Thursday, June 23, 2011

Pirates in London

Cinesite re-creates 18th century London in 3D for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Cinesite, one of the world’s leading film visual effects houses, has completed more than 300 stereoscopic visual effects shots for Pirates of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. For their first full stereo 3D project, Cinesite were tasked with creating large-scale photorealistic 3D environments for a dramatic carriage chase through London.



Directed by Rob Marshall, the fourth installment in the highly successful Disney/Bruckheimer series sees Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) embark on a quest to find the elusive fountain of youth, only to discover that Blackbeard (Ian McShane) and his daughter (Penelope Cruz) are after it too.

Working closely with overall visual effects supervisor Charles Gibson, Cinesite’s visual effects supervisor Simon Stanley-Clamp spent several weeks on location in Greenwich and at historical buildings Hampton Court Palace and Middle Temple, as well as being on set at Pinewood Studios. The film was shot in native stereo 3D using Red One cameras and Pace 3D camera rigs.



Starting inside St James’ Palace and progressing through three different exterior London environments, the carriage chase sequence was shot against three large bluescreens on location in Greenwich and comprises more than 200 back-to-back shots. Cinesite created complex 3D environments including full CG street builds with detailed period buildings, as well as set and background extensions. Atmospheric smoke, smog and fog were added to create an old London feel, and extras, shot in stereo against a bluescreen, were seamlessly composited to enhance the busy London street.

As well as the challenge of r-ecreating such a large-scale location, Cinesite also faced challenges due to the stereoscopic nature of the film. Head of visual effects technology, Michele Sciolette, led Cinesite’s efforts to build the stereo production pipeline and develop a number of new tools to meet these challenges. These included csStereoColourMatcher, a fully-automated tool designed to compensate for color differences between stereoscopic image pairs. csPhotoMesh was used extensively by Cinesite’s environmental specialists to quickly build CG sets for environmental work.



Other shots Cinesite worked on include creating Barbossa’s peg leg throughout the film by replacing the blue sock Rush wore on set with a digital peg leg. They also created highly detailed CG poison dart frogs in four different colors. In addition to their proprietary tools, Cinesite relied on Nuke, Maya, Houdini and RenderMan.

“We’re very proud of what we’ve achieved on our first full stereo 3D project,” said Antony Hunt, managing director, Cinesite. “The complexities that stereoscopic work introduces combined with the sheer scale of some of the scenes we worked on presented some big challenges. But by drawing on our extensive experience in creating photorealistic CG environments and our expertise in motion analysis and color correction, we were able to create some outstanding 3D visual effects.” 



About Cinesite
With one of the largest and most comprehensive facilities in Europe, Cinesite's visual effects team has the capacity and creativity to produce all manner of effects, both digital and physical, for feature films and broadcast projects of all scales. Their award-winning team of highly talented visual effects artists take filmmakers' ideas and turn them into spectacular cinematic reality.
 
Cinesite is currently working on Harry Potter The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Warner Bros.), John Carter of Mars (Disney/Pixar), and X-Men: First Class (Twentieth Century Fox). 

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Source : http://www.cgw.com/

Nvidia iray and GPUs Supercharge Jeff Patton's Designs for Mercedes Benz


For a Mercedes Benz product visualization project, freelance computer graphics (CG) artist Jeff Patton leveraged the power of high-efficiency Nvidia iray rendering software and Nvidia Quadro and Tesla professional graphics processing units (GPUs) to supercharge both his artistry and efficiency.


Jeff Patton is a prolific, self-taught, freelance CG artist who has created mechanical illustrations for major companies, including Honeywell, Delta Controls, and Johnson Controls, among others. He is also a recognized expert in Autodesk 3ds Max 3D software and Nvidia mental ray rendering software, as well as an active beta tester who has taught an Autodesk Master Class and writes tutorials on techniques for using both software solutions effectively.


In early 2010, some photo-real vehicle renders that Patton had created caught the attention of Mercedes Benz USA (MBUSA), which approached him to develop images for its Web site and print advertising. He was given computer-aided design (CAD) data for each vehicle along with environmental backplates, and tasked with compositing CG vehicles into those backplates while accentuating the cars' curves via reflections and lighting. He knew that the images he created would need to be a blend of photorealism and studio imagery--cars that appear to be physically photographed, but which are touched by Patton's artistry in reflections and lighting and further refined by the talented staff at MBUSA to create the most appealing visual possible. 


When he started the project, Patton was using 3ds Max software with mental ray and the Chaos Group V-Ray rendering engine on a CPU. Given the large file sizes he was working with and the amount of rendering that the images required, his work was slow going, with renders taking approximately an hour per image.
Patton believed that the high-efficiency Nvidia iray rendering software would be ideally suited for his Mercedes Benz product visualization project. As the first interactive, photo-realistic and physically correct rendering solution to leverage the power of Nvidia Quadro and Tesla professional graphics processing units (GPUs), the combination would supercharge both his artistry and efficiency. So he made the performance leap to iray and Nvidia GPU computational visualization, configuring a workstation with Nvidia Quadro 6000 and Tesla C2070 GPUs, both featuring 6GB of memory to handle the very high resolution 6K images Mercedes Benz required, along with the 5GB of model and scene data they were supplying.




Patton says: "After I finished my first full Mercedes Benz project with the new Nvidia setup, I was stunned. Rendering out the images at 6K in the past took me about an hour per image using the CPU. With iray and Quadro, I was able to knock that down to eight minutes! It's a huge benefit to be able to turn things around that much faster."
Since he began using iray with Nvidia Quadro 6000 and Tesla C2070 GPUs on the Mercedes Benz project, Patton's renders have been running up to 7.5X faster than they had on mental ray and V-Ray running on the Intel Core i7 960 3.2GHz CPU.
In addition to the speed improvements achieved with Nvidia GPU acceleration, Patton also realized improved clarity and detail in his images thanks to the photo-realistic capabilities of Nvidia iray. "The glass, the headlights--you can see every detail," says Patton. "I wasn't able to get that before without using really high sampling rates in other programs, and even then I couldn't pull out all of the details I can see now. There was a huge increase in clarity and detail that iray was able to pull out."

Nvidia iray also saves Patton time during the scene setup and render configuration phases of his workflow. "With iray I can just set my glossy material value to what I want and move on. I don't have to spend time configuring material and light sample values to balance grain and render speed or adjusting overall image sampling."
Since all his image processing now takes place on the GPU, Patton can use the CPU for other tasks. "In so many ways, iray running on the Nvidia GPUs allows me to work faster and create higher quality images. I'm handling more images in less time, and I can do more things with that time I save--whether it's taking on more work or spending more time with my family. The GPUs have made such a dramatic impact on my work. It's such an impressive increase in both detail and speed. The Nvidia GPU hardware and iray are an amazing combination. I can't wait to see how much further they develop in the future."

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 Source : http://www.cgw.com/

Two Ganda Young Indonesian Men's Create Surprises

Two Indonesian men's doubles in the second half made a surprise Djarum Indonesia Open Superseries by getting rid of the double Premier flagship, on Thursday (23/06/2011).
The biggest surprise Young made double Anga Primary / Ryan Agung Saputra by getting rid of the two leading South Korean, Jung Jae Sung / Lee Yong Dae. Ryan / Anga won in two games 21-17, 21-17.
In the quarter-finals, Anga / Ryan will face the winner of the second round match between pairs of Germany Ingo Kindervater / Johannes Schoettler who will face eighth-seeded Chinese pair, Chai Biao / Guo Zhendong.
While Indonesia's second double, Bona Septano / Mohammad Ahsan, also make a "surprise" by getting rid of doubles from Taiwan, Fang Chieh Min / Lee Sheng Mu, who is seeded sixth place. Bona / Ahsan win rubber game 21-19, 16-21, 21-12.
Bona / Ahsan awaiting the winner of the second round match between Malaysia doubles, Koo Kien Keat / Tan Boon Heong, and the Japanese pair, Naoki Kawamae / Shoji Sato.
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Source : Kompas.com

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