A Krakatoa Year In Retrospection

Here we are, finally in 2010 - we had 3ds Max 2010 for almost a year now so I am quite used to the number already. The past 2009 was a Good Year for Krakatoa customers (at least I hope so) due to the release of v1.5 and all that came with it.
Our company worked under the name Frantic Films VFX on a movie hopefully nobody saw, on another one under the name Prime Focus VFX that many people saw, on a third one that nearly every teenage girl saw and on the movie everybody seems to have seen at least three times since it just made a billion today. And all four of them used Krakatoa in their production. There was a fifth movie that had tons of Krakatoa in it, but it is still not released so I cannot talk about it, and after Avatar it is difficult to be excited about other movies anyway :)

So the beginning of the year found us developing Dragonball:Evolution and G.I.Joe at the same time, the former handled mostly in Winnipeg with animation done in Vancouver, and the latter done mostly in L.A. with animation coming from Vancouver and some effects done in Winnipeg. From RnD point of view, the two movies had some parallels - in DB:E, we had to grow objects using particles, in G.I.Joe we had to destroy them. While the actual implementation of the effects in production ended up quite different, the research process showed that the two tasks can be seen as complementary.
For example, some early tests called for the building of an exo-skeleton from particles drawn from the environments (dust, rocks etc.). Now if you try to use PFlow's Find Target to land particles on a moving surface, it is not impossible, but quite hard to control correctly. Whereas Thinking Particles uses an approach where the user control over a moving particle is gradually stripped away, forcing the particle to go to an exact location, PFlow just uses forces to try to get there even if the point is constantly escaping. If you look at the history of special effects in movies, shooting the action in reverse and playing it backwards has been one of the earliest and most amazing tricks of cinema. With the ability of the Krakatoa PRT Loader to easily control the flow of time using the Playback Graph parameter, simulating the EMISSION of particles from a surface together with complex forces and playing back the resulting PRT sequence to produce the build up of particles on the surface is quite easy. Try it out some time!

The production of the Nanomite effects for G.I.Joe involved two companies (Prime Focus VFX and Digital Domain) using vastly different rendering approaches to create the same look. In the end, particle (point) rendering and voxel rendering looked quite similar - at that point in time, production was locked to a build of Krakatoa that did not have Voxel Rendering yet, and I guess we wouldn't have used it even if it worked already. Assuming that a cloud of metal-eating miniature robots would produce some reflections, we added Environment Reflection Mapping support to Krakatoa, but ended up not using it for the movie. So the end users of the 1.5 commercial release benefited from this development. For a while, there was also support for Anisotropic Specular Highlights in the beta builds, but it just wasn't done right and we decided to pull it out of the shipping product. It might return someday in a better shape. If you haven't seen the "Particles In The Zoo" video by Matthias Müller, you should go watch it now - he used the Environment Reflections ability of Krakatoa to great effect, especially on the "scales" objects.

Then we had the real blockbusters - Twilight:New Moon and of course AVATAR. (I think Blogger.com should add support for the Papyrus font so we can write the name as JC intended) ;)

For the New Moon movie, Prime Focus employed Krakatoa for the "apparition effect", as well as for the foam on the wave that hits Bella. Both effects can be seen in the official trailer (at 1:10 and 1:03 respectively). Not being a teenage girl, I haven't seen the movie yet, but will probably rent it on Blu-Ray when it comes out. In the look development / RnD phase, I also tried to use Krakatoa's new Voxel Rendering for the "diamond skin" effect, but we ended up using an alternative approach based on V-Ray. The Krakatoa effect looked quite promising though and I am sure the knowledge gathered from those tests will end up somewhere else.

Strangely enough, my involvement with Avatar was mostly unrelated to Krakatoa - like with G.I.Joe, I worked on pipeline tools to speed up the production workflow. For G.I.Joe, we used a prototype of an assembly system where all assets were separated and combined only at render time, without using an actual MAX file to hold the scene. The scene was assembled on the fly for editing or rendering, then the changes were saved back to new versions of the asset files in their original locations on the network, and any change to an asset would propagate automatically throughout the sequence. No XRefs involved!
In the case of Avatar, James Cameron insisted on absolute continuity of the animation sequences shown on the 3D screens in the Bio Lab and the Ops center. So we ended up developing a database application (called SAGI = Screen Art Graphic Interface) that would keep track of shot lengths and what is seen on which screen. The 2D artists working on the screen graphics could use a User Interface to this database to enter their latest versions and request a 3D rendering of all screens affected by their entry. The SAGI application would write a control file and "drop" it into a folder monitored by the other part of the system called ASAR (short for Automatic Screen Art Rendering). ASAR was written in MAXScript and was running on a Deadline Slave as a never ending MAXScript job, checking the drop folder for SAGI request files periodically. When it would find a file, it would process it by loading the 3D assets, applying the right timing of the right textures for the Left and Right eye and submitting all necessary passes as new Deadline jobs. This made a human error in the assembly and rendering phase impossible and allowed 2D artists to trigger 3D rendering jobs without any knowledge of 3ds Max or Deadline. But most importantly, it allowed us to change the length of shots and preserve the visual continuity of the screen contents between shots without much human intervention. (You can read the official Press Release here).
That does not mean that Krakatoa wasn't involved in the making of the movie. It helped give the "holotable" terrain its distinctive LIDAR look and was seen on the "false color images" screens showing the energy flow at the Tree Of Souls. (seen below before and after)

Apropos LIDAR - about a year before I joined the company, some shots for X-Men 2 also involved a "holotable" graphics display. It is amazing how these kinds of jobs come around again and again (along with crystal growth and particle disintegration).

Another curious fact about X-Men 2 and Avatar - the former happens to be the movie with the highest Tomatometer rating Frantic/Prime Focus has ever worked on. The latter appears to be the one with the highest financial success. Reading Box Office Mojo daily makes me feel great, especially after all the online negativity before its release.

Outside of the world of VFX, the past year was marked by some of the best concerts in my life, led by the Winnipeg performance of Leonard Cohen, followed not-so-closely by AC/DC and KISS and farther behind by Metallica. (the above sentence should give you an idea of the approximate range of my musical taste). The year also included the worst concert I have been to, unfortunately by an artist I generally love, thus the disappointment was even bigger, but I won't discuss this further. It also saw my AI favorite losing the title despite performances like this, this and this (yes, I am a Glambert!) but producing an amazing album and getting to do this.

Just before the end of the year, me and my wife got to see Chaplin's movie "City Lights" with music peformed live by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Despite being in black and white and having an almost square aspect ratio, it was possibly the second best movie experience I had this year, right behind Avatar (which was in color, wide screen and 3D, of course)...

So on to a new year with lots of changes for me on the horizon and hopefully with more amazing music and a 2.0 version of Krakatoa on the market!

Happy New Year everyone!