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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.12 - MARCH 2001

The Technology Circle (continued from page 1) A screen capture of Shake 2.3's "Hope" imagery. © and courtesy of Precipice Pictures and Nothing Real. Proprietary Needs Another blow to the sellers is that major companies have their own versions of certain software packages. For example, the effect of animal fur is a "must have" look that digital artists have been trying to perfect for years. Many studios have written their own software versions for animal fur and muscle systems. If they're not happy with an off the shelf version, they have the means to create their own. In fact, there are some large houses where almost all of the software is proprietary and there are some major advantages in this. Proprietary software can save money and time for large effects companies. They've been working so long with their own product that they've built infrastructures such as file formats, geometry formats and image formats around it. For better or worse, they're married to their own proprietary software and it's difficult for them to break away and use a non-proprietary system. Another nice thing about proprietary software is that one can just walk into the office next door and ask a programmer to write something up really quick -- a cool plug-in or some other nice application. There's no waiting, or required detailed explanation necessary. Plus, if you are at ILM or another powerhouse, you probably have some of the brightest minds at your disposal. Rachel Dunn, one of Digital Domain's top 2D composite artists. Rachel Dunn, one of Digital Domain's top 2D composite artists with credits such as Dante's Peak, Fifth Element, Red Planet, Titanic, The Grinch and Super Nova, explains: "If a studio can afford to write custom software they will because writing their own proprietary software gives them the exact features they need in order to do their job. Most store bought software is written for a broad consumer market. Software companies are trying to make everyone happy. The larger studios don't need that. They custom tailor their proprietary software for their own in house artists." "Our proprietary software Nuke is very powerful. We have about 10 or 12 guys writing software for Digital Domain. A lot of the software we write is translation. We take store bought software and write links to it so it will work with Nuke. So we can get Alias|Wavefront's Maya to work with Houdini, to work with Softimage, to work with Ultimatte and so on and so forth. We can take a blue screen model and read it through five different software packages to get what we need." "We at DD find ourselves bouncing back and forth between quite a few different software packages when we're doing compositing because some packages do better than others on certain things. We will bring an image through a whole chain of software packages just to massage it into the shape we want. The artists and managers at Digital Domain really evaluate the software carefully because there's a whole lot stuff out there you can waste your money on." View an enlarged image of Richard Taylor's Seven Stones Man. Courtesy of Richard Taylor. Enter the Boutique Another factor that is changing the face of the way effects are done today is the shear amount of shots that need to get done for certain projects. Some feature films have up to a thousand effects shots. Producers often don't want to send a thousand effects shots to one house. For that matter there are very few effects studios that can even handle a thousand shots! Sending projects to multiple companies is one way of cutting costs and saving time. Some of these companies are small, highly specialized boutiques. One possible drawback about smaller boutiques is that they don't have stages and cameras, while the bigger studios do have access to motion control cameras, big stages and all the bells and whistles. They can also shoot blue screens themselves. There are a couple ways to view this development. Some think this is a healthy development and creates a competitive atmosphere, others think differently as small studios are burned to the ground trying to meet deadlines and make profits in a cut-throat world.

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