INDUSTRY ROUNDTABLE
“There have been significant advancements in technology over the last couple years that can make the virtual filmmaking process intuitive for filmmakers, and a large part of that is the utilization of game engines, such as Unreal.” —Casey Pyke
“The new trends that people are playing with is machine learning and deep neural networks. … Given its incredible potential, everyone seems to be playing around with it. It’s only a matter of time before it gets widely used in production.” —Mathieu Leclaire
themselves are not new – tools like Katana or Gaffer have been giving TDs and artists these capabilities for many years – the release of USD and its support by both the standard DCC tools and facility-sponsored open-source projects will make a tangible difference in how and at what level data is exchanged between applications and vendors. Machine Learning: The exponential rise of machine learning/ neural networks over the last couple of years will increasingly have an impact on VFX/animation productions. While simple data-driven solutions have been used in VFX production for a while – for example, to control geometry deformations in rigs – more applications for this new, more powerful wave of technology are being found at a steady pace and making their way into production workflows. De-noising, increasingly accurate alpha-matting, rotoscoping, context-aware painting, simplified versions of complex shading effects, example-based facial animation and secondary deformations, 3D feature, object and pose-tracking are all areas where machine learning has already demonstrated the potential to speed up the ‘time to first presentable iteration.’ More of these techniques are making their way into the everyday toolset. It will be interesting to see the impact this will have on work that might today still be a candidate for outsourcing. Big Data & Production Efficiency: As budget and time constraints become tighter, the need to be as efficient as possible, while at least maintaining the same quality standard, becomes an imperative. VFX and animation production generate a huge amount of data from a variety of sources: production tracking software, bidding, time-keeping and accounting systems, render farms, IT infrastructure and asset-management systems. These are rich sources of information that show a huge amount about how you spent your available human and machine resources. Just like ‘traditional’ businesses have already embraced using this data to gain production insights, so will the creative industries in order to optimize common processes. Using business intelligence and data-mining tools will be more commonplace to measure the performance of anything from ‘machine utilization,’ ‘rendering speed’ and ‘the time it takes for an update to make it through into a final image’ to ‘usable data generated during overtime’. These historical insights will help in more rational decision-making to validate past changes and investments, and they will help in predicting possible problems earlier. CASEY PYKE, SUPERVISOR, HALON ENTERTAINMENT
Virtual production and the use of game engines in film are both technical and creative trends that will become even more widely used in 2018 effects films. There have been significant advancements in technology over the last couple years that can make the virtual filmmaking process intuitive for filmmakers, and a large part of that is the utilization of game engines, such as Unreal. In our field – visualization – planning out sequences in previs can directly transfer over to a virtual scout or even a shoot
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with a virtual camera. Using previs animation and preliminary motion capture exported into a game engine, we can set up master scenes for the filmmakers to shoot which can be rather complex. The rendering capabilities of the game engine make crowds, lighting, atmospherics and depth of field all adjustable and shootable in real-time. We used Unreal on Logan, and deployed it on War for the Planet of the Apes for the entire visualization pipeline through to finals. The animation and assets made in that early stage can be used in live-action production for Simulcam setups or as virtual assets in virtual production. HALON’s use of Unreal for previs and postvis work make these technical developments work in all stages of a film’s production. It gives filmmakers a more intuitive and accurate idea of how their film is going to look, giving them the ability to better realize their vision. MATHIEU LECLAIRE, DIRECTOR OF R&D, HYBRIDE
The new trends that people are playing with is machine learning and deep neural networks. I’ve seen it being explored to blend animations, de-noise and accelerate renders, accelerate long and complicated simulations – like water and fluid simulations, rotoscoping and matte generation. I don’t know if it’s been successfully used in production much yet, but given its incredible potential, everyone seems to be playing around with it. It’s only a matter of time before it gets widely used in production. The arrival of the USD [Universal Scene Description] format is getting a lot of interest. Pipelines are getting more complex, and there are a lot more shared shots between FX facilities which makes this format interesting. MaterialX also shows potential for exchanging materials between renderers and facilities who use different renderers. The lines are being blurred between layout and final renders. A software like Clarisse makes it so much easier to quickly build very complex shots with a ton of assets and geometry in a very user-friendly way. Facilities are building libraries of assets for quick and easy reuse. Facilities rely more and more on custom libraries of animation vignettes to use to quickly lay out crowds instead of turning towards complicated AI based systems. We even build huge libraries of pre-simulated FX elements that we can quickly lay out when building a shot. These can often be directly used in a final render or they can serve as reference for the FX teams in order to guide the final simulations. Since scenes are increasingly huge and complex, people turn more towards procedural and simulation tools. That’s one of the main reasons a tool like Houdini is gaining more popularity. It already contains many tools and it is so flexible that it can help automate content creation that would otherwise be very costly to create by hand. OpenVDB is one such tool that opened up so many possibilities that simply weren’t possible before. Deep Images still is a good tool to render and merge complex assets that can even come from various renderers. The Cloud and GPUs are more easily accessible these days and can help distribute otherwise very costly computational
“When we get a good response on a vignette it’s much easier to build the pipeline – only once! – knowing we’ve cracked the big design problems without affecting scores of artists.” —Jake Morrison
“Time must be shared for VFX artists to gestate a creative answer to creative questions, and VFX filmmakers will find it increasingly necessary to find techniques and practices that allow the creative space to deliver volume on tighter schedules at a sustained quality.” —Jonathan Fawkner
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