The Art of Rendering

Great article from FXGuide.

A good attempt at being thorough about the current state of rendering technologies out on the market at large.

Specially informative sections on RenderMan and Arnold.

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-art-of-rendering/

Working "for free"...

Reading through this article at VFX Soldier today:

"New horizontal expansion includes government-funded Bachelors and Masters programs wherein students pay Digital Domain to work for Digital Domain. (...)

So, if 30% of our labor can be free, actually paying tuition, but by your Junior and Senior year at the college, you’re working on real firms (films), as part of the professional workflow, and you graduate with a resume that has five major films, your name in the credits, and more than just an intership level of experience, then that’s the perfect kind of trade off."

While some may think this makes sense, I strongly beg to differ.

Understand this: I do not know of any other industry whose educational foundation is based on students paying to work "for free" for a related profit-making business.

The implications of that ripple through the ranks of candidates and employees alike. Imagine, from a strictly business point of view, the validated access to labor that (albeit less skilled) is absolutely FREE.

In essence, you are creating a grey moral zone where "labor that is profited from does not necessarily need to be compensated".

While, the "benefits" offered to entry-level candidates dying for a break into the industry may be appealing to them, think of what that means to the skilled, experienced workforce that's come before!

For the students, it may "make sense", but they cannot see further ahead where that decision will take the very industry they want to live from.

I find the argument that this approach is necessary to "protect" the jobs that would be lost to cheap labor markets like China and India quite disturbing. Yes, by "market rules", those jobs will go anyway because of the economical inequalities that undermine the illusion of a truly "globalized world".

It supports the sad philosophy of "averaging for the lowest common denominator", which is (IMHO) the worst thing that can happen for any industry.

Morally dubious? Well, it depends on your point of view right?

As with a lot of other things in this industry that has become so much of a "morally grey zone"...

For DD, it's a lucrative scheme of justifying cheap (free) labor, with the added bonus that once the worker rises to a skill rank higher that "junior", "apprentice" or "student"; they can be automatically dismissed before DD needs to start paying them as employees. And so, the cycle goes on. Blessed by "Wall Street morals".

It just strikes me as another cause for concern. This industry has transformed itself in its VERY short life span. Remember people: most of our jobs DID NOT EXIST back in the late 80's, early 90's!

Seeing these tendencies of averaging talent, skill, experience and professionalism (KEY ingredients for this industry) by the lowest common denominator possible, so the top of the food chain can pocket a few extra greedy dollars, makes me concerned about the place VFX artists will find themselves in another 20 years - considering how fast things changed in the last 20.

Just my two very sad cents.

"PROMETHEUS" - Bring it ON!!

The anticipation buildup for this movie is unlike anything I've seen in the past two years...

Ridley Scott seems to still have some magic at his fingertips, and this latest trailer for "Prometheus" is nothing shorter than EPIC.

If this movie doesn't open up to some serious millions in the box office, I don't know what else can draw in audiences anymore!

To be honest, I think they are beginning to show WAY more than I'd want to see before hitting the theater... but I guess there's a good measure of  "studio marketing machine" involved in that.

In any case, there you have it! Now tell me how on Earth would you not want to go see this movie?! 

Gotta LOVE raytracing!

Evan Wallace is a WebGL wizard.

Playing with the latest in interactive CGI tech, he gives you a refreshing look at the current state of CG technology, married to Web tech and faster graphics processing.

His work can bee seen on his website, and some great "toys" are available for you to play with directly on your browser - like the interactive path-tracing Cornell box.

Gone are the days when people would look funny at you when you said "let's raytrace EVERYTHING!"  ;D

Brave New World

We hear news of FXI preparing to launch the Cotton Candy, a tiny computer that looks like a USB thumb drive. The device, which can run either Ubuntu or Android 4.0, has a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a Mali 400MP GPU that allows it to decode high-definition video.

And as our classical computer architectures shrink to sizes that were unimaginable 30 years ago, IBM reveals more details of its quest for the "next generation of computing".

According to their news releases, IBM revealed that physicists at its Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York have made significant advances in the creation of “superconducting qubits.” Using a number of techniques, IBM explained that it has set three new records in its bid to reduce errors in elementary computations, while retaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits.

In quantum computing, conventional binary bits are replaced by qubits, which can be 1, 0 or both. However, until now, qubits have been unstable: the pesky things tend to lose their quantum mechanical properties and go incoherent in a fraction of a second.

"The special properties of qubits will allow quantum computers to work on millions of computations at once, while desktop PCs can typically handle minimal simultaneous computations," the IBM researchers said. "For example, a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe.

“In the past, people have said, maybe it’s 50 years away, it’s a dream, maybe it’ll happen sometime,” said Mark B. Ketchen, manager of the physics of information group at IBM.’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. “I used to think it was 50. Now I’m thinking like it’s 15 or a little more. It’s within reach. It’s within our lifetime. It’s going to happen.”

Let's keep watching. If things follow through as they are predicting, and no major catastrophe hits humanity in the next decades, we could witness a leap in computational power within our lifetimes that will be unbelievably revolutionary - to say the least.

Raiding the Lost Ark

Jamie Benning has made 3 ‘filmumentaries,’ as he calls them, about the original Star Wars trilogy. His efforts collate interviews and rare behind the scenes footage and photos in what are essentially the most detailed commentary tracks a fan could hope for.

Benning followed his Star Wars docs with Raiding the Lost Ark, which tracks the creation of the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It’s a must-see for any Raiders or Steven Spielberg fan. No matter how much a viewer knows about the making of Raiders, I’d be very surprised if there was nothing here that is new, as Benning has incorporated everything from classic interviews to the minutia of little-seen production reports.

Timescapes

Photographer/film maker Tom Lowe's been working on his film TimeScapes since 2009, and has recently released a new trailer that shows off to stunning effect the Red Epic he's been filming on. Between the Epic and Canon DSLRs, all the shots are of incredibly high quality, filmed and edited at 4069x2304 resolution. Filled with stunning time-lapses and slow-motion photography, each frame is the equivalent of a 9-megapixel still image.

StudioDaily on "Immortals"

More on Image Engine's work on "Immortals".

This time, an article from StudioDaily.

The Evolution of Internet Search

Google released a short video today highlighting some of its key milestones in search over the past decade. It’s both a fun blast from the past and a worthwhile reminder of how much things have changed over the years. 

Image Engine Immortals

FX Guide talks to Image Engine about the work on Immortals. Mike chats to vfx supervisor Simon Hughes and Executive Producer Shawn Walsh about the film, which was shot in Montreal.

Direct link HERE.

1 TeraFLOPs on a chip

14 years ago, in 1997, Intel demonstrated the first supercomputer capable of achieving 1 TeraFlops by combining 9,680 Intel Pentium Pro CPUs.
Today, Intel unveiled the first chip based on its MIC (Many Integrated Cores) architecture: "Knight's Corner".

It is a single CPU with 50 computing cores, reaching over 1 TeraFlops in one chip. According to Intel,  "the result is a fundamentally new architecture that uses the same tools, compilers, and libraries as the Intel® Xeon processors. 

Intel already foresees a combination of many Intel® MIC processors surpassing the next big milestone: the exaflop barrier."

As a frame of reference, a six-core Intel i7 CPU peaks at 109 GigaFlops.

1 GFlop = 10⁹

1 TeraFlop = 10¹² 

1 ExaFlop =  10¹⁸ (that number would be read as "10 followed by 18 zeros", or "one quintillion" calculations per second) 

More at INTEL.

Nvidia MAXIMUS

NVIDIA Maximus-powered workstations combine the industry-leading professional 3D graphics capability of NVIDIA Quadro® GPUs and the high-performance computing power of NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs. Tesla co-processors automatically perform the heavy lifting of rendering or CAE computations, freeing the Quadro GPUs to do what they do best—enabling rich interactive graphics.

Nvidia MAXIMUS

Earth is AWESOME!

How can one not stare in absolute awe at the beauty of this little blue marble we live on?

Watch this in HD with full-screen ON!

Katana is out.

The Foundry has finally released the first version on their website and announced ILM has already purchased a site license.

Katana was developed at Sony Imageworks and has been their core lighting and look development platform for a fair number of big productions.

 Paired with either Arnold or PRman, Katana is reportedly a tremendous performance boost for artists lighting and shading 3D assets and environments.

Katana is Linux-only at this point, and price is undisclosed at The Foundry's website. Trust me, this in not software for the "shallow-pocketed" and "faint-of-pipeline".  This is a tool for studios with solid Linux pipelines and cash-fluent production revenues...

For more details, check out Katana's website.

Colour Bleed

Fantastic short by Peter Szewczyk.
Watch from the BBC's FilmNetwork.

Better White LEDs

Researchers are reporting the first use of a fundamentally new approach in the quest to snare the Holy Grail of the lighting industry: An LED (light-emitting diode) — those ultra-efficient, long-lived light sources — that emits pure white light. The new approach yielded what the scientists describe as the most efficient and stable source of pure white light ever achieved. The advance could speed the development of this next-generation technology for improved lighting of homes, offices, displays, and other applications, they say. 

Image Engine talks "The Thing"

Watch FX Guide's podcast as they talk to Image Engine about the creature and environment visual effects work in director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing.

Jesper Kjolsrud, our VFX Supervisor for the show and Steve Garrad, VFX Executive Producer, talk about the challenges and accomplishments of working on this project.

Check it out at FX Guide's website HERE.

Touchscreen Distinguishes Different Parts of Finger

By attaching a microphone to a touchscreen, the CMU scientists showed they can tell the difference between the tap of a fingertip, the pad of the finger, a fingernail and a knuckle. This technology, called TapSense, enables richer touchscreen interactions.

More at CARNEGIE MELLON NEWS

Say hello to Lytro...

Lytro has unveiled a little something it calls the Lytro camera - the world's first consumer light field camera.
Within the anodized aluminum frame, the friendly camera totes an f/2, 8x zoom lens which utilizes an 11-mega-ray light-field to power all that infinite focus magic.
www.lytro.com

Immortals Trailer

A new trailer is available for "Immortals", Tarsem Singh's vision of the Greek myth of Theseus and the Titans.
I was senior digital artist on this project for a good chunk of 2010 and early 2011.
"Immortals" will be in theaters November 11, 2011.
Link HERE.