Alexander Kucera

Great interview with a great screenwriter.

John and Craig sit down with screenwriting legend Lawrence Kasdan to discuss Star Wars, Raiders, The Bodyguard and how he’s shaped some of the most iconic big-screen stories and characters of our lifetime.

This 90-minute interview comes as part of WGFestival 2016 Craft Day, and features audience questions as well. Our thanks to the Writers Guild Foundation and the Academy for hosting us.

Link: johnaugust.com/2016/the-…

This is very cool. Insanely geeky, but very cool.

Brian Barto should be nominated for some sort of award. He’s recreated the “hacking” effect from one of my favorite movies of all times, 1992’s Sneakers1 as a command line program.

Link: medium.com/@bartobri…

Via: Six Colors



L.A. Story

Pro Tip: If all your requests for app A are “add/change feature & make it work like in app B”, maybe you should be using app B instead.

Next week is this year’s FMX in Stuttgart. I’ll be there as every year reporting for Professional Production Magazine, but I’ll also write daily session summaries for this blog. So if you can’t make it and want to read about any specific presentation let me know and I’ll try to watch and write about it for you.

Don’t believe everything you think.

Via: The Tim Ferriss Show

The closer you get, the slower I go.

• A Bumper Sticker

Via: Stephen King

back in 2009 I began pestering friends and random strangers. I would walk up to them with a pen and a sheet of paper asking that they immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart. Soon I found out that when confronted with this odd request most people have a very hard time remembering exactly how a bike is made. Some did get close, some actually nailed it perfectly, but most ended up drawing something that was pretty far off from a regular men’s bicycle. Little I knew this is actually a test that psychologists use to demonstrate how our brain sometimes tricks us into thinking we know something even though we don’t. I collected hundreds of drawings, building up a collection that I think is very precious. There is an incredible diversity of new typologies emerging from these crowd-sourced and technically error-driven drawings. A single designer could not invent so many new bike designs in 100 lifetimes and this is why I look at this collection in such awe.

Such a great idea.

There are some really beautiful designs in there and a few I wouldn’t mind taking for a ride.

Link: www.gianlucagimini.it/prototype…

Via: John Gruber

Today I am a proud to announce that my wife’s first children’s book illustration is available on Amazon. Tapp Malu was written by Angelika Tscherepanow and it is a really cute story. Monika put a lot of effort into it and it came out great and with a unique style you won’t find in any other children’s book.


Go get it and help make this little endeavor a success for her.

Link: amzn.to/1EXx4jC

David Sparks has a great selection of iBooks for a wide range of topics. If you help back because they didn’t work on an iPhone then the wait is over. The new iBooks release means that all of David’s books now work on the smaller iOS devices as well.

Link: macsparky.com/blog/2015…

Ich habe einen Kollegen, der ist auch ein Bayer. Gut, er kommt aus Serbien…

Via: A Friend

Agreed on all accounts.

Link: brooksreview.net/2015/06/p…

A great read that has me thinking about how to behave myself in the future.

As it was in Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Othello, so it is in life. Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption - even murder and genocide - generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie.

In Lying, bestselling author and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that we can radically simplify our lives and improve society by merely telling the truth in situations where others often lie. He focuses on “white” lies - those lies we tell for the purpose of sparing people discomfort - for these are the lies that most often tempt us. And they tend to be the only lies that good people tell while imagining that they are being good in the process.

Link: mobile.audible.com/pd/Nonfic…

Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time. […] In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening. […] Let’s start with the premise that you have a 40 hour week. (If you just started crying you need a new job.) […] People rarely schedule working time. And when they do it’s viewed as second-tier time. It’s interruptible. Meetings trump working time. Why? “I’m adding a meeting”

Link: medium.com/@monteiro…

I never thought of it that way, but it makes perfect sense. I’m definitely on a maker’s schedule.

Link: www.paulgraham.com/makerssch…

Via: Shawn Blanc

This post also appeared as part of a longer article on fxguide.

Christophe took us on a journey through the history of Renderman. From the basics of RSL (Renderman Shading Language) with its empirical shading to RSL 2.0 and the first steps in physically plausible shading to the new RIS path tracing engine that allows physically accurate image creation.

We started with RSL 1.2, which basically was state of the art in big budget productions up to 2005. It had the hallmarks of traditional computer graphics: light sources without any size or falloff (in fact, ILM usually didn’t use falloff on lights at all even though an option for realistic light falloff existed) and of course idealized materials that had lots of dials for creative control without any regards to physically accuracy or energy conservation. One could easily create a surface that was brighter then any of the lights hitting it for example.

With that creative freedom comes a lot of complexity though to get something that can be considered “correct” when it comes to realism, a required goalpost when you want to integrate your renderings into filmed footage.

To get to an acceptable result quicker and with less complications, Pixar started to implement physically plausible rendering which was first used in Iron Man and later in Monster University to great effect. This proved that both realistic and stylized results were possible with this physically more accurate model despite it having less dials.

While RSL 2.0 was quite successful it still had a few problems. Mainly it slowed down in complex raytracing setups due to Ray Hit Shading taking a lot of time and the memory usage exploded with complex scenes. This lead Pixar to develop a path tracing approach and a new render engine called RIS. For an in depth overview see last year’s article on RIS.

RIS allows for even simpler controls, while rendering more accurately, faster and with less memory then the RSL approach. Shaders are now fully integrated but very modular, which allows for easy debugging or switching out whole block for quickly getting different results.

Finding Dory, which is currently in production at Pixar, is the first movie that is using RIS. In fact, Dory is the first use of what Christophe calls the RUKUS pipeline: RIS, USD a new interchange format developed at Pixar similar to Alembic and Katana. Christophe joked that he still hasn’t figured out what U and S stand for.

Since RIS has the ability to do progressive rendering, the look development and final rendering has accelerated quite a bit. An artist can set up a complex shot, put it on the farm and then “check in” after say 20 minutes and get a good idea what the final images are going to look like as the whole image is already visible, albeit very noisy. Then they can just let it “cook” on the farm until an acceptable noise level is reached. The remaining noise residue is being filtered away as a last step. A technology that Pixar was able to use from Hyperion, Disney’s new Path Tracing engine and it will be part of the public Renderman release in the future.

This means there is less human (expensive) time needed to set up a shot as there is much less trial and error. Artist always have a really good idea of what the final result is going to look like.

Sadly, Christophe wasn’t able to show us final imagery of Dory, as production isn’t that far along yet, but we did see a few shots of Dory and Nemo in their new look and they do look much improved from their old selves. We saw them being shaded, lit and look dev’ed in realtime in Katana and the experience looked very smooth and seamless.

Brent Burley talked us through the development of Disney’s new Path Tracer Hyperion in this session. Path Tracing is the third cornerstone in Disney’s new rendering strategy with the former two being PTex and the new “principled” BRDF (Disney made available a nice tool to explore different measured BRDFs called BRDF Explorer).

Hyperion was used as the main renderer for Big Hero 6, Disney’s newest animated feature film. This was a big challenge as the development of Hyperion started only about three or four months before movie production. In essence the development of the movie and the render engine were in sync. This was a bit of a gamble, because the engine didn’t have all of its features yet and there was no way of telling how development would turn out down the road.

Like Manuka, Weta’s new render engine, or Arnold, Hyperion is a Path Tracer. The biggest problem with path tracers is the inherent noise. So where you get the benefit of a “correct” solution and relatively few dials for the artist to “fight” with, the downside is that it is very hard to get rid of the noise in a timely manner.

This is an inherently mathematical problem to deal with. To half the noise in an image, you have to quadruple the samples fired into the scene. Since you are always halving the noise, there is never a stage where you can reach zero noise. The best you can hope for is to reach a certain noise floor. Meaning all the important details in the image are represented (instead of hidden in too much noise). Once you reach that noise floor, the best solution Disney has found is to filter out the remaining noise.

To converge to the noise floor as quickly as possible, there are a few optimization techniques at work. First, rays in areas of common interest are grouped into batches. Those batches receive a high number of samples that are then smartly “redistributed” to the corresponding pixels. At technique I haven’t yet completely grasped, but that I plan to revisit with Mr Burley when I get a chance.

The net win seems to be with multiple bounces. First the speed hit is very minimal with multiple bounces and you need less bounces overall to reach acceptable light energy in the scene.

This was tested by going into a lighting lab situation. In essence they took a series of photographs and replicated the results with Hyperion. The results where pretty exact and it turns out that images that seemed to deliver wrong results where simply not using enough bounces. Once the proper bounce amount was dialed in, all the glows, light bleeds and so forth started working and the results looked natural.

Another optimization technique was the Statistical Lobe Selection Tree, which basically applies weights to the components of a pixel (light influence, reflective, diffuse, refractive influence, etc.). Once you have figured out what influences the pixel most, you can spend more samples there.

This got turned on its head when artists started using tens of thousands of lights in a shot. Sorting that many lights would have taken longer then simply brute forcing the sampling. The solution was to figure out where 95% of the influence comes from, which is usually the five or so closest lights, and then use the other 5% for a randomly picked light source.

There are also effects that can take a long time to calculate with even just one sample. Like a ray that bounces around skin for a while, just to exit somewhere else with less energy. in those cases Disney used a simple “shortcut”: biased filtering.

Say for Subsurface Scattering, Disney simply assumes that a ray exits a random maximum distance from the entry point with a certain amount of less energy. Which works well for most situations for things like SSS or hair. It has issues with small objects, but those can be worked around. The next step in Hyperion development is actually to improve the workflow for those situations in the future.

Another common issue were fireflies on water from bright light sources. Sun, anyone? This also is an intrinsically mathematical issue as the sun is a tiny and incredibly bright light source, which means it’s practically impossible to converge to a noise free result. The workaround they came up with was pretty genius. They first create a photon map that stores the energy of the refracted and reflected light and then use the calculated light energy values to basically turn hard surface objects into emitters. That means they spread out the high energy light source of the sun and made it trivial to sample. The result were beautiful caustics and inter reflections without any noise or sparkling at a reasonable rendertime.

A tricky thing with path tracers is the output of different passes for compositing. For this, Hyperion uses a technique called Stochastic Path Classification, which allows inexpensive splitting of a light ray into diffuse and specular components (and a number of additional passes). An added benefit is that it becomes possible to add some artistic local control on top of a shader. They call it transport modifier and it allows artists to tell a surface to use less specular contribution for example.

One interesting statistic was that due to the progressive nature of a path tracer only 15% re-renders took place. Meaning that most of the shots only had one final render pass. This was possible because every artist in every department always has a noisy preview of the final image in, more or less, realtime. There were no unexpected surprises, which made it possible to render the whole show in less then four months.

I’m on my way to Stuttgart as I write this to report from this years FMX. As always I’m writing for Professional Production Magazine. My goal is to update this blog with short articles about the various sessions. I’m also likely writing one or more things for fxguide. If you want to read about a specific session check out the schedule and let me know. I’ll see what I can do.

I’m usually very reserved with being the typical proud obnoxious dad. Mostly, because I find that extremely annoying in other people as well.

That being said, I just had to share this image my son Robin just created in Pixelmator. I helped where he didn’t know which keys to press, but the rest is all him.

I don’t know about you, but I like it. Then again, that’s what parents are supposed to feel, right? :)

I recently took stock of my video tutorial archive and it turns out I have 4,5 months of fxphd videos alone (assuming I watch them eight hours a day and take weekend breaks). Add to that tons of modo tutorials, Maya, Gnomon, Lynda.com, Digital Tutors, you name it. That is a lot of accumulated knowledge. It also was a large enough number that I started to ask myself if I really need this many tutorials or if I am just addicted to collecting as many as possible. I am behind on watching them after all.

This got me thinking about the old saying that one should surround oneself with people more skilled then oneself or smarter or generally just better—depending on the source of the quote.

I work from home, so while I see the wisdom in these words, actually doing something about it tends to be tricky when you are stuck in your own four walls almost 24/7. But it occurred to me that I am surrounding myself with smarter, more skilled people all the time. They mostly come too me in the form of video tutorials. I get to see a ton of different people showing me their way of tackling problems and offering solutions I would have never thought of. And, true, open time spots to watch them fluctuate wildly depending on project load, but I am also known for watching tutorials for a whole week straight if business is running a bit slow.

I feel like this is a very valuable practice that allows me to not only keep my sanity sitting mostly alone in an office, but also fill my subconsious with tons of input that I am able to make use of at a later date.