Ubisoft is now in the process of developing their games into short series and feature films. Their Assassin's Creed has a strong feature-like feel. © 2007 Ubisoft Ent.

Once again, EA showcased its new developments in Procedural Awareness solutions. These now allow non-player game characters to come alive with facial emotion and true body language, making these otherwise lifeless characters more in synch with their environment. During this presentation, Entis also introduced a new concept that may be a powerful way to look at what creates the famous Uncanny Valley in terms of ultra-realistic CG characters. Imagine a graph with the horizontal axis being Modeling Fidelity and the vertical axis, Motion Fidelity. Draw a diagonal line starting from point 0,0 and bisect the graph in two perfect halves. Entis called this line the Zombie line. Under this line, the modeling fidelity of the character exceeds its motion fidelity, and that's when you get the zombie-like character. The conclusion then is that CG artists and animators now need to work on how the human emotions and all their subtleties translate into motions and micro-movements.

Going in this direction was Bernd Bickel's presentation showcasing a new MoCap technique designed to capture the movements of wrinkles on the human face. Developed at the Swiss federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, this technology, based mainly on computer vision and video image analysis, achieves quite stunning results. A face animated with a standard MoCap solution for facial animation looks like a self-deforming mask, regardless of how good its texturing and rendering may be. But add the wrinkles, and the 3D face suddenly springs to life.

Students Strike Again...
As 3D tools become easier to learn and master, new solutions will continue to revolutionize the way people work today. As Jovan Popovic demonstrated in one of his talks, it is now possible to skin and rig 3D characters automatically and to transfer animation from one character to another with an ease previously unthinkable. This striking presentation made it clear that very soon, any child with a computer will be able to set up, rig and animate a 3D character with a high level of believability. The conference of Alexei Efros, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, emphasized that the future of compositing and matte painting is also wedded to automated technologies: they will make image retouching a breeze thanks to computer vision and automated processes that can automatically identify and transform a scene's lighting conditions, erase or add specific elements in an image, etc.

With such automated technologies enabling the production of increasingly professional-looking photorealistic results, the strength of the vfx industry will lie in its ability to diversify itself, and to work with highly talented individuals. And once again, the Imagina Awards were an opportunity to see that there will be no shortage of that. As always, the student films stood out and made a strong impression on the Imagina crowd. Two shorts from Supinfocom were honored this year. The very funny and hysterical Bolides by Francois-Xavier Bologna, Theophile Bondoux, Lyonel Charmette and Vincent Le Ster from Supinfocom Arles (France) won for Best School-University. The strange and poetic Camera Obscura by Matthieu Buchalski, Jean-Michel Drechsler and Thierry Onillon from Supinfocom Valenciennes was awarded the Jury Special Prize. And Julien Bocabeille, François-Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier and Emud Mokhberi from Gobelins l'Ecole de l'Image (France) were awarded Best Animation for Oktapodi, a film that can arguable challenge the best shorts from Pixar...

Expanding Vfx Reach Beyond Filmmaking
The conference given by Frederic Thonet, CGI operations director with Ubisoft, also hinted at what the future of vfx might be. The videogame company is now in the process of developing a new branch geared toward the production of short series and even feature films based on the intellectual property developed for its games. Thonet, who used to work in the vfx industry at Duran in France, one of the oldest vfx studios in Paris, showed a long clip from Assassin's Creed. The clip was a live recording of a gamer playing the game, but the result had a strong feature-like feel, thanks to the use of many cinematographic tricks such as depth-of-field blurs and sound design used in a narrative fashion, realtime editing of various camera angles that integrated seamlessly with the player experience and a strong mixture of action and dialog.

This new approach to interactivity is undeniably a preview for what tomorrow's movies and vfx will be. It is highly foreseeable that soon vfx artists will be asked by game companies to work on realtime game effects. And, indeed, the German company Crytek, renowned for its hit title Far Cry and its outstanding realtime 3D engine, has already taken steps in that direction. Cevat Yerli, Crytek's CEO, explained how his team developed the look of its Crysis game : "First, we asked a vfx studio to create a photorealistic 3D cinematic for the game. Then, we used their clip as a benchmark for what we'd have to achieve with realtime rendering. In the end, I think that, in certain ways, we even managed to exceed the quality of the original clip."