Friday Flashback #33

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In looking through some old PDFs, I found the PDF for a SOFTIMAGE|3D brochure from 1996, which included this page with some [rather low quality] images from the Joe Fly spot from Spans & Partner.

I remember them showing Joe Fly during one of the staff meetings:

Here’s some info I got from the google cache:

Fly & Sanchez Mostly Sports Spans and Partner, Hamburg, Germany

This delightful animated short was first released in 1995 at the Siggraph electronic theatre, and has since garnered multiple awards including: People’s Choice Award and winner of the Fiction Category at Montreal’s Images du Futur festival; a World Silver Medal at the New York Film Festival; and a Best of 3D Animation award from Dr. Dotzler Medien-Institut in Germany. After its original release on film, the piece was shown on several European networks, including Premiere TV and Germany’s ZDF.

Technology Notes:

The original film was rendered in 2D and distributed on 35mm film, and was wholly developed by Peter Spans, who also developed and directed the re-creation for CyberWorld 3D. The approach and challenge during this production was to combine loveable character animation with the very complex backgrounds, all seen from an insect’s perspective. Almost one hundred percent of the original material was redone when re-creating the original data for presentation in the 3D 15/70 format for CyberWorld 3D.

The normal software packages used by Spans and Partner make up only 65of the Company’s resources, with the remainder being developed as proprietary technology by the Company itself. Joe Fly & Sanchez was wholly rendered with Mental Ray on seven Compaq ES40s with 4 gigs of memory each. Mental Images helped Spans and Partner to optimize the very large 3D databases so quality was not sacrificed. Compaq provided rendering advise and Softimage supported for the cyberworld 3D software component with special thanks to Dirk Weinreich. Part of the compositing was done on SHAKE from Nothing Real.

Joe Fly & Sanchez Mostly Sports principal filmmakers:

Creator/Director: Peter Spans
Producer: Martinique Spans
Animators: Sabine Lang, Ismail Acar

IMAX 3D recreation:

Director: Peter Spans
Executive Producer: Martinique Spans
Line Producer: Kathrin Juergensen
Senior Animators: Sabine Lang, Piotr Karwas, Jakob Schulze-Rohr, Matthias Wittman, Heiko Lueg
Post/Compositing: Stephan Remstedt, Anna Heine
System Admin./Programming: Sandy Mantel, Thorsten Schlüter

About Spans & Partner Computeranimation, Inc.:

After working as director / head of design for other companies, Peter Spans founded Spans and Partner in 1991. The Company creates character animation, as well as special effects animation for feature films and advertising. Cyberworld

Netview and Internet Explorer 9

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I’ve posted before that Netview uses the version of Internet Explorer installed on your system. It turns out that, as of IE8, it’s not quite that simple. Thanks to Luc-Eric for pointing this out.

Netview is a hosted version of the Internet Explorer WebControl, and by default, the WebControl displays pages in IE7 Standards mode.

To force Netview to use IE9 mode, you can either set a registry entry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (or HKEY_CURRENT_USER)
     SOFTWARE
          Microsoft
               Internet Explorer
                    Main
                         FeatureControl
                              FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION
                                   xsi.exe = (DWORD) 000090000

or add this meta tag to your HTML page:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9" >

I tested the registry entry, and after I set it, this browser detect page correctly said I was using IE9 (before I set the registry, it said I was using IE7).

Also, after setting the registry entry, Netview scored 140 at http://html5test.com/ (before I set the registry, Netview scored 40). Note that IE9 itself scores 141.

Portal: No Escape – ICE used for live action short

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I did all the particle work on the gun, gun blasts and the portals in ICE:

Honestly the setup couldn’t have been simpler. There’s a stretched sphere that acts as an emitter for when the gun shoots. All the particles it emits have an animated turbulize node on it. On the walls there is a disc shape that it collides with and spawns new particles – then there’s a ring they’re attracted to. The velocity and weight are also turbulized.

That’s pretty much it.

Everything was rendered with emRPC and sent over to Nuke for tweaking by the compositors.

Paul Griswold

Scaling about an arbitrary point

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The animated gif above shows the result of scaling an object about a point that is not the origin. This is like moving an object’s center and then scaling the object.

Here’s an ICE tree that scales an object (a cube in this example) about an arbitrary point.

I didn’t freeze the transforms on the cube, so I used a StaticKineState property to hold the initial SRT values. Otherwise, when I had the cube.kine.global plugged into the tree, I ended up with some weird results sometimes.

A null named “pivot_position” is used to specify the scaling point.

First, we translate the scaling point back to the origin of the cube coord system.
Then we apply the scaling, and then we translate back to the “pivot position”.
Because the cube transforms weren’t frozen, I then multiple by the cube’s initial transfo matrix to get the final result.
References:
On-Line Computer Graphics Notes

Adding your ICE operators to menus

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The User Tools menu in an ICE Tree view has an Add Operator to Menu command that adds your compounds to menus, so you can apply them to the selected object. “Add Operators to Menu” is implemented in VBScript in %XSI_HOME%\Addons\ICEUserTools\Application\Plugins\ICEUserTools.vbs.

Unfortunately, this command wasn’t updated after 2011 Advantage Pack, so it doesn’t know about the new ICE toolbar and menu structure.

So, here’s a Python version that adds ICE operators to either the Particles > Create or Deform > Create menus in the ICE toolbar. When you apply the operators, they will be applied to all selected objects.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12898205/AddICEOperatorsToMenus.xsiaddon

The addon adds a “PSS Add Operators to Menu” command to the User Tools menu of the ICE Tree view, so it does add a bit of clutter (since I cannot programmatically remove the original Add Operators to Menu command).

To add operators to menus:

  1. Export your compound.
  2. In the ICE Tree view, click User Tools > PSS Add Operator to Menu.
  3. Type the name of the xsicompound file (without the .xsicompound extension).
  4. The next time you open the menu, it will be dynamically updated to include a command that applies your operator (with ApplyICEOp) to all selected objects.

See below the fold for the plugin code.
Continue reading →

Carl Bass talks to Architosh about Apple in the CAD/3D industries

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Exclusive Interview: Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, talks to Architosh about Apple in the CAD/3D industries | Architosh.

We have had more than six million downloads of SketchBook mobile. We’ve had almost two million downloads of AutodCAD WS in a fraction of the time SketchBook has been available. Even things like TinkerBox…we’ve had over a million downloads of that. So I think when you look at the numbers they speak for themselves. It shows you just how popular and compelling those devices are.