Generations: Siggraph 2018

Take a peek behind the scenes of this year’s largest CG show to discover what iToo Software, Luxion and more have to offer attendees!

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Welcome!

There are certain names, phrases and places that have become part of the furniture for people within the visual effects, animation and motion graphics community, and none more so than SIGGRAPH. For 40 plus years now, ACM SIGGRAPH has been at the forefront, extolling the virtues of innovation in computer graphics, as well as celebrating the achievements of the many artists, scientists, filmmakers and others who share this passion.

In August 2018, SIGGRAPH will be holding its annual conference in Vancouver, which will see thousands of artists, developers, students and manufacturers, joining to share in the latest and greatest of the CG community.

SIGGRAPH is the best place to head if you are looking to explore what the world of computer graphics has on offer, now and in the future, with a large community of similarly passionate artists and developers. To take a peek inside the latest tech, just flick through our highlights guide!

Rob Redman, Editor of 3D World & Carrie Mok, Editor of 3D Artist

vr

© 2018 Fable Studio, Oculus Studios

siggraph 2018

Getting immersed at SIGGRAPH 2018 Everything you need to know about the newest addition to the 45th edition of the computer graphics conference

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or the first time, SIGGRAPH will be host to an Immersive Pavilion, devoted entirely to virtual reality, mixed reality and augmented reality. It will feature a VRcade, a space for playing VR, MR and AR games; the Village for showcasing larger projects; and the VR Theatre, which is part of the Computer Animation Festival. Walt Disney Animation Studios’ first VR short film, Cycles, will make its world debut at SIGGRAPH 2018 in the Village and will explore the true meaning of creating a home and the life it holds inside its walls.

Elsewhere in the Village, Welcome to Light Fields is an experience focused on the freedom of motion, realistic reflections and translucence in VR. Welcome to Light Fields will showcase Google’s emerging technology that is powering its next generation of VR content.

It will take visitors to the mahogany interiors of Gamble House in Pasadena, glossy ceramics and shiny mirrors of Mosaic Tile House in Venice, stained glass windows of St Stephen’s Church, inside Smithsonian Institute’s Air and Space Museum and on board NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery.

Niantic, the creators of Pokemon Go and Ingress will also be exhibiting its multiple-device

AR experiences in the Village. Players will be able to have a go at ping-pong against one another, where the ball and paddles exist in AR for all users, to promote shared AR experiences.

Meanwhile, Fable Studio will bring Wolves in the Walls: Chapter 1 to the VRcade. The immersive fable will ask what it would be like to interact, have a relationship with and go on a quest with a character inside a virtual reality movie.

Baobab Studios will be on a journey with a dazzling crow in a retelling of a Native American folk tale.

In Crow: The Legend, the titular bird will travel far from home to restore light and warmth back onto a planet plunged into cold and darkness.

Returning for its second year is the VR Theatre, which will now have increased seat capacity and kiosk booths for attendees at the Exhibits Plus level and above to enjoy a selection of films not included in the screening programming. In the main screenings, viewers can watch a selection of VR films including Arden’s Wake: Expanded from Penrose Studios, Space Explorers: A New Dawn from Felix & Paul Studios and Oculus, and The Legend of Hanuman from Charuvi Design Labs, Graphic India.

The kiosks will feature Beyond The Fence by Goro Fujita, Facebook and Across Dark: Beyond 4th Dimension from Jeon-Hyoung Lee, 4th Creative Party Co, Ltd.

siggraph 2018

keyshot

KeyShot advances 3D visualisation and speeds workflow Coming to 3 KeyShot 8…

D professionals around the world know KeyShot as the industry-leading, real-time renderer that gives them the advantage with its speed, ease, and quality.

KeyShot is different than most rendering software – it’s stand-alone, real-time, CPUbased and available for Mac and PC. Together, with Luxion’s real-time ray tracing technology as the backbone, KeyShot has proven to be the go-to renderer for high-quality results fast.

Simple, Yet Advanced When you open KeyShot, you’ll be introduced to the most minimal user interface. Don’t worry though, it’s on purpose. The focus is meant to be on real-time results as every change you make in KeyShot - whether it’s a material, texture, environment update, lighting tweak or camera adjustment - can be seen the instant it’s made.

The user interface keeps the workflow simple, but underneath lies the advanced capabilities you would expect for creating previs concepts or production-level visuals.

KeyShot can import over 30 file formats but has plugins for the most popular 3D software.

KeyShot has over 700 material presets, but allows you to create advanced, custom materials and textures through the KeyShot Material Graph. You can cycle through HDRI environments presets quickly, but have the ability to customise or create your own with the

KeyShot HDRI Editor. You can take it even further by creating Model Sets and Studios in the same scene to explore model, colour and lighting variations. Render output can spit out a single image or give you 12 render passes and layers to help you fly through post-production.

A Better Workflow Since KeyShot is a stand-alone application it can sit right alongside your current process until you see where it speeds things up.

This might be in the early stages of creating concept models, identifying sooner how light works with particular shapes or how colours affect the appearance. It might be later on when you want to see an accurate material representation. Or, it might be when you have everything set and you need render passes of everything to complete final artwork.

For example, when you use KeyShot with ZBrush and the KeyShot to ZBrush Bridge, you can see your materials and lighting in KeyShot as you sculpt in ZBrush.

Luxion has been ramping up development efforts as well, previewing their upcoming VR tech at their KeyShot RenderWorld conference and releasing a free KeyShot Viewer that can be used to view and interact with KeyShot scenes and product configurators.

To get the scoop and take KeyShot for a spin, visit keyshot.com.

GEOMETRY DISPLACEMENT If you’ve ever worked with mapping displacement geometry, you know the setup can be tedious. Luxion brings a streamlined approach to adding displacement via the KeyShot Material Graph with the much-anticipated debut of this feature in KeyShot 8.

SCATTERING MEDIA Fog, bubbles, flakes. The possibilities seem endless for scattered media within volumes that can be controlled, and even animated, in a variety of ways with changes visualised as quickly as you can update the adjustments.

HIGH-QUALITY VR If you’ve struggled with data prep and have been disappointed with the quality of VR scenes, Luxion is promising something better. Their VR solution debuting with KeyShot 8 brings in the most accurate material and shadow representations, and it’s all done with one click from KeyShot.

KeyShot is a standalone real-time rendering application that makes creating amazing renderings and animations fast and easy. With support for the widest number of 3D file formats on both Mac and PC and free plugins for major CAD applications, KeyShot seamlessly integrates into your product development process from rough design concept to final production images.

Download a free trial at keyshot.com/try Model by Simon Williamson. Render by Esben Oxholm.

siggraph 2018

Allegorithmic

Allegorithmic’s new virtual show car X-TAON, made by well-known car designers and 3D modellers including Takumi Yamamoto and Frederic Gasson

Inside Allegorithmic’s biggest Substance Source drop yet With 700 materials for automotive, Substance Source has received its biggest material release yet. We spoke to Allegorithmic’s Pierre Maheut about the ins and outs of its latest asset set

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ust under two years ago, Allegorithmic started extending itself to new markets.

Clients from automotive, transportation design and aerospace were knocking on the door of the Substance developers and it’s in part why Pierre Maheut, Allegorithmic’s market strategy director of architecture and design and some of his colleagues were hired, to help the company reach new heights with new industries.

Now, Allegorithmic can count almost all of the OEMs as its customers, “We are at most points of the pipeline,” says Maheut, “for the marketing and the final CAD configurators, but also at the very beginning in the design studio. Colour, material and finish (CMF) designers are experiencing new materials to test.”

It’s no wonder that Allegorithmic has chosen automotive for its biggest Substance Source release. With 700 assets made available over the course of five weeks, it made sense for the drop to be separated into three themes: prototyping, exteriors and interiors, with a range of diverse materials provided with each set. The reason? More and more materials are being used in automotive, beyond the usual metals,

plastics, leather interiors and so on. “We want to showcase everything we want to do today,” says Maheut, “so with Substance Source and the automotive drop we want to show the capabilities of what we can deliver and we also want to deliver a ready-to-use materials library for people to start with.”

“You can see more and more materials you don’t expect to have in a car. We’ve seen porcelain for instance, and concrete in a Peugeot show car, so the CMF designers in automotive want to embrace a larger scope and to test things that are not usually in a car. For instance I was doing an internship at Citroën ten years ago and it had cork inside!”

It’s why the Substance Source Automotive drop is important, not just for automotive, but in theory for all of Allegorithmic’s markets, “What is interesting also, we branded it as an automotive drop and it’s something you can apply to automotive, but also our game users and VFX artists can use it to texture assets like spaceships, vehicle designs, trains, aerospace, aircraft interiors and so on. The materials you find in a car, you can find in an aeroplane.”

siggraph 2018

pixel plow

Scaling out rendering should be an effortless job Need GPUs? H ave you ever been working on a project, only to find out that you don’t have enough compute resources in-house to meet your deadline? If so, then you’ve undoubtedly searched the internet for render farm services to assist. When you did this, you found a lot of “services” that claimed to offer rendering. Most of them were unclear on how they worked, how much they charged, or even where they were in the world. You may have signed up for one of the services you found, only later to realize there were confusing limitations or obstacles that still prevented you from meeting your deadline.

If that was you, then allow us to introduce you to Pixel Plow. Pixel Plow is an always-on, cloud-based render farm service that differentiates themselves from the competition by being easy to use.

To start using Pixel Plow, simply go to pixelplow.net and sign up for an account. When done, you’ll get a welcome email with links to their agent software (available on Windows or Mac). A quick download and install of the agent, and you’re ready to render. Submitting your first job requires a small amount of prep, the directions of which are a clickable link in the agent window. You prep your scene, submit your

job, and watch in amazement as completed frames begin to trickle back to your computer as they complete.

The Pixel Plow agent displays all the pertinent job metrics while your render is running, so you can keep tabs on what is going on. Things like cost consumed, estimated completion time, estimated job cost, and data transfer performance are all displayed and updated in near real-time. Pixel Plow is up front and honest about the rates charged, software deployed, and versions running. No hiding costs behind tokens, credits, or any other nonsense!

Attention to the details of all aspects of online render farms is what makes using Pixel Plow an easy choice to make.

Pixel Plow is an always-on, cloud-based render farm service that differentiates themselves from the competition by being easy to use

If you’re looking to achieve more GPU rendering power, then look no further because Pixel Plow has you covered

With two different farm types in the form of CPU and GPU, Pixel Plow will enable you to scale out rendering from scenes making use of Redshift, V-Ray RT, Cycles, Prorender and more.

Smart Caching The V3 Pixel Plow agents all enable smart, farm-side caching of job data. This prevents re-uploading any file that was previously uploaded to the farm, even if it came from a different user.

Broad App Support Pixel Plow has deployed all of the common render applications and engines, and is always looking to support more. Beyond that, many less common software tools are deployed. All deployed software is listed publicly on their site, so you can see what they have running even before signing up.

siggraph 2018

Itoosoft

Scattering Buildings

Creating Parametric Monorails

Scattering Plants and Trees

Scattering and Animating Crowds

Creating Parametric Bleachers

Goodbye Poly Counts: Why you should use Forest Pack and RailClone T he beautiful, sun-bathed city of Cadiz on the southern coast of Spain is redolent with history, and home to one of the best known carnivals in the world. It’s not somewhere you’d expect to find the headquarters of a company on the cutting edge of instancing and scene assembly tools in 3ds Max, but that’s where iToo Software began and where they’ve grown for almost 20 years.

IToo Software have one stated goal – to make life easier for artists. Their procedural tools are designed to remove limitations. Too many polygons? No problem, Forest Pack and RailClone allow you to use a nearly limitless number of objects. Complex procedural model to create? No sweat, RailClone removes the technical barriers associated with parametric workflows and opens up their potential to a new generation of artists.

Forest Pack and RailClone play an essential part in the pipelines of major architectural visualisation, gaming and VFX studios including ILM, LUXX, ScanlineVFX, Blur and more. These studios come for the instancing power but quickly realise the benefits of an advanced feature set that’s perfect for fast and easy scene assembly.

According to Sergej Eichmann, CG supervisor at Blur Studio, “Forest Pack is the ultimate

set-dressing solution. Whether you need quick generic setups or complex show specific creations – Forest Pack has reliable, easy-to-use tools that can handle anything.”

Don’t be fooled by the name either, Forest Pack has many more uses than scattering trees and plants. Christian Haas from Stuttgart-based LUXX Studios describes Forest Pack and RailClone as their “secret weapon”.

For example, on Independence Day 2, LUXX used Forest Pack to scatter and animate Kinect motion-captured people to generate the huge crowds of up to 500,000 people seen during the president’s speech. “Forest Pack enabled us to handle a crazy amount of characters, including endless variations in geometry, animation and colours, but also easily control the crowd for special actions like standing up in time or starting to clap.”

LUXX’s latest full-length animated feature film, Manou the Swift, required them to create a detailed 10km x 10km model of the French city of Nice for aerial renders.

This huge area required only 60gb of RAM to render in about 30 minutes per frame.

According to Christian, “This is possible due to Forest Pack, this great tool handles trillions of polygons in a scene and we could fly along the

cityscape and up to the hills without needing to rework the scene.”

But don’t take their word for it, try it yourself by taking the free Lite version for a spin, or read more on iToo Software’s website: itoosoft.com.

What’s next?

You might wonder after 20 years of development, what more can be added to the leading parametric tools for 3ds Max? The answer is plenty! The recently released Forest Pack 6 and RailClone 3.2 plugins add new customisation features for artists and TDs, who can use advanced procedural effects, employ three new distribution modes including particles, import and manage new assets, and much much more.

Works wherever you do Forest Pack and RailClone work with all the leading Render Engines used by 3ds Max artists, including newly released versions of Arnold, V-Ray Next, and V-Ray Next GPU. Whatever your renderer of choice, they’ve got you covered.

LUXX Studios. Independence Day: Resurgence © 20th Century Fox

Modelling Buildings

1 million

plants

Parametric Scattering for 3ds Max Try it free at itoosoft.com/zeroproblems

Scene by F10 Studios - f10studios.co.uk

100,000

polygons per plant

Expanded Animation – EA represents the leading edge of what is achievable with modern technology and uncompromising artistic drive. EA wants inspired artists who are interested in using contemporary technology to gain exposure and training in order to make the most out of modern and emergent media.

EXPANDED ANIMATION & SCI-VI Scandinavian animation excellence

The Animation Workshop is recognized across Europe as a Center of Excellence with expertise in animation related activities in the areas of education, culture, communication, and business. In training and working with creatives in the animation industry over the last nearly 30 years, The Animation Workshop (TAW) has continually explored interesting and useful applications for animation. This experience has shown that animation can break down walls, make complicated information easier to understand, and when executed properly – create lasting artistic impact.

Two areas that TAW sees as increasingly important and ripe for development are the dissemination of knowledge through a program called Science Visualization, or Sci-Vi, and a framework for art cooperation called Expanded Animation.

Both of these programs take animation into exciting new territories by activating new partners, new audiences, and new functions for animation.

Sci-Vi represents the use of animation strategies and production to disseminate complicated science concepts to a

variety of audiences. The Animation Workshop has shown this strategy to increase engagement, retention, and the spread of important scientific understandings. TAW has established fruitful cooperation with a number of different partners to create public engagement with new knowledge.

Expanded Animation is an area of artistic development and cooperation spurred by emerging technologies and systems which seek to explore the intersection of art and technology, and the ways that animation can act on both. Through Expanded Animation, TAW matches world-class artists with state-of-the-art technicians to create new experiences that comment on our times.

The Animation Workshop is continuously working to further develop the concepts outlined here, as well as the networks and partnerships cooperating to make them a reality. They encourage those interested in learning more or getting involved to visit the website to find out more about projects currently under way and those soon to come!

The Animation Workshop/VIA University College Kasernevej 5 8800 Viborg Denmark +45 8755 4900 www.animationworkshop.via.dk

Photo: K. Pauli, CITIA

Science Visualization – Sci-Vi is a strategy shown to improve the understanding of and engagement with scientific learning among more and general audiences. By providing a lighter, more visually driven explanation, difficult concepts can be reduced to smaller, simpler parts and made more accessible.

The Animation Workshop/VIA University College in Denmark offers 3 bachelor educations and numerous courses, workshops and masterclasses.

Professional training activities: Semester courses • Visual Effects – 16 weeks • Storyboard – 12 weeks • 3D Character Animation – 16 weeks • Simulation in Houdini – 12 weeks • Illustration – 18 weeks Masterclasses • Houdini • Cinematic Storytelling More masterclasses coming in 2019 Other courses • ASF - Animation Sans Frontières • ANIDOX:LAB Animated documentary labs • Stopmotion workshop

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING COURSES & MASTERCLASSES Join an incredibly creative environment in Denmark, learn from the best, and effectively boost your artistic and technical skills with a semester courses or masterclass at The Animation Workshop!

Still by Andrei Zberea TAW brings in professional artists straight from studios around the world to train YOU. Working exclusively with guest teachers means that participants learn from industry experts with up-to-date and production-tested knowledge. You will receive hands-on, intensive teaching and practice every day from morning to afternoon, a blooming professional network, access to extra-curricular activities, and much, much more.

We’re in it for our students and participants, and here’s what some of them say: “The course has been more than useful: the atmosphere at The Animation Workshop is a cozy creative environment that makes you give the best of you and that inspires you constantly. Thanks!!”

Francesca Guiotto, 3D Character Animation 2018

“A fantastic course, It really helped me learn to develop my eye for animation and also produce animation using 3D software quickly and in high quality. The school itself is an amazing environment as everyone has the same passion and enthusiasm for their craft.”

“The course is amazing. I had little knowledge before I came here and I left the course with tons of knowledge, and skills. Very grateful for the opportunity! The school and environment is great, would love to come back one day” Daisy Keehnen, Visual Effects 2017

Joseph Young, 3D Character Animation 2017

The Animation Workshop/VIA University College Kasernevej 5 8800 Viborg Denmark +45 8755 4900 www.animationworkshop.via.dk