Alexander Kucera

We startend the session with a quick history of subdivision surfaces. Invented by Pixar and first used in the short Gerry’s Game they made away with the constraints of both polygonal modeling as well as Nurbs modeling. What’s wrong with Nurbs? Nurbs surfaces are based on control vertices or hull points through which a b-spline is calculated. This leads to smooth curvature and inherent UVs. Both are good. However, Nurbs modeling relies on adding a multitude of Nurbs patches together to form you final surface.

This talk was very theory heavy with lots of formulas and photos of curves that summarize pretty badly. I still gave it a try here. The session started with the history of camera tech. From the first wooden boxes with a hand crank. A hand cranked camera had severe restrictions in that it obviously only could film where a human operator could go and there wasn’t even adjustable focus. Since then we have come a long way.

Not too much to record for this one. It was mostly company heads trying to weasel their way out of loaded questions by the audience and discussion chair Eric Roth. Things like “Do you think a VFX union is a solution to the problems?” “…” It was interesting to see the panel stammer around the issue. But mostly it was sad that they still don’t see that they are a part of the issue.

Opening with a joke about the botched Oscar ceremony, this is promising to be a good yet sad talk. Rhythm & Hues went from 1000 artists to a small fraction of that recently. Why was Life of Pi “unfilmable” Three simple reasons, combined making for a perfect storm: water animals kids (the actor playing Pi while technically not a kid played his first role and could not swim) Research Ang Lee did some hands on research of how a life boat or raft behaves in the ocean and how water and waves behave.

Topics discussed center around what the industry can do to improve interoperability and workflow to strengthen the business instead of running it into the ground. Open Data Platforms Rob Bredrow took the lead by talking about the work he and SPI has worked on to create a good open standard onto which companies can build to achieve something greater. Alembic, OpenColorIO, OpenEXR to name a few. Before every company needed to reinvent the wheel in-house to set itself apart.

Starting out with a short overview of RiseFX, his company, Florian dove right into the workflow for Cloud Atlas. RiseFX has garnered a reputation for using innovative approaches to set extensions and they didn’t disappoint on Cloud Atlas either. Starting out with some stats: most expensive German movie to date at 100 million US dollars financed independently internationally lots of famous actors in multiple wildly different roles shot only in European locations standing in for totally different environments pre–production started July 2011 with the previz of 1973 San Fransisco and the Luisa Rey car crash shooting started in August Car Crash The previz was very accurately planned and is pretty much verbatim like that in the movie.

Yesterday evening was the first of likely many fxphd meetups this week. About 15 people showed up and had a relaxed chat. It was a great time to catch up with old friends and meet new faces. Movies were discussed, Schnitzels eaten and some teased (twitter: johnmontfx text: John Montgomery), who sadly couldn’t make it this year, with pictures of delicious wheat beer like the cruel friend we are.

Next week is FMX, a great yearly convention about visual effects, games and virtual reality. I’m there every year reporting for Professional Production Magazine and I thought this year I could up my game and write little short blurbs on this blog about the sessions I attend. I asked around and there was some interest from people that could not make it this year or which are interested in the topic.

Effective immediately, I switched over this site’s RSS to URI.LV to handle my feed subscriptions. With Feedburner going down in the near future and Kirby not having its own feed tracking, URI.LV seems like a pretty good replacement. Also its support rocks. I had a problem with the URL rewrite rules and Maxime, the mind behind URI.LV helped me out within minutes.

At the moment, I am in Lyon, France to write about Cartoon Movie 2009. At this conference, motion picture and games are presented to investors and distributors. A wide range of animation styles and storylines is present, which makes the conference really interesting to watch. A lot of great and creative people come together to give each other feedback and to look for new ideas and opportunities. All in all it is an exciting melting pot of like-minded people.