3D Festival 2003 Report
Read more about the new features of Softimage|XSI v.3.5, the crowd animation system Softimage|Behaviour and about the interesting seminars at the 3D Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark.
May, 12th, 2003, by Raffael Dickreuter

Softimage launched XSI version 3.5 and Behaviour 1.1. at the 3D Festival in Copenhagen. There were a lot of interesting seminars about the current situation in the industry, the history of 3D graphics and even an entire day about the making of Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers.

Softimage|XSI v.3.5
Here’s the scoop about the new features of XSI 3.5: In the preferences you can now choose between two languages: English and Japanese, so you don’t need to buy a Japanese Version, you get it as a language package. You can now also set prefix-names for your models.

New features are the transform manipulators which may please especially former Maya and 3ds max users. On right mouse click you now get a little popup menu the options of “local”, “global” , “view” etc.. for faster access.

A new pivot point that has great snapping options makes it way easier and faster to rotate, move or scale a certain component of an object. Till now if you had a complex model and wanted to rotate an edge it was difficult to achieve the desired effect. Thanks to the new pivot point you can now work more accurately on a certain component. However it looked like it wasn’t yet animatable.

In the render tree you can now rename all your nodes. Mental Ray 3.2 now writes incremental .mi files. OpenGL accelerated scanline rendering and shadow maps are another improvement.

When rigging a character you will get a “move joint” tool in XSI 3.5 that makes it easier to edit your joints after they were created.

An impressive feature is that you can quadrangulate triangle objects. If you have a complicated object that consists of a huge amount of triangles you can easily convert them into quads. All triangles, as well as all n-side polygons will then become quad.
When you symmetrize polyongs it will symmetrize also the UV and keep only one UV map.

Two known features of RC Tools can now also be found in XSI: Select around corner and select edge loop.

Texturing a tree or a road will become very easy in XSI 3.5 You simply define four quarter points that will be the quarter points of the UV and you will see your texture to follow accurately the geometry. This feature is also animatable and fully interactive.

The animation editor now allows negative scaling. So you can move an entire curve into the negative area. The F-curve edtior got Softimage|3D’s slope handling tools.

Several improvements in the hair panel is going to make your life easier: A slider helps you matching the hair with the level of subdivision. The amount of hair segments becomes animatable and you can texture along the lenght of the hair. The tickness can be edited with proportional or absolute SI units. In the Shematic view you get memo cams that become very handy for complex scenes.

A new button allows you to clean up structure changes. An option lets you actiave it permantently so this process is automated. When using directX realtime shaders in XSI 3.5 a window no longer pops up but will also be displayed in your viewport just like the OpenGL realtime shaders.

Softimage|Behavior v.1.1
Softimage also showed Behavior 1.1 at the 3D Festival. It has a very strong API and through scripting you get full control about a huge amount of characters. You can tell them to move in certain directions. They avoid each other and obstacles in an intelligent way. In Behavior you create the crowds animation and you can get it into XSI or any
other 3d software via dotXSI.

They showed several examples of huge amounts of characters as well as how a rather small amount of characters reacts to it’s environment and to the other characters around it. To use Behaviour you have to know the programming language “Piccolo” which syntax is similar to JScript and C++.

Ola Madsen (XSI Base member Null) demonstrated also the power of XSI. The 3D artist from Sweden said that each demo session for a few people took often one or two hours. The people simply didn’t want to leave anymore and couldn’t get to see enough of XSI’s power.

3D Festival Seminars

Creating Memorable Characters
Victor Navone of Pixar talked about creating memorable characters. He explained you should design a character from inside out. To get a proper design you first have to know what kind of person that character is. If he is friendly, generous, aggressive or whatever. This should then be applied to the look and design of your character.

It’s important is that your character is interesting for the audience, which means that it should have some type of flaw. Of course your character has to desire something which drives the story forward. A constrast between the different characters will make a story much more interesting. Your character is also defined a lot by his motion, The personality comes often accross to the audience via his motion. The body language also takes a key role when designing a character Of course the voice also plays an important role, so cast a memorable voice that suits your character.

Vitctor Navone also advises the visitors to exploit the opportunites unique to animation. Cartoon animation should be a combination of the familiar and the the fantastic.
A common mistake is that a character has too many flaws.

Rob Coleman
The animation director of ILM held a personal reflection about the evolution of 3d characters and showed how he got th job at ILM. He was the first person assigned to the postion of an animation director at ILM and stated that he loves to combine digital charactes with real life actors. Rob admitted that ILM’s great effects are the result of hard work and why ILM rather should be called “Industrial Light + Brute Force”.

He said that nowadays the 3d artists are no longer slaves to their computerers as they were the last 10-20 years. The todays challenge is no longer to overcome the limitations of the computer software but to teach the animators acting. Therefore the ILM people also have now acting classes.

Another session was the “History of 3D Graphics”. CG Talk held a voting before the event where the users could vote for the most important film effects. The winner was Jurassic Park followed by The Two Towers.

Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers
During an entire day Jason Schleifer, Matt Aitken and Bay Raitt showed what it took to bring Gollum to life and how they achived the impressive effects like the crowds.

Gollum was modeled in Mirai by Bay Raitt and he developed a great character system that made it very fast for animators to give Gollum that strong facial expressions. They used two different characters as one was Gollum and the other Smeagol. Bay’s job was also the help the animators so that they understand that brilliant system to get the desired expressions. It was based on sliders that let you achieve many different facial expressions depending on their combination and their weight.

A funny moment came at the end of the presentation when a young person asked where you could download that animation plugin…

Shelley Page Special Student Session
Shelley Page from DreamWorks held a special seminar for students on how to get a job in a large studio. She explained that you should try to specialize in a certain area. There was no need to show great modeling if you wanted to be a character animator. You should rather work full time on your animation skills and then show that in your reel. If you create a great short film with your firends then this might be good way to get an award at a festival, but to get a job it might rather be difficult as it was hard to see for a studio which part of the film was done by you. If you want to show a group project in your reel be sure that you state clearly what you did and what is other people’s work.