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MPC presentation on Fabric Engine from SIGGRAPH 2015

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[ #FabricEngine ]
Check out the Recorded video from SIGGRAPH 2015 showing Global Head of VFX Operations at MPC - Damien Fagnou presents an overview of their use of Fabric Engine and where they see things heading in the future.


Fabric Engine is a digital content creation platform that enables anyone to build powerful tools and applications for VFX, Games, Virtual Reality and Visualization. Fabric Engine comes with a visual programming system that enables artists and developers of all levels to take advantage of an execution engine that handles complex tasks like multithreading and GPU computing. This core platform provides the foundation for the various components required for building 2D and 3D content creation tools, all of which can be integrated within existing production pipelines. More information here
  More about Fabric Engine

Unreal Engine 4.9 Showdown Cinematic VR Demo Trailer

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[ @UnrealEngine #EpicGames #VR ]
Epic Games has released Showdown Cinematic VR Demo Trailer, its a non-interactive video including its entire Unreal Engine 4-based content library.

>>Unreal Engine tutorial


This direct capture of the Unreal Engine 4 Showdown demo takes you through a guns-blazing scenario where ammo and debris slices through the environment in slow motion. Watch a fiery car barrel past overhead, and face off with a colossal mech enemy.

Click image to watch video

Available for free through the Epic Games launcher, Showdown is compatible with Oculus DK2 and up, Sony PlayStation Morpheus, and HTC Vive SteamVR.
Get UE4 and loads of content for free here!

  More about Unreal Engine

Pixar Announces Universal Scene Description to be Open-Sourced

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[ @PixarAnimation #Pixar ]
Pixar Animation Studios announced its intent to release its Universal Scene Description software (USD) as an open-source project by summer 2016. USD addresses the ever-growing need in the CG film and game industries for an effective way to describe, assemble, interchange, and modify high-complexity virtual scenes between digital content creation tools employed by studios.

The powerful techniques for composing and non-destructively editing graphics “scene graphs” that form the core of USD have been evolving at Pixar for close to 20 years, dating back to “A Bug’s Life.” These techniques, such as file-referencing, layered overrides, variation, and inheritance, were completely overhauled into a robust and uniform design for Pixar’s next-generation animation system, Presto. “USD is the marriage of Presto’s ‘composition engine’ to lazy-access cached scene description, with top-to-bottom enhancements for scalability and leverage of today’s multi-core systems effectively,” says Sebastian Grassia, Lead Engineer for the USD project. Although it is still under active development and optimization, USD has been in use for nearly a year in the making of “Finding Dory,” bringing new levels of performance and stability to Pixar’s production.

The open-source Alembic project brought standardization of cached geometry interchange to the VFX industry; USD hopes to build on Alembic’s success, taking the next step of standardizing the “algebra” by which assets are aggregated and refined in-context. Says Guido Quaroni, VP of Software R&D at Pixar, “One of the key aspects of Pixar’s pipeline is the ability for hundreds of artists to operate simultaneously on the same collections of assets in different contexts, using separate ‘layers’ of data that are composited together at various production stages. USD generalizes these concepts in an attempt to make them available to any DCC application.”

The USD distribution will include embeddable direct 3D visualization provided by Pixar’s modern GPU renderer, Hydra, as well as plugins for several key VFX DCCs, comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and complete python bindings.

Pixar has already been sharing early USD snapshots with a number of industry vendors and studios for evaluation, feedback, and advance incorporation. Damien Fagnou, Global Head of VFX Operations for MPC Film, relates, “USD is an amazing opportunity for both software vendors and VFX companies; this type of common open standard drives the industry to greater innovation by focusing development and leveraging a wide community of artists and developers. We have been working with Pixar to evaluate USD since the beginning of the year and plan to use it as a key part of our future VFX pipeline.”

Jeff Clifford, Head of R&D for Double Negative, states, “Over the past 12 months, Double Negative have converted many large environment assets from our proprietary system over to USD for testing and more recently have been using the USD viewer successfully in production. Going forward we are hoping a dedicated team can help test and develop USD to cater for all our scene description needs, including our cross-studio collaborations.”

Among the vendors helping to evaluate USD are The Foundry and Fabric Software. Andy Lomas, Product Manager of Katana, says, “At The Foundry we believe that USD will have a huge impact, and deserves to become an industry standard similar to OpenEXR and OpenSubdiv. It is an ideal format for creating rich assets that will work naturally with Katana, allowing workflows that were previously only available to large studios using proprietary tools. We consider that it is exactly what is needed to enable a scalable collaborative pipeline, allowing the best in class tools to be used for each part of the production process.”

VP Product, Fabric Software, Kevin Tureski, states “USD perfectly complements Fabric Engine by handling complex scene data in an application-agnostic fashion. The design of the USD API made it straightforward for us to integrate it directly into Fabric Engine and we already have customers testing the combination.”

More information about USD can be found at the official website.
  More about Pixar

Google Zync Render Beta

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[ #RenderMore #Render #Google #adskMaya ]
Users can earn up to $800 in render credit on the newly-discounted service; Google also launches the Render More website and a competition giving one lucky artist the chance to have their work featured on the site.

The beta of render service Zync on Google Cloud Platform is now live. Users can earn up to $800 in render credit on the newly-discounted service. Google has also launched the Render More site, along with a competition giving one lucky artist the chance to have Google feature their work. In addition, Zync is announcing the availability of support for Pixar’s RenderMan later this year. See below for more details:

Zync Beta – $800 of Free Credit

Artists who register for an account now will automatically receive $300 in free Google Cloud Platform credit, which can be used for Zync rendering.
In order to promote the launch of the Zync beta, the team has also launched the Render More site, where artists can claim an additional $500 in Google Cloud Platform credit by filling out a form, making for a whopping $800 in free credit.

Price Cut

As part of the launch, Zync is also making price cuts of ~15% to all of its Zync pricing, further enhancing the cost effectiveness of Zync compared to managing on-premises render farms.


Google Launches Render More

Google has launched the Render More site where users can learn more about Zync.
On the Render More site, artists can also find details about an exciting chance to have their work featured as a success story on the Google Media landing page. By creating a render using Zync and uploading it social media using the #RenderMore tag -- or emailing gcp-for-media@google.com -- by December 31, 2015, one artist will have the opportunity to have their work featured on the site. If artists don't have a model to render, they can download the free Fred base model and take him out for a spin.

RenderMan Support

Zync will continue to work on the platform in the coming months, kicking things off with RenderMan support later this year. See below for a video tutorial on using Zync Render with Autodesk Maya:

  More about Google

Ladybug Journey

Homage to "Skyfall" title sequence trailer

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[ #MotionGraphics ]
Homage to "Skyfall" title sequence trailer by Creative Director based in Los Angeles - Heebok Lee.

>>Learn Motion Graphics

After I saw Skyfall title sequence in 2012 I decided to make homage to the sequence and later in 2013 I assembled a team of my friends to initiate this project. Since then we’ve been working on and off almost two and a half years and it is finally getting close to finish. We are going to release it on the day of new bond film, “Spectre.” Stay tuned and we hope you enjoy the work.



  More about Motion Graphics

SpeedTree in Visual Effects

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[ #SpeedTree ]
2015 Scientific and Technical Academy Award winning tool - SpeedTree is a group of vegetation programming and modeling software products developed and sold by Interactive Data Visualization, Inc. (IDV) that generates virtual foliage for animations, architecture and in real time for video games and demanding real time simulations

>>UE4 SpeedTree – DFAO/GI test


The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has honored three of our own with a Scientific and Technical Academy Award, presented to Michael Sechrest, Chris King, and Greg Croft at the Sci-Tech Academy Awards in Beverly Hills, CA on February 7th, 2015.






Watch SpeedTree Use in Visual Effects on CG Record TV

  More about SpeedTree

Autodesk Details Next Phase of Subscription Transition

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[ #Autodesk ]
Autodesk, Inc. announced that after July 31, 2016, new commercial licenses of most Autodesk Design & Creation Suites and individual products will be available by subscription only. When this takes effect, the company will provide new, simplified subscription options so customers can access multiple products and share licenses as they do today — while gaining the simplicity, accessibility, and flexibility of subscription.

Subscription offers a simplified customer experience, lower upfront cost and the ability to pay-as-you-go for Autodesk products and cloud services with multi-year, annual, quarterly or monthly subscription terms. As a result, companies can adjust more nimbly and with less cost to shifting business environments.


“The way we design and make things is changing: every industry is being disrupted by changes in production, demand and products,” said Andrew Anagnost, Autodesk senior vice president of Industry Strategy & Marketing. “Autodesk is embracing this new norm and evolving our business so that customers can thrive in theirs. Giving customers the flexibility to subscribe to software solutions that precisely match their needs best positions them to compete in this new era.”

Earlier this year, Autodesk communicated that it will stop selling perpetual licenses of most individual products after January 31, 2016, with new licenses for these products available as subscriptions. Transitioning the remaining majority of Autodesk’s product portfolio — including Autodesk Design & Creation Suites — to an entirely subscription-based offering represents the next step in this shift.

Choice and Flexibility for Customers During Transition

To pave the way for a smooth transition, Autodesk will offer a choice of simplified subscription plans tailored to the needs of individuals, teams or enterprises. Customers will be able to purchase subscription plans to gain access to individual products or a portfolio of products with the option of single user licensing or shared network licensing. These flexible options protect and optimize customers’ existing investments in Autodesk technologies and deliver a seamless path forward as Autodesk discontinues the sales of perpetual licenses.

Those who purchase a perpetual license of Autodesk Design & Creation Suites and affected products prior to July 31, 2016, will continue to own and have full usage rights for those licenses, and customers on Maintenance for those perpetual licenses will continue to receive corresponding benefits for as long as they continue to renew their Maintenance.

For full details on today’s announcement and subscription options, please visit http://www.autodesk.com/perpetuallicenses.

  More about Autodesk

Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 Update: A Redefinition of High Definition

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[ #Adobe #CreativeCloud ##madewithSlate ]
Adobe has announced that they will unveil Creative Cloud 2015 later of this year with more native UHD support and HDR workflow in Premiere Pro and After Effects. Creative Cloud members and trialists can download these upcoming versions of the Creative Cloud applications, including Adobe Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC, through the Creative Cloud desktop applications, or from Adobe.com. These advances will be showcased Sept. 11-15 at IBC 2015

In these upcoming releases of Creative Cloud video apps, you’ll get:

Exceptional UltraHD, HDR, and touch integration—Work with UltraHD (UHD) 4K and 8K media and beyond, and high dynamic range (HDR) files across Creative Cloud applications and throughout your creative pipeline. Maintain color fidelity between Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Adobe After Effects CC with the Lumetri effect now also in After Effects. Plus, navigate panels and workspaces with touch and speed your work with gestures on your Microsoft Surface Pro, Windows 8 tablet or Apple track pad.

Creative assets everywhere you work—Access your project or personal assets wherever you are through Adobe CreativeSync technology. Share images, color Looks, and more between Creative Cloud desktop tools including Photoshop and Illustrator, and with mobile apps such as Adobe Hue CC and Shape CC. Drag assets straight from the Creative Cloud Libraries panel inside After Effects and drop them into the Composition panel. Creative Cloud lets you access and apply assets to your projects without interrupting your creative process.

Vibrant world-class marketplace—Search, try out, and license any of the 45-million high-quality royalty-free images through the Adobe Stock service built into the Libraries panels in Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Color is now everyone’s responsibility in production. Feature updates in Adobe Premiere Pro CC, such as Lumetri Looks, enable filmmakers and editors to control the look of a project throughout the production process, from the initial script to the end, ultimately giving them more creative control. I look forward to what’s coming next in Creative Cloud,
” said Dado Valentic, Founder and Chief Colorist at Mytherapy.

“Adobe is refining our workflows to more easily use fantastic image quality and high dynamic range as creative tools. The ability to move the viewer with HDR imagery will be at our users’ fingertips,” said Bill Roberts, Senior Director of professional video product management, Adobe. “We are in a truly exciting age where the consumption experience is changing – we need to deliver tools that empower creative to take advantage of what is coming.”

Adobe Premiere Pro CC

Having set the standard for the best native file format support in the industry, Premiere Pro expands support for UltraHD and HDR formats with the inclusion of DNxHR, HEVC (H.265), and OpenEXR. Edit and deliver video with resolutions up to and beyond 8K, with high dynamic ranges that capture and preserve details like shadows and highlights. Plus, apply color corrections and create sophisticated Looks with the powerful and accessible Lumetri Color panel in Premiere Pro. This makes working with color and light an integral part of your creative process.
Use multi-touch devices to augment a powerful keyboard-driven workflow. Tasks like building a cut, scrubbing media, marking in and out points, dragging and dropping clips onto a timeline, and making edits can all be done with simple gestures. Pinch to zoom in and out of the Timeline and Monitor panels, and drag to scroll through all workspace panels. Control Premiere Pro through touch with Microsoft Surface Pro and Windows, and with Apple trackpads.

Generate exceptionally smooth slow-motion and speed-ramp effects, as well as high-quality frame rate conversions through GPU-accelerated Optical Flow frame interpolation technology.

To learn more about what’s coming next, visit the Premiere Pro blog.

After Effects CC

The industry-standard for motion graphics and visual effects has expanded its support for touch-enabled computers and smaller screens. Use your fingers to control After Effects workspaces. Pan compositions while adjusting composition properties and without halting playback through Uninterrupted Preview, now with more playback control for material with long per-frame render times.

Maintain color fidelity between After Effects and Premiere Pro; the Lumetri Color settings you make in Premiere Pro carry over to After Effects. Keep pace with rapidly developing color workflows through deeper support for ARRI RAW, Rec. 2020, and other UltraHD and HDR formats.

In Character Animator, when working on touchscreen displays, use multi-touch to simultaneously animate movements of different parts of a character, such as left and right arms. Character Animator will also soon be available in French, German and Japanese.

Learn more about what’s coming next on the After Effects blog.

Adobe Audition CC

Adjust the duration of a song to match your video content with Remix. Much more than a simple looping tool, Remix automatically rearranges your music to any duration while maintaining musicality and structure, creating custom tracks that fit your storytelling needs. Generate synthesized speech in dozens of voices to create scratch voiceover and narration that let you work on a project without waiting for finished recordings.
Learn more about what’s coming next on the Adobe Audition blog.

Adobe Media Encoder CC

Easily post content to your Facebook account as efficiently as you do to YouTube and Vimeo today with Destination Publishing. A single action solution for rendering and delivering content to popular social platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo and Creative Cloud, Destination Publishing now includes support for Facebook to easily showcase and promote social media projects and campaigns.

Deliver pristine UltraHD content encoded to the latest 4K formats including HEVC (H.265), DNxHR, and XAVC Long GOP. Render image sequences, including OpenEXR sequences, through automated workflows that launch when you drop sequences into Watch Folders. Offload rendering tasks from After Effects to Adobe Media Encoder so you can continue working in After Effects. Regulate the perceived loudness of your audio to meet ITU and other broadcast standards with Automatic Loudness Correction (also available in Premiere Pro and Audition).

Learn more about what’s coming to Media Encoder CC on the Premiere Pro blog.

Adobe Anywhere

Anywhere can now be deployed as either a multi-location streaming solution or a single-location collaboration-only version. Collaboration-only deployments bring a more focused collaboration feature set to enterprise customers who do not have remote editors. Please note that Anywhere is a separate offering from Creative Cloud..

Creative Cloud

Access all Adobe professional video applications, as well as Photoshop, Illustrator, and many other creative tools with your Creative Cloud subscription. Get easy and constant access to your graphic assets through the Creative Cloud Libraries panels built into After Effects and Premiere Pro. Use Adobe CreativeSync technology to keep all your creative assets—media, Looks, and more—up to date and instantly available wherever you need them—across desktop, mobile, and web apps.

  More about Adobe Creative Cloud

How to find your path in CG - Recorded video

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[ #CGEvent ]
ATLAS of CG has shared the recorded video of their Stream live on Aug 29, 2015 about How to find your place in CG industry? With Hasan Bajramovic, Patrik Karlsson, Bruno Camara, Siamak Roshani, Ioannis Karathomas, Mariano Steiner.


Their next Event is 26th of September with speaker:
- Ali Seiffouri, Technical Artist and Tool Engineer
- Yibing Jiang's Art Shading Technical Artist
- Ehsan Kiani Rigging Technical Artist
  More about CG Event

Iray for Cinema 4D

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[ #NVIDIA #Iray #C4D ]
NVIDIA and MAXON are revolutionizing the interactive rendering process by unveil GPU-accelerated Iray renderer for Cinema 4D, at IBC, in Amsterdam

>> See Also: Learn Cinema 4D

With this technology, you can produce physically-based, photorealistic imagery with the flexibility of interactive, progressive feedback as the scene’s geometry, materials and lighting are adjusted.
The demo will run on a local workstation with two Quadro GPUs and remote interactive rendering powered by NVIDIA’s Quadro VCA cluster.

Learn more about the Iray demo, and join Them live in MAXON’s booth (7.K30) on Friday, Sept. 11, and Saturday, Sept. 12, from 1-2 p.m. Central Europe time. Or, watch the livestream.

  More Cinema 4D Plugin [post_ad]

T800 Guardian - Terminator Genisys

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[ #Character #Zbrush ]
T800 Guardian - Terminator Genisys by CG Artist based in Bogota, Colombia: Caleb Nefzen for cover of 3D World Magazine issue 200

>> See Also: Learn Creating CG Character


  More about Character

Download Zbrush Brushes - Stylized Rock

Download Free Infinity Blade Collection in Unreal Engine Marketplace

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[ #UnrealEngine ]
Download thousands of assets from Infinity Blade Collection for free in the Unreal Engine Marketplace. This content represents a $3 million investment in art and sound design. via Unreal Engine Blog

>> See Also: Download Unreal Engine 4.9

here are Eight Packs of 7,600 Free assets:
  Infinity Blade: Grass Lands is the earthy citadel adorned with stone set pieces and beautiful props.
  Infinity Blade: Ice Lands is the wintery fort set deep within a glacial enclave.
  Infinity Blade: Fire Lands is the radiant castle interior laced with unforgiving paths, dramatic props and flowing lava.
  Infinity Blade: Warriors includes loads of assets for crafting fierce heroes.
  Infinity Blade: Adversaries has even more content for a making wide variety of rivals.
  Infinity Blade: Effects gives you visual effects ranging from fire and smoke to lightning and magical reactions.
  Infinity Blade: Sounds includes thousands of raw audio files and sound cues.
  Infinity Blade: Weapons presents a vast array of melee weaponry, including never-before-seen swords and axes and also a few Infinity Blade fan favorites.

Download:


Download Free Infinity Blade Collection in Unreal Engine Marketplace here
  More about Unreal Engine

StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void Opening Cinematic

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[ #StarCraft #Game ]
Blizzard Entertainment has unveiled the StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void opening cinematic. On November 10, 2015, players will join the fight to reclaim Aiur and vanquish the universe’s most ancient evil.
Pre-order StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void today at http://www.legacyofthevoid.com.

Click image below to watch StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void Opening Cinematic on CGRecord TV
  More about Game trailer

Bentley Systems buys E-on Software

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New Bentley Subsidiary Continues Advancement of Digital Nature Authoring - for Both Virtual Environment Creation and Physical Infrastructure Engineering

EXTON, Pa., U.S.A. - Sept. 14, 2015 - Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading global provider of comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced that it has acquired e-on software, a leader in the creation, simulation, and integration of natural 3D environments, with software development based in Paris, France.

E-on software is widely acclaimed in the digital content creation (DCC) market, where its VUE and PlantFactory products are a mainstay among computer graphics (CG) professionals in the media and entertainment, science, and education industries. E-on's offerings have been used in the making of numerous blockbuster films, including Minions, Jupiter Ascending, How To Train Your Dragon, Avatar, The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Hugo, and Terminator. Headed by founder Nicholas Phelps, e-on software, operating as a Bentley subsidiary, will continue to develop innovative solutions for the unique challenges of the DCC community.

Phelps said, "For over 20 years, I have dedicated e-on software to creating and supporting the best digital nature solutions. While initially only focused on serving the media and entertainment industry, we recognized in recent years a growing need among architects and engineers to 'tell their story' in a more compelling way. We responded to this by leveraging our expertise in visual effects and creating easy-to-use products such as LumenRT that bring quick, high-quality 'movie production' to the architectural and engineering market.

"I am thrilled to join Bentley Systems to explore and extend these avenues together. Bentley is a fantastic company that shares our passion for technological excellence. It will be a great home for e-on software to thrive in. We gain access to a highly qualified user base, substantial resources, and new distribution channels that will allow us to walk boldly into the future and produce ever more exciting and versatile natural environment simulation and integration products, putting Hollywood movie quality into the hands of engineers and artists alike, around the world!"

Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley said, "With our acquisition of e-on software, reality modeling for architects and engineers to capture existing conditions and provide context for proposed infrastructure designs can now be enlivened with digital nature. The natural world is the backdrop for all infrastructure projects and, as individuals, we all experience elements such as trees, skies, and terrains as being intrinsically vital to our quality of life. With the 'cinematic' quality of LumenRT environments, every architect and engineer can envision and present his or her proposed design alternatives as they would be experienced in actual operation in nature."

  More about E-on

Becoming a World-Class Animator

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[ #Animation #Gnomon ]
Gnomon is going to host another FREE event, join them for an evening with Marco Marenghi and learn what it takes to be a world-class animator. His story is one of inspiration and motivation; from dealing with redundancy to embarking on a complete career change and becoming a world-class animator for the industry’s highest profile companies. Marco will share helpful information on what he looks for in aspiring animators and will advise on how to stand out from the crowd. He will touch on lessons in rejection and perseverance, and offer general industry advice to help keep artists motivated in the competitive field of animation. Attendees and Livestream viewers will also learn about how skills can cross industries, from films to game cinematics, and vice versa. Plus, there will be opportunity to enjoy behind-the-scenes footage and stories from a true industry veteran.

>> See Also: Learn Animation

The event is free and open to the public. Entry is by RSVP only, and seating is first come first served. If you can't make it to Hollywood, be sure to follow Gnomon on Livestream to watch the full event for free from anywhere in the world.

Schedule:

7:00 pm – 8:30 pm: Becoming a World-Class Artist
8:30 pm – 9:00 pm: Audience Questions



Guest Speakers

Marco Marenghi
Animation Director
Marco was an accomplished artist from an early age. When a forced redundancy from a career in electronics in 1995 gave him the opportunity to re-evaluate his life, Marco chased his true dream to become a world-class animator. His story is one of inspiration and motivation, and was even the subject of a 2003 BBC documentary called simply "The Marco Marenghi Story". Marco has since worked as a team leader at several of the world's highest profile companies and still strives to create seamless and inspiring animation.

  More about GNOMON

Pixomondo Links Global Render Farm with Deadline

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[ #Deadline #Pixomondo ]
International creative design and VFX studio Pixomondo has evolved at the pace of the entertainment industry, bolstering its technology infrastructure and diversifying capabilities along the way. Founded in 2001 by CEO Thilo Kuther, the company spans six offices on three continents and offers a range of services starting from award-winning VFX for film, TV and commercials to interactive digital content, VR, live events, theme park entertainment and original IP. By sharing render resources across facilities, Pixomondo maximizes efficiencies; its globally dispersed farm runs 24/7 thanks to a proprietary process built on top of Thinkbox Software’s Deadline, on which the company standardized in 2010.


Patrick Wolf in front of the Deadline Monitor.

“Part of what influenced us to integrate Deadline so deeply is its open architecture and usage of the Python programming language. With the source code for application integration available, we can constantly tweak the software to our own specifications; it’s very extensible. Also, the Thinkbox crew has always been willing to grow with us and is quick to respond to our needs,” shared Patrick Wolf, Pixomondo’s Global Head of Pipeline.

Deadline high-volume compute management software is used to render, manage and process files locally and across the cloud. Pixomondo primarily leverages Deadline for remote rendering between branches. Wolf and his team customized Deadline’s job submitters to allow users to select the branch(es) to render in; they also extended the Deadline GUI to allow render wranglers to split local jobs to render on one or more remote farms simultaneously, a feature that has been extremely helpful on tight deadlines.
When a remote job is sent to the farm, event scripts in Deadline automatically determine the job dependencies. Necessary file transfers are queued and then a replica job is created on the remote farm recreating the settings of the user that submitted the job locally as well as remapping job priorities, pools and group configurations. As soon as a frame is rendered remotely a Deadline after render event informs Pixomondo’s Celery-based global queuing system. Celery then triggers the transfer of the rendered frame and also marks the task complete on the local side so that the remote render is transparent and seamless to the artists. After the remote render is complete and all frames were verifiably transferred back, a cleanup job removes the frames on the remote side to save storage space. Celery is then used to mark the job as completed locally, which allows dependent follow up jobs to run like a proxy image generator. Pixomondo’s production management system, Autodesk’s Shotgun Software, is also notified when the render finishes. Currently, the studio solely uses physical computing resources but Wolf is already investigating the integration of cloud rendering to the workflow.

“One of the cool things about our remote rendering setup is that every step is a separate dependent Deadline job with automatic retry and failover. Since every job has log files attached, you can easily see and troubleshoot if a connection drops or there is some other issue. It’s very easy to monitor how a job is performing, whether it’s local or remote,” Wolf explained.


Game Of Thrones, Season Five

Deadline jobs’ associated log files provide a wealth of statistics that help Pixomondo optimize its render farm performance. For “Furious 7” and “Game of Thrones” Season Five, supervisors concerned with RAM usage leveraged metrics from Deadline job log files to guide how they utilized various machines. Another appreciated Deadline feature is bracketing: for example, rather than waiting days for frames 1-100 to render, Pixomondo requests Deadline to render frames 1,100,50,25,75 first, then every 5th frame and only then the rest. This allows artists to quickly determine render issues before wasting resources on executing a complete pass.


Remote Rendering dialog.

In addition to remote rendering, Pixomondo taps Deadline for file transfer and its asset library. With file transfer, coordinators can select a playlist with hundreds of associated versions in Shotgun and queue them for transfer to another branch in Deadline. Deadline then automatically retries failed transfers, provides detailed logs and notifies users on completion. For asset archival, once a show finishes, Pixomondo selects the assets to archive in Shotgun and then a script generates Deadline jobs that asynchronously perform the actual archiving on the farm, allowing for hundreds of assets to be archived simultaneously, without blocking the computer. The archived assets are then automatically entered into an Asset Library project in Shotgun. The restore is again triggered from Shotgun and kicks of a custom Deadline asset restore jobs. In case an asset isn’t yet available locally, a transfer job takes care of pulling it from a remote branch. On completion of the restore Deadline automatically notifies the user via email.

“Deadline is incredibly fast. With its new database repository, I can connect to a remote branch easily from my desk and watch the jobs output as it occurs; I don’t have to wait until a job is finished. To maintain consistency, we've committed all our repositories to a version control system so that we can change any of the plugins in one location and it will apply the changes across the other branches,” said Wolf.
Further simplifying workflow customization, Deadline’s event framework allows Wolf to hook into any stage of a job on Pixomondo’s farm and tailor its execution. This allows for useful functions like the ability to customize jobs directly after submission in one central place, rather than being required to implement these code changes in every plug-in. Regarding applications, Wolf rarely encounters one not already supported by Deadline. Additionally, Deadline’s pools, groups, and limits groups make resource sharing frictionless.

Wolf concluded, “The beauty of Deadline is that we basically don’t have to worry about it processing our jobs. And if we do have to investigate the level of detail we’re able to pull out is fantastic, it’s extensible and it’s very user friendly. We’re happy that we standardized on it and really like how the feature set keeps growing year after year.”

For more information on Deadline, visit www.thinkboxsoftware.com/sales.
  More about Deadline

Technicolor buys the Mill effects company for $292 Million

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[ #VFX ]
Technicolor has announced today the acquisition of London-based The Mill, the world's largest visual effects and content creation studio for the advertising industry, for €259 million on a debt-free basis.

>>The Mill 2015 Reel


Founded in 1990, The Mill is consistently recognized by peers and clients as a premier visual effects provider for both advertising agencies and brands, and has earned in excess of 1,000 industry awards. It has operations in the key markets of London, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

This acquisition accomplishes many objectives set out in Technicolor's Drive 2020 strategic roadmap:

Establishes leadership positions for visual effects and digital creation across all segments of high-end content, including cinema, TV and advertising;
Reinforces Technicolor's strong portfolio of brands including MPC, Mr. X and Mikros Image servicing a broad range of customers across 10 global locations;
Brings significant talent and expertise around emerging technologies such as virtual reality content that will enable Technicolor's to enhance its technology platform across the entire industry;
Adds significant financial contribution with a business that has grown revenues at a 16% CAGR since 2009 to reach €135 million in 2014 while delivering EBITDA margins of approximately 20%;
Allows Production Services to better balance its portfolio through increased exposure to advertising and strengthens the financial profile of the Entertainment Services segment. With this acquisition Production Services accounting for approximately 40% of Entertainment Services revenues.

“In acquiring The Mill, we are executing on our Drive 2020 strategic objective of enhancing our market position in visual effects while improving profitability and revenue growth concurrently with accelerating deployment of emerging technologies,” said Technicolor CEO, Frederic Rose. “In The Mill, we have found a company that aligns with our focus on excellence in talent, technology and operational performance. It is a perfect fit.”
The new Technicolor building in Hollywoodz.
With these two transactions, the Adjusted EBITDA floor that Technicolor has set for 2020 (at least €500 million) as part of its Drive 2020 strategic roadmap will be achieved by 2017 while maintaining a strong cash flow generation. The transaction combined with the acquisition of Cisco Connected Devices will translate into high double digit EPS accretion for the full year 2016. The Company will update its Drive 2020 financial objectives concurrent with its full year 2015 results.

Frederic Rose, CEO, and Esther Gaide, CFO, will hold a conference call and an audio webcast today, Tuesday September 15th, 2015 at 6:30pm (CEST).

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Shotgun Software Releases New Shotgun Panel

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[ #Autodesk #Shotgun ]
LOS ANGELES -- Autodesk company Shotgun Software has announced the availability of Shotgun Panel for all Shotgun Pipeline Toolkit users. First revealed at last month’s SIGGRAPH Conference, the Shotgun Panel gives artists a simple mini-Shotgun user interface directly within common creative applications such as Autodesk Maya and The Foundry’s Nuke, enabling quick and easy access to key information and the ability to communicate with other artists on their team, without having to switch over to a web browser. Shotgun Panel can also be integrated directly into proprietary pipelines, will work as a floating panel in Autodesk Flame, and is customizable to support any facility’s specific workflow.


Shotgun Panel comes just ahead of the Shotgun 6.3 rollout, scheduled for later this fall. Additional improvements announced for Shotgun 6.3 include new review and approval features, and an updated Client Review Site. All of these tools are aimed at greater integration and communication, eliminating bottlenecks by giving users access to the information they need regardless of which application they’re using.

Shotgun pricing starts at $30 per account/per month with “Awesome” support, or $50 per account/per month with “Super Awesome” support.
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