Foundry Mari 5.0 improves the brush engine to include colour jitter, has a new export workflow for USD material networks and helps users to take better advantage of proceduralism in Mari.
Read more: Mari 5 Enhances Proceduralism and USD Look Development Workflows
3D software developer Unity will soon acquire Weta Digital’s tools, pipeline and engineering talent, in effect making Weta’s VFX tools available for integration onto the Unity platform.
Read more: Unity Set to Acquire Weta Digital’s Tools, Pipeline and Engineering Talent
Loki, Digital Domain
Chaos Group’s V-Ray renderer has won an Engineering Emmy Award for making new levels of photorealistic visual effects possible in episodic productions. The award honours technical developments that are “so innovative in nature that they materially affect the production, recording, transmission, or reception of television”. The award will be presented by the Television Academy Engineering Committee live at their annual event on 21 October 2021.
Used on hundreds of television programming since 2003, including Game of Thrones, Stranger Things and Star Trek: Discovery, V-Ray creates a blend of real and virtual elements on screen through the use of physically based rendering and adaptive ray tracing. Optimised to handle large production scenes, V-Ray is used to render digital environments, digidoubles, creatures and vehicles in a highly efficient way, leading to its use at studios like Digital Domain, Zoic Studios, Scanline VFX, FuseFX, Mackevision and others.
Game of Thrones, Scanline VFX
“We are very honored by this award, and are happy to have played even a small part in helping artists achieve their visions. It feels like every year we see something new and exciting happening in episodics, which gives our team the inspiration we need to push the software even more,” said Vlado Koylazov, CTO and co-founder of Chaos. “I am thankful for all the studios that have made V-Ray a part of their pipeline, and all the developers who work hard behind the scenes to make it even better. There’s more to come.”
“We use V-Ray every day to achieve the highest quality render output and iterate quickly on a very compressed delivery schedule,” said Matt Smith, digital effects supervisor at Digital Domain. “As we continue to bring film-quality VFX to episodics, V-Ray has become especially important to shows like WandaVision, where it helped us create over 300 shots for the season finale’s Witch and Vision battle scenes. Congratulations to Chaos.”
WandaVision, Digital Domain
“V-Ray has been at the core of Zoic's CG render pipeline for the past 14 years, producing close to 75 million rendered frames for 1,893 episodes, for the major studios including Disney, Netflix and Amazon,” said Saker Klippsten, CTO at Zoic Studios. “The support from Chaos is also first class. They’re always there to help implement new features and fixes, allowing us to focus on the creative and solve other pipeline issues.” www.chaosgroup.com
Ghost VFX says they work to make the impossible, possible and to produce imagery that speaks for itself. Their conviction led to a team of their artists receiving a 2021 Emmy for 'Outstanding Visual Effects in a Single Episode' for the Star Trek: Discovery episode titled ‘Su’Kal’ from season 3. Ghost’s team included VFX Supervisor Ivan Kondrup Jensen and VFX Producer Kristen Prahl, with VFX Supervisor Ante Dekovic, VFX Producer Aleksandra Kochoska, Lead VFX Artist Charles Collyer and On Set VFX Supervisor Alexander Wood.
Led by the series’ Supervising Producer / Lead VFX Supervisor Jason Michael Zimmerman, Ghost has been working on the series, made for Paramount+, since its first season. From there, the number of shots has increased each year. “Over the years, Jason and his team have come to trust us,” said Phillip Prahl, senior vice president of Ghost Copenhagen. “They’re very good at communicating all of the client-side objectives while allowing us an enormous amount of creative control.”
Ghost was the lead VFX vendor on ‘Su’Kal’, working with DNEG VFX Supervisor Toni Pykalaniemi and Crafty Apes VFX Supervisor Leslie Chung, whose teams also contributed work. “For this episode, we collaborated on a monster,” said Ivan. “The performance was originally going to be handled by an actor, but the production decided to make it fully CG and asked us to help design and develop the creature.
“We initially created several concepts, ranging from simple paintovers that augmented their practical build to full redesigns of the monster that would call for a complete VFX replacement. They chose the coolest and most complex solution preserving elements of the actor suit that were integral in the original look. The acting was also preserved, and it became a great inspiration for us creatively.”
Ghost generated simulation-based effects, like cloth tearing and ink in water. “It’s basically a character that has underwater behaviour,” Ivan said. “The clothing is torn and behaves like cloth in water, while it’s emitting some fluid. We used Houdini to simulate all the layering of those elements, as well as the creation of the clothing.”
They also relied on motion capture and performance capture. Using a mocap suit combined with an iPhone they could capture data at the office and transfer it to their rig for tweaking. The elegant motion looks strangely beautiful and for a moment, you might forget you are watching a monster. But in one shot, the monster’s mood changes from calm to angry, which shows both in the body and facial animation. It is also reflected in the kinds of underwater forces affecting the layers of simulation.
Ghost’s artists showed the change by increasing the turbulence and speed of the forces to build up energy, causing the cloth and tendrils to flutter. As it calms down, they toned down this effect to leave all the layers hanging weightless like cloth in calm waters.
The tendrils were a challenge that was mostly solved with simulation, but a rigged setup was also created for the bigger hero tendrils, allowing the team of animators to control them. The keyframed tendrils then served as a guide for the simulated versions. These types of shots required many layers that all affected each other.
The studio worked on nearly 130 shots for the ‘Su’Kal’ episode, and close to 500 shots for this season.
Ghost VFX has recently appointed Patrick Davenport as Ghost VFX president. Tom Kendall, who previously filled that position, has taken on the new role of head of Business Development, Sales and Marketing for the company. Rounding out the leadership team, Paul Richards has joined Ghost as EVP of Technology and Crys Forsyth-Smith has been named EVP of Global Production. All four staff members will be based at the company’s Burbank, California, location.
Patrick served most recently as COO at Method Studios, a division of Company 3. He previously held the same role at MPC Advertising. With 30 years of industry knowledge, including visual effects production for commercials and features, his leadership is based on a passion for storytelling and supporting the talent. He has led teams behind the scenes of such projects as ‘top gun: maverick’, ‘The Witches’, ‘Loki’ and ‘For All Mankind’.
Patrick Davenpot, Ghost VFX president
Tom Kendall has chosen to lead the company’s business development and outreach. This new role takes advantage of his expertise and commitment to building alliances with people and companies creating compelling episodic stories for audiences.
Paul Richards brings 20 years of technical and business experience in visual effects to Ghost VFX, having led teams in structuring enterprise-level architectural design, development and operations onto a secure unified pipeline. Richards most recently held the position of CTO of VFX at Method Studios, where he was responsible for the company’s brands serving major motion pictures, streaming platforms, broadcast TV, advertising, and video games.
Crys Forsyth-Smith joins Ghost VFX from Method Studios where she served as VP of Digital Production Operations. Her extensive background in studio and production management in visual effects includes over 20 years of collaborating with filmmakers and clients to achieve their vision.
Patrick said, “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to lead the talented team at Ghost VFX. At a time of extraordinary change and challenges within the VFX industry, we are looking to build upon the great creativity and 20-plus years of experience at Ghost VFX, using this solid foundation to expand globally. We see many opportunities for innovation and doing things differently, which we believe will allow for continued success and a sustainable business.” www.ghostvfx.com
Golaem has been awarded an Engineering Emmy Award by the Television Academy for its software Golaem Crowd. Golaem Crowd helps artists to rapidly populate television shows, films and game cinematics by procedurally animating thousands of characters with life-like movement in real-time, while keeping artistic control.
Golaem functions support automatic navigation of characters, path planning and steering, including reactive collision avoidance, in order to create realistic human behaviours. These features have resulted in Golaem becoming a widely-used tool in CG character generation across the television industry.
From its first use in Pan Am and Once Upon a Time TV shows by Zoic Studio, to The Walking Dead, Game Of Thrones and more recently Lovecraft Country, Golaem has accompanied the rise of visual effects and especially crowd creation in TV Shows. Golaem products have been recognised as having enabled creators to deliver their vision while respecting budgets and deadlines.
Golaem Crowd helps artists generate and animate a large number of characters in various styles and forms using behaviour building blocks such as procedural animation, path-planning and navigation as well as physics, hair/fur and cloth simulation.
Artists can adjust or layout a scene by moving characters on the fly with the help of procedural tools, adapting their feet to the ground or adding variety to their appearance and animation. With Golaem Layout, artists always have final control because at any time during the process they can give a character a custom appearance or manually take over the animation.
Golaem CEO Stéphane Donikian said, “Receiving this Engineering Emmy Award is a great honour, as it acknowledges once again the contribution Golaem made to the television industry. 2021 was a very special year for Golaem, and not only because of Covid. We recently celebrated Golaem Crowd’s 10 year anniversary, and we have the Golaem 8 release coming, which is the foundation for a whole new area of application for Golaem tools.”
The Golaem Team will accept the Emmy Award during the 73rd Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony on Thursday, 21 October 2021. golaem.com
