Marc’s Blog

Education: Connecting Students and Industry

Area Editor — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 20:00:00 UTC

Education is huge priority at Autodesk across every vertical market we serve – not only at the university or professional level, but also in elementary and secondary levels, where computer graphics can help spark deeper interests in math, physics, science, visual arts and more. In M&E, we’ve been involved in many education initiatives—some that AREA readers might be aware of and others that may be new to you.

This fall we’ll be sponsoring the Visual Effects Society (VES) Student Award once again. The award was developed in response to a challenge posed by director Steven Spielberg in his 2008 acceptance speech for the VES Lifetime Achievement Award. In the speech he called upon the community to start recognizing the amazing visual effects work completed by students, because “they are the future.”

In response to Spielberg’s challenge the VES Student Award, a joint collaboration by VES and Autodesk, was born to recognize outstanding visual effects in a student project. In a video interview introducing the award for the first time, Spielberg congratulated both the VES and Autodesk for our efforts in stepping up to make the award a reality.

The collaboration has proven so successful that we recently signed an agreement to support the award for the next three years. We’re really committed to not only training students in 3D animation, visual effects, game development, design visualization and more, but also to giving them a platform to expose their work to industry influencers.

Thus far, the VES Student Awards has proven to be a very effective launchpad for new talent. Last year’s winners were given the chance to meet film director Christopher Nolan, and two years prior, the winners received one-on-one time with director James Cameron.

Jan Bitzer, ILIja Brunck, Csaba Letay, Fabian Pross and Regina Welker, former Filmakademie students, won the award last year for “Loom” and have since then leveraged their success to launch Polynoid, a new production company. Thilo Ewers, who won the award just two years ago, is now working at Pixomondo as an entertainment supervisor, matte painter and lead environment artist.

We’re continually trying to put as many opportunities as possible in front of students to connect them with industry leaders and garner real-world experience. It’s opportunities like the CG Whiz competition, hosted by Escape Studios and The Mill, and sponsored in part by Autodesk, that give students a chance to turn their time and efforts into tangible experience for their resumes. The winners will be awarded with amazing internship opportunities and the opportunity to have their work seen by thousands of professionals across Escape and Autodesk’s social media properties.

Autodesk has also been an active sponsor of the SIGGRAPH volunteer program, which gives students the opportunity to gain an inside track during the annual conference, and the chance to meet some of the greatest thought leaders in computer graphics, VFX and animation. Anyone can apply to volunteer. Back in 2009, Autodesk launched the Panorama student contest, which this year takes place in conjunction with SIGGRAPH ASIA in December 2011. We have also supported an annual robotics competition that encourages secondary students to brainstorm, design and animate projects with the help of Autodesk tools, and we have been an active sponsor with the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), which hosts events for both professional and aspiring game developers.

All of these opportunities are open to students around the world and only require interest, an application and dedication to follow through. There’s really no excuse not to get involved, especially since the software needed to create content for these competitions is available to students to learn and use for free through the Autodesk Education Community.

At Autodesk, we have a mandate to connect students to the industry. We’re consistently promoting events on the AREA and Autodesk Education Community , giving students a chance to become involved. I’m often approached by students with aspirations to join the exciting worlds of game development, animation or visual effects for professional advice. There are plenty of opportunities out there for great talent, but it’s not enough to just take classes—it’s essential they get active in the community early on and there are more ways now than ever to do just that.

The VFX Legacy of Harry Potter

Area Editor — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:00:00 UTC

The ‘boy-who-lived’ first graced the silver screen in November 2001, bringing J.K. Rowling’s literary wizarding world to life. Potter-mania was in full force and fans of the books eagerly lined up to see how the magical adventures would play out in the theater. Ten years and over $ 6B in box office later, the fantastical franchise concludes with the bittersweet release of the eighth and final film, not to mention a bona fide box office smash hit, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II.

As Harry, Ron and Hermione faced the increasing difficulties of navigating adolescence while battling the malevolent, power-obsessed dark wizard, Lord Voldemort, the visual effects (vfx) teams bringing the tales to life were equally challenged to improve their techniques, making the effects of each installment even better and more believable.

We saw Quidditch players hop on their brooms to take to the skies, the whomping willow pummel Arthur Weasley’s flying Ford Anglia (narrowly missing the fearless trio), soul-sucking Dementors and terrifying mermaids hinder the progress of the Tri-Wizard tournament competitors. Such impressive visuals along with Grawp’s realistic facial movements, Dumbledore’s ring of fire, house-elves and an entirely CG Hogwarts illustrate just how far technological advancement and innovation have taken the vfx industry over the last decade.

A number of illustrious studios have played a part in bringing the Harry Potter world to life, many of them Autodesk customers. Cinesite, Framestore and The Motion Picture Company (MPC) worked on all eight of the films. Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) contributed to the first six films. Double Negative provided vfx for films three through eight while Rising Sun Pictures was brought on for the fourth film and beyond. Other significant contributors to the franchise include Baseblack, Luma Pictures, The Orphanage, and Rhythm & Hues, among many others.

At Autodesk, we have been in awe of the visual achievements in this franchise that has not only set an incredibly high bar for VFX, but also for how great books are adapted for the big screen without losing their signature magic. To date, two of the films, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, have garnered Academy Award nominations for excellence in visual effects; and current buzz indicates the final installment may well be a contender for the 2012 awards.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I featured a plethora of impressive work from MPC, Framestore, Baseblack, Cinesite, Double Negative and Rising Sun Pictures who digitally created a host of otherworldly characters and effects. Framestore used Maya as the principal tool for modeling, rigging and animation. By writing a suite of rigging and animation tools, Maya enabled Framestore’s animators to bring Dobby and Kreacher to life. Maya was also the backbone of for Baseblack’s 80 3D shots in the film.

The critically praised third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was the first Harry Potter film released in IMAX and the last Harry Potter film available on VHS. It also was the film that introduced viewers to the terrifying Dementors. ILM used Inferno to help create the opening train scene during which Harry's soul is sucked out of his body. Cinesite also used Inferno in many of their memorable shots.

Each of the eight films feature impressive vfx, but the exciting, eagerly awaited conclusion to the series just might finally be the ticket to vfx Oscar gold. Perhaps the best vfx scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II includes the fire-breathing dragon in Gringotts bank. The realism of the infuriated mythical creature completely draws the audience into the moment. Ghosts and stone castle knights come alive on screen in a way that was only possible in our imaginations not too long ago. Of course the epic standoffs of flame-shooting wands and magical enchantments that have been a stalwart of the series are once again present though elevated to a quality that surpasses all other efforts, and Voldemort's sinister visage will no doubt remain burned in the mind of moviegoers long after the credits roll.

I have thoroughly enjoyed watching the Harry Potter phenomenon unfold over the years and witnessing the profound impact it has had on all facets of our Muggle world. Each film further pushed the boundaries of the vfx industry in character design, atmospheric effects and countless other ways. Most importantly, all the many pieces – acting, directing, vfx, etc – were seamlessly combined to ultimately form a beautiful, highly successful and authentic adaptation of a much loved book series. Harry Potter will surely be missed, but the lessons learned whilst bringing his story to life will undoubtedly benefit the next great tale to make the leap on to film.

Watching WebGL

Area Editor — Tue, 31 May 2011 20:00:00 UTC

Engineers have been tackling the complex technical challenge of bringing GPU hardware acceleration into web browsers to enable great looking 3D content on the web. It’s a logical effort since GPUs are now for the most part ubiquitous on all modern computers. With browser wars heating up, along with efforts to provide more robust online experiences, we’re seeing some interesting new technologies taking center stage.

Furthermore, HTML5 delivers on the promise of delivering an app-like user experience but without the constraints of an app-store framework, right through web serving which is perfect for tablets and mobile!

WebGL enables GPU acceleration and is proving to have the potential to unlock a great opportunity for sharing and generating high-quality interactive 3D content online.

Early demos of WebGL implementations showcase the possibility of having real-time engines to drive 3D graphics in the web browser by tapping into the GPU. As technologies like WebGL take hold, we see the barriers for impressive 3D content on the web breaking wide open.

At Autodesk, we’ve eagerly anticipated the maturing of API standards in frameworks like WebGL because the more mainstream they become, the easier it will be for great 3D content to proliferate online.

As Autodesk senior software engineer Antonio Licon has been blogging, we’ve been experimenting with ways to view robust 3D files directly in web browsers tapping technologies like HTML 5, SVG and WebGL. We’ve been getting very interesting results, and WebGL is proving to be a great framework for 3D applications on the web.

Google also recently released a very interesting video talk that went into further detail about how they’ve managed to move shaders onto the GPU in Chrome using WebGL—and demonstrated thousands of objects running in a scene at 50 frames per second. These are early developments, but very promising.

As popularity of these technologies rise, we see an exciting new publishing target for our customers. . Both Flash/Molehill and HTML5/WebGL promise to give you, our users new opportunities to create new genres of interactive 3D content for the web, either for entertainment (games) or for marketing and advertising. If one day every frame of a web page or an app served through the web is able to deliver the visual experience of a games console, we anticipate that our customers will be at the forefront of creating some amazing new experiences online!

Rock on,

@mpetit

Project Skyline: Bringing Artistry Into Game Runtime

Area Editor — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:00:00 UTC

For the past three years we’ve been hard at work developing a new technology dubbed Project Skyline. We previewed Project Skyline at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and were relieved to see that you responded with as much enthusiasm as we’ve had about it ourselves. Despite copious hours of research with our customers and countless interviews with artists, TDs and programmers in the field before diving into Project Skyline R&D, it’s always nerve wracking to debut a new piece of technology that you feel so passionately about — so much so that I literally came away from GDC and my first thought was “PHEW”! The concepts were incredibly well received.

Project Skyline’s roots go back to something we’ve been witnessing in the industry for a long time — what we call the ‘Tale of Two Pipelines,’ or the fracture in the game development pipeline between creating content, and game engine runtime. There are many great tools available for creating content; artists are well served in this process. When you think about it, there should also be an equally abundant amount of tools available for creating game play, because game design is a highly creative process that’s essentially interactive storytelling. But in fact, this is an area that’s one of the least serviced in terms of tools — a lot of gameplay and game editing is done by engineers using C++ compilers — not a very creative or interactive process at all.

We’ve culminated our vision to extend good tools for creating assets, into creating tools for the gameplay itself — and not only tools that will help people work more creatively, but also standardized tools that can help teams work more productively. Allowing our customers to be more productive is a huge priority as there is a massive profitability problem in game development these days as evidenced by many recent facility closures and large-scale layoffs.

It’s hard to harness the complexity of a game when you cannot iterate quickly on an idea or vision. So the story we revealed at GDC was the notion of using Maya, a standard content creation tool and a known visual language, together with Softimage ICE-like visual programming technology to make the gameplay and game editing process interactive. This allows artists and game developers to debug gameplay directly in the game engine in real-time, enabling a live connection between creative assets and runtime, a key missing link in the game development process.

There are others who have attempted to solve this problem by providing a prescriptive approach to runtime — a cookie cutter range of gameplay actions. Our vision is different. We realize that the way game developers differentiate themselves, whether developing for consoles or mobile devices, is through runtime. The runtime of a game is where a lot of the amazing innovation happens in this medium. So while Project Skyline aims to standardize the toolset, we’re not trying to dictate what happens in runtime.

As a result, all of the values we brought to the asset creation space are being ported to gameplay as well. This has also been bolstered significantly by our recent acquisition of Scaleform, a leading provider of Flash-based UI tools and middleware for the videogames market. With Project Skyline, we’re demonstrating how you can interactively create and debug gameplay animation using Maya in real-time. And with Scaleform, we’re illustrating how this vision extends to UI editing and the creation of mobile and casual games, because Scaleform GFx 4.0 is the de facto high performance 2D game engine out there for those developers.

Our aim is to simplify the game development process for our customers, increase their performance, productivity and ultimately profitability from console to mobile and casual game platforms. We’re also looking forward to seeing how our customers in film, broadcast and animation will tap Project Skyline for real-time interactivity in pre-viz and conceptual stages of their productions.

As you can tell, I’m pretty excited about all of this. Project Skyline has potential to change the way games are being made—and with adoption, help bolster the game development model into a sustainable and profitable business for companies of all sizes.

You can check out a demo of Project Skyline here: http://area.autodesk.com/gdc2011/pd_gameprev

Award Season Musings

Area Editor — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 19:00:00 UTC

Awards season is upon us. It’s been an interesting year for animation and visual effects. We’ve seen the maturation of the industry as a whole. There has been evidence in this year’s visual effects nominations of a more artful use of visual effects in service to a story, and animation is being recognized in the Best Picture category with Toy Story 3—these are all exciting developments for digital artists and for readers of our AREA blog.

This year’s five Academy VFX nominees are wide-ranging in subject matter, visual style and use of visual effects.

Inception gave us fantastical dreamscapes and physics-bending sequences that blended live-action with CG. Iron Man 2 once again showed that digital effects make the impossible possible. The Harry Potter franchise always nails VFX, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was no exception. Alice in Wonderland bore the unmistakable mark of director Tim Burton, with a 3D conversion that yielded quite impressive results. Hereafter’s tsunami sequence demonstrated amazing fluid simulations plunging viewers into an experience that felt frighteningly real and immersive.

This year’s nominees reflect interesting developments in visual effects, in particular the use of VFX in service of the story. We saw this most clearly in the nomination of Hereafter, but also in films like Black Swan, in which the VFX added flourish to the story, but didn’t drive the film. Yet Darren Aronofsky’s tale couldn’t be told without the VFX.

And while Black Swan isn’t competing for a VFX Academy Award, it’s in contention for several other Oscars and a BAFTA Award in the visual effects category, and the film’s effects are getting praise for their beautiful and effective subtlety. Black Swan also points to the pervasiveness of visual effects, which touches so much of what we see in cinema today, visual effects-driven tentpoles and indie arthouse movies alike.

VES Student Awards

One of the highlights of awards season for us is the VES Awards, where so many of our longtime customers -- true artistic innovators -- are honored by their peers. This year marks the ninth annual VES Awards and the third time Autodesk has sponsored the VES Student Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in visual effects on any project that was created by a student or group of students while attending an accredited school.

This year the VES received entries from around the globe, and the final selected nominees hailed from universities in New Zealand, Germany and France. While not a requirement for submission, each of the four finalist nominees used Autodesk tools to create their short films.

This year’s winning student entry was “LOOM” created by Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck, Csaba Letay, Fabian Pross and Regina Welker of Film Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany. Using Softimage they filmmakers created a beautiful short of featuring a photo-real moth stuck in a tangled web as it meets a menacing spider.

Nominees included “Time for Change” and “Das Tub”; both entries were created by Rupert Ashton, Priyan Jayamaha, Junying Xu and Kristen Dale Pretorious, students from the Media Design School in Auckland, New Zealand using Maya. “Nuisible(s)” by Erick Hupin, Baptiste Ode, Phillippe Puech and Pierre Nahoum of the Artfx School in France also used Maya in their nominated short. We congratulate all of these very talented filmmakers and look forward to seeing what’s to come from them as they enter the professional market.

This year’s Academy Awards and VES Student Award nominees represent the coming together of artistry, tools, techniques and passion. It’s been a fascinating year, what with an animated film being nominated for Best Picture, and the presence of a non-VFX movie in the VFX Oscar category. These examples point to the further democratization of the VFX industry with visual effects talent in ever part of the world. We see this especially in the incredible breadth of student work. Just a few copies of Maya and a handful of artists is all it takes to achieve visual effects and animation work on par with what is being pumped out by top creative talent in the film industry today.

2010 Reflections and Looking Ahead

Area Editor — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 19:00:00 UTC

It’s that time of year when we look back at how far we’ve come and evaluate the goals we’re setting for the next year. While the economic hurdles of 2009 posed many challenges, 2010 is proof that the industry is on the mend.

Audiences swarmed to theatres donning 3D glasses looking for films that recreated the magical experience of “Avatar” and enthusiasts are banking on the much anticipated “Tron: Legacy” to deliver another epic 3D ride. If you attended Autodesk University last week you saw Digital Domain’s CEO, Cliff Plumer, present clips from the film ahead of its December 17th release date. All of us at Autodesk — and by the sound of it, all in attendance — were very excited about this preview.

2011 Releases Made a Mark
2010 marked a number of memorable moments for Autodesk, including the release of our 2011 product line, which was met with great enthusiasm. Our new digital entertainment creation (DEC) software releases showed performance, productivity and efficiency gains across the content creation spectrum, a fact validated in studies from Pfeiffer Consulting that revealed an ROI of up to nearly 20%, close to 20,000 USD per year, per 3ds Max or Maya workstation!

This year we also saw the continuing trend of animation and visual effects work moving around the globe and a corresponding adoption of distributed collaborative pipelines to address the need. This trend has also encouraged artists worldwide to become more multidisciplinary rather than specializing in one niche aspect of CG or visual effects creation. To help all Autodesk artists, we announced the 2011 Entertainment Creation Suites Premium at Siggraph, which combines Maya or 3ds Max with Softimage, Mudbox, MotionBuilder, Turtle and Lagoa Multiphyiscs –simplifying workflows and helping artists to extend their skillsets.

Customers’ quick adoption of the Suites verified the need for interoperability, integration and workflow simplification. Making our tools work better together and improving ease of use is helping to pave the way towards standardization in the way people implement their workflows, further simplifying project deployment across facilities and oceans.

The past year was also a great one for our creative finishing solutions with the 2011 releases of Flame, Flare, Smoke, Smoke For Mac and Lustre. The goal at IBC was to make our high end finishing tools even more accessible, interoperable and affordable, and we delivered it by introducing Flame Premium – Flame, Smoke and Lustre combined into one product at a considerable discount.

New Opportunities
We’re hearing more and more of our customers talking about ‘transmedia’ and looking for efficient ways to develop content that can live across multiple platforms and non-linear storylines. With 720p streaming being the norm on the Internet, the requirements of broadcast and Internet video are converging, and because audiences have high quality expectations, we’re seeing increasingly sophisticated content produced across the board. To help with this transition we’re moving forward to mainstream editorial finishing by bringing high-quality tools like Smoke For Mac to video professionals. In the future you can look forward to enhanced hooks between Maya and Smoke For Mac for an all-encompassing 2D/3D design and production solution.

We also took a big step in the educational market by making 36-month licenses of all of our software available for free online via the Autodesk Student Community. The number of students taking advantage of this is in the hundreds of thousands. This commitment extends beyond just applications, as we’ve released a wealth of educational content so it’s easier than ever for people to learn how to use the tools that will get them jobs in animation, visual effects, 3D design, design visualization and beyond. We’ve also put significant discounts in place for educational institutions and have deployed more than a hundred thousand seats of our software Suites in universities around the world.

The last year has also seen a consolidation of talents, where its far more likely that artists who may have specialized in one post production niche five years ago, may be completing VFX, color grading and finishing on a project themselves—and don’t want to turn to five different applications to get the work done. Flame Premium and Smoke on the Mac are making end-to-end finishing much more accessible to this level of artist.

Market Momentum
We’re excited about the momentum we’re seeing for Autodesk solutions in the games industry and the directions in which gaming is moving – from compelling graphics in games like “Halo: Reach” and “Call of Duty: Black Ops” to forthcoming S3D content on consoles and handhelds. The games community responded well to our 2011 releases and the Suites. We greatly enhanced our middleware products – the 2011 versions of HumanIK and Kynapse, and added advanced lighting solutions to our line of products with the acquisition of Beast.

Other highlights of the year include the launch of Sketchbook for the iPad, our new FluidFX iphone app, the 3ds Max 20th Anniversary, an Academy Award for the developers of Lustre, the Maya 3D Technology Lumiere™ Award and more.

What I will remember of 2010 is the growing presence of previsualization in modern moviemaking, the rise of virtual production and the quick expansion of cross-continent distributed collaborative production. We saw social/casual games take the industry by storm, posing a complex challenge to PC and console game developers.

Looking ahead, we have a lot of incredibly interesting things planned that unfortunately, can’t be disclosed in this blog post. But if our demonstrations at last year’s GDC are any indication, look for some compelling efforts in the game development arena and across all content creation markets. We have been laying the foundation for our game authoring solutions via acquisitions over the last two years—and by building out a hybrid team of internal software engineers that is equally entrenched in animation tools and run time middleware. This team is working to create unique solutions for developers that will bridge the worlds of content creation and game authoring—and I’m very optimistic for what’s to come! We have some exciting things in store to satisfy all artists using Autodesk tools, whether they’re in visual effects, commercials, broadcast television, design visualization, manufacturing, game development, architecture, special venue or interactive—and, as always we can’t wait to see what you, our incredibly talented user base, has in store for us!

Stereo and the bleeding edge

Area Editor — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 20:00:00 UTC

The groundswell of enthusiasm over Stereo 3D (S3D) has pushed the entertainment industry into hyperdrive. Hollywood studios have announced S3D film releases at a dizzying pace and the same is ringing true for conversions of catalogue titles. Love it or hate it—S3D has been a boon to the entertainment industry and a driving force for new jobs around the world in production, visual effects, post-production and game development. According to data from Screen Digest presented last month, global box office revenue for 3D movies in 2010 is 5.5 billion USD, so far. The top 12 box office markets have converted 15% of their total screens to digital 3D. More than 20 3D TV channels launched this year, more than 30 3D feature films opened, and 25 3D Blu-ray titles were released.

All of this work has created a viable new business opportunity for content creators, though as with any rising trend, it isn’t without its share of controversy.

Regardless of market climate, or critics of the trend (i.e. Roger Ebert), the demand for S3D content is real and significant. Driven by demand from their own clients, Autodesk customers around the world are updating and retooling their pipelines to support S3D production, for content originating in stereo, animated properties and for 2D-to-3D conversions. While legendary directors like James Cameron and Jeffrey Katzenberg have been vocal proponents of shooting stereoscopically for feature film releases, they recognize that the market is driving the demand for conversions. Most recently, James Cameron has announced the upcoming conversion of “Titanic,” Jeffrey Katzenberg is converting the “Shrek” film franchise — and of course we’re all salivating over the news that George Lucas is converting the whole “Star Wars” series to 3D.
The recent announcement that Warner Bros canceled the 3D release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” shows how difficult it can be to reach a high quality bar with the conversion process.

So, what is Autodesk doing to help clients producing stereo content? When our clients approach an S3D project they have many choices, whether they are shooting stereoscopically, creating animated content, shooting traditionally with a conversion in mind or some combination of all of these methods. What we’ve learned is that S3D is part of the story and is a creative process that requires the early involvement of artists no matter how good the tools are. There’s no magic silver bullet for stereo from a technology perspective, because you shoot, create and animate differently when your end product offers dimensionality—and it takes an artist or director to weave stereo into a storyline and/or concept effectively and successfully. The earlier the depth is added to the production process, the better the results seem to be.

With 2D-to-3D conversions of films, the hurdle seems to be the economics because all you have to begin with are the pixels—often the director isn’t available to oversee creative direction of the process. The challenge with this work is that in order to do a great conversion, you have to deploy a vast VFX arsenal, but straight 2D-to-3D conversions to date haven’t had the luxury of a blockbuster visual effects budget. A back-of-the-envelope calculation seems to show that the cost of conversion needs to go as low as 10,000 USD per minute of footage to make it viable for mainstream catalog titles, a figure which is significantly less than the 120,000-150,000 USD per minute costs estimated by some, including Michael Bay, for creating quality conversions.

The tide on rush, low-budget conversions for first-run movies seems to be turning quickly as audiences and the media become less tolerant of higher ticket prices for sub-standard theatrical experiences. Evidence of this tide shift is apparent with George Lucas’ announcement that Academy® Award-winning visual effects supervisor John Knoll will be overseeing the conversion of the first Star Wars film, “The Phantom Menace” with the same attention to detail and precision as they would any of their incredible visual effects projects.

From what we’re seeing, whether a film or game project is shot stereoscopically, whether it’s an animated property or converted from 2D, there is still a significant amount of post processing and digital manipulation required to achieve optimal results. At Autodesk we will continue building more advanced S3D support into Maya, Flame, Smoke on the Mac, Softimage, Motionbuilder and Lustre to outfit content creators with the strongest toolsets for bringing their 3D visions to life.

No matter how you approach it, stereo production is a complex proposition and we’re still in the early days. The ability to virtually navigate image sequences and scenes in 3D space is a key capability that makes S3D digital processes possible. Maya, Flame, Smoke for the Mac and all of our tools are truly 3D at the core. We are extending their capabilities so that you can apply these tools at any stage of the production process. If you can imagine it in S3D, you can create it, and we’ll continue to innovate on the tools and processes front just as fast as you can innovate in storytelling and visuals!

Autodesk Toronto Tour

Area Editor — Thu, 27 May 2010 02:00:00 UTC

Many of you enjoyed the tour of our 10 Duke headquarters in Montreal. As promised, here's a look inside our Toronto office. This is where a lot of the Maya and Mudbox magic happens.

Our 2011 Releases are “Suite”!

Area Editor — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 UTC

It’s now public! Our 2011 line up of 3D products has been announced. Next month (April) will mark the first time we release the entire Autodesk Media & Entertainment portfolio of 3D products on the same date. Even though Maya, Softimage, Mudbox and MotionBuilder 2010 released just 6 months ago, we’ve been able bring you some very significant increases in performance and capabilities in the new 2011 versions.

I’m really proud that our product development teams pulled this off, especially considering the year that 2009 was. Last year, our teams went through some pretty radical transformations. We reorganized ourselves to maximize commonality and interoperability between applications. Whereas in the past we had individual product designers focused on product features, we now have design teams that focus on workflows that can involve multiple products. A good example is our “portable character” project for character animation. Another example is rendering – our new cross-product team is bringing you a single mental ray for all our 2011 products and Common Materials across select applications.

Commonality does not mean uniformity. We keep in mind the different requirements that we hear from users of different products. A couple of years ago, our CEO Carl Bass launched an initiative to raise the level of visual quality in the viewport of every Autodesk application. This led to the development of a very powerful graphics system known inside Autodesk as OGS (One Graphics System).

It was interesting to see how product teams reacted differently to this opportunity. The 3ds Max team chose to create the Quicksilver renderer on top of OGS and bring tenfold speed and quality improvement to offline rendering, while the Maya team chose to integrate it in the viewport and bring the 10x speed up and quality increase to the interactive display of complex scenes for film previs and games level editing.

Similarly, Carl launched an initiative on direct manipulation. Initial results are in the 3ds Max 2011 modeling tools, as well as in the cool new Inventor Fusion modeller (don’t miss it at http://labs.autodesk.com/fusion/). You can expect to see many of these innovative, intuitive tools and OGS in other Autodesk applications.
We introduced our Entertainment Creation Suites back at SIGGRAPH 2009 and so far we’ve received tremendously positive feedback and seen great adoption of the suites. Users are clamouring for more interoperability and integration, and that’s what our 2011 releases are delivering with much improved interop between Mudbox and MotionBuilder and Maya and 3ds Max.

We’re not in the bells and whistles business. One of our top priorities for our releases is to make sure you can get the most out of current hardware with multi core CPUs, multi-GPUs and 64bits. Whether it is our new GPU-accelerated graphics system for Maya and 3ds Max, new multi-threaded operators in Maya, GPU-accelerated blend shapes and graphics for MotionBuilder or 64bit OSX support for our Mac applications, the primary goal for each and every release is to make a step forward in performance. We know that it is all about speed and our 2011 releases bring a lot in this area. Try them out!

I don’t want to sound like an infomercial but there is a lot to say about these releases. Here are my favourite new features:

3ds Max 2011 leads the rendering revolution with a node-based material editor, a new GPU renderer fully compatible with the viewports and mental ray and a new HDR compositor based on Toxik technology featuring an amazing vector paint module!
MotionBuilder 2011 is all about enabling performance capture and virtual cinematography workflows with increased FBX interop with 3ds Max and Maya and GPU acceleration of skinned characters for raw performance. With support of PhysX, it’s a game engine for animators but also for directors and cinematographers.
With brand new in-product community sharing, vector displacement maps, posing and deform tools, better Photoshop and Maya interop, Mudbox 2011 is leaping ahead.
Face Robot becomes a must-have for everyone with automatic lip-synching and improved interop with 3ds Max and Maya, and ICE kinematics promises some innovative ways to create rigs inside of Softimage 2011.
FBX 2011 adds support for animation layers, python, referencing and LOD, making it the glue for production.
And Maya 2011 delivers multiple breakthroughs. The new OGS-based graphics pipeline delivers much improved performance. The new Qt UI gives Maya a modern look that’s more consistent and easier to learn and at the same time, allows for more customizability of the UI and better visual integration of plug-ins. That’s huge news for the many of you who tailor Maya for your production pipelines. New skinning technologies and live HumanIK motion retargeting will dramatically cut down the time it takes to create high-quality, believable character animation.

The feature that fascinates me the most is the camera sequencer. Our team designed this brand new Maya feature that introduces 3D editorial to Maya. Later, we collaborated with the Sony Pictures Imageworks team; they helped us refine our design. Finally, we tapped into the knowledge of the Smoke team to make sure that we had smooth workflows and data interchange between Maya 3D editorial components and first-cut editorial systems like Final Cut and Avid and finishing systems like Smoke on the Mac and Flame. The result is amazing. With Final Cut, Maya and Smoke all on the same Mac platform that can exchange EDLs and cut lists, we’re enabling new innovative previs and 3D editorial workflows. A 3D storyboard/prototype of the shot/film/commercial/game can be kept up-to-date with all the editorial changes!

We’ve also announced new versions of our games middleware in time for the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. Kynapse 7, our AI and pathfinding middleware, is now plug-and-play with a new easy API for simple integration in many games engines and super fast path-data generation. The new HumanIK 4.5 is now tightly integrated inside UnrealEd so that complex character-character interactions can be authored graphically and interactively – no programming required anymore. Many games engines such as Unity, Trinigy Vision Engine and Epic’s Unreal Engine now feature improved FBX import pipelines.

It’s not your daddy’s CG anymore! We’re seeing lots of new techniques to produce content for film, TV and games, and I sincerely hope that our 2011 products help you extract the maximum performance out of your hardware and get you into the brave new world of Digital Entertainment Creation with previs, 3D editorial, virtual cinematography, performance capture, sculpting, believable characters, realistic facial animation, and stereoscopic compositing and finishing.

I hope I’ve managed to share some of the pride and enthusiasm that we have here about our 2011 releases. The big prize for us is when we get to see the stunning pictures and stories that you create with our tools. I can’t wait to see where you’ll be able to go with our 2011 software.

Rock on,
-mp

Avatar and the future of digital entertainment creation

Area Editor — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 UTC

My friends at AWN have given me a chance to speak about this incredible movie and what it means for us at Autodesk and for the industry.
Check it out ! bit.ly/aUg1IY

Cheers,

-mp

2009 is finishing on a roll!

Area Editor — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:23:20 UTC

Hi everyone,

It’s been a rough year for all of us but it feels like we’re exiting 2009 with some great momentum.

Seeing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 destroy all sales records for an entertainment product felt great after some reports of sluggishness in the business. Also, it was a unique moment to watch more than 1500 Autodesk University attendees in Vegas grab their jaws off the floor after seeing over 30 minutes of Avatar footage in Dolby 3D! Avatar has not only driven some groundbreaking innovation for moviemaking; it is a fantastic immersive experience with an amazing story.

We are also delighted with the results of Mass Animation – the animated short “Live Music” was released with “Planet 51” (another great movie from our Spanish friends) in 400 US theatres. Plus it’s available on iTunes for download. Last year, we were approached by Yair Landau and our friends from Intel, Dell and Reel FX and they asked us to make Maya available for free to a bunch of folks to make a movie using Facebook as a collaborative platform... It was somewhat of a leap of faith at that time! More than 58,000 people participated, the 51 finalists were from 17 different countries, more than 2000 copies of Maya were downloaded and the results have far exceeded expectations. The quality of the work produced is amazing! Check out this featurette about the making of “Live Music”.

We’re proud to be associated with Mass Animation 2.0, which launched Dec 7th. It gives DC comic fans out there a chance to animate heroes and villains from the DC Universe Online game currently in development by Sony Online Entertainment, and to collaborate online to create a CGI trailer and in-game character animations. Don’t miss it. We’ve again created a specific version of Maya for this project. Learn more at www.massanimation.com and join the Facebook community.

And finally, on December 15th, we started shipping our Smoke creative editorial finishing software on Mac OS X. This brings production-proven finishing capabilities to the extremely talented community of artists already using the Mac platform in broadcast and post-production. We gave a tech preview of Smoke on the Mac to Inter BEE attendees in Japan, and it was met with great excitement. You can watch the tech preview on Grant Kay’s blog and learn all about the product at www.autodesk.com/smokeonmac.

Don’t hesitate to download the 30-day free trial. We’ve put a ton of tutorials on-line for you to discover the power and depth of Smoke. If you’re not familiar with Smoke, I recommend the overview by John Montgomery of fxguide.com. It’ll even tell you how to run the trial on a Macbook.

Smoke on the Mac is an important achievement for us. We’ve been working hard to make the experience of our systems products available to as many of you as possible. The Mac platform gives us this opportunity and we’re thrilled about this first step.

2009 has been a rollercoaster year. It feels like it’s ending on a positive note. I wish you all happy holidays and look forward to 2010, which promises to be another exciting year in the world of entertainment.

Rock on,
-mp

10 Duke Tour: Come on over…

Area Editor — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:23:02 UTC

A lot of people wonder what our facilities look like, so here’s a quick tour of our Media & Entertainment headquarters at 10 Duke Street in Old Montreal.

Heroes and the next generation.

Area Editor — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:39:52 UTC

Recently, I got to leave behind the yellow and red leaves of Canada for the blooming purple Jacarandas of Australia. It’s been great to enjoy a bit of spring as winter approaches fast here.

During our user event in Sydney, Desmond Chan, Production Manager at Imagi in Hong Kong, presented Imagi’s work on Astro Boy. The movie looks great. It’s been made with Maya & MotionBuilder. What was interesting about it is the remote collaboration with a 24/7 production chain between HK and Hollywood – quite a feat!

I also got into fascinating conversations with several Flame and Smoke artists and Lustre colorists. It reminded me how difficult a job it is for them to work in a supervised environment. They have to perform their art and tricks with the director/supervisor/creative guy literally breathing down their neck. Needless to say, the software has to perform flawlessly and the UI needs to be extremely intuitive. These artists are truly the unsung heroes of our industry. Not only do they have to operate a very advanced piece of software under pressure, they also have to understand, translate, communicate and realize the intent and the creative vision behind the project. At the best of times, that creative vision is made tangible through various forms of previs, but a lot of the time they have to deal with folks who can only tell if it’s right when they see it. I am glad to see our customers starting to deploy Flare to accelerate the “battle-testing” of the next generation of Flame artists.

By the way, Flame artists are really really creative, check out “The Flame” from www.flamingJaime.com!

Talking about the new generation, last year, the VES and Autodesk responded together to a challenge by Steven Spielberg and sponsored the first ever VES Student Award. The winners were Australians Sandy Widyanata and Courtney Wise, who created their short film, 'PLASTIC,' as a graduation project while studying at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.

So if you produced some cool shots as a student sometime during 2009, check www.visualeffectssociety.org/awards/index.cfm and get your entry in! As Jeff Okun, Chairman of the VES puts it: "In order to get a job in this industry, you need to get your work seen. Even if it is shortlisted or nominated, there's a feather in your cap right there for trying."
(CGSociety article: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5296)

Don’t forget that students can download a 6-month trial of 3ds Max and Maya software and lots of other Autodesk software for free* from our student community. All you need is a valid email address issued by a school. And while you’re there, check our Industry Careers Framework, our self-directed learning content for Art, Design and Animation in the fields of entertainment and visualization.

It’s important for us to make our tools as widely accessible as possible for learning purposes. Expect to hear more about this soon. I’m looking forward to meeting the next generation of heroes!

Rock on,

-mp

*Free products are subject to the terms and conditions of the end-user license agreement that accompanies the download of the software.

Autodesk, 3ds Max, Flame, Flare, Lustre, Maya and MotionBuilder are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names or trademarks belong to their respective holders.
© 2009 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.

On Infrastructure

Area Editor — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:21:07 UTC

Our vision for Digital Entertainment Creation encompasses one of a scalable on-demand infrastructure that follows the ups and downs of real life production cycles.

For some of you, especially in post-production, a high performance computing/networking environment is a critical differentiator. Manipulating multiple real time streams is a key capability that has a direct impact on the facility’s productivity. Autodesk Consulting has become expert in setting up ultra high performance solutions for centralized workflows. For example, one of our recent installations offers more than 100 TB of usable space and services more than half a dozen creative seats for grading or finishing with real time 2k streams, this means over 4000 MB/sec of real time performance !

Many of you have much simpler infrastructure needs but they do not seem simple to fulfill either.

Back in July, I visited several of our customers in Europe and it has been a reminder of how much of a headache it is to put together a cost efficient infrastructure to support an average-sized animation studio. Solutions do exist but they remain rather expensive. Providing artists and animators with a quiet and cool environment requires the relocation of the computers into a dedicated room which often means pricey extenders. Managing the deployment and the versioning of both commercial and in-house software is often a complex process that results in errors (wrong version gets used) or delayed adoption of new releases. Even powering and cooling down a render farm in the center of a big city like Paris or London has become expensive and even sometimes challenging as power requirements keep going up.

We are seeing a trend to relocate compute farms and datacenters in places where real estate, network bandwidth and energy are cheap. This makes sense economically but also for the environment as these centers can be tied to renewable sources of energy like wind farms or hydro. We’d like our customers to be able to tap into these new centers for their infrastructure and focus on creative collaboration.

To that end, we are working aggressively with different partners to put together solutions for “infrastructure on demand”. Several new virtualization technologies offer new ways of deploying graphics software within a firewall to optimize resources and ease the deployment of new releases. We’re also looking beyond the firewall to offer remote solutions. In the coming weeks, we will offer the ability to test drive and evaluate several of our 3d applications online just using a web browser, keep an eye on our Labs website (see labs.autodesk.com/technologies/trials/) . Yes, Maya in a browser is around the corner !

We are exploring Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-service but we are also interested in providing new capabilities on-line. Autodesk is already offering 7 different SaaS applications in various fields (I recommend dragonfly.autodesk.com and labs.autodesk.com/technologies/showroom if you have plans for home improvements!) . We’re also actively looking at extending our products with web services for collaboration, creative tasks and processing

CPU intensive tasks like rendering or simulation baking are great candidates to “get to the cloud” and be delivered as on-demand services. We are working with partners to solve the problem holistically including affordable bandwidth and storage, secure file transfers and transactions and of course, remote processing capabilities. By the way, moving rendering and simulation to specialized processors like GPUs is another good way to achieve efficiencies as you’ve seen in our 2010 products releases but I won’t get into a CPU vs. GPU conversation here :-)

Our technology crystal ball is as good (or as bad) as anyone else’s so we’re exploring many directions to make sure that you can leverage the latest in computing innovations and remain single-mindedly focused on creative tasks. That’s where the fun is in Digital Entertainment Creation!

Rock on,

-mp

PS: Don’t forget to put SketchBook Mobile (www.autodesk.com/sketchbookmobile ) on your iPhone/iPod and say bye-bye to napkins!

Welcome to the AREA Virtual SIGGRAPH

Area Editor — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:24:51 UTC

Hi, I’m Marc Petit, head of Autodesk Media & Entertainment. Welcome to the AREA Virtual SIGGRAPH. We’ll be featuring live product demos from New Orleans, customer presentations, product videos, free master classes and more.

This year, since most of us are travelling less, we’ve expanded our virtual presence as a way for everyone to participate – whether you make it to New Orleans or not.

We’ve got a lot of exciting news. We’re launching the 2010 releases of Maya, Softimage, Mudbox and MotionBuilder. We launched 3ds Max 2010 in February and now have a new extension release. We also have updates to FBX, Face Robot and more.

Our big SIGGRAPH news is Maya 2010. We’ve combined Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited into a single product. Maya is already renowned for its creative tools and production flexibility. Now all customers can benefit from the full creative toolset, including advanced simulation tools for cloth, fur, hair and fluids, state of the art match moving tools – as well as our high-dynamic range compositing toolset.

Why these changes? Because the boundaries between rendering and compositing are blurring, and the amount of CG content keeps growing. Animators need more powerful compositing tools and compositors need better access to 3D. This is why we’re making the workflows more efficient and more integrated.

What does this mean if you’re a Maya customer? If you’re a Subscription customer – for either Maya Complete or Maya Unlimited – you’ll get the Maya 2010 release at no charge. If you’re not on Subscription, we have promotions to get you current. We want to make the transition as painless as possible for you.

We want to offer more value when you’re combining multiple Autodesk products in your workflow. That’s why we’re introducing two new Suites – offering an additional 35% in savings. There’s the Real-Time Animation Suite in which you get your choice of either Maya or 3ds Max, plus our real-time 3D animation system called MotionBuilder. And in the Entertainment Creation Suite you get all of this as well as Mudbox. These suites are available for commercial facilities as well as educational facilities.

You can find out more about these and our two new education suites here on AREA and also on Autodesk.com.

Some of you asked for an update on the Softimage acquisition and product development. The Softimage team integration is completed. They’ve settled into our Montreal headquarters and have been busy working on the 2010 release – again focusing on production efficiency and enhanced creative capability.

In case you missed it, we rebranded Softimage XSI. It’s now called Autodesk Softimage. The latest release – Softimage 2010 – has accelerated performance with Gigacore III. It’s been highly tuned to handle large data sets… pretty amazing stuff; we’ve seen up to a 500% performance increase in some areas – especially in the handling of referenced models. Softimage includes an Interactive Creative Environment – ICE – that lets you create custom tools and visual effects without the need for scripting. So we’ve made ICE even better; everyone should look into this because it’s relevant to many production pipelines.

Now, the big news with Softimage 2010 is that it now includes Face Robot. Face Robot lets you create incredibly lifelike facial expressions. I think you’ll like it. Check out the product pages and demos for more details on Softimage 2010.

And of course we have a new version of Mudbox – our digital sculpting and painting software. With its interactive rendering, artists can sculpt highly detailed, quality models with immediate feedback.

In Mudbox 2010, we’ve added Photoshop interoperability – a very popular customer request. We have also added a new SDK for Mudbox, making it really easy for production teams to customize and integrate. Last but not least, we have added new creative tools.

That’s a quick tour of what Autodesk is doing right now in entertainment. To summarize, we’ve got a ton of product launches at SIGGRAPH. These new versions are focused on production efficiency and creative tools. Maya 2010 – One Maya – is bridging the gap between CG and compositing, and our new Suites are there to give you more value.

Thank you for visiting Autodesk’s Virtual SIGGRAPH. Enjoy the show.

Landing in the Blogosphere

Area Editor — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:34:18 UTC

Landing in the Blogosphere

Hello and welcome to the AREA community. I’m Marc Petit, head of Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment division. This blog will cover what’s happening in the entertainment industry, our product strategy, and what we are doing in the community. So check back regularly and please post any comments, questions or suggestions you have for future topics – I look forward to covering them in future videocasts.

So, to kick off this first video cast I thought I’d take a moment to look at the challenging economic times we are all going through right now, and share with you how we see the recession impacting the entertainment industry.

This recession is rather different from past ones. It is not a result of tightening monetary policy in response to inflation; it’s a result of the collapse in credit markets.

Often consumers look to lower cost entertainment to help them through tough times. This means that there have been some positive effects such as growing movie ticket sales at the box office, and even some strong early year growth in games sales although things have slowed somewhat in the last few months. However while money is still being spent on entertainment, the credit crunch means that finding the money to invest in new productions is tough. The television industry has been the hardest hit as companies cut marketing budgets and ad spend. And DVD sales have slowed down while Blu-Ray has not yet taken off.

Overall the entertainment industry is still doing relatively well compared to many other sectors. The main challenge is finding funding for new productions. However, this will rebound quickly as credit becomes more available. So what can we do about the recession, and how will things look a few years ahead?

This recession has put a focus on the need for production efficiency. There’s an opportunity to solve the challenge of creating innovative entertainment in an efficient way. There are so many entertainment options available to consumers, and the creative bar is very high. Of course successful entertainment has to be compelling. But as digital production data keeps increasing in quantity and complexity, efficiency is becoming a major concern.

This is what Autodesk is focusing on: Empowering creative exploration, improving production efficiency and offering more value to customers. In a nutshell, we’re focusing on the next generation of Digital Entertainment Creation.

Let’s talk about the future of entertainment. The way you create digital art – from environments to believable characters – is getting better because of new real-time, immersive, interactive technologies. There will be more tools for creative exploration and collaboration than ever before. And data will become increasingly “intelligent”, meaning it will contain rich information about the asset itself – its properties, behaviors, even the solvers needed to process it correctly.

Creative exploration, collaboration and intelligent assets are active areas of research and development at Autodesk. You’ll see the results of this research in our upcoming product launches

Now, coming back to the present – what’re we doing to help you today?

I want to call out a key initiative. We recently launched the Autodesk Assistance Program to help you make it through the downturn. This program is for unemployed artists, animators and designers. This program gives you free 90-day software licenses to many Autodesk products – including the latest versions of 3ds Max and Maya. You also get free access to online training materials. The program is there to help you maintain and grow your 3D skills, and get up to speed on our latest software versions. Find out more at www.Autodesk.com/Assistance

In summary, this has been and will be a challenging year. The economy is likely to remain sluggish for a while. At Autodesk we’re focusing on creative capability and production efficiency – to help you create the best entertainment possible. We’re also finding new ways to offer you value, such as through the Assistance Program.

I hope our efforts help you excel in your careers and with your businesses. Thanks for tuning in.