loving the dot com

A few days ago I received an invite from Autodesk to an evening about their new release of Maya 8.5, with a talk from Joel Aron, the Digital Production Supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic - naturally, I jumped at the chance to go.

The launch event went down this evening at the Cumberland Hotel, right next to Marble Arch tube station in central London - it was absolutely packed! Autodesk started off by playing a few show reels of projects which their software had been mainly responsible for creating. You can check out all of these on the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Show Reels page.

Here’s their 2006 reel:

I have to say, I knew their products were widely used in modern media, but I had no idea really to what extent. Everything from ABC News logos, music videos to big-budget movies - basically, if you have a project which needs any kind of CG work there’ll probably be an Autodesk product involved somewhere.

After they’d finished showcasing exactly what their software was capable of doing, one of the Maya engineers ran through all the new features - mainly nCloth and Maya Nucleus, the new simulation framework in Maya 8.5. This was probably one of the first times I have been truly amazed by a real-time software demo, check out the other videos on the Maya Nucleus page and see it for yourself. This stuff actually works in real-time, without needing a whole server farm to do the calculations. Remember this is just the modelling bit though - rendering can still take a very long time.

Aside from the amazing Nucleus features of Maya 8.5, one of the things I’m really interested in looking at is their new support for Python as an internal scripting language. Previously all Maya scripts have been written in MEL (Maya Embedded Language), which had certain limitations and meant developers had to learn a whole new programming language. Having dabbled in Python more than I have in MEL I’m excited at the possibilities that this feature could open up, for both me and plugin developers.

When Joel Aron came on stage he played a showreel of ILM’s creative work - needless to say that was pretty damn impressive too. A lot of people associate ILM with only doing huge big-budget movies (think “Star Wars”, “War of the Worlds” and the like), but they actually work on a whole lot of other films too, doing subtle CG you probably won’t even notice. That’s the sheer brilliance of it.

The majority of Joel’s talk was dedicated to his work on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. I hadn’t realised until then exactly how much of the film was made in CG. I had originally thought the actors were wearing heavy costumes and it was just their faces which had been replaced with the CG models - turns out I was wrong. Most of the cast were entirely modelled in CG. Joel showed a load of footage from the original shooting and all the actors were wearing skinny lycra suits with motion-capture dots. Everything was then modelled in Maya and ILM’s own software, then put on top of the actors in the post-production stages. The detail the modellers went into when creating the cast was nothing short of insane.

One bit of the talk I found really interesting was the part about how ILM had written a series of tools for Maya which could automate Davy Jones’ tentacles, according to the mood or current conditions. That way the motion was sufficiently random and didn’t detract any attention away from the acting. Having seen the initial renders of the scenes, I can tell you that the sequences would look odd if it was gone. Next time you watch the film just look at how many really subtle animations there are in the background - also the number of CG characters which hardly appear, because each one is as detailed as the next, whether they appeared on camera for a lot of the film or not. No wonder it took ILM up to 23 hours to render each individual frame!

IMDb can tell you just how many big movies Joel has worked on. After listening to his talk this evening I’m definitely looking forward to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Transformers (both due out later this year).

On the whole though, what can I say about this evening? Wow.

A little bit of my own stuff

I bought a copy of Maya for myself a year or so ago (just before Autodesk bought Alias), and I’ve been kept happy for hours creating silly little animations since then. Here’s one of the first animations I rendered in Maya:

I created this little wormhole ages ago as my first test of fixing a camera to a motion path, it’s nothing complex at all having done it a few times, but I think turned out pretty well for a first attempt. Curse youtube’s re-encoding techniques though, the original looks much better.