The physics behind the movie magic

20th Century Fox

John Roach writes:Remember the Na'vi – the blue-stripped humanoid species with pointy ears and a powerful bond with nature in last year's biggest sci-fi epic, "Avatar"? They were created in a physics lab.
In fact, the entire movie "stands out for the amount of physics that was involved," Robert Bridson, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, told me in an e-mail. "A lot of the environments, and of course the characters, were completely computer-generated."
Bridson is an expert in the physics of computer-generated animation and co-author with Christopher Batty of a review of the state of the art and the challenges facing the field, published this week in the journal Science.

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"Compared with more traditional animation methods that rely chiefly on artists' efforts, numerical solutions to the equations of physics allow computers to calculate realistic motion, such as that of smoke, fire, explosions, water, rubble, clothing, hair, muscles and skin," they write.
This, in turn, results in animated films with amazingly realistic scenes. For example, when "Avatar" was made, New Zealand-based Weta Digital used physics to simulate how the muscles and skin of the Na'vi worked, how their clothing moved, and how the trees and plants on Pandora moved as well, Bridson noted.
"I also helped write the Naiad software they used to simulate a lot of the water in the film, from the river Jake Sully falls into at the start to the ocean waves pounding the coast near the end, and the water drops in the leaf that Neytiri drinks from," he said.
Routines and challengesWater, Bridson noted, is one of the biggest current challenges in computer animation, given the complex geometry involved.
Some aspects of making digital characters are becoming routine, such as making clothing ruffle, flames flicker and smoke billow realistically. (You can check out animations on Brison's website.) But really large-scale explosions, as well as scenes with multiple size scales — such as a boat on stormy seas — remain a challenge.
And then there's hair.
"Long hair or curly hair is still a huge problem," Bridson said. "It's difficult enough to get hair to behave in real life for action scenes."
Other challenges include getting computers to work fast enough to appease demanding directors. Filmmakers are also looking for methods to judge the quality of an animation. These are largely problems in transferring the technology from the lab to the movie studio.
"The scale at which studios want to do things is almost always a lot greater than what academics can tackle," Bridson noted.
He noted that most audiences may not even be aware how much of the action in the movies they see is already computer-generated. For example, rather than getting a yacht, camera crew and actors out in a real ocean to shoot a scene, it's actually cheaper for a studio to build a model of the boat, simulate the ocean around it and then put in the actors who were shot in front a green screen.
Coming attractionsIn the coming years, advances in the algorithms used for computer-generated animation should lead to subtle improvements in the quality and creativity of visuals, and allow directors to achieve their vision with shrinking budgets, Bridson noted.
"'District 9' from 2009 is an important harbinger of what's going to be coming," he said. "With a relatively modest budget of $30 million, and from outside the traditional Hollywood blockbuster network, they made a gorgeous, visually compelling work of art with a bit of a risky and very intriguing idea."
Just don't get your hopes up for feature-length films made by amateurs, a la YouTube, he added.
"Even if all you were to need on the technical side was a computer — no cameras, no sets, no actors — the artistic challenge of creating a film remains, and will still require a huge amount of dedication, time and talent."
That sentiment echoes what Ohio State University computer scientist Rick Parent told me in November when we chatted about the computer technology used to allow Jeff Bridges to play a nearly-30-year-younger version of himself in "Tron: Legacy," the sequel to the 1982 blockbuster.
Bridges told the Daily Mail that he could imagine a day when he could appear in movies without really acting by simply leasing studios his image. Parent said maybe, but not anytime soon.
"With removing the actor completely, now you've got a whole different problem of building those body motions, those facial motions, the speech — which is a whole other problem. Building that essentially from scratch … that's a whole other level of complexity, and we are not there at all."

Alice In Wonderland - VFX Breakdown

Alice In Wonderland - VFX Breakdown
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Watch: First 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides' Trailer

Captain Jack is back! Disney is pulling out all the stops to get our attention focused on this new trailer. The Mouse House has unveiled the first teaser trailer on Yahoo for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the fourth new movie in their incredibly popular pirating adventure series, this time directed by Rob Marshall. As expected, Johnny Depp is back as Jack Sparrow and he's joined by Geoffrey Rush, Penélope Cruz, Ian McShane, Stephen Graham, Judi Dench and Gemma Ward. This actually looks surprisingly quite fun, I will say that I'm looking forward to it, but it's not too high on my list next summer. Watch and enjoy!

Watch the first trailer for Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides:

Jack Sparrow (Depp) and Barbossa (Rush) embark on a quest to find the elusive fountain of youth hinted at the end of At World's End, only to learn that Blackbeard (McShane) and his daughter are after it, too.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is directed by Oscar nominated director Rob Marshall, whose only previous directing credits are Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha and the musical Nine. The screenplay was once again written by franchise regulars Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, based on Tim Power's book On Stranger Tides. Disney is bringing Pirates of the Caribbean 4 to theaters in 3D starting on May 20th next summer.

Trailers

Thor

The powerful but arrogant immortal warrior Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is cast out of the fantastic realm of Asgard and sent to live amongst humans on Earth, where he quickly becomes one of their finest defenders.

Paramount is bringing Marvel's Thor to theaters in 3Dstarting May 6th next summer!

Real Steel

 Real Steel is scheduled for release onNovember 18th, 2011 next year.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

n this movie, the Autobots and Decepticons become involved in a perilous space race between the U.S. and Russia, and once again human Sam Witwicky must help his robot friends defeat enemies like Shockwave.

Paramount is bringing Transformers 3 to theaters everywhere in 3D starting July 1st, 2011 next summer.

Pose basic rules

There are some poses rules, i found on internet which helps me for better posing and i would like to share these with u.

Basic Rules (Which can be broken, but generally they should be followed):

1. Shoulders and Hips have opposing angles.

2. Feet point towards interest. If a guy likes a thing, his feet would point to it in his pose. If he doenst like it, his feet will point away.

3. Head is almost never straight. Spine is almost never straight too!

4. Show the character to the audience. If the character is looking the screen right, dont turn the head into a profile.. rather turn it a little and let him see  through corners of the eyes! This helps the audience read his expressions more.

5. Face shows the expression. Then the hands.. then the next most importance is shoulders and spine. Never forget the shoulders and hands while posing! Practise hand poses while keeping different attitudes in mind. Observe shoulders in a lot of emotions too! Its not JUST action lines.. its also about gestures!!

6. Watch those silhouettes.. squint your eyes and see if your pose is readable or not.

7. Avoid symmetry as much as possible.

8. Think of mobility over stability. That is, dont have perfect stable pose all the time.. Taking it off balance a little goes a great way to show "life". By off-balance, I dont mean to take the character so far to make it fall.. make the character lean more on one leg.. or have one shoulder higher than the other and so on.

9. Think of ways to show "life". Think of irregularities. Regularities happen in nonliving things. So anything too regular looks lifeless. Thats why, drawing one eye bigger than the other makes the character appealing instantly.. ofcourse, it doesnt always apply, but most of the times it does!

10. Kill someone! Rob someone! Propose to love someone! Drop someone's pants! Think wild situations like that when practising. They are better than "standing", "watching", "reading" and so on while practising. If you can show wild emotions, its easier to show subtler ones. Its harder to learn the subtler ones.

11. Show weight. I will write more on how to do this later.

Some more rules added by my sir.

Line of action: Always try to catch the Line of Action while you animate a Pose. For better understanding of Line of Action,
study dynamic poses and the way body makes a different line formations in different poses..

Twinning: It is exact symmetric poses or mirrored poses, should avoid twinning to keep the posing more dynamic, natural and lively.

Body Language: All the body parts are equally important in posing to show the feeling of the character. Even a slight wrong head angle can change the feeling
of the pose, a wrong knee position can turn a male pose into a female gesture.

There are 3 level of Posing while we Animate a shot:

Basic Blocking (Key Poses or Majors): Where we animate the key poses for the major actions or events happening in the shot. (At this approval stage Animation director make it sure..that animator is going in right direction or not) It saves a lot of time and energy if animator or lead misinterpret the story board.

Breakdown: Where Animators key there breakdown poses in between the Key poses to define the other events happening in between.

In Between Poses : These poses comes in between Breakdown poses..Animators maintain the proper arcs and follow through these poses.

Rio trailer 2

Arthur Christmas Trailer

Meet Santa's son Arthur. British animation company Aardman (behind Wallace & Gromit, Flushed Away) is back at it again with another new animated flick, this time called Arthur Christmas, telling the story of Santa's son Arthur. Yahoo has debuted the first teaser trailer for the 3D animated movie, which isn't due out until Thanksgiving next year, but that's why this might be the perfect time to introduce us to these uniquely Aardman characters. The voice cast includes James McAvoy as Arthur, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton. It's another goofy teaser without any actual footage, so watch below and enjoy.


Arthur Christmas from zeelacul on Vimeo.

How does Santa deliver all those presents in one night? The answer: Santa's exhilarating, ultra-high-tech operation hidden beneath the North Pole. But this year, Santa's son Arthur has his own top secret mission.

Arthur Christmas is co-directed by effects animator Barry Cook, of Mulan, and Sarah Smith, who also wrote the script and is making her feature directing debut. Oscar nominated writer Peter Baynham who worked on the Bruno and Borat scripts and also wrote the Arthur remake for Russell Brand, helped co-write the script with Smith. Sony is bringing Aardman's Arthur Christmas to theaters November 23rd next Thanksgiving.

  

My first Showreel

Behind the Scenes- Avatar‘ Technology, Art & Innovation

Avatar as we all know is a milestone in filmmaking which in its journey created, introduced and defined many technical and creative firsts. The phenomenal amount of work that has gone in making the film will be discussed and re discussed for many years to come.

At a recent Autodesk press briefing, Nolan Murtha, Digital Effects Supervisor, Lightstorm Entertainment and Shawn Dunn, Head of Layout and Animation Technologies, Weta Digital got talking about Avatar and shared some valuable insights into the behind the scenes of the film.

Virtual Camera
For shooting Avatar a virtual camera was build which enables one to see the simulated CG world when focused on a real environment. "Virtual Camera is really like taking a monitoroff of the computer. We use our best motion building software which has acquired 200 million methods. So we would send our video feeds from motion building operator‘s box up to the monitor which your camera is holding. And the virtual camera has several controls; you can zoom in and out and he (James Cameron) could offset himself in the space. He could shoot with the actors without having to be right next to them. He could move himself in the 3D space, he could move up and down. We could scale his movements up to 50-1. So for his every foot, he‘s actually moved 50 feet in the virtual world. So he could fly along with one of the banshees or the gunship just by taking a few steps" Nolan said.

‘With the Virtual Camera we could scale his (James Cameron) movements up to 50-1. So for his every foot, he’s actually moved 50 feet in the virtual world’- Nolan Murtha.

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"We have a steady cam mode so we would simulate the steady cam mode and handheld the camera. We had a crane mode so you can go up from a tree and we can drop you down right where you are needed to land with someone around. You can do a lot more things which you can‘t do with a live action camera, obviously, since we have full control in the CG world. So when we are in full CG lens it‘s much easier and then we would have to tie it up with the live action camera, the 3D camera" Nolan explained.

When asked about the drawbacks of this technology and custom made equipment Nolan says, "Actually in some cases it worked really well and in some cases it just falls apart like when you are either shooting outside in the sunlight, there are various problems that come up with the live action stuff"

Technicalities
Shooting Avatar was not at all an easy task as there were two cameras, one recording the CG world and the other recording the real environment. Elaborating it Nolan says, "We had to combine it in real time. So with the CG version of it you use the monitor. The space is huge so it‘s the same as taking your monitor and plugging in your computer, the only difference was we did it with a 50 foot cable so he (James Cameron) can walk around with it. But with the live action camera, the fusion camera, we actually have to put motion capture markers on the big camera and match the position of the lenses. And then we would put live action cameras all around the place at the set and we would recreate all of the action sets as the digital copy so we have the exact copy aligned. And if someone walks behind the table so we had digital tables so their legs get cut off. We did lots of maths like that."

‘we would put live action cameras all around the place at the set and we would recreate all of the action sets as the digital copy‘- Nolan Murtha

Facial Expressions
Facial expressions and motions were one of the crucial things which were done brilliantly in Avatar. Shawn gives the credit to the facial system team working for Avatar. "We did some official mocap for King Kong and it worked well depending on the scene. But for avatar it worked amazingly well and one of the reasons for its success is that we have a very talented facial team who built a really great facial system that will accurately portray the actors facial. The important point in facial animation is that the character should look like the actor and it was really tricky. To get things like lips moving when the person is talking so that the lips not just open and close. And making the eyes move around giving the eyes movement. It‘s a long process making sure that you get the details right".

‘We merged the boom mike and a camera and placed it in front of the actors face. So it records their voice as well as their facial movements’- Shawn Dunn

According to Shawn, they merged the boom mike and a camera and placed it in front of the actors face. So it records their voice as well as their facial movements. "So the capture part became very easy you just put the markers on face and record it. Later is the difficult part when we have to align the markers and make it 3D. We then took it to the animators and the animators would work on finessing the motions making sure that the emotions of the actors and their facial expressions were presented clearly in the CG character".

Creatures and their motions
To record the motion of CG creatures Avatar team found a unique way. To record the motion path they made small gunships and banshee puppets and moved them around tiny mountain puppets. And then they would put the motion of a human flapping his arms on the wings. "And so what we would do is we record the flying path and then we would put the monitor in front of our guys face and he would look into the monitor and if the banshee is flying up then he would flap his arms pretty hard and he would bring his chest out and then he would duck and all. And so in taking the animated scene and giving it to Jim we would only take 45secs or a min to capture the creature and it worked. We did that for the fibre wolf as well. We had an acrobat who would run around on the floor. So we would improvise few things but it was mostly just to get the speed, the tempo and the time and in the meantime Weta would go and fix that", explained Nolan.

Ask Nolan why human giving motion to these creatures and he goes, "I mean obviously the human motion of flapping wasn‘t what you saw on the movie. So what our animators would do is look at bird motions and look at how creatures fly and they would acquire those in 2D. But this gave us enough idea to shoot the movie in Motion Builder and work in a quick pace and that became possible on the Motion Builder".

Composing a Scene
Shawn asserts, "It‘s not like moving your camera while recording a scene. What I mean is you have got a scene comprising of 15- 20 shots and Jim would change the environment for each shot. So if he wants a hand to come and touch the home tree he would shoot from different angles and then we would be like no it‘s not working move the home tree little closer. Digitally it‘s very easy because in virtual world you can move things. In the final environment world it‘s painful. In the scene when the gunship is hovering above the forest and looking down the home tree Jim wanted to show the ground, but if you notice the home tree is tilted. So then we created another home tree which was straighter, took the shot and stuck the picture perpendicular to the first home tree so you can see ground from the gunship hovering above the home tree".

To which Nolan adds "Essentially there were three motion building cameras and they all were put together to create a single stereoscopic image. We would open the same file on two computers and render the right eye on one computer and left eye on the other computer. And the third box is where the operator will sit and control the other two. And for every single shot in the movie we literally went frame by frame and evaluated the stereo".

"We used about 106 cameras in the space of 25 m width by 12m breath and the height of 5 m. The motion solving was done by Giant Studious, motion capture providers. There software they used is called Real Time which they used to solve the skeletons. We would feed those skeletons over to Motion Builder and drive the puppets of real time and then that would go to Jim‘s monitor", Nolan said.

Procedure followed for most Scenes:

• Construct the environment
• Test it with dummy actors for positioning
• Shoot the scene with real actors
• Editorial process (maybe out of 10 takes they like 3 and delete the remaining 7)
• Custom-tailor the remaining scenes
• Feed the motion skeleton from Giant Studious to the Motion Builder
• Rendering
• Selecting the final scene

About outsourcing the work Nolan says, "We would work in morning with Paris and London because they are ahead of us. We worked with Montreal and Industrial Light Magic, San Francisco and in evenings we would work with Weta! We worked with 6 to 7 different countries on 3 continents. We would like to keep things in one roof like Weta but if the movie gets too big then we do outsource".

For Shawn working for Avatar was challenging and difficult and ‘religious‘. He says, "It‘s just that Avatar was taking a complete new level with much bigger environments, many more characters, and more animation". Nolan who is currently working with James Cameron on Avatar 2 admits, "Avatar was a risky movie. You don‘t know if people will like 10 foot tall blue aliens kissing in a weird glow in the dark jungle. It could be a disaster because it‘s not necessarily a big blockbuster movie formula".

Avatar‘s creative journey was not smooth and hurdles were tackled intuitively, technically and also by tricks and some cheating- technical one‘s. But the level of VFX filmmaking brilliance that Avatar brought to the viewers is yet to be surpassed or even matched.