Emission Importance Sampling in Clarisse 5 - all lighting in this render comes from the emissive property of the materials.
Isotropix Clarisse 5 contains updates that address set dressing, look development, lighting, rendering and workflow. The application now has a multi-purpose PBR material based on the Autodesk Standard Surface Material specification. A new unbiased rendering feature, Emission Importance Sampling, has been added that can save lighting artists a huge amount of time. Also, upgrades to the Clarisse workflow help make it faster and simpler to use – item attributes are organised into hierarchical groups exposing only the most relevant attributes.
The Isotropix development team has introduced a built-in USD exporter in Clarisse 5 allowing entire Clarisse scenes to be imported into all applications that support USD without using specialised tools. This feature means users can now use Clarisse’s set dressing abilities for layout, and then export the scene as a .usd file to complete lookdev and render in a preferred application.
Expecting an increase in users who mainly carry out layout work in Clarisse 5, the team developed related improvements such as orthographic views and camera overlays to display safe frames and composition guides. An entirely new graph editor comes with all tools necessary to layout and animate scenes, and a dedicated workflow that rapidly switches and manages multiple viewpoints in the scene.
Autodesk Standard Surface Material - Clarisse (left) and Maya/Arnold renders.
Clarisse 5 now has a multi-purpose PBR (physically based rendering) material based on the Autodesk Standard Surface Material (ASSM) specification, a general surface shader that has existing support from Autodesk Arnold and Substance Painter. This development is consistent with Isotropix’s intention to move toward lookdev interoperability – that is, ‘lookdev anywhere and render everywhere’, which is the description of Sebastien Guichou, CTO and co-founder of Isotropix. Sebastien has demonstrated that rendering the same image in Autodesk Arnold and in Clarisse 5 produces results that are indistinguishable from one other.
The new version 5 has a revised subsurface scattering engine built with a more accurate random walk and a faster, better diffusion-based model. Therefore, users can switch between these two methods without first adjusting their materials in order to manage the rendering speed and accuracy tradeoff.
Transmissive materials have also been improved in Clarisse 5 with more controls for shadowing and surface thickness management. Transmission scattering simulation can now render dense transmissive materials very accurately, such as thick and viscous liquids.
Significant updates to lighting in Clarisse 5 bring new controls to independently tweak light contributions in diffuse, reflection, refraction or volume paths. Sampling of area lights, especially IES lights in volumes, are improved to produce less noise in renders than Clarisse 4 for the same number of samples.
Random Walk SSS in Clarisse 5
A new mode for lights contributes exclusively to AOVs. When in this mode, lights stop affecting beauty and the contribution is retrieved using light path expressions in AOVs. This feature makes it much simpler to set up rendering of additional fill lights used exclusively for compositing.
The ability to turn arbitrary geometries into lights and render them efficiently is another critical update. Due to the geometry-instancing capabilities in Clarisse, the renderer can now render virtually billions of textured lights while maintaining very fast render times, low memory footprint and a high level of interactivity.
Emission Importance Sampling (EIS) is a new unbiased rendering feature that updates the sampling of materials that define emission. It can save lighting artists a huge amount of time because it is no longer necessary to mock up emission using manually placed lights. In effect, this change brings together the look development and lighting stages.
The development team has documented several general rendering performance improvements in Clarisse 5. General ray tracing performance is up to 1.5x faster on actual scenes. Fur and hair now use a new engine that always renders curves adaptively and speeds up render times by up to 4 times, especially on challenging scenarios such as long tangled hair.
Random Walk vs Diffusion in Clarisse 5. Results are very close in these renders, allowing artists to switch between the two modes to manage quality and speed tradeoff without adjusting material settings.
Optimisations to volume accelerate render times by over 3 times with multiple scattering enabled, and a new anti-aliasing importance sampling function improves render times by producing better results simultaneously when denoised. A new BxDF path splitting strategy speeds up specular reflection/transmission paths, and a more predictable adaptive anti-aliasing method has been developed based on standard deviation.
Upgrades to the Clarisse workflow in version 5 help to make the application faster and simpler to use. All item attributes have been reorganised into logical hierarchical groups, for example, and only the most relevant attributes are now exposed by default. From there, users can manage the visibility of attribute groups in the Attribute Editor, which also displays visual hints to identify user-modified attributes.
Global variables can now be promoted and edited more quickly from the main user interface of the application. When linked to expressions, they can be used to create smart project templates that users operate with a simple set of controls. Users also can control the Clarisse evaluation engine, which tracks images for user modification, to prevent it from loading and processing any actual data.
Transmission Scattering Simulation in Clarisse 5
The render history has been improved with a new mode to manage render snapshots. Built-in light path expressions complementing existing AOVs have been added, and light path expressions have been improved to support Clarisse’s material lobes component, so that users can readily extract coating from diffuse or specular layers into individual AOVs to better adjust them in compositing.
Clarisse 5 is compliant with VFX Reference Platform Calendar Year 2020. All third party libraries shipped with the software now match the versions listed here, including the move to Python 3.7, which is the new default scripting engine in Clarisse 5. As this represents a maor change, it is still possible to run Clarisse 5 using the old Python 2.7 engine, and Isotropix will continue its support during the entire release cycle of Clarisse 5.
Clarisse 5 is available immediately. With the release of Clarisse 5, Isotropix is introducing and entirely new pricing schedule and special offers. More information is available here. www.isotropix.com
Car Rig Character Object Preset
Maxon’s Cinema 4D Subscription Release 24, or S24, has new tools to help users search for and obtain models, materials and other assets, and to place them within the scene in different ways. The release includes workflow upgrades for the new character animation tools added for S23, and an early look at the development of the Scene Nodes and Scene Manager interfaces to the new C4D core.
Cinema 4D S24 has new tools for placing objects within a scene when creating and adding props to an environment. The Place Tool is used for drag and drop placement of an object onto the surface of existing scene elements, with handles to scale and rotate the elements. Objects are automatically placed according to their bounding box or defined axis, with an optional offset. Items may be interactively copied and placed directly from the Asset Browser.
Place Tool
With the Scatter Pen, you can scatter a single object or a selection of objects onto surfaces by dragging them within the view, controlling the spacing, alignment and frequency, and then painting them in random or defined distributions. You can also vary the position, rotation and scale once they are placed. Clean up and tweaking objects individually is done with the Place Tool.
Alternatively, Cinema 4D’s physics simulation can be applied with the Dynamic Placement tool. Using dynamics to create realistic collisions between objects, the objects will clump together or drop naturally onto surfaces. For speed and accuracy, simplified proxy geometry is generated automatically.
Scatter Pen
To browse and search online or local asset databases, S24 has a new Asset Browser for finding models, materials and node capsules to use in 3D scenes. C4D subscribers have access to a large library of assets, organised with rich metadata and keywords, that can be downloaded and cached locally on demand.
Cached assets will be made immediately available for re-use on the local computer. Keywords can be added to the assets, making content more searchable. By saving frequent searches in smart folders, when you add assets later with the same keywords, they will be added automatically to the appropriate folders.
Asset Browser
C4D’s Asset Versioning functionality is useful in complex production pipelines. As the project evolves the asset can evolve with it – users can either roll back to a previous version or update a scene with the latest version very quickly. To make workflows more flexible and efficient, object-based assets can be inserted as objects, Instances or References. Users can also create their own libraries and add assets by dragging them directly into asset folders.
Workflow enhancements have been made to the character animation features introduced in R23. For example, R23’s Character Object was developed to accelerate character rigging. Users add rig components and controllers, and adjust the joints to the right position. Once the set-up and placement are correct, users bind the rig to the character and start animating. Initial weighting is applied automatically.
In R24, a Car Rig Character Object Preset (see top image) is now available to animate objects with four wheels along a spline. The wheels roll properly, and the chassis drifts or tilts automatically based on the motion path and ground plane. The rig is useful to help populate scenes with realistic traffic, or stage car chases.
Dynamic Placement
As well the Character Object, S23 added many animation tools to Cinema 4D such as walk cycles, character animation states for morphing, deformation tools and a pose library. For retargeting, a Character Solver workflow allows you to define character for commonly-used rigs and retarget animation to suit any new joint orientation. To upgrade these tools, S24 now includes improved curve evaluation and more effective retargeting and pose workflows.
Cinema 4D S24 gives users a look at the new Scene Manager core, currently under development to replace Cinema 4D's Classic Object Manager. Node-based assets are used to construct procedural geometry or entire scenes in the new hierarchy-based view, or the same objects can be viewed in the evolving Scene Nodes editor.
Scene Manager
The Scene Manager will eventually have a workflow similar to Cinema 4D’s Classic Object Manager. To integrate Classic C4D objects, drag them into the Scene Manager. Everything done inside the Scene Manager creates a corresponding node graph within the Scene Nodes editor, giving a choice of workflows depending on user preference or on the job at hand.
From the Scene Nodes you can manage relationships and dependencies between objects, construct and modify geometry, and build reusable assets. More important, TD users can expand the system of Distributions, Nodes and Capsules without resorting to code, giving teams more possibilities. These tools and others like them are being developed as Scene Nodes continues to mature.
Scene Nodes
Maxon has made Redshift for macOS available as well, including support for M1-powered Macs and Apple’s Metal Graphics API. Redshift’s features include ray switches, flexible shading networks, motion blur, AOVs, deep output, layered EXR and others. Setting it apart from other GPU renderers, Redshift is a biased renderer that enables artists to adjust the quality of individual techniques, of interest when aiming for a specific result for a job, in order to achieve the best balance between performance and quality for production.
As a Universal renderer, Redshift is optimised for high performance across M1- and Intel-powered Macs. Universal rendering refers to sending the fully rendered application in the initial payload to the browser and loading the application code afterward. That process shortens the time users have to wait before they start to see results on screen.
Redshift’s new native support for M1-powered Macs is expected to substantially improve workflow efficiency, since the integrated graphics in M1 were developed to increase graphics performance combined with low power consumption. Redshift for Intel-based Macs will be available before the end of May 2021, and support for M1-based Macs will be made available with the release of macOS Big Sur (11.3).
Cinema 4D S24 is immediately available for subscription customers. For perpetual license holders of Cinema 4D a release is scheduled later this year that will incorporate the features of S24, as well as future updates.
Maxon is showing the new features in Cinema 4D S24 during a three-day virtual event – The 3D and Motion Design Show. Tune in online at 3dmotionshow.com from 13 to 15 April for artist presentations. www.maxon.net
Framestore created several animated sequences for Netflix movie Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey. The Framestore team, led by Animation Director Ian Spendloff and VFX supervisors Tim Jenkinson and Johannes Sambs, worked with production VFX Supervisor Brad Parker and created nearly eight minutes of full CG animation to establish an emotive world-within-a-world.
Ian and Johannes will give a talk on this project at AEAF in August. Watch AEAF Speaker Lineup over the coming weeks for news about this and other AEAF Speaker Sessions.
The CG sequences begin and end the film, and create narrative bridges for important parts of the story about the family of toy maker Jeronicus Jangle. ‘We wanted these storybook sequences to be told in a way that Jeronicus the toy maker would tell them, something that would reflect his eccentric, inventive character,’ Ian said. ‘So I came up with the idea of a miniature mechanical, clockwork world, all contained within the actual book itself. Tiny hand crafted wooden versions of the film's characters play out scenes in tiny little mechanised sets that self-assemble.’
The sequences have a continuous flow as if shot in one take. This was worked out early on with Framestore Pre-Production Services, planning how the camera would flow from one scene to the next.
The idea that Jeronicus created this world served as the definition of how everything would be designed and executed. ‘We wanted to sell the idea he’d actually carved, painted and rigged up these automated figures and sets,’ said Ian.
They defined the laws, restrictions, materials and tools of a real, handmade world, and from there designed their 3D workflow. Tangibility and imperfection were essential, as were working within limitations and demonstrating restraint.
All the sequences’ buildings were designed to fold up and self-assemble with visible hinges and joins, and the background characters that fill the environments were flat hand drawn illustrations transitioned to 3D assets through a custom-built procedural tool that added texture, basic appendage joints and signs of wear and tear.
The animated performances needed a strong emotional response from the audience because they reveal character motivations seen throughout the film. The many rules and use of narrative to drive the scenes resulted in an automated style of animation. This made sure that every movement was considered and justified by the mechanics of the tiny world.
The goal was to maintain the impression that the characters were wooden objects, moving as a result of mechanisms, leaving it to the team to work out how to communicate their emotional responses with wooden figures and static facial expressions. www.framestore.com
Gravity
FuseFX has announced its acquisition of Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) visual effects studio in Adelaide, Australia. Founded in 1995 by Tony Clark, Gail Fuller and Wayne Lewis, RSP has established itself as one of the world's top visual effects studios.
Co-Founder and Managing Director Tony Clark will continue to lead the studio and operate under the Rising Sun Pictures brand. Together, the combined companies have nearly 800 artists at eight locations around the world - Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Vancouver, Montréal, Toronto and Bogotá as well as Adelaide.
"Tony, Gail, Wayne and the entire team at Rising Sun Pictures have created one of the most well-established and respected independent studios in the world," said David Altenau, Founder and CEO of FuseFX. "Their commitment to delivering the highest quality art and service to their clients has helped establish the studio in the visual effects industry. Their previous work and position in the industry make them a fantastic partner for FuseFX."
Tony said, "We're very excited to be partnering with FuseFX, which comes at an ideal time as we grow to meet the demand over the coming years. Our vision for Rising Sun Pictures is to be a cornerstone component of the next generation global full-service visual effects company. With the FuseFX partnership, we can achieve this vision to ensure that we stay at the forefront of visual effects production and remain a trusted creative partner to our clients.
"I'd sincerely like to thank my fellow founders and shareholders for the last 25 years. We have all been crucial to the success of RSP, culminating at this pivotal moment in time. RSP will embark on an expansion plan over the next few years, and we’re grateful to be partnering with David Altenau and the team at FuseFX to help fully realise RSP's potential."
Thor: Ragnarok
Tony will be joined by RSP’s well-established executive management team, including Chief Financial Officer Gareth Eriksson, Head of Business Development Jennie Zeiher, Executive Assistant Maree Friday, Head of People & Culture Scott Buley and Head of Production & Executive Producer Meredith Meyer-Nichols. There will be no operational changes to the RSP business and the team will look to add talent after a recent expansion of the Adelaide headquarters that gives the studio a capacity of 270 crew.
The South Australian state government welcomes the news of the partnership between FuseFX and RSP. Minister for Innovation and Skills, David Pisoni said, "South Australia is enjoying a golden age in the production of film, television and streaming services."
"The state government’s incentives, in combination with federal incentives, mean that South Australia is a prime destination for visual effects production and will continue to be for years to come," Tony said.
David Altenau said, "We're thrilled to be joining forces with Rising Sun Pictures to help fuel their ambitious expansion plans and to offer an even broader range of skill sets, geographic locations and storytelling solutions to our clients at the level of quality and service they demand."
Over the past year, the studio has contributed to projects including Disney's upcoming Jungle Cruise led by VFX Supervisor Malte Sarnes and as lead vendor on New Line Cinema's Mortal Kombat under the direction of VFX Supervisor Dennis Jones. fusefx.com
Resulting from joint development work between Pixar, Animal Logic, Luma Pictures and Blue Sky Studios, USD is now integrated into Maya, and can be used to load and edit massive datasets very rapidly. Due to the full integration, artists can then work directly with the data using Maya’s native tools.
The new mayaUsdProxyShape node enables native Maya workflows directly on USD stages, which are in-memory containers of the composed USD scenegraph. This means users can work directly with USD data in common Maya editors like the Viewport, Outliner, Attribute Editor, Manipulators, Snapping, and so on. Also the new USD Layer Editor allows you to create, view and manage a USD Stage’s complex LayerStack.
Other advantages of working with USD are robust referencing functionality, nondestructive data editing workflows and support for complex variants on top of USD, which make pipelines and collaboration more efficient to help teams scale for high-volume data workflows.
USD plugin for Maya
Users can import USD data as native Maya data, or export native Maya data as USD data, in effect using USD as a format for transferring data at high speed between Maya scenes or other applications that support USD.
A new USD Hierarchy View Window reveals a lightweight preview of USD scene structure, to show the contents of a USD file and set the state of the scene, including variants, before import. New features in Maya’s Outliner scene management editor make it possible to identify and work with USD data in the Outliner alongside standard Maya objects, such as different Data Branch colours, USD icons and badges and right-click contextual menus.
“Increasing support for open-source standards is a major area of focus for Autodesk, across all industries,” said Jocelyn Moffatt, Industry Marketing Manager, Entertainment. “The M&E team has worked toward USD integration, which is now crucial for innovation in visual effects and animation. Across tools, our goal is to simplify the complexities of working with massive datasets, aid in collaboration between artists and studios, and help teams creatively by managing technical pipeline challenges.”
USD stages
Paul Molodowitch, Lead Pipeline Technical Director, Luma Pictures, said, “We jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with Autodesk on USD for Maya, as we are strong believers in the power and usefulness of open-source projects. It was a complicated project to tackle, since it involved unifying the work of two separate codebases, and overseeing the contributions from many other sources.”
Among Maya’s animation tool updates is a new Ghosting Editor that allows artists to see animation spacing – the change in an object’s position from one frame to the next – over time, making it easier to see necessary edits and how poses work together in animations. The Time Editor has been improved with support for cached playback, without the need to playblast, and for additive animation clips. When a clip is set to ‘additive’, its motion can added on top of the motion of an underlying clip, to create a new animation. This can help keep the total number of clips low.
Time editor
In the Graph Editor, which graphically represents the interpolation between keyframes as curves, filters are added to only display your selected animation curves. A new Peak Removal filter cleans up unwanted spikes and peaks in curves and the Smooth (Gaussian) filter improves control over the range and width of blur effects.
Maya 2022 has several procedural, topology-independent rigging workflows. Component Tags and Deformer Falloffs are new ways of defining membership and weighting, as well as seamlessly sharing that data between geometry and deformers. With Component Tags, geometry can store named sets of components directly on a shape node. The sets can then be passed to and used by other nodes. By reducing the number of nodes and connections required for deformation, the tags result in more efficient deformer graphs.
New rigging workflows
Deformer Falloffs can also be shared and reused in a topologically independent way with many commonly used deformers, including Skin Cluster, Cluster, BlendShape and all nonlinear deformers. Two new deformers have also been added – Solidify and Morph. The Morph deformer blends smoothly from one shape to another and, with the component lookup feature, morphs a shape using only a subset of its components.
Modellers in Maya have a new Sweep Mesh tool to procedurally generate geometry and adjust attributes such as profile shape and size. Using the new Game Vertex Count plugin, game artists are able to more accurately estimate how assets in Maya impact their in-game vertex count budgets – before exporting them to game engines. This feature also includes targeted settings for Unity and Unreal.
Modelling updates
Other modelling upgrades include the extrude thickness tool, faster lasso selection and pivot improvements. Match, translation and scaling enhancements give more precise control over scene transforms.
Arnold 6.2, Maya’s standard renderer, has new post-processing nodes including the Light Mixer and Bloom for better control of lighting effects, and tools for automatic denoising after each render. GPU improvements, including support for shadow linking and faster start-up, help to render scenes more efficiently. Improvements to USD support in Arnold add support for physical camera parameters, search paths, autobump visibility, per-face material assignments, and reading stages from the shared stage cache via the cache id parameter.
Arnold 6.2 in Maya
Also, Arnold’s integration with OpenColorIO v2 means artists can take advantage of OCIO’s native implementation of ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) and processing improvements directly in Arnold.
Overall, Maya now has a faster, up-to-date user experience with a shorter startup time and customisable preferences, splash screen improvements, and script editor updates that increase efficiency and with control. Python 3 is the new default programming language for Maya on Windows, Linux and Mac OS, although on Windows and Linux, Maya can still be started in Python 2 mode.
3ds Max workflows have been optimised with new texture baking, modelling and rendering capabilities. To protect scene integrity, new security improvements powered by the Scene Security Tools plugin include Malware Removal that automatically detects and eliminates malicious scripts from scene files and startup scripts. Scene Script Execution protects against malicious scripts embedded in 3ds Max scene files, regardless of whether the scripts use Maxscript, Python or .NET commands, by blocking the execution of unsafe commands.
Relax Modifier
Efficiency upgrades for workflows are added to the most common modelling tools including Smart Extrude, Slice Modifier, Symmetry Modifier and AutoSmooth. A volume preserve option has been added to the modifier that performs additional calculations to reduce small detail and noise from models, while retaining the shape and definition of the overall mesh. Reducing this small, noisy data, for example from Scan and Sculpt data, with Relax can improve the processing time of the Autodesk Retopology Tools.
The Extrude modifier now contains significant performance improvements to the speed and interactivity of the initial extrude calculation, and to the responsiveness of the output when adjusting the amount parameter, allowing complex splines, which used to take minutes to process, to be operated on in a few seconds.
Bake to texture
Simplified navigation and selection of baked map types allow users to bake frequently used maps in a few clicks without requiring complex material setups. Also, all floating viewports can now be viewed full screen without a border using a simple hotkey shortcut.
For speed and interactivity, Quicksilver render settings are now QT-based, and the Viewport Bloom settings have also been synced to the Quicksilver settings. With the new Viewport Ambient Occlusion sampling value in the Viewport configuration settings, users can refine their Viewport lookdev, and optimise their GPU performance by adjusting the Viewport Ambient Occlusion quality.
Arnold 6.2 in 3ds Max
Imagers can now be applied, removed, re-ordered and edited directly in a dedicated tab of the Arnold RenderView for post-process rendering. A new Light Mixer imager makes it possible to interactively edit the contribution of each light group AOVs during and after rendering, without restarting the render. Bloom or ‘glow’, the Noice Denoiser and OptiX Denoiser are all available now as post-processing effects.
MotionBuilder now adopts Python 3 as the new default programming language on Windows and Linux. For developers, the MotionBuilder Python Command Line tool has been improved to allow new capabilities such as file processing and rendering from the Command Line. The MotionBuilder API has also been expanded making it easier to manage multiple script tabs in the Python Editor, and the startup experience can be customised to differentiate between different projects and tool versions.
A number of updates improve the overall animation experience and reduce the number of steps animators need to take to reach the desired result. Among these updates is the ability to visualise real Quaternion Rotation properties within the FCurve Editor, a new Add to Body Part property that simplifies keyframing for character extensions, and updates in the Character Controls that save time by reducing the number of actions required to expand IK auxiliaries when selecting individual effectors.
Maya, 3ds Max and MotionBuilder 2022 are available as standalone subscriptions or with the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Collection. www.autodesk.com
