It used to be about getting analogue data in and out of the digital world. Today it's about connecting those various digital worlds into a fluid creative process. While studios look to tighten budgets, minimize risk and broaden films' reach worldwide across platforms, there is no standard operating procedure for studios to produce content. Shorter schedules, and globalization are as disruptive to the digital pipeline today as non-liner editing and digital cameras were to their analogue counterparts. We'll walk through digital pipelines, expose a few of the methods and workflows that haven't changed for far too long, and take a look at trends in production workflows that will allow studios to quickly adapt to these ever changing environments.
We introduce a meshless hierarchical representation for solving light transport problems. Precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) and finite elements require a discrete representation of illumination over the scene. Non-hierarchical approaches such as per-vertex values are simple to implement, but lead to long precomputation. Hierarchical bases like wavelets lead to dramatic acceleration, but in their basic form they work well only on flat or smooth surfaces. We introduce a hierarchical function basis induced by scattered data approximation. It is decoupled from the geometric representation, allowing the hierarchical representation of illumination on complex objects. We present simple data structures and algorithms for constructing and evaluating the basis functions. Due to its hierarchical nature, our representation adapts to the complexity of the illumination, and can be queried at different scales. We demonstrate the power of the new basis in a novel precomputed direct-to-indirect light transport algorithm that greatly increases the complexity of scenes that can be handled by PRT approaches.
The character design for Madagascar emphasizes the preservation of strong lines, shapes, and silhouettes. Applying these directives to the hair was a major challenge in the first movie, as most dynamic hair solvers have difficulties providing believable simulated motion while adhering to those artistic constraints. Our hero character, Alex the lion, provided an additional hurdle with his mane growing not only on the scalp, but also from the neck and chest. Animators also had only limited control over the shapes generated, and fine tuning individual shots was time consuming and expensive. With a larger cast of lions in the sequel Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, we set out to find a solution that would preserve the movie’s artistic design, provide better animator controls, and could be easily set up on a wide range of characters.
Computer generated clouds are an important component in the animated movie 'Madagascar: The Crate Escape'. Our particle based cloud system is used throughout the animated feature in collaboration with our Layout, Lighting and Matte painting departments. It was clear from the beginning that several objectives had to be defined - the techniques used had to be relatively fast and able to create realistic and stylistic clouds, but, also and mainly, be art-directable. Another key component was to create a flexible and memory efficient pipeline designed to accommodate hundreds of production shots.
