DISCOVER and NETWORK

The world of hair in DreamWorks’ film ‘Trolls World Tour’ got much bigger than in the first film ‘Trolls’. The distinct musical genre that each Troll tribe was devoted to, influenced their hair design and movement. The wide variety of hair effects, both passive and active, exhibited by the Trolls in various environments and situations, provided interesting challenges. The task of creating all the hair effects brought together a combination of consistent hair simulation setups, an optimized fur simulation toolset, a suite of art-driven and artist-friendly hair manipulation tools, an effective communication link between Animators and Character Effects artists, and a high level of dynamic control over hair styles and render hair deformations. The artistic hair requirements imposed by the film pushed the boundaries of art-driven hair and the tools used to create them. This talk presents the tools and techniques used to bring that expansive world of hair to life.

In the summer of 2018, our effects department took advantage of some downtime. We decided to use this opportunity to create a short film with no characters, animators, or our full pipeline. The team wanted to test how far we could push our effects pipeline to create an end-to-end short film using Houdini as much as possible. We leveraged several new technologies and concepts in order to collaborate among 20 artists and include lighting and rendering when normally they would use other tools. The result was Automaton.

Storage and retrieval of production assets is vital for every modern VFX and animation facility. From the volume of assets being stored to the constantly changing variety and richness of the asset data, efficiently storing, indexing, finding and retrieving the assets you want is a growing challenge. This paper discusses some of the requirements of modern asset storage systems for VFX and animation, introducing two systems that were built to address these challenges as part of the collaborative EU funded “SAUCE” project; DNEG’s search and retrieval framework, and Foundry’s back-end asset storage. It also presents example use cases of the asset library from Filmakademie’s experiments in virtual production, demonstrating more artist focused and task centered systems that enable greater asset re-use.

Hosted at the Academy Software Foundation, OpenColorIO is the most widely used colour management technology for VFX and animation, providing a way to robustly specify and deploy color pipelines across many tools. It has helped artists see and create accurate colors on countless films including Spider-Man™: Into the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man™: Homecoming, Hotel Transylvania 3, Ghostbusters, Alice in Wonderland, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Surf’s Up, and Watchmen. This summer, OpenColorIO embarks on its next chapter with the release of a mighty upgrade that has been several years in the making. OpenColorIO v2 is now feature complete and will be part of the VFX Reference Platform for CY2021. This talk will provide an inside look at all the new features and capabilities:

• vastly improved GPU and CPU rendering engines
• built-in ACES transforms and support for the Academy/ASC Common LUT Format
• the introduction of a display-referred reference space and support for ICC monitor profiles
• new config features to greatly improve the user experience (UX) in applications
• new timeline-related features

For Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker we changed the way we create crowd assets across the different departments: modeling, rigging, crowd and lookdev. The main goal of the project was to reduce the overhead of creating a crowd asset and to integrate it as closely as possible with the hero asset workflow. To achieve these goals, we focused on adding four new features to our existing crowd asset pipeline:

• A simplified asset structure for highly variant crowd agents
• An automated process for generating crowd rigs from our hero rigs
• A customizable crowd asset generation process that provides flexibility to crowd supervisors
• A crowd asset QC system for reviewing slews of individual variations.

This allowed us to create and maintain more easily the different crowd asset variations used in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker for the spaceship armada fight, the audience in the final battle and the huge crowd for the festival sequence. It also enabled the show to use the crowd department to do more work, like the set dressing on the festival sequence or other shots that otherwise would need to go through the hero workflow.

In visual effects it is usually required to process multiple film plates in order to reproduce the performance of real actors using a digital 3D character. One of the most challenging aspects of this process is the complexity of facial animation.
Motivated by the work required to capture and digitally augment the performances for the 2019 film Cats, we created FaceLab, a system that drives the animation of a 3D facial rig by optimizing its blendshape targets’ weights and the head transformation matrix to match the reference plate. The system is designed to scale across different scenarios with varying complexity, and produced tangible savings on the show.