Mill 98% Human

[Kris Rivel]

Just wanted to say congrats to anyone at the Mill for the 98% human spot.  An amazing piece of CG and probably one of the most impressive examples of Softimage that I've ever seen.  Here's links to the spot and a brief making of for anyone who hasn't seen it:

Spot:  http://youtu.be/McD0dKuj5mA

Making of:  http://youtu.be/wLmVm0nc5Gg

Kris

[olivier jeannel]

Particle systems nowadays.... :)

They used regular hairs ?



Le 20/05/2013 20:26, Kris Rivel a �crit :

[Guillaume Laforge]

Subtle and efficient. Great work ! 

[Steven Caron]

nothing subtle about an ape putting a gun to its head.

the work is excellent!

[Gustavo Eggert Boehs]

Jesus, this is insane!

Muscle system looks superb, would you care to further comment on how the face is controlled vs. simulated?

Congratulations to all involved!

2013/5/20 olivier jeannel <olivier...@noos.fr>

--
Gustavo E Boehs
http://www.gustavoeb.com.br/blog

[Thomas Volkmann]

I was actually waiting for the cg to begin... :)

 

Awesome Job!

 

Thomas

Kris Rivel <kris...@gmail.com> hat am 20. Mai 2013 um 20:26 geschrieben:

[Jeff McFall]

Yeah, it made me rather uncomfortable, which means it really works.  Very awesome job.

 

The first time I played heard the VO only, without the video I thought it was about working in the CG industry.  We have a lot in common.  J

 

jeff

[Christopher]

Nice work. The Hairs are old school XSI Hair system.

::Christopher

[Jeffrey Dates]

Actually, That's false.  

Hairs are strands in ICE.

Source: Jimmy Gass sits across from me.  

[Eric Thivierge]

You guys using the XSI Hair tools as a base to control the strands though? Why I ask is that there was a point in the making of where it looked like the artist grabbed the end point and was going to move it around to style just like the Shave setup. Or was that an actual curve object?

 
Eric Thivierge
===============
Character TD / RnD
Hybride Technologies
 

[Graham D. Clark]

Congrats Jeff and send my congrats to Vince too!

Cheers,

Graham

PS ignore trolls

-- 

Graham D Clark, Head of Stereography, Deluxe 3D dba Stereo D

phone: why-I-stereo

http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamclark

[Kris Rivel]

I was wondering the same.  Looks like it was rockin the old-school hair.  Was very impressive regardless but yeah...would love to know more details and exact approach.

Kris

[Chris Chia]

Is it rendered in Arnold?
How much time does it take to render the hair?
And how many strands are we talking about?

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Dates
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 5:40 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Mill 98% Human

Actually, That's false.

Hairs are strands in ICE.

Source: Jimmy Gass sits across from me.

[Sam Cuttriss]

well played mr Gass and mr Dates and co,  

looks great,

Many similarities to the plight of lindsay lohan?

[Graham D. Clark]

I don't know if they did this but you can write a strand to hair-curve tool and toggle to visa versa so one can use the hair groom etc tools and go back n forth as needed

Graham D Clark, Head of Stereography, Deluxe 3D dba Stereo D

phone: why-I-stereo

http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamclark

[Darren Macpherson]

I would guess that the hair is based on an in house tool developed by Vince and Bradley which uses ICE strands.  I'm sure one of them could elaborate. 

--

darren macpherson | 3d artist | +2772 355 0924 | www.darrenmacpherson.com | dar...@darrenmacpherson.com | skype: darren.macpherson

[Mirko Jankovic]

Great work!

Gratz to everyone there.

Also muscle system looks great. Would be great seeing more about that as well. 

[Rob Wuijster]

big kudos to all involved. This looked awesome!

Wouldn't mind to see some more on all the stuff done for this, like muscles, hair, rendering etc.
Great Softimage showpiece! :-D

Rob

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[Erwan Naudin]

awesome stuff ! congratulations on the work done

2013/5/21 Rob Wuijster <ro...@casema.nl>

[Nour Almasri]

Amazing work , any technical info is appreciated .

[Jens Lindgren]

Just amazing work Vince and all other guys at The Mill!

 

/Jens

--

Jens Lindgren

--------------------------

Lead Technical Director

Magoo 3D Studios

[Nick Angus]

Stunning work, congratulations to all who worked on this spot.

 

N

[Octavian Ureche]

Amazing stuff. Kudos to the mill team.

O

[Alan Fregtman]

Incredible work, Mill team! Here's hoping one of you shares a few more technical details about the hairs, face and muscles. :)

[Sylvain Lebeau]

simply jaw dropping!

amazing work The Mill!!  as always!

sly

Sylvain Lebeau // SHED
V-P/Visual effects supervisor
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM <http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM>

[Mike Donovan]

Agreed.

 

m

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sylvain Lebeau
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 11:13 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Mill 98% Human

 

simply jaw dropping!

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[jimmy gass]

Thanks everyone.

The hair was nothing revolutionary. It was using the Melena set up to convert the XSI hair to curves, then the curves to strands.  It wasnt fast. It's just a lot easier to groom that way, using the built in hair system. Especially using a lowrez hair set up and copy styles to a highrez set up. So that is what you saw on the behind the scenes.

The basic groom was combed the old school way, then layers of ICE manipulations on top of that to get more variation, color dynamics etc.

Dave Barosin helped in getting the hair dynamics to work with a pretty ingenious set up.

Vince built the muscle setup which I'm not really able to comment on too much. He handed a cache of that geometry over to me, and I had a skin simulation stage that is basically a verlet set up that conforms to the muscles. It was used mostly for the body, but was also used sparingly on the face. (the stuff you see in the behinds the scenes is an embarrassingly old test scene, but you can see the verlet wrinkles)

The face was largely done with maps to drive deformation at render time. Based on the compression and stretch of the underlying geometry. 

Rendered in Arnold. With Keven Ives and Thomas Bardwell handling most of the shading and lighting.

[Steven Caron]

you cached the strands to icecache? alembic?

we found issues with motion blur if you didn't cache the strands and we use the same process.

[jimmy gass]

No strand caching. We wanted to save our self the extra step, since there were already like 5 stages of cache and sim. So the strands were left live.

To get Motion blur to behave properly, I just made a compound at the front of the entire system, that calculated the strand velocity and stored that every frame, but then set it back to what it was the frame before at the beginning of the sim to keep the behavior right. Basically just forcing the velocities for the rendered to do what it needs to do. That node has become quite popular here for that purpose.

[Ajit Menon]

When Jimmy says it was "nothing", that usually means he only built about 20 custom ICE compounds or so to do his bidding...

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 5:05 PM, jimmy gass <ji...@nervegass.net> wrote:

No strand caching. We wanted to save our self the extra step, since there were already like 5 stages of cache and sim. So the strands were left live.

To get Motion blur to behave properly, I just made a compound at the front of the entire system, that calculated the strand velocity and stored that every frame, but then set it back to what it was the frame before at the beginning of the sim to keep the behavior right. Basically just forcing the velocities for the rendered to do what it needs to do. That node has become quite popular here for that purpose.

--
Ajit

Ajit Menon | CGI artist
www.ajitmenon.com

"Success is not found in what you have achieved, but rather in WHO you have become." - Larry Bertlemann

[Steven Caron]

ok, thanks. we tried strand velocity but had issues with underlying geometry being blurred differently.

[Peter Agg]

Just to add to what Jimmy nicely rounded up: the facial animation rig was pretty much all done with envelope deformers rather than blend shapes. Chimp lips are surprisingly flexible so having the deformers being driven by curves was certainly the way to go with that.

The eyelids were also controlled with nulls looking at curves so the animators could define pretty much exactly what kind of shape they wanted - there's a lot of nice, subtle movement in them which is pretty much all down to their keen eyes and decision-making, really. Not much of it was automated so they did a really nice job - pretty much everything you see was something they chose to move, I just gave them the option!

Throw on a few sticky controls in key areas for secondary movement and you've pretty much got it as far as the control rig went. Then off it went to Vince's muscle system (though by that stage I unfortunately had to head back to the UK office, so I never got to see the cool stuff in action). 

[Szabolcs Matefy]

OMG. Very emotional piece, and great technical info. It’d be nice to see a screenshot of the facial rig J

 

So basically, the hair was based upon XSI Hair, and Melena was used to create the final look? Melena is great, it’s a shame that it is discontinued. I am very interested in the muscle rig as well, I’ve seen the weightmap is “animated” during the walk cycle. It’s some kind of stressmap?

 

Amazing piece, I hope one day Mill will make a tutorial book…

 

Cheers

 

 

Szabolcs

 

PS. Videos like this makes me consider leaving games industry to the VFX…

 

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Peter Agg

Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 11:34 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

[Sandy Sutherland]

We had this too - we used end on frame setting in the end to get as close as possible!

S.

[Morten Bartholdy]

It is spectacular, great work . Thanks for sharing the details!

Interesting especially to hear how you have used the old hair to groom - I also find the ICE hair tools coming short in that respect.

 

Morten

[Martin]

Awesome! Not only the CG but everything was amazing. And thanks for sharing details !
Can I ask how many people and months did it take?

M.Yara

[Ben Houston]

That is beautiful stuff.

--
Best regards,
Ben Houston
Voice: 613-762-4113 Skype: ben.exocortex Twitter: @exocortexcom
http://Exocortex.com - Passionate CG Software Professionals.

[Eric Lampi]

Ha! That's because Jimmy Gas is way too modest.

Awesome work guys!

Eric

--
Freelance 3D and VFX animator

http://vimeopro.com/user7979713/3d-work

[Javier Vega]

Impressive work. With the quality of The Mill, as usual. Congratulations!

Javier Vega

www.zao3d.com

Visita mi blog: http://blog.zao3d.com

móvil: 616 64 73 57
08922-Santa Coloma de Gramenet
(Barcelona)

2013/5/22 Eric Lampi <eric...@gmail.com>

[César Sáez]

Awesome work guys! Thanks for sharing :)

[Vince Baertsoen]

Hi everyone,

Thank you so much on the great comments. It feels good to hear all this.

It was such a pleasure working with the whole team and supervising this project.
It's not every day you get a project with  great script for a good cause, with good schedule and have time to RnD so much stuff.
It was roughly 3 to 4 months of work, to get tools done and spot out of the door.
Seriously we couldn't have done it without ICE in the time we had.
I am always looking at any software for commercial, to get things done to a really high quality level, in a short amount of time, and i still can't find anything which can beat the combination XSi, ICE and Arnold.

Everything on this project used ICE, from rig, muscle, skin, hair, rendering.

I started early test on skin with syflex and handover to Jimmy with Verlet which was much faster while I was carrying on and finishing the muscle system and leading the project.
Jimmy was working on the grooming of the hair and did a lot of super awesome compounds and scripts (yes he is being very modest). Dave did an amazing work on the hair interaction in a couple of weeks... like proper Siggraph paper staff... to get the stiffness and collision of the hairs right.

On the muscle, it was one very simple and generic muscle which had a lot of control to expend to more complex shapes and dynamic.
It was extremely fast, and could control stiffness, handles, tangeant, jiggle and more, through few parameters and weight maps.
The main strength was the speed to setup the whole body. I just needed to place each muscles close to the skeleton geometry and they would stick to it automatically: zero rigging involved.

Anyway XSi and ICE are awesome, i know i don't need to convince you guys.
It's not just about the software it's a lot about the talents and people, but seriously...XSi/ICE help a lot!

Thanks again for the feedback everyone.

Best,

Vince Baertsoen

co-head of CG
The Mill NY
Ext.: 2311
www.themill.com

---

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of César Sáez [ces...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2013 1:50 PM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Mill 98% Human

[Alan Fregtman]

Can you talk a bit about the skin collision with the muscles? Did you go with a plain raycast or something more fancy? :)

[Nick Angus]

Thanks for such a detailed reply Vince, this is the sort of stuff that puts the wind back in the sails of our little community!

Inspirational.

 

N