[See post to watch Flash video]

Imageworks’ production environment, which is known for its photo-real visual effects, digital character performances, and innovative technologies to facilitate their creation, has incorporated open source solutions, most notably the Linux operating system, for many years. Now the company is contributing back to the open source community by making these technologies available.  The software can be used freely around the world by both large and small studios. Each project has a team of passionate individuals supporting it who are interested in seeing the code widely used.  The intention of the open source release is to build larger communities to adopt and further refine the code.

• Field3d, a voxel data storage library
• Scala Migration, a database migration tool
• OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering
• Pystring, python-like string handling in C++
• Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking

Field3D
Field3D is an open source library for storing voxel data. It provides C++ classes that handle storage in memory, as well as a file format based on HDF5 that allows the C++ objects to easily be written to and read from disk.

The library was initially developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks as a replacement for the three different in-house file formats already used to store voxel data. It is the foundation for Imageworks’ in-house simulation framework and volume rendering software. It is actively used in production.

Scala Migrations
Scala Migrations is a library to manage upgrades and rollbacks to database schemas.  Migrations allow a source control system to manage together the database schema and the code using the schema.  It is designed to allow multiple developers working on a project with a database backend to design schema modifications independently, apply the migrations to their local database for debugging and when complete, check them into a source control system to manage as one manages normal source code.

The package is based off Ruby on Rails Migrations and in fact shares the exact same schema migration table to manage the list of installed migrations.  The Scala Migrations library utilizes the clean Scala language to write easy to understand migrations. Scala Migrations provides a database abstraction layer that allows migrations to target any supported database vendor.

OSL (Open Shading Language)
Open Shading Language (OSL) is a small but rich language for programmable shading in advanced renderers and other applications. OSL is similar to C, as well as other shading languages; however, it is specifically designed for advanced rendering algorithms with features such as radiance closures, BRDFs, and deferred ray tracing as first-class concepts.

The OSL project includes a complete language specification, a compiler from OSL to an intermediate assembly-like byte code, an interpreter that executes OSL shaders on collections of points in a SIMD manner, and extensive standard shader function library. These all exist as libraries with straightforward C++ APIs, and so may be easily integrated into existing renderers, compositing packages, image processing tools, or other applications. Additionally, the source code can be easily customized to allow for renderer-specific extensions or alterations, or custom back-ends to translate to GPUs or other special hardware.

Pystring
Pystring is a collection of C++ functions which match the interface and behavior of python’s string class methods using std::string. Implemented in C++, it does not require or make use of a python interpreter. Rather, it provides convenience and familiarity for common string operations not included in the standard C++ library. It’s also useful in environments where both C++ and python are used.

Maya Reticle
Originally developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks, spReticleLoc is a Maya C++ plug-in plus MEL code that creates a reticule for a camera.  It allows for various camera reference masks to be displayed when looking through the camera, such as filmback, projection gate, and pan and scan attributes.

The value of predefined parameters can be displayed in selectable areas, such as the camera focal length and name, current aspect ratio, frame number, name of the show and shot, Maya scene file name, current user name, etc.   Arbitrary textural information can be displayed as well.

More on Imageworks:

Imageworks’ most recently completed projects include G-FORCE, WATCHMEN, VALKYRIE, BODY OF LIES, EAGLE EYE, HANCOCK, SPEED RACER, BEOWULF, and I AM LEGEND.  Upcoming projects include ALICE IN WONDERLAND, CATS AND DOGS 2, 2012, and Sony Pictures Animation’s CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS.

Imageworks’ achievements have been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Oscars® for its work on SPIDER-MAN™ 2 and the CG animated short film THE CHUBBCHUBBS!. In 2008, SURF’S UP was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. In 2007, two of Imageworks’ projects, SUPERMAN RETURNS and the all-CG animated feature MONSTER HOUSE, were nominated for Academy Awards in the Outstanding Achievement in Visual Effects and Best Animated Feature respectively. With those two nominations, Imageworks became the first studio to be recognized in the same year in these distinct areas, an indication of the diversity and quality of the company’s capabilities. Other Oscar® nominated projects include THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, SPIDER-MAN™, HOLLOW MAN, STUART LITTLE and STARSHIP TROOPERS, for a total of ten nominations.

Action Essentials 2 is a collection of stock footage elements for your compositing software. It is unmatched for visual effects & motion graphics. You can use Action Essentials 2 with your compositing software like Adobe After Effects CS4, Autodesk Combustion, Autodesk Toxik, Autodesk Inferno and other.

FEATURING:

• 500 Pre-Keyed High Definition Elements
• Available in 2 Versions: 2K and 720p
• 60 Minutes of After Effects Training
• 20 Bonus Action Sound FX
• Detailed Video Thumbnails
• Over 90% Live Action Footage
• Pre-Keyed Stock Footage
• Built-In Alpha channels for faster compositing

Action Essentials 2 is available in two versions you have the choice between a 2K Film Resolution: (2048 x 1152) and a 720p High Definition: (1280 X 720) version of the footage. The 2K Film Resolution version offers the most freedom for compositors with over 2.5X more resolution in each element. The 720p Version is ideal for SD and 720p work but many of the elements work great with 1080i projects as well.

Action Essentials 2 is comes with many elements you can use in your daily work on visual effects: Atmospheres, Blood,  Charges, Couch_Hits, Debris, Dirt_Charges,  Dust_Elements, Explosions,Fire, Glass, Muzzle_Flashes, Particle_Hits, Powder_Hits, Smoke, Smoke_Charges, Sparks, Wall_Hits, Shells, Water and Textures (Bullet_Holes, Burn_Marks, Cracks, Ground_Holes, Grunge_Texture & Windshields)

Select and buy the right version of Action Essentials 2 :

• 720p High Definition [1280 x 720] $99.95
• 2K Film Resolution [2048 x 1152 ] $249.95 (beyond 1080p)

We recommend the 2K version.

31 Days of Oscar is a “In Theatre promotion for TCM‘s Oscar block” using a combination of shot elements and 3d.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Fresh Paint is a design/animation/live-action directing team headed up by Kevin Robinson and Mike Papagni.

Credits:
Directors: Andrey Mudrov, Yaroslav Kemnits (Director of Special Effects)
Producer: Dmitry Lesnevsky

VFXWorld published an interesting article about the VFX (Visual Effects) in the movie Wanted. You can find
Wanted: Bending VFX for a Killing Machine on vfxworld.com. The movie includes more than 800 visual effects shots.The article covers many aspects including the climactic train crash

Other coverage:

• Wanted a new VFX & DFX rich movie (www.StrongMocha.com)
• Russian Wanted Trailer! (www.StrongMocha.com)
• World Exclusive Wanted Featurette (empireonline.com)
• www.wantedmovie.com has more on the story, pictures and some trailer.

Next Limit released MAXWELL RENDER 1.7. Maxwell Render 1.7 offers several new and vastly improved features.

If you a customer of Next Limit check your inbox to find the URL to download the update.

What is new in MAXWELL Render 1.7

• New physical sky system
  The Physical Sky system in Maxwell Render 1.7 uses an entirely new approach and has been greatly enhanced adding more parameters to control the look of the sky and the resulting light in the scene, ranging from common Earth values to exaggerated fantasy skies. Users can create presets of sky settings to quickly load a new sky, or share their presets with other users. It’s also possible to save the current sky as an HDR map.This new sky system renders faster than the previous one – in certain scenes the difference can be dramatic. The concept of “Aerosols” – particles found in the air that interact with light and influence how lights scatters and reacts in the atmosphere – plays an important role. Aerosols have a big impact on the coloration of the sky and scene illumination.
• 1.7 Material Editor enhanced
  • Material Preview: the material preview now shows incremental updates and you can stop the preview rendering at any time by double clicking on the preview.
  • Material Swatches: here you can store material “swatches” or previews. A material state can be stored as a preview and the user can easily browse between the saved previews, allowing for faster material editing and experimentation.
  • Texture Editor: the Texture Editor in 1.7 offers various new image controls: Saturation; Brightness; Contrast; and Clamp min/max. These new controls allow users to work much more efficiently with textures. There is no need to use an external image editing application to make small changes to a texture, and the same texture can be used for colour, bump, roughness and weight map.
  • Wizards: this is a step-by-step guide to creating several types of common materials such as shiny wooden floors, plastics, clipmapped materials for leafs, SSS materials, etc. The Wizard will ask you for textures, bumps, reflectance maps and material values such as roughness and colour.The “Common” wizard can be used to create Diffuse, Emitter, Metal, Dielectric or Plastic materials

• New SSS Component
  Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) simulates the effect of light entering a translucent object and scattering inside it. Some of this light is absorbed and some is also scattered back to the surface. It is a crucial component that allows you to accurately simulate many kinds of materials including plastics, marble, milk, skin etc. The SSS component has been entirely rewritten for Maxwell Render 1.7, following an entirely new approach compared to the old system or any other SSS system currently available.The SSS component in Maxwell Render effectively replaces the BSDF material properties such as  eflectance/transmittance becausethe surface reflection color and amount depends on what happens inside the volume, just like in real life. There is no separation between “surface” material and “volume” material. The surface properties (roughness, bump etc.) remain the same as for the BSDF component. What this means in practice is that with the SSS component, you can get a full range of materials from regular clear glass, to almost solid-looking materials. This is one of the biggest strengths of Maxwell Render’s SSS system. The SSS material supports full GI and if the material is clear enough it will create caustic light patterns and also be influenced by caustic light cast from surrounding objects.

  You can weight an SSS with a BSDF, or several SSS components, but only one SSS or BSDF per material layer is allowed. You can quickly switch between using a BSDF or SSS component by right-clicking in the Material Layers list or by using the Edit menu and choosing “Turn to BSDF” or “Turn to SSS’. The Nd and surface properties you used in the previous component will be transferred to the new compone

• 1.7 Maxwell Studio improvements
  • Texture Handling and Memory Optimizations: texture handling, scene loading times and overall memory usage have all been improved. With scenes that use many large textures, objects and materials, the loading time is around 10 times faster. Only the textures that are active in the OpenGL viewport are now loaded into memory, saving RAM and allowing users to work faster with materials.
  • Realtime OpenGL Preview of Physical Sky: with the vastly improved Physical Sky system in Maxwell Render 1.7, the OpenGL preview in the viewports has also been improved, allowing you to change any of the Sky parameters and camera settings and seeing an accurate realtime preview in the viewports.
  • Color Picker: the color chips on the left side can be used to store commonly used colors. Drag& drop a color from the large color chips at the bottom of the Color Picker to one of the color chips on the left to store a color.
    The two large color chips at the bottom of the color picker allow you to compare the previously selected color with a new one.The top color chip updates to show the currently selected color in the colored wheel. The bottom color chip shows what color was selected when opening the Color Picker.
  • Isolate Selection: select this option from the right click menu in the object list panel, or in a viewport, to display only the currently selected objects in the viewport. This is useful if you have a cluttered scene and wish to view only the currently selected objects.
  • UV Operator: this option lets you apply the same transformations to all the selected UVs at the same time. You can, for example, scale all the selected UV sets by 10%. The Operator is found under the UV parameters section in the Object Parameters panel.
  • Material Browser: improved for version 1.7; it has a more common functionality with the Windows Explorer, having a folder view on the left side and the contents of the folder displayed on the right side.
  • 3D/ Ortho View Dropdown: You can switch a camera to be a perspective (3D) camera or an orthographic camera (2D). This is useful if you wish to render an orthographic view while still having access to common camera parameters such as resolution and ISO. Please note that focal length is not available when the camera is in orthographic mode.

• SimuLens
  SimuLens parameters: the SimuLens parameters have been added to the interface of Maxwell Studio and the plug-ins, and they are now also available through the command line. These changes allow for SimuLens to be used for animations.
• MXiMerge Tool
  The installation package includes a new tool called MxiMerge. This is a small command line application useful to merge MXI files into one folder. It can also be used to read information about an MXI file (resolution, sampling level, etc) and for converting MXI files into other image formats. To learn more about how to use this tool just open a command line/terminal window and type: (for Windows) MxiMerge.exe –help; (for Mac OSX and Linux) mximerge –help.
• MAXWELL Plugins
  All Plugins (3ds Max, Archicad 11, Cinema 4D, form-Z, Lightwave 3D, Maya, Rhinoceros, SolidWorks,  and Softimage | XSI) have been updated

Creative Cow together with Aharon Rabinowitz, Pete O’Connell and Eran Stern has released three new After Effects Video Tutorials.

1. Advanced Rotoscoping Techniques for Adobe After Effects by Pete O’Connell
2. After Effects: The Next Level, vol, 2: CS 3 Tips and Techniques by Aharon Rabinowitz
3. Motion Design with Adobe After Effects by Eran Stern

Film compositor Pete O’Connell shows you the secrets of advanced rotoscoping that will save you hours, even days, on your toughest jobs. Eran Stern has quickly become one of the Cow’s most popular authors; here he presents tutorials for real-world motion graphics that you can start using right away. And Aharon Rabinowitz, one of the world’s true AE masters, leads you through AE CS3

A week ago a Russian Wanted trailer with new unseen footage was released. This movie looks great and promises a lot of great visual and digital effects.

[See post to watch Flash video]

“The story: What if someone came to you and told you your father was part of a secret organization and was one of the world’s greatest assassins and you have it in your blood to be one, too? “25-year-old Wes was the most disaffected, cube-dwelling drone the planet had ever known…” (Wanted a new VFX & DFX rich movie www.StrongMocha.com)

The movie is based on a comic book series by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones published by Image Comics.Wanted is directed by Timur Bekmambetov.

Other coverage:

• Wanted a new VFX & DFX rich movie (www.StrongMocha.com)
  
• World Exclusive Wanted Featurette (empireonline.com)
• www.wantedmovie.com has more on the story, pictures and some trailer.

This clip and the ones on room.tv web site shows a great before and after comparison from the wonderland of retouching. On room’s website you find more fx & design examples of their recent work. room’s mission is to merge editorial, motion graphics, computer animation and sound design into a complete creative experience. room edits commercials, music videos and films, design CG effects and title sequences and more.

room’s team members are:

Jeff Selis (editor), Elisa Bonora (editor), Bill Pollock (online artist/editor), Elad Marish (composer/designer), Brandon Toh (sound designer/mixer), John Musemecki (cgi arist) & Jason Barager (executive producer)

Andrew Kramer from videcopilot.net did release another great After Effects Video Tutorial. This time he is guiding you through the creation of smoke on a footage and how to stabilize it. Andrew was inspired by the book Adobe After Effects CS3 Professional Studio Techniques (Author Mark Christiansen) that we at StrongMocha.com recommend as well.  I did buy the book myself some weeks ago and learned a lot from Mark Christiansen’s book, of course not as much I learned from Andrew Video Tutorials or products videcopilot.net sells.

From Andrew’s announcement at videocopilot.net:

“In this new 2-part tutorial you will learn a great method for stabilizing footage in After Effects that smooths the result rather than freezes the tracking center. We will also create smoke flying behind a police car, which is as fun as it sounds.

This one tutorial has many great tips and techniques including, rotoscoping, expressions and matte blending.”

“I’d also like to thank Mark Christiansen for allowing me to demonstrate his stabilize technique in this tutorial. For more information about his great After Effects book” Click the book below

Some day’s earlier the same week videocopilot.net did release another useful Video Tutorial. The After Effects Video Tutorial “Smoke Screen” which teaches you how to use various compositig techniques to create these smoke designs in After Effects.

Please do not forget to support the work Andrew is doing. One great way to support videocopilot.net is to buy their products like Twitch. Twitch is available as a download version, buy Twitch here. Twitch from Videocopilot is a awesome After Effects plug-in. StrongMocha highly recommends this great plug-in.To learn more on Twitch you can read more here:

New Twitch (Vines) Tutorial @ videocopilot.net

Twitch – a “must have” After Effects Plug-in

Twitch After Effects Plug-in promotion video

Alternative you could start to stabilize and/or track footage with monet or mokey both from Imagineer Systems, however these products come with additional costs you may do not want to spend. View the product overview chart to see how Imagineer Systems products compare and what you are missing in your toolbox: Chart