Zviz demo put together by ILM. All images © Lucasfilms Ltd.

With the prevalence of previs growing exponentially over the past few years, companies are trying to improve the process, giving directors more control over previs creation. Many have looked at Machinima as a possible solution. However, Industrial Light & Magic is taking that idea a bit further. Steve Sullivan, director of R&D at Industrial Light & Magic, tells Barbara Robertson about the new interactive previs system ILM is developing.

Barbara Robertson: During his keynote Q&A at last year’s SIGGRAPH, George Lucas said he wanted to have an interactive previs system and hinted strongly that it was under development. Is it?

Steve Sullivan: ILM has been poking at this problem for quite a while, often on shows, and George has always been interested in previsualization. But he never had the interactivity he wanted. Basically, right now most people do previs in Maya. Previs is a huge improvement, but it’s not a good tool for brainstorming. The director usually tells a previs artist, “Here’s what I want. I’ll see you tomorrow, or maybe next week.” In March last year, after Episode III, George said that he really did want a system he could use himself, and that ILM needed to make it. He wasn’t going to buy it from someone else. At that point, we were moving the pipeline onto Zeno.

BR: Didn’t you use a game engine to give Steven Spielberg a previs system on a laptop that he used for AI?

SS: That was an interesting experiment. We also made a system for the Hulk, for Ang Lee. Some of the R&D guys put an interface on top of the XSI realtime viewer. It had limitations, but it was a good step toward the tool we’ve built now: an interesting proof of concept. You could bring in a baked scene and move the camera around, so you could play with shot blocking. We also helped create a Maya-based system for Episode III that improved the interactivity a bit. But, we were hamstrung in terms of how much we could do differently.

BR: What mandate did George Lucas give you?

SS: The mandate was broad. We knew a little about what he wanted from previous previs systems: It had to be simple, simple, simple— simple enough for George to use. He said, “Directors should be able to sit on the couch watching TV while they mock up their shots.” It gave us a certain focus. But the target audience was also 12-year-old kids. George wanted a system that could teach people how to make movies: something that changes how things are done.

BR: Where did you start?

SS: We threw away all of our UI concepts and started from scratch. We couldn’t have the screen cluttered with widgets and check boxes; it had to be about the images. We have context menus, but not toolbars. We also came up with some interesting input devices. You don’t have to use the keyboard or a mouse. You can use game controllers, pan and tilt wheels on the set, multi-degree freedom joysticks. We’re agnostic about input devices. You can sit on the couch and use a game controller to move an image on your TV. Or, you can sit at a desktop and use a keyboard.

BR: So, how far along is the system now?

Steve Sullivan, director of R&D at Industrial Light & Magic.

SS: We have an internal system working now that we’ll shake out and make slick enough to be a product. We have no plans to market it now, but it needs to be consumer friendly.

We had five people working on it from March until October last year when we had the first demo. Then, we scaled the team down to work on stability. The people all came from ILM, so the system addressed their needs. Now, the team is back up to five to support people who are actively using it to develop the animated [Clone Wars] TV series. And, we’re working on getting the LucasArts game engine to be the default viewer in Zeno, so the previs viewer could use that rather than the one in Zeno. The game engine has higher quality visuals, is optimized in terms of lighting and performance and incorporates realtime physics.

It’s a production ready system. It runs on standard PCs and on laptops. It’s running under Linux now, but we have Windows machines. We could set someone up with that gear.

BR: Does the system have a name?

SS: We’re calling it Zviz.

BR: How does Zviz work?

SS: It has three modes. In one mode, you can build the set, a second mode is for animation and shooting and the third mode is for editing.

BR: OK. Let’s start with the first mode you mentioned. How does a director build a set?

SS: A director would probably have a world that’s already pre-built, but the capability is there if he’s in the middle of blocking out a shot and decides it would be great to have a doorway or an alley in the background.

We have a generic asset library with proxy props, automobiles, characters and so forth, so someone using the system has something to work with. You can bring in objects from the asset browser, assemble them in the world and scale them. The objects are simple. Some are on animatable cards like sprites. This is the front-end part of the process, the creative process, not the finishing process.