The Foundry ships first version of KATANA. ILM buys in.

The shipping of KATANA 1.0 is a significant milestone for The Foundry. ILM joins Digital Domain as the two companies which have invested in site licenses of KATANA. There is a third large facility which has invested in the software, but cannot be named publicly at this point in time. That makes three big companies who have bought in, even before the formal release of the software.

Since they acquired the tech from Sony Pictures Imageworks, they set a fairly concise plan for rolling out the product. While it brings many tools that could be useful for smaller to midsize facilities, in the early days of the product rollout, The Foundry has been concentrating on the larger facilities. But this won’t last for long.

According to The Foundry’s CEO Bill Collis, “we see KATANA as being something that should be useful to any company with an asset based  approach. At present there are some technical requirements, in particular studios currently have to provide their own shader libraries, but a lot of our focus is now on turning KATANA into a fully featured product useful to all companies large and small.”

KATANA was acquired almost two years ago, and much of the development time since that point has been focused on making the software more open and be able to be integrated into a variety of pipelines. Since it was initially developed in-house at SPI, it was set up to work strictly within their pipeline. “In particular there are now APIs for integrating exisiting asset management and renderfarms systems into KATANA,” says Collis. “There is even an API for plugging completely new renderers into KATANA, which is invaluable to many of the big studios.”

This opening up of the software was an important part of having ILM dive in with a site license. Working out of the box with Alembic was also a great help to them. Most of the big studios are interested in flexibility and extensibility,” says Collis, “so a key part of our development for companies like ILM has been a proper C++ APIs to write plugins to KATANA (what we call ‘Scenegraph Generators’ and ‘Attribute Modifiers’).”

KATANA can bring a lot of efficiency to a studio pipeline. People commonly think of costs for 3D as being driven by large render farms, but the fact is that the time the artists spend working on the scenes are a significant cost. If they are spending less time managing and dealing with assets, more time can be spent on the creative things that matter. “KATANA has a great reputation with its existing users as a powerful tool that can deal with the ‘unreasonable demands’ (as Sony put it) of modern production,” says Collis. “They have a saying that ‘there’s always a way to do it in KATANA’, and I think one of the big things the studios we’ve been working with have found is that artists can turn around changes to even the most complex shots very fast.”

Pricing for KATANA is similar to NUKEX, but all purchases so far have been site licenses so, it has been (probably obviously) “very much bespoke pricing” according to Collis. For those unfamiliar with the Queen’s English or British slang, it basically means that by the very nature site licensing, pricing has been individually targeted on a customer by customer basis.

As far as rolling the product out over the next twelve months, Collis hopes that a “significant proportion of the large sites” will have adopted KATANA and we’ll have KATANA 2 ready for  release. KATANA 2 should be more suitable for smaller sites.”

For a bit of background about KATANA, check out this past fxguide content:

• The Foundry acquires KATANA
• fxguidetv #111 – KATANA Primer
• The Foundry announces KATANA plans
• Digital Domain buys site license

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The Foundry Releases KATANA 1.0

To the reception of ILM

London, 27 October 2011 – Today leading visual effects software developer The Foundry (www.thefoundry.co.uk) announces the release of KATANA 1.0, a look development and lighting tool, replacing the conventional CG pipeline with a flexible recipe based asset workflow. In tandem with this release Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a Lucasfilm Company, has purchased a site license of KATANA.

Currently in use for upcoming productions, ILM made this significant investment to boost their production pipeline across their ILM and Lucasfilm companies. As a KATANA site license holder ILM will deploy the software both in their San Francisco and Singapore studios.

KATANA is specifically designed to address the needs of a highly scalable asset based workflow to:

• Allow updating of assets once shots are already in progress.

• Share lighting set-ups, such as edits and overrides, between shots and sequences.

• Allow use of multiple renderers and specifying dependencies between render passes.

• Allow shot specific modification of assets to become part of the lighting ‘recipe’ for shots to avoid having to deal with large numbers of shot specific asset variants.

Furthermore, KATANA is built from the ground up with the needs of modern productions in mind. Extensive APIs mean it integrates with current pipelines, shader libraries and workflow tools, whilst its collaborative nature allows it to scale to meet the needs of even the most demanding productions.

The main attraction of The Foundry’s KATANA stems from the flexibility of the product. KATANA has the ability to produce incredibly complicated shots while allowing artists to retain control.

John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic said “We worked closely with The Foundry over the past year on specific features and functionality we wanted to see in KATANA and after implementing it in production, we believe the package shows great promise and we look forward to our continuing relationship with The Foundry as we integrate technologies such as KATANA into our production pipeline.”

Bill Collis, Chief Executive Officer, comments, “We’re pleased to release KATANA, a product highly anticipated by pipeline engineers and Lighting supervisors. The Foundry is proud of its close association with industry leaders such as ILM. KATANA is yet another validation of The Foundry as the partner of choice for the VFX industry.”

KATANA is backed by The Foundry, a highly regarded provider of high-end visual effects tools, and has been production-proven on over 20 shows since 2004 at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

For more information please visit www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/KATANA

Mikros image: the making of the Canal+ bear

We had such a big reaction to the piece we published earlier in the week about Canal+ ‘The Bear Rug’, that we decided to speak directly to the team at Mikros image in France responsible for the visual effects for this amazing spot that will surely go on to clean up at Cannes and the other award shows. We spoke to VFX supervisors Laurent Creusot and Guillaume Ho at their studio in Paris.

Read Complete Article Here http://www.fxguide.com/featured/mikros-image-the-making-of-the-canal-bear/

Mr X. and The Three Musketeers

Paul W.S. Anderson’s take on The Three Musketeers mythology is a steampunked reinvention of the swashbuckling tale, complete with airborne battles and all in native stereo. Visual effects studio Mr. X Inc. delivered the bulk of the work with 274 shots, and fxguide got the details from VFX supe Dennis Berardi. Warning: contains spoilers.

Also, the film opens with a main titles sequence that literally maps out the conflicts of Europe at the time of Louis XIII, as the camera flies above miniature soldiers caught mid-battle on a parchment map. Mr. X Inc. creative lead James Cooper takes fxguide through the distinctive 1,642 frame, tilt-shift inspired opening.

New vfx and filmmaking books - ILM and Star Wars

I'm a big fan of 'making of' books. Some of the best over the years have been ones about ILM - in fact there are now three, ILM: The Art of Special Effects, ILM: Into the Digital Realm and, most recently, ILM: The Art of Innovation. At fxguide, we received an early copy of this latest book. We also got to speak to Lucasfilm author J.W. Rinzler about the limited edition Star Wars: The Blueprints release. Here's thecoverage.

Real Steel: case study in CGI / live action integration

Digital Domain (DD) has an outstanding reputation for the integration of live action and computer graphics. From films such as Apollo 13 to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and more recently on Transformers: Dark of the Moon, DD have proven they can combine live action and digital almost better than anyone in the industry. So we thought we would use Real Steel to learn from the best and explore some of the tricks and techniques of integrating CGI and live action.

Real Steel is a gritty, white knuckle story, set in the near future, where robot boxing is the world’s top sport, and a struggling promoter’s son feels he’s found a champion in a discarded robot. During the robot’s hopeful rise to the top, the former boxer Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) re-discovers he has an 11-year-old son, Max (Dakota Goyo), and together they take their robot Atom to a Rocky-esque showdown.

Click here  http://www.fxguide.com/featured/real-steel-case-study-in-cgi-live-action-integration/

Art of Stereo conversion: 2D to 3D..... By Mike Seymour

Stereo conversion, or dimensionalization as it is sometimes called, is the process of making stereo images from non-stereo traditional 2D images.

Many people argue that if you want a film in stereo you should shoot it in stereo. Yet many studios are warning post houses that if they work on stereo projects, even ones shot in stereo, there may well be a need to convert some footage and that high quality conversion is an important tool in the box of any effects house.

Stereo conversion is also needed for converting older films – such as the Star Wars franchise. John Knoll (ILM) is overseeing the stereo conversion of every Star Wars film for director George Lucas and in a recent AWN article he expressed the view that, “You can’t rush it and it’s an iterative process, and if you’ve got a gun to your head and you’ve got eight weeks to convert a 2,000-shot show, it’s not possible to maintain the level of quality control that you need.” In the case of Star Wars conversions for which Lucasfilm “will be (mostly) using outside vendors,” he also pointed out that he had been vocal in saying that past efforts “were victims of a too rushed production schedule and a too low budget.” Few people doubt that Knoll will deliver anything but cutting edge results.

Click here to view the article http://www.fxguide.com/featured/art-of-stereo-conversion-2d-to-3d/

Dino-sized effects in Terra Nova

Steven Spielberg’s big-budget dinosaur television series Terra Novatells the story of a dilapidated Earth in the year 2149, causing humans to look for a new place to inhabit. They discover a portal to a prehistoric dimension and begin carving out an existence in this dangerous new world. fxguide visited the Terra Nova set in Queensland, Australia, a four-acre compound set amongst the rainforest, and also sat down with the key visual effects artists involved to talk about bringing the dinosaurs and environments to life.

Real Steel

Two great pieces on Real Steel have just been published at fxguide - a case study on live action / CG integration looking at Digital Domain's work on the film and the virtual production involved. Plus an in-depthfxpodcast, as Mike Seymour chats with DD vfx supe Erik Nash.

Bunraku: digital origami

For Guy Moshe's film, Bunraku, a revenge story set in strange post-apocalyptic world, Origami Digital produced over 1000 visual effects shots, marked by constantly folding and unfolding paper-like buildings and skies. The film was shot mostly on stages in Romania and had a lengthy post-production process to fill the greenscreen frames with stylistic imagery. fxguide talks to visual effects supervisor Oliver Hotz and vfx producer Matt Rubin.

The Art of Roto: 2011

Rotoscoping is the process of manually altering film or video footage one frame at a time. The frames can be painted on arbitrarily to create custom animated effects like lightning or lightsabres, or traced to create realistic traditional style animation or to produce hold-out mattes for compositing elements in a scene and, more recently, to produce depth maps for stereo conversion. fxguide updates an earlier article with new tools and a history of roto.

5 Tips to Expand your Photography Business Skills

You want to turn pro? Great! First ask yourself why. It is not as glamorous as it may seem. Can you sustain your passion for the art of photography while shooting somebody else’s vision? Are you ready to take whatever job comes your way to make ends meet? Are you able to work with the demands of a commercial client or a wedding shoot? It can take years to find your own niche market and specialize in one photography genre that you really enjoy. Not discouraged yet? Okay, keep reading!

Think turning pro is a measure of your skills? Think again! There are many amateur photographers out there who have far better skills than pros. One thing amateurs have, and pros often lose, is the passion. Turning your hobby into a job can kill the passion pretty fast if you let it happen. I wrote an entire article about this earlier which can be summed up in a few words: Nurture the personal projects to keep the passion alive.

Ready to run a business first and be a photographer second? Hope so! Marketing yourself will suck up most of your time, especially the early years, so be ready for that.

There is nothing wrong about having a 9 to 5 job and keeping photography as your passion on your days off. Actually if you are thinking of turning pro I would definitely keep the day job for a while until you know for sure you can deal with the business side of photography and you’re able to pay the bills with it.

I make a living as a photographer and I was very lucky to be able to keep the passion for the craft alive and even see it grow with my business. It can be done, and if that’s what you want to do, go for it! You won’t know until you try!

Good business skills are also a talent. Some great photographers also have great business skills but it’s not that common. It’s the old right brain vs. left brain thing. You may have noticed some awesome photographers who couldn’t make it as pros and some not so great ones who are very successful at selling their work or services. Do not underestimate the power of good business skills!

When hiring a photographer, most people hire the whole package: Your photography talent + your business expertise + your people skills. That said, if your dream is to turn your passion into a business you don’t have to give up simply because you don’t have the business skills.

1- Get some help from qualified people. Look for a mentor in your area or online. Services such as SCORE in the States offer free business advice, workshops, events as well as templates to get you started with your business plan.

2- Maybe your partner or spouse has good people and business skills and will help you with that side of the business. It’s okay to be the artist and let someone else handle the customer service side of the business. And if you’re really good at what you do, they won’t mind dealing with someone else for the nitty gritty stuff!

3- If you have a solid portfolio, but lack the nerve or skills to sell yourself, hire an agent. An agent works on commission, marketing your work, so you can happily concentrate on your craft. It’s not easy, especially for artists, to blows their own horn. Having someone else do it for you can really make a difference! There are also online services, such as Agency Access, that cater to creative people.

4- Remember that your most important clients are your past clients. Treat them right and they’ll be your best PR people. Get written referrals from customers, add a ‘testimonials’ page to your website. Word of mouth is the best advertising!

5- If all you hate doing is billing people and dealing with accounting, that’s an easy fix. You can hire an accountant for as little time as an hour every week, or use an online billing service. Starting out and can’t afford it? Consider trading services for a while. Accountants need photographers too!

It makes good sense to delegate some of the work to people who are good at it. You will have more time to do what you are good at – and love – which is being behind the camera.

Do you have a story to share about your experience in the business aspect of photography? The dPS readers would love read about it in the comment section below.

Read more: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/5-tips-to-expand-your-photography-business-skills#ixzz1aLptplYy

18 Tips for Shooting from a Train

Getting successful images from a moving train can be quite tricky, and a real test of one’s patience and persistence. Recently, I had a chance to take what is considered one of the great train rides of the world, the Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacifico, better known as El Chepe, which winds through Barrancas del Cobre (the Copper Canyon), one of Mexico’s many natural wonders.

The canyon gets its name from the copper color of some of its 3,000 plus foot walls, which can be seen in all their glory from many vantage points along the route, not because of copper mining in the region, as some people claim. It’s been compared to the Grand Canyon in the United States, but my assessment is that it’s a cross between the sheer cliff walls and alpine vegetation of Yosemite National Park and the deep and layered gorges of the Grand Canyon, but with a convenient train ride between them.

Each day its complete route in the northwest of Mexico travels from the capital city of Chihuahua, in Chihuahua state, to Los Mochis, in the neighboring state of Sinaloa (a second train does the reverse route). I was on assignment to shoot the cultural and travel images for a cookbook on the regional cuisine of Mexico, and so the portion that I experienced went from Divisadero, Chihuahua, to El Fuerte, Sinaloa, which is often referred to as the most scenic part of the journey.

Read more: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/18-tips-for-shooting-from-a-train#ixzz1aLoeLj9t

Camera and Lighting Session at Clusters Trivandrum Campus

Today Clusters Trivandrum Campus organised Camera and lighting Session for Visual Effects Students. We are happy to share some snaps

Career Coach: Celebrate Your Mistakes

Pamela Kleibrink Thompson talks about the fear of failure and overcoming it.

By Pamela Kleibrink Thompson | Monday, October 3, 2011 at 3:02 pm

Pamela Kleibrink

Thompson.

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.  Art is knowing which ones to keep.”-- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

Every October we celebrate a huge failure in America on Columbus Day.  The Spanish crown funded Columbus’s voyage hoping to gain advantage over others in the lucrative spice trade by finding an alternative route to the East Indies. Columbus was unsuccessful in his quest.  Instead, on October 12, he landed in the Bahamas archipelago and discovered a land that was rich in resources and already inhabited by people. After failing in his original mission, Columbus discovered America by accident.

Don’t be afraid to fail.  Failure can be eye-opening and life changing.

Here are two more mistakes that give us reason to celebrate.

In 1930, Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts, was mixing a batch of chocolate cookies and found out she was out of baker’s chocolate.  She substituted sweetened chocolate, expecting the small pieces would melt and the dough would absorb them, making chocolate cookies.  But when she took the pan from the oven, Wakefield was surprised that the chocolate had not melted into the dough and she had not baked chocolate cookies.   Instead, her mistake, not having baker’s chocolate on hand, led to the invention of Toll House Cookies, also known as chocolate chip cookies.

In 1970, Spencer Silver was working for 3M Company trying to find a strong adhesive.  Instead he failed–the new adhesive he invented was weaker than anything they already made.  It would stick but could be easily lifted off.  It wasn’t thrown out, but no one knew what to do with it.  Four years later Arthur Fry, another 3M scientist, used Silver’s weak glue on the markers in his hymnal to keep them in place.  The weak glue kept the markers in place and they could be lifted off and reused without ripping the hymnal pages.  Fry sang the praises to God in his church choir and lauded the weak glue to 3M.  Post-It Notes started selling nationwide in 1980, ten years after Silver invented the super weak adhesive–one super mistake.

Embrace your mistakes and forgive yourself if you are not successful in achieving the goal you had in mind.  The results from your mistakes could lead you into new directions, or, as in Columbus’ case, a whole new world.  Celebrate your mistakes this October and all year.  “There is glory in a great mistake,” wrote Nathalia Crane.  There may be glory in small ones too.

Pamela Kleibrink Thompson is a recruiter, career coach, speaker and writer.  She is learning not to dwell on her mistakes.  She contributed to the books Eclectic Collage 1 and Eclectic Collage 2: The Relationships of Life  which you can find on Freundshippress.com and Amazon.com.  You can reach Pamela at PamRecruit@q.com.

Courtesy :http://www.awn.com

Rhythm and crowds: Moneyball

Crowd replication is a staple of the invisible effects category, for almost obvious reasons that the shots are designed to be in the background but still give life to scenes in the film. More than 120 crowd shots feature in Moneyball, which tells the story of baseball club the Oakland A’s, and how its general manager Bill Beane (played by Brad Pitt) turned the team around. Rhythm & Hues devised a procedural technique with real extras and a Houdini pipeline to fill out the Oakland A’s stadium. Here's the story at fxguide.