Imagina 2008 Impressions

Somewhere between racetracks filled with Ferraris and Porches, thirty story buildings of Monaco the long running event of Imagina resides. The event has in the past been primarily focused on CG images and 3D in films and video games. Over the past couple of shows however, it has also introduced the growing architectural visualization market, and this year it was almost accounting for fifty percent of all the content I saw.

The Exhibition Floor

The exhibition floor had a good range of products on display. There were a few different virtual cities displayed, some new eye-tracking technology, 3D plant plug-ins and car simulators. The stands that first grabbed my attention were IMAGTPs use of the CryENGINE2 for displaying architectural 3D visualization. The engine allows for some beautifully lush environments, effects and highly detailed real-time models. There have been real-time 3D visualization applications before, but this is the first time you can really say that they rival the fully rendered versions.

Next to IMAGTP was Wacom’s show booth. They were demo’ing their newest drawing tablet, the Cintiq 12WX. Similar in design to the Intuos, it looks slick and comfortable, but the big different is of course the drawing area being replaced with a LCD screen, making it essentially a digital drawing pad. The display was sharp and the tablet comes with all the features you have been used to with other Wacom products.

Craft Animations were on hand to show of their vehicle and simulation plug-ins for Max and Maya. Using a nice quick rig setup you can create an interactive way of controlling vehicles and aircraft, while being able to record their actions and use it for animation. The plug-in look quite useful for a lot of companies, visualisation and game sequences being the obvious choices.

Conferences: Day One – Video Games

The first day of conferences were filled with Video Games related information. We heard Matthew Jeffery from EA talk about a range of issues within the industry. He mentioned how the average gamer was growing up and how there were now more women playing games on a regular basis than before. Of course we could not avoid hearing about the ever popular term ‘casual gamer’ and how the Nintendo Wii has changed the way some people look at video games. He also talked about the future of gaming, how user-generated content was the new big thing and online becoming a vital factor in success of video games. Lastly he had a message to the students in the audience about the different gaming degrees around the world. ‘Choose carefully’ were the words he used when describing which one to pick. The main problem being they were not all preparing the students for what to expect in the industry, which kind of takes away the whole reason for attending one in the first place.
Overall the talk was interesting, though occasionally broken up by a few clearly advertising aimed video clips, but it would not be an EA talk without them now would it?

Next up was Cevat Yerli from Crytek and he talked briefly about his experience working on FarCry and Crysis. He explained some of the process they used to create Crysis and how it evolved into the final released game. CryENGINE2 was also talked about, but in the end there is not nothing much to summarise here.

Sony displayed Home for the Playstation 3, showing how they have heavily modified the Home environment based on feedback from Beta testing. Although most of the conferences were plagued by technical difficulties and it did not seem like we were going to be seeing the demonstration of Home, the tech-crew managed to pull it off in the end.

What Sony showed was pretty impressive. The new design on the Home Square was much friendlier and smaller, making it less alienating. The loading times between the different areas were also shorter than the last demo I saw; I think the longest one was about 3 seconds. This was great to see since this was initially one of my worries about Home. The rest of the content Sony showed were more or less what we had seen previously. They showed some of the private areas, placing of props, changing wallpaper and playing mini-games. And anyone remember the ‘throwing the Sony Bravio TV around’ to tell you how durable it is? Yeah, they did that one too.
In the end though, I am excited about Home.

Ubisoft’s talk was a bit disappointing, coming across as more of a last year’s demonstration of Assassins Creed, but without a live demonstration. There really was not much to see or hear that was news.

Antoine Villette from Darkworks showed some early character interaction AI routines between floating dots. The talk was in French and to say that the translator was somewhat poor would be a compliment, so the talk came across as being very basic, but I am sure there was more here than what I got out of it.

Conferences: Day Two – R & D

Day two of the conferences proved to be very technical, but also very interesting.
The first talk was held by Alexei Efros, and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and although his title for the talk was fairly heavy reading; Using Data to “Brute Force” Hard Problems in Computational Photography (no less!), Alexei explained it all very well and broke down everything into nice and understandable pieces.
There were two tools he presented, one used to add an element/object a photo and the other to replace a hole in a photo.

The first used a library of cut-out and labelled objects, like cars, people, fire hydrants etc. The program would analyse the perspective, light and colours composing the image and then pick objects that would most suit that image. Alexei stressed that the program worked better the bigger the library was and showed some examples that worked surprisingly well. He also mentioned that they were working on a way to let the program cut out objects from source photographs by it self. A photomontage artists dream for sure.

The second tool shown was used to replace parts in an image (for example a unwanted car or bush). There are already a few tools out there that do this, but they have to guess using nearby pixels what to replace the hole with, which ends in very mixed results. Instead this tool would use similar techniques to the first tool and scan the image for its perspective, colour and light properties, then search a library of millions of other images to find potential matches. It then presents the top 20 or so images to the user. In this case it worked particularly well and we were shown a good few examples, some of which were hard to see whether they have been modified at all. The technology presented by Alexei was impressive and I can see it becoming a vital tool in the future.

Jovan Popović grabbed my attention with a talk entitled “Rigging-less Animation: Pinocchio and Puppetry.” Animating a character in 3D generally involves building a rig, or skeleton, with which to control the mesh of the character. Building and locating these rigs within a mesh can become quite complex and tedious task. Having had to build rigs for animation, an automated process sounded bit far fetched because of the complexity involved. However, Popović envisioned a system that was accessible to children, educators, researchers and other non-expert animators.

He explained the math behind the process which you can find here to show how they automated the process. It finds the locations of joints by creating a graph whose vertices represent potential joint positions and whose edges are potential bone segments. Popović was then able to demonstrate how they used 16 characters they had not previously seen and applied their method of automated rigging. Only 3 of the 16 models didn’t solve the skeleton embedding correctly within the mesh and then all it took was one hint for a single joint to produce good embedding. The results were impressive, and some of the animations were quite funny.

So now what you have is a smart system where you can throw practically any model at it and it solves the best position for the skeleton within that mesh, whether it’s a horse or a robot. The system breathes life into a character very quickly and efficiently.

Conferences: Day Three – VFX

VFX in film was the flavour of the day for Friday. Present were Dayne Cowan from Double Negative, Gary Brozenich from Moving Picture Company and insert name from Framestore presented a talk on VFX in film.

The talks centred on the methods of production they used for particular scenes and how an individual style evolved. It was fascinating to see how scenes from Harry Potter, Children of Men and Sweeney Todd were produced. All three of the speakers conveyed a lot of passion and energy for their work. When Framestore were asked to create the birth of a baby in 3D, it took 9 months (ironically) of hard work to produce a 3 minute sequence. The attention to detail, and many layers involved were inspiring to say the least.