Making Movies

Making Movies
„ Concept
„ Storyboarding
„ Sound
„ Character
Development
„ Layout and
look
„ Effects
„ Animation
„ Lighting

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 Concept
„ “Nothing gets in the way of the story”
„ John Lasseter (Pixar)

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 Story-
boarding
„ Explicitly define
„ Scenes
„ Camera shots
„ Special effects
„ Lighting
„ Scale

„ Used as guide by
animators

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 Sound
„ Voice recording of talent completed before
animation begins
„ Animations must match the voice over
„ A puppeteer once told me that the voice makes or
breaks a character

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 Character Development
„ 300 Drawings

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 Character Development
„ 40 Sculptures

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 Character Development
„ Computer
Models

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 Layout & Look
„ Build scenery
„ Match colors

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 Matchmoving
„ CG camera must exactly match the real camera
„ Position
„ Rotation
„ Focal length
„ Aperature
„ Easy when camera is instrumented
„ Hard to place CG on moving objects on film

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Match-
moving

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 Matchmoving
„ Known patterns in live action made it easier to
track – furniture, wall paper
„ 2D – 3D conversion in Maya

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 Shooting Film For CG
„ Actors practice with maquettes (small scale
models)
„ Maquettes replaced with laser dots
„ lasers on when camera shutter is closed
„ After each take, three extra shots
„ chrome ball for environment map for Stuart’s eyes
„ white and gray balls for lighting info

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 Matchmoving
„ Film scanned
„ Camera tracking data retrieved
„ 3D Equalizer + Alias Maya to prepare (register) the
digital camera
„ Once shot is prepared, 2D images rendered and
composited with live action

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Water

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Particle
Sim and
Indentation

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Tools

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Compositing

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 Compositing
„ Lighting

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Facial Animation

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Facial Animation

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Fur

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Cloth

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Buttons and Creases

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Texture

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 Companies
„ Pixar „ Dreamworks SKG
„ Disney „ Tippett Studios
„ Sony Imageworks
„ Angel Studios
„ Industrial Light and
Magic (ILM) „ Blue Sky
„ Rhythm and Hues „ Robert Abel and
„ Pacific Data Images Associates
(PDI) „ Giant Studios

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 Toy Story (1995)
„ 77 minutes long; 110,064 frames
„ 800,000 machine hours (91 years!) of rendering
„ 1 terabyte of disk space
„ 3.5 minutes of animation produced each week
(maximum)
„ Frame render times: 45 min – 20 hours
„ 110 Suns operating 24-7 for rendering
„ 300 CPU’s

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 Toy Story
„ Texture maps on Buzz: 189
„ (450 to show scuffs and dirt)
„ Number of animation ‘knobs’
„ Buzz – 700
„ Woody – 712
„ Face – 212
„ Mouth – 58
„ Sid’s Backpack – 128
„ Number of leaves on
trees – 1.2 mil
„ Number of shaders – 1300
„ Number of storyboards – 25,000
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 Toy Story 2
„ 80 minutes long, 122,699
frames
„ 1400 processor render farm
„ Render time of 10 min to 3
days
„ Direct to video film
„ Software tools
„ Alias|Wavefront
„ Amazon Paint
„ RenderMan

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 Newman!
„ Subdivision-surfaces

„ Polygonal hair (head)

„ Texture mapped on arms

„ Sculpted clothes

„ Complex shaders

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 Devil’s in the Details
„ Render in color
„ Convert to
NTSC B/W
„ Add film effects
„ Jitter
„ Negative
scratches
„ Hair
„ Static

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Images

Shadows?

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Images

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Images

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 Stuart Little
„ 500 shots with
digital character
„ 6 main challenges
„ Lip sync
„ Match-move (CG
to live-action)
„ Fur
„ Clothes
„ Animation tools
„ Rendering, lighting, compositing

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 Stuart Little
„ 100+ people worked on CG
„ 32 color/lighting/composite artists
„ 12 technical assistants
„ 30 animators
„ 40 artists
„ 12 R&D

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Stuart Little

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 Final Fantasy

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http://www.arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/01q3/ff-interview/ff-interview-2.html
 Final Fantasy
„ First ever animated feature to attempt photorealistic CGI
humans
„ Second biggest box office flop ever (lost over $124M)
„ Main characters > 300,000 polys
„ 1336 shots
„ 24,606 layers
„ 3,000,000 renders (if only rendered once)
„ typically 5 render revisions
„ render time per frame = 90 min
„ Most layers per shot 500
„ 934,162 days of render time on one CPU
„ they used 1200 CPUs = 778 days of rendering

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 Final Fantasy
„ Renderman (Pixar) used for rendering
„ direct illumination
„ many hacks to fake global illumination
„ Maya used for modeling
„ Hair
„ Modeled is splines
„ Lighting and rendering complicated as well

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 Star Wars I
„ The good
„ Jar-Jar’s ears (cloth
simulation)
„ Jar-Jar’s facial animation
„ Sets
„ Were only as high as the
tallest character in the
film
„ Above that was all CG
„ Was the first interaction
between CGI and humans
„ The bad
„ Jar-Jar
„ Jar-Jar
„ Jar-Jar
„ Jar-Jar
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 Making Movies
„ Production Team
„ Production Line
„ Special Effects

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 Production Team
„ Directors „ Shader Writers
„ Modelers „ Effects Animators
„ Lighting „ Looks Team
„ Character Animators „ Security Officer
„ Technical Directors „ Janitor
„ Render Wranglers „ Lackey
„ Tools Developers

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