Animal Logic's USD Alab is a fully realised USD scene, intended to encourage further collaboration and exploration among the wider community into Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD). Animal Logic Group has now released USD Alab as open source software.
As an early adopter of USD, Animal Logic began transitioning their Sydney and Vancouver studios to an end-to-end USD based pipeline, starting during production on ‘Peter Rabbit’ in 2017 and completing with Peter Rabbit 2 in March 2020.
Seen earlier in their 2017 open source project AL_USDMaya, Animal Logic continues to promote broader USD adoption through the release of USD Alab, intending it to serve as a reference for many USD Concepts. “We believe USD to be a foundational tool for our industry and broader communities, and we encourage the release of open source assets to educate and inspire others to conduct their own exploration,” said Group Chief Technology Officer, Darin Grant.
While open source data sets exist aleady, USD ALab is one of the first real-world implementations of a complete USD production scene. It is a full scene description from global assets through to shot outputs, including referencing, point instancing, assemblies, technical variants, global assets and shot based overrides.
“There are two downloads available, including guiding documents and two sets of textures,” said Supervising Assets TD, Jens Jebens. “The first download contains the ALab scene assets themselves, derived from our production assets and conformed for compatibility to allow them to load in any tool that supports USD. The second download is an optional extra, a production rendering Texture Pack that delivers 4K OpenEXR textures with udims for production style rendering.”
“Beyond the USD assets, we’ve included documentation showing some new ideas and concepts from our experience using USD, including the idea of render procedural definitions, an extremely useful concept that we have not seen in USD to date,” Grant said. “We hope that this combination forms the starting point for future contributors to present their own ideas for discussion, promotion and, hopefully, adoption.”
“The ALab concept was born from Animal Logic’s Art Department,” said Head of Production Technology, Aidan Sarsfield. “Handed a brief for something ‘uniquely Animal’, the team came up with a great story that revolves around a secret backyard shed inhabited by a mad scientist of sorts. The resulting asset suite draws on the unique aesthetic that you’ll find in our studios, and there’s also some fun Easter eggs in there that link back to 30 years of the Animal Logic brand.”
USD ALab is also among the first sets of assets to adopt the Academy Software Foundation’s asset license. Animal Logic wanted to allow the broadest use of these assets to promote education, training and demonstration by students, studios and vendors. “Initially motivated by a desire to create unencumbered assets for our own demonstration and presentation purposes, we realised that the industry at-large could use something similar and pushed to release them,” Aidan said. “I’m excited to see how ALab develops in the community, particularly as we will be extending the data set over time.”
The USD ALab data set is now available and hosted here on Animal Logic’s website through Amazon Web Services. animallogic.com
Hydra Viewer in Nuke
Christy Anzelmo at Foundry has moved up to become Chief Product Officer, leading the delivery of Foundry’s product portfolio for Media & Entertainment and Digital Design. Christy first joined Foundry in 2015 and has been working as Senior Director of Product, heading product management and product design on Foundry's VFX compositing and review tools Nuke, Hiero, Cara VR and Flix.
In this new role of CPO, she will work with the company’s product management and product design teams on the vision and roadmap for Foundry’s products, taking responsibility for introducing new tools and software.
Christy studied at Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder. Her background in product design and business management extends over 15 years, and includes product leadership experience in fashion, electronics and software. Over that time, she has thought of her role in terms of developing creative ideas into successful products, and has focussed on that process throughout her career.
She said, “I have also been fortunate enough to work with passionate and dedicated VFX and animation artists and the teams that support them. They have been a continuous source of inspiration and motivation as innovation went ahead for the Nuke family.”
Christy Anzelmo, Chief Product Officer at Foundry
Christy and the teams she works with need to carefully balance innovation with the core improvements and maintenance. “That’s the ongoing challenge for established products like much of Foundry's portfolio. Because our products sit at the centre of pipelines, we tend to start from a baseline of technical and hardware requirements, following the VFX Reference Platform, for example.
“Then we build in core improvement projects that benefit the majority of artist workflows, and leave some space for the 'delighter' features – the ones artists aren’t expecting – and for niche workflows and experimentation. Since my background is in fashion, I tend to think of building a product plan like merchandising a collection. You need the right amount of black t-shirts and jeans, as well as trendy new ideas to excite customers and push the product line forward.”
She mentioned two aspects of Foundry’s culture that help manage this balance. “The first is the close connection between our Research team and the product development teams. Research tends to focus on longer-term technology trends, and product teams tackle mainly core engineering and shorter-term projects, but we are all focused on the same mission of accelerating artists and teams and we work collaboratively to deliver new technology to users.
“For example, the Machine Learning tools released in Nuke 13 came from a collaboration between the Research and Nuke teams. We could see potential in ML to accelerate image processing, often at the expense of artist control. To re-gain some of that control, the Research team started several projects, experimenting into whether implementing artist-driven ML training into Nuke would be feasible.
“Once the team established that this would be possible, the Nuke product designers, developers and product managers worked hand-in-hand with the Research engineers to develop this experiment into a production-usable toolset we could deliver in Nuke.”
The second area that Foundry’s product teams focus on is connecting and working with customers to stay on the pulse of what they need, in order to adapt quickly. Last year when the pandemic took hold, they quickly re-prioritised some longer-term projects related to remote review from Nuke Studio and Hiero, and roaming licensing features. As the industry shifted abruptly to remote working, those new tools and features were pushed out to clients straightaway.
Because the last 18-month period has resulted so much change for users, Christy sees her product management and product design teams’ roles changing as well. Nevertheless, she believes strong product management is crucial to keeping development efforts focused on what artists need. “That’s especially true during times when artist and studio requirements are evolving quickly. I expect we will push harder to collaborate and understand the artist experience, now that on site studio visits are less likely to happen for a while.
“With the explosion of remote work in VFX, in the next product cycles, I also see a greater emphasis on improving the user experience – that is, making Foundry tools easier to learn and use for artists working from home now, long term, as well as thinking about how we can enable more collaboration for remote teams. Luckily, we are seeing exciting technological developments that will enable new workflows of this kind, from USD to the expansion of cloud-based workflows.” www.foundry.com
Adobe released updates across the Creative Cloud applications Premiere Pro and After Effects, Substance 3D, Mixamo and the mobile painting tool, Fresco. These updates contribute to simpler, faster workflows, and launch new integrations with the open source 3D tool, Blender.
Speech to Text is a new tool and workflow in Premiere Pro that completes each step of the captioning workflow inside the NLE automatically, while leaving the creative control over the results to the user. As well as shortening the time it takes to create a transcription and captions, it gives the editor new ways to search and navigate video sequences – when you double-click on a word in the Text panel, the playhead moves to that position in the Premiere Pro timeline.
Where changes are needed, users can edit the text in the transcript. When finalised, captions are automatically created from the transcript on the Timeline, using Adobe Sensei machine learning to match the pacing of human speech. The captions can then be customised using the design tools in the Essential Graphics panel. Supporting 13 languages, Speech to Text is included with Premiere Pro or Creative Cloud All Apps subscriptions at no additional cost.
As well as joining the Blender Development Fund, Adobe is launching two new plugins — Substance 3D in Blender and Mixamo Auto-Control Rig Plugin for Blender. The Substance 3D in Blender plugin allows Blender users to access the Substance library of textures and 3D assets without leaving Blender itself, and use the Substance materials (SBSAR) files in Blender projects. With the plugin, users can tweak parameters and switch presets to iterate and reuse assets faster, optimizing the workflow as they go.
Mixamo speeds up the process of rigging biped characters for video games or visual effects, which normally is very time consuming. Mixamo’s ability to create a control rig on a character model, by applying motion capture clips, can now be accessed directly inside Blender. The plugin allows you to edit Mixamo’s mocap animations – choosing from over 2,500 clips – non-destructively in Blender. Both of these plugins are now available in beta.
Since the release of After Effects Multi Frame Rendering for export in March 2021, more features have been developed that accelerate After Effects by using all of the cores in the system it is running on. For example, Multi-Frame Rendering for Previews accelerates projects by taking advantage of the system’s CPU cores. Speculative Preview will automatically render compositions and any associated pre-comps in the background while After Effects is idle.
For rendering out compositions, especially to H.264, Multi-Frame Rendering export from Adobe Media Encoder can render multiple compositions in the background while users continue working on others. After Effects will send a notification when renders are complete via the Creative Cloud app, and Render Queue Notifications will display on the user’s phone.
Adobe Fresco is Creative Cloud’s drawing and painting app built for stylus and touch devices like iPad, Wacom tablets and phones. It has vector and raster watercolour and oil brushes, and AI-powered ‘live’ brushes. In continuous development, it now has non-destructive Adjustment Layers, Graph Grids for precise placement, expanded preferences and masking support in iPad and Windows. Like iPad users, Windows users can now access the Photoshop brush libraries by Kyle T. Webster, as well.
With the Colour Adjustment Layers, you can experiment and make a colour change without making a permanent colour commitment, which is useful for applying non-destructive tonal and colour edits. Hue/Saturation, Brightness/Contrast and Color Balance are accessed through the Appearances icon in the taskbar.
In Fresco's Precision panel, users can now access and control new Grids graph overlays used to align the elements of a design with the overall vision, Transform mode to snap a layer to the centre of the canvas, and Rotation Snapping. Masking support is now available for Vector, Type and Image layers. Layer masking makes changes reversible on every layer in Fresco.
Beginning with this version, Fresco will remember the customisation of your work surface each time you open the app. It will also remember which tool you were using when you last closed a document. www.adobe.com
Corona PRG Clear Sky Model
Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max makes updates to the Corona Physical Material and Corona Sky, with improved effects that increase realism in 3D scenes, and achieves faster render speeds.
Corona’s Physical Material now has 35 new presets for glass, metal and fabric, with a new Oren-Nayar diffuse model. These changes make it possible to set up initial hyper-realistic scenes in a few minutes. From there, the Physical Material comes with various features for greater control over looks. These include Sheen parameters for creating photoreal fabrics, and Clearcoat lacquer.
Corona Physical Material
Materials are now defined as either Metal or Non-metal to make sure that only the correct, industry standard parameters are available for each material type. As Roughness instead of Glossiness is now the default, users switch to Glossiness and Specular when needed. Controlling the look of a metal can now be done by adjusting the Edge Colour and then fine tuning the end result by eye, or by using Complex IOR (index of refraction) for physically correct scenes.
Clearcoat in the Physical Material has an absorption layer that affects the colour of Diffuse Reflection and other aspects of the base layer in a realistic way. Achieving the same effect with the earlier legacy Material needed several layers that could be hard to control. Clearcoat also has an independent bump map, allowing you to create rough surfaces with a smooth, rippled or other clear coating over the top.
'The Dream House' Hossein Yadollahpour
The Material Sheen effects take into account the look the fibres of a fabric give surfaces. Instead of trying to manage individual fibres across the surface, users can adjust the new Sheen parameters, which make fabrics render faster and easier to control.
Rough glass now produces more realistic reflections and refractions – even when using the same values, the new glass may look different and more correct. Thin glass with roughness, like frosted glass, can now blur refraction as well as reflection, and also correctly simulates bouncing within the thin glass.
'Ice King' Fabricio Pinho
Artists using the Sky Model can more accurately depict a digital sun and weather from hills, a skyscraper or at sea level in Corona Renderer 7. The new Altitude Parameter applies real-world data to calculate what the sky will look like from a user-defined height.
For sweeping landscape shots or high aerial city views, a new Volume Effect – or aerial perspective – affects objects placed in the distance, where they naturally take on more of the sky colour. Users can control the strength of the effect through a single value. Previously, such effects were only possible using the Corona Global Volume material, but were more complex to set up and could impact render times.
'Audi' Edgar Barbero Mera
Corona Renderer 7 render times generally are up to 50 percent shorter. This acceleration extends to data or scene opening, as files may now open faster due to the background loading of Corona Bitmaps and proxies. The speed improvements are especially evident in scenes that mainly use the new optimised features like transparency processing, denoising and calculating passes in 32 x 32 pixel blocks.
To maintain compatibility with pre-existing scenes, the previous Material will still be available as an option called Corona Legacy Material. Corona Renderer 7 is available now for 3ds Max 2014 to 2022 (64-bit). corona-renderer.com
Pixar RenderMan v24 releases with a new render architecture for animation and VFX, able to use both the CPU and GPU, and a new shading system for layered materials.
Read more: Pixar RenderMan v24 releases with a new render architecture for animation and VFX
