FMX 2011 – Day One

John and I are in Stuttgart, Germany for FMX 2011. It’s the 16th incarnation of this conference on animation, effects, games and interactive media, but our first time attending. Even after just one day we have both realized this is such a great event, with so many good presentations and a very fun vibe.

Apart from numerous professional film and production talks, there are several key software companies here giving workshops, SIGGRAPH papers, as well as VFX houses with recruitment booths such as Lucasfilm, Double Negative, MPC, Framestore, Pixomondo and Animal Logic. If that’s not enough, there’s also the Festival of Animated Film to take in.

Here’s a run down of presentations I managed to see on day one.

LUXX Studios

I started the day at a talk by LUXX Studios, an effects house located in Stuttgart. Andrea Block, Christian Haas and Eike Wichmann ran through some of LUXX’s recent projects, including work for Die Deutschen (Part II), Planet Egypt, Carl & Bertha, Hawx 2 game cinematics and shots from the shoot for computer game ‘EA Active’. LUXX is hiring and it was pretty neat getting a feel for what a local effects facility was working on.

Image Metrics and Crysis 2

Image Metrics broke down its facial animation workflow for Crytek’s Crysis 2 computer game. This workshop session was great for artists who actually would be using the product on a day to day basis. The Image Metrics Faceware system relies on a single feed of video, which can come from SD, HD (and even an iPhone) to capture a facial performance. 2D key frames are then analyzed, and a 3D pose extracted to match the actor expressions based on known data about faces, but also with each pixel looked at for unique facial data. This was a great practical presentation showing a rig and mesh setup in 3ds Max and giving a number of hints of how to streamline the final process.

Animal Logic and ‘Legend of the Guardians’

Animal Logic’s Art Director Grant Freckleton and Head of Lighting and FX Matt Jones gave a rich presentation of their studio’s production on The Legend of the Guardians. Participants were ushered in with 3D glasses (and a handy cleaning wipe) and shown final shots from the film in stereo with a breakdown of each sequence. What made this so interesting was a listing of the philosophies Animal Logic followed in designing their owl characters and the Ga’Hoole world – things like having the look supporting the story, having it contribute to a unique audience experience, making animated owls that aren’t necessary kid friendly and adopting a live action mentality.

One interesting insight was that because the owls were generally small in size, a close up meant a different depth of field than if you were framing for a real person which resulted in blurred backgrounds. So a special depth of field previs’ing system was employed to see what shots would look like. Other key points include Animal Logic’s further development of its fire tools, fluid sims and  feather systems. And one particular scene – the rain tunnel – was considered a ‘no compromise’ scene, which means the studio had more time for iterations to deal with how rain drops would hit against the owls feathers.

Blue Sky Studios and ‘Rio’

Head of Lighting and VFX Supervisor Andrew Beddini gave a thorough run through of Blue Sky Studio’s lighting and rendering systems for Rio. The company relied on its CGI Studio for in-house rendering, which is a fully physically-based raytracing renderer. There were some neat points on making adjustments to renders on human characters in the film to make sure they remained stylized where necessary. Then for scenes in Rio de Janeiro, Blue Sky came up with a number of procedural methods to save time on production but still use CGI Studio to produce great results. The favelas or slums were key sets, but only 5 actual models were built and then rotated around in different shapes to make up the scenes, then rendered procedurally with no texture maps. Other shots of landscapes with rocks and vegetation were also handled procedurally and Nuke was also relied upon to bring together shots of skies and clouds.

Andrew generously gave us some time after his presentation for an interview, so be sure to look out for that on fxguidetv soon.

Other presentations

There was no way we were going to be able to see everything today as many presentations and workshops are held concurrently. Some of the ones I couldn’t get to incl uded a look at Arnold, Bakery Relight, Disney’s work on Tangled, an ILM presentation on Leslie Iwerk’s Creating the Impossible doco, ILM’s Ben Snow on image-based lighting, Scanline’s Hereafter effects, and a series of presentations on Chinese animation. Unchartered Territory VFX Supe Volker Engel was also on hand to discuss Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, which is not out until later in the year, but has a wave of interest after the trailer showed some impressive scenes of 16th Century London. In fact, the presentation was so popular that John and I were both unable to get in. Luckily we met Volker in person and will be doing some in-depth coverage of the work closer to the release of the film at fxguide.

Tomorrow is looking just as exciting at FMX, with presentations scheduled for TRON: Legacy, Paul, Rango, The King’s Speech and multiple talks on open source software. We’ll be back then to give you a look at more of the week’s events.