Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About How the VFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

[Mathieu Leclaire]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/transformers-dark-moons-powerful-visual-208967

"It took a staggering 288 hours per frame to render the Driller along with the photoreal CG building that includes all those reflections in its glass."
Really? 288 hours per frame? Could this actually be right or did The Hollywood Reporter screw up their numbers? I've heard of 24 & 48 hours per frame renders before, but did they really waited 12 days to see their results? That doesn't sound right. 
The only way I would believe a studio would agree to render in such amount of time would be if this number where the sum of separately rendered elements. Maybe like for say 12 layers, each layer split into a dozen tiles and each tile rendered on a separate machine. So basically you would have like 144 machines all simultaneously rendering one part of the image. Which would really result in a 2 hour waiting period for the user to see the final result or something like that. That I could believe, with ILM's massive render farm. Something like that could be pulled off. But I also know it's never that simple. 
But 288 hours a frame? I find this number hard to believe. Though nothing surprises me in this industry anymore.
-Mathieu

[Guillaume Laforge]

And it was "just" a photo-real exterior shot. Now try to imagine the render time for the robots rendered inside our classroom :).

G.

[peter boeykens]

12 days for a frame? using mental ray on SGI, with MB and dof, that sounds about right .

 

it must be total machine time per final frame in the movie, combining all layers,

and other computing tasks such as precomputing simulations, caches, maps, comp...

in stereo so multiply by 2 ?

 

What I take away from such claims (I've heard the 24-48 hrs a frame before)

is that where mere mortals spend most of their time compromising and optimizing,

the big boys doing big scenes are doing it with brute force approaches.

and they have the manpower and machine power to handle this.

 

Item #4: 200.000 render hours / day = 8.333 machines? Sweet. (except if it's SGI's of course.)

 

Item #1: driller consists of 70.051 parts. Not sure that’s a figure to brag about.

 

[Tim Leydecker]

In anticipation of Transformers 3, watching Transformers 1+2
has the funny side effect of ending up noticing quite a few

render-optimization-shortcut-deadline-last minute bay changes-hacks

in TRSFMS 2 at least, in the big battles around the pyramid - towards the end.

There�s shots and even sequences that look like hardware captures polished over,
where Megatron and the good guy battle or when foebots roll into
and over the good guys dug into the dessert town.

Mind you, those "hardware captures" look great, there�s just some less AA or
indirect bounces missing that look less highly polished compared to earlier shots...

I�m really looking forward to finally watch 3 - in 3D.

Cheers

tim

P.S: Indoor scenes go well with brute force approaches,too. I guess?

On 16.07.2011 16:55, Guillaume Laforge wrote:
> And it was "just" a photo-real exterior shot. Now try to imagine the render
> time for the robots rendered inside our classroom :).
>
> G.
>
> On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Mathieu Leclaire<mlec...@hybride.com>wrote:
>
>> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/transformers-dark-moons-powerful-visual-208967
>>
>> "It took a staggering 288 hours per frame to render the Driller along with the photoreal CG building that includes all those reflections in its glass."
>>

>> Really? 288 hours per frame? Could this actually be right or did The Hollywood Reporter screw up their numbers? I've heard of 24& 48 hours per frame renders before, but did they really waited 12 days to see their results? That doesn't sound right.

[Axel Akesson]

"“We also added a kind of secret sauce to make everything a little sharper, because we know that through the steps, no matter what, when you get to the final screening things tend to go less sharp.”"

Wonder what this means... maybe just that they used a sharp pixel filter when rendering.

aa

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Tim Leydecker <baue...@gmx.de> wrote:

In anticipation of Transformers 3, watching Transformers 1+2
has the funny side effect of ending up noticing quite a few

render-optimization-shortcut-deadline-last minute bay changes-hacks

in TRSFMS 2 at least, in the big battles around the pyramid - towards the end.

There愀 shots and even sequences that look like hardware captures polished over,

where Megatron and the good guy battle or when foebots roll into
and over the good guys dug into the dessert town.

Mind you, those "hardware captures" look great, there愀 just some less AA or

indirect bounces missing that look less highly polished compared to earlier shots...

I惴 really looking forward to finally watch 3 - in 3D.

[Mathieu Leclaire]

"Item #1: driller consists of 70.051 parts. Not sure that’s a figure to brag about."

From what I've seen at previous SIGGRAPH presentations, each part are very hi resolution with many 4K texture maps... So I can see how manipulating and getting 70 051 different hi resolution objects to render can be quite a challenge. And they did say it took the most powerfull desktops an hour to load the scene. It's not just the number of parts. It's the complexity of each part. I do remember ILM saying at SIGGRAPH transformers 2 presentation that if you took each robot part that they modeled and lined them up one next to the other, they would be long enough to go to the moon and back. I think that gives them the right to brag about it.

-Mathieu

-----Original Message-----
From: "peter boeykens" <pet...@skynet.be>
Sent 7/16/2011 12:10:56 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About How theVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

12 days for a frame? using mental ray on SGI, with MB and dof, that sounds about right .

 

it must be total machine time per final frame in the movie, combining all layers,

and other computing tasks such as precomputing simulations, caches, maps, comp...

in stereo so multiply by 2 ?

 

What I take away from such claims (I've heard the 24-48 hrs a frame before)

is that where mere mortals spend most of their time compromising and optimizing,

the big boys doing big scenes are doing it with brute force approaches.

and they have the manpower and machine power to handle this.

 

Item #4: 200.000 render hours / day = 8.333 machines? Sweet. (except if it's SGI's of course.)

 

Item #1: driller consists of 70.051 parts. Not sure that’s a figure to brag about.

 

 

From: Guillaume Laforge

Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2011 4:55 PM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About How theVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

And it was "just" a photo-real exterior shot. Now try to imagine the render time for the robots rendered inside our classroom :).

G.

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Mathieu Leclaire <mlec...@hybride.com> wrote:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/transformers-dark-moons-powerful-visual-208967
"It took a staggering 288 hours per frame to render the Driller along with the photoreal CG building that includes all those reflections in its glass."

Really? 288 hours per frame? Could this actually be right or did The Hollywood Reporter screw up their numbers? I've heard of 24 & 48 hours per frame renders before, but did they really waited 12 days to see their results? That doesn't sound right. 

[Serguei Kalentchouk]

I'm pretty sure that refers to the bluring effect you get when working
with stereo. It's not uncommon to play with sharpness, color and
brightness to help reduce the quality hit you get with stereo.

The time per frame quoted is most certainly combined render time.
70k+ pieces is more than enough to make the job very challenging!

--
Technical Director @ Digital Domain

[Graham Clark]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Serguei Kalentchouk <serguei.k...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm pretty sure that refers to the bluring effect you get when working
with stereo. It's not uncommon to play with sharpness, color and
brightness to help reduce the quality hit you get with stereo.

The time per frame quoted is most certainly combined render time.
70k+ pieces is more than enough to make the job very challenging!

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Axel Akesson <axel.a...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "“We also added a kind of secret sauce to make everything a little sharper,
> because we know that through the steps, no matter what, when you get to the
> final screening things tend to go less sharp.”"
>
> Wonder what this means... maybe just that they used a sharp pixel filter
> when rendering.

AFAIK They just ran a sharpening filter in DI. We did same thing on Captain America 3D as it was shot on Genisis cropped and then scaled back for DCP. We also isolated a lot of areas with power windows and various sharpening filter settings depending on conditions. I presume TS3 did same things

--
Graham D Clark,
phone:  why-attempt, S3D work phone: why-I-stereo
http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamclark

[peter boeykens]

of course handling 70.000 hi-resolution detailed parts with 4 textures must be quite a challenge to handle every step along the way.

But I'm wondering if all 70.000 of those parts were really needed and if everything was as optimized as could be. If so, then kudos.

 

I was a bit surprised about those scene load times.

you see, - if you load 70.000 parts in an hour, that's 19 parts per second.

Now how complex can those parts be if you can load 19 a second?

Really - I do take those figures with a grain of salt.

 

I'm used to production scenes taking 15-30 minutes on average to load, and complex shots 45-90 minutes -

and with sets, characters, vehicles and props combined we're talking perhaps 20.000 parts and there's usually lots of badly optimized stuff in there.

 

When I go in and check some assets, and find the (in)sanity check was shortcircuited, I don’t brag about it - I go and see the supervisor hoping something can be done to stop the madness.

 

I hope they work with simplified versions and swap at rendertime.

Of course transformers being transformers there's less room for offloading parts of a model - as everything interrelates and can potentially change shape. 

I'd also like to think they have kick-ass rigs that greatly streamline manipulating those parts, but a little voice that’s been around tells me they have a tendency for hand animation rather than intelligent rigging.

 

Oh that figure about lining up all parts and going to the moon and back. (384.000km times 2 so 768.000km!) Classic stuff.

Perhaps the producer was talking with the modeling sup and things got out of hand.

Did they also calculate the carbon footprint of the movie by any chance?

 

Either way,

no doubt they are raising the bar with transformers, no doubt they are doing some really daunting stuff.

No doubt I'd be stuck trying to model and rig just a single finger on a background Bot.

[Guillaume Laforge]

I think that this kind of article about incredible large data set handling is a little bit out now. It was a standard for movies like Jurassic Park to speak about the incredible complexity (for the time) that a studio could handle. But now, we all use the same computers more or less. Everyone can create a scene with millions of polygons. Everyone can wait hours/days while the computer is processing the thing :). The only positive point the article can show is that they can handle such big render time I guess... But today, I think that we would be more impressed by new tech to manage those large data set efficiently than by a demonstration of the biggest ... render farm.

My 1/2 cent (processed on a 2CPU laptop in less that one second).

Guillaume

[Mathieu Leclaire]

BTW, that's 70 000 part just for the Driller... then you also have the building and all the debris to load up. Not sure how heavy the geometry for that is, but that probably adds to the complexity and the loading time of the scene.

[Axel Akesson]

You have proxy geo in the scene and then you load the heavy stuff with a Delayed Read Archive in PRMan.

I agree with Guillaume that all this talk about massive render times and assets with 70 000 parts is a bit silly nowadays. I guess producers still get impressed by it though.

I've dealt with assets with billions of polys even before CC sub-d... does that mean that we render those billions of polys in any given shot though? Not really.

aa

[Eric Deren]

> It's not uncommon to play with sharpness, color and
> brightness to help reduce the quality hit you get with stereo.

Please tell me more about this quality hit you get with stereo. Are you
talking about the exhibitors' projection system or stereo in general?

-Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Serguei Kalentchouk
Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2011 2:16 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About How
theVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

[Mathieu Leclaire]

Yeah, I guess you are right... I will have to ask more details at SIGGRAPH. But also, don't forget that this is an article by TheHollywood Reporter. Their main client base don't know nothing about VFX work, so they have to use simplified facts to keep their readers attention and to allow them to feel like they actually understand what's going on in a VFX house. I'm sure the SIGGRAPH presentation will have much more technical information and details as to why those renders took so long and why they decided to do it that way.

-Mathieu

Axel Akesson wrote:

You have proxy geo in the scene and then you load the heavy stuff with a Delayed Read Archive in PRMan.

I agree with Guillaume that all this talk about massive render times and assets with 70 000 parts is a bit silly nowadays. I guess producers still get impressed by it though.

I've dealt with assets with billions of polys even before CC sub-d... does that mean that we render those billions of polys in any given shot though? Not really.

aa

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Mathieu Leclaire <mlec...@hybride.com> wrote:

BTW, that's 70 000 part just for the Driller... then you also have the building and all the debris to load up. Not sure how heavy the geometry for that is, but that probably adds to the complexity and the loading time of the scene.

-Mathieu

-----Original Message-----
From: "peter boeykens" <pet...@skynet.be>

Sent 7/17/2011 5:57:15 AM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About HowtheVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

of course handling 70.000 hi-resolution detailed�parts with 4 textures�must be quite a challenge to handle every step along the way.

But I'm wondering if all 70.000 of those parts�were really needed and if everything was as optimized as could be. If so, then kudos.

�

I was a bit surprised about those scene load times.

you see, - if you load 70.000 parts in an hour, that's 19 parts per second.

Now how complex can those parts be if you can load 19 a second?

Really - I do take those figures with a grain of salt.

�

I'm used to production scenes taking 15-30 minutes on average to load, and complex shots 45-90 minutes -

and with sets, characters, vehicles and props combined we're talking perhaps 20.000 parts and there's usually�lots of badly optimized stuff in there.

�

When I go in and check some assets, and find the (in)sanity check was shortcircuited, I don�t brag about it - I go and see the supervisor hoping something can be done to stop the madness.

�

I hope�they work with simplified versions and swap at rendertime.

Of course transformers being transformers there's less room for offloading parts of a model - as everything interrelates and can potentially change shape.�

I'd also like to think they have kick-ass rigs that greatly streamline manipulating those parts, but a little voice that�s been around tells me they have�a tendency for hand animation rather than intelligent rigging.

�

Oh that figure about lining up all parts and going to the moon and back. (384.000km times 2 so 768.000km!) Classic stuff.

Perhaps�the producer was talking with the modeling sup and things got out of hand.

Did they also calculate the carbon footprint of the movie by any chance?

�

Either way,

no doubt they are raising the bar with transformers, no doubt they are doing some really daunting stuff.

No doubt I'd be stuck trying to model and rig just a single finger on a background Bot.

�

�

�

�

�

From: Mathieu Leclaire

Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2011 8:02 PM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About HowtheVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

"Item #1: driller consists of 70.051 parts. Not sure that�s a figure to brag about."

>From what I've seen at previous SIGGRAPH presentations, each part are very hi resolution with many 4K texture maps... So I can see how manipulating and getting 70 051 different hi resolution objects to render can be quite a challenge. And they did say it took the most powerfull desktops an hour to load the scene. It's not just the number of parts. It's the complexity of each part. I do remember ILM saying at�SIGGRAPH transformers 2 presentation that if you took each robot part that they modeled and lined them up one next to the other, they would be long enough to go to the moon and back. I think that gives them the right to brag about it.

-Mathieu

-----Original Message-----
From: "peter boeykens" <pet...@skynet.be>
Sent 7/16/2011 12:10:56 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About How theVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

12 days for a frame? using�mental ray on SGI,�with MB and dof,�that sounds about right .

�

it must be total machine time per�final�frame in the movie, combining all layers,

and other computing tasks such as precomputing simulations, caches, maps, comp...

in stereo so multiply by 2 ?

�

What I take away from�such claims�(I've heard the 24-48 hrs a frame before)

is that where mere mortals spend�most of their�time compromising and optimizing,

the big boys doing big scenes are�doing�it with brute force approaches.

and they have the manpower and machine power to handle this.

�

Item #4: 200.000 render hours / day = 8.333�machines? Sweet. (except if it's SGI's of course.)

�

Item #1: driller consists of 70.051 parts. Not sure that�s a figure to brag about.

�

�

From: Guillaume Laforge

Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2011 4:55 PM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About How theVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

And it was "just" a�photo-real�exterior shot. Now try to imagine the render time for the robots rendered inside our classroom :).

[peter boeykens]

don’t hesitate to report back here!

despite being sceptical about figures,

I am very interested to see what its all about.

 

 

From: Mathieu Leclaire

Sent: Monday, July 18, 2011 8:10 PM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About HowtheVFXwere Done via The Hollywood Reporter

Yeah, I guess you are right... I will have to ask more details at SIGGRAPH. But also, don't forget that this is an article by TheHollywood Reporter. Their main client base don't know nothing about VFX work, so they have to use simplified facts to keep their readers attention and to allow them to feel like they actually understand what's going on in a VFX house. I'm sure the SIGGRAPH presentation will have much more technical information and details as to why those renders took so long and why they decided to do it that way.

-Mathieu

Axel Akesson wrote:

You have proxy geo in the scene and then you load the heavy stuff with a Delayed Read Archive in PRMan.

I agree with Guillaume that all this talk about massive render times and assets with 70 000 parts is a bit silly nowadays. I guess producers still get impressed by it though.

I've dealt with assets with billions of polys even before CC sub-d... does that mean that we render those billions of polys in any given shot though? Not really.

aa

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Mathieu Leclaire <mlec...@hybride.com> wrote:

BTW, that's 70 000 part just for the Driller... then you also have the building and all the debris to load up. Not sure how heavy the geometry for that is, but that probably adds to the complexity and the loading time of the scene.

-Mathieu

-----Original Message-----
From: "peter boeykens" <pet...@skynet.be>

Sent 7/17/2011 5:57:15 AM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About HowtheVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

of course handling 70.000 hi-resolution detailed parts with 4 textures must be quite a challenge to handle every step along the way.

But I'm wondering if all 70.000 of those parts were really needed and if everything was as optimized as could be. If so, then kudos.

 

I was a bit surprised about those scene load times.

you see, - if you load 70.000 parts in an hour, that's 19 parts per second.

Now how complex can those parts be if you can load 19 a second?

Really - I do take those figures with a grain of salt.

 

I'm used to production scenes taking 15-30 minutes on average to load, and complex shots 45-90 minutes -

and with sets, characters, vehicles and props combined we're talking perhaps 20.000 parts and there's usually lots of badly optimized stuff in there.

 

When I go in and check some assets, and find the (in)sanity check was shortcircuited, I don’t brag about it - I go and see the supervisor hoping something can be done to stop the madness.

 

I hope they work with simplified versions and swap at rendertime.

Of course transformers being transformers there's less room for offloading parts of a model - as everything interrelates and can potentially change shape. 

I'd also like to think they have kick-ass rigs that greatly streamline manipulating those parts, but a little voice that’s been around tells me they have a tendency for hand animation rather than intelligent rigging.

 

Oh that figure about lining up all parts and going to the moon and back. (384.000km times 2 so 768.000km!) Classic stuff.

Perhaps the producer was talking with the modeling sup and things got out of hand.

Did they also calculate the carbon footprint of the movie by any chance?

Either way,

no doubt they are raising the bar with transformers, no doubt they are doing some really daunting stuff.

No doubt I'd be stuck trying to model and rig just a single finger on a background Bot.

 

 

 

 

 

From: Mathieu Leclaire

Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2011 8:02 PM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About HowtheVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

"Item #1: driller consists of 70.051 parts. Not sure that’s a figure to brag about."

>From what I've seen at previous SIGGRAPH presentations, each part are very hi resolution with many 4K texture maps... So I can see how manipulating and getting 70 051 different hi resolution objects to render can be quite a challenge. And they did say it took the most powerfull desktops an hour to load the scene. It's not just the number of parts. It's the complexity of each part. I do remember ILM saying at SIGGRAPH transformers 2 presentation that if you took each robot part that they modeled and lined them up one next to the other, they would be long enough to go to the moon and back. I think that gives them the right to brag about it.

-Mathieu

-----Original Message-----
From: "peter boeykens" <pet...@skynet.be>
Sent 7/16/2011 12:10:56 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About How theVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

12 days for a frame? using mental ray on SGI, with MB and dof, that sounds about right .

 

it must be total machine time per final frame in the movie, combining all layers,

and other computing tasks such as precomputing simulations, caches, maps, comp...

in stereo so multiply by 2 ?

 

What I take away from such claims (I've heard the 24-48 hrs a frame before)

is that where mere mortals spend most of their time compromising and optimizing,

the big boys doing big scenes are doing it with brute force approaches.

and they have the manpower and machine power to handle this.

 

Item #4: 200.000 render hours / day = 8.333 machines? Sweet. (except if it's SGI's of course.)

 

Item #1: driller consists of 70.051 parts. Not sure that’s a figure to brag about.

 

 

From: Guillaume Laforge

Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2011 4:55 PM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Subject: Re: Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 5 Things to Know About How theVFX were Done via The Hollywood Reporter

And it was "just" a photo-real exterior shot. Now try to imagine the render time for the robots rendered inside our classroom :).

[Tim Leydecker]

Hi folks,

win xp64, xsi 2012sp1.

In previous versions of xsi, one could conveniently select any
object in the viewport and refresh the Rendertree to get the
material assigned to it or in case a partition had a material
assigned directly get that material displayed.

It seems directly getting the partition�s material displayed is
broken, I have to select the material in the explorer�s pass display
to get it to show up in the Rendertree?

Is that a new setting or a preset functionality?

Cheers

tim

[Ben Davis]

Works for me... (selected object, pressed "7" or refreshed)

win 7 64, xsi2012sp1

Ben

--

Benjamin Clifford Davis

3D artist - Senior Modeler
Senior 3D Generalist

www.bcdavis.info

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Tim Leydecker <baue...@gmx.de> wrote:

Hi folks,


win xp64, xsi 2012sp1.


In previous versions of xsi, one could conveniently select any
object in the viewport and refresh the Rendertree to get the
material assigned to it or in case a partition had a material
assigned directly get that material displayed.

It seems directly getting the partition´s material displayed is
broken, I have to select the material in the explorer´s pass display

[Tim Leydecker]

Thanks for checking!

I�ll look into my scene. Might as well be from opening
models and a scenefile created with an earlier xsi version.

Cheers

tim