Eric Enderton, senior software engineer at NVIDIA, discussed the convergence of film and game via the GPU as a fast parallel computer. While we’ve already witnessed breakthroughs in realtime rendering, sim work, Rigid Body Dynamics and Collision Detection, Enderton suggested that more and more vfx tasks would soon be accelerated by the GPU. Eventually, this would push into more interactive tools.

Paul Debevec, research associate professor at USC and the exec producer of graphics research at the university’s Institute for Creative Technologies took part in, “Looking Ahead at the Future of Visual Effects Tools.”

Paul Debevec, the esteemed research associate professor at USC and the exec producer of graphics research at the university’s Institute for Creative Technologies, offered his ongoing work on integrating live action and 3D CG. “Performance Relighting and Reflectance Transformation With Time- Multiplexed Illumination” involves a technique for capturing an actor’s live performance in such a way that the lighting and reflectance can be modified in post. Using the new domed Light Stage 6, Debevec is trying to capture the whole body and is working on virtual viewpoint control with a vertical array of cameras. He still needs to capture arbitrary motion and deal with data flow.

Richard Kerris, who heads technical marketing for Apple’s software applications, discussed open standards in which programmers are becoming artists and vice versa, and extensible tools for post, offering such examples as Luma artists programming a pipeline and workflow made easier by Apple products, and director David Fincher benefiting from the same on Zodiac.

Terry Brown of HP sales explained how they are enabling 3D artists to virtualize everything through remote graphics software with compression technology. They are part of a new production paradigm that is security protected, which is being used at DreamWorks and other studios.

Habib Zargarpour, senior art director at Electronic Arts, dazzled the audience with glimpses into the future of UI, stating that realtime interaction is the Holy Grail. He showed how he could instantly light a shot from Need for Speed Most Wanted and previewed a realtime CG shot of a fetus created on a game engine platform from Trapped Ashes, a horror anthology involving Matrix vfx supervisor John Gaeta and pioneered by Matrix color & lighting td Rudy Poat. Zargarpour said these innovations will lift technical obstacles to create better artistic decisions.

The second day kicked off with a look at the “Invisible Effects: The Da Vinci Code & Casanova,” which took an in-depth look at the two recent films . The Da Vinci Code © 2006 Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. All r

The second day kicked off with a very visible look at the “Invisible Effects: The Da Vinci Code & Casanova.” This panel took an in-depth look at two recent films that have recreated eras and locales not accessible to their filmmakers, moderated by Ian Hunter, vfx supervisor at New Deal Studios.

Amongst the many recreated environments in The Da Vinci Code, it was particularly challenging to recreate an entire CG environment for the interior of the Saint Sulpice church, working from some photos taken by overall visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton. Chris Burns, vfx supervisor at Double Negative, said things were measured and relayed to artists in “Angus feet,” since the vfx supervisor’s feet measured 11.99 inches long; so he walked off and recorded the dimensions. They wound up with about four feet of error when they mapped it out.

There weren’t nearly enough photos as artists took more of a multiplane approach instead of 3D in this growing “photogramatory” process. They had 100 photos to work with, but they needed about 14,900 more. Plus the angles did not match up with how the director planned to shoot it, according to Mark Breakspear, vfx supervisor for Rainmaker.

Bill Taylor, ASC, vfx supervisor/cinematographer, Illusion Arts, recounted what a challenge it was to create the entire environment for Casanova in CG. It was done in a made scramble on a tiny budget (that could not afford live-action shoots). Actors were captured and then recreated in different costumes to create crowd scenes.

The panel agreed that working in greenscreen was preferable to bluescreen because green gives the highest luminance and works better in sunlight, said Breakspear. That and blue is the noisiest channel with light registration, added Burns.

Next up, the vfx team on the latest X-Men franchise discussed the challenges of working on a tight schedule (April 20, 2005-April 8, 2006) and with various vfx houses in five countries on three different continents. Panelists were John Bruno, vfx supervisor; John “DJ” Des Jardin, vfx supervisor; Bryan Hirota, vfx supervisor, CIS and Edson Williams, vfx producer for Lola Visual Effects with Hunter moderating.