Impossible Objects Visualises Mexico’s Sport Heritage for UFC at Sphere Las Vegas
VFX Supervisor Morgan McDermott at Impossible Objects talks about making their immersive film for UFC’s debut at the Sphere, combining heros and symbols of Mexican independence with UFC legends.
Chaos puts Project Arena’s Virtual Production tools to the test in a new short film, achieving accurate ICVFX with real-time raytracing and compositing. Christopher Nichols shares insights.
Moving Picture Company (MPC)has appointed Lucinda Keeler as Head of Production for its London studio, bringing over 20 years of experience and leadership in the VFX industry.
REALTIME studio has launched a Virtual Production division, following its grant from Media City Immersive Technologies Innovation Hub to develop a proprietary Virtual Production tool.
ZibraVDB plugin for Virtual Production and CG studios delivers high compression rates and fast render times, making it possible to work with very large volumetric effects in real-time.
Maxon One 2025 updates Cinema 4D, Redshift, Red Giant and Cineware, and releases ZBrush for iPad, putting ZBrush sculpting tools into a mobile device with a new UI and touch controls.
Das Element asset library software version 2.1 has new video playback controls, hierarchy tree customisation for libraries, faster set-up processes and simpler element migration.
Autodesk returned to SIGGRAPH 2024 to show software updates that include generative AI and cloud workflows for 3D animation in Maya, production scheduling and clip retiming in Flame.
Shutterstock launched a cloud-based generative 3D API, built on NVIDIA Edify AI architecture, trained on licensed Shutterstock content, as a fast way to produce realistic 3D models with AI.
Freefolk has promoted Rob Sheridan to VFX Supervisor in their Film and Episodic division and Paul Wight is now the company’s first Chief Operating Officer.
Golaem 9 includes a new animation engine, helps create new shots without simulations, and has better crowd control, helping artist improve the quality of their animated hero characters.
Adobe’s Generative Remove feature, based on the Firefly AI model, is now part of Lightroom, and the AI-powered Lens Blur tool has now become generally available with new presets.
AEAF’s virtual event is taking place in just under one month. The Speaker Program line-up has grown to cover topics ranging from VFX and animation in TV shows and movies to learning how to wrap your pipeline around USD on a student budget. We are now also hard at work judging the wonderful entries to the AEAF Awards. We will soon announce the Finalists and cut the Showreel to be screened online this year for the very first time.
REGISTER to attend on your favourite screen on 14 August. See more detail about the Speakers here.
The speakers you will see and hear at AEAF this year are presenting from all over the world – Canada, the US, London and Australia – and from diverse backgrounds, and all are dedicated to visual stories and a love for film.
Alexis Wajsbrot, who has also co-directed his own film, will take you on Framestore’s winding journey with Marvel to conceive and create the illusion battle Spider-Man fights with Mysterio in 'Spider-Man: Far From Home’.
Robert Bock from Rodeo FX, is in fact an accomplished Director of Photography and now holds the special role of Head of Live Action studio at Rodeo. His photographer's eye also made him the ideal candidate to supervise VFX for ‘Tales from the Loop’, translating paintings to the TV screen.
FX Lead Luke Gravett and Character FX and Crowd TD Chelsea Shannon are talking from not one but two Animal Logic studios, Sydney and Vancouver, about how they worked their way into the roles they now fill developing tools and pipeline for feature animation projects.
DNEG’s Ben Wiggs working life has been devoted to VFX animation for 17 years, starting with commercial stories at MPC to, most recently, treading that fine line between mechanical and human motion in robots for ‘Westworld’ 3, the topic of his talk.
Nelson Sepulveda-Fauser is one of the ILM team responsible for de-aging the principle actors to help tell the story in 'The Irishman', and will talk about his team’s work on the project, an Oscar nominee, from the perspective of 16 years at ILM.
As a VFX TD who enjoys getting his hands dirty, Technical Lead Daniel Flood at UTS ALA will demonstrate how teams can start using USD, one of the fastest growing developments in VFX today, as the basis of their pipeline, from Shotgun integration through lighting and automated rendering – all without breaking the budget.
AEAF Awards’ Feature Film categories, VFX and Animation, have received the most varied lineup of entries yet. It is also very big. Everyone devoted to filmmaking – artists, animators, producers and directors – is invited to tune in and watch the AEAF 2020 showreel on 14 August, which will include breakdowns and before/after clips of many of these projects. Among them are superhero blockbusters and monster thrillers from the major studios, plus independent titles from around the world, a feature documentary and kids’ movies.
Unfortunately, several of the vendors are not able to post their VFX reels publicly in AEAF’s online section, nevertheless the work is beautiful and seeing them in the AEAF lineup is really exciting.
Weta Digital 'Jumanji: The Next Level'
It’s great to have a chance to see VFX and animation from more than one vendor on the same film. Look out for work from Method Studios and Weta Digital on ‘Jumanji: The Next Level’, Framestore and Weta Digital on ‘Lady and the Tramp’, and Rodeo FX and Framestore on ‘The Aeronauts’.
Virtual production was a critical factor in two of the movies from MPC, ‘The Lion King’ and ‘1917’. Not only did their work result in tremendous visualisations of the film’s stories but the projects became important R&D opportunities for more productions of this kind in the future.
Framestore ‘Pokémon: Detective Pikachu’
Amazing talent for photoreal animals and creatures that play starring roles is evident in several entered projects - ‘Lady and the Tramp’, ‘Call of the Wild’, ‘The Lion King’, ‘Pokémon: Detective Pikachu’, 'Jumanji: The Next Level' and more.
Terrifying monsters like MPC's 'Godzilla: King of the Monsters' are one thing but horror is another – although judging by the monster builds and animations by the artists at Rodeo FX for ‘Crawl’, Method Studios for ‘IT Chapter 2’, Cutting Edge for ‘The Invisible Man’ and MPC for ‘Underwater’, the line between them is very fine. The edge of your seat will be the safest place to watch from.
Fin Design 'Lost in Russia'
Environments are the stars in some of the projects including – among other – RSP’s race track in ‘Ford v Ferrari’, a hot air balloon’s view of the English countryside for ‘The Aeronauts’ by Rodeo FX and Framestore, wild Africa made by MPC for ‘The Lion King’ and the vast Russian winter under moonlight in ‘Lost in Russia’ created by Fin Design. This last movie, made by filmmaker Xu Zheng in China, only just missed a theatrical release after the COVID-19 health crisis closed all cinemas in China. It was made available for free viewing over producer Huanxi Media’s streaming platform.
Animated features for children – and grownups who love animation – bring great stories to life in ‘100% Wolf’ by Flying Bark Productions, ‘The Addams Family’ produced by Cinesite and ‘Upin & Ipin: The Lone Gibbon Kris’ from Les' Copaque Production in Malaysia. These three projects have very different animation styles and stories, and represent a huge amount of work.
Cinesite 'The Addams Family'
Since inspiration and courage are essential for all aspiring filmmakers, you will find both in abundance in a documentary feature film titled ‘Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché’ from PIC Agency & Be Natural Productions. Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) was the first female filmmaker and wrote, produced or directed 1,000 films during her career. The footage for this project is mainly archival, resulting from 8 years of research, and also includes work from an animation team.
MAXON has acquired Redshift Rendering Technologies Inc, developers of the Redshift rendering engine. Redshift is a GPU-accelerated, biased renderer with a wide set of tools that makes rendering complex 3D projects notably faster than many traditional rendering systems. Redshift is available as a plugin for MAXON’s Cinema 4D and several other 3D applications including Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini and Katana.
Recognising that rendering can be the most time-consuming and demanding aspect of 3D content creation, MAXON believes that Redshift’s speed and efficiency combined with Cinema 4D’s responsive workflow make an effective combination for their users. The two companies are planning to continue collaborating on the development of a very close integration of Redshift into Cinema 4D.
Redshift’s current list of customers include Technicolor, Digital Domain, Encore Hollywood and Blizzard. Projects in which Redshift has been employed for VFX and motion graphics include ‘Black Panther’, ‘Aquaman’, ‘Captain Marvel’, ‘Rampage’, ‘American Gods’, ‘Gotham’, ‘The Expanse’ and others.
Redshift and Cinema 4D Development
For Redshift and Cinema 4D users, the most important aspects of the acquisition are that Redshift pricing will remain unchanged, and Redshift can still be purchased through the usual channels. Redshift will remain available for Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini and Katana, and plans to develop a plugin for Blender will continue as planned. More integrations may be considered in the future, and Cinema 4D will also continue to support other third-party render engines through its plugin architecture. Release plans and development for Redshift 3.0 will not be affected either.
The existing combination of Cinema 4D and Redshift has been a success for reasons including ease of use, stability, reliability and efficiency that characterise both pieces of software. Redshift is a high-performance renderer that supports biased rendering for fast, noise-free renders. Designers comment that using Redshift with Cinema 4D, known for its efficient workflow, saves time and money, and supports creativity.
As well as speed, Redshift has tools that focus on photorealistic imagery that compare to images rendered by unbiased rendering engines. For example, Redshift’s RenderView Interactive Preview Region (IPR), which reflects changes to a scene in close to real-time, allows usesr to adjust the settings as they work on scenes with no downtime.
Into the Future
It is anticipated that MAXON's infrastructure and resources will give the developers of Redshift a chance to focus on their core competencies and expand their reach into the market. Although the entire Redshift company has been acquired, their team has been retained and will possibly be expanded. Their members will continue to be instrumental in the software’s future development and to work with MAXON’s product management and rendering development team.
Furthermore, while Cinema 4D is well known for motion graphics, Redshift’s development focus and plans will remain as they are including the development of Redshift version 3.0, which may progress more rapidly now. Its fast, iterative workflow and final rendering is very well suited to motion graphics as well as other 3D work. Redshift and MAXON are still dedicated to serving existing and potential visual media markets including visual effects and visualisation.
Maxon will continue to make robust API and development support available for all third-party rendering engines, should users have preferences and needs for specific rendering engines. www.maxon.net
To prepare for water simulations for 'Adrift', Milk wrote custom scripts for Houdini and AWS Thinkbox Deadline to simulate locally and render in the cloud using Amazon EC2 instances.
Feature Films at AEAF Highlight Work from RSP, MPC, Iloura, Cutting Edge
From RSP comes highly creative work on sequences in 'Thor: Ragnarok'. The team produced more than 170 final visual effects shots for the film, spending about 18 months focussing on two battle sequences and developing the look of the Bifröst Bridge, the magic rainbow that links the realms of the Norse universe. One of their sequences plays out as a story-within-a-story and, by controlling many separate digital and live action elements, RSP helped the production define their story in detail right up until the shoot.AEAF-FF-Thor-rsp3.jpg
MPC have entered work from some of the most exciting blockbusters from the past year including 'Wonder Woman', 'The Greatest Showman', 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales', 'Alien Covenant', 'Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle', 'Blade Runner 2049'.
'Wonder Woman' includes hero digital characters, crowd simulations, destruction simulations and environmental extensions. Battle sequences involved crowd work and motion capture, with numerous FX layers brought together in compositing.
In 'Alien Covenant' one of MPC's most exciting challenges was to help bring two terrifying creatures to life - the Xenomorph, the creature that featured in the 1979 ‘Alien,’ and a new species of alien, the Neomorph. The direcetor Ridley Scott was looking for a more unnatural version of the original Xenomorph, with non-human proportions, that would still be recognisable. Meanwhile, the new Neomorph creature had to go through four stages of development as it grew.
A completely different project was 'The Greatest Showman', an original musical that required abundant circus animals, including elephants, lions, horses and snakes, all ready to perform in Barnum’s circus, plus recreations of 19th century New York featuring environments ranging from cityscapes and country sides to circus interiors and mansion exteriors.
'Blade Runner 2049', one of the most important VFX films from the last year, includes the digital recreation of the head of the character Rachael, as she appeared in the original 'Blade Runner' film. MPC overcame many obstacles in rebuilding her skull, head and facial features, devising a pipeline and workflow combining photography of the actress from 30 years ago with modern scans, performance capture and digital imagery.
For '2:22', Cutting Edge in Sydney produced design heavy effects sequences that required futuristic holograms, CG aircraft manufacturing and transforming Sydney into New York City. Cutting Edge VFX Supervisor Simon Maddison, oversaw more than 750 VFX shots across a network of vendors, completing 300 in-house. Green-screen set-extensions were built to resemble Grand Central Station. The massive Grand Central set created challenges for lighting and when populating plates with people. The team also created a near-miss passenger aircraft collision at JFK International Airport, building CG planes and clouds to simulate the near-crash.
Iloura, now merged with Method Studios in Melbourne, created a large number of shots for 'Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle'. Among them was a sequence involving a herd of stampeding white rhinos, among the most complex sequences in Iloura’s history. The ravine environment was completely CG, Millions of pebbles, boulders, trees and many other assets were built and rendered. Ground interaction simulations and smoke rising from CG helicopter blades were needed – plus the herd of fully CG rhinos and often, digital doubles of the cast.
Iloura also entered their work on the Netflix movie 'Bright', for which they needed to create looks, environmental effects, FX simulations and an evil little creature – all with a completely original, very creative style that make the near future feel both dangerous and familiar at the same time. www.aeaf.tv