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War of the Worlds
War of the Worlds
ILM relied on Autodesk Maya software, as well as Discreet Inferno and Discreet Flame systems and Autodesk Burn software as part of their proprietary SABRE visual effects system, to realize various concept-based effects for Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Complicated concepts and sequences such as the warring aliens and their tripods were crafted using Autodesk Maya software. Another involved the Tripods’ heat ray - the Tripod tentacles were imported into the Discreet Inferno system’s 3D environment, and the system’s 3D particles feature was used to create an organic-looking plasma spray that vaporized buildings and people. Autodesk’s Discreet Inferno system was also used as a part of ILM’s proprietary SABRE visual effects system to shape the film’s “Fleeing the Neighborhood” scene, in which Tom Cruise attempts to drive his family out of the city while destruction looms around them. This scene relied on miniature models of buildings and cars, blowing debris and pyrotechnical elements. Miniature models of buildings destroyed by the aliens were created at ILM and shot on a green screen. The Discreet Inferno system allowed the artists to layer all of the elements, including the footage of these models, in 3D space and composite them seamlessly into the environment. |
As a result, there was no visible difference between the original buildings shot on location and the buildings that were replaced with green screen footage of the destroyed miniature models. “There are a lot of compositing tools that could allow us to stack up 50 rendered elements on top of each other, but Autodesk’s Discreet Inferno system offers more,” notes Grady Cofer, Discreet Inferno system supervisor at ILM. “The system’s creative tools and interaction facilitate an artist’s touch, and that’s what really matters. We couldn’t have done War of the Worlds without it.”
Animated Short Film Category
In the Animated Short Film category, Autodesk products were used to shape three of the five nominated films. Anthony Lucas of 3-D Films used Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, and Autodesk Combustion desktop visual effects software to create The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper and Morello. Autodesk 3ds Max software was used to craft the film’s iron flying ships, while Autodesk Maya software was used to create the clouds in the sky. Autodesk Combustion software was then used to composite the images together and to add glows and color tints to the scene. Two-dimensional film Badgered was conformed and onlined by John Rowe, head of digital post-production at the National Film and Television School in London, using Autodesk’s Discreet Flame system. The Discreet Flame system was also used for color balancing to create a consistent look throughout the film. |
Shane Acker used Autodesk Maya 3D animation software to craft his Oscar-nominated film 9. Acker took four and a half years to produce the film, beginning production in version 2 and finishing in version 6 of the Autodesk Maya software. “Working on this project over an extended period of time allowed me to experience Autodesk Maya blossoming into the amazing program it is today,” said Acker. “I was surprised at how smoothly my files would transfer into each new update, and I was thrilled with how the tools in each new version would expand the possibilities for the film,” he added. Acker used Autodesk Maya software for modeling, animation, dynamics and particle effects. “I wanted to create a dark, dirty, surreal world emotive of European stop motion animation and the paintings of Zdzislaw Beksinski. Autodesk Maya software allowed me to free up the camera and explore intricate movement and staging that I would not have been able to achieve in a real stop motion set,” explained Acker. The software was also used for lighting and rendering of the short, to achieve a non-photorealistic, stylized look. “Autodesk Maya software rendering provided what I needed without the overhead of global illumination or radiosity style rendering,” he noted. |
Other Categories
Autodesk technology was also used to shape Oscar-winning and nominated films in other categories. Autodesk’s Discreet Lustre system was used by Éclair Laboratoires to digitally color grade Documentary Feature winner, March of the Penguins. Post-production facility The Video Lab relied upon Autodesk’s Discreet Lustre system to digitally color grade Foreign-film winner, Tsotsi. “Autodesk’s Discreet Lustre system allowed us to create a look that captured the mood and grittiness of a contemporary South African township, while maintaining aesthetic appeal to an international audience,” explained Tracey Williams, digital intermediate and visual effects producer at The Video Lab. Color played an integral role in the storytelling and was used to enhance the mood of various situations. “When we wanted the audience to feel empathy towards Tsotsi, the film’s hostile lead character, we used virtual lighting gags to lift Tsotsi’s eyes, allowing the audience to look almost directly into them,” noted Brett Manson, Video Lab colourist and visual effects artist.
Autodesk Congratulates Visual Effects Oscar Winner King Kong
Autodesk Congratulates Visual Effects Oscar Winner King Kong
Eleventh Consecutive Year that Autodesk Clients Win Best Visual Effects Academy Award
Autodesk congratulates visual effects facility Weta Digital, who crafted champion visual effects for the Oscar-winning film King Kong. Autodesk also congratulates Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks, for shaping the Visual Effects category nominated films The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and War of the Worlds. For the eleventh consecutive year, Autodesk technology was used to realize winning visual effect ideas for films in this category. In addition, Autodesk’s Discreet Lustre system was used to digitally color grade Oscar-winning films in the Visual Effects, Documentary Feature and Foreign Film categories.
King Kong
Weta Digital relied on the Discreet Lustre system to help create the distinctive look and feel of King Kong. "We used Autodesk’s Discreet Lustre system as part of the entire visual effects color grading process while making King Kong. We used it to grade at the front end before the computer-generated elements were added, and also at the very end of our pipeline to grade the final images,” explained Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital. “As the elements came in, the Discreet Lustre system helped us work out the look for complex environments like Skull Island and 1933 New York." Digital color grading is the process of altering or enhancing the colors in a movie using scanned copies of the original film.
Sony Picture Imageworks
Sony Picture Imageworks
Bringing Narnia’s fantasy world to life.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was challenging by virtue of the complexity of its visual effects and the short timeframe in which hundreds of shots had to be completed. A holiday 2005 blockbuster produced by Walt Disney Pictures in association with Walden Media, The Chronicles of Narnia brings viewers into the incredible world of fantasy and adventure created by C.S. Lewis. With more than 1,400 visual effects shots, the workload associated with The Chronicles of Narnia was divvied up between three major visual effects companies: Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), ILM, and Rhythm and Hues. Over 600 of the shots were created at SPI, which engaged the talents of its 3D animators and visual effects compositors, who used an arsenal of Autodesk® technology. |
Incredible 3D Animation
SPI’s film workflow used Autodesk® Maya® 3D animation software seats where many of the movie’s 3D talking animals—including wolves, beavers, and a fox—were created. After the basic polygonal characters were developed, these 3D Nurbs “puppets” were moved to the Rigging department where they were refined.
“All of SPI’s animation work for Narnia was done in Maya, with 3D characters moving back and forth between our design and Rigging departments. We took great care to design characters that would be extremely believable whether they were CG wolves interacting alongside live-action wolves or fantastic, mythical creatures, such as Mr. Tumnus, a fawn, who is essentially a man with goat legs,” says David Schaub, SPI’s animation director. “Maya offers us all the tools we need to perfect the appearance and movements of our characters down to the smallest detail.”
The Rigging department builds the skeleton and musculature into the character and applies the deformers that need to mimic muscles and tendons moving under the skin. “Because of the system’s open architecture and software development kit, our riggers could take Maya further by writing their own muscle-based facial animation control system,” says Schaub. “For Narnia, the ability to develop custom tools and deformers greatly extended the reach of Maya to cover all our animation needs.”
Lightning Fast Rendering
SPI also employed six seats of Autodesk’s Discreet® Flame® system, considered the state-of-the-art system for movie effects work, all running on SGI workstations. Facilitating a highly efficient film workflow, all of the Flame boxes could off-load even the most complex visual effects composites onto the Autodesk® Burn™ background processing software.
“The increased speed Burn provides for rendering allows us to quickly implement client feedback and provide a result in many cases while they are present,” says Jason Anderson, SPI’s interactive compositing production manager. “During Narnia, there were countless occasions where Burn streamlined our workflow and assisted us in meeting deadlines with its efficiency and rendering speed.”
Breakthrough Visual Effects
The Flame team—which included artists Lisa Deaner, Dave Takayama, Todd Mesher, Rob Blue, Doug Forrest, and CG Supervisor Dave Smith—completed complex visual effects shots which harnessed many of the powerful Flame tools, including Action, 2D and 3D tracking, 3D and modular keying, color warping and color correction, painting, degrain and regrain, rig removal, camera tracking, multilayered green screen compositing, and more.
For an effects shot involving footage captured from a helicopter flying over a forest, Takayama had to remove a lake and mountains from the background while preserving the tree line of the forest in the foreground. He dropped into the background a matte painting that featured an ice castle sitting on a lake; animated the water to create waves; and added glints, glows, and lens flares on the castle to give the fabricated scene a more photorealistic finish.
“The Flame desktop environment makes organizing shot elements very intuitive. You can see most of everything right there in front of you without searching through file directories and then previewing individual frames,” says Blue. “Also, effects shots are almost never ‘locked off’ anymore. So, Flame tracking tools, especially the camera tracker, proved to be essential for creating realistic, seamless results.”
In another difficult shot in Narnia, footage taken from the helicopter flying over a mountain contained a hotel on a mountainside below. Deaner had to remove this hotel and replace it with rocky cliffs and layers of trees, a process that really maximized Flame camera-tracking capability. Deaner also replaced dull, hazy skies with an early morning sunrise to give the scene a wintery look.
“Our pipeline uses a centralized ‘shot tree’ which can be directly accessed from every workstation. Batch’s LUT (Look-Up Table) node gets used quite frequently to integrate linear CG elements with log background plates,” says Blue.
“The greatest challenge in Narnia was the sheer scale of the plate preparation work,” Blue adds. “The tools within Flame, in conjunction with Maya and Burn rendering, enabled us to execute all of Narnia’s most demanding tasks successfully.”
Schaub agrees: “The real breakthrough with the effects work was that we were able to complete over 600 effects shots in just eight months. The flexibility and power of Autodesk’s tools made it possible for us to meet this remarkably fast turnaround.”
NARNIA™ © Disney/Walden, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. All Rights Reserved.
 | Narnia (pdf - 134Kb) |
The Orphanage
The Orphanage
At this leading visual effects company, artists spend more time creating art, thanks to the high-end tools in Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max software products.
At The Orphanage, technology takes a back seat to artistry. “I consider visual effects to be moving surrealism,” says Jonathan Harman, a CG supervisor at the company. “Just as Dali didn’t spend all his time thinking about how the chemicals were mixed to make the paint he used, we don’t want to spend all our time thinking about the software we’re using.” “If we’re using good software,” he adds, “our artists will spend less time thinking about the technology and they’ll spend more time being artists.” To achieve such artistic freedom, The Orphanage, a leading visual effects, production, and technology company based in San Francisco and Los Angeles, has integrated Autodesk® Maya® software and Autodesk® 3ds Max® software into every stage of its pipeline, from modeling to rigging to animation to rendering. “It’s about direct manipulation. We want our artists to drive the creative process directly and not have to move through layers of abstraction and complexity to achieve their creative visions,” says Dan McNamara, vice president of technology. “Maya and 3ds Max allow our artists to do that.” According to Harman, the artists have been achieving this goal with Maya and 3ds Max for several years, using Maya for modeling and creature work, and 3ds Max for shading, texturing, lighting, and rendering on projects ranging from feature films to television commercials to music videos. During that time, however, programmers at The Orphanage also had to bolster their production pipeline with proprietary tools designed to enable the software to interoperate. |
Now that both Maya and 3ds Max are part of the Autodesk Media and Entertainment portfolio, the artists are looking forward to smoother interoperability between the two powerhouse packages. “We used to feel that having Maya and 3ds Max in our pipeline was both a strength and a weakness—a strength because each package has very strong features that © Paramount Pictures, Aeon Flux. Image courtesy of The Orphanage. At this leading visual effects company, artists spend more time creating art, thanks to the high-end tools in Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max software products. The Orphanage By Audrey Doyle complement each other and a weakness because getting data from one package to the other was an issue that required some heavy lifting on our part,” Harman says.
“Today, we’re using the FBX file format to transfer data between Maya and 3ds Max, and we’re looking forward to having even more synergy and interoperability between the two packages in the future,” he continues “This will turn what used to be a weakness into a very important strength.”
Over the years, artists at The Orphanage have relied on the varied and robust tools in Maya and 3ds Max to create stunning digital effects for a multitude of projects. Most recently, the company created effects for the movies Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Aeon Flux, and it is currently working on effects for The Host and Superman Returns. As the team explains, each of these projects has presented CG challenges that they have been able to overcome, thanks to certain features and capabilities in Maya and 3ds Max. In Harry Potter, for instance, one of the team’s responsibilities was to create effects for the scenes comprising Dumbledore’s pensieve. According to the story, a wizard can remove a thought from his mind and place it in a pensieve, which is a magical object that stores memories. This leaves the wizard with a clear, fresh mind to concentrate on more pressing matters.
At one point in the film, Harry falls into Dumbledore’s pensieve and ends up in one of the elder wizard’s memories of a trial that took place sometime before. The artists used Maya to model the environment—an elaborately detailed trial chamber measuring eight stories high and weighing in at 3 million polygons. “Maya is great when it comes to handling huge, very detailed and dense models like this one,” McNamara says. In addition to the size of the model, another challenge concerned rendering it, which they accomplished in the Brazil Rendering System in 3ds Max. For this task, the team found the Per-Pixel Camera Map plug-in to 3ds Max particularly helpful. The Orphanage artists developed the plug-in for their work on the film Hellboy, and Autodesk began packaging it with 3ds Max version 7.
As Kevin Baillie, associate visual effects supervisor on Harry Potter, explains the artists rendered the trial chamber environment via projection mapping, a technique that relies on the theory of matte painting from the camera’s perspective in that artists work on only what the camera will see. “It allowed us to take this environment whose look we had developed to a reasonable state, render out a few different views of it, and hand them to our matte painters, who painted on the frames all the details that would have been too difficult or would have taken too long to do in 3D,” he says.
Then the matte painters handed the views to the 3D team, who used the 3ds Max plug-in to project the paintings back onto the Maya geometry and render them through the 3D camera in 3ds Max. “As a result, when we flew the 3D camera through the trial chamber, it looked like we were moving through this beautifully artistic environment,” he adds. “With this tool, we made that environment really sing.”
The Per-Pixel Camera Map plug-in also played an important role in the artists’ work on Aeon Flux. According to Harman, who was a technical director on the film, one of the team’s more-challenging shots concerned the gigantic city of Bregna and the lush forests surrounding it, all of which they modeled in Maya and textured and rendered in 3ds Max and Brazil. “In this shot, we flew the equivalent of 50 miles through and over the CG forest, and then into the CG city,” he says.
In addition to adding a heightened sense of realism to the environment, the plug-in enabled the team to accommodate changes quickly and easily. “In a big shot like this, it was important for the director to be able to ask that the trees be greener or the walls on a building be mossier, for example, and for us to be able to make those changes quickly,” Harman says. “The matte painters just had to go in and paint the trees greener and paint more moss on the walls. We didn’t have to re-model anything.”
Another challenge on Aeon Flux that the Autodesk software helped the artists overcome concerned the metal spheres the title character used to escape from prison. Prior to her imprisonment, as Aeon Flux crept along a maze of hallways en route to her assassination attempt on another character in the film, she had released several drops of liquid from a ring. While she’s trapped in her cement cell, she whistles; the drops of liquid pop up off the floor and transform into metal spheres, which roll to her cell, assemble on an exterior wall, and explode, freeing her.
To handle the challenge of creating the spheres’ photorealistic reflective surfaces, the team turned to the image-based lighting tools in Brazil and 3ds Max. “We used high-dynamic-range images captured on set to light the spheres and create the reflections,” Baillie says. “If something has a bright highlight on it and it moves quickly, you want the motion blur to act properly when the object is moving—the highlight should streak and stay crisp and hot, and the rest of the object should get blurrier. We couldn’t have achieved this look on those metallic spheres if we didn’t use the image-based lighting technology in Brazil and 3ds Max to light the objects and map the reflections.”
As an aside, Harman and Baillie equate the complexity of the reflections in these shots with the work the team completed recently for a Sprint/BMW commercial called “The Build.” At one point in the commercial, as an actor reaches for the car’s door handle, you can see the reflection of his arm on the side of the door.
“For this commercial, we had to create some tricky blurry reflections to provide an extra level of photorealism,” recalls Harman. “The idea is that if you put your hand on a car and then take your hand away, as your arm moves away from the car its reflection becomes blurry but the reflection of your hand remains more in focus. With Brazil, we were able to get that extra level of photorealism; that blurry reflection.” Images courtesy of The Orphanage.
| | Orphanage (pdf - 212Kb) |
Madman Entertainment/Anthony Lucas
Madman Entertainment/Anthony Lucas
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello powered by steam… and a production toolset including 3ds Max, Maya, and Combustion.
Australian director and animator Anthony Lucas is going nowhere but up these days. On the wings of an Academy Award®, a Grand Crystal award at Annecy, two Australian Film Awards, a BAFTA nomination, and many other accolades, his animated short The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello has been lauded with international recognition. The 26-minute film, an adventure set in an imagined 13th century navigated by steam-powered dirigibles and inspired by Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne, was brought to life using paper cut-outs, 2D backgrounds, 3D models, and effects. Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya®, and Autodesk® Combustion® software products combined to form the toolset for creating 3D airships, particles, and clouds as well as compositing hundreds of 2D elements. |
Creating Collages in 3D
Lucas developed a knack for stop-motion animation at age 11 and added to this knowledge of digital technology on the desktop while working on television commercials as an adult. The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello uses a silhouette paper-cutting technique, with characters that were drawn on paper, scanned into the Adobe® Photoshop® application, and then “chopped up” into layers and manipulated digitally.
“There was a lot of 3D to 2D work where we would bring in 3D models, scanned artwork, miniature, and other layers into Autodesk Combustion as our program-of-choice for transforming and manipulating these elements and marrying them together,” commented Lucas. “Combustion was a real lifesaver, especially because it accurately reads Photoshop files, provides a really sophisticated toolset, but is easy to learn and use.”
Digital Sculpting
Lucas’ cut-and-paste experience in stop motion also translated into his unique method of 3D model building. “I approach 3D model building in a very non-technical way. The way I build models is more akin to the way a sculptor works with found objects—and the 3ds Max user-friendly interface made it a practical and logical choice for this project.” Lucas purchased a variety of different ships from the Despona 3ds Max model library and disassembled them for ‘parts.’ These parts were then combined and reconfigured to construct the signature look of the vehicles and ships in the film. Airships animated and rendered in 3ds Max could be imported and tracked seamlessly in Combustion via the RTF file format.
Though they appear to be 3D, the backgrounds in the short were created using photographed miniatures and feature some 60-80 layers each. Photographs of the miniatures were brought into Combustion to manipulate the z-depth and create a very stylized landscape collage that seemingly exists in three-dimensions.
Atmospheric Effects
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello transpires in the clouds with many and various vehicles, such as dirigibles and iron ships— Lucas leveraged Autodesk software to add a range of essential particle and atmospheric effects. Real-time particle effects for chimneys, smoke stacks, etc., were created and tracked in Combustion onto 3D airships, which were modeled in 3ds Max. Autodesk Maya was integrated into the production pipeline exclusively to generate the clouds that dot the film’s landscape.
The film was written by Mark Shirrefs and the visual effects supervisor was David Tait. Artists who contributed to the film’s CG creation include: Animators Janelle Kilner, Brock Knowles, Jacob Winkler, David Cook and Anthony Lucas; Background, Layouts & Character Designers Jacob Winkler, Xavier Irvine, and Anthony Lucas; and 3D Artists David Tait and Fionnuala O’Shea.
The mysterious geographic explorations of Jasper Morello are indeed mysterious: the ground floats, aircraft defy physics, and a lack of reflecting light leaves the characters cloaked in silhouette. The look the film achieves is highly creative—a unique mixing of computer technologies that are of the moment and animation techniques that have been around for centuries.
| | Jasper Morello (pdf - 145Kb) |
Maya Meets Needs of Next-Gen Game Development
Maya Meets Needs of Next-Gen Game Development
Naughty Dog is harnessing the power of Autodesk Maya to create an all-new franchise for the Sony PlayStation 3.
The artists at Naughty Dog are skilled at meeting the challenge of developing games that take full advantage of the unprecedented power and graphics capability of next-generation consoles. That's not surprising, given that they have plenty of experience in that area: with each new generation of the Sony® PlayStation® game console, they've developed a brand-new franchise that was optimized to harness the hardware's potential, starting with their Crash Bandicoot series for the PlayStation 1 in 1996, and then moving on to their Jak + Daxter series for the PlayStation 2 in 2001. The impending release of the Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) this fall has the Santa Monica, California-based team working on their third new franchise, which they say will continue their tradition of developing third-person action games that take full advantage of next-generation hardware capabilities. To develop the content for this new franchise, the team is relying on the advanced capabilities in Autodesk Maya 3D animation software. "As game hardware has evolved over time, so has Maya, whether it's through the features the software offers or through our ability to customize the software to meet our needs," says Evan Wells, Naughty Dog co-president. "One of the things we were concerned about when we started to develop this game for the PS3 was that because of the hardware's capabilities, the environments in this game could be much larger and more realistic, and the graphics and characters could be much more realistic and complex, than those we developed for previous-generation systems. We were happy to see that the evolution of the hardware hasn't prevented us from achieving the level of detail we want to achieve in Maya." The hero character of this as-yet-unnamed game is a treasure hunter who finds himself stranded in a jungle on an island as he searches for a highly valuable, long-lost cache of historical significance. Given the game's setting, one of the things Naughty Dog is focusing on is creating extraordinarily lush and highly detailed backgrounds. "Our backgrounds are very complex," says lead modeler, Rob Adams, who adds that one of the biggest advantages of Maya in this regard is the fact that its intuitive user interface is clean and fast. "The user interface's marking menus in particular, which we use for all sorts of modeling procedures, allow us to work very quickly," he notes. The user interface also is fully customizable, thanks to the renowned Maya Embedded scripting Language (MEL). In fact, MEL scripting has come into play in several areas of development on this project. For instance, with a MEL script the modelers were able to create a reference node interface tool that they're using to quickly and efficiently place and organize instances within the game's environments, thereby enabling them to incorporate thousands of objects into their scenes. "With the PS3, the level of detail and the quality of that detail have gone up tenfold compared to what was achievable in previous-generation systems," Adams says. "Maya lets us take advantage of all that power." In addition, the team has used the Maya API/SDK to write file translators that make working with their game data a breeze. "It's easy for our programmers to work with the Maya data format and to write tools that allow us to use the power of the PS3 to its full advantage and get a larger quantity of more detailed and complex graphics on the screen," Wells states. Meanwhile, Mel, the scripting language in Maya, has been a boon to lead animator, Jeremy Lai-Yates. "As an animator, I'm not very technical, so I don't know much about scripting. But I have been using Mel a lot," he says. "If I find myself doing a repetitive task, it's really easy for me to turn that task into a macro to save time. Mel, the scripting language in Maya, is powerful enough to meet the needs of our best programmers, but it's also easy enough for someone like me, who has no technical background, to get a lot out of it." Another robust feature that has proven helpful in this project is the software's rigging capabilities. As Wells explains, "The game's hero character isn't your typical commando or space marine. He's much more fallible and gets by through tenacity and, sometimes, by the skin of his teeth." As such, the animators have been challenged with the task of showing that level of struggle and emotion through the character's body and facial animation. Toward that end, Lai-Yates says the Maya rigging tools are second to none. "The software's rigging capability is one of the best-if not the best-in the industry," he enthuses. "We can pose the character, and actually sculpt the poses, very interactively, quickly, and efficiently." It's this high level of speed and efficiency that the team values most about Maya. "That's really what it comes down to: how fast you can create the content which, because of the hardware's increased capabilities, can be more detailed and complex than ever before," says Adams. And in this task, Maya has never failed to please. "At the start of this project we had to take a hard look at our pipeline and make it as efficient as possible so that we could create the high quality of content that this next-generation platform will be capable of supporting," says Lai-Yates.
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| | Naughty Dog Success Story (pdf - 492Kb) |
Mokko Studio Reaps Benefits of Toxik/Maya Workflow While Creating Effects Shots for Silent Hill
Mokko Studio Reaps Benefits of Toxik/Maya Workflow While Creating Effects Shots for Silent Hill
By Audrey Doyle
“It’s a match made in heaven.” That’s how Marc Rousseau describes the workflow afforded by Autodesk® Toxik™ and Autodesk® Maya® software. “You have the top compositing system working with the top 3D system,” he continues. “With Toxik and Maya in a film-based workflow, the possibilities are endless.”
Rousseau is the visual effects producer and general manager of Mokko Studio (http://www.mokkostudio.com), a Quebec-based production house that’s been using Autodesk® Combustion® desktop compositing software and Maya for film-based effects since it formed in 2003. Earlier this year, Mokko added Toxik to its compositing arsenal. And Rousseau says the artists liked what they saw.
“Toxik is the new guy on the block, but we could tell when we started using it that its collaborative features represented a new generation of compositing tools for film-based visual effects,” he says. “We decided we should take advantage of it right away.”
And they did, for their work on the film Silent Hill. Released in April, Silent Hill tells the story of a mother who, unable to accept a diagnosis that her daughter should be permanently institutionalized for psychiatric care, flees with the girl to the abandoned town of Silent Hill, in West Virginia. Her daughter soon goes missing, and as she searches for her, she uncovers the strange town’s history. According to Rousseau, the 15-person Mokko team handled three sequences composed of 50 effects shots. All of them comprised an eerie environment enveloped in a smothering fog, which Mokko helped design and then created with assistance from Toxik, Maya, and Combustion. As Rousseau explains, the film’s director, Christophe Gans, wanted this eerie environment to represent an “other world” of implied hidden danger. “Our sequences show the mother walking down the stairs, and another of her and a policewoman walking onto a road, in a dense fog, and it looks like the road suddenly ends,” Rousseau explains. “You’re in the middle of nowhere with her, with ashes falling from the sky. It is really quite breathtaking.” The artists received green screen footage of the actress; shots with the live-action ash; some CG ash shots created by another studio as reference; and a live-action shot of fog. To create the CG fog environment, the team used different techniques, depending on the shot. “For some shots we used particles and cloud tanks created in Maya, and for others we created matte paintings and deformed them in Combustion,” Rousseau explains. They also used Maya Fluids for smoke and fog effects. Then they composited the CG elements into the live-action shots using Toxik. According to Mokko, most final composite shots comprised more than 20 layers. The most stunning shot the team worked on was a fog shot that included a huge dilapidated building, which they created as a matte painting into which they incorporated Maya camera projections, 3D elements, and particles. In addition, they created a CG version of a Jeep® vehicle moving through the fog environment. “The film crew shot a Jeep against green screen, but they needed it to move farther than what they had shot,” Rousseau explains. “So we matched the camera movement, re-created the Jeep, and animated it moving through our CG world in Maya, then composited all the layers in Toxik.” |
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To create their own CG ashes the team relied on the Maya particle system, which enabled them to provide the organic but changing look Gans wanted. “We couldn’t apply just one recipe to all 50 shots, because, for example, the ashes landing on the stairs react differently based on how the wind catches them and how the actress moves past them,” Rousseau says. “So we redesigned the look from shot to shot, and made sure what we created matched the other ash elements.
“Maya was great for this, and for helping us to create the turbulence and determine the speed and weight of the ashes falling on the stairs,” he continues. “It’s the best solution available for creating particles.”
According to Rousseau, Toxik provided several important benefits on this project. Most important was its collaborative work environment, which enabled multiple artists to work on different aspects of the same shot simultaneously, with the assurance that everyone had immediate, up-to-date access to all the data. “So if one artist finished his roto, for example, that work updated in the other artists’ workspaces, which meant everyone always had access to the most up-to-date work,” he says. “We had only two months to do this, and this saved us a lot of time. Toxik takes the confusion out of making sure everyone is working on the latest version of a shot, which is crucial for film work.”
Mokko’s lead compositor and VFX supervisor, Alain Lachance, also appreciated the collaborative work environment of Toxik. “In addition,” he notes, “since Toxik works in floating point, it gave us the opportunity to work with the maximum quality [possible], which was especially useful with the shots that had fog.”
All told, Rousseau says Mokko is pleased with the results they achieved using Maya and Toxik as the backbone of their pipeline on Silent Hill. “We’ve only just begun using Toxik, and we look forward to using it on more film projects,” he concludes. “The benefits of a Toxik/Maya workflow are exactly what we need.”
Midway Games creates the video game sequel to the John Woo film “Hard Boiled”
Strangle Hold: Midway Games creates the video game sequel to the John Woo film “Hard Boiled”
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Scheduled for release this winter for the Xbox 360, and PC, “Stranglehold” is Midway Games’ video game sequel to acclaimed director John Woo’s 1992 hit film, Hard-Boiled, which stars Chow Yun-Fat as Inspector Tequila, a tough cop who teams with an undercover agent to shut down a sinister mobster and his crew. The third-person action adventure game, which boasts intricately detailed interior and exterior environments set in Hong Kong and Chicago, features a photorealistic CG version of the actor complete with his signature fight moves, along with two dozen additional main characters. The Autodesk® 3D Animation Product Portfolio of 3ds Max®, Maya®, and MotionBuilder™ software is among the software Midway used to create this game.
All of the characters except for Tequila began life as sketches the artists created based on character bios and the script. Once they had nailed each character’s look, they built models of them in Maya and 3ds Max, rigged them in Maya, and animated them in MotionBuilder. In addition, they created robust facial rigs in Maya for lip syncing, and they created wrinkle displacement maps in Maya which they used in the game’s cinematics for character shots requiring scrunching and wrinkling of facial skin.
The creation process for Tequila was a bit different. Because that character is based on an actual person, the team scanned Chow Yun-Fat, the actor who portrayed him in the film, so they would have an accurate dataset from which to model the 3D version in Maya.
And because this is a sequel to a movie that’s almost 15 years old, they had to modify the character’s age substantially. To do so they started with a base scan mesh, and wrote some MEL scripts in Maya to deform the head topology to the shape of the scan data so that all of the Tequila facial animation was consistent. Then they worked with the actor’s representatives to dial in the age representation of Tequila that everyone felt comfortable with. The team also used Maya to rig the character.
As with the modeling process, animating Tequila was a bit more involved as well. First the team captured the motions of another actor performing the moves they were looking for, as directed by Midway. Then they cleaned the marker data and imported it into MotionBuilder for animation. But to faithfully reproduce in the game Tequila’s signature moves from the film, Midway had to create a substantial amount of animation.
In fact, the way Tequila moves is one of the things that make “Stranglehold” stand apart from other next-generation games. In the movie, Tequila is known for performing aerobatic moves while he’s firing his guns. For instance, he’ll run and then dive on top of a cart, which will roll across the room, with him on top shooting at his enemies. He can do that in the game, as well. If the character’s near a cart, the player just presses a button and Tequila run and then dive onto the cart, and it will roll across the floor automatically. And while the character is in that special move, the player can make the character aim and shoot around the room.
This is but one of the numerous moves from the film that Tequila can perform in the game. To generate all the Tequila moves, Midway had to create about 10 times the amount of motion you’d create for a typical third-person shooter, a task they accomplished by writing Python scripts for batch exporting out of MotionBuilder. In addition to Python scripts, they also wrote a substantial number of MEL scripts in Maya and MAXScripts in 3ds Max to automate other repetitive tasks.
Besides the way Tequila moves, another stand-out feature of “Stranglehold” is the fact that every one of the hundreds of objects in the game’s eight expansive levels is destructible. Shoot at a bag of rice, for instance, and rice will trickle through the bullet holes. Similarly, bullets can shatter windows and chip away at concrete pillars and walls. Once the bullets start flying, everything is fair game in terms of damage and destruction.
To support this level of object damage and destructibility, Midway had to create multiple versions of every object in the game—sometimes four or five states into which objects can degrade. Toward that end, one of the tools they used was the Pro Booleans Extension to 3ds Max, which adds extra intelligence to the process of performing Boolean operations. First, it combines topologies, determines co-planar triangles, and removes incident edges from the mesh. Next, it performs the Boolean operation on N-sided polygons, not on triangles. The mesh is then re-triangulated and its co-planar edges remain hidden. The result is clean high-quality meshes with fewer small edges and skinny triangles.
Additional features used in this project include auto-rigging, animation layers, and motion retargeting in MotionBuilder; and pelt mapping, normal mapping, and shade mapping in 3ds Max.
CBS Digital Restores Visual Effects to “Star Trek” TV Series
CBS Digital Restores Visual Effects to “Star Trek” TV Series
"The pure speed of the Autodesk workflow … allow(s) us to move a huge volume of effects through our pipeline, going from one system to another in a very costefficient manner"
—Craig Weiss Director of Visual Effects CBS Digital Hollywood, California
In the late 1960s, when the starship Enterprise first set course on its five-year mission to explore strange, new worlds, “Star Trek” viewers were introduced to inventions including medical diagnostics, wireless handheld devices, microwave ovens, and desktop computers, envisioned as part of everyday life in the 23rd century. “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry could never have imagined that just 40 years later, innovative technology from Autodesk, including Autodesk® Inferno®, Autodesk® Flint®, Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® Combustion®, and Autodesk® Burn™ software products, would play such a significant role in the restoration and remastering of his beloved science-fiction television series. |
Classic Effects Digitally Restored Virtually every “Star Trek: TOS” episode featured phasers firing, transporters “beaming” Enterprise crew members to and from planet surfaces, and warp drive and star field effects that gave viewers the sense of the Enterprise speeding through entire galaxies. Revolutionary for their day, the visual effects were produced using film opticals, a time-consuming, inexact, and laborious method. Today Autodesk’s visual effects and compositing technology is lightyears ahead. There were, however, initial butterflies that digitally remastering the series would run the risk of overpowering the quaint, signature effects that ‘Trekkies” have come to know and love. “While we are re-creating many of the series’ revered effects elements and shots from scratch, our creative goal has been to digitally restore them to their most pristine condition, without pushing beyond the level of effects that would have been possible in the 1960s,” says Craig Weiss, director of visual effects for CBS Digital in Hollywood, California. |
Turning Out Remastered Episodes at Warp Factor 1
“While it would have been nice to have a year and a half to ramp up for this huge undertaking, the harsh reality was that we had to hit the ground running,” says Weiss. “Since we began the work, we’ve been turning out 30 to 45 visual effects shots per week, oftentimes with 15 to 20 layers per shot.”
Since the first remastered episode aired in September 2006, the series’ 40th anniversary, CBS Television Distribution has been releasing an episode per week to licensed broadcasters. Originally, 80 episodes were produced, 79 of which were aired in 1966-1969.
The original 35mm film negative rolls were transferred via a high-speed Spirit Datacine onto HDCAM-SR HD tape. From there, high-resolution imagery was ingested into a Sledgehammer storage area network supporting three Autodesk Inferno visual effects compositing systems, one Linux-based Autodesk Flint visual effects compositing system, three seats of Autodesk Combustion for 2D paint and rotoscoping, and 12 seats of Autodesk Maya, the industry’s leading 3d animation software.
“What enables us to keep pace with this extremely challenging production schedule is the pure speed of the Autodesk workflow. The Autodesk products allow us to move a huge volume of effects through our pipeline, going from one system to another in a very cost-efficient manner,” says Weiss.
“Autodesk Burn has also proven indispensable,” adds Weiss. “The system enables our artists to offload any effects shot to a rendering PC. We don’t have to tie up our creative workstations or lose momentum waiting for renders.”
A CGI Enterprise
The starship Enterprise was re-created in painstaking detail within Maya, and the new CGI model is based on the exact measurements of the original physical model of the Enterprise, which now resides in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Exteriors of alien ships, including the fearsome Romulan Birds of Prey and Klingon Battle Cruisers, were also lovingly recreated.
Originally, all 3d planets were re-created in Maya, and then imported into the Inferno compositing environment. The sheer volume of the planet shots, however, spurred Weiss and his team to find a better way. They significantly streamlined the process by creating the planets using 3d geometric spheres, lighting, texture-mapping, and layering tools in Inferno.
“Thirteen years ago, I chose Inferno and Maya for this department,” says Weiss. That was long before Autodesk acquired Alias, and since then I’ve been delighted by the happy marriage of Maya and Inferno. Hopefully, we’ll see even more seamless integration between them, to further enhance the speed and efficiency of our already powerful production platform.”
Faithful Re-creation
The Inferno compositing system has also been the principal tool for re-creating and compositing multiple layers and passes for star fields, galaxy shots, battle scenes, phaser glows, lighting effects, and all of the imagery in the ship’s central “View Screen.”
Autodesk Combustion software has been used extensively to spruce up deteriorating or dated matte paintings, including a backdrop that appeared in “The Menagerie,” the series’ two-hour pilot. “There was a scenic backdrop in a large window, with many actors standing in front of it,” says Weiss. “Using Combustion, we rotoscoped the actors out of the scene, before giving the backdrop a digital face-lift. We then enhanced things further with digital lighting tools, before returning the actors to their places in the foreground.”
Working closely with the CBS Television Distribution team, which included Mike Okuda and David Rossi, two of the original “Star Trek” visual effects creators, CBS Digital has been remastering the series to an HD universal master, at 1080/24p, that can support redistribution to broadcast syndication, including SDTV and HDTV, as well as releases to international television markets, and possibly later on, on high-definition DVD formats.
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Animators Catch a Wave in Surf’s Up
Animators Catch a Wave in Surf’s Up
A few minutes into Surf’s Up and it is clear this is not your typical animated movie—the characters interact with the camera, there is a retro film clip straight out of the 1970s, and the water looks so good that you just want to dive in. The film follows Cody Maverick, a penguin that leaves his hometown of Shiverpool, Antarctica, to follow in the footsteps of his idol, surfing legend Big Z. Surf’s Up, the second feature-length animated picture from Sony Pictures Animation, stars the voice of Jeff Bridges and Shia LaBeouf, with cameos from professional surfers Kelly Slater and Rob Machado. The movie, produced by Christopher Jenkins and directed by Ash Brannon (Toy Story 2) and Chris Buck (Tarzan), uses a documentary style, drawing from the traditions of both the great surf films and Christopher Guest mockumentaries. “This was a really fun movie to get to do research for because it was penguins and surfing, which are two fun things,” says,” Rob Bredow, visual effect supervisor. To prepare for such an ambitious project, the team at Sony Pictures Imageworks went on some unusual field trips. “We took our entire crew surfing,” Bredow says. “We got a group to give us surf lessons—mostly I think we learned what it felt like to wipe out.” |
Getting the Penguin Look Right The characters and sets were designed to look quite natural, in keeping with the documentary feel, but they still have the heightened look possible with animation. For instance, while the texturing on the feathers is almost photorealistic, the characters have stylized markings on their sides. David Schaub, animation director at Sony Imageworks, describes how: “All the lead penguins have different patterns—unique lines for Cody and Lani, Big Z has the hibiscus edge, and Tank has his bad-boy tattoos.” |
Stock Footage Scratches Lend Authentic Look |
Rising Up to Meet the Challenge of Animated Water
It can be argued that the water plays as big a role in Surf’s Up as the penguins. From the inky waters in Antarctica to the turquoise waves on Pen Gu Island, the water reflects the mood of the scene and acts as a physical and emotional obstacle. It is the first movie to tackle so much animated water, with characters moving through, over, and under the surface. “The biggest challenge in this movie was the waves,” Bredow says. “Water is always a challenge, but especially breaking waves—that’s kind of the holy grail of water simulation. We wanted the audience to feel that they had ridden the waves themselves when they walked out of the theater.”
“The directors had always talked about the wave being a character,” Ford says, “So we took that to heart and said, ‘let’s make it a character as part of our character pipeline.’”
“We animated them like a character,” Bredow explains, “but, of course, waves don’t have bones, so you don’t animate them the traditional way—we used a series of blend shapes to control the movement of the waves.”
To make the surfing look more natural, various details were added to the water during animation, including wake trails and splash. To create the effect of the sea foam around the board, Schaub says that “a particle system was built, so that when the lip comes crashing over the top of the wave and hits the water, it triggers an explosion of white water that we can see interactively in the animator’s file. This gave us a pretty accurate representation of the ultimate shape and volume of the white water before it gets rendered-in effects.”
Maya Core of Sony Imageworks’ Front-End Pipeline
While the team used a combination of software to create the final water animation, much of it was done in Autodesk® Maya® software. “Maya is the core of the front-end pipeline at Sony Imageworks,” Ford explains. “It is used for modeling, layout, animation, and some effects work.” By leveraging the power of Maya Embedded Language (MEL) Python® and the Maya API, the team customized the software to overcome many of the film’s challenges. Schaub comments that, “We never have the question, ‘well, can the software do that?’ Because if it doesn’t, the way the program is built allows us to create a tool that will do that.”
Although the movie has a lot of action, one of the strongest scenes in the film is a quieter moment, where Cody and his hero, Big Z, carve a surfboard together. At more than 1,800 frames, it is a much longer sequence than is typical in an animated movie, where clips rarely run longer than a few hundred frames. “There was concern that it wouldn’t hold up as a performance in the movie because it’s so long,” Schaub admits, “but we really wanted to prove that we could do this. You rarely get to do these long bits of performance, and it was great to have these extended moments where you could really let the characters perform.”
“Whenever you get a scene that is that long,” Ford says, “you get an animator working on it for months.” To overcome this production obstacle, they had to find ways to break up the sequence so that the animation could keep moving down the pipeline. Schaub explains: “We found convenient break points by acting the scene out ahead of time. Layout would set up a session with four or five different cameras placed the way they would be if they were filming it on set.” Once the sequence was performed and filmed, the directors reviewed the footage and decided where the cuts could logically go.
Of course, animation is only half of the performance and the scene also succeeds because of the remarkable voice talent. In traditional animation, actors typically record their lines individually in separate voice-over sessions, which can create a canned feel. Surf’s Up breaks new ground because the actors were in the same room, which allowed them to improvise. “A lot of people have commented that the dialogue felt like the characters were really there, actually interacting with each other, and that’s because they actually were,” Ford says.
Since its release, the critical feedback for Surf’s Up has been glowing, as Bredow can attest. “People who have seen the movie have really appreciated the attention to detail that has gone into it. The question that I’ve loved getting from various people is ‘How did you paint out the surfers and put the penguins in?”
More Than Meets the Eye
More Than Meets the Eye
Industrial Light & Magic brings Michael Bay’s Transformers to life with Autodesk Inferno and Autodesk Maya software.
"Autodesk Inferno and Autodesk Maya were absolutely the best tools for Transformers. Being able to import Maya animation into Inferno means we can leverage the animation work through the same file and with the same choreography in each shot. It is a very powerful, efficient, and streamlined way of working. That’s where these tools really shine."
—Mark Casey, Inferno Lead, Transformers, Industrial Light & Magic
A military helicopter approaches a U.S. Air Force base. Unperturbed, base security requests standard identification from the already visible pilot but receives no response. A closer shot of the pilot reveals an ever-so-slight electronic flicker. So goes the opening sequence of Transformers, director Michael Bay’s big-screen take on what began as a line of toys in the mid- 1980s. Created by the SABRE team at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the feast of 3D animation and visual effects that follows leaves little room for comparison. No sooner has the helicopter landed than it transforms into Blackout, a malicious, mechanical marauder who uses plasma blasts and advanced weaponry to lay waste to the base. And that is only the beginning. “There were so many elements involved in that one sequence, let alone the entire film,” explains Mark Casey, Inferno Lead on Transformers. “Visual overload is what Michael Bay does best, and we had the challenge and the opportunity to block, time, and choreograph all that mayhem. The sheer number and complexity of shots would have made this movie an extremely daunting task without Inferno on our side.” |
Making interoperable use of Autodesk® Inferno® and Autodesk® Maya® software applications, a 30-plus-member team of digital artists created some 460 effects shots for the movie, not one of which was boring. “There were no easy shots on Transformers,” says Scott Benza, Maya lead, who worked on the production for more than two years. “Even before working on the opening sequence, complex models had to be built for the animators to work with. A complex previsualization was created at Bay Film using Maya, and Maya was used to create and rig all fourteen of the Transformers and their vehicle counterparts. Once the characters were rigged and ready to go for animation, we used Maya for 100 percent of the character animation in the movie, including facial animation.” And make no mistake: these are no ordinary characters. Optimus Prime, the heroic leader of the Autobots, has no less than 10,108 moving parts and, in this movie, moving is definitely the operative word. With characters and scenes of this complexity, there is simply no time to be lost. “The sheer complexity of these shots was mind-boggling at times,” says Casey. “Some included dozens of practical elements and background plates, all of which had to be stitched together with the animation. Pyrotechnic explosions shot on stage, smoke elements, lens flares, and all manner of other elements had to be combined into individual shots. With Inferno, we were able to tame the beast and pepper each shot with just the right elements to tell the story.” |
The staggering amount of data required for every effects shot on the film might have caused the massive production to lag, but ILM artists were ready for that eventuality. “We’ve never worked with models of this complexity, let alone with so many characters in one scene,” says Benza. “To speed up the process, we switched over to referencing in Maya. That allowed us to use lowerresolution versions of the characters as we created the scene. That reduced our animation time to roughly half of what it would have been using the original models. Maya increased our productivity a great deal.” On the Inferno side, Casey is quick to agree: “Inferno was the best tool for this job because of the system’s speed, flexibility, and ability to generate many iterations for the director. Often, the instructions we receive are pretty subjective, and Inferno gives us all the tools we need to keep trying until we get just what the director wants.” Suffice it to say that, once again, Industrial Light & Magic transformed sheer mayhem into seamless entertainment. |
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Gage/Clemenceau Architects By Maya
Gage/Clemenceau Architects
Gage/Clemenceau Architects use Autodesk® Maya® software to move beyond typical architectural design limits.
Project Summary One of the firm’s core design tools is Autodesk Maya—a modeling, animation, and rendering solution that is widely used in movies, television, and game development, but is just now being discovered as a tool for architectural design and visualization. “We use Autodesk Maya software to create unique architectural forms that are more robust and less expected than those created with software packages specifically built for architectural design,” remarks Mark Foster Gage, a founding partner of Gage/Clemenceau Architects. The fact that the development of Autodesk Maya software has been focused outside the building industry— primarily in the film industry where it is used for generating and animating characters—gives architects like Gage/Clemenceau Architects a totally different palette. |
A Door to Innovation
In fact, it is a happy coincidence that the firm is using Autodesk Maya software at all. “When I was in graduate school at Yale University, I went through a wrong door and accidentally walked into a classroom where they were teaching a digital media class using Autodesk Maya software,” relates Gage. “Before I discovered my mistake, I had already seen a demonstration of Autodesk Maya software and realized its potential for architectural design.” He transferred into the class and has been using Autodesk Maya software ever since.
About half the firm’s work is billable projects and the other half is architectural competitions and exhibitions. But regardless of the project type, they use Autodesk Maya software to imbue the design with inventive elements. “For our billable projects, we generally use AutoCAD to do perhaps 75 percent of the design. But we always try to pick one aspect of the job and use Autodesk Maya software to make it absolutely unique,” states Gage. For instance, on a recent project for a residential loft owner in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, the firm designed a stunning partition that resembles a translucent, frozen drapery. The design pattern of the wall was created in Autodesk Maya software using NURBS and fabricated with a CNC (computer numerical control) mill, using the pattern as the toolpath.
“For our architectural competitions, we rely on Autodesk Maya software exclusively for design and use AutoCAD to create plans and sections,” says Gage. “In our competition designs, we avoid using any prescribed design style. Instead, we use some technique that we’ve discovered in Autodesk Maya software and apply that to an architectural project.” As a result, their competition designs are always progressive—always based on new forms of aesthetics.
Pushing the Envelope
Gage/Clemenceau Architects is constantly pushing the design envelope, adapting some of the generic modeling features for architectural design in Autodesk Maya software and using the software’s modeling tools and techniques to facilitate experimentation with complex architectural forms.
In the past they used NURBS, especially animating NURBS, to produce designs based on a template that repeated but every repetition was varied. “Now we’re taking advantage of Autodesk Maya software Subdivision Surfaces modeling, which has given us a whole new design vocabulary,” reports Gage. For example, the firm recently used Subdivision Surfaces on a proposal for an addition to a library in Sweden. Instead of floor plates with volumes inserted, the project placed a series of elaborately contoured and hanging programmatic “leaves”—all interconnected by bridges, walkways, and escalators. Instead of a totally seamless surface appearance, their use of subdivisions gave the components the look of being assembled from multiple pieces—as would be the case for architectural components.
Textures are another important component of the designs of Gage/Clemenceau Architects, and they use Autodesk Maya software to study how different textures affect a design. Reports Gage, “On a recent project we used shape-deforming lattices and fluid dynamics to generate surface textures with NURBS and then ‘drew’ textures on the surfaces by splitting polygons into 3D patterns. Finally, we converted the model to subdivision surfaces for a smoother, almost sticky, aesthetic.”
Education and Fabrication
Although Autodesk Maya software is not built specifically for architecture, it is being used at many of the top architecture schools around the country, including Yale, Columbia, and the Southern California Institute for Architecture. In addition to his work at Gage/Clemenceau Architects, Mark Foster Gage is also an assistant professor at Yale’s School of Architecture, where he teaches graduatelevel advanced design studios and seminars—and thus has a keen awareness of the role Autodesk Maya software is playing in educating the next generation of architects. “Autodesk Maya software is driving all of the formal experimentation at these schools,” reports Gage. “As we become more experienced with digital fabrication techniques and demonstrate that these designs can actually be built, this sort of formal design exploration will gain even more prominence within the profession.”
Model Project
One of the firm’s recent projects using Autodesk Maya software was the interior redesign of a modeling agency’s headquarters building in NYC. The company represents people from the fashion industry—who understand well the influence of design—so impressions created by their headquarters office were particularly crucial. One exceptionally striking part of the design was an intricate wall surface with a unique wave pattern in the lobby area. The wall was designed in Autodesk Maya software and fabricated using a CNC Milling machine. The building contractor was using the mill in his fabrication shop to do cabinetry work, and when Gage/Clemenceau Architects approached him to fabricate this wall surface, he didn’t think his machine had the capability. “We showed him how it could be done by using 3-axis machining to create discrete panels that were combined to create the wall. He was amazed his mill could produce a building component that large and complex,” remarks Gage.
Competitive Designs
Some of the firm’s most original work is done for architectural design competitions. For these projects, Autodesk Maya software brings originality to their designs—originality not particularly conducive to CAD systems with prepackaged architectural forms and architectural intentions. For example, Gage/Clemenceau Architects were finalists in a competition sponsored by NYC’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to build an installation in the courtyard of the PS1 Contemporary Art Center. Echoing the sway of underwater sea kelp, the design consisted of 16 modular structures of carbon steel tubing that would curve overhead, covered with a metal mesh that would allow filtered sunlight into the courtyard area. Autodesk Maya software was used to model the metal “kelp,” and to study how the design was affected by light—natural daylight, artificial multi-colored light projected from the floor up through the “kelp”, and small LEDs arranged throughout the gold-painted canopy.
Purpose-Built for Innovation
Autodesk Maya software may not have been created as an architectural design tool, but it is getting the job done for Gage/Clemenceau Architects— precisely because it is not focused on architecture. “Autodesk Maya software has worked for us because we’re using it for unintended purposes—fueling our innovative thinking and helping us overcome creative obstacles,” concludes Gage. “Autodesk Maya software is fulfilling our aesthetic ambitions in a way that no other conceptual modeling tool can.”
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