Computer Graphics World 2010-04

www.cgw.
com April 2010
Awe-Inspiring
DreamWorks heats
up stereo 3D in How
to Train Your Dragon
$6.00 USA $8.25 Canada

April 2010 • Volume 33 • Number 4 Innovations in visual computing for DCC professionals
12
26 Features
COVER STORY
Training Exercise
20
12 DreamWorks creates seven unique dragons, all with different shapes
and animation rigs, as well as a CG cast of Viking characters, for the T
32
2
3D stereoscopic feature How to Train Your Dragon.
By Barbara Robertson
For Gods’ Sake

Departments 20ofIn Clash of the Titans, visual effects facilities share the legendary work
bringing gods and creatures to life, and building the heavens and hell.
Editor’s Note It’s All A Game By Barbara Robertson
2 Atattendance,
a time when most industry trade shows are exhibiting a decline in
the annual Game Developers Conference has exceeded Lab Report
expectations with a record 18,000-plus visitors last month. This success
can be attributed to the gaming market’s ability to adapt to new
demands from emerging genres, particularly the mobile, social, and
26Acommercially
look at how Autodesk Labs explores new technologies that may be
relevant to customers.
By Karen Moltenbrey
casual gaming sectors.
Spotlight Brick by Brick
4Mudbox,
Products Autodesk’s 2011 versions of 3ds Max, Softimage, Maya,
MotionBuilder, and FBX; HumanIK 4.5; Kynapse 7. The Foundry’s 32 Ansolelyarchitect agrees to a unique undertaking—building a full-scale house
out of LEGOs—and uses digital tools to plan and design the structure.
Nuke 6.0, NukeX 6.0. Wacom’s Cintiq 21UX. News Graphics card By Karen Moltenbrey
growth exceeds expectations. PC gaming hardware forecast. User
Focus Tooth Fairy visual effects are movie magic.
Portfolio SEE IT IN • Navigating datacentric workflows.
• VFX for the small screen designed
36Unleashed: The Art of Naughty Dog. x to impress.
• Director Neil Jordan on Ondine.
Back Products • The sound of HBO’s The Pacific.
38Recent software and hardware releases from the Game

Developers Conference. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx x
ON THE COVER
Enhanced Content The young Viking Hiccup, atop the friendly dragon
Get more from CGW. We have enhanced our magazine Toothless, battles the mother of all dragons and the
content with related stories and videos online at www.cgw.com. source of bane for the humans and dragons alike in
Just click on the cover of the issue (found on the left side of the DreamWorks’ new CG animated feature How to Train
Web page), and you will find links to these online extras. Your Dragon. See pg. 12.
April 2010 1
Editor’sNote
It’s All A Game

The Magazine for Digital Content Professionals
E D I TO R I A L
S
Karen moltenbrey
an Francisco became the central hub for gaming last month as the Moscone Convention Center Chief Editor
karen@cgw.com • (603) 432-7568
hosted the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC). At one point several years ago, GDC 36 East Nashua Road
seemed to be having a tough time of things, as the San Jose show floor got smaller and the sessions Windham, NH 03087
became fewer. But, with the move to San Francisco a few years back, GDC exhibited a comeback, a re- Contributing Editors
Courtney Howard, Jenny Donelan,
newal of sorts. The panels were extensive, and the topics interesting and relevant. The show floor hosted Audrey Doyle, George Maestri,
far more vendors. This year was no different. Kathleen Maher, Martin McEachern,
Barbara Robertson
At one point, GDC was focused solely on computer games, but more re-
cently the gaming industry has extended its reach into other segments of the WILLIAM R. RITTWAGE
Publisher, President and CEO,
market. Consoles, like their PC counterparts, have been a major focus for COP Communications
developers at the show, especially following the introduction of the sixth-
generation consoles (Dreamcast, GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2). SA L E S
When the current generation of machines was introduced, game develop- Lisa BLACK
Associate Publisher
ment became a more complex process, requiring similar cutting-edge tools National Sales • Education • Recruitment
and techniques as films. Tool vendors were happy to be such an integral lisab@cgw.com • (903) 295-3699
fax: (214) 260-1127
part of game development, and soon they were filling the conference floor
to hawk their wares, while top-level game studios were eager to share their Kelly Ryan
Classifieds and Reprints • Marketing
trials and triumphs. kryan@copcomm.com
Today, gaming stretches far beyond the PC and console to handheld (818) 291-1155
devices, the Web, and cell phones. In fact, this year’s conference was heavily focused on mobile graphics
Editorial Office / LA Sales Office:
and causal games. And that’s hardly surprising. For years, mobile gaming has promised 3D applica- 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204
tions, though they have been a long time coming. But now, their time has come, thanks to devices such (800) 280-6446
as smart phones. Think about it. The smart phones that are available today are more technologically
advanced than most computers were not that long ago. The most popular, of course, is Apple’s iPhone, P rod u c tio n
KEITH KNOPF
which seems to offer everything a person wants: a built-in camera, an Internet client for e-mail, Web Production Director
Knopf Bay Productions
browsing, Wi-Fi connectivity, and, of course, mobile phone capabilities. Its biggest attraction is its mul- keith@copcomm.com • (818) 291-1158
timedia functionality. While the iPhone is not the only smart phone available, it does have something
that most other devices do not have: apps. Indeed, there appears to be an app for just about anything MICHAEL VIGGIANO
Art Director
and everything. And this has not escaped the notice of mobile game developers. At this year’s GDC Mo- mviggiano@copcomm.com
bile/Handheld mini-conference, games for these devices—from the iPhone to the Blackberry, Android,
Chris Salcido
and more—were at the top of the topic list. As experts there noted, 2010 will continue to see the rise of Account Representative
mobile offerings as phone carriers overcome the obstacles (format issues, distribution problems, and so csalcido@copprints.com • (818) 291-1144
forth) that have hindered this genre.

A similar revolution has occurred on the Web with the casual gaming phenomenon. While many be-
lieve the big-name console titles to be the most popular choices for gamers, think again. Casual gaming
is redefining the typical “gamer” with a wide range of arcade, puzzle, board, and card games that have
made the leap to the virtual world. Not convinced? Just search for these titles—Scrabble, Sally’s Salon,
Bejeweled 2, Jewel Quest, and Monopoly—and you will find a host of players (and a ton of fun, too).
These casual games have opened a new genre: social gaming. Even though gaming on the social site Computer Graphics World Magazine
is published by Computer Graphics World,
Facebook has been around for a few years, last year saw a big boom. Case in point: Do you play Mafia a COP Communications company.
Computer Graphics World does not verify any claims or
Wars or Farmville? If not, chances are good that you will. Current predictions are that social gaming will other information appearing in any of the advertisements
contained in the publication, and cannot take any
reach $5 billion in a few short years. Some, though, are treading more cautiously in their predictions for responsibility for any losses or other damages incurred
by readers in reliance on such content.
this new emerging market. David Cole, an analyst with DFC Intelligence, is predicting a resurgence in
Computer Graphics World cannot be held responsible for
casual gaming for this year, citing revenue sources from virtual goods as opposed to advertising. Social the safekeeping or return of unsolicited articles,
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gaming, he points out, has a precarious ad model whereby users must sign up for promotional offers. As Address all subscription correspondence to: Computer
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One of the biggest changes at GDC during the past decade or so was the formation of the Serious USA—$72 for 1 year, $98 for 2 years; Canadian
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CHIEF EDITOR
karen@CGW.com
2 April 2010
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Autodesk Readies Its 2011 Releases
Autodesk has revealed 2011 product versions of its digital for paint layers, vector displacement map extraction, the abil-
entertainment creation software, including Maya, 3ds Max, ity to create higher-quality turntables, and enhanced file trans-
Softimage, Mudbox, and MotionBuilder—all of which offer fer with Maya and Adobe Photoshop.
features for increased production efficiency. The products Offering significantly improved interoperability with Maya
offer new features and enhancements that help accelerate 2011 and 3ds Max 2011, MotionBuilder 2011 now inte-
workflows and improve data interoperability through formats grates more smoothly and reliably into production pipelines.
such as Autodesk FBX, helping artists to maximize their Skinning and blendshape deformations are calculated on the
creativity and optimize their productivity. In addition, Autodesk GPU for improved performance. The in-viewport experience is
has launched new versions of its Kynapse and HumanIK game significantly more interactive, and playback is many times faster,
development middleware, focusing on improved ease of use. further enhancing the software’s capabilities as a real-time virtu-
On the heels of the Maya 2010 makeover last summer, al production system. The new version is priced at $3995.
Maya 2011 features a customizable user interface, enhanced Additionally, Autodesk’s FBX 2011 asset exchange tech-
tools for character animation, including non-destructive live nology helps facilitate higher-fidelity data exchange between
retargeting, high-performance display of large scenes in the Autodesk software and certain third-party applications. The
viewport, new 3D editorial capabilities for pre-visualization open format provides new support for additional third-party
and virtual production workflows, integrated color manage- and proprietary applications. In addition, game developers
ment, asset structures for pipeline connectivity, and improved using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 will be able to import
rotoscoping. Also, Maya 2011 is now available for Snow FBX files directly into the Unreal Editor. Developers can use
Leopard, the 64-bit Mac OS X operating system. Maya 2001 the Python programming language to integrate FBX technol-
is priced at $3495 for a stand-alone license; an upgrade from ogy into pipelines not based on C++. FBX 2011 is offered
Maya 2010 costs $1745. free of charge and can be downloaded at http://usa.autodesk.
3ds Max 2011 sports a new node-based material editor—the com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=6839916.
feature most requested by users—and a high-quality hardware These new products also will be available as part of the
renderer that provides near-production-quality results 10 times Autodesk 2011 Entertainment Creation Suites. The suites,
faster than traditional rendering techniques on common graph- priced at $4995, offer a choice of either Maya 2011 or 3ds
ics cards. It also offers a tightly integrated, full-featured high Max 2011, and include MotionBuilder 2011 real-time char-
dynamic range compositing system (based on Autodesk Toxik acter animation software, as well as Mudbox 2011 digital
technology), as well as enhanced tools and workflows for sculpting and 3D painting software.
creating and texturing models, animating characters, and view- In further news, Autodesk is offering HumanIK 4.5, anima-
ing high-quality images interactively. A 3ds Max 2011 stand- tion middleware for full-body inverse kinematics and retar-
alone license costs $3495; an upgrade from the 2010 version geting that enhances existing animation systems, allowing
of 3ds Max or 3ds Max Design is priced at $1745. characters to interact dynamically and realistically with their
Softimage 2011 introduces new rendering and anima- environments. HumanIK 4.5 improves ease of use with an
tion tools for creating more complex, high-quality characters artist-friendly integration into the Unreal Engine and a Char-
and effects faster. The software offers a novel advanced acterization plug-in for creating and validating characters in
shading architecture and editing environment, an innovative Maya. Pricing is unavailable at this time.
rigging paradigm with support for kinematics in ICE (Inter- Autodesk, meanwhile, upgraded its Kynapse middleware
active Creative Environment), and automated lip synching in to Version 7. An artificial intelligence solution that supports
the Face Robot facial animation tool set. A Softimage 2011 complex dynamic 3D pathfinding, spatial reasoning, team
stand-alone license carries a price tag of $2995; an upgrade coordination, and automatic data generation, Kynapse is
from Softimage 2010 is set at $1495. now easier to use, with new pathdata generation, improved
Mudbox 2011, priced at $745 for a stand-alone license, tuning and profiling, simplified integration and configuration,
delivers new tools for helping to deform and pose models. It as well as off-the-shelf behaviors. Pricing for Kynapse will be
also offers new image adjustment brushes and blend modes announced at a later date.
PRODUCT: MODELING•ANIMATION
4 April 2010
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The Foundry Launches New Nuke
Leading visual effects software develop- quality of their work. Nuke and NukeX are keyer—especially tuned for tackling reflec-
er, The Foundry, has rolled out the much- fully script compatible, with Nuke capable tions, semi-transparent areas, and hair—is
awaited Nuke and NukeX 6.0, following of viewing and rendering nodes created now a standard feature in Nuke 6.0.
feedback from artists and production using the extended NukeX tool set. NukeX 6.0, meanwhile, extends the range
analysis by an in-house research team. Nuke 6.0 incorporates a new shape of tools usually found in the compositing
Offering VFX users two different Nuke rotoscope and paint tool set based on a environment, adding an integrated 3D
products enables facilities of all sizes to rewritten core curve library and new Roto- camera tracker, automated and manual
implement a Nuke solution to fit a range of Paint node. The release introduces a flex- lens distortion tools, FurnaceCore (The
artist and customer needs. Nuke contin- ible, non-destructive, layer-based paint Foundry’s re-engineered set of the
ues to be an evolving, flexible solution for hierarchy integrated with Nuke’s anima- Furnace plug-ins), and a DepthGenerator
a multitude of visual effects tasks, while tion and tracking capabilities, and support plug-in.
NukeX brings previously inaccessible for per-object attributes, such as blending Both Nuke 6.0 and NukeX 6.0 are
tools and workflow options to composit- modes and motion blur. Additionally, The now available for $3500 and $6000,
ing artists, saving time and increasing the Foundry’s Keylight blue/green screen respectively.
PRODUCT: COMPOSITING
Graphics Card Growth Exceeds Expectations

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry’s research and consult- Fourth-quarter 2009 saw the first shipments of a new cate-
ing firm for graphics and multimedia, found that figures for esti- gory, CPU-integrated graphics (CIG). With the advent of new
mated graphics chip shipments and suppliers’ market shares CPUs with integrated or embedded graphics, we will see a
for the fourth quarter of 2009 came in above expectations, with rapid decline in shipments of traditional chipset graphics, or
a 14 percent year-to-year growth—an amazing comeback in this IGPs (integrated graphics processors).
year of retrenching and recession.
Intel was the leader in fourth-quarter 2009, elevat- 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Total
ed by Atom sales for netbooks, as well as strong Graphics 180.6 217.1 239.0 269.4 316.5 351.7 373.0 425.4 544.0 600.1
growth in the desktop segment. AMD, meanwhile, Chips:
Annual
gained in the notebook integrated segment but Percentage 20.6% 20.2% 10.1% 12.7% 17.5% 11.1% 6.1% 14.0% 27.9% 10.3%
lost some market share in discrete sales in both Growth
the desktop and notebook segments due to Growth rates from 2002 to 2011.
constraints in 40nm supply. Nvidia picked up a little
share overall. Nvidia’s increases came primarily in Vendor This Quarter Last Quarter Unit Growth This Quarter Growth
Market Share Market Share Quarter to Quarter Last Year Year to Year
desktop discretes, while slipping in desktop and Market Share
notebook integrated. AMD 19.9% 20.1% 13.6% 19.3% 91.5%
AMD reported revenue of $427 million from its Intel 55.2% 53.6% 17.9% 47.7% 114.7%
Nvidia 24.3% 25.3% 10.2% 30.6% 47.3%
graphics segment for the quarter, up 40 percent Matrox 0.0% 0.0% 66.7% 0.1% -16.7%
sequentially. AMD’s graphics segment reported SiS 0.0% 0.3% -81.8% 1.1% -92.5%
an operating income of $53 million, a substantial VIA/S3 0.6% 0.7% -3.9% 1.2% -9.5%
Total 100.0% 100.0% 14.7% 100.0% 85.7%
improvement from the prior quarter.
Intel reported revenue from chipset and other Recent market growth.
revenue of $1.877 billion in the quarter.
Nvidia’s quarter, which straddles the calendar quarters, report- The fourth-quarter 2009 edition of Jon Peddie Research’s
ed revenues of $903 million for its fiscal Q3, which is from “Market Watch” is available now in both electronic and hard-
August to the end of October. The firm’s next quarter ended copy editions, and can be purchased for $995. Visit JPR’s Web
in January. site at www.jonpeddie.com.
NEWS: GRAPHICS CARDS

6 April 2010
Wacom Offers New Cintiq 21UX
Wacom recently introduced its Cintiq21UX, its newly redesigned interac-
tive pen display designed to meet the needs of professional photogra-
phers, designers, artists, and animators.
The Cintiq 21UX captures the slightest nuance of pen pressure against
the LCD surface and offers 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity. Rear-
mounted Touch Strips are ideally placed for fingertip access while
working. Each Touch Strip has an accompanying thumb-controlled
Touch Strip Toggle button that controls as many as four user-
assigned functions per application, such as zoom, scroll, brush
size adjustment, and canvas rotation.
A patented stand allows users to recline the pen display at
any angle between 10 and 65 degrees to match the user’s ideal
working posture. In addition to reclining, the Cintiq 21UX can be
rotated up to 180 degrees in either direction to take advantage of natural
drawing movements or offer a different viewing angle. The Cintiq can be removed from the
stand for use on a tabletop or to attach it to an articulating arm (not included).
The Cintiq 21UX ships with a number of software packages, including Corel Painter, Nik
Color Efex Pro 3.0, and Wacom Brushes 3.0. It is priced at $1999.
PRODUCT: PERIPHERALS
PC Gaming Hardware Forecast to Reach $27 Billion

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the indus- growth rate is due to purchasing delays purposes and double as a media center.”
try’s research and consulting firm for for systems and upgrades in 2008/2009 JPR uses a complex methodology to
graphics and multimedia, has revealed as consumers circled the wagons and pinpoint the true global, total addressable
the market forecast for PC gaming hard- took a conservative position on discre- market for PC gaming hardware, which is
ware, and the results are better than tionary spending,” he says. “A recovering no easy feat given the multi-dimensional
previously expected. economy, processing advancements, nature of personal computers. The result is
The worldwide PC gaming hardware and higher-quality gaming offerings will a report series that is highly accurate and
market (including systems, accessories,
and upgrades) is forecasted to have Year 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
gained $1.2 billion in 2009, a 5.9 percent Total PC Gaming Hardware Market $20,076 $21,260 $27,617 $32,749 $34,760
increase versus 2008 (from $20.07
billion to $21.26 billion). The increase is all contribute to a healthy year for PC available by segment (enthusiast, perfor-
due to higher-than-anticipated consumer gaming hardware in 2010.” mance, and mainstream) for companies
demand for enthusiast, performance, and As JPR president Jon Peddie points not focused on all levels of PC gaming.
mainstream hardware influenced by the out, the personal computer gaming The report covers all major regions and
ability to play video games ranging from market continues to be the high-growth provides detail for the top 37 countries.
casual to hard-core simulations. area and technological leader for home The “Worldwide PC Gaming Hard-
Due to significant growth across all entertainment. “With Windows 7 and ware Market” report series by Jon Peddie
major markets, the worldwide PC gaming DirectX 11, advanced and exciting phys- Research is available in three versions:
hardware market is expected to skyrocket ics, and stereovision capabilities, the enthusiast, performance, and mainstream,
30 percent in 2010. JPR senior video PC platform is far and away the most with each selling for $5000 and the set
game industry analyst Ted Pollak credits advanced,” he notes. “And, the PC has of three for $12,000. With the set is a
this growth to a number of factors. “The the added advantage that when not used summary report of the total hardware PC
largest influence on the high forecasted for gaming, it can serve more practical market worldwide.
NEWS: GAMING
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Fairy Good
T
his past year, Prime Focus orchestrated massive
naval battle sequences for Red Cliff, engineered
destructive nanomites for GI Joe: The Rise of
Cobra, gave Edward Cullen a Vampire sparkle in The
Twilight Saga: New Moon, and designed 3D stereo-
graphic displays for Avatar. The studio rounded out
2009 with a little lighthearted fun by turning Dwayne
“The Rock” Johnson into a magical childhood icon for
director Michael Lembeck’s Fox release Tooth Fairy,
which hit theaters in early 2010. Prime Focus created a range of visual effects for the film Tooth Fairy, including fairy
wings, magic dust, and the surreal swirling vortex in the image above.
In the movie, Johnson plays Derek Thompson, a
violence-prone hockey player with a reputation for separating in various stages of wardrobe,” Harvey says. “After lining these
opponents from their bicuspids, earning him the nickname plates up and warping them together, we used them to generate
“Tooth Fairy.” An unbeliever of magic, Derek is punished for his particles that stream off or onto Derek, to generate the costume.”
cynicism by having to spend a two-week sentence as a real There was also one scene in which Derek goes through a
tooth fairy, complete with tights, a tutu, and wings, all the while personal transformation—he starts believing and is no longer
trying to hide his new appendages from his girlfriend. the cynical guy he once was. This empowers him with his own
Prime Focus was one of the primary visual effects vendors on kind of fairy dust, and he gets playful with it, fashioning the parti-
Tooth Fairy, contributing 90-plus shots, the majority of which cles into a guitar and creating dust that looks like the Northern
involved fairy dust simulations ranging from simple magic wand Lights dancing across the bed of his girlfriend’s daughter.
dust to a gigantic dust vortex that serves as the portal between “Some of the most fun we had was during the fairy dust look-
our world and the fairy universe. The VFX team also created the development,” says Harvey. “Our artists set up a mini stage,
majority of the CG fairy wings and handled some digital double where we spent a day shooting several cases of baby powder
and matte painting shots. and Kraft glitter thrown in people’s faces—most notably mine.”
This generated lots of HD reference footage for how the dust
Art-Directing Fairy Dust and glitter moved and caught the light.
Creating the fairy dust was an interesting challenge for the team
at Prime Focus. Director [Michael Lembeck] was looking for Creating the Magical Fairy Wings
something beautiful and physical, yet magical, and the difficulty The artists also created the majority of digital wings for the
was in finding that balance. According to Chris Harvey, visual film’s lead fairy characters. These had to integrate seamlessly
effects supervisor at Prime Focus, the crew experimented with into scenes in which the actors were wearing practical wings,
hundreds of simulations, varying colors and quantities of sparkle with a lot of cutting back and forth. Like the fairy dust, each
versus powder and gravity. “Of course, there was the somewhat character’s wings had their own unique personality and char-
humorous yet very real concern that we didn’t want to end up acter, and Derek had two sets—smaller wings when he was a
creating something that would spawn playground injuries caused newbie fairy, and as he grows more powerful, super wings.
from kids throwing things in each others’ faces!” he says. “We went through a number of iterations during look-devel-
The artists designed several kinds of fairy dust for the movie— opment, creating concept art all the way through to modeling,
amnesia dust (which comes in handy after a human crosses lighting, and rendering different animation styles. Some designs
paths with a fairy), the Fairy Queen’s gold dust, and Derek’s being considered included wings that were more muscular
uniquely personal magical dust, for example. These all varied hockey-player type wings, or wings reminiscent of tattoo art,”
in color scheme, movement, design, level of sparkle versus Harvey explains.
powder, and how much weight they would have in terms of Harvey counts the group fortunate to be working with film-
their own magic movement. makers who were particularly collaborative, and gave the artists
The fairy dust sometimes even became its own character. In a lot of input in terms of the creative direction. “We’d do the
one scene, Derek transitions from his pajamas into a fairy tutu, wings, and then the filmmakers would show our wings to the
and fairy dust particles stream off him and back onto his body to studio for sign-off,” he says. “In the end, after that process of
form a new costume. “We were given 10 different plates of Derek discovery, however, the filmmakers opted to stick with having
USER FOCUS: ANIMATION

10 April 2010
CG replacement wings that perfectly matched the practical North American VFX hub in Vancouver, British Columbia, with
wings so that from shot to shot, you wouldn’t be able to tell additional shots sprinkled across the facility’s artists in Winni-
the two apart.” peg, Manitoba. All told, the team comprised approximately
One interesting note that came back from the filmmakers, seven 3D artists, six compositors, and two VFX supervisors
Harvey recalls, concerned how the wings looked “ ‘amazing, working on the show from January until July 2009. The primary
but that they looked too real and too practical, and needed software packages used by the artists on this show include
to be more magical.’ So while that was great feedback—that Prime Focus Software’s proprietary high-volume particle
the shot was kicked back because it looked too real—we had system, Krakatoa, Autodesk’s 3ds Max modeling software, and
to constantly maintain a balance between photorealism and a Eyeon Fusion for compositing.
more magical aesthetic.” The filmmakers shot the majority of the movie in Harvey’s
For Tooth Fairy, the artists also created digital matte paint- hometown of Vancouver. Mammoth Studios, one of the city’s
ings. In the pivotal scene in which a stadium roof opens and a largest soundstages, served as the location for filming the
giant dust vortex sucks Derek up and transports him into the Fairyland scenes, while the new Olympic ice rink provided the
pastel alternate universe known as Fairyland, they built the setting for the movie’s action-packed hockey sequences. As
roof digitally, and re-projected and matte-painted it so they someone who has been with Prime Focus since its days as
could then rip it apart. In addition, they created the digital Frantic Films VFX, going all the way back to 2003, “it’s been
debris flying about, and meticulously art-directed the swirling exciting to be a part of the thriving Vancouver filmmaking scene
dust effect. Finally, they enhanced scenes in which Derek flies and seeing how the industry has brought in so much talent and
over a cityscape by augmenting the sky and atmosphere, as revenue to our city,” Harvey says. “And being able to take my
well as the city below. kid to the movie theater to watch something our team worked
The bulk of the work was done out of Prime Focus’ primary on is, of course, an added bonus.” ■
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April 2010 11
n n n n CG I•Stereo
©2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC.
The iconoclastic young

Viking Hiccup rides the
dangerous Night Fury
dragon after befriending
the creature that other
Vikings considered an
enemy. At right, Tuffnut,
another teenager, will take
12 April 2010 some convincing.
CGI•Stereo ■ ■ ■ ■
DreamWorks forges a new

stereo 3D experience and brings
a Viking world to animated life
in a CG adventure-comedy
he title of DreamWorks Animation’s design language of the movie pushed

latest film is How to Train Your Dragon, caricatured shapes set in a realistically
and indeed, the star of this animated fea- textured world with live-action-esque
ture, a teenaged Viking named Hiccup, lighting,” Otto says. “We had exaggerated
does just that, albeit in his own way. shapes, but the story is epic and naturalistic. So we
So, it makes sense that the biggest chal- needed to be sure we could deliver the emotional
lenges for the real-world animators, visual effects art- beats with realistic acting.”
ists, modelers, and riggers centered on “training” CG Production started a year before release. “The
tools to help the crew create these dragons. Seven magnitude of the dragons was a main task to
dragons in all. Unique dragons devised by Annie tackle,” Otto says. “And on the human side, we
Award-winning character designer Nicolas Marlet wanted to make sure the Vikings had beards, and
(Kung Fu Panda, Over the Hedge), who also designed that created challenges for the rigging and charac-
the main characters for the film: Hiccup, his big- ter effects departments.”
bearded father Stoick, a young female Viking named
Astrid, and various other Vikings young and old. Dragon Power
Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, the team who At first, the riggers thought they could set up the
wrote and directed Disney’s Lilo and Stitch, directed controls for one dragon and apply them to the oth-
How to Train Your Dragon and wrote the screenplay. ers, but it wasn’t that simple. “We ended up with
It’s the second film created in stereo 3D at Dream- seven bespoke dragons,” says Nathan Loofbour-
Works from start to finish. row, character TD co-supervisor. “They share many
The story, based on the children’s book by Cressi- controls, but each is unique with special powers of
©2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC.
da Cowell, pits the brainy Hiccup against his brawny its own.” They all had legs and wings, but one had
dragon-slaying tribe: Hiccup breaks with tradition, spikes that move up and down based on the dragon’s
befriends a dragon, and dubs his dragon friend emotional state, and another puts his wings down
“Toothless.” The tribe is not amused. and crawls. They each walked differently, flew dif-
Simon Otto, head of character animation, began ferently, and spewed different forms of CG fire.
working with Marlet, a design team, modelers, and And, they had different personalities. Unlike the
riggers three and a half years before the film released, dragon in PDI/DreamWorks’ Shrek, these drag-
as part of a small development group that brought the ons are primary characters.
two-dimensional drawings into the 3D world. “The “We tried to hit a tone that was hopefully
April 2010 13
ter system.” The supervisors led 51 animators

at PDI/DreamWorks in northern California
and at DreamWorks Animation in southern
California. Although Otto noted that organiz-
ing the production by character rather than
sequence can sometimes be more difficult to
manage and less efficient, for this production
that wasn’t the case.
“It turned out that it helped us in the
long run,” Otto says. “Because the animators
worked on one character, it was significantly
more efficient, particularly with complex char-
acters. And, the consistency of the characters
grew as we went through the film.”
Systems within the animation rig helped
the animators handle that complexity.
Wings and Fire

“We spent a lot of time optimizing,” Ring
says. “The biggest problem was the complex-
ity of the characters. For example, when you
have hundreds of spikes on a dragon’s back
that can be moved independently, putting in
controls that don’t bog down the animators is
a big challenge.”
At top, two Terrible Terrors illustrate the color range in this species of dragon, as they fight over a bit of This film was the first to use the studio’s
food. At bottom, Hiccup shows his astonished yet dubious friends how to train a Monstrous Nightmare. rewrite of its in-house rigging system. “That
definitely helped because it’s faster,” Ring says.
fresh,” Otto says. “Dragons have been in many a walrus, crocodile, bumblebee, and bulldog. “Also, we gave animators low-res proxy ver-
films, but they’ve mainly been in 2D or live- “He’s silly like a bulldog is silly,” Otto says. “The sions of dragons. They could turn off the parts
action movies, like Dragonheart. We didn’t dragons aren’t funny as in a Tex Avery cartoon, they didn’t need.”
need to match a live-action design or match but there is a funny aspect to their design and To help the animators control the dragons’
to plates, and we could make a more complex behavior that’s drawn from real-life observa- wings, the riggers started by looking at mov-
dragon than a drawing. Nico [Marlet] looked tion.” Gronkle flies like a hummingbird, but ies of bats for reference. “Then we broke down
for a shape language—what a short, stubby scoops up rocks and turns them into lava balls. the wings mathematically,” Loofbourrow says.
dragon would look like, for example. We drew Hideous Zippleback has two heads that zip “Each wing had five, six, or seven divisions
inspiration from real life and steered the de- together. One head spurts gas, the other head based on how they would fold up.”
signs into something naturalistic and recogniz- ignites it. The tiny Terrible Terror attaches it- For each dragon wing type, the animators
able for the audience. We wanted to have fun self to the larger dragons for free rides. “His created flap cycles for different flying maneu-
with them. Make them believable. And at the fire is close to propane gas,” says Craig Ring, vers—landing, coasting, and so forth. Then,
same time, somewhat silly in their nature.” visual effects supervisor. “The funny thing is the riggers added those flap cycles to the wing
The animators drew from personal experi- that it’s so out of scale for the dragon. It’s like a rig, and the animators could make the dragon
ences with their cats and dogs for Toothless. 20- or 30-foot blowtorch.” The red and black fly using a few simple controls. “It was almost
But, Toothless is also a dragon in the Night Monstrous Nightmare, which looks most like like they could turn a crank in the dragon and
Fury species; a bird of prey, a panther, black a classical dragon, sets itself on fire. Lastly, the the wing would flap,” Loofbourrow says. “They
like a stealth bomber, that fires white-hot Red Death is the biggest of all, in every way. could dial in weak, medium, and strong cycles
lightning bolts. “Toothless has four legs, two Rather than have the seven supervising ani- as they animated. We embedded the curves the
sets of wings, a tail, and a tail fin,” Otto says. mators be responsible for having their teams animators crafted, and the system interpolated
“[For us] to have maximum artistic control, he perform all the characters in entire sequenc- between them over time and strength. They
had four times the number of controls as Hic- es, Otto organized the supervisors and their could slide between no flapping to the stron-
cup, the main character.” teams by characters, using a system typically gest flap. The curve shape would change, and
The Deadly Nadder, on the other hand, has implemented for traditionally animated films. the dragon would move smoothly.” The com-
the muscular legs and aggressive nature of an In addition, separate sets of animators worked bination of flight cycles and tweaks gave each
ostrich and the beautifully colored feathers of on crowd scenes with armies of Vikings and dragon its unique method of flight, whether
a parrot. His tail is spiked, and he shoots swirl- big groups of dragons. hummingbird or bird of prey.
ing, white-hot sparkly shapes, but he doesn’t “Most of the supervisors were classical 2D As with all the procedural and simulation
see well. animators who had worked at the studio for systems created for the characters, whether
Gronkle is a tubby, green dragon with tiny a long time,” Otto says, “so we persuaded the dragon or human, the animators could tweak
wings that Otto describes as a cross between studio to go back to a supervisor-per-charac- the performances. And because each dragon
14 April 2010
breathed fire differently, the riggers created

controls within the rigging system for those
performances, as well. The character effects
Authoring in Stereo
team, though, created the CG fire—seven dif- This is the fifth film stereo supervisor far away in depth. So the Happy Ratio
ferent types. The directors wanted each dragon Phil “Captain 3D” McNally has worked is a combination of these things.”
to have different fire and wanted the fire to be on and the second film at Dream- McNally uses the way photogra-
different from any fire seen before in films. Works since CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg phers manipulate camera apertures as
“We looked at movies with live-action drag- mandated that the studio would create an analogy for the way artists use the
ons and discovered that the fire tends to be the all future films in stereo 3D. As a result, tool. “We have planes within a scene,”
same propane gas explosion style,” Ring says. at DreamWorks, the minute a film moves he explains. “The artists decide which
“Propane gas makes great explosions on loca- from the storyboard stage, everyone is part is important. If it’s a close-up, they’ll
tion without setting everything on fire. But, working in stereo 3D. set a marker on the nose of a character.
we didn’t have that problem. So, we decided
to make it more dangerous.”
The effects crew primarily used Autodesk’s
Maya particles and fluids for base simulations,
with Side Effects Software’s Houdini breaking
apart things the dragons exploded. They added
color and detail via an in-house renderer.
Each dragon had its own set of effects art-
ists working on its particular style of fire. “All
the fire was independently developed,” Ring
says. “We shared some generic fire tools and
volume rendering, but we had different artists
hitting different targets, and it really paid off.”
For example, inspired by high school chem- “We worked out what authoring in The system knows the distance from
istry class experiments in which students 3D is on Monsters vs. Aliens,” McNally the nose to the camera and guides the
burned magnesium powder, Deadly Nadder’s says. “We had to get the technical gear artist on the stereo numbers.
artists twisted Maya particles into sparkly together—put the technical pipeline in The tool also made it easier for
fireworks. Similarly, particle-driven fire emit- place so we could author in 3D all the McNally and head of layout, Gil Zim-
ted from a hand-animated rock helped the way from previs—train the artists, and merman, to make creative decisions as
Gronkle turn a rock into an exploding lava so forth. So a lot of that work was in they designed the stereo experience.
ball. Houdini helped break the flaming rock getting everyone up to speed and see- “We would sit down at the beginning
apart on impact. ing that it was 100 percent successful of a sequence and work out how the
A Maya fluid simulation, on the other in terms of delivering sophisticated 3D stereo should emotionally support the
hand, streamed gas from one of the Hideous without hurting anyone.” script,” McNally says. “We had done
Zippleback’s heads. The same tool set with dif- Before work on How to Train Your this at the studio to some degree on
ferent parameters converted the gas into a fiery Dragon began, McNally went back to Monsters, but this was the first time we
explosion when the second head lit it. And, Monsters and looked at what they had could concentrate more on the emo-
Terrible Terror’s giant blowtorch used both done. “I analyzed the settings we, as tional arc than the technology.”
Maya fluids and particles. a group, had derived by sitting in the McNally offers an example, and
Red Death’s fire was perhaps the most oner- theater and deciding what we liked,” he here’s the setup: It’s a sequence where
ous. “He has smoky, dirty fire, like an oil refin- says. “Then, I came up with a little cal- Hiccup has brought down the Night
ery,” Ring says. “The fire is driven by a creature culation that’s now in our tools.” Fury. He goes into the forest to find out
500 feet long. At one point, he sets a whole fleet The calculation, which McNally where the dragon crashed. Hiccup’s
of ships on fire. So, the fire had to look big.” dubbed the “Happy Ratio”—the tool capture device has netted the dragon,
Coincidentally, a huge wildfire erupted near even comes with a smiley face—gives so Hiccup decides he’ll kill the beast
where some of the artists lived. “There were 50- artists a baseline from which to design with his little dagger, take the heart back
foot flames,” Ring says. “Some artists were evac- the stereo. “Even if an artist hasn’t to his village and prove he’s a knight.
uated out of their homes. It was on the news worked in stereo before, we can get “So as he’s gearing up to do this,”
constantly.” He and the other artists studied the consistency,” McNally says. McNally says, “we ramp up the stereo
fire to determine what made it look so big. The way it works is that the tool intensity in sync with the camera push-
“It’s about having pieces of flame breaking has default settings for the volume of in. It’s not a stereo effect we think the
off, rather than having a continuous flame,” objects in a scene and the depth of a audience will notice, but the intensity
Ring says, “and about lots of small detail. Our scene. “If we have a tennis ball float- goes up further and further. One of
old volume renderer would have bogged down ing within arm’s reach, the ball needs the shots is a close-up of Hiccup with
and crashed, so we rewrote it.” The crew ran volume because in real life we see the forest behind, and he’s standing
the base simulation for the huge fire in Maya, around the sphere,” McNally explains. with the raised dagger. At the begin-
then added details on top. “But a distant planet might be flat and ning, the stereo is set at 50 percent of
16 April 2010
modo 401® Dracula image by Rick Baker
normal. The character is a bit flat, the

background is close. He’s in our per-
sonal space a bit. As we ramp up, it
isn’t like the shot goes farther away or
comes closer, it just expands. The vol-
ume within expands. It has the effect
of the character getting closer and
the background getting farther away.
The audience feels the impact of the
sequence, the music, lighting, and
camera, but they don’t pick out what
we’re doing in stereo. We think that’s
the perfect use of stereo: adding emo-
tional intensity without drawing atten-
tion to the technique.” When Hiccup
decides he can’t kill the dragon, the
stereo drops down to be less deep
than even in a normal sequence. The
adrenaline drains from the scene.
In another sequence, Hiccup, who
At top, Ruffnut and Tuffnut face a Deadly Nadder. Note how the lighting in this shot and the lack of
is riding on the back of the dragon,
background detail focuses attention on the characters. At bottom, the gruff Viking trainer Gobber, who
does a free fall along the z axis. “They lost his limbs fighting dragons, stands out from the teenagers behind him.
do a rolling dive, like going off a roller
coaster,” Otto says, “and then they’re Beard Taming tion controls with physically-based dynamics.”
finally flying.” Although many Vikings in the film have vari- Stoick’s beard had 100 guide hairs draped
The animators working on that se- ous types of beards, Hiccup’s father Stoick has over his chest and flowing along his face. The
quence helped create the stereo 3D the mother of all beards. “His beard is prob- animators could look at the tube geometry
experience. “We want to make sure ably as complex as Shrek in his entirety,” Otto and, using a magnet, pull the curves in a spe-
the 3D experience feels truthful and points out. cific direction. “For really tricky cases, we’d
real,” Otto says. “It’s in the framing— Stoick’s beard obscures his entire upper body take the guide curves back into Maya and use
the characters have to be within the and most of his face. “His face is the beard,” the whole suite of Maya tools—sometimes dy-
frame—and in the timing. It’s how long Loofbourrow laughs. “His beard is his lips. His namic calculations, sometimes hand-animated
you play certain moments out, how you cheeks. Even his brows are hairy eyebrows. You keyframes—to get the hair-to-hair contact
allow certain depth cues to happen.” have to look at the hair to understand his per- working right,” Ring says.
In the free fall, for example, the ani- formance, to see the smile in his beard. We had A surfacing department added shader pa-
mators hold back a moment as Hic- to make sure his expressions showed through.” rameters that controlled the hairs’ shininess,
cup is finally flying, to give the audi- Riggers Doug Stanat and Sean Nolan han- kinkiness, color, and so forth, and the studio’s
ence the same thrill Hiccup felt. But dled Stoick’s face and beard rigs, working to- in-house renderer then multiplied the guide
there are other ways in which stereo gether to shape his facial expressions and make hairs into the thousands of beard hairs. The
3D has affected animation. “In 2D, sure he had follow-through on his dynamic process wasn’t always straightforward, though.
everything is about silhouette,” Otto beard. As in most hair systems, guide curves “A whole bunch of departments are involved,
says. “Stereo gives you more read- controlled the overall shape of the characters’ and sometimes they worked in parallel,” Ring
ability; it reads very differently. We’re hair and beards, with dynamics driven by the says. “So you get to the end, look at it, and the
only scratching the surface.” underlying performance creating the move- animators move a guide curve, rigging adjusts
McNally notes, for example, the ment. Usually a character effects group runs the rigging, surfacing changes a shader param-
action in animated films typically hap- the dynamics after the animators finish. Not eter—iteration after iteration.”
pens on a proscenium stage with the this time. “In this case, because we knew the One reason for the iterations was that the
characters on the left and right, and animators had to see the beard as they worked, crew created the film in stereo 3D. “This was
the action playing across the frame. we couldn’t send the beard to simulation and one of the first films in which we looked at the
“In 3D, though, we no longer have the back,” Loofbourrow says. “It had to be part of hair and fur in stereo 3D,” Loofbourrow says.
confusion of characters overlapping,” the animation process. It wasn’t fast. But, it was “All kinds of stuff can happen in a bushy beard
he says. “3D can also carry more vi- fast enough.” that you don’t see until you put on 3D glass-
sual density. In 2D, simplicity works So that the animators could see the guide es.” The problems typically happened with
better, and we spent a lot of time in curves, the modelers turned them into tubes. the guide hairs, with two guide hairs passing
the past clearing the space and sim- “That gave the animators a low-res preview of through each other—a problem exaggerated
plifying the shots. But, the more the the volume of the hair,” says Ring. “We also when the renderer interpolated the guide hairs
better in 3D. We can keep putting tried to get as much movement built into the into thousands.
stuff into the shots and it never gets rig as we could so they could see the move- “We previewed the beard in 3D as much as
confusing.” –Barbara Robertson ment. We had the ability to mix hand-anima- possible,” Loofbourrow says. “We’d slap on the
18 April 2010
CG I•Stereo n n n n
little red-blue glasses. We couldn’t see the beard

in color, but we could see the problems.”
Fifty people at DreamWorks worked on
fire and water effects, and another 20 on
cloth, hair, and fur. In addition, a lighting
crew of approximately 50 artists brought the
scenes to life using techniques from live-ac-
tion filmmaking.
Light My Fire
“One of the things we hadn’t done before was
to bring in a live-action director of photogra- Animators could control the Vikings’ hair and beards using rigs with built-in dynamic simulations.
phy,” says Ring. “This time we had Roger Dea-
kins as a visual consultant. He came in once trast, richer blacks. We threw away detail to “What I love about this film beyond the vi-
every month or two depending on his sched- concentrate on the characters and pushed the sual design,” Otto says, “is that we’re in it for the
uling and sat in on color grading, too.” live-action feel.” long haul. From beginning to end, it’s a deeply
The eight-time Oscar nominee for best cin- How to Train Your Dragon has a look and touching and charming experience. Of course,
ematography helped the team work interac- feel that’s as different from any of Dream- I’m close to it, but there’s a sequence where
tively to develop the look. “In the past, we did Works’ previous films: Madagascar, Kung Fu there is zero dialog for six minutes and the story
paintings to guide lighting and provide inspi- Panda, Shrek, Over the Hedge, Monsters vs. is told very clearly at that moment. I think the
ration,” Ring says. “We did a lot less of that on Aliens, Shark Tale, Flushed Away. In part, that’s film really hits home in regard to heart, emo-
this show and not at all for many sequences.” due to Deakins’ influence. In part to the de- tion, and charm. It’s very truthful. That’s what I
By using Maya, they could, just as Deak- sign decision to set the caricatured shapes in a like best about the film.” n
ins might do on a live-action set, put a light realistically textured world. But the result is a
outside a window or place a soft bounce card film unlike any other, and one—we expect the Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a
in a scene. “I think it really paid off for a style studio hopes—will lead to yet another success- contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can
for the film,” Ring says. “We had more con- ful franchise. be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.
April 2010 19
■ ■ ■ ■ Visual Effects
It has been less than 20 years since the origi- aged Medusa’s multiple snakes, buzzed through Harpie se-
nal Clash of the Titans stormed the box office to become quences, and smoked the Hades effects in 444 shots. Simon
the 11th highest grossing film of 1981. Legendary special Stanley-Clamp supervised a crew at Cinesite who wrestled
effects artist Ray Harryhausen, who co-produced the film, a stinging, six-minute Scorpioch battle to the ground. The
created the stop-motion magic for that feature. Moving Picture Company, piloted by Gary Brozenich, flew
This year, three visual effects studios based in London Pegasus, tackled the kraken, and splashed CG water in 220
wrangled creatures and composed environments to bring shots, many of which are in the end battle. In addition, all
Warner Bros. Pictures’ remake of the 1981 film to the the studios created environments.
screen. Directed by Louis Leterrier, the action-adventure
Framestore: Medusa, Hades, Olympus
“Normally, we do two or three things—a creature or an
environment—and lots of small effects,” says Framestore’s
Webber. “But for this film, we did probably 20 quite
different effects. The main ones were Medusa; Hades,
played by Ralph Fiennes, who turns into smoky stuff;
and the environments.”
At first look, Medusa has a massive snake body, but
her body slithers into a womanly shape, and her head has
snakes for hair. For her face, Framestore used reference
photos of the model Natalia Vodianova. “We had to try
to make the snake body merge seamlessly into a human
The floor was originally a marble map of the earth, but to give body and still feel snake-like,” Webber says. “The 50-foot
the throne room at Olympus more drama, Framestore put the snake starts changing into a human body around the hips.
gods’ feet in the clouds above a photoreal planet below with You see a slight bulge, a hint of stomach muscle, and the
mountains, forests, and a moving sea. scales smooth out. She has metal armor—a kind of metal
fantasy stars Sam Worthington (Perseus), Ralph Fiennes bra with a snake design.”
(Hades), Liam Neeson (Zeus), and a host of CG creatures, Other than snakes in her hair, the mermaid-like Medusa
including the Medusa, Harpies, witches, Pegasus, Scorpi- looks human from the upper half, but her lower body is
ochs, and the kraken. a scaly snake, not a fish. Each individually modeled scale
Nick Davis was the overall visual effects supervisor. moved with procedural animation as her skin moved. “We
Framestore effects artists, supervised by Tim Webber, man- wrote an in-house plug-in for [Autodesk’s] Maya to man-
Im
20 April 2010
Visual Effects ■ ■ ■ ■
Visual effects
studios use CG tools
to create mythic
heavens and hell for
Clash of the Titans
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

April 2010 21
n n n n Visual Effects
Medusa’s head transforms from a snake to a beautiful woman with snaky hair, and back again. with tiny statues of humans, fly over a map on
Animators at Framestore controlled the timing of the morph and the individual snakes. the floor and out through a corridor, and then
up into the clouds. We based one establishing
age the scales,” Webber says. “She was quite a a big spout like a fountain, so we used Maya shot of the exterior on a helicopter plate taken
technical challenge. She doesn’t have any dia- fluids, but mostly Houdini. For the spout, we from up in the clouds. Another was complete-
log, but we needed to give her facial expres- used different types of fluid solves and then ly CG—the clouds, the waterfalls, the moun-
sions based on Vodianova, so we had a full-on ran particles through it.” tain, the plants.”
facial animation rig.” Twice during the film, Hades and the Har- For environments, Framestore typically cre-
When Medusa petrifies people, her head pies morph into each other. The first time, the ates geometry and projects textures in Maya
changes from a beautiful woman to a scary Harpies attack soldiers and then fly together using procedural-generation techniques for
snake. “We had two models in 3D, both ani- into a spinning ball. The spinning ball be- natural landscapes. “We also did matte paint-
matable,” Webber says. “They had to morph comes the dark essence that, as it slows down, ings and used basic projections in [The Found-
one to the other, so the model could change, turns into Hades’ cape. The cape opens, and ry’s] Nuke, and built fully CG stuff with tex-
the textures could change, and the skin surface we see Ralph Fiennes, who was a bluescreen tures, lights, shaders, all completely CG,”
parameters could change. They didn’t all change element. Animators manipulated the black Webber says. For rendering, the team used
at the same time.” Hints of the snaky face re- Harpies into the spinning ball; particle simu- Pixar’s RenderMan and, for the fly-through of
mained, for example, when she morphed back lations turned the ball into smoke. the interior, Mental Images’ Mental Ray.
to a human. Animators controlled the timing The second transition starts with Hades. Knowing that shots would take place in the
for the morph and for the snakes. When he flicks his cape forward, the cape interior, Framestore was prepared to build set
“We considered procedural techniques for breaks apart and each part becomes a Harpy. extensions for the throne room and the corridor
the snakes, but ended up doing a lot of hand To make this possible, modelers built the cape leading there. On set, the floor had a marble
animation,” Webber says. “They had very in- with separate panels. Animators moved the map of the earth to illustrate the gods’ power
dividual behavior.” parts away from Hades, and then effects artists over the planet. But later, this didn’t seem oth-
Hades, too, sometimes looks human and ran a cloth simulation that responded to the erworldly enough. “We replaced it with some-
other times a dark essence. He first appears as animation. A 2D morph turned the pieces of thing much bigger,” Webber says, “a photoreal
long streams that flow through a crowd and cape into Harpies. earth with a moving sea, mountains, forests, and
join together to form a spout of black vapor In addition to the creatures, Framestore also floating clouds. The gods walked through the
with fire inside. The spout becomes a tornado created several environments—the witches’ atmosphere. They had clouds at their ankles.”
that sucks soldiers inside and then spins into mountain, set extensions for Medusa that in- After some concern that audiences might
Hades in his human—Ralph Fiennes—form cluded caverns with boiling lava and a temple wonder whether the gods would tread on
wearing a cloak. The cloak’s edges are on fire. on a hillside, the misty landscape around the villages as they walked, the artists decided to
For the dark essence, Framestore effects art- River Styx, but the most notable and biggest make the scene less real. “We made it very
ists used Maya and Side Effects’ Houdini, plus environment is Olympus. “In the opening cloudy to distract people from worrying about
volumetric rendering. “It worked differently shots of the movie, we have a massive fly- those issues,” Webber explains. “The whole
in different shots,” Webber says. “We had thin through of Olympus,” Webber points out. place became a glowing atmospheric place
tendrils, a giant column of smoke, tiny wisps, “We come down through a huge dome filled with swirling clouds. We enhanced the gods’
22 April 2010
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n n n n Visual Effects
costumes as well, to give them magical glows.” sky was rarely cloudy, the early work paid off. to his ability to go on location early. “We had
The effects artists swirled the clouds with fluid As the crew filmed the action, Sam three months,” he says. “We had to hit the
solvers and created the shapes using Render- Worthington (Perseus) fought, in close-con- ground running, and everything went to the
Man shaders. Compositors placed the gods in tact scenes, with a green-suited stuntman on a wire. So we definitely reaped the benefits of
the mist using The Foundry’s Nuke. pogo stick holding a big block. Using in-house getting out to location early—almost to the
Of all the work, Webber is especially software, Cinesite gave the director a real-time point where we’d pay to go out there ourselves.
pleased with how the crew treated Medusa. overlay of the CG scorpion onto the live-ac- The crew doesn’t like visual effects on set be-
“She was a completely CG character,” he says, tion footage during principal photography. cause we slow them down. They don’t want
“a fascinating mythical character with human For the travel montage, Cinesite inserted to get out of the way so you can do a survey.
expressions. Not many films have done photo- the palanquin-carrying scorpions into foot- So the time invested upfront pays for itself in
real human faces in close-ups, and I think she age shot in the Canary Islands, Ethiopia, and the long run.”
looks incredibly real even though obviously
she’s not. We’re proud of that.”
Cinesite: Scorpiochs
The giant CG scorpions come in 15-, 30-,
40-, and 65-foot sizes and battle the warriors
for close to six minutes. When tamed, they
become methods of transport across the des-
ert, following one another nose-to-tail like
elephants, with as many as six people at a time
riding atop in a palanquin.
For reference, the Cinesite crew filmed four
different scorpion species at a scorpion farm
and brought two large creatures back to the
studio for closer study. “The bigger they are,
the less venomous,” Stanley-Clamp says. “We
watched how they jumped, how fast they
could run, how far they could reach. We got
them to run around and follow things. We
also saw reference online of amazing fights be-
tween scorpions and rats.”
Modelers created the cinematic versions
in Autodesk’s Mudbox, and riggers worked in
Maya. “The scorpions have eight legs, so they
aren’t the typical quadruped, but we’ve done
spiders before,” Stanley-Clamp says. “The
main consideration was the palanquin.” The
riggers constrained the creature’s tail so it
couldn’t push through the palanquin, and
attached reins from the riders inside to the
Scorpioch’s mouth and claws.
(At top) Aaron Sims, character designer for the film, developed the Harpies’ design; animators at The
Leterrier planned to film the battle between Moving Picture Company gave the winged creatures their personalities. (Bottom) For Pegasus, MPC
the giant stinging creatures and the soldiers in artists put CG wings on a real horse and created a digital double.
three areas of Teide National Park (Tenerife,
the Canary Islands), so set builders arrived Wales, adding digital doubles for wide shots MPC: Pegasus, Kraken, Argos
a month early to add broken architecture to and to send people flying through the air if Although VFX supervisor Gary Brozenich
the natural environment. That gave Stanley- flung off the tail of a scorpion. began working on the film 14 months before
Clamp and a crew the opportunity to survey As the giant beasts trod along, Cinesite kicked release, from the time principal photography
the set before the shoot. “We went out a week up dust and dirt using Houdini. “We rendered ended and production started, the crew had
before filming and did a survey and reference the dust as conventional passes and moved it five months to deliver their 220 shots. “We
photos,” he says. “We had measurements and into Shake with as much depth cuing as we did a number of different things through the
a Lidar scan taken the weekend before film- could get,” Stanley-Clamp says. Although the film—CG water and ocean, everything that
ing, and we did rudimentary photogramme- studio’s core compositing tool is Apple’s Shake, was Pegasus-related, the CG Argos environ-
try. I also did HDRI photography every hour compositors also used Nuke on some difficult ment, the kraken, and the Harpies, so the end
on the hour for that week.” and dynamic shots. For tracking, they used pri- sequence was our main work.”
In addition, Stanley-Clamp took shot-specif- marily Science D Vision’s 3D-Equalizer. For Pegasus, The Moving Picture Com-
ic HDRI photographs during filming, but be- Stanley-Clamp credits the crew’s ability to pany added CG wings to footage of a horse
cause the action took place in daylight and the push through their shots so quickly in part shot on location. “Whenever he’s running on
24 April 2010
Visual Effects n n n n
textures to create new buildings in Argos.

“This is a new Greek city, so we needed new
buildings, not ruins,” Brozenich says. “The
neo-classical buildings were in better shape
The CG kraken smashes into a digital breakwater as digital water streams down 700 feet of its giant body,
than the old Greek buildings.”
and then the monster demolishes CG buildings in the city with its thrashing tentacles. MPC’s rigid-body
dynamics solver managed the destruction in these all-CG shots, which took months of development. To manage the huge city, the layout team
divided it into sections using London’s postal
the ground, we tracked and roto-animated ing out of the water, the compositors layered codes to identify areas in particular shots.
the shoulder area to tightly attach the wings,” 60 particle-cache renders. When the creature’s “When we’re looking from the kraken’s head
Brozenich explains. “We had to replace the tentacles smash into buildings, MPC’s PAPI, view, we see a third of the city, so we loaded
upper shoulder to seamlessly blend CG skin, a rigid-body dynamics solver, destroyed the that portion,” Brozenich says. “We had tens
hair, and flesh to horsehair and flesh.” structures. Because PAPI works with the stu- of thousands of pieces of geometry: props,
Because the horse could cover hundreds of dio’s Alice crowd-simulation software, they trees—32,000 trees—and God knows how
yards in a short amount of time, MPC used were even able to throw digital people into the many canopies, market stalls, streets. And
an elaborate marker system and positioned wit- mix. “We used a combination of PAPI, Flow- then on top of that are the crowds that we
ness cameras along the route. “We captured the line, Maya, Maya plug-ins, plus shaders for drove through Alice.”
horse from these static cameras to track it in 3D the water,” Brozenich says. “It took months of MPC has created cities and crowds before,
space from multiple locations,” says Brozenich. development. But, this was the first time we but this time the studio took a different ap-
“We also had Lidar scans of set pieces.” were able to render Flowline through Render- proach. “We always knew we’d have CG shots
Rather than a horse that magically flew like Man, which was a huge advantage. We could with CG characters,” Brozenich says, “the
a bird, Pegasus would build momentum on use the same HDRIs and reflection maps, and kraken, Perseus, Pegasus, crowds, the Harpies.
the ground and glide up in the air. Once in the TDs could run everything through one We wanted to make the city like any other as-
the air, the horse became a digital double, fully lighting pipeline.” set, so we lit, rendered, and treated it through
CG, performed by animators. The kraken battle takes place in Argos, the same pipeline as the creatures. That added
The enormous kraken, on the other hand, which was partially a set piece, but largely CG. complexity to the way we rendered shots, but
was always fully CG. It has crab-like claw legs, “We had one long road, a central square, and it was part of the normal lighting process. So,
a human-like torso, a reptilian head, a long tail four smaller roads off that on set,” Brozenich we didn’t need to have separate teams on the
that ends in a series of smaller tentacles, and describes. “We also had a set for a lighthouse. city. Any TD could pick up and light the city
more tentacles growing out of its back. It is ar- The rest of Argos was computer-generated.” just as he or she would light a character.”
mor-plated. When it rises from the water, the The city is in a canyon surrounded by cliffs, Whether or not these shots push the state
part that is above water is 700 feet tall. a sort of arena that extends to a large harbor— of the art of visual effects in general, Brozenich
“Rigging was quite an effort,” Brozenich the harbor from which the kraken emerges. feels the film pushed the state of the art at
says. “We built into the rig a lot of what we The crew based the cliffs on those in Tener- MPC. “We never expected to be in a position
would usually do in techanim [technical ani- ife, but rather than the existing landscape, to do a 40-second, full-CG city with an 800-
mation]. The tentacles used an FK solution the artists carved a digital gorge, used photos foot creature emerging from a CG ocean. So,
because that was the cleanest rig for the anima- of the cliffs as reference, built an ancient city in terms of the types of shots we are able to
tors, but they also went through a secondary into the cliff sides, and added a horseshoe- handle, it definitely pushed us. And, from a
pass to add wiggle and jiggle.” shaped inlet. storytelling point of view, it was a great time.”
To help the animators have something that “We photographed Malta locations to get It’s amazing that these studios created
large move through the city of Argos, the team architectural types and [locales in] Matera, Ita- most of the effects in less than six months. If
attached a speedometer to the character and the ly, to see how structures would be derived and anyone wants a good touchstone for how far
camera. “The trick was to have his perceived built into cliff sides, then presented storyboards digital effects have matured in less than 20
speed move relative to the camera move,” to Louis Leterrier and Nick Davis,” Brozenich years, comparing this remake of Clash of the
Brozenich says. “We tried to make something says. “Once they approved the storyboards, Titans to the 1981 version would be a good
that could never possibly be real seem real.” we shot individual buildings for photogram- place to start. n
When he rises from the water, particle sim- metry.” The crew shot buildings in Malta, Ma-
ulations in Scanline’s Flowline and in Maya tera, Edinburgh and Glasgow (Scotland), and Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a
stream water from the surface. During one Bath and Oxford (England)—any city with contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can
40-second shot of the creature’s full body com- neo-classical structures—and then used the be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.
April 2010 25
What is Autodesk Labs? It is a group within Autodesk that is home to innovative,
new technologies and collaborative development. Started approximately three
years ago, Labs explores technology that may be commercially relevant to custom-
ers in design—from architecture and manufacturing to film and games. The goal
of Labs is to take invented technologies and integrate them into early, experimen-
tal prototypes that the Autodesk Labs community can try out, with the goal of
determining whether the technology could be made into a product or a function
within an existing product. Basically, they strive to engage the design community
to determine whether a certain technology has value.
Recently, Brian Mathews, vice president of Autodesk Labs, sat down with CGW Brian Mathews
chief editor Karen Moltenbrey to discuss what this group does and the effects of
that work on designers around the world.
26 April 2010
Trends & Technologies n n n n
When was Labs formed? tion trials over the Web). Each of those examples started out as a tangible
There were a few different incarnations of it, but the current format prototype that evolved with customer feedback. Look at Freewheel: We
started about three and a half years ago. took the idea of allowing people to collaborate using a SaaS model; early
adopters—people who want a competitive advantage through technol-
How many people work in Labs? ogy—helped us grow it into a Web service that gets hundreds of thou-
Approximately 30, but that’s misleading since my core team coordi- sands of hits per year. These users want to know what is coming down
nates projects that leverage technology experts anywhere in the com- the line so they can shape it, form it, even before it may be practical.
pany. The virtual team is much larger and dynamically changes based
on project needs, with people rotating in and out continually.
Where is Labs located?

Because of its dynamic nature, this question is hard to answer. If we
just consider the core team, I’d say we are headquartered in San Fran-
cisco, with staff in Chicago, Phoenix, San Rafael, France, and China.
How are the groups within Labs formed?

Some projects, like Project Showroom, are created in four different
locations. The project has a lot of specialty areas in it, like high-perfor-
mance computing experts (people who know how to run clusters with
thousands of cores), content schema experts, computer graphics global
illumination experts, material science experts, Web design experts, data
center experts, and so forth. So a project like Showroom spreads into
several different areas and different teams globally.
What is the group’s goal?

Our primary goal is to engage a community of early adopters in the
development of new design technologies. Everyone in the company has
a role in innovation. Labs’ role is to sit in between our research teams
and our product teams to develop inventions into innovations: We ma-
ture horizontal technologies to prove they are ready for commercializa- Based on SaaS, Autodesk’s Project Freewheel combines a dedicated Web
tion by product teams. site and a Web service for interactively viewing design data.
Take multi-touch, for instance. Four years ago, before the iPhone
shipped or Windows 7 had multi-touch, Autodesk Labs did a bunch Where do you find these early adopters?
of “maturing” development in this area. From an invention point of Mainly through our Web site. We have a community site (http://
view, multi-touch had been around since the 1970s, when universities labs.autodesk.com). We do a daily blog, and that gets a lot of traffic.
were working on it. Several Autodesk researchers had in fact been work- We also have e-mails and newsletters. People in the know and who fol-
ing with multi-touch for decades. But, obviously, multi-touch hadn’t low technology and Autodesk—the early adopters—find us. We also
become a practical innovation. That is where Labs came in: We took do various trade shows, like Autodesk University.
something possible and attacked some of the technological and business
barriers to making it practical. We created several prototype products How do you decide what to look at?
and engaged our community of customers to gather feedback. We are My analogy is that I am the museum curator; I don’t make the art,
successful in maturing a technology when we are able to graduate a but I choose what gets shown. There are others who create technology
technology out of Labs and have a product team pick it up. that may be too risky that’s not ready for prime time, or hasn’t been
productized into a tangible prototype. Some stuff just doesn’t make the
What does Labs do, then? cut—it’s not thought provoking or doesn’t really need an early-adopter
The mission of Labs is to explore and validate new approaches to community to perfect it. Many of those technologies are handled by a
design technology through functional prototypes. Our vision, as I men- product team. I try to keep most little utilities or productivity tools out
tioned, is to engage a community of early-adopter customers in the of Labs. There are other avenues for those things.
development process. We have a lot of R&D that happens directly in
Labs, but we also take emerging technology from other parts of the What do you look for in a technology?
company and connect it to our early-adopter user community. We are looking for horizontal tools and technologies that would
In a traditional product development process, new technology is kept make designers in any discipline more productive.
secret until it hits beta. In that process, customers are only involved at the
very end, where all you can do is fix bugs. In contrast, the Labs process Are you concerned about competitors stealing your ideas?
is to take technology and involve customers in development from the That comes with being open, but it goes both ways. We’re dealing
very beginning. For example, we’ve taken emerging concepts like cloud with immature technologies where others may copy us both in what
rendering and built Project Showroom, or 3D software as a service (SaaS) works and what doesn’t work. We can be a catalyst that gets the en-
and built Project Freewheel (for viewing and sharing designs over the tire industry involved in finding answers. By being open, we’re able to
Web), or application remoting and built Project Twitch (running applica- solicit a tremendous amount of user feedback that helps us shape the
April 2010 27
n n n n Trends & Technologies
product. At the end of the day, our main goal Labs. A lot of the time these technologies be- tions. A CAD group can design the chair you
is to make a tool that works for our customers. come a feature in existing products. Some of are sitting in, but the technical publications
If we make something valuable for them, how the translators and analysis tools have shown department makes assembly instructions.
can you really lose with that? up in Inventor, Revit, and AutoCAD. Some Now with Inventor Publisher, a manufacturer
have become their own product, like Inventor can take the CAD model and augment it with
How do you deem a technology good LT. Still others we have walked away from for other information and help publish the data in
enough to graduate out of Labs? a number of reasons. For instance, three years an interactive way to its customers on the Web
Each technology is different. Once Labs has ago the picture-based visual product search or even an iPhone.
gotten rid of some of the technology speed concept was interesting but the technology
bumps, and when our engineers say the tech- wasn’t ready, and we withdrew it from the site. What about Twitch?
nology has legs, and when our customers show That is one project we have been working
interest, then product teams often say, ‘Hey, I What are some of the technologies with on for years. We saw the promise a long time
want to own that.’ That’s when we graduate great potential? ago when we did Project Freewheel. When
it and hand it off. Some technologies never Inventor Fusion, which is the idea of re- you look at SaaS applications like Google Mail
make it and are killed either because the proto- envisioning what Inventor looks like if you or others, they are a compromise when com-
type didn’t work as desired, or customers were do history-free modeling. You have direct ma- pared to their desktop equivalents. You can’t
disinterested. Failures are part of the process: nipulation. You can grab your model, like a really do 3D graphics on the Web with current
By getting user feedback early, we can free up hole, and drag it and make it bigger without standards. So we thought about how far we
engineering resources for new projects that having to go into the parametric recipe. It is could push 3D over the Web. Freewheel was a
show more promise. a lot simpler and has a much easier learning zero client; you didn’t have to install anything
Our users also pitch ideas. They usually curve. Unlike other history-free modeling sys- because it was purely HTML. We were able to
While the goal of Autodesk Labs is to graduate a technology, not every one of them finds its way into
want a new feature in a product they already a product. Above are images from Inventor Fusion, a history-free modeling concept.
have. It’s rare that they come up with a brand-
new invention of how to apply technology. tems, with this one you get the best of both do 10 frames per second of full-screen graph-
Our customers usually innovate in their own worlds since it automatically synchronizes a ics on entire cities because we would render
fields, like bridge building or airplane manu- parametric recipe, which is technologically on the server; in doing so, we did some tricks
facturing, so they bring deep domain expertise complicated. Many people said it was impos- with JPEGs and sent them down to a browser
that augments the software development skills sible or very, very difficult. It’s currently not or smart phone, where we found we could do
we have. The advantage of a large community production-perfect, but amazingly close, and some simplified 3D over the Web. We then
is that there are always people who know more that’s why it is in Labs. started doing complex user interfaces. When
than you about something. Another technology was launched at this we saw what we could do, we thought, What
past AU, Inventor Publisher. This is a stand- would CAD look like on the Web? You would
How long does it take to graduate a prod- alone technology preview. We have Inventor want perfect fidelity, zero latency, and high
uct from Labs? (for doing product design) and Design Review performance. Project Twitch came out of that.
We’ve only been around for three and a half (that allows people to review, mark up, and We investigated a lot of technologies in this
years, but if you go to the Labs Web site, there play assembly animations of what the prod- space that just fell a bit short. So while we had
are dozens of technologies that have been built uct looks like), but customers told us they still the concept for a long time, it is only recently
over that period, and there is a page that shows needed an easy-to-use tool that helps them cre- that the technology is ready.
all the technologies that have graduated from ate clear and comprehensive technical instruc- Think of Twitch as a 1000-mile-long VGA
28 April 2010
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n n n n Trends & Technologies
cable. We replaced that cable with an Ether-

net cable. People tried to do this before, but
their solutions required tons of bandwidth, or
they degraded image quality, or they buffered,
which introduces latency. While many vid-
eoconferencing systems work just fine, those
technologies don’t have the resolution and
low-latency qualities you need to remotely run
a CAD application over the Web. We need
latencies that are sub-50 msec. The best stan-
dard compression technologies out there have
about 250 msec and can eat up 10mb of band-
width for HD video. Twitch can go as low
as 3mb, with latencies as low as 10 msec. So
with Twitch, we have all the benefits of a SaaS
application—easy to implement, no capital
expenditure, collaboration, real-time data ac-
cess, data centralization—with all the benefits
of desktop software because we are running
desktop software. Project Showroom lets users mix and match product selections, textures, and colors from leading
Oh, and it runs better than your current manufacturers using a Web browser.
desktop software because we have super-tricked-
out hardware in a data center that is dedicated ing, someday we’ll do real-time simulation while players right now. Bigger companies generally
to you when you’re awake, but the price is lower you are designing. Currently, people design the run their own data centers at some scale, but
since we re-use that system while you’re asleep. building, send it out to an analysis firm; a few they have to have the machines. The equip-
Before, if someone in New York and London weeks later the results are sent back, and it either ment has to cover their peak usage, and they
wanted to collaborate, they constantly had to meets code or fails, in which case you have to have to buy enough for that one hour a year,
move their files and versions around. But if you redesign it. If we can have the analysis happen- for the worst-case scenario. The rest of the year
can just move the video around, you can leave ing in the background while you are designing it goes unused. Now with cloud computing,
the data in the data center, and you have instant so every couple of seconds you get a result back, the bigger companies can right-size the big
access to it over fibre channel. This is the first you will design a better building. data centers so they can buy based on the aver-
no-compromise SaaS solution—benefits of the age, and when the need arises, they can make
desktop with all of the power of the Web. What allowed all this innovation to occur? an API call and burst the application into EC2,
A combination of many things. Like any in- for example. It makes for a more efficient data
How does SaaS come into play? novation, it is evolution on a path. You have to center and drives the cost of computing down
SaaS is not just about doing stuff faster. You have the Internet, search engines, content that dramatically—and that drives innovation.
can now take a 1000-CPU-hour computation is in a searchable universal format, rendering, Moore’s Law has computing power dou-
and run it on one machine for 1000 hours and and simulation technology. All this informa- bling every 18 months. Now we are seeing
it costs the same as if you ran it on 1000 com- tion has to be written in such a way that it can Moore’s Law to the third dimension with cloud
puters for one hour. In the past, that was not be done in parallel over multiple cores rather computing. Moore’s Law has always been two
the case. You can now rent supercomputers in than just faster single cores, an operating sys- dimensional—two dimensions on a chip, a
the cloud by the second, giving you access to tem that can manage a large number of cores, two-dimensional surface. In a data center, you
compute power you never had before. One and network implications. Most Web appli- can stack computers into the third dimension
example of this is Showroom. Imagine laying cations use redundant components, and it is and you get a different Moore’s Law through
out a kitchen floor plan and getting a physi- very expensive. That is how most Web hard- Web access. So the cost of computing is going
cally accurate photorealistic rendering in four ware is built—expensive and reliable. That’s down, and that has implications across all our
seconds. Normally that would take four CPU great for normal Web apps. But when you get lives—entertainment, medical, and so forth.
hours, but with 2000 cores, you can squeeze into cloud computation, you no longer want
that into four seconds. The Project Showroom to use the same approach; you want the soft- Is this invention or innovation?
concept is about letting you do really high- ware to be fault tolerant, not the hardware. In What really counts is innovation, not just
quality rendering in near real time by using this way, you can buy much cheaper hardware. invention. Invention is great, but until you
thousands of cores. Technically, writing soft- That is another innovation—you get the price innovate about how to use it and solve a real-
ware for that is different than how you write down, and then you need a business model. world problem with a real-world delivery plat-
desktop software. Most people cannot run their own big super- form, invention is only intellectually interest-
At Labs, I look at our recently acquired anal- computer centers, and that is where Microsoft ing for us geeks. But innovation is where the
ysis, simulation, and visualization technologies, Azure and Amazon EC2 come in—they offer productivity gains come from. It is how you
and consider how to adapt all those engines into computers that are rentable on-demand and bring sometimes-old ideas together to solve
a supercomputer in the cloud. If you want to priced by the minute. real-world problems, and you’ve got to involve
design a green building or a sustainable build- These services are all focused at the small the customer in the process. n
30 April 2010
A Special Thank You!
To All of Our Friends For Sponsoring our
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32 April 2010
Architecture ■ ■ ■ ■
When Barnaby Gunning was a youngster, he, did not dictate specifics of what he wanted
like so many children, played with LEGOs, in the building, but rather left it up to Gun-
using the small, colorful, plastic bricks to ning. “He wanted us to build a house made of
build a multitude of objects. Who would have LEGOs, not just make a model of a house,”
imagined that, many years later, he would be adds Gunning. “Oftentimes LEGOs are used
playing with LEGOs once again, only this to build a representation of something else.
time using millions of them to construct a So the obvious thing would have been for
life-size, multi-room house—including a him to say, ‘Here is a house I like, make it
kitchen, bath, living room, and bedroom, out of LEGOs please.’ ” He did not do that,
complete with fixtures and furniture, and all much to Gunning’s delight.
made with none other than LEGOs. May’s hands-off approach was ideal for a
Gunning, a principal at Barnaby Gunning number of reasons. “LEGOs are a construc-
Architects in the UK, designed and helped tion toy, and you can’t just scale up some-
build the LEGO house for the BBC television thing,” says Gunning. “And when you start
series James May’s Toy Stories, in which ambi- making something at full scale, the nature of
tious projects are created using popular toys. the full-scale [object] will be determined by
The project, however, was far from child’s the building material, in this case LEGOs.
play, requiring a great deal of digital design We needed to find out what we could do and
work and planning before construction on not do with LEGOs, and then determine
the unique structure could begin. how to put three million bricks together in
Always up for an adventurous project, Gun- less than three months’ time.”
ning received a call several months ago from a
former colleague who told him about the TV
crew’s plans. “As architects, we are interested
in systems and how you can construct build-
ings,” Gunning says of his firm. He spoke to
the series’ producers and was surprised when,
a few months later, he received a phone call
asking him to join the effort.
As if building a house from LEGOs wasn’t
challenging enough, the project was ham-
pered even more so due to the broadcast. “It’s
one thing to build a house in which the time
scale is sort of determined by deliverables,
but with a TV show, the whole thing has to
be juggled around their [filming] schedule,”
Gunning says. From early discussion to air-
date was just three months—not even enough
time to construct a regular house. This home,
however, was far from “regular.”
Because the clock was already ticking for (Left) Architect Barnaby Gunning used
the TV producers, they had ordered the Luxology’s Modo to plan the LEGO house;
LEGOs for the project before Gunning (above) the completed structure at the
building site.
signed on—approximately three million of
them, which equated to a week of produc-
tion at the factory. “They ordered the stan- Design Concepts
dard LEGO bricks online,” says Gunning, When Plum Pictures, the series’ production
“350,000 of this one, 250,000 of that one….” company, had approached Gunning, the
To determine the amounts, the crew built a LEGOs had not yet arrived. To get an idea
toy-scale house (about a foot long and five to of what he would be dealing with and to de-
six inches high), and calculated the number sign the unusual structure, the architect made
of bricks that would be needed if that model a virtual LEGO set within Modo, Luxology’s
were scaled to full size. 3D modeling and sculpting software. “I al-
As to not influence Gunning’s design, ways use computer modeling as a way to test
the small model—a single-story house with out ideas,” says Gunning, whose previous
a roof and terrace—was not shown to the projects include the British Museum Great
architect and his firm. Moreover, when the Court, The Esplanade Theatre Shells in Sin-
designer met with the TV presenter, James gapore, and numerous private houses in the
May, he was pleasantly surprised that the host UK. “I am of the generation of architects who
April 2010 33
n n n n Architecture
started using 3D modeling to show ideas.” Well over three million LEGO bricks were used to build the full-scale house. Some pieces, such as
Throughout his career, Gunning had tried the people figures (top, left), were donated by the public. Other pieces were used for constructing the
exterior and interior (top right).
various software programs prior to standard-
izing on Modo in 2004. “I was excited be- Gunning also used Modo to create basic ning recalls. “We realized then how we could
cause finally there was a 21st century 3D components for the house, each containing get the floors in and a roof on the house. It was
modeling program that didn’t have all this several hundred LEGO pieces. In essence, the more straightforward than we had expected.”
bloated code floating around in the back- LEGO house would comprise thousands of In actual construction, finite-element anal-
ground,” Gunning says. “I can fly around, smaller “houses,” some with windows, some ysis is used to determine the limitations of the
play with the design, change bits and pieces, serving as roof pyramids, and some as hollow building materials. But because LEGO is not a
and the results are immediate.” blocks that would be used for the structural known building material, it would have taken
For this project, as he does for all his archi- beams. With Modo, Gunning was able to ex- upwards of a year to do the proper research
tectural endeavors, Gunning drew concepts by plain how to create prototype components that and analysis. With only three months to get
hand and modeled them in Modo, moving would be tested, and then later, how the ap- the house designed and built, the architects
back and forth between the drawings and the proved components should be assembled and had to come up with an alternate solution.
3D model. “My current dissatisfaction is in the combined to complete the overall structure. Tests on individual bricks provided some of
lack of tight linkage between Modo and the The software also enabled the crew to de- the required information, and large-scale pro-
drafting program we use, [Nemetschek’s] Vec- sign a pleasing outside aesthetic with the totyping helped determine what worked and
torworks. The program is okay, but I feel like I multi-colored bricks. Initially, the group did what did not. “The best way of working out
am using systems from two different millennia Modo renderings with random bricks, which what we could do structurally with the LEGOs
and not getting the most out of it,” he says. was what May had in mind. “It just looked was to test the big components and the beams,
For the LEGO house, Gunning used Modo mad,” Gunning says. “Instead, working with and see what happened.” They began building
to not only get a feel for the design, but to com- the interior designer Christina Fallah, we came beams that could span two meters (about six
municate the concepts easily and efficiently. up with a design that emphasized stripes, giv- to seven feet). This was met with a variety of
Usually that is in the form of presentations to ing it a bold, graphically strong look.” “exciting” experiences, with the early versions
clients, but in this scenario, the use was twofold: collapsing easily.
to generate an overall design and explore the Construction Plans “We played around with this undulating
layout of the house, and to convey the unique According to Gunning, Modo gave the de- wall plan, but when we mocked that up, it was
instructions for assembling the LEGO bricks sign team a feel for the material quality of the a bit too flexible,” Gunning recalls. “One eve-
into blocks, or components. Both required the LEGOs in a large-scale structure well before ning we loaded up a whole section mockup of
ability to quickly duplicate instances of geom- any components were assembled. LEGOs are the building, with over half a ton of material,
etry, and to accomplish that, Gunning’s group quite strong, he says, and when they are pieced until the beams collapsed. There were thousands
wrote a number of Python scripts to generate together, they stay together nicely. (The larger, of LEGOs on the floor,” recalls Gunning. “All
the larger bits and pieces of the house. chunkier LEGOs are less sturdy when joined the LEGOs were fine, so we just picked them
For instance, “creating instructions for build- together.) However, LEGOs can be pulled up and made something else with them.”
ing the roof pyramids could have been time apart by a three-year-old quite easily. “That The trick, though, was to conserve the num-
consuming, but instead we were able to write makes it difficult to use LEGOs for most con- ber of bricks being used while making the
a simple script that created the roof pyramids ventional building projects,” he adds. structure secure. After a month, the group had
quickly from our virtual LEGO set,” Gunning To determine the exact limitations of this redesigned the building using hollowed blocks
explains. “It can get confusing counting bricks novel building material, Gunning contacted that could support James May’s weight as he
on something like that because on each course Neil Thomas and Eva Wates of structural walked around the house. However, the pro-
there is a different amount of bricks, and you engineers Atelier One; they had pointed out, duction company’s insurers would not allow
just can’t say, ‘I am adding two bricks here each “quite surprisingly,” Gunning adds, that while construction to start unless a parallel timber
time.’ You need to know which types of bricks you can pull the bricks apart easily, there were frame was “sleeved” by the hollow segments.
you are adding each time you do so. Know- a number of LEGO plates that have amazing “We then had to redesign the house again to
ing what the logic of the structure was, I could tensile strength. “Neil suggested how we could make it work with the timber columns,” says
generate the whole of the pyramid, and at the build beams with a system of hollow bricks Gunning. “Making the timber coordinate with
same time, the script could tell me how many and joists that played to the compression the LEGO was difficult; the timber column
and what types of bricks were in it.” strength of the bricks and the plates,” Gun- could hit the LEGOs and damage them.”
34 April 2010
Architecture n n n n
Building Blocks 3000 people answered the call to assemble cur, requiring the crew to put the blocks back
The house was designed around the maximum the bricks into components, each of which together again. “And when things didn’t go
space the architects could create within the were about a foot long and half a foot wide, right, you could just take apart a few bricks
limitations of the structural system, which was and eight courses of bricks high, “something and put them together again,” he adds.
seven feet wide—not very big. “We had grand young kids can put together quickly without In the end, the two-story house contained
ambitions of creating a house where you don’t much difficulty,” Gunning says. In a single large windows, a huge staircase, and hinged
feel hemmed in by this kind of dimension. We day, 3000 components were made, “which doors, a working toilet (with basic plumb-
played around with the 3D organization of meant that we had half the house built,” he ing), and a shower. The rooms were furnished,
it in Modo, and came up with a surprisingly adds. The components were small enough to down to the cutlery, plates, and pots and pans
spacious living room, bedroom area, big win- move around, yet were not especially fragile. in the kitchen—all made of LEGOs. Unfor-
dows looking out to the vineyard, a kitchen, Some components were used for the walls, tunately, some of the furniture fell apart when
bath… all the things you need to live in it,” some even with windows in them, while oth- used, but the goal was achieved nevertheless.
says Gunning. ers formed the roof. So, what was the most daunting aspect of this
Throughout the design and construction Modo helped the group relay the com- project? “It was that moment when I realized
phases, the group had to maintain an accurate plex instructions to the public. “You need to that three million LEGOs is a lot of LEGOs,”
count on the number of LEGO bricks being explain to people who have no knowledge Gunning recalls. “The challenge was then get-
used. “We had to make the house as big as pos-
sible with the limited number of LEGOs we
Careful planning within Modo was necessary to

ensure that the crew did not run out of LEGOs.
Also, the architect used the software to come up
with an optimal design for the overall structure
and the furnishings inside.
had,” says Gunning. Often this was a delicate about building how to put the components ting them put together in way that you don’t
balancing act. The team had to avoid making together,” he says. “It was important to gener- end up having to do it hundreds of times.”
the walls too thin from a structural point of ate clear, concise instructions, which we did in The house was completed in the given
view, yet not make it too thick because too many Modo. A few times we did not do that, and timeframe, and it took almost two weeks af-
LEGOs would be used in the process. The tim- we had to have them redo the sections three to ter completion before May and the film crew
ber insertion, while difficult to manage, provid- four times until they got them right.” could record the sequence, which included
ed the necessary structural depth while utilizing Realizing they were low on LEGOs, the May spending the night in the LEGO house.
a single-brick layer design for the beams. group asked the public to donate bricks to the While sturdy, the house was not 100 percent
Alas, after the design was completed, the cause, and most of the donated pieces were waterproof. “LEGOs are not ideal for long-
group did a quick calculation and realized that used to augment the original number. Though time construction,” Gunning notes.
at least six months of construction work would not usable for load-bearing construction, many That was certainly the case here. After film-
be needed to assemble the LEGOs. “We would of the tiny bricks that were donated were used ing the segment, the house was demolished,
need a lot of people, and you cannot have that to construct a striking stained-glass window at despite public outcry and a Facebook cam-
on a construction site. It’s way too dangerous,” the top of the stairs. paign to save it, and the bricks were donated
Gunning says. “We had to think about how Unlike at LEGOland, the house bricks to LEGOland for use in fundraising events for
we could create something that was clearly a were not glued together because of the time charity. Still, the project appears to be the larg-
LEGO building and constructible within the crunch. “The real nightmare was someone est LEGO construction to date, one for the
timeframe and still have some magic to it.” breaking things that were already made. Our record books. “I can say that in all my career,
The answer was to use components: beams risk was building the house several times over I have never done anything quite like this, nor
and blocks would form the wall elements and because of broken pieces,” explains Gunning. am I likely to do it again,” Gunning says with
could be made easily by the public and then A dedicated construction team spent about six a chuckle. n
transported to the site, while little “houses” weeks assembling the various components at
would be used to make the large house. the building site and constructing remaining Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer
An announcement was made, and nearly components. Indeed, some breakage did oc- Graphics World.
April 2010 35
Unleashed: The Art of Naughty Dog
When you mention the name Naughty Dog, what comes art at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects’ on-campus display their works. Most galleries in Los Angeles focus
to mind is a range of imagery—from the cartoon look of gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibit features approximately on fine art, leaving the entertainment artists with few
Crash Bandicoot and anime look of Jak and Daxter, to 30 pieces, which range from traditional and digital sculp- available venues. “To me, the artists we know who are
the painterly style and graphically detailed look of the ture, to photography, to matte paintings, and more. focused on games and entertainment are among the
widely popular Uncharted and Uncharted 2. The talent “Naughty Dog obviously has been around for many years most talented in the world, and I think many others feel
of the artists behind those highly acclaimed titles is as and has always been a top game studio. The quality and the same way,” says Alvarez. “That is why we decided to
diversified in genre and medium as the aesthetics of the caliber of the work they are doing as a team just gets put this gallery together.”
game art they create. Collectively, they produce amazing higher and higher,” says Gnomon founder Alex Alvarez. Former student Melissa Altobello, now at Naughty Dog,
works admired throughout the computer game industry. “Now we get to see their personal art, who they are as had approached Alvarez about featuring pieces from her
Individually, they are artisans, pursuing their own passion individuals.” The gallery artwork is strictly personal work, colleagues at the school. “I think it is inspiring for the
outside of the work arena with the same intensity and he adds, though many continue to do fantasy art that has a students to see this caliber of artwork that the profes-
creativity they illustrate daily at their desk. fantastical, sci-fi feel and vibe—some more so than others. sionals are doing. It gives them a target and shows them
Now, the public has the opportunity to see the scope Gnomon opened its gallery a few years ago, enabling a why they are at the school,” he says.
of their talent that transcends the video game arena, as number of talented folks—many who lecture and teach at A selection of images from the Naughty Dog group is
a number of these Naughty Dog colleagues display their the school or work on DVDs for The Gnomon Workshop—to presented on these two pages. –Karen Moltenbrey
36 April 2010
OPPOSITE PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT
Buggle Takeoff Shaddy Safadi was inspired
for this piece while trekking in Northern Borneo,
where she visited Deer Cave.
The Life Giver An all-digital piece by Genesis
Prado. “I was trying to portray how the nymphs
of the forest give and take life as an example of
a cycle of life. I wanted to portray life as some-
thing to be cherished and not taken for granted.”
Annapurna Base Camp Carlos Gonzalez-
Ochoa’s panorama of the Annapurna South
mountain at sunrise. Photos from the trip were
heavily used as reference for Uncharted 2.
THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

Home Sweet Home Melissa Altobello created
this piece wherein the ground crumbled away, in
a nod to the recent natural disasters.
Sam A digital photograph that was part of a
lighting experiment by Hong Ly.
Steam Punk Village A painting by Robh
Ruppel following completion of Uncharted 2.
Escape #1 Andrew Kim strived for a simple
but dynamic scene in a steampunk/sci-fi style.
Strong diagonal lines in perspective made this
possible, and a simple background made the
characters/objects stand out.
April 2010 37
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38 38 April 2010
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