V-RAY MAG 2015 - SIGGRAPH EDITION by Chaos Group

2015

QUESTIONING REALITY Lorett Foth turns the cute sinister Exploring a VR San Francisco with Steelblue Legend3D’s terrifying Crimson Peak experience THE STATE OF INDEPENDENTS How Fido put the crazy in Kung Fury PostPanic redefines short films with Sundays

PLUS: Marek Denko returns to Prime Even Ash Thorp on Ghost in the Shell homage Project 2501 Sculpting the undead in The Animation Workshop’s Roommate Wanted Render mask tips

Image © Lorett Foth

Image © Steelblue

V-RAY MAG

2015

COVER IMAGE Lorett Foth - THU Cat

chaosgroup.com

V-RAY MAG

Image © Fido

Image © Ash Thorp

Image © The Animation Workshop

QUESTIONING REALITY STEELBLUE

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

P. 4

The future of San Francisco

MAREK DENKO Return to Prime Even ASH THORP

LEGEND3D

P. 20

P. 8

Project 2501 LORETT FOTH

Making virtual a reality

P. 22

P. 26

THU Cat

THE STATE OF INDEPENDENTS

STUDENT SHOWCASE ROOMMATE WANTED

FIDO’S KUNG FURY

P. 12

Feel the fury

POSTPANIC

P. 30

TUTORIAL P. 16

BEHIND THE MASK

P. 32

PostPanic works on Sundays

CONTENTS

Images © Steelblue

THE FUTURE OF SAN FRANCISCO STEELBLUE FOUNDER O’BRIEN CHALMERS EXPLAINS HOW HIS COMMUNICATION COMPANY HAS MOVED BEYOND THE PHYSICAL AND INTO THE VIRTUAL by Henry Winchester

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“WE ARE STORYTELLERS AND ALWAYS LOOKING TO CREATE ENGAGING EXPERIENCES WITH OUR CLIENTS.” San Francisco is experiencing a massive property boom at the moment. The City by the Bay’s skyline is dominated by enormous cranes lifting megastructures into place. Nestled in this urban explosion sits Steelblue, a creative agency specializing in strategic visual marketing—in fact, it’s had a hand in the visualization of most of the new buildings. “The speed at which developments are moving in San Francisco is unlike anything we’ve experienced,” explains O’Brien Chalmers, Steelblue’s founder and president. “We’re literally surrounded by construction sites—and many of our larger clients. There really is no substitute for getting a call and being able to show up at a client’s office five minutes later.”

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“WHEN YOU FORGET YOU’RE WEARING A DEVICE AND ARE ABLE TO NAVIGATE WORLDS INTUITIVELY, WE’VE DONE OUR JOB PROPERLY.” The vertical expansion of San Francisco has given both Steelblue and the city’s architects a wonderful chance to explore and innovate new ways of working. The city itself has a duality unlike any other—its Haight-Ashbury district is considered the birthplace of counter-culture, but venture south to Silicon Valley and you rub shoulders with billionaire tech company CEOs. It’s a juxtaposition which is at its most prominent in the city’s downtown district—the architecture here is perhaps the ultimate fusion of design and science. “We see this as an incredible opportunity to innovate,” says Chalmers. “The best part about this is that our clients are willing to invest in exploration of art and technology, anything that will allow them to differentiate their projects from the competition.”

Images © Steelblue

As a result, Steelblue uses cuttingedge tech to create pre-visualizations of buildings. It’s already explored 3D printing with a table top model of San Francisco, complete with LEGO-like swappable buildings and interactive projections. Now it’s moving out of the physical and into cyberspace as it tries on virtual reality headsets for size. “We picked up Oculus Rifts during the initial Kickstarter campaign in 2012,” explains Chalmers. “We are storytellers and always looking to create engaging experiences with our clients, so VR was a natural progression in the evolution of our toolset. People’s appetites for richer and more inclusive experiences are growing, which makes the ability to control those experiences all the more enticing. There will always be a place for passive interaction with renderings and films, but by making designs interactive, you encourage a new type of experience that is very valuable to the communication process.”

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Initially developed with gaming in mind, virtual reality headsets have seeped into other industries such as Steelblue’s architectural visualization, as well as television and movies. And while these may be different arenas, their ultimate goal is identical—to make the customer, or player, or audience feel as if the technology has ceased to exist

and that they are physically present within an imagined world. “When you forget you’re wearing a device and are able to navigate worlds intuitively, we’ve done our job properly,” Chalmers says. “The other part is to be able to experience these worlds with other people at the same time.

with artists and develop the tools with the artists’ challenges in mind. A director of our company recently commented, ‘V-Ray is faster in not only render speed but innovation.’” Ultimately, though, Chalmers argues that the tools don’t matter as much as the end result. Virtual reality is—like 3D printing, or Photoshopped mockups, or hand-drawn blueprints—simply another tool which can be leveraged by talented artists to explain and explore ideas and concepts.

“THEY ARE TOOLS TO HELP TELL A STORY AND TECHNOLOGY IS MAKING IT EASIER, MAKING THE STORY THAT MUCH MORE IMPORTANT.” “To us, the artist, the tools are important,” he explains. “But whether a photo was shot from a drone or a balloon; if your environment is CG or practically shot, if you are using green screen shot people or the latest 3D Crowd simulation software; real time tool X or Y, it does not matter. They are tools to help tell a story and technology is making it easier, making the story that much more important.” The process of creating architectural visualization is one that is changing as fast as the San Francisco skyline itself, then. Steelblue prides itself as being at the heart of this frenzy of activity— rather like a small, sturdy lighthouse in a tempestuous ocean. And, with eight years of running the company, Chalmers feels he’s nailed a winning approach to both prospective clients and the staff he works with.

The communal, shared experience inside 3D spaces is a very exciting prospect and one we’re paying very close attention to.” Of course, an out-of-place shadow or a low-res texture can quickly turn the dream of virtual reality into a nightmare. Fortunately V-Ray’s virtual rendering capabilities ensure that make believe

buildings look just like the real thing. The software’s a core part of Steelblue, too, with the company singing its praises. “The number of people on our team that have gotten direct and speedy responses from Vlado is unheard of,” says Chalmers. “Their team are active

“We’re small enough to be able to provide a very personalized level of service on every project and deep enough that we can respond to the complex range of challenges our clients bring to us,” he says. “An ongoing project of mine that I am very proud of is the team that Steelblue has assembled. When starting this company a goal was to surround myself with talented, creative, artistic, brilliant and fun people. Check. And, speaking of terrific teams, we are hiring…” Learn more at steelbluellc.com

VIRTUAL REALITY

MAKING VIRTUAL A REALITY

LEGEND3D’S VFX SUPERVISOR JUSTIN DENTON ON THE CHARMS AND CHALLENGES OF VIRTUAL REALITY by Henry Winchester

Images © Legend3D

espite initial doubts, there is now no question that virtual reality is the next big thing. But, as an entirely new way of looking at the world, it brings with it a new set of challenges we hadn’t even thought of before - most notably, how do you tell a story when your audience is able to do whatever and go wherever they want? “What’s most interesting is how quickly it’s evolving, that we’re starting to latch on to how you tell these stories,” explains Justin Denton, VR director & visual effects supervisor at Legend3D. “Time travels differently - it’s either slower or faster. We’ve gotten so

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accustomed to the editing pace of standard film, that now when you’re in a virtual space it’s very different.” Denton himself is an expert of all things VR. He began his visual effects career in pre-visualization, before moving into the not unrelated field of supervision, then virtual camera development. Three-dimensional cinematic worlds obviously translate into virtual reality, but it was Denton’s later work on theme park and planetarium experiences that set him up for his role at Legend3D. “The main person I learned under was Richard Taylor, who was the VFX

This advertorial virtual reality experience was pitched, shot, and edited by Legend3D in conjunction with digital agency Firstborn and director Mark Kudsi. Dubbed “Art of Patrón: Be The Bee,” it puts the viewer in the shoes (or little fuzzy legs) of the brand’s iconic insect as it flies over a tequila field and through the company’s headquarters. It was filmed using an array of GoPro cameras underneath a drone—appropriately enough. “We put our 360Heros H3Pro7 camera rig on a two foot arm below the drone itself,” explains Denton. “We did that to help with overall visibility, and to minimize how much we would have to replace the sky, or replace ceilings. We also put a camera on top of the drone so we had reference images of what was above, and we could use that to stitch things together.”

“YOU DON’T WANT TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL SICK WHEN YOU’RE TRYING TO ADVERTISE A PRODUCT - ESPECIALLY AN ALCOHOLIC PRODUCT!”

supervisor from the original “Tron”.” says Denton. “He was dealing with all these things that people think of as new VR problems, but he had been solving them for decades. So I understood some of the inherent problems of telling a story for VR really early on. I spent two years there, and just this January I came on with Legend3D.” Like Denton, Legend3D was already cut out for the burgeoning virtual reality industry. It made a name for itself as a post-production visual effects house, converting films such as “Man of Steel”, “Transformers 3” and “Maleficent” from flat 2D to stereoscopic 3D. It felt it

could use its well-established pipeline to solve one of the biggest problems with shooting live-action footage for virtual reality: the chunky, clunky cameras which capture the multiple angles for 3D playback. Legend3D completed stitching and conversion on “The Recruit: R U In” to launch its virtual reality division. The company also provided some simple visual effects compositing for the live-action short film, which was made for Samsung’s Galaxy Gear VR headset. But its next project, for tequila company Patrón, took Legend3D further down the virtual reality rabbit hole.

The company used NUKE and some custom code to track the footage so CG could be added. But a bigger problem was the drone’s wobbly flight path. “We realized we had to deal with all this movement which was in the drone, which would make people sick,” says Denton. “That’s the main thing you don’t want to do when you’re trying to advertise a product - especially an alcoholic product!” Denton used the tracking data it had gathered to remove all rotation, resulting in nice smooth movements. But the results were maybe a little too smooth, so the original curves were refiltered and animations added so that the footage felt natural— but didn’t induce motion sickness.

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Images © Legend3D

While “The Recruit: R U In” and the Art of Patrón film showed that Legend3D could handle live-action and liveaction/CG projects respectively, it felt that in order to become a proficient virtual reality studio it needed to tackle a full-CG project. Fortunately, film studio Legendary Pictures was seeking a virtual reality project to market Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming gothic horror “Crimson Peak”.

were some big errors and issues,” says Denton. “But I was sending nightly emails, and since they’re on Bulgaria time I would wake up to new responses. It’s amazing how quickly they respond - it blows my mind! You could tell that Vlado and the team were excited about the possibility of it. It went from me not knowing if we were going to be able to use V-Ray, to buying a render farm’s worth of licenses seven days later.”

“They gave us some of the CG elements effects company Mr X had done, and said, ‘we have a concept for ComicCon we’d like you to develop.’” says Denton. “But right off the bat I realized that they were set up for V-Ray. I’m traditionally a V-Ray artist as well, so I was excited about that, but the problem was that V-Ray didn’t support stereoscopic 3D rendering then. For me that was a giant bummer.”

Particle effects work really well in 3D, and especially in virtual reality, and they were crucial to the “Crimson Peak” experience. But Phoenix FD — Chaos Group’s fluid simulations plug-in for Maya—was an unknown quantity when it came to virtual reality. Koylazov was unsure, but granted Denton a test license to try it out.

V-Ray’s lack of stereoscopic support could have made life a lot more difficult for Denton and Legend3D, but on the off-chance he decided to reach out to Chris Nichols, Chaos Group’s creative director. Virtual reality was, at this point, in the pipeline for 3ds MAX, but thanks to founder Vlado Koylazov Legend3D was allowed access to the nightly test builds of V-Ray for Maya. “It was very rough early on—there

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“It worked beautifully,” says Denton. “My artists and I had zero experience with Phoenix FD, and it’s the closest to a plug-and-play setup I’ve ever seen for particle sim rendering. I was very impressed with it, the look we were able to get was spot on so fast that we’re definitely Phoenix FD converts based on this experience!” The “Crimson Peak“ experience is just the tip of the virtual reality iceberg, and it’s a medium which is experiencing fast growth. Horror is the perfect genre

for these simulated worlds because it’s pretty easy to scare people with dark spaces and giant monsters, but Denton believes we’re on the cusp of virtual reality exploding into all forms of entertainment.

“IT’S FASCINATING TO SEE HOW QUICKLY PEOPLE ARE BREAKING THE RULES THAT WERE SET VERY EARLY ON.” “Maybe six months ago we were in the Lumière brothers stage of this, where a train goes by and everybody will buy a ticket to see that in a theatre,” he says. “But we’re rapidly evolving—maybe we’re in the seventies now, I’m not

“HORROR AND FANTASY HAVE PRESENTED THEMSELVES AS THE PERFECT GENRES FOR THESE SIMULATED WORLDS.” sure! It’s fascinating to see how quickly people are breaking the rules that were set very early on, I think due to the technical limitations, and we’re getting away from that very fast.” Virtual reality filmmakers, then, are having to create a new ways of using visual language to guide viewers through this brave new world. It’s a medium which is equally inspired by the world of videogames as it is films, as there has to be some free choice and interactivity on the viewer’s part. “A big challenge for directors, especially directors new to the VR space, is ‘how do I make the audience look where I want them to look?’” explains Denton. “We’re coming up with all these methods for keeping the viewer’s eye where you want to go, whether it’s a lighting change that shifts to a certain area, or you have a guide, which can be a person or an animal or a spirit, where you’re physically led to look at a different part of the screen. Those things are going to evolve into the next stage, which will be if you watch a bird

fly by, and you stay focused on it long enough, maybe you start to fly with it.” Of course, the most important part of this virtual reality experience is that people will have access to the headsets. Both the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus are due for release early next year, but there’s a chance that they’ll remain niche, cultish products and sideshow attractions. But Denton hopes not. “If the Oculus and the Morpheus take off as well as it seems like they might, I feel like it’s going to explode past of just how many devices will be in people’s homes,” he says. “Virtual tourism is going to be really big. The education side of it could be really big. The other big area is scientific R&D. One of the areas where it’s getting really interesting is documentary. As a viewer, with a camera that can see everywhere, a doc can’t lie to you and really immerses you in the emotion of a very real moment.” Next for Denton and Legend3D are more movie tie-ins—but he’s not allowed to say what. But if you’re desperate to try out these uncanny experiences for yourself, you can right here. “We’ll be at the VR Bar at SIGGRAPH,” he says. “We’ll have a number of our latest projects there, which I’m super excited about.” Learn more at legend3d.com

Home of the CG Garage podcast labs.chaosgroup.com @ CG_Labs

FEEL THE FURY HOW EFFECTS HOUSE FIDO BREATHED LIFE INTO THE BONKERS WORLD OF KUNG FURY by Henry Winchester

“K

ung Fury” was never exactly going to be a normal production. The 30-minute film is a love letter to cheesy 80s sci-fi and kung fu movies, complete with arcade bots, dinosaur cops, laser eyes, time travel, and Adolf Hitler. Almost every shot includes a sight gag or explosion, and it’s the kind of film you have to watch in five-minute chunks so you have time to digest the sheer amount of crazy things happening on screen. Director, writer and star David Sandberg launched the film with a trailer, inviting fans to

Images © Fido

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invest via Kickstarter. The trailer immediately struck a chord with an audience raised on b-movies and beat-em-ups, helping the campaign to net a whopping $630,000. Stockholm effects house Fido jumped on board shortly thereafter to handle the film’s countless effects shots, but it soon found that Sandberg’s approach to shooting would be highly unconventional.

For both Scott and Sandberg it was a completely new experience. Scott’s 15-year experience in the industry includes work on commercials, while Sandberg cut his teeth directing music videos. Originally intended to be a feature-length film, “Kung Fury”’s longer run time would stretch them both, but fortunately Sandberg had a good idea of how he wanted the film to play out.

“In May 2014 we started talks with David, the director, and Laser Unicorns, the production company,” explains VFX Supervisor Cameron Scott. “It was like any other big project that we’d taken on - except he’d already filmed everything, which is not our ideal way of working! But every job is different and, and every job, no matter what the expectations are, has its own set of challenges. This was just another challenge.”

“David sat down with us and all-in-all it took a couple of days, and then five more days of breaking down each shot, and saying what elements are in it, and what type of environments we have,” says Scott. “Thankfully the movie was quite logical in the way that it was set out, so a certain sequence was played out in a certain environment, and then it went on to that next sequence and that was in a different environment. It was quite easy for us to plan and divide the film up into segments so we could chop it up and plan it in that way.” During the planning process, it was decided that each shot would also carry the film’s trademark thrift store VHS look, complete with the oversaturated colors and tracking artefacts 80s kids expect. Sandberg had already used After Effects to create this aesthetic for the trailer; for the film, Fido would emulate his work in NUKE. The rolling bars recorded straight from an aging VHS player were another great idea that appeared in post. To keep the film within budget, Sandberg shot the majority of the film against a greenscreen in his Stockholm office. Although the majority of the film was in the can, there was an inevitable need for reshoots and changes—Scott believes 20% of the footage was shot during this period, but that the film was better for the changes. And while Sandberg had a solid idea of how certain shots were going to work, for others he relied on the effects company’s expertise and ideas.

“ALMOST EVERY SHOT INCLUDES A SIGHT GAG OR EXPLOSION, AND IT’S THE KIND OF FILM YOU HAVE TO WATCH IN FIVE MINUTE CHUNKS.”

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“THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THIS PRODUCTION AND ALL THE OTHER LONG FEATURE FILMS WE’VE HAD WAS THAT THIS WAS JUST SO MUCH FUN.” “He had such a strong vision - by the end of it we could really understand the way he was thinking, but in the beginning it was like, ‘ummm...OK, we’ll do that,’” says Scott. “There were some shots where one guy in here would just have this crazy idea that was hilarious, and he’d give it to David and he’d think, ‘yeah, that’s great.’ It was up to us to make it as cool and mayhem-filled as we could given those parameters.” And Kung Fury is almost entirely fueled by mayhem. To Scott, one particular sequence takes the cake, though—a two and a half minute unbroken tracking shot in which “Kung Fury” takes on hordes of Nazi soldiers. A homage to beat ‘em up video games from the 80s and 90s (think: “Streets of Rage” and “Street Fighter”), it shows our hero Kung Fury taking down foes while 100,000 jostling troops appear in the backdrop. “That was incredibly complex because it was multiple takes of Kung Fury that all had to be stitched together,” explains Scott. “The soldier was just one guy, so we had hundreds of takes of him that also had to be stitched together and duplicated. Then all of these elements were Images © Fido

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rotoscoped and put into a scene that we rendered out—in all, it took 48 hours to render, and that one shot took about 100 days to produce.” Another shot, in which Kung Fury’s mentor is vertically bisected, was created by a single artist at Fido. To create the effect, a digital double of the unfortunate policeman, complete with internal organs and a lolloping tongue, was spliced with footage shot on location. “This was a very successful example of when we just dump a shot in someone’s lap and say, ‘make it look cool!’” says Scott. “Normally we have that pipeline of specialists working on shots, but in this case, our toolset allowed one guy was able to split a cop in half in a very eye-catching way.”

“KUNG FURY IS ALMOST ENTIRELY FUELED BY MAYHEM.” Shots like these pushed the company’s pipeline— which consists of Maya, ZBrush, NUKE, Houdini and V-Ray—to its limits. Fortunately the Fidodeveloped ftrack production tool and V-Ray helped plan and execute the 400 effects shots. “Without V-Ray we wouldn’t have been able to manage the workload,” says Scott. “There was so much data involved, and the digital sets were enormous. It quickly became one of the foundations of our pipeline.”

“V-Ray is great out of the box, but our artists really know how to exploit it to the best of its abilities,” added Scott. “Especially our lead lighter, whose work on the brass robot eagle looks just fantastic. The good part is we didn’t have to customize V-Ray, we just exploited the power that’s inherent within it.” Now that “Kung Fury” is over, and has banked nearly 18 million views on YouTube, it’s back to business as usual for Scott and Fido. Sandberg has almost certainly got a Hollywood career ahead of him thanks to the online buzz his short generated. Scott, meanwhile, believes “Kung Fury”’s hype could lead to more projects for Fido, too. “This is something we really want to exploit,” says Scott. “Because it was only going to be released on YouTube it doesn’t have any financial returns, but the free marketing that we get is invaluable.” Riding high, Fido is booked up with commercials, a TV series, and a game until the end of the year, with a potential feature film in the works too. Even with that workload, it would love the chance to work with Sandberg again. “I really hope that we can collaborate together on something else, because it’s just going to be even more awesome next time,” Scott says. “He’s such a nice guy and made nine months of really hard work into a time that was enjoyable all the way through.” Learn more at fido.se

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POSTPANIC WORKS ON SUNDAYS By Trevor Hogg

As soon as it hit the Internet, “Sundays” became an instant viral sensation sparking a studio bidding war won by Warner Bros. The epic science fiction proof-of-concept short film revolves around Ben (Brian Petsos) who starts to recall his lost love Isabelle (Sofia Sisniega), which leads him to question the existence of the dark and crumbling world in which he lives. While appropriately wearing an Amsterdam beer T-shirt, I chatted via Skype with PostPanic co-owner Mischa Rozema (“Stardust”) and Visual Effects Supervisor Ivor Goldberg (“Year Zero”) about the evolution of the project that began half a decade ago for the Dutch film production company.

“I remember years ago working on another script that was too big for us to do at the time,” states Mischa Rozema who was going to direct the short film that explored societal behavior within the context of an imminent apocalypse. “If humanity knew the exact date when the world will end, how would it react to that? Without a social system, politics, and an economy, how would we deal with that world and what would that world look like?” The initial ideas resulted in the development of an alternative reality. “It was also going to be shot in Mexico. At the same time we got interest from Warner Bros. They were looking for directors and sent me loads of scripts but I didn’t like any of them.”

ROZEMA DECIDED TO FOCUS ON DEVELOPING HIS LABOR OF LOVE, WHICH CRYSTALIZED INTO SUNDAYS. “The post-apocalyptic thing has been stretched out of context. A long piece of the short is the dying of our world as we know it, but I needed to set the viewer in that kind of mood set. It’s a poetic ‘End of Days’ destruction. There are no screaming people or cars being lifted.”

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Images © PostPanic

Obvious cinematic comparisons for “Sundays” include “The Matrix” with its collapsing urban setting, and “Inception”, which navigates dreamscape environments. “We’ve always been about making things grimy and dirty,” notes Ivor Goldberg when discussing the futuristic society. “The machines come from the technology of our time which has been pushed forward so it’s not laser beams or thrusters or the typical sci-fi look.” The aesthetic had to be rooted in familiar elements. “We have to be able to connect with it so the funky flying helicopters are really old school Russian ones which we modified into something else,” explains Mischa Rozema, who is fascinated by Mexico City with its Brutalist and ghetto architecture and population that is both very rich and very poor. “It’s a place where I can tell these stories that link to reality but border on the fantastic. For me, as a Western filmmaker, to tell the same story in Amsterdam, Los Angeles or Toronto would be much less believable.” Before the arrival of V-Ray, various renderers were utilized for their multiple strengths. “From a 3D point of view, almost all of “Sundays” was rendered with V-Ray. For us V-Ray is a complete production-ready package, and in that sense it has replaced everything we used in Brazil and in Mental Ray,” remarks Ivor Goldberg.

“V-RAY REALLY ROCKED FOR US. NOT BECAUSE OF ALL OF THE AMAZING THINGS THAT IT DOES, BUT THE FACT THAT V-RAY DOESN’T GIVE YOU ANY PROBLEMS.”

For example, the closing aerial mountain range shot, where the mountains slowly degrade to a low-poly landscape were all done in house with V-Ray. “It came together so fast from a displacement and rendering perspective. Originally, we were going to use projections and matte paintings which was the way we worked so much with other shots to be able to make it a faster process. But it ended up coming straight out of the renderer and into compositing. The beginning shot with the sun surface utilizes all of the displacement power of V-Ray. We had fun with it.”

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Images © PostPanic

Conducting principal photography in an urban home of 21 million people presented major logistical problems. “We only had four to five days to do the whole shoot,” remarks Mischa Rozema, who filmed with RED Epic and Canon 5D cameras depending on the situation. “About half the time we were stuck in traffic in Mexico City.” Storyboarding was a huge asset in making sure that everything needed was captured. “I love being meticulous and detailed in what you want as a director but I always leave a backdoor open. I want to leave 15 to 20 percent to making decisions while we’re there shooting.

and portraits of people. Stuff happens. We were there during the Day of the Dead (a Mexican holiday) and we got some great footage just messing around.” “Because so much of it was guerrillastyle we would have a butterfly green screen on standby which we would throw into the scene,” states Ivor Goldberg. “I had what I called my ‘bible’ with plans, solutions, what shots to get, etc., but despite the best planning, some things don’t work out when you get to a location.

SOME OF THE BIGGEST SHOTS WERE SHOT IN THE MOMENT QUICKLY OUT OF A CAR WINDOW WHILE DRIVING BETWEEN LOCATIONS .

What we also did, which was a smart move, was to have a second crew carrying a 5D. Once I was in Mexico City it started talking to me. What can I use in the film? I need footage of this

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Another example was shooting a rehearsal that ended up being the final take due to time constraints. “Afterwards, we realized that the guys holding the green screen were walking with it. As the green screen at one point filled up the whole screen, it made the whole shot a nightmare. You couldn’t track it.” “For a DOP, I chose Jon Gaute Espevold [Passion] who is Norwegian,” remarks Mischa Rozema. “I hadn’t worked

with him but I have always admired his work. I could have chosen from lots of great Mexican DOPs. It was interesting because their work was fantastic but it was also the expected view of Mexico. I wanted this distant Scandinavian feel so I took a gamble on how that would work. It was a matter of very colorful versus a Northern European approach to the visuals. A lot of the grading has been done with that choice in mind. I graded for months while we were editing because it says a lot conceptually. Reshoots were conducted to assist the visual effects work. “We had a lot of material,” observes Mischa Rozema. “I could make another one of these. We had to shoot some elements, like the fire that needed to be attached to the burning guy. It was more about effects shoots than anything we had forgotten.” The shot design continued after the principal photography. “I started off sketching on top of these stills that we made. “It was an important step between the sketch and the actual outcome. In-between there was the concept art.” “Sundays” features extensive digital augmentation. “Once we came back from the shoot I'd write up my essential to-do list,” states Ivor Goldberg. Public support was critical, such as the Kickstarter campaign that raised over $50,000 US for the principal photography, as well as volunteers who donated their artistic talents such as compositors and sound engineers. “We had people doing it for love so

that meant you couldn’t say to them, ‘I need this shot by next week,’” notes Ivor Goldberg. “They were doing it in their own time.” The effort paid off, with PostPanic being rewarded with a Hollywood studio deal which will see the science fiction concept expanded into a feature length film courtesy of Warner Bros. “This has been a chess game,” admits Mischa Rozema. “We were in Hollywood last year to get the lay of the land. We had the two teasers out there, and our agents and management made appointments with studios that might be interested. We left with a good feeling. We went back again to see if people were still interested and it turned out within a couple of days the whole thing blew up.”

”THERE WERE OVER 100 VISUAL EFFECTS SHOTS FOR A 14 MINUTE FILM. IT WAS RIDICULOUS BUT AMAZING.“ "I can’t wait to get working on the feature. The story in the feature film will be different but it will definitely connect to the world in the short. We’re going to try to make it even better” says Rozema, who is not too sure about developing a trilogy like “The Matrix”, whereas Ivor Goldberg muses, “Seven days a week, a franchise is just waiting!” Learn more at postpanic.com

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MAREK DENKO Return to Prime Even Software: 3ds Max, V-Ray marekdenko.net Images ÂŠ Marek Denko

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ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Images © Ash Thorp

PROJECT 2501

HOMAGE TO GHOST IN THE SHELL INTERVIEW WITH ASH THORP DESIGNER, ART DIRECTOR AND ILLUSTRATOR by Henry Winchester

“Ender’s Game, “Total Recall”, “Prometheus”, “X-Men First Class” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”. And as well as working ridiculously hard to create amazing titles and screens for these blockbusters, he also found the time a couple of years ago to embark on a personal assignment: “Project 2501”. “I had watched this documentary on a photographer called Gregory Crewdson,” explains Thorp. “He was doing these massive movie-style productions to make just one photo you’d build a set and lighting, and you’d have the rig, and you’d have everybody there, the make-up, all this stuff. It inspired me. I thought it would be really cool to do a big production just for one still image.”

“LET’S DO THIS, LET’S REINTERPRET THE OPENING SEQUENCE WITH 30 TO 40 4K IMAGES AND MAKE THEM LOOK AMAZING.”

If you haven’t seen Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film “Ghost in the Shell”, we recommend you take a good look at your life and what you’re doing. Then watch it. And watch it again. This anime is an enduring gateway into the alluring world of eastern sci-fi, a complex, mature film which deals with ideas of identity and its destruction in the modern metropolis. Among the film’s numerous fans is Ash Thorp. “I couldn’t have been more than 10 years old when I first saw it,” he says. “My aunt Tess introduced me to “Akira” and “Ghost in the Shell” within like a month. It literally blew my mind. I had grown up on American animation, which I thought was pretty amazing, until I saw what Japan was capable of. It was a significant moment in my life, a statement to me: this is great work, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to accomplish this.” The trajectory Thorp was launched by “Ghost in the Shell” has been an incredible one. As an art director, illustrator and designer he’s worked for Columbia, Sony Pictures and Digital Domain on big budget movies

For a subject matter, there was only one natural choice: the movie that inspired Thorp’s career path. “A friend of mine, Filipe Carvalho, and I were like, ‘let’s do something fun, a passion project. Let’s do “Ghost in the Shell”!’ Nobody had done a proper translation of the film. My friend Tim Tadder, who’s a phenomenal photographer, was hitting me up about doing a project, and I had the concept. All these things connected, and I said, ‘let’s do this, let’s reinterpret the opening sequence with 30 to 40 4K

images and make them look amazing.’” Thorp assembled a core team of 15 talented designers, artists and photographers, all of whom were willing to work for free. Along with Tadder, Thorp invested $3,000 to $4,000 of his own money to get things going. Crucial to the project were the shots of the model, taken in a hired swimming pool, but this was also the point where magnitude of Thorp’s task became apparent. “It was a very long day and I came home and I was so eager, like a kid at Christmas, to look at these pictures on my computer,” Thorp says. “I was floored by how amazing the photos looked. But I was also very scared by how high the level of CG had to be, to match the level of fidelity and beauty of the photos.” In addition to the intimidating nature of the project, Thorp’s first role as a director was a trial-by-fire. At times he was managing over 40 people, all using different software to create different file types with different operating systems. A pipeline of sorts was eventually created, but it was too little too late. If Thorp learned anything from the experience, it was to communicate better and make people’s roles clearer. Nevertheless, most of Ash’s crew enjoyed the experience, so much so that they’re collaborating with him on future projects. “It was a great lesson to me,” says Michał Misiński, art and

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“I WAS VERY SCARED BY HOW HIGH THE LEVEL OF CG HAD TO BE, TO MATCH THE LEVEL OF FIDELITY AND BEAUTY OF THE PHOTOS.”

design director at Polish visual effects house Juice, which helped with the rendering. “I learned a lot, Ash was a great leader and when you work with such a great and talented person you learn a lot.” Overall, it was a good experience for Thorp, too, and the quality of the images is testament to the amount of time and effort that went into them. V-Ray, in particular, was a hugely important tool in their creation. “It allows creatives like myself, who don’t have these reaches of massive Hollywood budgets and all these kind of things, to make beautiful images,” he says. “It’s huge, though - I want a simple button that says, ‘Make it cool! See what’s in my head and just make that!’”

The icing on the cake for Thorp was a chance encounter with one of his heroes in Japan. “I was visiting the studio that makes “Evangelion”,” he says. “We’re there, and the artist who designed and illustrated “Ghost in the Shell”’s opening sequence was randomly at the studio at a meeting, he’s never there. “They interrupted his meeting to introduce me to him, they showed him the project, and he was really blown away,” Thorp continues. “The moment that happened I realized all the hard work, the hardship, everything, I was in Japan and I met the person who actually drew this stuff and built it out and inspired me, and I inspired him back. It was a really special moment for

me, personally and artistically, and it kind of closed the chapter for this.” While “Project 2501” may be over, Thorp’s career has only just begun - and he’s already achieved more than most. Next on the to-do list is a videogame, as well as a short film, a comic and a potential movie based on his “Lost Boy” property, and numerous client projects. But he owes it all to one person. “I didn’t realize until after this was done, and I sent this to my aunt, that I was so grateful to her for showing a kid this weird mature crazy shit,” he says. “And she was blown away, just thankful that I decided to take the creative path.” Learn more at gits2501.com

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LORETT FOTH THIS GLOBETROTTING ARTIST SHOWS US THAT THERE’S MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A CAT by Henry Winchester

It’s not often that we see an image which sends a chill down our spine, but Lorett Foth’s entry from a recent CGSociety contest has done just that. It’s a masterful creation—once you get past that striking feline gaze you realize that this moggy is garbed in a squirrel’s skin, and the glassy emptiness of the unfortunate rodent’s eyes is deeply unsettling. Foth was already working on a squirrel when she heard about the challenge for the Trojan Horse was a Unicorn festival, in Portugal. “They’re my favorite animal and I wanted to see how realistic I could make one look,” she says. “I was happy with the fur I had been working on, so I wanted to use it. When thinking about fur and other animals, I thought about cats. And then

it just hit me, why not put a cat in a squirrel? It reflected the theme of the Trojan Horse perfectly.” With a rather demented image in her head, Foth got busy modelling and rendering. Time was not on her side, so she quickly created a concept piece in ZBrush, which was then copied over to Photoshop and painted over to give a rough outline of the final image. A sphynx cat’s otherworldly looks perfectly suited the subject matter of the image, but she didn’t take any shortcuts in creating its distinctive wrinkly skin. “I always try to put a lot of detail into the sculpt itself as I often find using displacement maps or normal maps doesn’t get the same result,” she says. “Adding fine hair onto the cat also made a big difference.”

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“ANIMAL FUR DOES NOT ONLY HAVE DIFFERENT LENGTHS AND COLORS, BUT ALSO DIFFERENT THICKNESSES, MULTIPLE LAYERS AND CLUMPS.” With the cat in place, Foth returned to the squirrel she’d created earlier and turned it from a fluffy living critter to a PeTA-baiting fur suit. With the key players ready, her next task was to create the accessories in ZBrush: the leather, pearls and feathers were modelled and textured rather than sculpted, providing Foth with standalone floor to blend with her background photograph. The drama Foth presents may grab the viewer, but it’s the more subtle elements that sell it as something more real and uncanny. Key to this is the squirrel’s unkempt fur. It’s a notoriously hard part of any render, but Foth’s painstaking attention to detail belies the fact that her hair experience was minimal. “When looking at animal fur closely, you realize how much is going on,” she says. “The fur does not only have different lengths and colors, but also different thicknesses, multiple layers and clumps. I attempted to replicate all of this, which takes considerable time.”

The finishing touches were made with V-Ray’s hair and fur shaders, a muchrequested feature that comes standard with version 3.0. “I have always worked with V-Ray,” says Foth. “I think the results I get with V-Ray are more realistic in comparison to other render engines.” When she isn’t creating wonderfully morbid images, German-born Foth spends her time creating mind-boggling 3D visualizations for Cream Studios in Australia. But she uses her personal projects as a chance to push her limits and learn new skills. Next on the agenda? Feathers. “Following my THU project, I am feeling confident in doing anything with fur, however I haven’t done anything with feathers yet,” she says. “I made some feathers for the wand which gave me a small insight, but I am very keen on creating a bird and see how far I can push it to look as realistic as possible.” Learn more at lorettfoth.com

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ROOMMATE WANTED SHOWS THE PERKS AND PERILS OF LIVING WITH A ZOMBIE

by Henry Winchester

BJØRN BLAABJERG SØRENSEN, GRADUATE OF THE ANIMATION WORKSHOP, EXPLAINS HOW HIS TEAM BROUGHT A UNIQUE CLAYMATION AESTHETIC TO THEIR CG ANIMATION Everyone can relate to the story of the roommate from hell. They’re usually either too messy, or too tidy, and the fact that you have to spend most of your quality time with this person only makes matters worse. But what if your roomie is actually a zombie? That’s the pitch of “Roommate Wanted”, a short graduation film from The Animation Workshop. In this gleefully deranged dark comedy a straightlaced medical student takes on a member of the undead as a new flatmate. But its stop-motion modelling clay aesthetic is just as striking as its oddcouple plot.

“ROOMMATE WANTED’S HAND-MADE MODELLING CLAY AESTHETIC IS ALMOST AS STRIKING AS ITS ODD COUPLE PLOT.” The stop-motion technique “Roommate Wanted” apes is notorious for its painstaking intricacy and long production times, though. To ensure they wouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives making the film, the team cheated a little, employing a blend of CG and real items to economise the production. “None of us had been trained in stop motion animation, so we felt more secure making it CG,” explains Bjørn Blaabjerg Sørensen, the film’s technical director and character technical director. “It seems crazy, but it was easier to make CG characters than real life ones with armatures in them. Director Lærke liked the feel she got from stop motion, so the challenge for her was to try to achieve that through CG.” This approach required a completely different production cycle to a standard CG project. The backdrops were created first, to be photographed and retopoed in Maya, giving the animators something tangible to work from. This took up the pre-production phase, and it was a time-consuming process.

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“First of all there was design, after that we had research how to work with different materials, and how we could make a surface look like concrete, for instance,” says Sørensen. “It turns out that spraying isolation foam with grey spray colour erodes the surface in such a way that it looks like concrete wall at a miniature scale. There was a lot of trial and error involved - there is no ctrl+z command for real life. But I can proudly say that I built Adam’s desk and painted his cactus green, among other props.” Once the physical set was recreated within the confines of a computer, CG characters and props were added, again based on items created in the real world. Despite their rendered nature they created problems of their own: misaligned shadows or wonky reflections would immediately break the illusion of “Roommate Wanted”’s sculpted clay realism, so the team had to ensure all these elements were aligned perfectly.

“THE FILM LOOKS LIKE A PAINSTAKINGLY-CREATED AND HAND ANIMATED CLAYMATION PROJECT DESPITE ITS COMPUTERRENDERED NATURE.”

As well as providing a great testbed for the team’s animation skills, Roommate Wanted marked the culmination of Sørensen’s training at The Animation Workshop. When he started he had no knowledge of 3D or CGI, but by the time he finished he was baking bump maps onto an animation curve. “I learned more at TAW than I could have ever dreamed of, and I did so through all the professionals that the school brought in every week to guide us through the curriculum,” Sørensen says. “The Animation Workshop is an amazing and supportive place, and they guided me all the way from beginner to the professional I am today.” “Roommate Wanted” Team: Director: Lærke Kromann Co-Director: David Crisp Art director: Jane Langkilde Madsen Animation and production Manager: Lea Bøje Animation Lead: Anne Moth Larsen Pipeline manager and Modelling lead: Henning Sanden Designer: Dorte Flensted Jensen Technical director and Character TD: Bjørn Blaabjerg Sørensen

Learn more at vimeo.com/119932781

“To make it look convincing we had to very carefully match light-catching geometry up to each shot background after extracting the CG camera from NUKE,” says Sørensen “We blocked out the lights with V-Ray IPR. Once light angle, colour and mood was in order, we rendered our shots with grey shaders to see how light, characters and background would behave together, and from there we were able to further art direct and adjust the lights.” Bjorn even went to great extremes to make sure the models looked as convincingly hand-crafted as possible. “I created a V-Ray shader that would shuffle the fingerprint bump maps on the character at a seemingly random frequency,” he says. “It wasn’t random though, but baked onto an animation curve in order to work on the renderfarm. This was fun and a good challenge.” The eight-person team behind the film are proud of the finished product, but they’re equally pleased with the way they came together and worked together. Everything was planned down to the minutest detail, a wise move as they were able to use scripts to automate the process and have the film ready way before its deadline, giving time for tiny tweaks and corrections.

TIPS & TRICKS: PREPARING MAPS FOR RENDERING The team made sure to sculpt the displacement details in ZBrush before publishing the final character model as to have the best possible base mesh for applying the displacement maps. “Even though you go back to subdivision level one of a model that you sculpted on, at least in ZBrush the base mesh is altered slightly. It’s a good approach to grab that mesh after the fine sculpt has been done, just to make sure that the model will fit the exported displacement maps,” says Sørensen.

ADVICE FOR STARTERS TAW’s graduates give aspiring CG artists four tips for success: Ask for honest opinions, ask for critique and listen. Don’t just do your own thing and think everybody else is wrong, it will get you nowhere. Start out doing a bit of everything and then a year or two later try to focus on something specific. Be different! Network, network, network!

BEHIND THE MASK HOW TO SPEED UP YOUR WORKFLOW WITH V-RAY 3.0 FOR 3DS MAX’S RENDER MASK FEATURE by Toni Bratincevic

We’ve all been there: a material in your 3ds Max model isn’t right, so you want to tweak it. But your client’s breathing down the back of your neck, and you don’t have time to re-render the whole thing. But, gah, that material. You just can’t ignore it. Fortunately V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max has the Render Mask feature. Select regions of your model with this tool and it will only re-render those parts, making both you and your client very happy. While simple to use, we’ve drawn on the services of Blizzard Entertainment’s Environment Modeller Toni Bratincevic to explain its ins and outs. Thanks to our friends at 3D Total for this tutorial.

“RENDER MASK IS A RELATIVELY SIMPLE, BUT VERY USEFUL FEATURE.” STEP 1: WHAT IS IT? Render Mask is a relatively simple, but very useful feature, added to V-Ray 3.0. In the past, tweaking materials on specific objects, like reflection intensity, required the user to re-render a section of the image, or re-render completely, to get visual feedback. While doing a Region render, even if an object didn’t take up the majority of the render’s selection area, the CPU would need to spend time rendering everything selected in that region. Render Mask minimizes this time by re-rendering only the selected object that material is applied to. This feature can be found under the Render Setup > V-Ray > Image Sampler tab.

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STEP 2: WORKFLOW There is a selection of masks you can use to define regions, not limited to selected objects. There are options to Include/Exclude groups of objects, Textures, or Layers. Using Selected object is the most straightforward option, since you just need to select the object and hit Render. I used a Render Mask workflow on several of my projects, as it is a great way to speed up scene rerendering when tweaking specific material qualities.

STEP 3: REFLECTIONS While Render Masks are useful for tweaking materials or lights on the fly, I wouldn’t recommend saving an image re-rendered with Render Masks and using it as a final product. As seen in this image, some artefacts from anti-aliasing are visible after rendering using Render Masks. Also, changing diffuse colors (as an example) of an object rendered with Render Masks will not affect the reflections around the scene where that object is visible.

STEP 4: TEXTURE I rarely use Texture selection, but it’s useful in some cases. When selecting Texture in the Render Mask box, the Render Mask option beneath it changes to <None>. Clicking on this option will start the Material Editor from which you can select one of the procedural textures available in 3ds Max, or use an external texture such as a bitmap. In this example, I select a checker texture with tiling set to 42. At this point we will change the object’s material and hit re-render. Areas covered by the checker texture are rendered over the original image, and the new material updates are visible.

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STEP 5: PAINTED Still using the Texture option as a Render Mask, bitmaps can also be used to define the mask area to render. Here I’ve used Photoshop to create a black and white mask and saved it as a JPG file. This image is loaded and used as a Render Mask texture in V-Ray 3.0 using a bitmap texture node. While this is not a common workflow, if you want to be very precise when defining the area that should be rendered, this is the only way to do so.

“IT IS VERY STRAIGHTFORWARD: YOU JUST NEED TO SELECT THE OBJECT IN THE SCENE AND HIT RENDER.”

STEP 6: SELECTED The most simple and most useful method to define the region to re-render is Selected. It is very straightforward: you just need to select the object in the scene and hit Render. Rendering will only update in areas covered by the selected object. Since it doesn’t require any additional steps, I recommend using this in your everyday workflow.

STEP 7: INCLUDE/EXCLUDE In situations where you’ll be tweaking an object many times during re-rendering, or you want to render a complete animated sequence with isolated groups of objects, Include/Exclude lists can be a very useful workflow. By selecting Include/Exclude as your Render Mask, and clicking the Include box beneath the Render Mask option, you’ll find a menu where you can define which objects should be included in the list. At this point you just need to select the object on the left side and click the arrow to move them to the right area.

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STEP 8: SELECTION SETS Selection Sets are another way to define Include/Exclude lists. These are saved for use in other areas of 3ds Max: for example, if you need to use the same set for Light Linking. This is my preferred way of using Include/Exclude lists. You just need to select the objects in the scene and click at the top of the 3ds Max menu where it says â&#x20AC;&#x153;Create selection setâ&#x20AC;?. Just type in a name for the selection and use it in the Include/Exclude list when using the Include option below Render Mask.

STEP 9: LAYERS A good way to keep organization of the scene manageable and clean is to use Layers, and divide the scene into spatial areas such as background, foreground, and midground. Once the scene is organized and objects assigned to specific layers, these layers can also be used in Render Mask to define areas that should be rendered. In Render Mask selection, click on Layers, then click on the button below Render Mask, which will have changed to Select Layers. Now you just need to select which layers should be used as a Render Mask.

STEP 10: CLEAN Usually when using Render Masks, previously rendered images already exist in the frame buffer, thus you are always rendering on top of an existing image. In case you want to use Render Mask with a clean black frame buffer, there is a Clean option under the V-Ray frame buffer options. This will delete the image, so next time you render you will not see the old image. Rendering on a clean frame buffer also creates a good alpha, so if this image is saved, it can be used in compositing applications to merge over other layers.

This article originally appeared in 3D Creative magazine. Find out more at: 3dcreativemag.com

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