After a disappointing event last year, Imagina 2006 was a pleasant surprise. With organizational changes and a renewed focus on the professional tradeshow, Imagina is once again the great European event it once was.

Imagina 2006 was a pleasant surprise, after a disappointing 2005 edition. With several organizational changes and a renewed focus on the professional tradeshow, Imagina intends to revert to the great European event it once was.

Imagina 2006 offered its usual technical conferences, presented by high-level professionals and researchers, along with special presentations, a film premiere and, of course, the Imagina Awards, with Prince Albert of Monaco in attendance.

In this year’s edition, Imagina organizers also came up with several new events attendees enjoyed. The large student contingencies from France, the U.K. and Italy had access to all-day open classes on topics such as, “Tips for Better Skinning” and “VFX in Combustion,” plus conferences on art and technology. Tradeshow exhibitors were given access to a new communication tool, the Privileged Information meetings, where buyers and sellers met in special conference rooms for elaborate demos and discussions. The tradeshow this year was physically located at the heart of the event, which made it much busier than before and provided a venue for all sorts of spontaneous encounters between friends and fellow conference attendees.

At Imagina, the videogame industry seemed to be leading in technological advances. Frank Vitz of Electronic Arts presented the brilliant work behind the Fight Night 3 game.

This year’s presentations and conferences brought to light a particularly interesting trend. VFX professionals now appear to have reached some sort of technical plateau after the innovations developed in the Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies. The focus has now shifted to leveraging this know-how by pushing the limits of actual technologies, such as crowd simulation, HRDI rendering, camera mapping, fur tools, etc.

And, instead of trying to come up with the latest totally new fx-of-the-day, vfx houses are hard at work managing and renewing increasingly complex pipelines. Indeed, film projects now require increasingly heavy amounts of data and are spread out over longer periods of time. Two studios discussed these new directions — Rhythm & Hues, which was responsible for generating and rendering massive amounts of virtual creatures for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe and Double Negative, whose work on Batman Begins was spread over 18 months.

Looking for Realism in Performance
While the quest for the perfect digital actor continues to be many a studio’s avowed objective, several presenters felt that most technical challenges appear to have been met. Therefore, at Imagina, the videogame industry appeared to be the one leading the charge in technological advances. Frank Vitz, project director at Electronic Arts, presented of the brilliant work behind the Fight Night 3 game and gave us a glimpse of what may well be tomorrow’s 3D. After perfecting an impressing demo reel for the game, his team had to shorten image render times from 35 minutes to 1/30th of a second! The key sequence is basically an adaptation of the famous “superpunch” in Matrix Revolutions, courtesy of George Borshukov who joined Frank Vitz’s team. Now that it is played in realtime on a game console, one can’t help but marvel at what the future holds, when complex film vfx will be done in realtime.