Raysinblue

Douglas Trumbull & Miniatures Vs CG

2012-01-17T13:31:00.001+08:00

A lot of movies made a few years ago don't look good today. They would never pass muster. But movies I've worked on using miniatures look good and don't age. If I did Blade Runner 2 today, I would use miniatures, even though I would use digital compositing and other digital effects far superior to optical printing.

Here is a two part interview at Creative Cow where Trumbull discuss what keeps him busy these days. I quite well agree with his above statement and I believe above miniature in Blade Runner is one of the best sci-fi spectacle I have seen in films to date.

I truly hope and wish Trumbull will shift direction of VFX industry once again in near future.

Classic multi plane matte shot

2012-01-10T19:36:00.002+08:00

I came across another great post at Matte Shot - a tribute to Golden Era special fx and this photograph really made my day so I thought it would be worth putting here as reminder for myself.

This is kind of shot I do on day to day basis and it's great feeling to see people were doing this techniques of 2.5d or camera projection decades before computers were introduced to visual effects.

link to the blog post

Compositing | Matte painting Reel 2011

2011-12-14T23:55:00.001+08:00

I have my new reel and it comprises mostly of feature work I did this year in Makuta VFX, so many thanks to guys & girls there for all the support and help.

rahul reel 2011 from Rahul on Vimeo.

Here are couple of screen shots and a detailed breakdown can be downloaded from here. Hope you enjoyed the new reel and I would really like to hear all your comments.

Android apps for VFX folks

2011-09-10T01:49:00.000+08:00

Well, I got myself a new Android phone couple of weeks back and I was hovering over the net to find any good apps which will help me on location while shoots or in front of workstation and here are few interesting ones I came across.

Kodak Cinema

This one comes with a nifty film calculator which calculates how much amount of film is need for given time and film format. The depth of field calculator which does exactly what it says and awesome Film/Video Glossary which gives you instant offline access to definition of all the industry standard terminologies.

I feel this is must have app for anyone in film/video industry as the glossary feature invaluable at any time. Also it features online help from Kodak support personal and their online resources.

CamCalc Free

CamCalc is another free goody I came across, apart from Depth of Field, Focal Length Equivalents, Flash Calculation and other cinematography calculators I found Field of View and Miniature Calculator extremely useful for VFX folks as FOV calculator can be used while matching moving camera or aligning a camera in 3D scene. And Miniature Calculator will always comes in handy during on set VFX supervision to determine frame rates, distances and speed for a given scale.

D-Measures Free

The below video says it all

It would be very useful on location shoots for taking quick notes regarding measurements of props or set itself.

Super Swiss Army Knife

As the name suggests this is multi-function app with the following features, Ruler, Protractor, Flashlight, Compass, Gradienter, Wall picture, Vertical andTelemeasurement.

I think among the above features, Ruler, Vertical and Telemeasurement can be used in set. Vertical can be easily used to check whether items are vertical and showing the angle of deviation through help the phone camera. I am haven't personally used Telemesuremnt but according to the app decscription it uses simple 3 steps to measure the distance around any object and its height with help phone camera. This again can be used while on location but I doubt how accurate this could be but still time saver for those approx measurements.

Alarm Clock Plus
Last but not the least, this is the best alarm clock for Android out there so never be late for early morning call time for shoots ;)

PS: I think there could be still lot of good film/vfx centric apps out there which I may haven't discovered yet so I will try to update this post if I find any or if you know any app please do drop a comment here.

Update July 2011

2011-07-23T17:41:00.007+08:00

I haven't updated this blog for past couple of months mainly due my to busy schedule at work. Been mostly busy working on Badirinath which was released early June, I mostly worked on matte painting and compositing for this show. Here are some of screenshots of work I did for the movie, hope you like it :)

Valley Mate Painting, actually painting 12K resolution for mid shots to tight close up shots.

Final Comp was projected on to a hemisphere in Nuke with match moved live action camera.

Waterfalls Matte Painting, it started as concept matte painting and later developed into full 2D vertical pan shot with added CG water and fog in Nuke.

Original film plate stitch up for 2D PAN.

Final Comp

Original film plate

Final comp

Original film plate

Projection setup in Nuke

It was a great learning experience working for this movie and I think I made some vast improvements in my work though it is still far from good standards. Thanks to all the guys and gals at Makuta VFX for all the help and support.

Matte Painting with Superwhites in Photoshop

2011-03-06T21:54:00.021+08:00

Last month I had a very good discussion with one of members at mattepaingt.org regarding the topic of painting with HDR images in Photoshop. Since there ain't much information available on this issue in the Internet I thought its worth a post here.

Even though you may not come across this issue everyday but still always good to know your way out if faced with in any situation. Let's say you have a close up of a snowcapped mountain with a strong glow (super whites) on the snow and it is series of shot you got from the production in 10 bit log format. Since there are multiple matte painters or vendors working on these series of shots, it would a make lot of sense if all super whites goes the same way as it came from the film scanner to the DI department in all of these shots without causing any mismatch.

At the moment most of the Photoshop's filters nor tools doesn't support 32 bit depth so that leaves us with best option of working in 16 bit to keep the extra information in your highlights (superwhites). You could also paint in Log but that is a pretty hack by itself and also blending modes or transparencies may give you weird results since all of them are designed to work in linear or gamma corrected images.

Following are two ways you could approach this issue.

i) Painting on Gamma remapped 16 bit Linear plates. (Thanks to Jbills for this one)

I find this method very logical and doable once you get the hack of it. You start with finding the brightest pixel in your film scan / image in your comp app (Nuke, Curvetool node) and then remap (Nuke, Grade node) your white point to the same. This will obviously darken your image and you save out 16 bit file out of your comp app for matte painting.

In Photoshop you apply an adjustment layer with the inverse of the darkening you have done in your comp app. Which can be calculated by division of 1 by your brightest pixel value and later inversing resulted value. You can now apply adjustment layer with this value to expand tonal range back to normal for matte painting. Once matte painting is finished the file is exported back to comp app in 16 bit image where you now apply directly apply the vale you got while diving 1 by your super white pixel value. Thus saving your super whites!

To quote jbills from the thread

So we simply compress the above and below float information and remap to 0-1. then, in photoshop (16 bit) I'll add an adjustment layer and remap the white point to .7, for example, to expand these values back out. Matte painter works with that turned on but exports without it and we invert the compression in nuke. pretty simple.

At first it may not sound as easy it does especially if you are new to these terminologies so I strongly suggest you to go through this thread again and try this workflow by yourself to have a clear understanding.

ii) Painting on 32 bit log plates.

Painting on the Log space is most accurate solution as far keeping all the information same as the input but as I mentioned before most of Photoshop tools and operations are not geared towards Log space. Also do keep in mind when you open a .dpx file Photoshop it opens it up as 16 bit gamma corrected file, that is by defualt sRGB. In order to take get full range of your Log space you must convert it to 32 bit Linear but before doing so you must change your color profile from sRGB to a custom Linear profile. Otherwise Photoshop will assume the file is already gamma corrected and will linearize the image causing a shift in the pixels values while bit depth conversation.

Do check out this great blog post by Brendan from fnord software on this issue. Also keep in mind that you can always turn on your proof setup to monitor Gamma in Photoshop to view your file in display Gamma of your monitor irrespective gamma correction of your file (more like viewer Gamma in Nuke). In this case our washed out Log file will look more like sRGB for viewing sake while working on the matte painting.

Advantage of working in 16 bit Linear space.

Adopting a 16 bit Linear workflow may not really save all of those super whites information but still has notable advantages over default 8 bit sRGB workflow. The 16 bit offers more color precision, accurate composite and blending operations to name a few. There are plenty more tonal range available in Linear mode and it is very evident if you compare the colors in color picker box in both modes. From the below image it is obvious that how much more tints and shades we are getting in the Linear mode and there is will be noticeable change when you work with Levels or Curves considering the more range you have.

One thing to keep in mind though, while exporting to your 16 bit Linear matte painting you want to make sure that your comp app recognize it as Linear not as sRGB and do not add any additional gamma correction to linearize image since it is already in linear color space.

For this workflow you may still need to use the proof setup option available in view menu to view your linear images as gamma corrected ones. Also here is a link to download fnord Cineon Converter for Photoshop which does standard Kodak Log2Lin conversation.

Download Cineon Converter (WIN, MAC)

All this will be a thing of past only if Adobe build a robust workflow based on 32 bit Linear float that is similar to Nuke. Until then it will be always a hack to manage color especially with the film plates or HDR images in Photoshop.

Here are couple of cool links for further reading and you could find a lot more if you Google for one of the most mysterious word in CG industry!

Raw Capture, Linear Gamma and Exposure, Adobe Whitepaper.

The Importance of Being Linear, Larry Gritz, NVIDIA Corporation.

My favorite top 10 TED talks

2011-02-10T00:44:00.008+08:00

I been watching TED talks ever since it went public on internet. Since I subscribe to their monthly newsletter I haven't really missed any of the popular talks. TED talks have been really inspiring and had a great influence on my life. Though I have constantly posted some of the talks in my blog but there are few talks which always come to my mind when I think about TED and following are some of those talks I would rate it as my favorites.

and this one is my most favorite!

Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms

2011-01-07T02:31:00.005+08:00

Sir Ken Robinson's talk never ceases to amaze me and I think he is absolutely right! We need a paradigm shift in our education system to change the way we think, work and live. Until then most of us will be stuck within our iterating factory line systems and unaesthetic minds.

VFX pipeline notes

2010-12-02T17:44:00.016+08:00

I was responsible for a pipeline research back at my previous workplace and here are some of the general insights I had from my research. There are some good resources out there on web when it comes to pipeline and there is this really great blog called 'The Art of CG Supervision', by Isa Alsup. Especially check out this collection of articles on studio pipeline on his blog, Pipeline Articles.

In the preliminary research itself I realized that everybody tends to think they have a pipeline but in reality they mix up their workflow with their pipeline. It is very important to note that pipeline is structural process of the whole project while workflow is the step by step process an artist undertakes to complete a particular task and pipeline often divides workflow into more meaningful sections using dataflows.

The term 'pipeline' is a computing term and the term was invented by Douglas McIlroy, one of the designers of the first Unix shells. According to Wikipedia, 'a pipeline is a set of data processing elements connected in series, so that the output of one element is the input of the next one.' This concept transcends well into the whole spectrum of visual effects production where there is always one shot completed by more than one artist or department.

A visual effects pipeline usually comprise of three elements and they are chiefly, Production, Data and Approval. One could also look at these three elements from a managerial perspective and then it could be divided into Technical Management, Information Management and Creative Management. The pipeline can be consists of diverse components and according Alsup, it mainly comprise of people, technology, methods and leadership. It is crucial to note that a digital asset management system is not a pipeline but it is only a dataflow centric element of an effective pipeline.

A effective pipeline is derived by nature of work, resources and the company ideology. The nature of the pipeline can be data centric or artist centric or even technique centric but according to Mayur Patel, author of the book 'The Digital Visual Effects Studio', an artist centric pipeline would be more effective because it gives more importance to the work artists perform rather than the data they generate and this sort of pipeline also tries to provides the artists optimum conidtions to unleash their creativity.

I think it could be questionable that why one should complicate the concept of an artist workflow and asset management system into such a management jargon. Moreover adopting such a system would add more managerial costs to the organisation. But an effective studio pipeline is targeted at long term goals such as streamlining diverse projects, quality control and interactivity at different stages, estimating project overhead, facilitating employment of certain technology or methods and embracing company culture in the process.

I think if you consider the above factors then you can look at the pipeline as a production facilitating element which directly relates to the profit motives of the business and you use it with control and style.

Following are list of resources on pipeline

www.animationpipeline.com
www.3dresearch.blogspot.com

Anatomy of Production Pipelines, CGtantra interview

Zoic Studios’ ZEUS: A VFX Pipeline for the 21st Century

Digital Visual Effects Pipeline and Techniques - Presentation on pipeline

The Production Pipeline, Webinar by Mayur Patel

VFX management, Scott Squries's blog post

Audio interview about PDI DreamWorks' Animation Pipeline

Andrew Whitehurst's article on VFX Pipeline
Pipelines: Plumbing for the next web

Render farm notes

2010-10-31T18:26:00.008+08:00

This post is mainly for folks who wonder about how a basic render farm setup works in a animation or visual effects production pipeline. This is nowhere near a technically accurate post since most of it is took from my own personal research on setting up a render farm back at my previous workplace.

Most of render farm uses parallel rendering or distributed rendering for complex or huge amount rendering in the production. The distributed rendering basically breaks up the image sequence into chunks of individual frames and spreads it across the render machines for faster processing.

A very common way to go about distributed rendering is by server clustering, it is way of combining multiple computers or computer servers to perform a common task. There are different ways of clustering meant for different job types. Since our requirement is parallel rendering so the most effective way of clustering would be a parallel gird based cluster, in which dedicated master node (server) is the only computer which artist interact with to submit jobs. This machine then acts as the file server, render manager. This provides a single-system image to the user, who launches the jobs from the master node without ever logging into any worker nodes (other clustered computer under server).

There are quite a lot of render manager software available in the industry today which allows you to effectively set up a parallel cluster based render farm and following are to name a few, DrQueue, Qube, Royal Render, Deadline, Smedge, Muster etc.

Here is a basic flowchart depicting the setup I described above.

Also note that this setup is also commonly known as HPC (High performance computing) depending upon the scale of your farm. It is ironic the main advantage of this setup is not mainly speed, though it is considerably a large factor. But don't expect your frame to be rendered within a split second after your mouse click. It is rather an obnoxious process which will really require some good patience and technical expertise. Other main advantage would be the ability to queue the render jobs and this opens up lot of possibilities like for example, queuing multiple tests version for a shot for a overnight rendering thus increasing your productivity.

Cloud computing and GPU render farm bandwagon.

If you been researching on render farms lately then these are two terms which will hit you again and again and it is important not to get mixed up with both of these technologies since they are not really corresponding to each other.

Cloud computing is more a like remote service thorough web or virtual private networks (VPLAN) where you can use the service provider's hardware for your rendering purpose. And this it makes perfect sense to visual effects production houses who might need to increase the render farm capacity on a particular show's requirement. But acquiring , lodging and maintaining even a one single worker node in a render farm involves lot of costs even the after project is over so cloud render farm suits the industry needs.

Though it sounds like a cost effective scalable solution but comes with its on issues like security, availability of custom scripts, plugins or assets at service provider's site and also remote management of render farm may prone to more network issues.

To understand better the scope of cloud computing, take a look this presentation

GPU rendering on the other hand is going to bring a paradigm shift in the industry where it may to replace most of current CPU based render farms. This doesn't mean the end of CPU based render farms since there still areas (simulation, dynamics and AI) where CPU will perform better than GPU.

Here is snippet took from article called 'Are you ready for GPU revolution?" by Joe at renderstream

To help you understand how GPU acceleration could speed up rendering, lets think of it in terms of bucket rendering. (Please keep in mind this analogy isn’t technically accurate) Most of you are familiar with bucket rendering since modern renderers use that method. As a renderer calculates and ultimately draws pixels, it does so in small portions, or buckets, of a predetermined size. For every number of cores you have in your machine, you will have an equal amount of buckets at render time. For example, a common workstation today will have 4 cores (also known as a quad core) thus you will see 4 buckets at render time. If you have a dual quad core machine you will see 8 buckets and so on…
Today’s GPUs have 240 cores and the next generation will have up to 512 cores. By the time GPU acceleration is available for rendering, there could be even more cores available on the GPU. So, you can start to see how a GPU can have a tremendous impact on rendering. With CPUs we see a bucket work on a small portion of the rendered frame and then move on to another region. With a GPU, the available buckets would essentially fill the entire rendered frame. All portions of the frame would be “worked on” at once allowing for near real time rendering.

It also worth check this a great article on how GPU render helped spped up Avator production. As they described in the article GPU rendering will definitely bring a huge difference in productivity of the artists.

So as you can see I think in the future GPUs will be effectively integrated into current CPU based render farms and it will have huge impact on the render times and the way artists works.

Till then, happy rendering ;)

Porn drives technology and its goes stereoscopic!

2010-10-25T14:37:00.008+08:00

They say porn industry drives technology and it didn't took much time for them to join the new millennium's stereoscopic 3D bandwagon. According to a guardin article, in nutshell here is what porn has done for media industry so far.

· Camcorder and VHS video machines were pioneered by porn barons anxious to find a cheap way to mass market blue movies. Take-up of DVD players was driven by pornographers and their customers because the technology enabled users to skip to and from their favourite scenes.
· Pay-per-view cable or satellite TV movies entered the market only after porn firms introduced 'premium' services in hotels and on digital networks. Interactive television, common on digital sport channels, was developed by pornographers to allow users to focus on favourite actors and actresses.
· Internet use and e-business have been driven by smut. There are 80,000 adult websites, which generate annual profits of more than £1 billion - more than any other e-commerce sector.

Compositing showreel 2010

2010-10-21T12:36:00.005+08:00

You may also download shot breakdown and I have also designed a single webpage placeholder for my reel, resume and shot breakdown, check it out!

I managed to finish this cut quite quickly in couple of days time, so I am pretty happy about how it turned out. I hope my next show reel will have more high end feature film compositing and matte painting shots.

Most of the work in this show reel was done during my time at apostrophe films. So I thank everyone over there especially my senior artist Faisal and other colleagues in VFX dept.

Houseboat Matte painting

2010-10-01T15:09:00.004+08:00

I think I am almost done with this one, I was trying to create a surreal and simple composition which looks convincing.

References Images

WIP1

WIP2

Comparison to original plate

Final matte painting

Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index

2010-09-21T13:06:00.002+08:00

I have already posted two videos (Link1, Link2) on Happiness culture and here is another one from TED which is worth bookmarking here.

Hope these ideas will really influence our work place and society in future.

Stay Happy :)

Pre Viz to Post Viz

2010-08-11T12:48:00.011+08:00

Check out these cool videos from Previsualization Society and they plan to do more on videos on the same so keep an eye on their updates on vimeo. Thanks to my friend Zameer for sharing this stuff on FB.

Previs Documentary - Part 1 from Previsualization Society on Vimeo.

Heathentown Pitch Reel from Previsualization Society on Vimeo.

Heathentown Making Of reel from Previsualization Society on Vimeo.

There is cool article on which some light on difference between Previz and Postviz at digitalcontentproducer.com, do check it out. And here is a great fxguide article on Previz studio Third floor which was born of Lucasfilm Skywalker Ranch and following is a profile video about them by Autodesk.

I think coolest thing is that Virtual Cinematography and GPU rendering is closely linked to Previz to Postviz . Both of these stuff are current hot trends which is driving this dynamic industry and soon it will change the way we work.

Here is amazing talk by Nvidia on GPU technology, do check it out, It's really awesome!!!

On the following video you could really see what they mean by real time rendering.

VFX Outsourcing Scare

2010-07-23T00:20:00.007+08:00

I been participating and following in lot of discussions (link1, link2, link3) on this matter mainly in VFXtalk forum. The above first link is dated back to 2007 and rest two are recent links. There are quite a lot of discussions happening within the industry and including recent VFX TownHall meeting which grabbed lot of attention in general media.

The reason for this post is that I have an alternative thought on this matter and I think death of outsourcing to India and China can only do good for them in long term. As of now these two big countries are madly serving west, not only in VFX but also in other areas like IT and BPO.

If for some reason one day, this whole outsourcing business comes to an end and all these Indian and Chinese businesses started to look into their own potential and start to create market for themselves then I think the possibilities are limitless for them . We should never forget how much the population of India and China constitutes the entire world population and also both these economies are growly at very high rates with no signs of slowing down.

I feel both India and China are too comfortable with serving western markets that they don't realize the potential of their own markets. Bottom line is that this outsourcing business is not only doing bad for west but also for the east.

Anyway I feel this whole outsourcing business is a cyclical phenomena. By that, I mean soon Indian or Chinese companies would be outsourcing to Philippines, Vietnam or buying out US companies. We shouldn't forget what happened to American brands like Jaguar , Land Rover and Hummer which were bought by Indian and Chinese companies. Same could happen with entertainment business as well. Already Indian companies like Prime Focus and Reliance have strong presence in Hollywood

The actual reason for this scare is overlooked most of the times. If you really study the trends then its obvious that it is the state of the industry not the outsourcing which creates all this emotional responses. This has been addressed by industry pioneer, Scott Ross in two fxguide podcasts. He not only mentions issues but also the solutions in the latest podcast. The first podcast is definitely worth your time and it is one of the best podcast I ever heard at fxguide.com

As a final note, I think we all like to live in our own mind bubble and we would like to ignore the changes happening around us but the time will make us adapt to the reality somehow.

A few alternative perspectives on this subject

Globalization and VFX

The Tragic Plight of Hollywood VFX Sweatshops

VFX Solider, an entire blog dedicated to this issue

TED talk on Fractals

2010-07-07T22:51:00.004+08:00

Seriously I am not sure why I constantly stumbled on things that I have posted here before. Anyway I am glad it happens and I always come across information that particularly interests me.

I had posted about Loren Carpenter's fractal algorithm last year and today I came across this wonderful talk by a mathematics legend Benoit Mandelbrot, who talks about fascinating fractals forms which can be found in plants, clouds, human body, painting, architecture, and even in finical statistics.

It is amazing to see forms that can be created in Adobe Photoshop or After Effects with few clicks have so much complexity yet simple and related to our universe in various ways.

Classic Matte Painting resources

2010-07-05T00:37:00.009+08:00

I remember I had posted few resources on the Albert Withlock back in last year. I just came across these videos about the craft another great master matte painter Peter Ellenshaw. Thanks to one of the member called Thomas on mattepaiting.org for posting these highly valuable videos.

It is amazing to see that how matte painting techniques overlapped so much with overall compositing process of the film. It never stop to amazes me that basic fundamentals of the craft always remains the same while just the tools and techniques advances.

Somehow I also stumbled on a really great blog by Peter Cook with quite lot of articles on classic matte painting. This is a must bookmark for people who are fan of all classic matte painting masters.

http://nzpetesmatteshot.blogspot.com/

I had mentioned about some great resources hosted by vfx artist, Domingo Lizcano in my last post but now I saw his blog which also have few interesting and informative articles on class matte painting.

Do check that out too http://domingo-lizcano.blogspot.es/

Another video on Happiness Culture

2010-06-27T22:23:00.002+08:00

Well, I just came across this interesting talk by hotelier Chip Conley on happiness based business model. After my recent rambling on the same, I was very intrigued by this talk as well so as usualI am just bookmarking it here in my blog.

Cool youtube vids on color space

2010-06-20T15:18:00.004+08:00

Check out these couple of videos color space. The first one explains three dimensional visualization of color in XYZ color space. In the second video John Paul Caponigro explains Color Spaces in a very interesting way balloons.

It is important to note three dimensional representation of color because most of advanced color operations works on this principal and it is very much crucial when it comes to color management as well.

Enjoy the videos :)

A different perspective on Internet piracy

2010-06-16T00:36:00.004+08:00

Last year I wrote about my thoughts on online piracy and now it's good to see Youtube shares similar views on the same :)

Another cool Pixar article

2010-06-11T01:07:00.005+08:00

Its seems like I can't get enough of it... I just came across another cool article on Wired about the Pixar process and if you think I'm just obsessed with their success stories then take a look at this quote for instance.

“It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up,” says Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3. “We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.”

The Happiness Culture

2010-06-09T00:51:00.005+08:00

I saw this cool article called "The Happiness Culture: Zappos Isn't a Company -- It's a Mission" on fastcompany.com. It is a very interesting article about the business culture at an e-commerce company called Zappos and it discusses ideas of CEO, Tony Hsieh who have wrote book on the same topic.

According to the article, here are there main core values of the company.
1. Deliver Wow Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and a Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More with Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

What really made me intriguing is that it's seems a lot similar to Pixar's culture which I discussed in one of my last posts. Apart from the above points they even have a similar training program for all staffs irrespective of the position when they join the company.

Here are few interesting quotes on Hsieh which I found personally interesting

"I think we're just at the beginning where companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. People are becoming...just because the information is everywhere and it's pretty hard to control now. So I think moving forward it's going to be only the authentic companies or people can win because everyone else will eventually be outed."

"In the end, the culture is about more than money. "It's not me saying to our employees, this is where our culture is. It's more about giving employees permission and encouraging them to just be themselves."

"There's three types of happiness and really happiness is about being able to combine pleasure, passion, and purpose in one's personal life. I think it's helpful and useful to actually think about all three in terms of how you can make customers happier, employees happier, and ultimately, investors happier."

Take a look at the interview which this article was based on.

Notes on Stereoscopic 3D

2010-05-16T22:55:00.001+08:00

I been following this technology closely for more than a year now and I was convinced that this technology is going to be a game changer when I first heard that Avatar is going to be on 3D. A lot has been happening since Avatar came out and I think one of the crucial outcome was incursion of stereoscopic 3D into main stream broadcast media.

Singapore, as a highly techno friendly country, will be the first among the nations to do a nationwide 3D trial on the broadcast possibly on coming August. I think as for the HD wave it would be interesting to see when viewers will fully adopt this technology to broadcaster's standards. On the other side Samsung is widely promoting it's line of 3D capable TVs and a ims to sell more than 2 million 3-D TVs this year and Panasonic has already came up with their affordable 3D productions gears for broadcasters. With all these vibes there is strong urge in the industry to produce more stereoscopic content for this new market that is ranging from music videos to military simulations.

Apart from all these general happenings it was very intriguing to dig deep into the technology itself and to see how it has transformed in the past few years. Stereoscopy is relatively a very old technology and people are being lured with this illusion since 1800s. I think most popular technology which we are all familiar with is Anaglyph Image where two images (left and right) are made up two colors (red and cyan) and superimposed to create illusion of stereoscopy when watched with same color coded glasses. Fortunately we have already come a long way from Anaglyph Images which caused motion sickness to us most of times.

According to Wikipedia, there are two technology for viewing stereoscopy images, mainly active and passive glasses. Active glasses technology needs an expensive wireless electronic glasses which is synced with the display screen and passive glasses uses polarizing filters on the projectors to project two images superimposed on to the screen. So for obvious reasons such as cost and practicality, Active glasses technology is moving more towards broadcast and PC gaming markets and passive glasses towards cinemas.

In cinemas, the most widely used technologies are by RealD and Dolby 3D. Both of them use slightingly different technology that falls under passive glasses technology. According to Wikipedia, The RealD Cinema system uses an electronically driven circular polarizer, mounted in front of the projector and alternating between left- and right- handedness, in sync with the left or right image being displayed by the (digital) movie projector.

Dolby 3D uses Infitec which stands for interference filter technology that splits the color spectrum into six narrow bands which then are divided into 2 in three primary color channels. This technology is a much superior form of Anaglyph technology.

There is also IMAX3D which use polarization technology similar to that of RealD.

As for a standardization, at the moment RealD is the clear winner in the race with the huge success of Avatar. According to Zdnet.com, the company has net loss of 16.3 million from 23.4 million revenue in the year 2008 and for the year end of 2009, the company lost 20.3 million from 95.9 million revenue. Here is an image comparing both Anaglyph and polarizertechnology.

On the other side, broadcast and PC Industry are widely embracing Active glasses or Liquid Shutter Glass technology. Like I mentioned before in this technique liquid crystals are triggered in synchronization with the refresh rate of the screen allowing the glasses to alternately darken over one eye, and then the other. Screens also display different perspective for each eye using a technique called Alternate frame sequencing.

Nvidia is in forefront of this technology along with Samsung in PC gaming market while Samsung plans to dominate broadcast market and others like Panasonic and Sony are joining the trend. All of them uses the same technique ofalternative frame sequencing or time sequencing as mentioned above. It is important note that most of today's screens or monitor's support maximum of 80 hertz refresh rate but in order to support this high speed syncing with the active shutter glasses the screen should have a minimum refresh rate of 120 hertz.

Following is a Panasonic promotional video showing previous technology and advantages of current technology

Panasonic has also offers full 3D solutions from production to delivery, take a look at below video below and here is the link to their full production flow chart.

There are also other technologies in which you don't have to wear any glasses. These technologies comes under the category of Autostereoscopy. Uptil now most of these technologies are expensive and screen based so it may not ne easily adoptable for cinemas or main stream broadcast. One such technique is Pixel barrier where two images (left and right) are interlaced into the screen simultaneously.

Another similar technology is Alioscopy, where you have pixel barrier or filter to make the coded sub pixels a stereoscopic 3D experience. The real beauty of this technology is that it has 8 different perspectives so viewer could enjoy the true 3D experience from different angles. I have personally experienced this technology and found it truly an amazing experiencing but at the same time rendering 8 different views in full HD resolution would be extremely time consuming process.

With all these happenings it is so obvious that a good part of futur entertainment is going to be on 3D. I feel it is crucial to note that even though Stereoscopic 3D is not a new technology but only until Avatar that James Cameron showed us that this technology could be effectively used as a visual language rather than just a gimmick to attract audience.

Unfortunately in case of the films, a lot of production houses are looking at it as marketing tool to attract audience rather than taking it as a story telling medium and I think in broadcast media, stereoscopy is pushed in order to resurrect the penetration of HD into the main stream market considering only two broadcasters worldwide are fully HD now. According to Bill Schultz, co-CEO of Moonsoop Entertainment, L.A., "We have been doing HD for six or seven years, and there are still broadcasters who do not ask for an HD delivery,". So if Stereoscopic 3D becomes successful at least it will make sure that everybody goes HD.

I could be completely wrong here but personally, I don't feel like looking at stereoscopy as a future but instead I would like to see it as matured form of story telling medium because lot of people associate it with black & white to color or silence to sound transition in films. But from what I have seen and experienced, I think this technology has it's limitations compared to conventional 2D films and there are times where 2D might win over 3D films. For example, fast cuts of shots with different scale and depth might work pretty well with the conventional 2D film. But I think doing that sort of cuts in stereoscopic film in which the perception of deptsh changes very quickly between scenes may not be pleasing to your brain no matter how good the edit looks.

Since doing a Stereoscopic film would be technically superior I think a good example to relate what I meant would be, painting with water color and oil paint. You could pain beautiful paintings with both mediums but oil painting add whole new demension as well as technical limiations compared to water color. So it just the choice of the filmmaker that would call for Stereoscopy.

Micheal Bay is one of the director is who has been outspoken about his opinion on 3D as well as 2D to Stereoscopic 3D conversion. Micheal Bay says “The way I shoot is too aggressive for 3D cameras. It’s a time consuming thing,” said Bay. “Who knows… It might be a fad. I’m kinda old school. I’m old school because I like to shoot on film. I like anamorphic lenses, and that is old school.” I agree with him on the above statement and I think it relates to my previous example as well.

For the past few weeks I been testing stereoscopy at my workplace, so I will try to post more on this subject relating to workflow, aesthetic and story tellings aspects as I discover them.

Ed Catmull on rendering successful business

2010-05-09T20:07:00.000+08:00

I stumbled upon this great talk by president of Pixar, Ed Catmull on maintaining successful creative environment. As an artist, personally I feel creating and sustaining a creative environment on workplace is the most crucial part of any art production. Art is all about expressing our emotions or ideas in such way that the audience feel and embrace it with their own collective experience. So if artists are working in an environment where they are intimidated by the managerial forces then it is merely impossible for them express their emotions or ideas.

I found issues raised by Catmull very intriguing and it made me dig more deep into more articles on Pixar's business model.

Later, I came across couple of other good articles and a great video interview of Catmull on The Economist. All of the articles I came across discussed the same issues he addressed in the first talk which is derived from his own tremendous experience in the computer graphics and animation industry.

One of the main point raised by Catmull was that lot of companies confuse the organisational structure with the communication structure which will hinder the creativity of the team. According to him flow of information between all the departments irrespective of structural management is must to facilitate a creativity. This is in very much contrast to the general idea of management where you report only to your manager or supervisor. But according to Catmull, the efficient way to manage people is to trust them and make them responsible for the work they do instead of getting permission from manager for each task.

He gives a good example on above issue in Harvard Business Review as follows, "Within Pixar, members of any department can approach anyone in another department to solve problems, without having to go through 'proper' channels. Managers understand they don't always have to be the first o know about something going on in their realm, and that it's okay to walk into a meeting and be surprised."

The above management philosophy goes together with the peer culture in Pixar which relays lot on trust and honesty. Since everyone have a shared responsibility and trust then it is easy to recover from a failure and Catmull stress that good management is not about preventing the errors but it is about recovering from the failures.

In order to facilitate communication, trust, high morale and spirit practically into work environment of Pixar, they have formulated Pixar University which trains employees at any level on general fine arts education. The classes are mainly on pushing unconventional thinking, creating peer culture and teamwork among the all levels of the company. According to Pixar University Dean Randy Nelson, "If you don't create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in which weird ideas can be floated, then it's likely you're going to be producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace."

It is very important to note that at Pixar they put more importance on people and workplace than the ideas they create. As Catmull says in the talk, if a good idea is given to a bad team they won't come up with anything but at the same time if the team was good then they would have either fixed it and or would have come up with a idea that works.

So it is very much crucial to put together teams of people to function well because because if they work well together then the ideas they created would sell anyway. The significance of people working together is so much important for Pixar because a movie was never about an idea but it was all about collective ideas from people working effectively in different disciplines and levels. So it makes perfect sense why they put so much money and effort into making the creative space for their artists.

Finally it is interesting to note that great art always comes from unstable environment and like Catmull points out in the above talk that good teams are inherently unstable. So much of what I discussed above goes to the fact that it is essential to have working environment which not only creates great ideas but keep people together and I hope people get that right and not just they get notion of it.

'The prhase is important in the community but it just doesn't have any effect on the behavior"

Ed Catmull

Matte Painting Breakdown

2010-03-21T23:57:00.000+08:00

I been out of this blog for months now, I been busy On and Off these days anyway I feel good that I had completed this personal work. Though I am not very proud of the results but I am very happy that it really helped to get back in touch with my matte painting skills after a long break.

So here goes a short break down of the whole process.

Inspiration and references.

Basically I was inspired by the above shot in Star Trek to start with this matte painting. So I started looking for inspiration in similar matte paintings done by other artists and collected few good reference images to start with my concept.

clean plate

As you can see this image gave me a lot of open space for my concept and it already had some incredible mood and atmospheric perspective to start with.

reference pictures

Above were the most of the reference images I have used early in the process. There might be other images I have used apart from these ones but for now these are the main ones I could relate to in my library.

concept photo collage, version 1

In the above image you can see I have used basic solid shapes and few images to build up the basic composition. I have used the airplane engine exhaust and bullet shell images mainly to get the shape of the main structure.

version 2

After getting the basic composition and direction. I tried to establish the scale and added more structures overall. The sky was basically composite of clouds from different photographs.

version 3

At this stage I continued to add more structures such as cranes, poles and pipes . Most importantly I tried to crush the blacks to match the distance. Getting the atmospheric perspective (level of fog) was the most tricky part and I achieved it by painting blindly with high level of opacity at first and then erasing it with a low opacity large size air brush.

version 4

After getting a right sense of atmosphere I started to paint light and shadows after considering the direction of the light source. I also added more structures and removed some structures from both sides of the composition. At this stage I also started to get some really good critics from my coworkers which really guided me in the right direction.

Version 5

Getting the right combination of haze and light was really tricky part and I also felt it was a very subjective matter. At this point I also started to add more details such as building lights, hard and soft highlights and a glance of sunlight from right to create center of attention. I also adjusted the scale of elements to make it more convincing with the lighting.

version 6

(Click here to view high res image)

I was happy with the feeling I had with the previous version but I really pushed it a little bit further with help of some really good criticism from my friends and good folks at mattepainting.org

With this last version most of changes were on the lighting and foreground. I made lighting more evenly throughout the scene and the foreground was changed to match the lighting. Also I added more details such as more building lights and finally I changed the sky to match the overall lighting as well.

That's the end of this breakdown and I am really happy to share this process with you all so if you have any queries please do let me know.

Us Now, Documentary on human collaboration

2009-11-28T02:24:00.000+08:00

Continuing from my last post, this entry is the on the same subject which is about the importance of sharing or collaborating with others. Whats more interesting about this short film is that it shows how we could use the technology which exists today to improve fundamentally everything we do in our life from socializing to government policies.

Its funny that I felt the first person (Clay Shirky) who appears on the video was Tom Hanks but I just found that he also feels same way about himself. Anyway I found his views very interesting especially the following, "As time goes on, we'll see people increasingly comfortable participating in situations where the social value is really about other people caring enough rather than someone being paid to provide that value."

Here is TED talk by Shirky himself on importance of co-operative model and btw, I am excited to attend TEDx singapore meet later today!

Secret of success is helping others, says Lucas

2009-11-15T16:30:00.000+08:00

For sometime I really wanted to post this entry into my blog to just tag this up in my web space so that I won’t forget these really great words of wisdom from this interview. I believe this interview was done on sidelines with 33rd AFI Life Achievement Award which was presented to Lucas.

If you have watched the above video you might have noticed him saying, “getting the most praised for least body of work”. I was very moved by those words especially since I was also who was one among the people who looked only at his success but not at what methods or practice he would have had adopted to achieve it.

This interview had some really good insights into how he achieved his success and following are few quotes which I found really inspirational.

Lucas says, “No matter how easy it looks on the outside, it's a very, very difficult struggle. You don't see the struggle part of a person's life. You only see the success they have. But I haven't met anybody here at the Academy or anywhere else that hasn't been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever.“

Other than passion, practice, perseverance, one interesting point he pointed to be successful really caught my attention and that is helping others. According to him it also matters how much one dug his own life to understand things around him and how we all fit into the bigger picture. He says, "bigger picture" understanding -- of how we fit into the world, and how we fit into the universe. Not necessarily thinking of ourselves, but thinking of others.”

He explains It is ironic that most of the people doesn’t understand this phenomena which exists all around us and we fail to look at the large picture by being a self absorbed creature which would end like a cancer cell. According to him, “If you put that notion on a larger scale, you have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever.”

Lucas reminds us that if we look at human history all the inventions and advancements we ever made is because we had worked together. As we know helping others is the basis of any society and it is obvious that as a group we are stronger than an individual but once we become possessive or selfish it is very difficult to win or succeed in anything we start out to.

According to Lucas, ‘My success was based on how much I could push everybody up. And eventually their success was the same way. And in the process they pushed me up, and I pushed them up, and we kept doing that, and we still do that.” He states that even though his friends were his competitors that doesn’t stopped him from enjoying their success as his own.

I think Lucas’s career is a best example for what he is trying to describe above because a good amount of his success was truly based on his associations he had with Coppola and Spielberg from the very beginning of his career.

It is also important to note that Lucas not only revolutionised film industry by bringing the digital realm into reality but also he along with Coppola proved that how films could be made outside the gated Hollywood studio system which existed during their era.

Following are two videos in which he talks about his two early films and how Coppola played a crucial role in both of them.

Finally as a personal note, I think lot of people today doesn't understand the importance of cooperating or helping others. It is very much apparent in the Internet forums where people would just gaze at the threads while never take any effort to contribute back. It is even more ironic when people think that by contributing to forums they are not gaining any knowledge. As for me whole reason I write blog or I am active in the forums is not just to contribute but to learn and expand my knowledge. I think the best possible way to learn is when you share.

TED talks on CG Face

2009-10-31T22:12:00.000+08:00

Here is a talk on the technology by Paul Debevec. Do check out his website for more information on facial capture technologies.

Next is talk by Ed Ulbrich on the technology put into practice in the film Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Please do note that it took 155 people and 2 years to pull this amazing VFX and it was for a invisible VFX which most of the audience wouldn't even have noticed!

Bad movies which killed purpose of great VFX

2009-09-26T19:46:00.000+08:00

I was searching a bit deeper into one of my favorite website (wired.com) checking for some random articles and I found these two articles very interesting, namely, 10 Sci-Fi Movies We’d Like to Throw Into a Black Hole and 10 Geeky Movies That Should Have Been Great, but Weren’t.

One of the thing which you can find similar in all these movies mentioned in above articles are they all had some good amount of visual effects being Sci-fi or geeky movies but still they fail to impress majority of the audience. This issue reminded me of a in-class presentation (presentation given during late 2006) I did during my degree class back in college.

I think this lists mentioned in the above two articles could be even longer including some of the recent movies but this issue is more serious than critics bashing VFX or VFX artists bashing poor scripts. After my research in college I had came to point of realization that this whole phenomena is effect of various trends and other factors which affected this dynamic industry and this is something which will continue to evolve.

As a VFX artist I love to bash at some of these high budget VFX movies which killed purpose of those great VFX shots and most importantly hard work of people behind it. So here goes my list of 5 bad movies which killed VFX (oh we all love to doing this, lol)

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!)

1.) Star Wars prequels
Seriously after watching these prequels it even downed my appreciation for the original trilogy. Tough I enjoyed those best of the best ILM eye candies after a while it was apparent that I was watching these movies just to enjoy the VFX shots not the movie as a whole.

2.) The Matrix sequels
The very first Matrix is my favorite movie both visual effects and story wise but both movies came after were fail to impress me like the way first one did. It would be better to quote from Weird's article for this one;

The Matrix is one of the best science fiction films ever made, period. The first 40 minutes of the original leaves you scratching your head, trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. During the rest of the film, the pacing, the action and the story are beautiful in their execution. The film ends with enough questions to keep the audience talking, speculating and watching again for new clues.
What we didn’t need, however, were answers. The answers are a letdown. They were full of quasi-mysticism about the nature of man and machine
The sequels also feel bloated by the special effects in a way the first film didn’t. At various points, the story just stops so we can see our protagonists fight the bad guys in various unbelievable ways. What began as a compelling story moves steadfastly into mind-numbing, summer-blockbuster territory.

3.) Daredevil
Though there mixed reactions to this movie, for me this movie was one of the first superhero movie which left me with some emptiness and this one represents trend of other superhero movies which followed the same suite like Electra, Fantastic four, Spiderman 3, Ghost Rider and most recently X- Men Origins.

4.) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Great cast, good visual effects but poor script, I think that was this movie was all about. It is interesting to note that there aren't much good Steampunk films made in Hollwywood, another one I could think of is Wild Wild West and I think both these movies didn't really exploit the depth of genre instead they just became like any other high budget Hollywood flicks.

5.) Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
This is again one of those sequels which again fail to capture our expectations. Though Schwarzenegger was present in this movie it didn't really help the poor story in any manner. This one was suppose to be direct continuation of last movie but I felt through out the movie it was drifting away from the first two movies.

I think they continued this trend for some reason even in the latest movie T4. I felt the latest movie is not as bad as T3, maybe it because the only thing I could associate T4 with first two movies is the soundtrack and everything else seems like some other new movie. Oh yeah, I liked dramatic out of world and sudden appearance of CG Schwarzenegger at the climax.

There are other movies which I didn't mention but then this list won't have an ending. I only mentioned the movies which I personally had lot of expectations and in which I enjoyed the VFX but not the movie as a whole. So I would like to stress this whole post is more of a personal reflection than a general opinion.

I think the main reasons behind these failures are audience's high expectations and their increasing maturity to high end VFX or action/dramatic sequences. I am not blaming the audience and safe guarding the filmmakers but if you look at the industry as a whole , the audience plays a major role in creating and destroying the trends in industry.

Like I stated before my expectations were very low for the fourth installment of Terminator but due to failure of T3 I felt T4 was a much better film . And on audience's maturity, this is where it gets really interesting because according to an eassy at filmcritic.com,

One of the first films that shocked audiences was The Great Train Robbery, where audiences reportedly ran from the cinema in terror when the criminal pointed his prop gun straight at the camera. A film, which was described as ‘general slaughter’ by a New York Times film critic, was James Cagney’s 1931 Public Enemy. This included eight deaths, all of them off camera, used suggestive sound effects and actors reactions to notify the audience that a death occurred. If you compare this with Bruce Willis’s 1990 Die Hard 2 in which 264 people died, all on camera and all of them very brutally and bloody, this proves that audiences are becoming difficult to shock.

I think only way out of this phenomena is when audience really appreciate visual effects for its story telling qualities instead of it's awe-inspiring effects but then I really don't know when that is going to happen because currently it is very apparent that VFX is used as a marketing tool and not to mention the high end FX race between the top VFX studios.

The industry is always going through constant evolution mainly due to technological development and then due to social and cultural changes. I remember back in my college presentation I quoted Lucas on this issue as follows,

"The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie. Those movies can't make their money back anymore."

"It's no accident that the 'small movies' outclassed the spectaculars in this year's Academy Awards. Is that good for the business? No—it's bad for the business. But moviemaking isn't about business. It's about art! In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies."

If you compare his statement with latest movie District 9, which had an overall budget of 30 million and which boasted top notch visual effects. It is apparent that there is strong trend for low budget film making and I think in future the budgets will continue to shrink. It doesn't mean the death of high end visual effects but I think it will be the birth of very niche class of films which will use visual effects more for its story telling qualities that can be comparable to films in 70s & 80s.

I think I don't have to stress again how important story is in the process of film making and to conclude this post I would like to quote VFX producer Rick Baumgartner from his blog

On one level, visual effects deals with the problems of human perception – finding ways to take advantage of the strengths and weakness in the human visual system. Cues such as scale, perspective, depth, color, pattern, texture, intensity, shadow, parallax each of us instinctively use to place ourselves in the world. Visual effects take advantage of these cues.
On still another level are the technical problems related to the tools and materials used to develop a visual effects solution. But no matter what the eventual technical hurdles, visual effects starts with the written representation of the story -- the script -- and very quickly moves into iterative visual representations of the story.
The bottom line always is the story: depictions of real or imagined events with characters, objects and environments illustrating some aspect of the human experience

Traditional Mattepaiting and Albert Whitlock

2009-08-24T00:11:00.004+08:00

Today I was digging a bit deeper into history of mattepainting, one of my favorite craft associated with visual effects. Though we all seen the craft of mattepainting in very early specials effect films such as the A Trip to the Moon, the craft was really perfected by few elite group of men in Hollywood mainly during mid and late 90s. As from my preliminary search on web I think there ain't much information on Internet on this but what I found is worth posting here.

First of all here is an almost comprehensive list of those artists by a VFX artist called Domingo Lizcano. He had done a great job collecting images and matte paintings of almost all the artists used who used traditional methods of mattepainting. It is quite difficult to find articles and resources on these old techniques, maybe there isn't much information on traditional methods of mattepaiting because of the closed nature of Hollywood during that era.

Anyway a good insight into these techniques can be found this book called 'The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting'. It is important note that one of the coauthor of this book, Craig Baron worked in ILM during early days for Return of the Jedi(1983) and others. After ILM he founded Matte World Digital, one of my favorite VFX studio. I particularly admire their work because of its invisible nature. It is very evident in their work for Benjamin Button which made Baron won a Oscar for VFX.

As I said I am big fan of invisible visual effects and this is one the reason why I admire the work of all these old great artists. One of the legend of this invisible craft was Albert Whitlock, he is considered as one of the most skilled matte artist of all time. He was born in London in 1915 and started his career by working in film warehouse, then miniature painters to helping carpenters, creating titles and then signs for several of Hitchcock's early classics and later he had worked for Disney and finally Universal as matte artist.

(Excerpt from Albert Whitlock: A Master of Illusion)

Following are few of my favorite Albert Withlock matte paintings.

Mattepainting with live action (History of the World: Part I (1981))

Original live action plate and matte of above shot

Mattepainting with live action (The Birds (1962))

A Photo realistic Matte Painting from film Earthquake

Mattepainting with live action (History of the World: Part I (1981))
There quite lot of good shots and I can't include them all here but here is a montage put together by Craig Baron for Visual Effects Society's tribute to Albert Whitlock talk session.

Floyd W. Martin on his article on Whitlock states that most of the films he worked were not Sc-Fi or visual effects oriented films but normal films in which mattepaitings were subtly used to tell the story. Martin continues, Whitlock was often depicted the natural world through his paintings and extensively used the technique of perspective & depth which Italian Renaissance mastered perfected. Though Whitlock associated himself with Fresh impressionist art movement which studied the affects of light on objects than objects itself.

Following is an excerpt from Whitlock's interview by Super-8 Filmaker magazine on above subject of the effect he looks for in a mattepainting.

Well, you can't live on matte shot for a lifetime. Eventually you realize that it's quantity that film producers are interested in, so you start developing techniques whereby you can turn out quantities. So by necessity, you find yourself in a situation where you're looking for minimum of effort. As my mentor in England would say, the right kind of scribble is better than wrong kind of painting. After a little bit of accidental painting you realize that you're painting something close impressionism.

Like impressionistic painting, my paintings are not concerned with the object, but the effect of light on the object.

He further continues in the interview stating, whenever he looks for a reference he don't look for the exact reference he could find in terms of the location or the subject but in fact he look for a similar reference which has the same lighting condition which he want replicate in his shot. According to him, "In there you have phenomena, which is much more important for creating a realistic effect. the light, the time of day and effects in that painting are much more important than the individual buidlings which nobody would take account of. "

This above statement of Whitlock had an instant strike on my mind because I never looked at my work in this perspective though I pay lot of attention to lighting on my work but I never wondered that those buildings or structures in my painting will never exits if there is no light. I think a normal viewer would often think if there is no light then it is a night shot but only very few would think even in a night shot there are lights.

I think we all have to closely look at and study the methodologies which masters like Whitlock used to perfect their paintings. It is especially very important in this digital era where these concepts are very much overlooked because of the simplicity of the tools we use.

To end this write up I am quoting couple of authors from articles on Whitlock, firstly from Matrin whose article I mentioned before;

'Though his work may go unrecognized because it is so convincing, Whitlock's artistry with special effects is important in understanding three concepts: the collaboration necessary in movie-making, the need to use effects for budgetary reasons, and the fact that film is a two-dimensional illusionistic medium.'

And finally to quote Ray Zone on his article called Matte Painting Monet in American Cinematographer Magazine July 2000 issue

He was truly unique a master painter with the precise mind of a photographer. He would paint in f-stops and light his images according to the key lights and fill of the original photography the kinds of computations that are done today by highly complex computer software. Whitlock made such calculations in his head, and he knew what would work on the screen. "Hopefully, the camera does lie," Whitlock said, "because it’s looking at a painting that we are trying to convince people is the real thing."

Some bitter truth about the industry

2009-08-19T22:13:00.000+08:00

Yesterday I saw this old thread in mattepaiting.org about interview of Hollywood illustrator/storyboard artist, Sylvain Despretz and interestingly Despretz himself had commented there few days ago. Go through the thread if you have time since it has some valuable information and different views, even Dylan Cole has his say (guess he was active in the forum almost 5 years back).

The more I think about these issues I feel it is notl ironic when someone says you need have a lot of luck or be at the right place at right time. Actually it matters a lot and God knows what holds for budding artists but anyway all one could do is just work your ass off and be persistent no matter what.

Here are few are quotes which I felt very interesting and insightful from his interview hosted at cgchannel.com

"You could say that most people are essentially interested in the Prestige of the movies that I worked on, more so than any objective notions of personal artistry, or drawings, but I guess you can’t ask too much of people."

"I have learned that Professionalism is often antithetical to Enthusiasm, but that when given a choice, it is also more reliable.

'I am a sort of Artistic Rent-A-Friend; “rent” being the operative word.'

"In music, after enjoying a Century of rich and heartfelt compositions in Contemporary Classical, Jazz, Big Band, Blues, Rock & Roll, all disciplines requiring a decent amount of Skillfulness, we are asked to accept Star-Puppets barking to walls of prerecorded sounds…They even have a new name for “ripping-off without crediting”: it’s now called “Sampling”.

There is an another article by Despretz called 'YOU WANT TO BE A HOLLYWOOD ARTIST?'. Even thought it is more based on illustrator/storyboard artist scenario, it still holds lot of things similar for other artistic trades in film industry. I really liked this article and here are few excerpts from it.

Is there a standard path to a career in film arts?
There is no path to a career in the film arts, or any kind of art, for that matter; this should be the first thing art schools ought to tell their students: "We haven't a clue; no one does". The problem for a student or young professional is three-fold:

a) Acquiring experience, to become competitive.
b) Making money just to live, in a way that remains at least on target.
c) Breaking into the "gated community" of show business.

I'm being offered a job today, but I want to hold out for a better one that promises to begin soon; what should I do?
This is a Jedi Mind Trick; the better job may manifest, sooner or later, but most likely, it won't. Common wisdom says that you might consider taking whatever job is in front of you - even if only for the time being. Look out for you; no one else does.

And here is my favorite one and believe me or not this happened to me already few times even in my short career span.

Will talking about money reflect negatively on me?
You bet it will!

You are expected to behave like Van Gogh.

The industrial world relies on Artistic low self-esteem for its survival. The hunched-back, Igor-like, image of the drooling Artist-Geek, chained to a drawing table, is a staple of our business. To complete that image, you need do nothing more than be ashamed of your need for money. People will be delighted.

Learn to identify the euphemisms of the trade:

"We want people who are excited about the project": We are looking for suckers.
"We would like to send you the script before we discuss money": We are looking for suckers.
"We want team players": We are looking for suckers.
"You are so talented": Are you a sucker?
"He's a trooper": He's a sucker.
"We getting a crop of young artists": We are looking for suckers.
"He's High Maintenance": He's figured us out.

Only then, can you identify the only sign that you are dealing with a professional outfit:
"Are you available; what is your rate?": We mean business!

Ancestor of Vue or Fractcal Noise?

2009-08-08T22:25:00.000+08:00

Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter on Vimeo.

I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world's first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each.

Loren Carpenter

I think this is one of the most commonly used algorithm in 2D and 3D computer graphcis today. To know more about its humble beginings read Act II of Micheal Rubin's book driodMaker.

Cognitive use of color in films.

2009-08-03T21:38:00.000+08:00

Today I read a very good article on cognitive use of color treatment in films by Isaac Botkin, the author of book called Outside Hollywood.

According to Botkin, 'Color can be used to communicate information to audiences in all kinds of ways. For example, the storyline in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic takes place in three different places, each of which is a very different color. Viewers can instantly tell where characters are and what part of the story they are watching. This is a very obvious way to communicate basic information.' He also states that colors can be used to create an emotional state such as safety and danger by altering the mood from warm to cool colors.

It is interesting to note how different directors use colors differently, to explain this Botkin closely examine Ridely Scott's Black Hawk Down and how it bended the normal norms of color treatment. To read more on that check out Botkin's article Color Theory for Cinematographers.

Finally Butkin had posted color chart of the movie Black Hawk Down created by Brendan Dawes.

(For more color charts check out Dawes's website)

Butkin states that if we look at right color gradient strip we can clearly see the film’s acts and turning points highlighted clearly. When I first vaguely read this article it reminded me of visual cognitive lessons I took back in my college. So Just to refresh my memory on this subject I read through some of my old notes and wrote my insights here as follows:

It is important to note that color is only one of the visual component the director has in his arsenal to alter the visual intensity of any shot. The visual intensity of the shot depends upon the intensity of the story structure and story structure is break down into basically four sections namely Exposition, Conflict, Climax and Resolution. Here is the graph which shows the story intensity at various levels of a story.
Here we can see the graph rising at the Exposition (EX) leading to Conflict (CO) then reaching its peak at the Climax (CX) and finally falls down to the Resolution (R). According to Bruce Block, the author of book called 'The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media' , all good stories follows this uphill structure.

I think this structure is very apparent if we look at the color gradient strip of Black Hawk Down, in which according to Butkin, cool colors suggest safety, warm colors suggest danger and finally green color suggest most intense part.

So once we understand the story structure we could use the visual components to get desired intensity. The author Block explains this in his book using Principle of Contrast and Affinity which basically states, the greater the contrast in a visual component, the more the visual intensity. The greater the affinity in a visual component, the more the visual intensity decreases.

The other main visual components that can be used to create visual intensity are Line, shape, tone, color, movement and rhythm. Its beyond the scope of this post to go into detail of each of them but here are couple of screenshots from Block's book which explains these components graphically.

As a compositor/VFX artist, I strongly believe it is important to understand the story structure in order to alter the intensity of the shot according to director's vision. Since all of these visual components plays a important role in achieving a good composition which helps to sell the particular shot to audience.

Rotoscoping Basics by Scott Squires

2009-08-02T22:52:00.000+08:00

This is pretty old podcast but every time I watch it I learn something new so I thought I post here so that I could come back watch it again in future.

Don't forget to check out Scott Squires's great blog.
http://effectscorner.blogspot.com/

DROIDMAKER

2009-07-19T01:27:00.000+08:00

I'm not really sure how this will go over, but i've decided to make my book DROIDMAKER downloadable in its entirety, effective today. It's a long book (518 pages), and I still recommend going to Amazon and getting yourself a copy (it's how you can pay for this "shareware"), but below are links to get PDFs of the book: I've divided it into the three "acts" that makes up the saga.

Thank you, and enjoy!

I just started reading this book and it gave me a really good insight into early career of George Lucas and Francis Coppola. It is a must read for any Lucas fan and It has a really good account of hardships he has gone through before getting where he is now.

I remember once my professor told me back in my college days, its easy to write about greatness of a person like Lucas but its hard to write about what methods or approaches he had used to achieve that greatness.

Download the book from Rubin's blog
http://droidmaker.blogspot.com/

'A pixel is not a little square' says Alvy Ray Smith

2009-07-13T22:37:00.000+08:00

Its ironic that before reading this memo by Alvy Ray Smith I never wondered what really makes up a pixel. I always believed the computer stores color information as little squares but actually its only a mathematical representation of color information. Like Smith points out its mainly misconception due to the way computer application shows pixels when we magnify an image.

According to Smith,

'A pixel is a point sample. It exists only at a point. For a color picture, a pixel might actually contain three samples, one for each primary color contributing to the picture at the sampling point. We can still think of this as a point sample of a color. But we cannot think of a pixel as a square—or anything other than a point.'

He also states that an image is a continuous straight parallel array of point samples and by using an appropriate image reconstruction filter we could create full colorful image what out of it. It is interesting to note that for example, while using any of these filters they would represent array of point in a form of rectangle which can be almost similar to a square. I believe this is the reason why when we zoom on image we see square pixels which represents the main color value of points sample present in that particular area. Smith's explanation on the same as follows

when you zoom in is this: Each point sample is being replicated MxM times, for magnification factor M. When you look at an image consisting of MxM pixels all of the same color, guess what you see: A square of that solid color! It is not an accurate picture of the pixel below. It is a bunch of pixels approximating what you would see if a reconstruction with a box filter were performed. To do a true zoom requires a resampling operation and is much slower than a video card can comfortably support in realtime today.

I think today it is not really important to understand this very basic issue since it is something our today's image manipulation applications manage quite efficiently underneath the user interface. But at the same time understanding this basic issues may help us to understand other important techniques such as 4:2:2 color sampling which I discussed in my last post. The Bayer filter used in 4:2:2 digital image sensors of digital cameras are similar to an image reconstructions filters such as bilinear interpolation, bicubic interpolation and spline interpolation. They all build full color image from incomplete color samples (sample points) and this is process or algorithm is called demosaicing.

The below two images from wikipedia which explains this visually

The four red dots show the data points and the green dot is the point at which we want to interpolate.
Example of bilinear interpolation on the unit square with the z-values 0, 1, 1 and 0.5 as indicated. Interpolated values in between represented by colour.

Who is Alvy Ray Smith?
He was one of the cofounder of Pixar and also Executive Vice President from 1986-1991 and founder of Altamira which was acquired by Microsoft. He was co-awarded the Computer Graphics Achievement Award by SIGGRAPH in 1990 for "seminal contributions to computer paint systems," including the first full-color paint program, the first soft-edged fill program, and the HSV (aka HSB) color space model.

Most interestingly he gave Pixar its name which meant "to make pictures", an invented Spanish verb meaning. Also while at Pixar he played an important role in hiring John Lasseter who is now the CCO at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Finally check out the Pixar founding documents hosted in his website.

Cheers,
Rahul

Truth about resolution and pixels

2009-07-05T20:31:00.002+08:00

Last week our team had a presentation on RED workflow from good people at Icerberg Design here in Singapore. The key issues we discussed at the end were 4:2:2 color sampling and advantage of 10 bit log space of RED workflow. While advantage of 10 bit log space is almost similar to a film workflow but the compromise we would make would be on the quality of the image.

Is RED 4K really 4K? There is a really good interview of John Galt, Panavision Senior Vice President, Advanced Digital Imaging at creativecow.net and here from few good quotes from the interview.

Any of the high-end high definition video cameras, they had 3 sensors: one 1 red, a green and a blue photosite to create 1 RGB pixel.
But what we have seen particularly with these Bayer pattern cameras is that they are basically sub-sampled chroma cameras. In other words they have half the number of color pixels as they do luminance And the luminance is what they call green typically. So what happens is you have two green photo sites for every red and blue.

So how do get RGB out of that? What do you have to do is, you have to interpolate the red and the blues to match the greens. So you are basically creating, interpolating, what wasn't there, you're imagining what it is, what its going to be. Thats essentially what it is. You can do this extremely well, particularly if the green response is very broad.

Well 4K in the world of the professionals who do this, and you say “4K,” it means you have 4096 red, 4096 green and 4096 blue photo sites.

I dug a bit deep into this subject and though I felt it was too technical but I got some good insight on this subject.

To really understand this issue first we must take a look at what really defines quality of the image. A common misconception is that resolutions increases the sharpness of the image but in reality the fine details are mostly irrelevant to human eye, though human eye is capable of reading extremely fine details. This is also true at greater distance and what really defines the sharpness of the image are the contour defining features at a higher contrast. It is important to note that above statement doesn't mean a low resolution image with high contrast will give better viewing experience since it could lead to aliasing issues.

Since resolution and sharpness are completely separate terms, we establish relationship between them using MTF (Modulation Transfer Function). So each time when generation loss happens during transfer of medium we define it using MTF.

There is a lot more to read and understand on this subject. A good start on that would be the main source of information of what I have written here, an article called 4K systems by Dr. Hans Keining, R&D Depth ARRI .

To conclude, counting pixels wouldn't be the best way to judge quality of an image and the quality of an image depends upon lot of attributes. The MTF just doesn't start at post production, for example there are modulation happening within the camera during the capturing process. So it is really important to take a closer study at these issues separately.

Coming back to the RED discussion, I believe RED's subsampled 4K image would be slightly advantageous even in HD or SD (based on a broadcast scenario) production since MTF would be comparatively lesser compare to a normal 4:2:2 color sampled HD camera.

Cheers,
Rahul

A legend departed

2009-06-27T21:35:00.001+08:00

I don't have much to say but I am happy that I have a very good memory of watching his hit music videos with everyone at home during my childhood. That was before his career downfall and I am glad that I was able to feel that excitement with everyone in my family. Whether he is a good person or not, that doesn't matter anymore but what matters is we all know that we are not going to see any other person like him for at least 100 years.

A alternative view on Global Warming

2009-06-27T20:08:00.000+08:00

The Great Global Warming Swindle

I was doing some research on this topic recently for my work and I bumped on few articles stating global warming as a propaganda by mega corporations and all those control freak secret societies for world domination. Whether this could be truth or not I still believe we must keep a control over our carbon levels and the way we utilize our natural resources.

Here are few excerpts from a article which supports the same argument.

Howard C. Hayden, emeritus professor of physics from the University of Connecticut, told a Pueblo West audience that he was prompted to speak out after a visit to New York where he learned that scaremongering billboards about the long-term effects of global warming were being purchased at a cost of $700,000 a month.

"Someone is willing to spend a huge amount of money to scare us about global warming," Hayden said. "Big money is behind the global-warming propaganda."

Hayden pointed out that global warming is taking place throughout the solar system, underscoring the fact that natural causes and not human beings are driving climate change, which has occurred throughout history.

"Yes, the polar ice caps are shrinking . . . on Mars," he said, "On Mars, the ice caps are melting and small hills are disappearing," adding that warming trends were also being observed on Jupiter, Saturn and Triton.

Citing the fact that human activity is responsible for just 3 per cent of carbon-dioxide emissions on earth, Hayden said that carbon levels in the atmosphere have been rising and falling for 400,000 years.

"We are at the lowest levels in the last 300,000 years," he said. "During the Jurassic period, we had very high levels of carbon dioxide."

"About 97 percent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from natural sources, not humans," Hayden concluded, adding that global warming is being pushed not by grass roots advocacy groups, but by giant corporations who stand to gain from selling concepts such as carbon tracking and carbon trading.

Source: Professor: Big Money Behind Global Warming Propaganda, Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet Tuesday, March 11, 2008, link

Anyway the counterpart of this same theory suggest that all these scientists belong to neo cons and they protecting mega corporations such as exxon. This particular website draws relation between those scientists and exxon company.

But its get more exciting when I think why the same neo cons who are the ones behind one world government propaganda would play at both sides. Daniel Taylor states in his article that neo cons are using global warming propaganda as one of their tool for building a world government and here are few interesting quotes form the article.

"In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991) published by the Club of Rome, a globalist think tank, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."

"Richard Haass, the current president of the Council on Foreign Relations, stated in his article "State sovereignty must be altered in globalized era," that a system of world government must be created and sovereignty eliminated in order to fight global warming, as well as terrorism. "Moreover, states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies if the international system is to function," says Haass. "Globalization thus implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker. States would be wise to weaken sovereignty in order to protect themselves..."

Source: Global warming hysteria serves as excuse for world government,Daniel Taylor,March 14, 2007, link

So who knows they are enjoying while playing at both sides. Just like they like to sell the weapons to both sides during a war.

The Mum Song

2009-06-21T02:20:00.000+08:00

I think she summed it up pretty well there...

Fusion 6 Advanced Materials

2009-06-17T23:10:00.000+08:00

This video shows how to build a car paint shader inside Fusion 6. This particular feature looks very promising and it really shows how much compositing applications are getting closer to the 3D applications these days.

What I really found interesting is interactivity of this feature and its looks a lot like the procedural shaders in Maya Hypershade. Since this is happening inside a compositing application like Fusion I felt its even more interactive than Hypershade in Maya. There is also this tutorial on building Anisotropic Highlights which will help us to understand anistropic attributes in detail.

I believe most of the people have reached a point where they don't know about the basics of shaders since everything is readymade for them even in basic 3D apps so its very insightful to create these shaders or their properties from scratch inside a compositing app.

There are other bunch of new features in Fusion 6 and especially on 3d side of things. Visit eyeon website for more details and also check out few notes on new features like 3D Fog(not just affects the depth but also the color), Transmittance, Composite Materials and many more at http://www.vfxpedia.com/

Changing gear

2009-06-15T22:14:00.000+08:00

I got myself this sexy thing yesterday and it's feels great :)

And this is what under her hood:

At her heart she got a AMD Turion X2 RM74 64 bit, 2.2 GHz. Her face is so shiny and beautiful because of her ATI Radeon HD 4570 512 MB dedicated memory. To remember all the random stuffs I throw at her she got a 320 GB HDD. Finally to handle all of me at once she got 4 GB of RAM ;)

Piracy?

2009-05-30T20:36:00.000+08:00

A few days back I noticed the soundtrack for my showreel which was uploaded in Youtube had been removed because of copyright infringement. And I felt it was time for me move on to some other video sharing webiste.

Here is good take on this topic..

In 2002, the RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) reported that CD sales had fallen by 8.9 percent, from 882 million to 803 million units; revenues fell 6.7 percent.[12] This confirms a trend over the past few years. The RIAA blames Internet piracy for the trend, though there are many other causes that could account for this drop. SoundScan, for example, reports a more than 20 percent drop in the number of CDs released since 1999. That no doubt accounts for some of the decrease in sales. Rising prices could account for at least some of the loss. "From 1999 to 2001, the average price of a CD rose 7.2 percent, from $13.04 to $14.19."[13] Competition from other forms of media could also account for some of the decline. As Jane Black of BusinessWeek notes, "The soundtrack to the film High Fidelity has a list price of $18.98. You could get the whole movie [on DVD] for $19.99."[14]

But let's assume the RIAA is right, and all of the decline in CD sales is because of Internet sharing. Here's the rub: In the same period that the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent.

There are too many different things happening at the same time to explain these numbers definitively, but one conclusion is unavoidable: The recording industry constantly asks, "What's the difference between downloading a song and stealing a CD?"--but their own numbers reveal the difference. If I steal a CD, then there is one less CD to sell. Every taking is a lost sale. But on the basis of the numbers the RIAA provides, it is absolutely clear that the same is not true of downloads. If every download were a lost sale--if every use of Kazaa "rob[bed] the author of [his] profit"--then the industry would have suffered a 100 percent drop in sales last year, not a 7 percent drop. If 2.6 times the number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, and yet sales revenue dropped by just 6.7 percent, then there is a huge difference between "downloading a song and stealing a CD."

It all started with Napster and its amazing where file sharing is stands after 10 years.

“Napster changed the idea of music as something you paid for to being something that was free,” Mr. Usher said in an interview. “It took a whole industry that had its infrastructure built up on making, delivering and selling a CD – a piece of plastic – and it took away the piece of plastic. And without that piece of plastic, you can’t support that pyramid of infrastructure that you no longer need when you deliver for free.”
David Usher, lead singer of the Vancouver rock band Moist

For established musicians who came up through a system built on record sales, radio play and landing the cover of Rolling Stone magazine as measures of success, Napster and file sharing shook the foundations of their world. But for emerging artists, and for a generation of kids who grew up plugged into video games, computers and the Internet, digital media leveled the playing field

Its very clear that due to file sharing nobody is losing out on anything expect few people like major recording companies or film production companies can't hit their more than cent percent profit targets.

Anyways I just embrace the free culture because that is the only way all of us can evolve into better human beings who will be able to do what they love and do it freely. Finally this is what Shawn Fanning who is the creator of Naspter gotto say...

“I’ve never really been concerned with [my own legacy] especially how it relates to the press,” he said. “I mean, I was writing software because I loved writing software. Writing software is a pretty anti-social thing as well. So [a legacy] is not something I tend to think about, I just tend to focus on doing stuff that I enjoy, that I feel good about and I just love creating things, and wherever that takes me, it takes me.”

Its interesting to note that he single handily wrote the whole software code when he was only 18 for sharing music with his peers in college.

Source 1 : Free Culture: Version 2004-02-10
Source 2 : Thank You Napster, Matt Hartley Technology Reporter, Globe and Mail Update, May. 19, 2009

A few quotes from the movie 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'

2009-05-20T23:01:00.000+08:00

“You can be mad as a mad dog at the way things went. You can swear and curse the fates. But when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”

“We’re all going the same way. We’re just taking different roads to get there, that’s all.
You’re on your own road.”

“It’s not about how well you play. It’s how you feel about what you’re playing.”

“We are meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?”

“For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be.”

“It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you.”

“It has no time limit. You can start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same,
there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best of it or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things that you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of And if you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

I really feel those above quotes were best movie dialogues I have heard in recent times.Its inspiring and thoughtful, at the same time its fits within the storyline.

I really feel bad that this movie didn't won the best movie award in the Oscars. :(

Disneyland with the Death Penalty

2009-05-19T22:34:00.001+08:00

Its an article about Singapore by William Gibson, who is called as father of cyberpunk genre. I been living here for almost past three years and I was amazed by authenticity of this article to this very day. Though it was written in 1993 and I feel nothing much has changed in terms of culture and society from outsider's point of view.

Here are few interesting quotes from the article

link to the full artcile (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//1.04/gibson.html?pg=5&topic=)

"It's like an entire country run by Jeffrey Katzenberg," the producer had said, "under the motto 'Be happy or I'll kill you.'" We were sitting in an office a block from Rodeo Drive, on large black furniture leased with Japanese venture capital.
Now that I'm actually here, the Disneyland metaphor is proving impossible to shake. For that matter, Rodeo Drive comes frequently to mind, though the local equivalent feels more like 30 or 40 Beverly Centers put end to end.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They're good at this stuff. Really good. But now they propose to become something else as well; a coherent city of information, its architecture planned from the ground up. And they expect that whole highways of data will flow into and through their city. Yet they also seem to expect that this won't affect them. And that baffles us, and perhaps it baffles the Singaporeans that it does.
Myself, I'm inclined to think that if they prove to be right, what will really be proven will be something very sad; and not about Singapore, but about our species. They will have proven it possible to flourish through the active repression of free expression. They will have proven that information does not necessarily want to be free.
But perhaps I'm overly pessimistic here. I often am; it goes with the territory. (Though what could be more frightening, out here at the deep end of the 20th century, than a genuinely optimistic science fiction writer?) Perhaps Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable...weirdness.
Dear God. What a fate.

Ancient Mysteries

2009-05-19T22:00:00.000+08:00

The famous Egyptian Book of the Dead, in a passage containing a confession to the "Lord of Righteousness," reveals a remarkable correlation to the Ten commandments of the Old Testament:

BIBLE: Have no other gods before me I do not tamper with divine balance
BOOK OF THE DEAD: Make no idols I stop not a god when he comes forth

BIBLE: Do not misuse the name of God I do not offend the god who is at the helm
BOOK OF THE DEAD: Keep the Sabbath holy (Egyptians had no Sabbath)

BIBLE: Honor your mother and father
BOOK OF THE DEAD: I do not harm my kinsmen

BIBLE: Do not kill
BOOK OF THE DEAD:I do not kill

BIBLE:Do not commit adultery
BOOK OF THE DEAD:I am not an adulterer

BIBLE: Do not steal
BOOK OF THE DEAD: I do not roh

BIBLE: Do nor lie
BOOK OF THE DEAD: I do not tell lies instead of truth

BIBLE: Do not covet another's property
BOOK OF THE DEAD: I do no wrong or mischief to others

This comparison provided compelling support for those who claim that the biblical Israelites drew heavily from the ancient Egyptian texts. The Egyptians, in turn, gained their knowledge and beliefs from the older cultures of Babylon and Sumer

Source: Rule by secrecy, Jim Marrs, Page 362

So is there any God or all roads leads to summer? You gotta read this book by Jim Marrs to know the rest of the story. It is must read for anyone who is interested to know an alternative version about our history which may hold a lot of truth about mankind and it's origins.

Is communisim and democracy is the same stuff?

2009-05-19T21:54:00.000+08:00

It was the Russian Marxist Vladimir Ulianov, known to the world as Lenin, who referred to the plan for taking over nations as outlined in the Communist Manifesto (1848) as "the conquest of democracy." In the Manifesto itself, just before listing the ten measures to be used in gaining control of a nation, reads: "The first step in the revolution is to raise the proletariat (lower class) to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy." With those of limited intelligence and ability in control, it is very vasy for the secret rulers to direct them.

It was Lenin who coined the term "democratic centralism" to denote strict guidance from a small center and broad "participation" of a large number of people in the activities flowing from this guidance. It should also be noted that the nations controlled by the international money interests are called democracies..

Source: THE CONQUEST OF DEMOCRACY
by Erminie King Wright

So its all about few people ruling over a lot of folks at the end of day! Then for what reason we had Cold War and on going wars for the spreading or safe guarding democracy?

Friendship between a guy and girl

2009-05-19T21:45:00.000+08:00

After a long break... not sure whether I am going to resurrect this blog this time but I just felt like posting few things which I kept as note in my desktop.

Whether you’d admit to it without water boarding, there is a sexual component at play in most friendships between men and women. It may be innocent flirting, repressed mommy issues, or you’re playing with fire. But whatever it is, it affects how you are as a man and it affects the quality and content of the relationship

Source: Art of Manliness, Q&A section. Ask Wayne.

Its a very interesting thought and one which I completely agree to. Throughout my life I been irritated by guys who behave like girls or even worse to get attention from them. I strongly believe a guy can keep a good friendship with girl while keeping at least some dignity.

2007-09-30T12:13:00.000+08:00

AE Mythbusting from Mark Christiansen

2007-09-30T11:27:00.000+08:00

Heard enough of this(AE is inferior to other comping apps) at least this explanation by Mark Christiansen, author of Adobe After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques will clear this issue.

I am quoting few words by Christiansen

"Of all of the major desktop compositing software packages available, only After Effects has been used both for the highest-end visual effects work and the highest-end motion graphics."

"Why, you might ask, if I can acknowledge that After Effects isn’t the software of choice at most feature effects studios, do I persist in writing books about doing feature-quality visual effects work in After Effects? Two reasons come instantly to mind:

1) Today and for the forseeable future, more shots will get done in After Effects than in all of the others combined.
2) I can comfortably argue that After Effects is more powerful than the competition, because of the breadth and depth of work you can do with it. "

"The strength, and therefore the Achilles heel of After Effects is the Timeline. It is the heart of the application (or as I call it in my book, the “killer app”), the place where all of the work gets done, and it allows for complex timing and spatial animation of elements. Among all major compositing packages, this workflow is unique to After Effects."

Enough said by him.. he also states the disadvantage of AE over other node based apps.. He argue its mainly because workflow which result in overall slow responsiveness. But at the same time this workflow provides more easiness when it comes to working with movement lot of elements at the simultaneously.

Mythbusting (Part One)
Mythbusting (Part Two)
[Mythbusting (Part Three)

Not over.. Also check out this blog post by Stu Maschwitz about comparison between Node Vs Layers.

Its not about one software being inferior to another, its about your requirement, budget and personal preference on particular project!

Cheers,
Rahul

Free Software Movement

2007-07-30T23:32:00.000+08:00

Free as in free speech not as in free beer!

This is short motion design I completed for my college assignment. I believe it will raise question in minds of viewer and urge them to know more about their freedom and about free software.

My First Televsion Add

2007-07-30T23:27:00.000+08:00

This is my first work which got aired , it was aired in Singapore national Television. I did the butterfly, flower and compositing for this project.

10 Cities, I want to visit

2007-06-27T17:41:00.000+08:00

1st LA

2nd NY

3rd Paris

4th Berlin

5th Hong Kong

6th Tokyo

7th Bejieng

8th Shanghai

9th Sydney

10th London

Matching real world with CGI

2007-06-27T17:37:00.000+08:00

"How we can composite the 3d object with an still image or a video footages with exactly the same lighting and composition"

I think Ambient Occlusion is a good solution for achieving this particular goal. For example immense amount of planning and R&D must be required in order to match the real scene lighting setup to CG lighting set up and if we are matching models then again there is lot of planning is required.

Now industry is shifting towards IBMR for the same. (Image-Based Modeling and Rendering) IBMR method is pretty simple in concept it takes reference from set of photographs and with complex algorithms it generates final image this technology is still at its primitive stage though its gaining more popularity today. IBMR methods gave more importance to lighting than the actual shape of the model. And there is lot more happening in IBMR which helps the artist to match real world lighting in CG world. Almost all major VFX blockbusters in Hollywood use IMBR in their pipeline

Ref: http://www.debevec.org/Items/NewScientist/

http://research.microsoft.com/china/papers/Review_Image_Rendering.pdf

So lighting, as you know it is very important in geometry based modeling when it comes to compositing them to the CG scene or the real footage. Lighting in Computer is darker than real world and it doesn’t show the highlights clearly. So with these lighting normal lighting setup our models will look flat (will have that soft plastic feel) so on SIGGRAPH 2002 our good guys at ILM presented technique called ambient occlusion with this technique we got control over all the attributes of the scene or object and we may adjust the levels of each in the post according to our needs

Here you can see the advantages very well!!!

Ref: http://www-viz.tamu.edu/students/bmoyer/617/ambocc/

In lighting Context, as you may know one of the new and exciting technology is HDRI (High Dynamic Range Images) it is basically a technique where the ratio between brightest and darkest regions are stored in one single image file. This information is very useful for faking the real world lighting in 3d app and even AE 7 supports HDRI. There are lot of movies which had used this technique for example Spider man 2, Batman begins, Troy and lot more.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDRI

http://www.debevec.org/Research/HDR/

Studying real world lighting is really challenging job because in Matrix sequels technical directors hired $700,000 machine which is actually used by US Defense to calculate how real world light acts on Agent Smith’s highly anisotropic silky cloth material in order to recreate the same on CG. They calculated BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) BRDF is calculated because same model or scene reacts differently in lights sources from different positions and angles

BRDF (It gives the reflectance of a target as a function of illumination geometry and viewing geometry. The BRDF depends on wavelength and is determined by the structural and optical properties of the surface, such as shadow-casting, multiple scattering, mutual shadowing, transmission, reflection, absorption and emission by surface elements, facet orientation distribution and facet density.)

For more information

Ref: http://www-modis.bu.edu/brdf/brdfexpl.html

And another example is for creating Doc Ock's CG skin in spider man 2 Sony image works created Light Stage system which captures reflectance field of a human face photographically. This resulting image was to used for model under different lighting condition and from various light points and angles and this same technique was used for creating various HDR environment maps.

After lighting the next important factor is dept which calculating 3 dimensional information from 2 dimensional images for this purpose a method called technique called Photogrammetry is used. In this technique different points on an object are determined by measurements made in two or more photographic images taken from different positions. Hollywood movie Fight Club is perfect example for this technique using this technique high speed high-speed photo-realistic camera movement down the side of, around and through buildings, as evinced at the film's beginning and also in the 'galaxy of trash' pull-back. And finally Photogrammetry and HDR are very closely related subjects Pixel Lieberation Front ( PLF ) used the Photogrammetry side of the initial research very effectively in films such as Fight Club.

Ref: http://www.univie.ac.at/Luftbildarchiv/wgv/intro.htm

Optical Flow

2007-06-27T17:34:00.001+08:00

Optical flow is used in most compositing packages from After Effects to Shake, Flame, Nuke, Fusion and toxik.

Its a technology which tracks every pixels in you footage from frame to frame and it records the this movements of pixels in form of vector with analysis and study of this information we will able to track, matchmove and it can be also used have various other uses.

For example It forms the basics of MPEG compression technology and this technology can actually do wonders it had been used in for various complex techniques including Universal Capture in Matrix sequels. Its also much related to Mocap

It future optical flow can be used to track full human motions in our PC using simple compositing software.(http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/black/)

links:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/black/
http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/research/vision/Research/OpticalFlow/opticalflow.html
http://petewarden.com/notes/archives/2005/05/gpu_optical_flo.html

(simpler explanation)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ogale/research/research.html
http://www.fxguide.com/article333.html

Reflection Ccclusion

2007-06-27T17:33:00.000+08:00

Its difficult to occlude the reflection and even there might be self occlusion if the objects itself got reflective surface so we use technique called Reflection occlusion this technique was first developed during Speed II and enlisted into full time service on Star Wars: Episode 1 by ILM.

Reflection occlusion is calculated by shoting number of rays in the reflection direction, if the ray hits the object it will be black pixel and if it doesn't then it will be white. we cloud simulate this in 3d app, for example we cloud add base color(white) to objects and if the object reflects then the color won't be white. so finally we will get a reflection occlusion pass. And I guess in real shot we can just take the enviorment map and make that into

This occlusion pass is multiplied with the reflection pass in a compositing software. So we will get accurate depth in the reflections.

This technique is basically similar to ambient occlusion approach.

so our final out put will be something like this

Ambient Occlusion + Environment Maps * Reflection Occlusion (Enviorment map Multiplied with Reflection Occlusion)

Even we cloud use as HDR image as our enviorment map for more flexible and better results. Using reflection occlusion we cloud get some pretty realistic output!

Future of Compositors

2007-06-27T17:27:00.000+08:00

Evolution is slow process its not sudden change and there are various factors which affects the its development from one to stage to another so we don have to be much concerned about the same.
And I believe good craft man with his polished skill set won't get lost in future. If he is good at what he do and he do that perfectly then no one can take his place.

A perfect example will be senior VFX supervisors at ILM, they all started with opticals and now they doing the same job in digital environment. They got adapted easily. It all depends upon your passion and your know how in the craft.Compositors have to do what he is assign to do I don think their will be change in work a compositor in future. May be, he or she may face more challenges and difficulties but on the other end the technology is making things simpler and easier.

Production pipeline is all about specialization! A pipeline is there in production because jobs must be breakdown to people who are good at doing particular job. And finally one man can't do every job from pre production to post production.

There is no need to feel insecurity for compositors because this field is getting more exciting day by day. But we must be ready to learn new stuffs and broaden our know how, these days I feel a sound knowledge in 3d is a must because more and more compositing softwares are supporting real 3D environment and objects inside the composition.

I think, in future Compositors will be doing more work which have assigned to lighting, texturing and rendering artist now! So who’s is going to suffer at the end? Compositors or 3D people?
Well there is will be need of specialized person now and in future until technology makes things child’s play! And finally as long as there is some art in our job we all will be unique just because everybody's style and execution differs…

Crowd manupulation with compositing

2007-06-27T17:17:00.000+08:00

Classic crowd-replication techniques:

80 to 100 extras were photographed in different separate passes. Then they were duplicated in Post Production, An immense amount of Roto/Tracking were done to match separate crowds to the final composite. In some cases a detailed color correction is done on each group of crowd to get a better output. Another classic method is to shot different blocks of crowd in different position with blue screen behind or along side them and composite them to clean plate but this method got lot of limitations like the camera must be locked off and the whole composition must be small.

Example of this can be found here: http://www.bftr.com/Pages/movies/vendetta_prisonhi.mov

Shadow-matting and color correction are the common challenges faced on crowd replication when done through classic techniques.

In simple words: shoot smaller crowds and composite them altogether with their digital extras (their own duplicates).

But these days...Industry is moving towards more to AI based crowds which can think and interact with environment around them; then only solution for them is think 3D! In beginning they were using Particles for generating crowd but this technique found difficult due computational difficulties so they began to develop huge scripts which drives the animation which later gave birth software called Massive which is very much known for its crowd replication in LORT! There are other proprietary tools and plug-ins for creating crowd replication today.

Check these links for more information:

http://www.digitalanimators.com/2002/07_jul/features/digitalcrowds.htm

http://www.animallogic.com/commercials/nintendo/index.html

http://www.creativematch.co.uk/viewnews/?89690

http://www.dneg.co.uk/production_history/projects/to_kill_a_king/to_kill_a_king.html

And finally check this sexy crowd ;)

http://www.beam.tv/beamreels/reel_player.php?reel=ZGszxVyWzX&reel_file=KFxnMHmjGP

Man this is hell lot bikini girls, girls, girls I mean lot of them ;-)

Cheers,
Rahul.

Reinterpretation of 300 Oracle sequence in Neo-surrealism

2007-06-27T14:59:00.000+08:00

This piece of art was created for my module assignment in my Degree. The assignment was to interpret a art so I decided to interpret 300's Oracle Dance sequence for my project. Actually there was competition going on for the same in vfxtalk.com so it was good coincident for me which ended up pretty well.

I received some nice constructive criticisms and as well as appreciations for good try. Later I had uploaded the video in Youtube and I don't know how It have now 1000+ views... ;) still unclear whats the reason.. Doesn't matter whether people hate it or love it but they are watching it, which makes me happy :)

Welcome Note

2007-06-27T14:35:00.000+08:00

Hey people,

Thanks for visiting my blog, this blog would be generally about my thoughts on life, art and anything which I consider worth posting on this space.

I think a major part of this blog will be about visual effects techniques since thats what I do for my living. I would be posting more stuffs on techniques and methodology rather than posting inspiring works or reviews.

Anyways thats all I have to say about this blog for now.

You stay beautiful,
Rahul