Pixar’s lead developer of the RenderMan for Houdini plugin, Sarah Forcier, will show where state-of-the-art rendering technology is headed in the upcoming version of RenderMan 24, with updates on XPU, Lama, and other major features in this upcoming release.
During a deep dive into Stylized Looks by early adopter, 9to3 Animation, learn how advancements in NPR (non-photorealistic rendering) are set to transform RenderMan into a tool for broad look development, delivering everything from photorealism to new kinds of Stylized Looks. Guest speakers, Ernst Janssen Groesbeek & Hristo Arabadzhiyski, will show examples of how Stylized Looks can be created interactively with Houdini. This approach enables a wide range of stylized treatments of scenes quickly, efficiently, and procedurally. Ernst and Hristo will showcase how they’d emulated traditional media with these tools, and how their workflow for Stylized Looks is both versatile and artist-friendly..
Sarah Forcier joined Pixar Animation Studios in 2018 as the lead developer for the RenderMan for Houdini plugin. Over the last couple years, she has rewritten RenderMan’s Houdini integration, worked to support the latest Houdini features, and presented this work at FMX and Siggraph. Prior to Pixar, Sarah studied at Cornell University and University of Pennsylvania.
Ernst janssen Groesbeek is educated in Architecture and Architectural Engineering, specializing in Computer Visualizations. Ernst started contributing to the Graphics and Animation industry as an Assistant professor at the Chair of Design Informatics, Faculty of Architecture at Delft University. After educating students for 18 years, he founded 9to3animation in 2014. To expand his knowledge and creative endeavors. He continued his career by designing and developing imagination-based – non-photorealistic – shading and lighting methods used in several national and international productions. Together with Christos Obretenov, he set out on a journey to explore the possibilities of Imagination Based Rendering. They are the early adopters of Pixar's RenderMan plug-in that enables film and animation studio's to create their unique style.
Hristo Arabadzhiyski is a Houdini artist on his self-taught journey to be a TD. A designer by trade and a marketing specialist by education, he picked up 3D as a hobby over a decade and a half ago. That hobby has since branched out into proceduralism, manipulating geometry with VEX, building HDAs, shading & rendering with RenderMan, compositing, film photography, and traditional sculpting. One underlying philosophy binds all these together, and that is his drive for bold non-photoreal stylization and expressive qualities.
This presentation covers the "Blood Drum" effect from the Diablo IV cinematic "By Three They Come". We'll dig into how we took advantage of Houdini's flexible simulation tools, and VDB surfaces to efficiently create a complex formation effect. Then onto how Vellum enabled us to create dynamic stretching and tearing effects.
Nema Safvati is a Senior FX artist at Blizzard Entertainment within the Story and Franchise Development Division. He started out in advertising at studios such as The Mill and Moving Pictures Company. Before working at Blizzard Nema worked on feature films at Digital Domain in Los Angeles. Such as Spider-man: Homecoming, Thor Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War.
Mustafa B. Yaldiz, Andreas Meuleman, Hyeonjoong Jang, Hyunho Ha, Min H. Kim} (2021, ``DeepFormableTag: End-to-end Generation and Recognition of Deformable Fiducial Markers,'' ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 40(4), presented at SIGGRAPH 2021, Aug 9--Aug 13, 2021
Developing a game that satisfies high expectations on visual quality while running at 30 fps on a 6 year old console platform, PlayStation 4, is quite a challenging task. The majority of the world of The Last of Us Part II contains alpha geometry which has poor rendering pipeline performance and full-screen expensive shaders with heavy resource usage. This required us to use plenty of hacks and tricks to push the hardware to its limits and make sure we don’t have to needlessly compromise on the visual fidelity of the game. This talk mainly focuses on case studies from the actual game highlighting the most expensive parts of our game’s frame and how we were able to come up with solutions to these performance hurdles.
Check out more SIGGRAPH 2020 Presentations on the Naughty Dog Research Blog: http://www.naughtydog.com/blog/naught...
Making xSTUDIO a Cross-Platform Reality - Ted Waine, DNEG; Michael Kessler, Epic Games & Alex Santo, Ahead
xSTUDIO is an Open Source review and playback application intended for the VFX, Animation and beyond. From the project’s inception it was intended that xSTUDIO would be cross-platform with binary distributions for MacOS, Windows and Linux. Naturally this aspect would be crucial to the success of xSTUDIO as an Open Source product. However, the initial phase of development was done exclusively on Linux. For the DNEG xSTUDIO team the cross-platform requirement remained something of low priority. Following the Open Source release of xSTUDIO dev teams from Epic Games and Ahead partnered to investigate xSTUDIO as a candidate for deployment as a playback and review solution. As a predominantly Windows platform business the next steps for Epic would require a full Windows port for xSTUDIO. The team carried out this work with (more moral than technical) support from the DNEG xSTUDIO team. In this talk we will hear about this experience of adapting the codebase and dependencies to be Windows compliant. Cross platform support is an important goal for many Open Source software products. Sharing our experience of porting a GUI application from a Linux environment to Windows, the short cuts that were learned and the build tools that enabled and accelerated this effort.
In this recorded webinar and interactive Q&A session, a panel of leading sound professionals discuss trends across editorial, re-recording mixing, dialog, sound design, and music editing as well as how to meet the challenges of a changing media landscape.
00:00 - Start
00:55 - Meet the Panelists
02:27 - Panel discussion starts
03:56 - Scott Jennings - Favorite Tools
07:03 - John Ross - Collaboration, live streaming
11:13 - Cheryl Ottenritter's - Impact of immersive
13:35 - Biggest workflow challenges?
19:10 - Demo intro
20:06 - Multiple User Collaboration
23:38 - Nested timeline collaboration
25:52 - Decompose nested audio tracks
29:52 - ADR Tools
32:21 - ADR Recording
33:29 - Dolby Atmos tools
34:17 - Atmos remastering
39:17 - Importing a master file
43:18 - Space View Scope
45:37 - Output loudness tools
48:10 - Q&A
This video was developed in partnership with Blackmagic.