Program

This high-level talk shares lessons learned from the process of adapting machine learning techniques into a visual effects pipeline. This presentation covers a broad range of topics around the creation and implementation of the digital veils that were created for Welcome to Chechnya, a documentary film by David France that exposes human rights violations. After some background on the project, the talk relates ideas about working on documentary productions and practical details of the process.

Ryan Laney is a Visual Effects Supervisor and developer who loves using technology to support storytelling. He learned the trade while working with outstanding teams on fun and challenging projects at leading VFX studios like Manex Entertainment, Industrial Light and Magic, Digital Domain, and Sony Pictures Imageworks. Regularly mixing existing techniques with new developments, he is often crafting solutions across disciplines, helping to produce effects tailored to each film’s unique needs. He has developed tools and supported teams for many award-winning projects such as clouds and water effects for The Aviator, Goo in Spider-Man 3, outer-space effects for Zathura, and energy systems Green Lantern, robots in G-Force., and a custom cloud renderer for Hidalgo. At Teus Media, Ryan is exploring visual effects solutions for documentary filmmakers. His maiden voyage into this area was with the digital veils he developed for the documentary Welcome To Chechnya. The work earned the film a Visual Effects Society Nomination for Supporting Visual Effects and a spot on the Oscars' VFX Shortlist. This recent focus on machine learning techniques has led to working with human rights groups to help make these identity-protecting tools available to the productions that need them.

From the original TV show to the feature film adaptations, the universe of SpongeBob is very well-known for its unique characters, whether lead or secondary. To deliver dynamic and directable crowds for SpongeBob the Movie: Sponge on the Run, the teams at Mikros Animation had to think of a new approach from the ground up for the Crowd department to populate hundreds of shots as quickly and effectively as possible. Several challenges were faced: the crowd population was made of dozens of unique morphologies of cartoon characters instead of a generic and classical bipedal one; the locations to populate were huge and diverse; the resulting animation had to remain faithful to the 2D-stylized original show.

In this paper, we detail the array of techniques and tools which were developed to tackle these challenges. First, a rig creation automation tool was developed to process any hero character rig from the movie and retarget any cycle done by the Animation department. Then, a generic behavior tree and simulation templates which can be instantiated for thousands of entities in any location were created.

Framestore has been producing award winning creature effects for over 20 years, with complex rigs and realistic animation being crucial elements of these creatures’ visual fidelity. The studio has a long history of building bespoke tools and technology. In this talk, we present FIRA, a machine learning based pipeline which allows for the extension of a largely proprietary stack of simulation and rigging tools into an emerging domain of realtime workflows. FIRA allows for fully simulated render resolution rigs to be used in previs and virtual production workflows and provides a portable, high performance representation of a VFX deformation rig that can easily be used in different DCCs and applications.

Animating with multiples and smears is a technique of 2D anima- tion dating roughly back to the 1940s, most notably on the Looney Tunes cartoons. We have seen an increase in the use of multiples and smear geometry as some 3D animation becomes more stylized and the computed motion blur is not enough to convey a more exag- gerated motion or speed. DreamWorks first began the exploration starting with Peabody and Sherman and has since used different methods throughout the years. For Boss Baby: Family Business, the DreamWorks A.C.M.E. Multilimb System is an end-to-end pipeline solution for achieving the traditional 2D multiples and smears that puts the control back into the hands of Animation.

In this talk we examine how the Rust programming language’s unique features can be used to write more stable, performant software for visual effects production, and describe the ASWF Rust Working Group’s efforts to provide high-quality C and Rust bindings to the existing C++ VFX software stack using an automated conversion tool.

Computer graphic animation as it is done for feature films and TV series is now a mature field, relying on animation software and techniques designed over more than two decades. In a context where budget and time constraints increase at each project, it has never been so important to understand and modernize the animation process. Rumba is a software dedicated to the animators working on entertainment productions, providing excellent performances and modern animation tools. In this paper, we would like to share our vision of the state of the art of the computer graphic character animation process, with a focus on how the rig design impacts the animation process. We’ll then present how we’ve designed Rumba to modernize this situation.

A behind the scenes look into the challenges faced, approaches taken and tools created to achieve the unique visual style of “The Mitchells vs the Machines”. We will be focusing our presentation on three of the biggest challenges we had to overcome which were the hand drawn outlines around all characters and environments, revealing watercolour textures in the shadows, and the stylization of the trees.

The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) aims to increase the quality and quantity of contributions to the content creation industry’s open source software base and to provide a neutral forum to coordinate cross-project efforts. Hosted projects and the technical talent who work on them are at the core of the ASWF mission and overall industry success. Having the backing of an open source Foundation has many attractive benefits, yet there may be some confusion as to how it all works. In this talk, we’ll hear from the ASWF and representatives from a recently adopted project. This panel will discuss the benefits and possible challenges of becoming a hosted project and what the process looks like from start to finish.