Quick demo of the zoom on cursor feature in the 2012 Advantage Pack, in an ICE Tree view.
http://vimeo.com/27590997

Walt Disney Animation Studios has licensed its XGen visual effects and animation software, used for Rapunzel’s hair in “Tangled” as well as fur, feathers and foliage, to software giant Autodesk.

Under the exclusive five-year license, Autodesk will turn XGen into commercial software available to animation and vfx professionals and to students. Announcement came at the Siggraph computer graphics conference.

via Mouse’s XGen to Autodesk – Entertainment News, Siggraph, Media – Variety.

via Autodesk Announces Subscription Advantage Packs for 2012 Entertainment Software

The Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Softimage 2012 software delivers practical production tools to Softimage artists and technical directors. The Advantage Pack provides:

• New modeling and selection tools that greatly improve productivity and ease of use
• New options for ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) rigid body dynamics that enhance the simulation toolset
• Extended SDK access that provides greater control over customization

PS: New options for ICE RBD = Bullet

Project Photofly 2.1 Now Available

New features include FBX support.

via Project Photofly 2.1 Now Available – It is Alive in the Lab.

Read the 5 things here. Here’s 3 things I pulled from their list:

• The Driller consists of 70,051 parts. Only a few artists working with ILM’s most powerful desktop machines were able to load the shots where the Driller takes on the building. And they sometimes waited nearly an hour for the files to load.
• It took a staggering 288 hours per frame to render the Driller along with the photoreal CG building that includes all those reflections in its glass.
• For a last push on the final weekend of work, ILM’s entire render farm was used for Transformers 3. ILM calculates that that added up to more than 200,000 rendering hours per day — or the equivalent of 22.8 years of render time in a 24-hour period

I’m guessing the 288 hours per frame was just part of the 200,000 hours per day ?

via ‘Transformers: Dark of the Moon’s’ Powerful Visual Effects: 5 Things to Know About How They Did It – The Hollywood Reporter. via Mathieu Leclaire on the XSI Mailing List

THE AUTODESK BOOK
In March, 2011, Autodesk released its first book: Imagine, Design, Create: How Designers, Engineers and Architects are Changing Our World. The book provides a wide-ranging look at how the creative process and the tools of design are dramatically changing – and where design is changing in the coming years. Bringing together stories of good design happening around the world, the book shows how people are using fresh design approaches and new capabilities to solve problems, create opportunities and improve the way we live and work.

WHY A BOOK
Imagine, Design, Create expresses Autodesk’s vision for design as a means to help people innovate and prosper. As a physical artifact, it is a tangible representation of the power of design, which we can give to our customers and partners, providing them with a continual source of inspiration as well as a persistent reminder of Autodesk’s role to foster design.

You can buy the book on Amazon. As an employee, I got a free copy.

The book doesn’t really focus on Autodesk products: in fact, they’re hardly ever mentioned. It’s all about the end results and the general design process. I haven’t read the book yet, but one thing caught my eye in the chapter about the massively multiplayer Lego game:

Making LEGO bricks look real on
the screen became the next engineering
stumper. It turned out that a single 2-by-4
brick required more polygons than a World
of Warcraft avatar—the tiny studs and
surfaces contain a lot of detail. The solution
turned out to be “hidden surface removal,”
which preserved the integrity of each brick
while a player manipulated it onscreen,
but removed the polygons once the piece
snapped into place in a user’s creation. It
took forty engineers four years to build
code so that a computer could understand
when and where to remove surface detail
without harming the look of the model.

40 engineers for 4 years? Imagine what you could do to Softimage or Maya or Max with those kind of resources 😉

Quickly set a preset for the most common poly and surface primitives. Softimage 2012 only.

via BlackRedKing Blog » Default Primitive settings for Softimage 2012.

One of the greatest challenge was to create animations where pages of paper should fold to different geometrical objects. So we developed some “PaperTools” in Softimage ICE, simplifying this task.

via Christian Schnellhammer . TD Blog.

We used Softimage to create all the 3D elements, and rendered with Arnold. Employing Arnold in this show was one of the best decisions we made for the show, and it allowed us to render with all of the expensive calculations such as GI, glossy reflection, and 3D motion blur, without costing too much render time. Additionally, all the effects work such as cloud/myst, flags/banners, water, and crowds were done with ICE in Softimage, and these libraries of effects also helped toward recycling for use in other shots. Also, while we originally planned to replace all of the CG cliff renders with image-based projections at the end, the sophisticated lighting and quality of the Arnold renders allowed for only about 10% of touch-up painting in the end.

via The Art of VFX » THOR: Jonathan Harb – VFX Supervisor & Founder – Whiskytree.