7 ms·

Why a Frozen Head Slows My Films Right Down

83 points by thenomad 13y ago

bsenftner 13y ago
Worth noting that the guys at www.3D-Avatar-Store.com are former VFX pipeline developers offering auto-creation of photo-real 3D heads, just supply one facial photo and you get a fully rigged head ready to stick on any body.
- thenomad 13y ago
  Ooh, very interesting, thanks. Always extremely interested to hear about tools that are simplifying the content creation pipeline.
- ykl 13y ago
  But, of course, that assumes that the rig for the hand matches whatever rigging system your pipeline currently uses. If you've got a hand rigged with a skeleton based system (see: every IK/FK system under the sun), but your pipeline uses a fully deformer based rigging system (see: Pixar's system), that hand is still no good to you. Once you start going down the CG pipeline rabbit hole, you begin to realize just how far it goes.
- delinka 13y ago
  What do I need to do to get pricing from the 3D Avatar Store people?
  - bsenftner 13y ago
    If it's for commercial use, use the contact form. Otherwise, its 3 free for noncommercial web site use upon joining and low pricing, like $2.50 a pop, thereafter. WebAPI use is considered commercial, has many more features, and a boatload more for release soon. So use the contact form for for WebAPI. Disclosure: I'm the founder. Here's an example of what we're hustling to make public: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0vewo3j3k6326fn/Obama%20Auto-lip-sync.mov https://www.dropbox.com/s/0vewo3j3k6326fn/Obama%20Auto-lip-s...
    - thenomad 13y ago
      I don't mean to be rude here, but "If it's for commercial use, use the contact form." kind of says to me "if you have to ask, you can't afford it". Is that an accurate hypothesis on my part? I make indie animation, but it's not all non-commercial.
      - bsenftner 13y ago
        We're a small company, and want to provide a quality service. Any commercial use will undoubtedly require some level of support, and we want to assess those getting commercial access to insure we can support them successfully. We're not expensive by any means. We just don't want to be flooded and then have to tell users we're overwhelmed. Plain and simple.
programminggeek 13y ago
Pretty much everything the author is talking about applies to the switching cost of picking up a new language, tool, or framework. The time spent to find all the little gotchas and so on is always bigger than you estimate. This is why a lot of people learn a tech stack like Java, PHP, Rails, C#, Django, etc. and stick with it for so long. Even if the new thing offers awesome benefits, it comes with a lot of those hidden things you have to re-learn and re-invent over and over again.
- thenomad 13y ago
  Author of the article here: I absolutely agree with you. I also do quite a bit of web development, and I've encountered these issues in both contexts - notably a few years ago when I got very excited about Rails. These days I do most of my web-side work in PHP precisely because it's the language I've been using for years, and thus I'm more aware of the hidden bumps in the road.
- ykl 13y ago
  This is why retooling a pipeline at an animation or VFX studio is so mind-bogglingly complex and difficult. The analogy I've heard before is imagine not only rebuilding an airplane while its flying and trying to make sure the passengers don't notice, but sometimes also making the tools that you're rebuilding the airplane with from scratch as well.
  - thenomad 13y ago
    I've only worked with smaller indie studios directly, but yes, that's an excellent analogy!
- bsenftner 13y ago
  This is also why the accomplished and well known film makers tend to always work with the same crew. Check out IMDB crews of our major film makers, and its the same teams over and over again. They develop their own pipeline and repeat as long as they are successful and able to continue making films. It's too complex otherwise. It's this way for any collaborative, complex system. We're not making products, folks, we are making teams that make products, hoping to build the right team we can build and release successful products with over and over again for the rest of our lives.
eonil 13y ago
Does this mean you have constructed your own pipeline with your own implementation? Just like Pixar or ILM?
- thenomad 13y ago
  It's not complete yet, but yes, that's the direction I'm going in. Most CG workflow stuff is either directed at games (completely different requirements) or 30min+ a frame rendered CG. The kind of indie performance capture I'm interested in is very much a new frontier - some people do it, but not many.
Grue3 13y ago
And what kind of animation doesn't take so damn long? Be happy you don't have to draw each individual frame like in the old times.
- thenomad 13y ago
  And what kind of publishing doesn't take so damn long? Be happy you don't have to hand-calligraph each page. No need to talk about this crazy "blog" nonsense... :) I'm pretty sure that the future of computer graphics will look extremely different to what it does today. I've been exploring the possibilities for indie production for 16 years so far; no reason to stop now.
- Keyframe 13y ago
  Having done both in my parallel life of animation, I can attest that hand drawn animation takes less time. :) Having said that, there is a huge opportunity to make a good storyboard/animatic tool out there, because current solutions are, to be polite about it, shit.
bryanlarsen 13y ago
Attacking this problem is one of the primary goals here at Exocortex. In the short term, you can use our Alembic Crate tool to assist with transferring your assets between tools. In the long term, we're working on clara.io, a web-based replacement for SoftImage/Maya/3DSMax. Think how much easier would it be for tooling if all your assets were web-accessible with nice web APIs.
- eonil 13y ago
  Seems your product is defining your own model/rig/animation standard in Alembic container. So do you offer C++ accessing library? Also, for the clara.io, can I access all the data from local native programs using the API? I mean GUI-less console programs.
  - bryanlarsen 13y ago
    For Crate, you can either use the standard Alembic C++ or Python API or you can use our Python extension. For clara.io, you can access the data, run commands or even run scripts on the server using a simple HTTP API. Our examples use curl which should be easy to translate into your language of choice.
    - thenomad 13y ago
      OK, that's VERY neat. So we could simply write a Ruby script to pipe geometry data from one application to another, for example?
      - bryanlarsen 13y ago
        Ruby's overkill, you can do that with a simple CURL on the command line. Geometry's fairly easy, there are a large number of file formats that handle geometry well so it's basically just a simple export & import. You might want to pull out Ruby to manipulate bones & rigging, for example. You can get a JSON representation of the scene or part of the scene that Ruby can parse easily. Another option would be to create a clara.io plugin in Javascript which you can then use both from the browser GUI and trigger via the web API.
snorkel 13y ago
Composing a 3D scene is a lot like composing software. The objects in the scene are like individual functions that were authored separately for a specific purposes. Some 3D objects can be reused in other scenes, and sometimes it's only specific to that scene. Over time you build up a catalog of objects, textures, and characters, just as a software developer builds up a catalog of code objects. The action in the scene is the execution of the program, and the camera's view is where the output of the program is being directed to. And just as software has bugs and hacks, so too 3D scenes have glitches, shortcuts, hacks, and areas that are under construction.
- thenomad 13y ago
  And each software tool you use is a (really, really complex) library - and just like libraries in coding, some of them require quirky inputs, or have wierd restrictions, or randomly crash on a Tuesday.
ttflee 13y ago
As long as you do not care about the originality and quality, CG animation is cheap and fast. In China, some cartoon production companies have made money out of fast paced 3D animations. They copied the story board from Japanese ancestor anime frame by frame, got the scenes constructed and complete the animation and voices. Finally they got government subsidies counted by not the gross cost but minutes of production! BTW, 3D animations have been proved to be cheaper than 2D ones in this scenario, as many models get reused times and times again.
- malkia 13y ago
  Netflix has plenty of these animations, and it's hard to keep my son off them. Some of them are real bad, like this one - Legend Of Kung Fu Rabbit - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1876517/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1876517/
  - tinco 13y ago
    Wow that movie has a trailer that looks really good! So it's very obviously an almost direct copy of Kung Fu Panda, but they did put a lot of work in it. You can see it lacks some polish here and there, but on the whole I'm surprised at the quality of the graphics and animation.
  - gohrt 13y ago
    > Rebecca Black Is that accurate??
  - ttflee 13y ago
    I'm afraid this is not the type of anime I was discussing. The Legend Of Kung Fu Rabbit seems to have certain originality. What I mentioned was those copy-cat animated TV series potentially violating IP of the original creators. The average quality was much rougher than this one.
- thenomad 13y ago
  Interesting info! I didn't know about that. I have a blog post on "quality" coming up: whilst I care a great deal about originality, for my purposes animation is a vector for story, not an end in itself.
liminal 13y ago
I'd love to see a chart showing work hours spent per minute of animation produced over time. Over the last 30 years I'm sure things have become MUCH more efficient, but it would be interesting to see the shape of the curve. Is that sort of data publicly available anywhere?
- thenomad 13y ago
  Not to the best of my knowledge. However, I might start keeping such things myself - check back in a couple of years when I've had time to build up a data backlog :)
- astrodust 13y ago
  If money is any indication, which it probably is, then it's a lot. Toy Story 3 cost $32K per second of screen time.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
niels_olson 13y ago
> One of the biggest speed-ups for any 3D process is, simply, having done it before. Really, any process. Doing my first real research project, holy crap. So many things to figure out before you're allowed to start...
twic 13y ago
Okay, so did anyone else see the title and assume the "frozen head" was Walt Disney? http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Walt_Disney_Frozen http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Walt_Disney_Fr...
csense 13y ago
He's talking about using Maya toward the top, then 3D Studio Max later on. Using two different packages is asking for trouble! Why didn't he just pick one technology and stick with it? Also, why not Blender? I'm guessing you'd probably have more luck with file formats and stuff with Blender because you can read the code for everything.

83 points by thenomad 13y ago

Worth noting that the guys at www.3D-Avatar-Store.com are former VFX pipeline developers offering auto-creation of photo-real 3D heads, just supply one facial photo and you get a fully rigged head ready to stick on any body.

thenomad 13y ago
Ooh, very interesting, thanks. Always extremely interested to hear about tools that are simplifying the content creation pipeline.
ykl 13y ago
But, of course, that assumes that the rig for the hand matches whatever rigging system your pipeline currently uses. If you've got a hand rigged with a skeleton based system (see: every IK/FK system under the sun), but your pipeline uses a fully deformer based rigging system (see: Pixar's system), that hand is still no good to you. Once you start going down the CG pipeline rabbit hole, you begin to realize just how far it goes.
delinka 13y ago
What do I need to do to get pricing from the 3D Avatar Store people?
- bsenftner 13y ago
  If it's for commercial use, use the contact form. Otherwise, its 3 free for noncommercial web site use upon joining and low pricing, like $2.50 a pop, thereafter. WebAPI use is considered commercial, has many more features, and a boatload more for release soon. So use the contact form for for WebAPI. Disclosure: I'm the founder. Here's an example of what we're hustling to make public: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0vewo3j3k6326fn/Obama%20Auto-lip-sync.mov https://www.dropbox.com/s/0vewo3j3k6326fn/Obama%20Auto-lip-s...
  - thenomad 13y ago
    I don't mean to be rude here, but "If it's for commercial use, use the contact form." kind of says to me "if you have to ask, you can't afford it". Is that an accurate hypothesis on my part? I make indie animation, but it's not all non-commercial.
    - bsenftner 13y ago
      We're a small company, and want to provide a quality service. Any commercial use will undoubtedly require some level of support, and we want to assess those getting commercial access to insure we can support them successfully. We're not expensive by any means. We just don't want to be flooded and then have to tell users we're overwhelmed. Plain and simple.

programminggeek 13y ago

Pretty much everything the author is talking about applies to the switching cost of picking up a new language, tool, or framework. The time spent to find all the little gotchas and so on is always bigger than you estimate. This is why a lot of people learn a tech stack like Java, PHP, Rails, C#, Django, etc. and stick with it for so long. Even if the new thing offers awesome benefits, it comes with a lot of those hidden things you have to re-learn and re-invent over and over again.

thenomad 13y ago
Author of the article here: I absolutely agree with you. I also do quite a bit of web development, and I've encountered these issues in both contexts - notably a few years ago when I got very excited about Rails. These days I do most of my web-side work in PHP precisely because it's the language I've been using for years, and thus I'm more aware of the hidden bumps in the road.
ykl 13y ago
This is why retooling a pipeline at an animation or VFX studio is so mind-bogglingly complex and difficult. The analogy I've heard before is imagine not only rebuilding an airplane while its flying and trying to make sure the passengers don't notice, but sometimes also making the tools that you're rebuilding the airplane with from scratch as well.
- thenomad 13y ago
  I've only worked with smaller indie studios directly, but yes, that's an excellent analogy!
bsenftner 13y ago
This is also why the accomplished and well known film makers tend to always work with the same crew. Check out IMDB crews of our major film makers, and its the same teams over and over again. They develop their own pipeline and repeat as long as they are successful and able to continue making films. It's too complex otherwise. It's this way for any collaborative, complex system. We're not making products, folks, we are making teams that make products, hoping to build the right team we can build and release successful products with over and over again for the rest of our lives.

eonil 13y ago

Does this mean you have constructed your own pipeline with your own implementation? Just like Pixar or ILM?

thenomad 13y ago
It's not complete yet, but yes, that's the direction I'm going in. Most CG workflow stuff is either directed at games (completely different requirements) or 30min+ a frame rendered CG. The kind of indie performance capture I'm interested in is very much a new frontier - some people do it, but not many.

Grue3 13y ago

And what kind of animation doesn't take so damn long? Be happy you don't have to draw each individual frame like in the old times.

thenomad 13y ago
And what kind of publishing doesn't take so damn long? Be happy you don't have to hand-calligraph each page. No need to talk about this crazy "blog" nonsense... :) I'm pretty sure that the future of computer graphics will look extremely different to what it does today. I've been exploring the possibilities for indie production for 16 years so far; no reason to stop now.
Keyframe 13y ago
Having done both in my parallel life of animation, I can attest that hand drawn animation takes less time. :) Having said that, there is a huge opportunity to make a good storyboard/animatic tool out there, because current solutions are, to be polite about it, shit.

bryanlarsen 13y ago

Attacking this problem is one of the primary goals here at Exocortex. In the short term, you can use our Alembic Crate tool to assist with transferring your assets between tools. In the long term, we're working on clara.io, a web-based replacement for SoftImage/Maya/3DSMax. Think how much easier would it be for tooling if all your assets were web-accessible with nice web APIs.

eonil 13y ago
Seems your product is defining your own model/rig/animation standard in Alembic container. So do you offer C++ accessing library? Also, for the clara.io, can I access all the data from local native programs using the API? I mean GUI-less console programs.
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  For Crate, you can either use the standard Alembic C++ or Python API or you can use our Python extension. For clara.io, you can access the data, run commands or even run scripts on the server using a simple HTTP API. Our examples use curl which should be easy to translate into your language of choice.
  - thenomad 13y ago
    OK, that's VERY neat. So we could simply write a Ruby script to pipe geometry data from one application to another, for example?
    - bryanlarsen 13y ago
      Ruby's overkill, you can do that with a simple CURL on the command line. Geometry's fairly easy, there are a large number of file formats that handle geometry well so it's basically just a simple export & import. You might want to pull out Ruby to manipulate bones & rigging, for example. You can get a JSON representation of the scene or part of the scene that Ruby can parse easily. Another option would be to create a clara.io plugin in Javascript which you can then use both from the browser GUI and trigger via the web API.

snorkel 13y ago

Composing a 3D scene is a lot like composing software. The objects in the scene are like individual functions that were authored separately for a specific purposes. Some 3D objects can be reused in other scenes, and sometimes it's only specific to that scene. Over time you build up a catalog of objects, textures, and characters, just as a software developer builds up a catalog of code objects. The action in the scene is the execution of the program, and the camera's view is where the output of the program is being directed to. And just as software has bugs and hacks, so too 3D scenes have glitches, shortcuts, hacks, and areas that are under construction.

thenomad 13y ago
And each software tool you use is a (really, really complex) library - and just like libraries in coding, some of them require quirky inputs, or have wierd restrictions, or randomly crash on a Tuesday.

ttflee 13y ago

As long as you do not care about the originality and quality, CG animation is cheap and fast. In China, some cartoon production companies have made money out of fast paced 3D animations. They copied the story board from Japanese ancestor anime frame by frame, got the scenes constructed and complete the animation and voices. Finally they got government subsidies counted by not the gross cost but minutes of production! BTW, 3D animations have been proved to be cheaper than 2D ones in this scenario, as many models get reused times and times again.

malkia 13y ago
Netflix has plenty of these animations, and it's hard to keep my son off them. Some of them are real bad, like this one - Legend Of Kung Fu Rabbit - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1876517/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1876517/
- tinco 13y ago
  Wow that movie has a trailer that looks really good! So it's very obviously an almost direct copy of Kung Fu Panda, but they did put a lot of work in it. You can see it lacks some polish here and there, but on the whole I'm surprised at the quality of the graphics and animation.
- gohrt 13y ago
  > Rebecca Black Is that accurate??
- ttflee 13y ago
  I'm afraid this is not the type of anime I was discussing. The Legend Of Kung Fu Rabbit seems to have certain originality. What I mentioned was those copy-cat animated TV series potentially violating IP of the original creators. The average quality was much rougher than this one.
thenomad 13y ago
Interesting info! I didn't know about that. I have a blog post on "quality" coming up: whilst I care a great deal about originality, for my purposes animation is a vector for story, not an end in itself.

liminal 13y ago

I'd love to see a chart showing work hours spent per minute of animation produced over time. Over the last 30 years I'm sure things have become MUCH more efficient, but it would be interesting to see the shape of the curve. Is that sort of data publicly available anywhere?

thenomad 13y ago
Not to the best of my knowledge. However, I might start keeping such things myself - check back in a couple of years when I've had time to build up a data backlog :)
astrodust 13y ago
If money is any indication, which it probably is, then it's a lot. Toy Story 3 cost $32K per second of screen time.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

niels_olson 13y ago

> One of the biggest speed-ups for any 3D process is, simply, having done it before. Really, any process. Doing my first real research project, holy crap. So many things to figure out before you're allowed to start...

twic 13y ago

Okay, so did anyone else see the title and assume the "frozen head" was Walt Disney? http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Walt_Disney_Frozen http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Walt_Disney_Fr...

csense 13y ago

He's talking about using Maya toward the top, then 3D Studio Max later on. Using two different packages is asking for trouble! Why didn't he just pick one technology and stick with it? Also, why not Blender? I'm guessing you'd probably have more luck with file formats and stuff with Blender because you can read the code for everything.