studioGPU

Will you be submitting to CGSociety’s B-Movie CG Challenge?

I’m a huge fan of B-movies.  I love watching zombies, monsters, bug-eyed aliens and of course the werewolves of B-movie fame.  So I was delighted to see CGSociety’s: “Attack of the 50ft CGChallenge” running today, through April 19, 2010.

Basically CG artists are asked to create their own version of B-movie or resurrect creatures from an existing movie. The emotive impact and implication of “the story behind the imagery” is the aspect that is most important.  But as we all know, good story can be strongly enhanced by powerful lighting and FX.  Since there is not a lot of time (nor budget) to produce these B-movies, the ability to do quick creative treatments and changes (essentially previs for animation) can be critical - i.e. MachStudio Pro.

Check out the StudioGPU CG animation showcase to see some inspirational examples (not of B-movies content, but of animation content). The Princess Twins, New Guys (each video produced in only a week), and Secret of Skull island, all make clear what you can do with good story telling and real-time lighting workflows.

You can enter as individuals or as teams so this might be a great opportunity to search for colleagues in our forums.  If you do plan to enter the contest, add a comment here or in the forums so we can follow your work!

Producing a broadcast commercial a month using MachStudio Pro

MachStudio Pro has been out on the market for less than 6 months, but already I've seen examples of some impressive production work. Last week there was a press release about the PlayMobil DVD for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, and no doubt there will be other high visibility releases.

But I wanted to do some informal callouts in this blog of some of the interesting work I've seen, running from small productions, to experiments, to high visibility projects. What got me thinking about this, was the recent "Natal" video I received from FX, lda, a Mozambican post production studio for TV. FX, Ida is using MachStudio Pro to produce one commercial each month for the Arroz Leao brand of rice.

Nildo Essa is the principal behind FX, Ida. He began as a one man shop but has recently expanded to add in a second modeler for background scenes, and a story writer. Nildo himself does all animation, rendering, lighting and character modeling.

Natal (a punk jingle bells holiday commercial) is the second commercial in the series created with MachStudio Pro (see his other video in the showcase)

The workflow for Natal

For the "Natal" Commercial, Nildo motion captures all moves of the 3 characters in his very small but workable mocap studio (Nildo is the actor!). He imports this data into Max, cleans it up, and then maps into onto the final characters which are already modeled and textured.

With the camera work done he moves all assets into MachStudio Pro. For Natal he rendered the foreground elements separately from the background and then used After Effects for compositing and motion blur. In Premiere Pro he adds the final touches and special FX.

Now the kicker: Each commercial averages about 1 week of actual production from audio recording to the final piece and showing to the client. Impressive to say the least.

If you have an example of work you have done in MachStudio Pro, or impressions/critiques about the productions I feature in this blog, submit a comment.

Rick Bergman, Sr. VP and GM at AMD, talks about MachStudio Pro to enhance Hollywood productions

At Siggraph 2009,  Rick Bergman, Senior VP and General Manager of AMD, discusses how GPU-based computer graphics can enhance Hollywood productions. In particular he showcases MachStudio Pro as a critical tool for real-time creative work.

Hardware tesselation brings the artist vision into alignment with the final product

SIGGRAPH 2009 was an exciting show for StudioGPU.  We showcased the upcoming version of MachStudio Pro V1.2 and announced that MachStudio Pro now ships with the FirePro V8750 2GB accelerator from AMD.

But the fun part of the show was watching peoples’ jaws drop when they saw MachStudio Pro in action.  Everyone understands the concept of a really fast final renderer.  But real-time workflow, working creatively at final render quality was what drove the “I don’t believe it” reactions.  The best way to show you what I mean is to let you watch a demo we captured on camera.

The demo runs through real-time ambient occlusion,  lighting, on-the-fly shader adjustments and finally shows sub-pixel displacement mapping using hardware tessellation. 

Tessellation involves breaking down polygon meshes into higher poly meshes. In the video below, taking a simple polygon mesh and breaking each polygon down into smaller units allows the surface of the object/model to become smoother with a greater sense of depth and detail, including self-occlusion, self-shadowing and silhouettes.

But more detailed characters, especially with complex animation, devour memory and up storage requirements. Software runs into bandwidth issues so load times increase and memory demands shoot up. But the new version of MachStudio Pro takes advantage of the FirePro V8750 GPU to generate the additional complexity using hardware tessellation.

Hardware tessellation means there is no penalty hit for the virtually unlimited fineness and detail created by the displacement maps.

Quick note:  Once you start the video, click on the HD button on the lower right, to watch the video at higher quality.