The complete set of iam4 “Flower” wallpapers…
Superior engineering. Visionary architecture. Never before has a software solution been so open and so flexible. SOFTIMAGE|XSI version 4.0 is completely customizable, offering unmatched access to the core of the software and giving unparalleled control over a dramatically accelerated creative process.
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME:
Nintendo Find What They Need at France’s la maison
Michael Abraham
Softimage Customer Stories, 2002 Volume 2 Issue 3
It’s true what they say: There really is no place like home. It’s where the heart is; it’s where you hang your hat; it’s where, no matter what you may have done, they have to take you in. Okay, okay, let’s not get crazy, but that is the essential concept behind la maison, a quite startling digital visual effects company located just outside of Paris, in Saint Cloud, France. One thing is certain: the creators of “Symphony”, a striking new commercial for Nintendo directed by Bruno Aveillan, definitely made themselves at home at la maison.
It’s little wonder. Founded in February 2001 by the team of Annie Dautane (formerly Director of VFX at Medialab, now CEO of la maison), Eve Ramboz (Digital Visual Effects Supervisor) and Luc Froehlicher (Head of CG), with help from a friendly partnership with French animation production company Millimages SA and its president, Roch Lener, la maison (literally, “the house”) is actually housed in a 4000 square meter former printing plant. After architect Olivier Rouvillois got his hands on the place, however, little of the old printing plant remained. Each of the company’s different suites has a distinctive atmosphere, with decorative touches influenced as much by the 1950’s as our current era. The overall effect is one of elegant comfort and relaxed creativity, a mix that la maison has conclusively proven to be a very strong one indeed.
“Our real goal at la maison is to provide an environment where directors and producers can develop their projects knowing they are fully supported by exceptional artistic talent and technical expertise,” says Dautane matter-of-factly. “It may sound a little corny to some, but we literally do want to make directors and producers feel entirely at home. That is when the truly great ideas come to the surface.”
In just over a year of operation, there have been a great many great ideas at la maison. Now boasting a staff of 35 strong as well as a stable of established freelancers, la maison has completed no less than 30 projects for commercials, feature films, television and music videos. Their commercial work alone has been for such noted companies as Nestlé, L’Oréal, Citroën, Peugeot, Ford, Thermasilk, Saturn Vue, Victoria’s Secret and, of course, Nintendo.
OF GORGONS AND GAME BOY
What begins as a normal night at the symphony quickly changes into a battle between good and evil in “Symphony,” Nintendo’s latest commercial for GameBoy Advance, which achieved finalist status at the AEAF (Australian Effects and Animation Festival) in February. As a beautiful female conductress begins the music, an elderly patron with the face of a skull, looks up to the elaborately decorative cornices of the concert hall. As he does so, what looks like an angel in the architecture suddenly comes to life as a hideous gorgon, descending on decrepit wings to attack the conductress. Fortunately for her, the musicians are the protective sort: violin bows sprout flames and shoot from their hands like arrows, pinning the gorgon to the wall as one of the tympani players throws a cymbal like a discus, decapitating the dreaded beast.
But this battle is far from over. No sooner has the gorgon’s head taken leave of her shoulders, than the elaborate overhead chandelier transforms into a dragon. Narrowly dodging a blast of electric flame, the conductress uses her baton to reduce the second beast to shards of glass. As the spot closes, the concert hall is returned to its original state, and we see a GameBoy Advance gripped between two hands. The effect is at once elegant and epic, refined and revolutionary.
“For the Gorgon, we had to create a perfect 3D version of the sculpture decorating the theater,” says Froehlicher, head of CG at la maison. “We knew that some of the shots would incorporate both the real caryatids and the one we created, so we wanted to get it exactly right. That was a very big challenge, especially when you consider the realistic, yet phantasmagoric nature of the character. To that end, we took a lot of photographs of the real sculptures from different angles. Using SOFTIMAGE®|XSI™, we were able to recover a lot of geometry from the photographs and extract appropriate textures from them. The wings themselves were created out of assorted dust and (wood) debris.”
As challenging as the Gorgon was, however, she was easy fare when compared with the glass dragon that poses the ultimate threat. Froehlicher continues.
“Creating an immense glass dragon was one thing, but having him explode at the end was quite another,” says Froehlicher. “It required all manner of large, medium and very close shots to accomplish successfully. After a few mapping tests, we knew that the only way we could do it was to create our own geometry. Since the dragon’s look depended on light refracting through the many crystals of glass, we knew we would have to ray trace the whole thing. We also knew that we would have to use SOFTIMAGE|XSI from beginning to end.”
That prospect was somewhat daunting in and of itself, since the la maison team had only used SOFTIMAGE|XSI sparingly, their busy schedule making them think that learning a new software would ultimately be prohibitive. Moreover, some of the freelancers on the Nintendo project had never touched SOFTIMAGE|XSI before. Would SOFTIMAGE|XSI be able to handle such an immense job in just two months?
“It did,” says la maison CG animation supervisor Mathieu Royer, with great satisfaction. “We used scripting to generate some 45000 crystal pearls on NURBS surfaces. The surfaces were then deformed and animated around the main dragon skeleton. We worked on low-resolution models and transferred the final animations onto the complete model. We rendered several layers and mattes for the graphic artists and compositors would be able to integrate the dragon into the real pictures.”
In the end, the entire elaborate production was completed in just three months, with no more than a dozen people handling modeling, tracking, animation and lighting. The results literally speak for themselves.
When asked about his favorite features in SOFTIMAGE|XSI, Froehlicher and Royer don’t hesitate.
“mental ray®, the NLA and Subdivision Surfaces are definitely the top three,” he says with a smile. “Especially mental ray. To render 3D for integration into real pictures, you’ve got to have mental ray, and it is seamlessly integrated into SOFTIMAGE|XSI. That was really the main reason we decided to jump into SOFTIMAGE|XSI from version 1.5. Since then, we haven’t looked back. Different software packages have different advantages, but the ergonomics, the precision and the constructive way of working that we have found with the SOFTIMAGE|XSI animation toolset really makes it an inevitability in the world of 3D animation.”
Royer also reserves special praise for the Animation Mixer: “The Mixer allows us to do infinite variations of one animation, use the same source several times without being repetitive all while keeping different levels of modification. We also do about 99% of our modeling in SOFTIMAGE|XSI now, so those tools are also very strong.”
With the Nintendo spot at the forefront of their impressive reel, la maison is certain to prove Thomas Wolfe – author of You Can’t Go Home Again – dead wrong. On the contrary, when it comes to visual effects and animation, clients are going to be “going home” again and again in the years to come.
Click here to see the Nintendo “Symphony” commercial.
SOFTIMAGE|3D product info from 1999…
Reboot, one of the first animated TV series, first aired 30 years ago on 10 Sept 1994…
You can read more about the history of Reboot over at the The Oral History of ReBoot, TV’s CGI Pioneer
From that article, a SOFTIMAGE|3D sighting:
SAND by Daniel Langlois, Char Davies
SIGGRAPH 1991: Art and Design Show
The installation consists of two independent curved walls, each 8 ft. x 8 ft. set up on 10 ft. x 10 ft. of floor, set with a curved backlit transparency on each wall. The two images that comprise the entry SAND are frames from a 3D computer film currently in progress. Exhibiting them as still images gives us the opportunity to focus attention on their content as metaphor. Although all the objects in the scene are synthetic, they are wrapped with textures that were digitally scanned from actual rocks and sand. Taken out of context from the film, the view of the beach is a meditative image in which time, represented by the lapping water on the shore, stands still. The under-the-surface image immerses viewers in a moment in time and place where our human bodies cannot usually go.
The SAND scene used to create the beach image has 850 models of pebbles and 125,00 triangles. The scene used for the under-the-surface image has 400 models of pebbles and 150,000 triangles. Both scenes contain multiple lights and raytraced shadows, transparency, reflection, refraction, and fog-as well as texture maps digitally scanned from actual rocks and sand. The deformation effect visible in the under-the-surface image was created with refraction. All modelling, animation and material definition were accomplished interactively with the 3D animation software SOFTIMAGE.
From the XSI 6 days, the Softimage hoodie guy:
Montreal’s PMT uses their investment in SOFTIMAGE|XSI, Avid|DS and Avid Media Composer to join the circus.
DREAM JOB: Montreal’s PMT Puts It All Together for Cirque du Soleil’s Solstrom
By Michael Abraham
“This was a dream job,” says Isabelle Gratton, President of Montreal post house PMT. “We all want a lot more projects like this one.”
Gratton’s succinct appraisal of PMT’s work on Solstrom — a 13-episode television series blending film, situation comedy, burlesque theater and circus acts as only Montreal-based, world-renowned Cirque du Soleil can – is the sort of sound byte that seems to belie both the significant contribution of the company and the genuinely appealing warmth of Gratton’s personality.
In fact, Gratton’s friendliness shines like the spring sunshine, even over the phone. As for the company she keeps, the roughly twenty-member team at PMT battled tight deadlines to create spectacular 3D visual effects for Solstrom, using SOFTIMAGE|XSI together with Avid|DS and Avid Media Composer. Nonetheless, the President’s statement does cut straight to the heart of PMT’s most recent work.
“The combination of creativity and resources was just astounding,” Gratton continues. “Cirque du Soleil is always very clear from the outset that only the best will do. They won’t compromise when it comes to creativity and artistry. They are willing to commit whatever resources are necessary to making all their productions great. As a result of that demanding dedication, our artists had the motivation to fully explore the extent of both their technological tools and their own creativity. The results prove that our people are really the greatest asset we have.”
Montreal’s very first postproduction facility was founded in 1981. For those of you too young to remember, that was right around the time a little format named “video” was beginning to take hold and make itself known. About a decade into their now nearly quarter-century of existence – an awesome achievement in and of itself, especially in our industry – PMT bought the first license of SOFTIMAGE|3D and have been loyal customers ever since.
In the ensuing years, the company has dedicated itself to long-format television projects, mostly within their home province. Indeed, at the French-language portion of the annual Gemini Awards (Canada’s Oscars), you can pretty much count on the fact that PMT has had a hand in creating roughly 75% of the nominees and winners. What is more, the company’s unsurpassed expertise has either been experienced by, or is at least well-known to, every director and producer in the province.
It was through their impeccable reputation then, that PMT captured their dream job and, at least for a few months, got to join the world’s most unusual circus.
As it happened, the company had worked many times with Pierre Gagnon, Mario Rouleau and Pierre Séguin, the directorial team that would handle all thirteen episodes of Solstrom.
“Solstrom was a huge contract, and the directors wanted to work with the best editors available,” says Gratton matter-of-factly. “For some years now, François Bonnelly has been considered one of the best editors around, but he has been also involved in virtually every facet of the design, animation and visual effects business for many years. All three directors knew that they needed his diverse skills to make this project all that it could be. Francois really has all the skills to truly maximize what can be accomplished on Avid|DS.”
And PMT accomplished a great deal. Three of the company’s four Avid Media Composer suites were dedicated to Solstrom, while two more Avid|DS suites were kept busy twenty hours a day as Bonnelly and Luc Bellerive strove for ever greater quality. Of particular benefit to the project was the easy integration between Avid|DS and SOFTIMAGE|XSI, which allowed Bonnelly and 3D Artist Richard Poissant to work closely as the project progressed:
“SOFTIMAGE|XSI was the natural choice for the Solstrom 3D effects,” says Gratton. “As one of Softimage’s very first clients, PMT has always been extremely happy with all of our Softimage and Avid systems, which now include four Avid Media Composer suites and two Avid|DS HD rooms. Our Solstrom animators adore SOFTIMAGE|XSI’s open construction history and flexible workflow, as well as its polygonal modeling tools, particle system, render passes and integrated compositor. Together with our Avid systems, we have greater control during postproduction and can achieve superior results.”
Not surprisingly, the nature of PMT’s usual work requires a sizeable amount of color correction, a task the company used to farm out to other facilities with telecine systems. Now, much of the color correction work can be performed using SOFTIMAGE|XSI, saving time and money for both PMT and their clients.
In addition to color correction, Gratton says that her artists particularly love the SOFTIMAGE|XSI Render Tree for its non-destructive modification abilities:
“Solstrom was a continual work-in-progress,” says Gratton. “Quite a few decisions were still being taken even during the online, and a lot of effects and writing were still being worked out during the offline. What was more, the series had been sold to five different broadcasters, each of whom had their own unique modifications. In the end, we created a total of eighty versions of the effects. With that amount of modification, it was fantastic for our artists to be able to go back easily and without having to repeat a lot of work. We could never have done as much as we did without SOFTIMAGE|XSI.”
If we’ve learned one thing from the past decade in this industry, it’s that nothing is ever guaranteed. That said, however, SOFTIMAGE|XSI’s future at PMT seems pretty secure:
“In all honesty, it has been a long, long time since I have seen our artists love a system they way they do SOFTIMAGE|XSI,” says Gratton. “In our long history, we’ve tried every system out there, but XSI has just amazed our team. They always want to learn more, know more, get the latest versions, etc. They truly love what it can do.”
Gallery of photos from SIGGRAPH 2001
Welcome Aboard!
SOFTIMAGE / XSI / version 4.0 / reel > 2004
2002: Toon shader
eX-SI 