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MPC Film Advances the Craft of Visual Effects at SIGGRAPH 2018

Studio group announces its extensive schedule of talks and presentations for the upcoming computer graphics conference and exhibition in Vancouver.

This year at SIGGRAPH 2018, MPC R&D will have a number of speakers presenting at a broad range of talks on the technical and creative challenges of VFX, including the studio’s work on the Academy Award-winning Blade Runner 2049.

Together with its main SIGGRAPH presence, MPC R&D will be hosting its own tech talk event at the Vancouver Convention Centre, a packed day of presentations with speakers from MPC Film, Mill Film, Technicolor and Mikros Image covering a range of topics from techniques for handling large-scale VFX, to specific areas like USD, virtual production, simulation and more.

This year MPC Film will again be participating in the Digital Production Symposium (DigiPro 2018). Held just prior to SIGGRAPH, this event brings together the world’s premier creators of digital visual effects, animation, and interactive experiences, to share ideas, insights, and techniques that bring innovation to real-world production.

MPC Film Talk and Appearance Schedule:

MPC Film, DNEG, and Framestore Present: The Visual Effects of Blade Runner 2049

Monday, 13 August 10:45am - 12:15pm, West Building, Ballroom AB, Vancouver Convention Centre

35 years after the release of the original Blade Runner film, the visual effects teams behind Blade Runner 2049 were tasked with the challenge of crafting a dystopian world in the next phase of one of the most beloved sci-fi films of all time. Set 30 years after the first film, the sequel follows a new blade runner as he unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. MPC Film assets supervisor Axel Akesson will discuss the creative and technical challenges faced in producing a digital recreation of the character Rachael.

Talk: Creating the Unreal

Accelerating Film Environment Creation Using Game Development Tools

Tuesday, 14 August, 3:45pm - 5:15pm East Building, Ballroom A, Vancouver Convention Centre

Modern films demand large and complex worlds. Delivering the quality that viewers expect requires quickly building out large areas while still retaining artist-level control for art direction. This talk looks at how MPC leveraged game engines to accelerate environment creation in movies such as A Wrinkle in Time, and more.

Talk: Light it Up

Katana For FX: Intertwine FX and Lighting

Wednesday, 15 August, 9am - 10:30am, East Building, Ballroom BC, Vancouver Convention Centre

KatanaForFX enables FX artists to focus on the design of their simulation while presenting their work with the look developed by the lighting department. Lighting artists receive the settings defined by FX in their renders. They develop the materials for the FX elements and share them with the FX department.

Talk: Ohooo Shiny!

Deep Thoughts on Deep Image Compression

Thursday, 16 August 2pm - 3:30pm, East Building, Ballroom A, Vancouver Convention Centre

A practical challenge when using deep images, is managing the data footprint. As Rob Pieke (MPC Shadow Lab) will explain, with a richer contextual understanding of the target composite, automatic and artist-controlled systems can be built to significantly compress deep images such that there is no perceptual different in the final result.

Course: Pathtracing in Production

Wednesday, 15 August, 2pm - 5:15pm, West Building, Room 301-305, Vancouver Convention Centre

This course offers a brief introduction to Monte Carlo path tracing for photo-realistic image synthesis followed by a practical perspective on existing algorithms and their performance as well as essential tricks used in the challenging daily work of rendering professionals. The speakers cover diverse backgrounds such as animation and VFX - among them Rob Pieke (MPC Shadow Lab).

Panel: Future AI and Deep Learning Tools for VFX

Tuesday, 14 August, 2pm - 3:30pm, East Building, Ballroom BC, Vancouver Convention Centre

This panel discusses trends and prospects for using AI tools in the VFX pipeline. Panel experts including Rob Pieke (MPC Shadow Lab) will talk about the current AI tools that work in the industry, give answers to questions, and share their vision of their technology development.

Virtual Production in 'Book of the Dead': Technicolor's Genesis Platform, Powered by Unity Real-Time Live

Tuesday, 14 August, 6-7:45 pm, West Building, Ballroom AB

MPC’s real-time architect Francesco Giordana will demonstrate a Unity-powered virtual production platform that pushes the boundaries of real-time technologies to empower filmmakers with full multi-user collaboration and live manipulation of whole environments and characters. Special attention is dedicated to high-quality real-time graphics, as evidenced by Unity’s Book of the Dead.

MPC R&D DigiPro 2018 Talks

Layering Changes in a Procedural Grooming Pipeline

Curtis Andrus, MPC R&D lead, will explain that with MPC’s structure, there is an increasing need from artists to make changes to grooms at different points in the pipeline. He will describe a new system built into Furtility (MPC’s in-house grooming tool) that supports these requests, providing a powerful tool for nondestructively layering changes on top of a base groom description.

Genesis: A Platform for Virtual Production

Robert Tovelll and Nina Williams will show Genesis, MPC’s new Virtual Production platform. Genesis offers filmmakers full multi-user collaboration and live manipulation of sets and characters, while offering high quality real-time renders with special attention to lighting. In addition, it provides VR and AR enabled tools for a more immersive experience for the Director and enhanced on-set workflows.

Recoloring Deep Images

Rob Pieke describes in-progress research to investigate methods for manipulating and/or correcting the colors of samples in deep images. Motivations for wanting this include but are not limited to: a reference to minimize data footprints by only rendering deep alpha images, better color manipulation tools in Nuke for 2D (i.e., not-deep) images, and post-render denoising. Much of what we describe may be conceptually easy to solve by changing upstream departments’ workflows (e.g., “just get lighting to split that out into a separate pass,” etc.), but the practical challenges associated with these types of suggestions are often prohibitive as deadlines start looming.

MPC R&D – Advancing the Craft of Visual Effects

Monday 13th August 2018 9:30 am-6:00 pm, Vancouver Convention Centre, Meeting Room 9 – East Building

MPC R&D is excited to be hosting its own tech talk event. Throughout the day, MPC will be hosting talks covering a range of topics from techniques for handling largescale VFX, to specific areas like USD, virtual production, simulation and more.

Details of the event can be found here: MPC R&D – Advancing the Craft of Visual Effects

Please register now to avoid missing out!

MPC is also currently hiring for a variety of roles across their portfolio of studios. Visit the MPC Film booth at the SIGGRAPH Job Fair to find out more about their award-winning team and hear about all of current opportunities to join the global MPC Film family. Go here for more details: http://bit.ly/careersMPC

Source: MPC Film