the lm in the 1920s also limited
Glagos ability to communicate with the
outside world and the weapons hed have
available. One of the movies we watched
for reference was Reds, he says. Te whole
time I was watching, I was thinking that all
those characters were just one cell-phone
call away from solving everything.
As for the aliens, Williams wanted Glago
to confront something outrageous, some-
Director Chris Williams made his lm using CG in
part to create a vast emptiness that would have been
more difcult to achieve with hand-drawn animation.
February 2009 18
nnnn
CG Short Films
The simple shape of the alien spaceship makes it necessary for Glago (and the
audience) to make a judgment about the intentions of whatever might be inside.
Disney tests a new, streamlined
CG pipeline for Glagos Guest
By Barbara Robertson
thing hed have to judge. Te rst drawing
I did had Glago with a typical alien that had
tentacles and a bunch of eyes, he recalls.
But I tried to come up with something
more interesting than that. I pared things
away until I was down to a minimal form.
Many of those minimal forms, an orb,
became the aliens now in the lm. I hadnt
seen aliens look like that before, Williams
says. Also, because theyre simple, blank,
and faceless, Glago can project onto them
intentions that might not be true.
Te aliens became the second motiva-
tion for creating the lm in CG. One
of the great things about CG is that it al-
lows many creatures on screen moving in
sync, Williams says. We could give them
a strangely unnerving quality that creates
an interesting impression on the audience.
Tats something we couldnt pull o in
2D, and maybe not even in live action.
Darin Hollings, who came to Disney
Feature Animation by way of the visual
eects studio DreamQuest Images and
Disneys Te Secret Lab, supervised Gla-
gos visual eects. At Pixar, short lms are
often a springboard for talent and a testing
ground for technical innovation, and Ed
Catmull, Pixars founder and now presi-
dent of Pixar and Disney Animation, car-
ried that tradition to Disney.
Ed Catmull and Andrew Millstein [ex-
ecutive vice president and general manager
of Disney Animation] wanted us to try in-
novative things with the short, Hollings
says. So, we created a new pipeline from
scratch. We wrote new tools to manage all
the assets, and a new lighting package to
send everything to [Pixars] RenderMan.
Our goal was to get the highest quality
level with the least amount of artist time as
we could. We wanted to make things fast
throughout the pipeline so when animators
opened a scene, they could scrub the anima-
tion. Tey didnt have to do a playback.
Pushing Pipeline Speed
Although the crew based the pipeline on
Autodesks Maya, they designed it to be
independent. All the metadata, the way
we put shots together, and the way we lit
shots was independent, Hollings says.
Te geometry stood on its own, and you
could light a scene without opening Maya.
Because the metadata holds the scenes to-
gether, the pipeline is agnostic. However,
everything comes back to Maya.
Yun-Chen Sung, who had worked on a
lighting package for DreamWorks Shark
Tale, created new lighting tools called Lilo
for Glago. Using Lilo, the artists would
position lights in Maya, but they would
adjust values, assign materials, and launch
renders from Lilo. Its base function is to
create and manage the render passes, ex-
plains Hollings.
Lighters used such standard techniques
as subsurface scattering, ambient occlusion,
and so forth for Glago, the aliens, and the
snowy world. Chris wanted big expanses
of emptiness, with sky, snow, and a dark
gure, especially in the rst part, photoreal
in a contrasty way, Hollings says. But,
when you get close, he wanted lots of de-
tail and lushness.
With the streamlined pipeline in mind,
Sung made sure Lilo could produce quick
renders. We didnt use AOVs, Hollings
says, referring to RenderMans arbitrary
output variables, used to separate images
by such attributes as diuse, specular, re-
ections, ambient, and shadows. While
that provides control over individual layers,
this multipass technique creates extra steps
in the production pipeline.
We created ecient RIB les and did
Glago on one level, the spaceship on an-
other level, and so forth, Hollings explains.
We did old-school levels in compositing. It
made it really fast to work on a shot. Toward
the end of production, I could check out a
shot, change the lighting, composite it, and
put it in the queue in a couple of minutes.
Helping make that possible was the
crews attention to speed throughout the
process by creating lightweight models,
textures, and rigs. We had one super-light
rig for the animators that didnt show every
deformation, and then a second rig with
all the deformations that animators could
choose to use or not use, Hollings says.
For facial animation, senior modeler Hi-
roki Itokazu created a rig based on blend-
shapes. We wanted the animation of
Glago to be subtle and dierent from ani-
mation done in the past, so it was impor-
tant to make sure the facial controls could
convey that, Hollings says. We thought
about going with a next-generation defor-
mation slider approach, but Hiroki had
already set up a series of shapes and a user
interface, and had the whole thing working
without even being asked.
Disneys proprietary XGen software grew hair inside tufts modeled with geometry to create the
art-directed look of Glagos beard.
February 2009 19
CG Short Films
nnnn
Simulation
To create Glagos hair, beard, and mous-
tache, the crew pioneered the use of Dis-
neys XGen software with geometrically
sculpted hair. Hiroki modeled every tuft
so it could be art-directed, Hollings says.
He sculpted the tufts, and then Mitch
Snarey grew the hair to ll the volumes. I
think thats the rst time weve constrained
hair into volumes here.
For Glagos coat, character eects su-
pervisor Ian Coony traveled north to
Pixar to talk with the crew that handled
the clothing for Ratatouille. John [Lasse-
ter] was over the moon about how good
those clothes looked, Hollings contends.
But, they were cotton. Glagos coat is
wool. Ultimately, though, Coony used
Disneys Fabric in-house cloth solver for
the dynamics.
It was a fairly straightforward simula-
tion process, Hollings says. Once we -
naled the animation, wed run simulations,
and once the simulations looked good,
wed bake them into les.
Te other major simulation task, con-
trolling the little alien orbs, was less
straightforward. Eects supervisor Cesar
Velazquez created a process that started
with particle simulations in Side Eects
Houdini to produce the general motion
of particles moving from one point to an-
other. Ten, using Houdini scripts, he cre-
ated additional layers. With one, he added
collision detection so the particles wouldnt
interpenetrate. Another added deforma-
tion so the little green balls would retain
their volumes.
He gave us wedges with 1000, 2000,
5000, and 10,000 orbs, Hollings says. Te
more the orbs, the slower the simulation.
Velazquez also oered Williams dierent
choices for how the orbs movedbouncy,
slowly, treadmill-like motion, and so forth
and with the orbs moving as a group or with
some orbs moving independently.
Eects animator Dave Hutchins created
most of the other particle simulationsin-
cluding the blowing snow, interactive snow,
and objects moving inside Glagos house
with Maya, using hardware rendering in
some cases. He also added Glagos breath
to every shot in which the star appeared.
Road Testing
Each night, when the render queue light-
ened up, the system automatically created
a simple render of all the shots. Te pipe-
line was completely push-based, Hollings
says. As an animator nished, the lighter
would get the new animation. If someone
moved a chair in a room and I was working
on the same shot, the next time I rendered
it, the chair would have moved.
Te nightly auto-render served as a
troubleshooting tool. It rendered every-
thing in a simplistic way, and also the cloth
sims, Hollings says. It was a way to see
the status of the show every day and dis-
cover anything that was broken.
Pixars Mike King helped the team de-
velop the asset management tool, which
they named Nani. Tat was the tool that
managed all the master sets, populated the
shots with elements, and created Maya
les, Hollings says. We also took advan-
tage of having people on the crew, who had
come from many dierent studios, help
create tools across the board. We put our
heads together and thought about what we
would do if we could create a pipeline any
way we wanted.
For example, iPlay, written by Sung,
gave the artists the ability to look at the
whole short and select what they wanted to
see within a sequence. A navigation system
that moved quickly within the le system
made it possible for the artists working on
something within a particular shot to play
the shot easily. We tried to create the most
ecient pipeline possible in a small scale,
Hollings adds.
Some of the tools and techniques road-
tested for Glagos Guest helped power
Bolt. We transitioned from using tile-
based texturing to facet-based texturing,
which Bolt then used, Hollings says. And,
some ideas are being considered by the Ra-
punzel leadership. Even though exact tools
may not move to other shows, the ideas
ow when the people join other crews.
But, that wasnt the point. Te point was
to explore and innovate. It isnt often that
you get the opportunity to do a show any
way you want, and to succeed or fail.
Succeed, they did. Sometimes, the big-
gest achievements happen way behind the
scenes. n
Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a
contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She
can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.
A new lighting package called Lilo, developed for Glagos Guest, helped the lighting artists
produce the lms stylistic photoreal look quickly.
nnnn
CG Short Films
February 2009 20
www.nabshow.com
Conferences: April 1823, 2009 / Exhibits: April 2023
Las Vegas Convention Center / Las Vegas, Nevada USA
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opportunities designed to expand your know-how and abilities. See,
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CGW :209_p 1/30/09 7:19 AM Page 1
When Pixar wanted a new short lm to
show with its then upcoming CG feature
Wall-e, animator Doug Sweetland jumped
at the opportunity. Te result is a ve-min-
ute toon called Presto, a short lm about
a rabbit that pulls a magician out of its
hat. Its dierent from anything Pixar has
produced in the past, and its the rst short
Pixar has produced on a rigid deadline.
Normally, shorts are not primary proj-
ects, Sweetland says. When a feature needs
resources, the short goes on hold. But, one
of the tests with Presto was to see if we
could do the lm without interruptions.
Tey did, but it took some clever tricks
on the part of the production crew to make
it happen. Our original schedule had us
nishing before the peak usage of labor on
Wall-e occurred, says Richard Hollander,
producer. We lost that battle and became
lock-step to Wall-e. It made for a slightly
terrifying ending. But, the company was
going to make this short happen.
Pixar green-lit the idea in March and, by
September, had nailed the story. Anima-
tors work on parts, never on the whole,
Sweetland points out. Our discipline is to
take a piece and make it as rich as possible.
But I had been applying that discipline
to the story, which is a really bad idea. I
thought I wanted two sympathetic leads.
I kept creating colorful, clever bits that
didnt work as a cohesive whole. Changing
Presto to a classic antagonist was a huge
tidal shift for me, but it was the key.
It also t with Sweetlands inclina-
tion to make a lm that would be more
cartoony than other Pixar shorts. For in-
spiration and reference, he assembled
a reel of Tex Avery, Tom and Jerry, and
Bugs Bunny cartoons. Tey all speak
with basically the same vocabulary,
says Sweet land. Teres an economy to the
shots thats incredible. Teres even a quote
from [William] Hannah or [Joseph] Bar-
bera thats something like, You see a cat,
you see a mouse, its an instant setup.
The Setup
Sweetland wanted the setup for Presto to
be as quick and clear as in those cartoons,
but, a bunny and magician arent natural
antagonists. We probably worked on the
opening, from the time when theyre in the
dressing room to when theyre on stage,
more than any other shots, he says.
To create the rivalry, Sweetland used
animation and production design. In the
dressing room, Presto, an elegant magician
dressed in a tuxedo, frowns as he cleans the
inside of a purple wizards hat, but smiles
when he dusts his top hat. He places both
hats on a table near an enormous carrot.
Sitting nearby is a cage, and inside, Alec, a
white rabbit, wiggles in excitement.
Presto opens the cage door and puts the
purple hat on Alec. Alec reaches for the car-
rot. Presto pulls the struggling rabbit back
by its tail. Alec runs in place and stretches its
Pixar developed new motion-blur techniques to create the illusion of speed without losing a
cartoony look. In this shot in the lm, you can see blurring around the rabbit Alecs hands and feet
as the animal tries to grab the carrot, but you can always see the outline of the hands and feet.
February 2009 22

CG Short Films
arms toward the carrot. Presto commands
Alec to stay, and then magically pulls the
rabbit by its ears out of the top hat. He holds
the carrot in front of Alecs face. Alec pre-
pares to take a bite, but Presto yanks the car-
rot away. Te rabbit will have its revenge.
On the wall behind the table, a show bill
advertises Presto and his Hat of 40 Fath-
oms. Near Alecs cage is a sign that reads
Feed Rabbit.
Te dressing room was a little set all
by itself, says Harley Jessup, production
designer. It started as a broom closet be-
cause Presto was at the bottom of a billing,
but as the story progressed, the dressing
room got larger. We added cues that told
about Prestos self-importance and how the
poor rabbit was just a prop. You can see a
bouquet of owers in the background and
congratulatory posters on the wall. Grease
paint, makeup jars, and tonics appropriate
for a 1912 performer spill across the dress-
ing table.
Jessup had a more complicated task once
Presto moved onto the stage. Tere, the
hungry rabbit takes charge, creating wild
hat tricks of its own in front of an elegantly
dressed audienceat the hapless magicians
expense. Te theater is huge. In one shot,
Presto hangs 150 feet above the stage oor.
And then falls.
Set builders created the theater and
dressing room by modeling the entire 3D
space and props in Autodesks Maya, and
then moving the scene into Pixars propri-
etary Menv software. We denitely dress
to camera, but the space allowed the layout
team to move the camera in unexpected
ways, Jessup says.
To help speed the production, the team
borrowed props from Ratatouille, which
Jessup also designed. For example, the
proscenium arch in the theater is from the
dining room in Gusteaus restaurant. Te
fan in the dressing room is from Skinners
o ce, and the dressing table is a modi-
cation of Skinners desk. Te door to the
dressing room is from the bathroom just
o the kitchen in Ratatouille.
The Curtain Opens
Presto himself, in fact, looks a little like the
lawyer in Ratatouille. Hes thinner and more
delicate, Jessup says. We reworked him.
But, he bears a resemblance. And, a close
observer might think the audience members
were customers from Gusteaus restaurant
who stopped at home on the way to the the-
ater to change their costumes and hairstyles.
Like the designers, supervising techni-
cal director Tony Apodaca leaned on Ra-
tatouille for the production pipeline. We
thought, Hmmmm, we have a rodent and
a tall, lanky human, Apodaca says. Now
which show has similar technology that we
might borrow? Te crew built new char-
acters; they didnt deform Ratatouille char-
acters. But, they used the same pipeline for
hair grooming and simulation. Te model-
ers sculpted in Maya, and riggers worked
in Pixars Gipetto.
We used rigs already in development
as starting points, Apodaca says. But we
added a lot to the facial deformation to get
extreme poses. Like Looney Tunes char-
acters, Alec can reach three times his body
length. So, riggers carefully added the ap-
propriate amount of mesh topology to keep
the mesh from breaking and to have every
deformation produce smooth shapes.
To cover Alecs skin with fur, hair groom-
ers used Pixars Gopher software, a set of
Pixar RenderMan, Menv, and Maya plug-
ins that work together. Texture maps and
UV maps attached to geometry in Maya
moved through Pixars Slim to Render-
Man, which grew hair based on parameters
set in Maya for guide hairs by using maps
that determined density, color, waviness,
thickness, and so forth. Its similar to [Joe
Alters] Shave and a Haircut, Apodaca
says, but we need to have our own to be
compatible with our animation system.
Te unique grooming techniques devel-
oped for Alec concentrated on producing
feathering of the fur on the skin next to the
nose, keeping the hair out of its eyes, and
making sure there was no bare skin when
Alec stretches its arms. We did all that by
carefully painting the maps and knowing
that if extreme animation was happening,
wed need more esh in particular parts,
Apodaca says.
For Presto, the interesting technical chal-
lenge was in the cloth simulation. Tailoring
artist Christine Waggoner designed Prestos
tuxedo and costumes for the 2500 people in
the audience. Our cloth pipeline uses 2D
pattern-making, Apodaca says. We laid
everything out the way a tuxedo would be
tailored to his body. Ten, we made sure the
inter-cloth collisions were set up properly for
the coat over the vest over the pants, so they
could move around and not poke through
each other. Tat was great for a while.
Apodaca explains that unlike Rata-
The posters on the wall of Prestos dressing room emphasize how much he thinks of his hat and
how little he considers his rabbit. Tacked to the bottom of one poster is a tiny hand-lettered note
that reads, Feed Rabbit. But, dont feel too sorry for Alec. Hes a magician, too.
February 2009 23
CG Short Films

touilles characters, Presto is stationary for

a long time, and then he accelerates fast
and moves quickly. When that happened,
the skin went through the cloth before the
cloth knew what was happening, and the
skin stayed on the wrong side.
We had to go back and do simulations
at high speeds or x simulations after theyd
been done, Apodaca says. It was really a
question of speed. You can run a simulation
at four or eight times the frame rate so the
skin doesnt move far enough to penetrate
the cloth, but even then you get funny folds
or little pokes, or things get snagged. Also,
cloth x tools used in Ratatouille helped the
team pin, glue, and grab pieces of the mesh
in Menv to pull them into order.
Te curtain was equally di cult, but for
dierent reasons. Its deceptive, Apodaca
says. In terms of tailoring, its as simple as
you can get. Its a big, square piece of cloth.
But, its extremely heavy and very long, and
the numerical calculations dont appreciate
all that weight. As a result, it was di cult
to get it to hang like a real curtain and fold
properly when opened, a problem solved
only with much iteration. Moreover, the
curtain had tassels.
We wanted it to look like gravity placed
the tassels, not like someone placed them in
computer graphics, Apodaca says. So we
held the tassels above the ground, with the
big ball at the top of each and all the little
fringes hanging down from that, and then
used cloth sim to slowly push them to the
ground. Te inter-fringe collisions gave each
one a nice random shape. Even though they
just sit there for most of the lm, if we had
put them in place with Maya, they would
have looked mechanical.
For the theater crowds, created with a li-
brary of mix-and-match heads, hair types,
jewelry, and body shapes, the crew used
the crowd animation system from Cars.
Animators created such actions as clap-
ping, head turning, and so forth, as well as
a standing ovation. We tossed them onto
the characters at random, Apodaca says.
It was a relatively old-school simulation.
Because the initial storyboards had
several shots of Presto looking into the
crowds, to make it possible to render the
2500 theatergoers, the crew put higher-
resolution characters in the rst few rows,
lower-resolution characters behind them,
and then had consistent shading across the
entire audience.
As the story evolved, we had fewer shots
of the crowd because it detracted from the
pacing, Apodaca says. If we had known,
we would have put less eort into them
and they would have looked worse. So, it
was a happy accident.
A Toon Type of Motion Blur
Te biggest technical innovation for the
lm was in how the crew handled mo-
tion blur. In 2D animation, a cone-shaped
streak with speed lines indicates fast mo-
tion. Apodaca didnt want to replicate
that look, which would have given
the lm a 2.5D appearance, but he
wanted to get the sense of cartoon
motion blur.
Dana Batali, head of the PR Ren-
derMan group, helped provide one
answer: We changed the shape of
the motion blur in the shutter of
RenderMan to a more triangular
shape, Apodaca explains. It spends
more time sampling at the end of the
frame, the nal position, than the
front, so the front edge is dense and
opaque, and the back edge wispy,
undersampled, and transparent.
Ten, the second answer: Tey
blended a non-motion blurred
frame that had sharp edges with the
new triangular motion blur streak.
Te result produced an image in
which you could see the characters
silhouettes, but with enough blur
so when they moved, it gave the
impression of speed.
We did this only on the charac-
ters, not the background, Apodaca
says. Tats also an homage to the way cel
is done, with beautiful watercolor paint-
ings in the background.
Being able to create a toon was a joyful
experience for many on the crew. Many of
us are in animation to begin with because
of cartoons, but were never able to do
them, Sweetland says. Tere was noth-
ing better I could ever witness as a direc-
tor than to see people hurl themselves at
the work with unbridled abandon. I think
Presto is a really good combination of an
old cartoon and a Pixar movie.
At the end of the lm, Alec gets his reward.
Te rabbit has replaced the hat on Prestos
poster, and a bouquet of carrots sits next to
the bouquet of owers. As for the Pixar crew?
Teir rewards have only just begun.
Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a
contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She
can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.
The storyboard and production design sketches
show the elaborate stage on which Presto performs,
the size of the theater, and the number of people
in the audience. Top, the spotlight shows how far
Presto will fall. Bottom, the heavy curtain became an
interesting challenge for the cloth-simulation team,
as did the crowd creation and simulation.

CG Short Films
February 2009 24
COMING SPRING 09
At least one reason we make hand gestures
when we talk is to help people see what we
mean. Visualization is a critical part of un-
derstanding. On the computer, 3D visual-
ization opens up the door to collaboration
and decision-making. Not many people
make decisions based on hand waving.
Te eld of visualization and, especially,
immersive visualization is utterly booming,
with changes happening in every area of
the industry as designers and scientists push
the technology for greater realism, while
hardware architectures rise to the chal-
lenge. Systems are being built on what can
only be called a grand scale. For instance,
several visualization centers have been built
that take advantage of Sonys 4 projectors
for super high resolutions and crazy real-
ismor, at least, it used to be crazy; now
its just expensive.
Whats changing right in front of our
eyes is the range of tools available for this
purpose. A lot of the high-end visualiza-
tion systems we have now came from
work done in the 1980s by Carolina
Cruz-Neira, Tom DeFanti, and Dan San-
din at the University of Illinois, Chicago,
where the rst CAVE (Cave Automatic
February 2009 26

Visualization
Virtual Environment) was built. A CAVE
can have three, four, ve, or six walls, and
stereoscopic views to give users the illu-
sion of immersion.
Todays systems, though, have evolved to
suit a given situation. Tere are still CAVEs,
and their numbers are growing, but there
are also power walls and high-end worksta-
tions with 3D glasses, or auto-stereo scopic
screens that dont require glasses, all provid-
ing people with a clear view into the ab-
stract. Whatever the medium, the demand
is for as much reality as possibleand in
real time.
Europe Versus the US
Over the past decade or so, European devel-
opment in 3D visualization has been on the
rise. Jeroen Snepvangers of RTT (Realtime
Technology), with headquarters in both Eu-
rope and the US, has seen both sides of the
visualization/realism coin. He contends that
the use of 3D visualization has increased
much more in Europe than it has in the US,
and a contributing factor may be a dierence
in attitude. Snepvangers heads RTTs opera-
tions in the US, where, he says, the com-
pany has found considerably more interest
in the creation of photorealistic images. In
Europe, however, RTT is being asked to
build visualization centers. Everyone has
to have a CAVE, he adds.
Research in raytracing, graphics algorithms
that track the path of light as it travels and
bounces from source to objects, has been very
active in Europe, including at Fraunhofer
Institute in Germany and at universities in
Lund and Gothenburg, Sweden. Even ve
years ago, CAVEs were more popular in Eu-
rope than in the US, says Snepvangers.
But, there have been considerable ad-
vances. Five years ago, Snepvangers says,
the interactivity worked well in immersive
This interior view of Lamborghini,
created on RTTs DeltaGen
platform, provides a clear picture
of various details. More and more,
materials are becoming a critical
area for visualization.
February 2009 27
Visualization

February 2009 28
nnnn
Visualization
applications, but the imagery didnt look
photoreal. Tats where RTT Europe has
put a lot of its eorts. Reality is on the
priority list of our clients, he notes.
Te same sentiment was echoed last
year at the E-Magiciens conference held
in Valenciennes, France, where Philippe
Delvigne, director of the Industrial De-
sign School (ISD), noted that the prog-
ress of 3D visualization and virtual real-
ity was happening faster in Europe than
in the US through the development of
consortiums and centers for visualiza-
tion, rather than big, proprietary sys-
tems. Delvigne points to the PerfVR ef-
fort, a collaboration to create standards for
3D visualization that would make the use
of visualization centers easier.
Silicon Graphics (SGI), of course, is still in
the game, and is also getting a lot of business
in Europe (see SGI Returns to Software,
pg. 32). Bob Pette, vice president of the visu-
al business unit at SGI, says there tends to be
far more small visualization centers through-
out Europe than elsewhere. He notes that
one of the largest eorts on this front was
by CEA/DAM, a consortium spearheaded
by the French Atomic Energy Commission.
Te group has built the CEA/DAM Ile de
France Center in Bruyres le Chtel. Tis
center is devoted to simulation and environ-
mental surveillance, and is part of an eort to
extend technology to other industries.
Even in Europe, that spirit of collabora-
tion is shifting somewhat. Security con-
cerns, Pette says, are causing groups to
build larger centers for their own use. And,
its worth adding that those uses are increas-
ingly specic.
In France, Airbus has built an enor-
mous CAVE to mimic the inside of the
Airbus A380 main deck. Te CAVE is 7.5
meters wide, 3 meters deep, and 3 meters
high. It is built using 16 Christie projec-
torsfour projectors each illuminate the
ceiling, back wall, and oor; two projec-
tors are used for each of the two smaller
side panels. Projects are stacked to create a
stereo pair for each channel.
Te CAVE was built by Viscon, which
also supplied the VisController II software
to match up the images into a seamless,
uniform image. RTT and VRcom sup-
plied the software to produce the images.
Te CAVE gives visitors the feeling of be-
ing inside the A380 Airbus: It can demon-
strate color schemes and change the seat
arrangement for customers. Te company
is also interested in using the CAVE for en-
gineering and ergonomics studies.
Multiuser Sites?
In the US, the visualization industry is be-
ing driven by the oil and gas industries. In
oil and gas, there is little enthusiasm for
sharing systems with outsiders. Neverthe-
less, Norwegian company Cyviz opened
the Cyviz Technology Center (CTC) in
Houston last May. Te facility follows
Cyvizs original CTC, which opened in
Norway the previous year. Te company is
also building a new CTC in Dubai, United
Arab Emirates. Cyviz plans to host custom-
ers at the centers as well as use the locales as
showcases for the companys technology.
Te center in Norway has three auditori-
ums and a conference room, and relies pri-
marily on power-wall designs that range in
resolution from 3.7 to 6.3 megapixels. Like
Viscon, Cyviz supplies the software technol-
ogy to create a seamless image from multiple
computers, and the company works with
dierent partners to build the system ac-
cording to the customers requirements.
Projector companies Christie and Barco
are especially active in this eld, along with
Hewlett-Packard, which provides the com-
puters for many of these systems, including
those at the Cyviz CTCs. Te real trick in
visualization is in getting the data from the
systems onto screens in such a way that the
imagery lines up and the colors are perfect-
ly balanced so the illusion is not broken.
In theory, Headwaves customers are the
type of people who might use one of Cyvizs
centers, but Steve Briggs, vice president of
systems integration, has his doubts. Head-
wave has developed compression technol-
ogy that enables it to present enormous
amounts of data to the user. Te data gath-
ered for oil and gas exploration is extremely
densescientists might be looking through
7000 feet of water and 20,000 feet into the
earth, as they were in the Gulf of Mexico
when the enormous Jack Field discovery
was made in 2006. As Briggs observes,
Were staring at tens of terabytes of data.
In this business, mistakes cost money
and lots of it. A deep-water oil rig costs
HP, in conjunction with DreamWorks, developed the Halo system so executives can collaborate
without technology getting in the way. With zero latency and high-denition resolution, partici-
pants soon forget theyre not in the same room with one another.
February 2009 29
Visualization
nnnn
more than $100 million. Typically, says
Briggs, companies will want to start a
project, spending just a percentage of the
entire project, and get to oil so they can
start pumping to support the rest of it.
Location is Key
Briggs believes visualization is critical but
not always practical. He says that even
when you have a visualization center on-
site, it might not be that practical to use.
Visualization centers have to be scheduled,
and the data has to be prepared. In reality,
he says, people wont even walk down the
damn hall.
Briggs continues: Visualization centers
are primarily for blowing the socks o ex-
ecutives or for those situations where an
entire team wants to look at something.
Comparatively, Headwave is seeing a lot
more interest in deskside systems. Head-
waves software is based on a massively
parallel architecture that enables it to take
advantage of GPU clusters. Tis is one of
the rst products to take advantage of GP-
GPU, or GPU-compute, technology that
exploits the hundreds of cores in a GPU
(for instance, the ATI R770 processor with
its 800 processor cores, or the Nvidia GTX
200 with its 240 cores) to go to work on a
much wider variety of number-crunching
tasks. In fact, Headwave was one of the rst
companies to put Tesla, Nvidias heavy-
duty, general-purpose GPU computing
solution, to use (see Digging Deep, Sep-
tember 2008).
As Briggs notes, in spite of all the im-
provements in graphics hardware, one does
not just re up a 3D visualization and start
collaborating away. Regardless of the display
medium, the content has to be ported to the
proper format that is conditioned for dis-
play. Te work Cruz-Neira is doing at the
LITE (Louisiana Immersive Technologies
Enterprise) center is somewhat similar to
the European model, though most often it
is university personnel who are contracting
with outside clients to create visualizations.
Understandably, Cruz-Neira takes is-
sue with arguments that Europe is ahead
of the US on the visualization front. She is
an impassioned advocate for high-end visu-
alization and a one-woman Johnny Apple-
seed for the technology. An example of her
seed-planting is the $27 million, 70,000-
square-foot LITE facility at the University
of Louisiana in Lafayette (UL Lafayette),
where Cruz-Neira is the executive director
and chief scientist. It was built through the
cooperation between the state of Louisiana,
Lafayette Economic Development Author-
ity (LEDA), and the university, and at least
one of the major areas of research is oil and
gas, in addition to medicine, weather predic-
tion, entertainment, and industrial design.
Te university has long been a regional
champion, bringing high-tech practices to
an area that has seen its local businesses face
several crippling challenges over the de-
cades, including the transformation from
an agricultural district to one dependent
on oil, only to be devastated by the depar-
ture of the oil industry from the US, fol-
lowed by the long-lasting horrors brought
by Hurricane Katrina.
Te LITE center has three visualization
venues that were built with SGI and Chris-
tie equipmenta six-sided CAVE with
1400x1050-resolution walls, a 174-seat
Reality Center with a 37-foot screen, and
a 20-room conference center. Te venues
are used by the LITE centers partners and
clients, as well as by the university, and for
demonstration purposes to show local in-
dustry what can be done.
Te systems are powered by SGI Prism
systems, each one having 16 Intel Itanium 2
processors and six graphics pipes. LITE also
has an immersive collaboration teleconfer-
ence room that enables users to work across
a high-speed ber link. Last, but far from
least, the center has an SGI Altix 350 super-
computer with 352 processors and 8 of
SGI InniteStorage SAN humming away in
a back room to handle the heavy lifting.
Its not just the hardware, though, that
makes this possible. Cruz-Neira is able to
accomplish what she has because the uni-
versity is able to bring its resources to bear
on particular problems. Most recently, UL
Lafayette announced breakthrough work
visualizing 3D data from mammograms to
better understand breast cancers, and the
center has also done groundbreaking work
in weather studies and prediction. Further-
more, the LITE center is a tourist attrac-
tion of sorts, hosting regular open houses
and conferences.
Cruz-Neira believes her real work is to
help companies build their own visualiza-
Increasingly, teams collaborating across thousands of miles need to truly see an object. For
instance, they need to see how a material will really look in a nished product.
February 2009 30
nnnn
Visualization
tion centers because every companys goals
and problems are unique. Yes, we do a lot
of work with companies that use our cen-
ters, but we do a lot of work helping com-
panies build their own systems, she says.
Getting a Closer Look
Je Brum, vice president of marketing at
Mechdyne, contends that the usefulness of
a visualization center is closely related to its
convenience. He believes that a system of
centralized visualization centers is not as
practical in the US because the country
is so vast, and as a result, traveling to an
outside visualization center doesnt make as
much sense as it might in Europe, where
railways link many cities. Also, like Cruz-
Neira, he nds that every customer pres-
ents a new challenge.
Mechdyne has licensed the CAVE trade-
mark from the University of Illinois, and
its Fakespace division worked on one of
the largest CAVE projects in the US: the
C6 upgrade at Iowa State (an-
other project in which Cruz-
Neira played an active part),
completed in 2007. Mechdyne
and Fakespace upgraded the
universitys older system based
on CRT projection that had
a total resolution of 6.3 mil-
lion pixels. Te upgrade put
24 Sony 4 digital projectors
pumping out resolutions of
4096x2160 to work. A cluster
of 49 HP xw9300 workstations
with dual processors and dual
GPUs are driving the graphics.
Its the rst system of its kind
to support wireless tracking,
and it is capable of presenting
100 million pixels. Tat little
redo is reported to have cost
Iowa State $4 million.
Te C6 is being put to work
on a variety of jobs for groups
within the university and also
for outside contractors. For in-
stance, the US Navy is using the system for
simulations. It renders specic topography
and battle scenes, and enables control of
virtual vehicles. In another application, re-
searchers explore the makeup of plants on a
cellular level. You can y into a genome and
get a whole new appreciation of the biology
of organisms, says Brum, who has lost none
of his enthusiasm for this technology.
In another project, Mechdyne has built
a specialized power-wall application for
paper-product company Kimberly-Clark
that replicates store shelves. It has a wide
front wall and side walls for creating a virtu-
al environment. According to Brum, Kim-
berly-Clark used to build actual shelves,
exactly re-creating them from a retail chain
and stocking them with actual products (or
prototype packages) and competing prod-
ucts. Clearly, this was not cost-eective.
As Mechdyne began installing high-def-
inition screens in sites and working with
industrial design customers, company of-
cials were asked if the system could faith-
fully represent colors and even the stitch-
ing in the material. We did a system for
Ikea that uses multiple Sony 4 projectors.
Teir goal was to see the stitching in the
seats of their furniture, says Brum. But go-
ing to 4 means that the application has to
be capable of displaying that resolution.
You dont want to just put in HD resolu-
tion and scale it up to 4; the application has
to be cluster-compatible, Brum adds. And
thats something that providers like Mech-
dyne bring to the party. In fact, that ability to
be cluster-compatible and to natively show
resolutions up to 4 is going to become in-
creasingly important on the high end.
Te ability to visualize materials with
perfect delity is an increasingly important
area in industrial design, and it spans car
design, furniture design, shoe design, and
interior design. Te ability to correctly
reproduce materials and fabrics is already
becoming the dividing line for some com-
panies bidding for projects. RTT main-
tains that it rst started working with car
companies on this request, but is hearing
from Adidas, the companys client in the
shoe business, as well as from furniture de-
signers and airplane designers.
It used to be enough to project tex-
tures. Tats no longer good enough, says
(Top) Showcase lets users put digital models in realistic
environments complete with reection maps for realistic
reections. The software scales from desktop to clusters.
(Bottom) Customers can go inside the Airbus CAVE to get
an accurate picture of the interior of their new plane before
they take delivery.
Headwaves compression technology lets
users, such as geologists, view enormous
datasets, including well information.
February 2009 31
Visualization
nnnn
Snepvangers. It has to be shaders, real-time
shaders.
If you think youve heard the magic
word, youre right. Shaders means graph-
ics processors, and RTT has been working
closely with Nvidia, using the companys
CgFX tools to create realistic procedural
shaders that can be changed according
to characteristics, such as color or thread
count, to see what might work better. In
the same way, RTT is also working on
ways to reproduce paint.
Te paint companies are very interested
in spectral rendering, trying to gure out
when paint jars with an environment. Its a
hot topic, says Snepvangers. 3D is going
way beyond just 3D shapes; its now going
into more of what can I know through my
eyes? Te brain can imagine how material
feels, what the characteristics of the material
are, how it stretches and moves, how soft.
We believe you can do a lot with your eyes.
Autodesk is pursuing a strategy similar to
RTTs, but is building it from a dierent
direction than RTT is. Autodesk acquired
Alias, and along with it, the companys in-
dustrial design software, Studio. Te com-
pany added on to its portfolio with the
raytracing company Opticore from Go-
thenburg, Sweden, and is putting its tools
together in Showcase to create easy ways for
companies to visualize designs. Te oering
is compatible with all CAD products and
allows users to grab a model and put it, ren-
dered, into an environment.
On the one hand, the rm is building easy
desktop visualization. Our goal is to de-
mocratize visualization, to make it very easy
for the designer to get to a presentation
quickly, says Tomas Heermann, product
line manager at Autodesks Manufacturing
Solutions Division. On the other hand,
however, Autodesk ran into the same op-
portunities that Mechdyne and RTT have
seen on the high end of visualizationthe
ability to reproduce materials and textures.
Te rm saw that on the marketing side
as companies in the car business wanted
to reproduce colors and materials; this has
escalated to a point where companies are
forming consortiums to try and gure out
ways to measure color and material, and
reproduce it with shaders. Its an eort that
is similar to the development of ICC stan-
dards, which have been developed to com-
municate color information between PCs
and printers. Its the Holy Grail, to be as
real as you can in the unreal world, says
Heermann.
Distributing the Vision
For the future, there are probably two
models that will be used most often by
businesses, and that will be to have some
form of visualization on sitethe best that
can be aorded by the companyand
also some networked collaboration. Brum,
making the case for on-site systems, points
to a study performed by Volkswagen sev-
eral years ago in which engineers were
asked how likely they were to use a visu-
alization center if it was o-site, in another
building, down the hall, or at the desktop.
Like the people Briggs is working with
at Headwave, most users said they might
walk down the hall but theyd prefer to sit
at their own desk.
Te next step for visualization is to get
all the realism of high-end visualization
centers close to home. It seems clear now
that for visualization to be most useful, it
has to be down the hall and at the desk, but
what hall, and what desk? And as Snepvan-
gers points out, collaboration, increasingly,
is not real time.
Globalization means that people are
working at dierent times and in dier-
ent places. RTT has developed its Picture
Book software that lets users share images
and access a model in RTTs DeltaGen
viewer, the rms raytracing application
that takes advantage of the GPU for fast
rendering. Te Picture Book applications
let users work with a server-based database
to upload and access les at any time. Tis
model also makes it easier for companies to
work with outside suppliers.
In addition to RTT, Autodesk and Men-
tal Images (now owned by Nvidia) have
similar strategies. One of the most vener-
able companies in rendering in the enter-
tainment sector and for industry, Mental
Images has gone to work enabling long-dis-
tance collaboration based on its high-speed
rendering technology with its RealityServer,
which maintains and processes content on
the server. Images are streamed on-demand,
giving access to huge datasets anywhere they
are located. And, by never leaving the server,
the system satises the need for security.
Users gain a close-up view of complex data from the inside the C6 CAVE at Iowa State. The setup,
which supports wireless tracking, is capable of presenting 100 million pixels.
Building a visualization center is only
one step on the way to accessing infor-
mation and understanding it. The chal-
lenge is to get visual and related infor-
mation into a format that is useful, and it
may well be that just one pretty picture
doesnt tell the story.
Bob Pette, vice president of SGIs vi-
sualization group, helps customers build
visualization centers, and hes been do-
ing it for 20 years. During that time, the
issues have changed. In the early days
of advanced visualization, just getting
3D graphics to the display was the main
challenge, and SGI developed key tech-
nology to enable that end, including cus-
tomized pipelines and the rst graphics
processing units (GPUs). Today, says
Pette, graphics are no longer an issue.
Instead, people are overwhelmed by
huge amounts of information.
For instance, a design project includes
much more information than a CAD
model. It may also include engineering
and analysis information, technical draw-
ings, and supply-chain information; or a
site considered for oil and gas explora-
tion will have geospatial data, satellite
data, pipeline modeling information, and
environmental data. In both cases, the
information only makes sense if it is pre-
sented in a meaningful way.
For some time, the stumbling block
for high-end visualization centers has
not been technical, its been contextual.
Visualization centers are not being in-
creasingly used because it takes time
to prepare data for presentation, and
oftentimes customized software has to
be developed for the application. Ironi-
cally, the whole point of visualization is
to be able to make a decision quickly.
The most valuable information is the
information you can get to and use to
make a decision as soon as possible.
SGI contends it has been working on
this problem for several years and from
several angles. The company builds
Reality Centers for clients and supplies
components for other systems. At the
end of October 2008, the company
introduced its VUE (Visual User Expe-
rience) software, which makes it easier
to combine information from a variety of
sources and deliver it to anyone on any
platform. With the introduction of VUE,
SGI is returning to software develop-
ment, one of its core competencies,
A lot of this work will be done at the
desktop. Designers will put together quick
demos of a proposed product with lighting,
reections, and beautiful surfaces, and theyll
share them for approval. Tey can be dis-
tributed on the Web or hosted in real time.
Tere are numerous products popping up to
do just this. BunkSpeed burst on the scene
last year with fast raytracing to create beauti-
ful raytraced images complete with high-dy-
namic range environments and reections.
At SIGGRAPH 2008, the company was
ghting o a raft of competitors, including
ArtVPS, StudioGPU, and Eon Reality.
One competitive issue will be scalability.
Like Mechdynes Brum, Autodesks Heer-
mann says applications are going to have
to accommodate increasing resolutions
and clusters. RTT, Mental Images, and
Autodesk are also taking advantage of the
GPU. And wherever people are looking at
visualizations and trying to make decisions,
theyre going to want more.
Te goal is to be able to put the same qual-
ity image on the desktop that one currently
goes down the hall, across the city, or to Lou-
isiana, or maybe over to France, to see. n
Kathleen Maher is a contributing editor to CGW, a
senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon, CA-
based consultancy specializing in graphics and multime-
dia, and editor in chief of JPRs TechWatch. She can be
reached at Kathleen@jonpeddie.com.
Mental Images RealityServer enables users
to upload models, information, drawings, and
photos associated with a project; remote
users can access that information at any
time. The software scales to accommodate
high-resolution raytraced images.
February 2009 32
nnnn
Visualization
SGI is trying to offer customers a better view of their large image sets by providing the data
in a format that is useful and easy to understand through its new VUE technology.
SGI Returns to Software
moved to back burners in the dark years
of the companys struggle to survive
during bankruptcy and to start growing
once again. Through the upheavals at
SGI, CTO Eng Lim Goh has remained
at the center of SGI, and he has con-
tinued to work on the vision of making
visual information accessible across
platforms and across the world.
Although SGI expects VUE to help sell
Reality Centers and visualization hard-
ware, SGI is selling VUE as a separate
set of products for any visualization appli-
cation. These technologies, says Pette,
enable OpenGL to run on any platform,
including those of our competitors.
There are other options, including propri-
etary systems built to order. Hewlett-Pack-
ard offers Remote Presentation Graphics
(RPG) to customers that lets them access
remote data on HP machines. Mental Im-
ages Reality Server is similar to VUE in
that its agnostic about the platform.
Product Lineup
The VUE components include:
n
FusionVUEIntegrates informa-
tion from various sources and
platforms so it can be presented
in VUEspace, SGIs presentation
environment.
n
SoftVUERenders visual in-
formation in software and does
not require specialized graphics
hardware.
n
PowerVUERenders informa-
tion for large-scale applications
in real time, taking advantage of
CPUs and GPUs, depending on
the platform.
n
RemoteVUEDelivers visual in-
formation via Internet Protocol to
remote locations on any device.
Because the information is man-
aged at the data center, Remote-
VUE protects sensitive data.
n
EventVUEIntegrates diverse
data sources and organizes it ac-
cording to context or geospatial
relationships. It can analyze real-
time events based on established
parameters, and issue alerts or
highlight potential threats.
Although, SGI is now announcing
VUE as a set of packaged modules,
the company has been developing the
technology for several years and mak-
ing it available to customers. At this
point, SGI has several customers al-
ready working with VUE components
in the eld. Halliburton is using a VUE-
based system to monitor real-time drill-
ing. NASA is modeling the effects of a
dirty bomb blast in urban areas to help
plan evacuation. And, in the really crazy
category, the McLaren race team is able
to run information from a race, pinpoint
areas on the car that could be better
streamlined, and rebuild a car in time for
the next raceovernight if necessary.
But perhaps the real power that new
visualization technologies like VUE bring
becomes apparent as they get broader
rollouts into games, entertainment, and,
of course, shopping.
Pette points out that the work the
military is doing to train soldiers isnt
that different from a computer game. In
both cases, VUE can offer more access
to information and richer visual detail.
VUE tools could be used to build better
GIS databases that can be delivered to
our car while were hunting for parking
spaces. And, shopping for a car could
get more interesting if one could pull up
models on an iPhone and compare mod-
els and specs.
Listing the possible applications re-
veals nothing new. Weve been talking
about these capabilities for a long time.
But, we havent had them yet. For SGI,
the key is software, specically open
software. Its a vision the company has
held constant over the years, and it
comes to life in VUE. Kathleen Maher
February 2009 33
Visualization
nnnn
SGIs VUE software modules are platform agnostic; therefore, not only do they run on the
companys Reality Centers but also on systems from competing companies.

Broadcast
February 2009 34
Picture
Perfect
FIT CREW
CG plays the lead role in a unique marketing campaign for Honda By Karen Moltenbrey
ears ago, advertising campaigns for
cars were about one thing, the ve-
hicle. Today, the ads tend to focus
on the experience the vehicle oers,
with glimpses of the car, truck, or SUV as
it traverses a picturesque landscape. How-
ever, when it came to devising a multi-
media campaign for the Honda Fit, the
creative team at advertising agency Rubin
Postaer & Associates was determined to
throw out the car-commercial rule book.
After all, leaf-covered roads, postcard-per-
fect mountains, and pure beauty shots just
didnt t the vehicles brand.
Te agency wanted something uniquely
stylized, and we wanted to push the boat
out a bit, says Digital Domains Brad Park-
er, who, along with Eric Barba, directed the
spot. Tey wanted us to create a really dif-
ferent look and step it up a notch or two.
And step it up they did. Rather than use
live action or a photoreal approach, Parker
and Barba used a highly stylized look cre-
ated with computer graphics that places a
3D Honda Fit within surreal CG environ-
ments and scenes.
We focused on making the spots origi-
nal, unusual, and coolwhich really set
the tone for the brand, Parker says.
In fact, Parker and Barba have had a
history of making cool ads for Honda,
albeit as visual eects supervisors as op-
posed to directors. Tis time, they took on
all those roles. We had direct contact with
the agency and the client, and could tailor
the team to the vision we had, says Parker.
We had the freedom to come up with
ideas, and we knew exactly how to execute
them. Working with outside directors is
great, but sometimes it is hard to know
what they really want and where they want
to go with something.
Te overall concept of the campaign
which included three television and the-
atrical spots, along with elements for an
interactive Web programwas to create
a unique Fit universe. Tis meant that ev-
ery object had to be conceptualized by the
Digital Domain team and then brought to
life. Yet, the three commercials contained
very dierent ideas selling very dierent
features of the same car. And all three had
to have an extremely stylized look.
So rather than go o and do three dif-
ferent designs with development paths, we
pooled our resources and decided to create
a cohesive world, or universe, says Parker.
When we pitched the job, we created a
map similar to Middle Earth, laying out
where the three commercials would take
place in the Fit world and how we would
tie them together. We had to make thou-
sands of decisions about what the world
would look like, including the color pal-
ette, the creatures, everything. Later, the
group used that map as a guide for the on-
line materials, which included games.
Spot On
Two of the three television commercials
Mecha-Mosquitoes and Defense Mech-
anismare 30 seconds long and 100
percent CG. Te third, Bats, is only 15
seconds in length and contains some live
components.
In Mecha-Mosquitoes, giant mechani-
cal mosquitoes, with chrome wings and bod-
ies of hulking gas-guzzling cars, gorge them-
selves on fuel from an overturned gasoline
tanker truck on the outskirts of a city. Soon a
swarm begins to chase a passing Honda Fit,
which darts in and out of trac to fend o
the attack. In the city, the car reaches a tun-
nel under a huge building shaped like a bug
zapper, whose blue light proves too irresist-
ible, and fatal, to the insects.
Te second all-CG spot, inspired by un-
derwater photography with a cyan/green/
yellow palette, is set within the Fit worlds
city limits. A menacing shark-like gas-guz-
zler patrols the streets, knocking down signs
and recklessly skidding around corners,
while a Fit waits at a stoplight with other
vehicles. As the monster car approaches,
the other vehicles scatter; the car accelerates
aggressively toward the Fit. Just before im-
pact, the Fit inates like a blowsh, sending
the mean machine zooming o.
Bats, meanwhile, illustrates the Fits
cavernous storage capacity by housing and
releasing a cadre of the Fit worlds resident
bats at an eerie lookout point.
Te style of the commercials, with their
dramatic action, striking colors, and atypi-
cal characters, is a big departure from the
type of realistic work Digital Domain is
known forincluding the groundbreak-
ing accomplishments on Te Curious Case
of Benjamin Button (see Whats Old Is
New Again, January 2009), for which
Barba served as visual eects supervisor.
Te team was up for the challenge.
I love working with an empty canvas.
You have more ownership and control
over every pixel when you create and de-
sign something from scratchvehicles,
objects, buildings, and environments that
look concrete in a way, where you can al-
most reach out and touch them, although
they are clearly stylized and do not exist,
Parker says. However, he does caution that
in such circumstances, you have to exercise
some constraint and give yourself some
basic rules to avoid going o in wild direc-
tions that arent going to serve the purpose
of the story.
On the other hand, creating such an
open-ended project can be dicult be-
cause the concepts are so loose. Teres
a lot of pressure to create something no
one has ever seen before. Teres nothing
harder than a client coming to you and
saying, Make something really great and
cool that is brand new and we have never
seen before, and well tell you if we like it,
Parker adds. It has become fairly standard
to light cars in plate photography or create
photorealistic eects in plate photography.
But to design a world from scratch is prob-
ably one of the hardest things were asked
to do.
A Fit World
Although the world in these commercials
is super-stylized, the Honda Fit has a more
realistic appearance. To create that imag-
ery, the modelers started with basic digital
scans of the cars exterior, which CG super-
visor Richard Morton and his team then
enhanced. Drawing on experience they
honed earlier in 2008 crafting vehicles for
the feature lm Speed Racer (see Photo
Anime, Hyper Pop Art, April 2008), on
In the all-CG Defense Mechanism, a semi-realistic Honda Fit (left) faces a gas-guzzler (middle),
which, like the cityscape and the puffed-up Fit (right), is super-stylized. The artists built the models
in LightWave, while surface shaders developed for Speed Racer gave the vehicles their shine.
February 2009 35
Broadcast
nnnn
February 2009 36
nnnn
Broadcast
which Morton served as CG supervisor,
the Fit crew used various surface shaders
developed for the lm that emulated the
layers of car paintundercoat, base color,
clear coat on topand how they behave in
certain lighting environments.
At times, some additional bodywork
was needed for close-up shots of the models.
In those instances, the crew used physical
objects and photos of the actual vehicle for
reference while re-creating the parts in CG.
For one shot, the modelers received an ac-
tual headlamp cluster from Honda, which
they then rebuilt in NewTeks LightWave.
As a matter of fact, the project was most-
ly done in LightWave, from modeling, to
lighting, to rendering. Richard Morton is
strongest in lighting hard-surface objects
in LightWave, and built a team around
him with those capabilities, notes Parker.
A number of the developments for Speed
Racer were indeed used for this project, in-
cluding Digital Domains fairly new linear
lighting pipeline, which oered the artists
more control over the imagery. Here, the
challenge was more artistic than technical,
he adds.
Te Digital Domain team used a vary-
ing color palette among the Fit spots.
For instance, Defense Mechanism was
slightly more saturated, with a futuristic
style of the painters from the 1930sthe
Gothic images of cities that were very dra-
matic and had a lot of atmosphere and
false color, explains Parker. We tried to
take that look and push it further. Its not
one that weve seen exploited to any extent
in automotive commercials. Compara-
tively, in the Mecha-Mosquitoes spot,
David Rosenbaum, creative director, was
inspired by 1950s creature moviesTe
Mosquito that Ate Manhattan, that type of
thing, describes Parker.
Stepping into dierent territory felt
great, Parker contends. Instead of going
for a motion-graphics style, we chose to use
all the horsepower of Digital Domain but
harness that into this stylized look, which
I personally found interesting and unique,
and hope its something we will see more of
here, he adds.
And it proved to be a good t for the
campaign, as well. n
Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer
Graphics World.
Conceptualizing
The Fit campaign was more about visual style and art direction than anything
else. We went through a fairly involved process of working with some great
conceptual artists and developing what the vehicles and the world would look
like, says co-director Brad Parker.
During the project, Parker and the team had the chance to work with what
the co-director calls the new school of concept artist, meaning those who
now work in 3D as opposed to 2D. And we nd that very helpful to the overall
process, Parker adds.
In the past, an artist would sketch or paint scenes in Adobe Photoshop, and
then the 3D artists would re-create the imagery in 3D. We would nd out pretty
early on that what you can paint or draw in 2D doesnt necessarily translate into
three dimensions easily, explains Parker.
Now, when these conceptual artists work directly in 3D, they give the project
artists a starting point because their work is directly applicable to the next step
in the process. We can directly load in their models and use them in previs, and
you have a good-looking spot within the rst week or so of development, says
Parker. That has really streamlined the overall process.
Digital Domains Brad Parker and Eric Barba created a uniquely stylized Honda Fit universe for an
ad campaign that includes the spot Mecha-Mosquitoes, featuring giant insects with chrome
wings and bodies resembling gas-guzzling cars. The stylized look, striking colors, unusual charac-
ters, and dramatic action are a big departure from the studios well-known realistic lm work.
Computer Graphics World knows your
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Twenty years ago, Pixar Animation Studios
released a shading language, an interface, and
a specication called RenderMan, a collection
of tools and systems that would let thousands
of people create pictures of whatever they chose
to design, as Pixars Ed Catmull put it then.
And indeed, studios around the world have
used RenderMan to create hundreds of lms,
many of which have won Oscars for visual
eects and for animation.
In 1993, Catmull, Loren Carpenter, Rob
Cook, Tomas Porter, Pat Hanrahan, Antho-
ny A. Apodaca, and Darwyn Peachey received
a scientic and engineering award from the
Academy for the development of RenderMan
software. In 2001, Catmull, Cook, and Car-
penter received an Academy Award of Merit
for signicant advancements to the eld of
motion-picture rendering as exemplied in
Pixars RenderMan. Catmull has also re-
ceived Academy Awards for subdivision sur-
faces and digital image compositing.
Tis month, at the Scientic and Tech-
nical Awards presentations, the Academy is
bestowing its Gordon E. Sawyer Award, an
Oscar statuette, to Ed Catmull, a computer
scientist, co-founder of Pixar Animation
Studios, and president of Walt Disney and
Pixar Animation Studios, for his lifetime
of technical contributions and leadership in
the eld of computer graphics for the motion-
picture industry. Below, Catmull discusses
the evolution of RenderMan and its impact
on the CG industry.
What was the original goal for Render-
Man?
We wanted to do something that was
going to last for many years, so we had,
lets say, three main goals. One of them was
to think about extreme complexity. We set
a goal of being able to manage 80 million
polygons, which at that time was extreme-
ly ridiculous, but we were trying to think
about the problem in a dierent way. Tat
forced us to redo the way we thought
about the whole pipeline, which has
led to an architecture that has lasted
for years. Second, we believed we
had to nd a solution to motion
blur. And the third goal was to
come up with control over shad-
ing and lighting so it didnt have to
be done by programmers.
How did you solve motion blur?
We were trying dierent things.
I had an analytic solution for the
problem, trying to come up with
an exact solution. But, Rodney
Stock suggested that we look at
dithering. Tat triggered Rob
Cook to experiment. And he came up
with stochastic sampling. Te stochastic
sampling not only solved the motion blur,
but it also opened up solutions to depth of
eld. So it was a very beautiful and elegant
solution to the problem. And then Rob
came up with the notion of shade trees for
solving the problem of complex shading.
You were at Lucaslm then?
Yes. Te architecture was originally called
REYES, which Loren [Carpenter] named;
it means renders everything you ever saw.
When we spun out and became Pixar, the
technology, of course, followed us. I think it
was [Silicon Graphics CEO] Jim Clark who
suggested coming up with a standard way
to talk to rendering. It was at that time we
initiated an eort to come up with an inter-
Ed Catmull, CG pioneer
and president of
Disney Animation
and Pixar Animation

Trends & Technology

February 2009 38
face, and the interface was what we called
RenderMan.
How did the interface come about?
Pat Hanrahan was an employee of Pixar
at the time, and he took the lead. Tere
were 19 companies involved in this, ve
very active. But, we didnt have a design by
committee. Te way we set this up, and I
felt very strongly about this, was that Pat
had the nal call about what went in. He
was the architect. And to this day, thats
how we make our movies. We have the
leading conceptual designer on a movie or,
in that case, the interface, and nobody can
override that person. But Pat listened to
every body, which is what made him good.
Im going to get a bit technical here.
With rendering, like with raytracing, you
have to have all the information before you
can start to do anything. You dont actually
care about the order of things because you
cant start until everythings there. But with
a real-time machine, you have to be able
to process information as soon as it shows
up, so you care about the order. Basically,
the original interface was designed so that
the order mattered. If you were doing real
time, you could process it when it arrived,
but if you were doing sophisticated render-
ing, you could wait until it all got there so
you could do raytracing.
Te trick was, if you thought about both,
you could get the order right. If you only
thought about one, then you would screw
up the other one. So getting that right was
part of the trick of the original interface.
So it would work either way?
Tats right. If you pay attention to the
order to begin with, you can have it both
ways. If you dont pay attention, then you
make mistakes. I believe the late Je Mock
said we could do all this in software, and
someone, I forget who, suggested calling
it RenderMan. (In the forward to Steve
Upstills Te RenderMan Companion,
published May 1989, Catmull credits Pat
Hanrahan. David A. Price, in his book Te
Pixar Touch, quotes Hanrahan sharing the
credit with Jaron Lanier.]
Te shading language started with Rob
Cooks shade trees, which generalized the
shading formulas, and then Pat and Jim
Lawson generalized thiswith everybody
thinking about itinto the shading lan-
guage that is part of RenderMan.
Do you remember which lms outside
Pixar rst used RenderMan?
Id say the milestone picture was Te
Abyss. Well, it was more like a stepping-
stone. Te rst milestone, when people
rst noticed it, was Terminator. And the
big milestone, when the rest of the indus-
try [other than ILM] switched over was in
1993 with Jurassic Park.
Does Pixar use exactly the same com-
mercial version of RenderMan as every-
one else?
At one time, the Pixar version was dif-
ferent from the industry version because
Pixars needs drove the development in a
dierent direction. But, after a while, we
realized it was a big pain in the neck for
everybody. So it evolved into one version
that Tony Apodacas group controlled.
One time, we delayed a release of impor-
tant technology, the hair stu, and we
realized that was a mistake. Weve never
done that since.
Tat was deep shadows?
Yes. Tat was when we deviated from the
pattern. But the studio believes nowvery,
very rmlythat we always want it to be
the same for everybody. When I say the
studio, I include all the technical people.
Its easier to think about it as a product; its
clearer, and, from a reliability point of view,
its a better place to be.
Why did you move the RenderMan
group to Seattle?
Tony went into production, and Dana
Batali took over the group. Hes so good
that when he had to move back to Seattle
for family reasons, we moved the group with
him. Its better because the group doesnt get
sucked into production crises.
Is the RenderMan group a protable
unit?
Oh yes. A lot of people, you know,
would like rendering to be free, but I
think the industry now gets that the free
renderers dont advance as much. If the
companies dont make money on them,
they dont want to invest in them. We
have a price structure that everybody
knows supports the RenderMan group,
and the group uses all its resources to
make the product better for the lm in-
dustry. So while the industry has to pay
for it, its not getting something targeted
at CAD/CAM or games.
Pixar rendered Cars using raytracing in PRMan, the studios commercial version of RenderMan. It
was Pixars rst use of raytracing throughout a lm; the cars demanded it for the reections. Cars
received an Oscar nomination in 2007 for Best Animated Feature.
February 2009 39
Trends & Technology

February 2009 40
Does that mean the RenderMan group
doesnt care about games?
We care. But, if a game company buys
RenderMan and uses it, theyre doing it
because they want feature-lm quality for
their games. CAD/CAM people use it, and
universities have it. We listen to anyone
who nds it useful. But clearly our direc-
tion is dominated by the people who want
the very best in quality, performance, and
reliability.
Reliability is a big one. Tese lms cost
so much money, the one thing studios
dont want is to nd that it chokes. Tey
want their lm to go through, they dont
want to wait long for it, and they do not
want any surprises. Its dicult. Were talk-
ing about super-complex things.
Are the multicore machines helping?
Tere are two kinds of forces. One is in
the interactive loop where the studios want
pictures as fast as possible. Te other is
when they want to render the whole mov-
ie, and in this case, its the total eciency
that counts. If you have to render 100
frames, the most ecient thing is to have
each frame render per each processor, so
each processor is going full out. So for the
100 frames, thats the most ecient way.
But, if youre doing one frame, rendering
with 100 processors isnt 100 times faster.
You wish it were. So for that reason and
because youre sharing disks and so forth,
the eciencies for a single frame start to go
down. Im not giving you solid answers. Its
complex, and dealing with the complexity
and tuning it for the rendering world is one
of the things the RenderMan group is do-
ing to take advantage of the architectures.
Youve got to follow the mainstream.
When you think of whats driving Ren-
derMan, do you still think in terms of
photorealism?
Well, when we started, we were using ani-
mation to drive it for ourselves because we
wanted to make animated lms. But, we
used reality for a number of years as a driver.
At the time we started, the distance from
what we were doing to reality was pretty far.
We said that if we can match reality, then
we will have control over the lighting, even
though, as an animation company, were not
trying to do reality, were trying to do some-
thing dierent from reality. On that trash
planet Wall-e is walking around, excuse me,
gliding around, its not reality, but on the
other hand, its very real. Its a dierent real.
Its very hard to describe. But we use the dif-
culty of reality to drive us forward.
I remember for years and years Id get
up and give talks, and say the dierence
between the best computer graphics and
what you see in front of you is a huge gap.
I could show the best stu from anybody,
and then say, Look in front of you. And
the dierence was marked.
But I havent been able to say that for a
long time. Its kind of embarrassing that
the credit frequently goes back to those of
us in the early days. Te bulk of the work
and the heavy lifting was done by teams led
by Tony for a few years and now by Dana
for many years. Teyve done extraordinary
things. Dana is doing a phenomenal job of
being responsive to what people need by
pushing in new, important directions while
being very practical. And, RenderMan has
gotten very sophisticated in terms of the
lighting model, the shading support, the
multicore work, the shadowing, the deep
shadowing. Teres been just an incredible
amount of work, going beyond what we
thought was possible.
Beyond what you thought was possible?
Oh yeah. Im blown away. I see stu now
and think, You guys have really pushed this.
We used to talk about millions of polygons.
We thought we were being adventuresome
by picking this number. Now its millions of
hairs with a sophisticated lighting model on
each one. Its just mind boggling.
We look back on it now and say, Wow,
that was just the beginning. Te really cool
stu was yet to come. But, its never been
about predicting, which you cant really
do anyway. It has been about creating an
environment in which people can do cool
things. If we had set out to solve all the
things we actually did solve, we might have
gotten frozen. n
Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a
contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She
can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.
(Left) Pixars technical crew wrote sophisticated subsurface scattering shaders in PRMan to
create the green aliens volumetric, translucent material for Lifted. (Right) Each character in
One Man Band required several hundred shaders. Both shorts received Oscar nominations.
nnnn
Trends & Technology
CGW :209_p 1/29/09 3:26 PM Page 1
Competition is erce in computer graphics. Everyone wants to
be part of the next groundbreaking, breathtaking hit and respon-
sible for the greatest eye-catching computer graphics and visual ef-
fects in lm, television, gaming, or the Web. Tats not really news.
What is making daily headlines, however, is the economic reces-
sion. Today, we hear daily reports of the plunging US dollar, in-
creasing layos, and unstable oil prices. So
what will the summer bring for a new
class of ambitious graduates eager
to nd or make their niche in the
industry? Truth be told, qualied
applicants today outnumber
industry job vacancies.
Te economic downturn
has made more applicants
available, giving us the
ability to select from a
large pool of resources,
acknowledges Je Rothberg, president and co-founder of Future
Media Concepts (FMC), a digital media training center. A boon
for recruiters, this fact can present a challenge for recruits. Indus-
try veteransthe recruitment and human resources professionals
who interview you from across their desksoer advice on how
to best render yourself recession-proof.
Portfolio Perfection
In a competitive market, it is more important than ever to get the
basics right, says Vic Rodgers, HR manager at Double Negative
(www.dneg.com), a full-service visual eects facility in London.
Ensure that your show reel is working hard for you: Tere should
never be any excess or diluted work that will detract from the main
event, which, for us, should be the rst 15 seconds of any reel.
Continue to update your reel, he says. And if you have left college,
dont stop there. Keep working on things and adding them to your
reel. Te VFX world moves fast, and its good to see that you are
keeping pace.
Te most important thing is having a solid demo reel, says
Kraig Docherty, director of talent strategy and acquisition at Blue
Castle Games (www.bluecastlegames.net). A full-service, third-
party publisher/independent developer in Vancouver, British
Columbia, Blue Castle Games more than doubled in personnel,
in 2008, adding 80 staers. New graduates tend to include all
their materialeverything they did from the rst day of school
nnnn
Recruitment
This half wireframe/half
rendered bust of Ben
Franklin was created by
DMD alumnus Salim
Zayat, who got a job at
Shaba Games.
February 2009 43
Recruitment
nnnn
Kristin Ying, while a junior
in the Digital Media Design
program at the University of
Pennsylvania, interned for
Electronic Arts (EA). She
included this 3D model of a
tiger in her demo reel.
through graduationon their ve-minute
demo reel; rather, he points out, the demo
reel should be a representation of their best
work. I would rather see a one-minute
demo reel of their best work, he admits,
than ve minutes of everything they were
learning throughout their education.
Docherty also encourages candidates to
stop casting a very wide net. Demo reels of-
ten include a wide array of projects and ele-
ments, making it dicult to discern what
the artist is interested in. Its important, he
says, to get a sense of what they want to
do or what their passion isfor example,
concept art, character animation, and so
forthand to ensure that their reel dem-
onstrates their best work. I cannot stress
that enough, he adds.
Experienced professionals also need to
submit a demo reel, Docherty recognizes. It
needs to be a detailed art breakdown of what
they did in an animation, otherwise it is dif-
cult to tell what their involvement was in
the project. What I have seen from anima-
tors who get it is they break down their reel
and show us the progression of what they
developed, what they did personally, and
then the end result. Te resum does have a
lot of weight, as does the cover letter, but the
demo reel tends to be the rst thing we look
at, explains Docherty.
It is also advisable to submit a demo
reel with material in relation to what the
potential employer is looking for, advises
Docherty. If an artist submits a reel full of
puzzle games to a publisher of rst-person
shooters, for example, he hasnt much hope
of being considered for a job vacancy.
Te aesthetics or achievements of the
work completed in a portfolio also gain the
attention of Lala Gavgavian, director of
stang at Venice, California-based Digi-
tal Domain (www.digitaldomain.com),
a VFX and animation company. Yet, the
overall presentation also makes an impres-
sion, good or bad. Something as simple
as correct spelling on a resum and cover
letter goes a long way, she admits.
Industry Involvement
Networking is the most important tactic,
says Gavgavian, of landing the ideal job.
Although travel budgets are often curtailed
and travel funds hard to come by during
trying economic times, industry events can
be invaluable networking tools. In fact,
even if you can only attend one conference,
expo, user group meeting, or trade show a
year, make the most of it while there and
then keep in contactwhether by phone,
e-mail, or online social networking sites
such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and
otherswith folks following the event.
It is advantageous to become and remain
involved with this fast-paced industry as
much as possible.
Part of the ability to secure employment
in this industry is timing, says Gavgavian.
Staying on top of the latest news for the
industry, like which studios have awarded
work and are beginning to ramp up, is key.
Most studios receive hundreds of reels per
week, and a submission will receive the
most attention when an actual position is
available. Making connections at industry
conferences, such as SIGGRAPH (www.
siggraph.org), is an advantageous way to
keep a nger on the pulse of the industry
February 2009 44
nnnn
Recruitment
and key studios within it, she continues.
Where at all possible, make the most of
conferences as a chance to meet potential
employers, advises Rodgers. A smile and
a hello go a long way.
Gavgavian, proposing another method
of industry involvement, encourages sea-
soned creatives to become a mentor or
an instructor at an art college during the
down cycles. Tat need is becoming
more prevalent, and these slower times
are the perfect opportunity to get out
there and exercise creative abilities in a
more diverse way.
Gain Experience
Interning presents another opportunity to
get your foot in the door and gain greater
experience during economic hardships.
FMC is a strong proponent of interning,
admits Rothberg. Interns can learn a great
deal about the business, whereas employers
can get a sense of who will make a good
employee and become a valuable member
of the team. Interning is no guarantee of
future employment, but FMC (www.fmc-
training.com) has hired interns to full-time
positions based on their desire, willingness,
and aptitude. Having the ability to intern
can denitely pay dividends if one has the
time and desire, he explains.
One way to set yourself apart is with
manufacturer certication, a valuable
tool to have in your digital tool kit. Te
achievement of an industry-recognized cer-
tication can only help in the employment
process, continues Rothberg, who has ex-
perienced an upward trend in certications
oered by Avid, Digidesign, Adobe, Apple,
Autodesk, and other solutions providers.
Being able to dierentiate oneself from
the competition is an excellent idea in case
of unexpected layos or downsizing.
Attitude Is Everything
Gavgavian and her colleagues look for
soft-skill qualitiessuch as the ability to
be a strong team player, a self-starter, and
have a great attitudewhen lling all po-
sitions at Digital Domain. We seek indi-
viduals who are open and willing to learn
new software and processes for the techni-
cal and/or artistic positions.
Similarly, Rodgers seeks proven team
players whose reel demonstrates the po-
tential to produce world-class visual eects
for the cinema. He also endeavors to avoid
people with large egos and who want to
do their own thing, because they dont t
into Double Negatives culture. You cant
pretend to be passionate and enthusiastic
about what you do, he says. People who
commit to do their best, have integrity, and
are willing to learn, stretch, and challenge
themselves are worth their weight in gold
and should always be able to nd work.
Know your Stuff
When all is said and done, it is paramount
to be knowledgeable about the process,
workow, and the latest tools. Rothberg
recommends really knowing your stu,
becoming an expert in the software of your
choosing and more. Todays editors, for ex-
ample, are no longer just storytellers. Todays
artists are often called upon to add eects,
adjust audio, deal with outside production
elements, and to be comfortable with com-
pression and output issues; therefore, it is
critical that one know as much as possible.
Strong and varied technical skills ensure
that students and graduates are better pro-
tected from economic considerations, says
Norman I. Badler, professor of Computer
and Information Science; director, Center
for Human Modeling and Simulation; di-
rector, Digital Media Design; and faculty
executive director, Computer Graphics
and Game Technology at the University of
Pennsylvania (cg.cis.upenn.edu/cggt). For
example, in the initial Web boom of eight
to 10 years ago, many companies had 10
to 20 employees developing a single Web
site. Tey had front-end designers and
back-end programmers galore. When that
bubble burst, our students survived be-
cause they had been educated to do both
jobs; thus, two salaried employees could
be replaced with one person. Likewise, in
animation, special eects, and games, the
closer a graduate is to the boundary be-
tween being a technical artist and a techni-
cal director, the more choices that student
will have for each job he or she considers,
and the more valuable the person will be
to the employer. By being conversant and
knowledgeable in the culture and lingo of
both, such students serve a critical interdis-
ciplinary, yet exible, role.
Badler and colleague Amy Calhoun also
Qualied applicants may nd themselves in the main conference room, called the whale, or
the adjacent executive ofce in Digital Domains studio. Most recently, the VFX facility nished
groundbreaking work on the feature lm The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
February 2009 45
nd that the highly technical jobs are more
recession-proof than others. Badler says:
Learning how to program for real time,
how to write shaders, how to build an [Au-
todesk] Maya plug-in, or how to program
for the GPU are not trivial skills. You cant
pick them up overnight, and yet our in-
dustry is dependent on such technologies.
Te more advanced technical skills students
have (the more they know about how a
piece of software works and not just how to
use it), the safer their positions will be in a
slow economy.
In a technology-driven industry, con-
tinues Badler, it is crucial that students
know how to make technology work for
them, rather than the reverse. If you only
know how to model objects in one plat-
form and the company recruiting you
uses another, can you adapt? If your tool
set lacks something you require, can you
build the tool that you need? Can you ex-
plain what you need, in either artistic or
technical terms, well enough for someone
to build it for you? Tese are the skills that
keep people employed.
Multifaceted skill sets and exibility are
the hallmarks of great employees, accord-
ing to Badler. If you dont know how to
do something that is in demand, he sug-
gests learning it; after all, myriad resources
are at your disposal, and virtually all new
discoveries are documented and publicly
available. Can you think of any other
industry that distributes all its intellectual
property for free in the way that graphics
does? I cant, and because of that, there
is really no excuse for being uninformed.
Access to SIGGRAPH papers are a click
away, and the better informed job seekers
are about the directions that technologies
are headed, the better prepared they are for
the inevitable changes that are inherent in a
technology-driven industry, he says.
Times of recession provide a chance
to step back and re-tool. If you lack suf-
cient technical skills to land the job of
your dreams, you might want to consider
an advanced degree created for returning
students, Badler suggests. For example,
our CGGT masters program was designed
specically for students with undergradu-
ate degrees in computer science who want-
ed to re-align their skills for the graphics
industry. We dont teach them topics
theyve already mastered, but we do focus
on helping them develop new abilities to
add to their bag of tricks. Similar programs
are cropping up all over the world, so nd
one that suits your current abilities and,
more importantly, will help you improve
your areas of weakness and re-enter the job
market at a higher level.
Perhaps most importantly, consider what
you love to do and determine how to make
it easier, faster, and better, recognizes Badler.
Want to do animation? Find a way to do
some of the back-
ground animation
procedurally, thereby
freeing up your time
to focus on the star
characters. Love rig-
ging? Build a rigging
system that will work
for most characters so
youll have more time
for complex rigs.
Creating tools
that allow creatives
to spend their valuable time on the jobs that
really matter is the key to eciency of time,
money, employees, and companies, Badler
says. And ecient companies dont need to
lay people o in recessions.
Choose a Company
Just as you audition for a position at a stu-
dio, to some extent, that studio is also au-
ditioning for you. Tey want to draft the
brightest, most talented, well educated, and
hardworking team players to their team.
And when you win that dream job, you
likely will want to be gainfully employed
there for some time and not laid o due
to economic hardship. Apply to companies
unaected by the recession.
Companies like Digital Domain,
which have diverse service oerings, are in
an advantageous position to leverage talent
across several areasin our case, across our
feature VFX, commercials, and games divi-
sions, says Gavgavian. We havent seen a
big dierence in our hiring patterns due to
any change in the economy.
Whereas diversity shields one studio,
another is unaected thanks to its global
reach. As a visual eects facility for fea-
ture lms, Double Negatives work is de-
pendent on the status of the lm indus-
try, admits Rodgers. We are fortunate
that our client base is truly global and
that, thankfully, CG is often the most
cost-eective solution to delivering strik-
ing images to the screen, both fantasti-
cal and photoreal invisible eects. [In
2008] we were the busiest we have ever
been, and our recruitment has continued
to allow Double Negative to increase in
size at a healthy rate.
In the end, the quest for a dream job do-
ing exactly what you love in this industry
takes heart and dedication. Never give
up, advises Rodgers. Gavgavian echoes
the sentiment, noting, Sometimes it takes
working within the industry in dierent
disciplines or positions before your dream
job will present itself. Be open to other op-
portunities that can lead you there. Dont
give up. n
Courtney E. Howard is a contributing editor to Computer
Graphics World. She can be reached at cehoward@
twitchcafe.com.
DMDs Ray Forziati modeled and animated a T-rex, and composited
the elements in a video scene to produce this project.
Recruitment
nnnn
VISUALIZATION
Reality is Served
Mental Images has unveiled its Reality-
Server 2.2 server-based, 3D Web applica-
tion and services platform for developers
and system integrators. RealityServer,
designed to provide high-quality renderings
for large-model visualization in 3D, enables
users to create and deploy 3D interac-
tive Web services and applications for a
variety of disciplines, such as aerospace,
automotive, architecture, and product
design. Real-time viewing and interaction
with high image quality and large datasets
enables Web-based remote collaboration
without the need for downloads or client-
side viewer applications. RealityServer
maintains and processes content securely
on the server, so the client does not need
additional plug-ins, client-side applications,
storage, memory, or more-powerful CPUs
and GPUs. The software platform provides
multiple rendering options, including a
high-quality raytracer and an interactive
graphics-card renderer.
Mental images;
www.mentalimages.com
RENDER MANAGEMENT
Frantic Deadline
The in-house software division of Frantic
Films VFX has released Deadline 3.0,
an administration and rendering toolkit
for Windows-, Linux-, and Mac OS X-
based renderfarms. Deadline offers file
sharing, 64-bit support, an intuitive user
interface, and custom-written interfaces
for popular rendering packages, including
Autodesks Maya, 3ds Max, and Softim-
age XSI, NewTeks LightWave, Maxons
Cinema 4D, Adobes After Effects, and
more. Additional features include exible
job scheduling, secure administration
and auditing, remote error reporting, and
job monitoring with automatic progress
updates. Deadline, available free to start-
up renderfarms of two nodes or less, starts
at $130 per render node for the rst 10
licenses.
Frantic Films Software;
http://software.franticlms.com
3D MODELS
Male Model
Michael 4, the latest version of Daz 3Ds
3D male figure, is designed to be the
most realistic, versatile, and anatomically
accurate human male model available for
public use. The gure is derived from high-
resolution human photography and body
scans combined with fourth-generation
unimesh and improved rigging and body
contours. With Michael 4, artists can
produce, morph, and mix characters of
different proportions and shapes, lending
to virtually limitless character genera-
tion. Michael 4 comes with multiple head
shapes to manipulate age, weight, and
ethnicity characteristics, as well as high-
resolution, photoreal skin texture maps
with such enhanced irregularities as pores,
freckles, veins, and muscle striations. Daz
3Ds new high-end Character Setup Tools
infuse Michael 4 with more realistic joint
movement while eliminating distortion.
Available free of charge for all registered
Daz 3D users, Michael 4 is now available
for electronic download via Daz 3Ds Web
site. Corresponding product bundles
containing various clothing, hairstyles,
skins, heads, and body shapesrange in
price from $35 to $60.
Daz 3D; www.daz3d.com
SIMULATION
Extended Family
E-on Software has expanded its Vue
product family with Vue 7 Complete and
Vue 7 Pioneer. Vue 7 Complete, speci-
cally designed for expert 3D artists and
small studios, provides wind and breeze
effects, ventilators, EcoSystem painting,
and 3D export. Vue 7 Pioneer, an entry-
level version of Vue targeted at newcomers
to 3D and casual artists, offers various
landscape-creation tools for creating
and rendering 3D worlds. Users can add
independent modules to Vue 7 Pioneer
to extend its functionality and progres-
sively upgrade to Vue 7 Complete. Vue 7
Complete and Vue 7 Pioneer are priced at
$599 and $49.95, respectively.
E-on Software;
www.e-onsoftware.com
MOTION TRACKING
Contact Editor
Animazoo debuted Contact Editor, soft-
ware with editing and auto-cleaning tools.
Contact Editor works in conjunction with
Animazoos IGS-190M (Mobile) and new
IGS-190H (Hybrid) motion-capture suits
to deliver optical-quality motion-capture
data from an inertial gyroscopic system.
The newly released IGS-190H combines
the features of the IGS-190M with a new
Ultrasonic system, ExacTrax, and Version
9 software. Animazoo developed the
ExacTrax ultrasonic tracking technology
to work in conjunction with the IGS-190M
and GypsyGyro-18 systems. Its scalable
conguration includes one Sonar Process-
ing Unit (SPU) per four sonar sensors (up
to 32 sensors per PCI slot of a standard
PC). The basic system comes in a 20-
sensor/ve-SPU conguration. The hybrid
system is designed to accommodate up
to four IGS-190 systems without requiring
additional sonar gear.
Animazoo; www.animazoo.com
For additional product news
and information, visit CGW.com
46 February 2009
SOFTWARE
WIN
WIN LINUX
WIN MAC
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WIN MAC LINUX
prove the number of iterations so we can add
more to our shots. The more iterations, the
more we can improve on individual shots;
this gives artists more time to work on their
shots and directors more that they can put
into a shot, he adds. It is not as glamorous
or as sexy, but it will have a greater impact
on what the audience sees.
To this end, Imageworks has been ex-
tremely active in generating improved soft-
ware packagesassets that are perhaps even
more valuable than, say, a database used to
re-create New York City (which Image-
works has readily available). One example is
Katana, Imageworks lighting package that
enables artists to light scenes quickly and
with fewer lights and fewer man-hours. The
studio also developed new rendering soft-
ware, called Arnold, that enables the crew to
render shots quicker, whether it is for a VFX
or CG movie. It was used on Monster House
and Eagle Eye, and currently
on Cloudy and Alice.
Additionally, the facility
has created numerous track-
ing and production enhance-
ments for locating where shots
are at any given instance on
any computer, and for helping
to determine the cost benefits
of making certain changes to
a shot.
There are many internal
technological advancements
that give artists a very clean way of working
on a shot as opposed to just managing the
things they need to do to be able to work on
the shot, says Sarnoff. It is much easier for
artists to take [software] off the shelf than
to design it themselves. However, there are
some things we need to do in this company
that are unique because we are always on
the cutting edge. Take our lighting tools for
instance; we work on a lot of shots, and the
commercial tools are not yet able to handle
the volume we need. When we are work-
ing on tens of thousands of processors, it is
more cost-effective to just build something
yourself than to buy it for each processor.
In terms of CG models, the desire is still
there to cross-utilize assets among various
media, particularly from film to games.
However, most film assets are still too heavy
to have practical value for these licensees.
What has improved most, though, is the
understanding of what people can use and
what they do not need, so they are no longer
asking for the wrong things, says Sarnoff.
They no longer ask for everything, but
rather very specific pieces of the models or
the shaders they want to use, so they can
make their model look as compelling as
what we created for the theater experience.
The Economy and the Future
In todays economic climate, even Hol-
lywood is feeling the pinch. There has
always been this theory that the entertain-
ment industry is recession-proof. The dif-
ference now is that there are many forms of
entertainment, so you never know which
part of the industry will be recession-proof
and which will be affected by the economic
troubles we are facing, notes Sarnoff. So
rather than thinking we are bullet-proof,
everyone in this industry needs to keep their
eyes on the ball to see where the audience is
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CGW_THIRD_vert:CGW_THIRD_vert 10/24/08
February 2009 47
nnnn
Editors Note
Tim Sarnoff, president of Sony Pictures
Imageworks, is responsible for the direction
of the studio, and thus keeps his finger on
the pulse of the industry at all times.
When necessary, Imageworks creates software that enables
its artists to do their work more efficiently. For instance, the
studios Arnold rendering software was used on various films,
such as Eagle Eye.
February 2009, Volume 32, Number 2: COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD (USPS 665-250) (ISSN-0271-4159) is published monthly (12 issues) by COP Communica-
tions, Inc. Corporate ofces: 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204, Tel: 818-291-1100; FAX: 818-291-1190; Web Address: info@copprints.com. Periodicals
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going to get their entertainment. They will
go somewhere regardless of what happens
with the economy, but we need to be smart
about producing the right kind of product
they want to see.
Make no mistake: Imageworks will con-
tinue producing movies. People always
want to hear a good story or see a good
moviethat is still the biggest bang for
your buck, spending two hours engaged
in a movie theater, Sarnoff adds. Seeing
a movie that takes you somewhere else is as
good as it gets in entertainment.
Will uplifting stories draw audiences
more so than other types? Sarnoff doesnt
believe so. Studios are still looking for the
best stories and putting them out whenever
they feel it will make the greatest impact,
he says. Nevertheless, films are getting
more expensive to make. Sarnoff points out
that the cost range for films will always ex-
istthose at the high end will continue to
get more expensive, and there will always be
those with smaller budgets.
There are new technologies that come
along that allow new filmmakers to make
compelling films with far less money. But the
number of films at the high end will continue
to grow because there are more outlets for ex-
pensive films, depending on what story you
are trying to tell, Sarnoff explains.
The audiences expectations will con-
tinue to grow, too. They expect perfection.
They want something fantastic, and it is
expensive to create something spectacular.
To wow an audience today takes quite a bit
more skill than it did a decade ago, says
Sarnoff. It requires not just the machin-
ery and the technology we use today, but
the imagination and skill sets of the people
making the shots, and that goes back to
what I said earlier about innovation.
Sarnoff continues: I am now trying to
give the artists the tools they need to express
themselves without necessarily having to go
through the mundane process of trying to
get the work to appear on the screen. I want
to take directly what is in their mind and
provide the conduit by which they can place
it on the screenthat would be the tech-
nology I am looking for. Because, at the end
of the day, our imaginations are limitless, so
lets see if we can tap into them better.
Personally, what is Sarnoff hoping to ac-
complish in the near future? I want my
kids to turn to each other and say, My God,
thats amazing; thats terrific. Its personal
to me. Thats why we do itwe want to
please and impress the audience. n
February 2009 48
nnnn
Editors Note
According to Sarnoff, visual effects (such as those in Valkrie, top, and Body of Lies, bottom) are
no longer considered part of postproduction. Rather, they are considered part of the production
process, and included in the initial film planning.
CGW :808_p 7/16/08 11:45 AM Page 1
www.aja.com
AJA makes the whole process easier.
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From capture to conversion, Keith Colleas entire
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With a resum including work on blockbusters such as Alien:
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post production veteran has been a longtime user of AJA products.
Colleas entire post production workflow depends on AJA products,
including KONA, Io HD, and Converters. Im a huge AJA fan, says Collea.
On his recent feature, The Gene Generation, Keith chose Io HD as the
centerpiece of a fully portable projection system. Using the Io HD, an
Apple Intel MacBook Pro and a G-Tech G-DRIVE, we were able to create
a system that allowed the film to be shown on a Sony digital cinema
projector without the use of a tape-based VTR for playback, he
explained. It saved us time and money, and the picture quality
was better than if it came off of tape. It was just incredible.
To find out more about how Keith uses AJA products to enhance
his workflow, check out the full details at www.aja.com/keith
I o H D . B e c a u s e i t m a t t e r s .
Keith Collea
Co-writer and Producer, The Gene Generation
CGW :109_p 1/29/09 7:13 AM Page 1