StudioGPU Blog

What’s cooking in the StudioGPU Labs - Feb 2010

2010-02-12T14:47:58Z

MachStudio Pro has come a long way since it was first announced last fall. There have been several version updates and a lot of work by creative people pushing the software to see what it can do.

A few weeks ago I posted an example of a photorealistic architectural rendering created in MachStudio Pro. The rendering was set up to emulate the style of the same scene as rendered in VRay.

The results surprised many people. The V-Ray-rendered and MachStudio Pro-rendered images were both production ready and very comparable. But of course, the MachStudio Pro image rendered in only 84 sec as opposed to a typical lengthy photo-realistic render (many minutes). And you could change the materials, lighting, AO, DOF, cameras, HDR exposures on the fly.

I've seen some other example renders that are being used in upcoming productions (which unfortunately means I can't share them yet) that are positively astounding.

Passion & Development

With each update, the SGPU development team adds in more refinements, and enhanced ways of rendering. It's one of the big advantage of buying software from a smaller startup - they are passionate about their work, want to constantly improve and are approachable by and responsive to users.

So this week I want to share an image I received from the StudioGPU Labs. It's an example of work in development.

Now if you've followed the recent Renderosity review, you know StudioGPU is…

Too many of the concept tools for architects miss out on light, time and the relationship of the two

2010-01-19T18:16:55Z

Continuing with the blog topic of exploring interesting work I’ve seen created in MachStudio Pro by small or one-man shops, this week I turning to a basement redesign project.

Chad Wanstreet is a Technical Director at Speedshape Detroit, an automotive and product visualization studio. However, his previous education (and obviously still a passion) was in architecture. This is where Machstudio comes in. Chad used MachStudio Pro to help he and a friend visualize and define a basement renovation project.

Below are several images from the project (more in the showcase). What interests me most about these renderings (besides the visual) is the workflow:

Model and texture iin 3ds Max
Light in MachStudio Pro
Render from MachStudio Pro in passes: diffuse, reflection, AO, z-depth, and matte (render time for 1920 x 1080 images at x24 anti-aliasing was about 5 mins to produce all 5 passes)
Final composite in Nuke for stills and animations

Take a look at these sample images - they are a great example of “previs for architecture”. Quoting from Chad:

“Machstudio provides me with a quick feedback loop for my concepts, and the ability to create animations very quickly, which I love. Too many of the tools which designers and architects use for quick concept work focus only on volumes and materials, and miss out on light, time and the relationship of the two.” (bold is my editorial)

“Machstudio Pro allows me…

Will you be submitting to CGSociety’s B-Movie CG Challenge?

2010-01-18T20:28:09Z

I’m a huge fan of B-movies. I love watching zombies, monsters, bug-eyed aliens and of course the werewolves of B-movie fame. So I was delighted to see CGSociety’s: “Attack of the 50ft CGChallenge” running today, through April 19, 2010.

Basically CG artists are asked to create their own version of B-movie or resurrect creatures from an existing movie. The emotive impact and implication of “the story behind the imagery” is the aspect that is most important. But as we all know, good story can be strongly enhanced by powerful lighting and FX. Since there is not a lot of time (nor budget) to produce these B-movies, the ability to do quick creative treatments and changes (essentially previs for animation) can be critical - i.e. MachStudio Pro.

Check out the StudioGPU CG animation showcase to see some inspirational examples (not of B-movies content, but of animation content). The Princess Twins, New Guys (each video produced in only a week), and Secret of Skull island, all make clear what you can do with good story telling and real-time lighting workflows.

You can enter as individuals or as teams so this might be a great opportunity to search for colleagues in our forums. If you do plan to enter the contest, add a comment here or in the forums so we can follow your work!

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Producing a broadcast commercial a month using MachStudio Pro

2009-12-17T17:18:03Z

MachStudio Pro has been out on the market for less than 6 months, but already I've seen examples of some impressive production work. Last week there was a press release about the PlayMobil DVD for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, and no doubt there will be other high visibility releases.

But I wanted to do some informal callouts in this blog of some of the interesting work I've seen, running from small productions, to experiments, to high visibility projects. What got me thinking about this, was the recent "Natal" video I received from FX, lda, a Mozambican post production studio for TV. FX, Ida is using MachStudio Pro to produce one commercial each month for the Arroz Leao brand of rice.

Nildo Essa is the principal behind FX, Ida. He began as a one man shop but has recently expanded to add in a second modeler for background scenes, and a story writer. Nildo himself does all animation, rendering, lighting and character modeling.

Natal (a punk jingle bells holiday commercial) is the second commercial in the series created with MachStudio Pro (see his other video in the showcase)

The workflow for Natal

For the "Natal" Commercial, Nildo motion captures all moves of the 3 characters in his very small but workable mocap studio (Nildo is the actor!). He imports this data into Max, cleans it up, and then maps into onto the final characters which are…

Senior lighting job posting seeks MachStudio Pro experience

2009-12-08T20:15:29Z

I was just cruising around on CGArena and came across a job posting for a Senior Lighting lead for a company in Toronto, Canada. “March Entertainment is currently looking for a multi-talented, creative, passionate individual to help build and lead a lighting team for exciting, animated 3D projects in our Toronto office.”

What caught my eye was one of the job requirements:

“We need someone who has at least 6 yrs. experience lighting with Maya and any experience with MachStudio Pro is a bonus (but we expect some on-the-job training with this package).”

You can check out the job posting here.
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Photo realistic rendering in MachStudio Pro?

2009-11-04T18:01:43Z

There has been some discussion in the forums about the ability of MachStudio Pro to do photo-realistic rendering.

I guess some of that confusion has come about because many of the examples shown in our video tutorials and showcase are from real CG animation production projects where the look and feel was intended to be stylized (PlayMobil), mech (Bionicles) or illustrated (Princess Twins), rather than photo-real renderings.

I've read several comments in which, although artists were amazed by the performance and quality of MachStudio Pro, they were specifically searching for a solution to replace their offline photo-realistic rendering engines. A typical comment was something like: "Well V-Ray/Mental Ray/Brazil renders this architectural/automotive/product image like this. How close can MachStudio Pro get to this kind of photo-realistic render?"

Well it was a reasonable question, so Yoni (our chief scientist) got hold of some of the architectural models people were referencing as examples and ran them through MachStudio specifically with the intent of showing photo-realism and emulating the style of V-Ray.

Putting it to the test

The best way to evaluate how it turned out is to take a look at a few of the renderings. (note: unlike many renderings you see, these were not doctored in PhotoShop. They are the actual final renders.)

Click on the links for the two images and one video below. (will open in a new window)

Modern Exterior…

What kind of 3D workflow do you use for CG animation?

2009-11-02T20:50:08Z

I ‘ve been working on a story about 3D work flows and I would love to get some feedback on what kind of work flows other 3D artists have set up and are using for the 3D CG animation work.

Obviously there will be as many ways to set up a production pipeline as there are 3D artists, but from what I can tell, it boils down to only 2-3 unique variations.

The most common work flow is to model and then hand off to one or more lighters to render “in camera” within an applications like Maya or XSI, using a 3rd party rendering solution like VRay or Mental Ray. The pluses are that it feels like one environment. The drawbacks are that the work flow is linear so you can get way downstream, doing a lot of test renders before you see problems or come up with a good creative. Also the rendering settings can be very complex to setup and if you use multiple lighters, you can get multiple results. Getting a great result can be time consuming, especially for animation. (See 3D Workflow Seminar from Assembly 2008.)

The second type of work flow relies much more on compositing in After Effects, Flame or similar software. The animation scene is rendered in layers and compositors work with the rendered images in the same manner as the 3D, working with separate passes for things like specularity,…

Real-time lighting at Halloween

2009-10-30T17:51:20Z

If you drop by the StudioGPU office in Hollywood this week, you will have encountered a great example of what 3D animators and engineers do in their spare time. Not sure who actually carved this, but kudos!

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StudioGPU Chief Scientist talks about light & materials as brushstrokes on the canvas of the camera

2009-10-20T18:16:20Z

At Siggraph 2009, John Peddie Research held their annual rendering panel discussion and StudioGPU’s Chief Scientist, Yoni Koenig talked about parallelism in the visualization workflow and his ambition for MachStudio Pro. In the video capture below, he describes the need to make the creative process for 3D production more spontaneous, giving the computer graphics artists the same freedom of expression that artists in the real world have with their hands in the clay or their fingers wrapped around a pencil.

To quote from the video: “So the whole idea is that light and materials become brushstrokes on the canvas of the camera, as opposed to linear methods which is more like a series of punch cards, which you create and then pass to your piano to play.”
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Rick Bergman, Sr. VP and GM at AMD, talks about MachStudio Pro to enhance Hollywood productions

2009-09-22T15:54:27Z

At Siggraph 2009, Rick Bergman, Senior VP and General Manager of AMD, discusses how GPU-based computer graphics can enhance Hollywood productions. In particular he showcases MachStudio Pro as a critical tool for real-time creative work.
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Hardware tesselation brings the artist vision into alignment with the final product

2009-08-17T16:11:09Z

SIGGRAPH 2009 was an exciting show for StudioGPU. We showcased the upcoming version of MachStudio Pro V1.2 and announced that MachStudio Pro now ships with the FirePro V8750 2GB accelerator from AMD.

But the fun part of the show was watching peoples’ jaws drop when they saw MachStudio Pro in action. Everyone understands the concept of a really fast final renderer. But real-time workflow, working creatively at final render quality was what drove the “I don’t believe it” reactions. The best way to show you what I mean is to let you watch a demo we captured on camera.

The demo runs through real-time ambient occlusion, lighting, on-the-fly shader adjustments and finally shows sub-pixel displacement mapping using hardware tessellation.

Tessellation involves breaking down polygon meshes into higher poly meshes. In the video below, taking a simple polygon mesh and breaking each polygon down into smaller units allows the surface of the object/model to become smoother with a greater sense of depth and detail, including self-occlusion, self-shadowing and silhouettes.

But more detailed characters, especially with complex animation, devour memory and up storage requirements. Software runs into bandwidth issues so load times increase and memory demands shoot up. But the new version of MachStudio Pro takes advantage of the FirePro V8750 GPU to generate the additional complexity using hardware tessellation.

Hardware tessellation means there is no penalty hit for the virtually unlimited fineness and detail created by the displacement…

So just who are some of the people behind StudioGPU?

2009-07-28T20:16:48Z

MachStudio Pro was the brainchild of a group of digital artists and engineers who had worked together in the game industry for 15 years. So who are some of these folks?

One of them is Chief Scientist Yoni Koenig. The crew at AMDUnprocessed came into the Hollywood office and did an unrehearsed interview with Yoni. It is an interesting watch and listen as Yoni talks shading pipelines, lighting pipelines, compositing, render farms, Hollywood and more.

There are also interviews with David Koenig - Chief Executive Officer and Andrew Baum - Vice President of Marketing.

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Shaking up the time vs. quality tradeoff in the stereo 3D production pipeline

2009-07-10T19:09:51Z

Unless you've been living in a cave the last few years, you know that Stereoscopic 3D is one of the hot topics in CG animation for cinema. Think Up, Ice Age 3, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Toy Story 3, Monsters vs. Aliens, G-Force 3D, to name a few (see more). The market for 3D stereo gaming is probably even larger, with both the X-Box and PlayStation 3 expected to roll out upgrades this year to support stereo 3D. If the topic interests you and you are attending this years Siggraph, be sure to check out the Computer Animation Festival which is devoting an entire segment to stereo 3D.

I've been following stereo 3D for years, but primarily for scientific visualization, where artistic quality control and live action footage were not issues. Then a few weeks back, I came across a twitter reference (@sterlingy) that piqued my interest. The tweet was by the guy (Sterling Youngman) who is behind the Pansy Warrior Princess (PWP) - a somewhat unusual and definitely niche site, that has a pretty sizable fan following, having surpassed one million viewers (reminds me of a cross between Monty Python, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and the recent World Of Warcraft Mountain Dew Game Fuel commercial).

Youngman is producing a Pansy Warrior Princess 3D stereoscopic music video to debut at IBC this September and is using…

Shot-based vs Scene-based pipelines for the lighter/compositor

2009-06-23T16:42:59Z

If you are a lighter/compositor working with desktop rendering software, then you are used to working in a shot-based pipeline. Shots are set up, animated, lit, and rendered on a single camera move/shot basis. For example, you might light and render a long camera pan of a Cylon Raider traveling through space (I admit I was/am a BSG fan).

For a a typical animation scene (e.g. Cylon Raiders attacking Colonial Vipers against a star backdrop), the standard approach is to break the scene out into multiple shots, then distribute the shots to your lighters for setup and rendering or setup and transfer to a render farm.

A lot can go wrong

A lot can go wrong with a shot-based pipeline - from continuity problems where two different lighters work on shots that cut against each (each having their own "artistic" eye), to different lighters not understanding your shot breakout. In either case, you end up wasting render time twice over (once for the mistake and once to fix it) as well as wasting the time and goodwill of your lighting team.

Even if nothing goes wrong, a significant amount of time and energy gets absorbed when lighters have to go through the pains of recreating light rigs across shots or go through an import/export procedure to get those rigs into several independent scene files.

But because rendering is typically an action discreet from lighting/materials setup,…

Point release brings a load of new features: Max exporter, material library, animatable fog & more

2009-06-02T15:49:54Z

Having watched a taping of the recent Montreal May 7 demonstration of MachStudio Pro, I was struck by how open the presenters were about the roadmap for future enhancements to MachStudio Pro. Of course I assumed these were all several months into the future.

To my delight however, this week MachStudio Pro has advanced to new version (1.0.2.10) which includes a load of new features - more than I would expect in a simple point release.

Highlights of MachStudio Pro v1.0.2.10

Exporter for 3DS Max 2009 - With this addition there are now dedicated exporters for Maya 8.5, 2008, 2009 and Max 9, 2008, 2009, 2010 (64-bit versions ~~coming soon~~ are also available). A dedicated exporter makes it fast and easy to export geometry, animation, and cameras. Importantly, if you update the animation file in Maya or Max, simply open it again, and it will automatically update in MachStudio Pro. You can even update just a sequence of animation frames and plug-them right into the MachStudio Pro scene.

High-quality Materials Library - 107 unique materials that you can apply to any material node (e.g. fabric, glass, paper, wood, marble, etc.). Tweak and adjust as you would for any shader.

Animatable fog - This allows the appearance of a fog effect to change as the eye-point moves in relation to an image. Or create things like the…