Audi commercial

[Stefan Andersson]

This one looks really really nice! I love the art work and how
everything is executed.
I hope someone on the list could tell us all a bit more about the production.

http://motionographer.com/theater/audi-filter/

regards
stefan

--
Stefan Andersson / vfx supervisor / Swiss International AB
S:t Eriksgatan 48 B / SE-11234 Stockholm / Phone: +46 8 662 24 60
myBlog: http://sanders3d.blogspot.com

[Steven Caron]

you saw this?

http://motionographer.com/theater/audi-filter-making-of/

still would like to know more

steven

[Steven Caron]

was emFluid used?

steven

[christian]

fantastic sound as well..

[Sam Cuttriss]

krakatoa + chromatic aberration?

looks cool.

[Steven Caron]

part of me hopes they used mental ray or 3delight to render that, the other part of me hopes they used my plugin to go from XSI to krakatoa

s

[Sam Cuttriss]

cool, i guess its all xsi?

has anyone had any luck with using deep shadows/ volumic shadows as
matte tools for these types of things?
i hear it bought up in nuke and renderman circles for compositing
volumes, but im still trying to figure out how to make it work under
xsi, mentalray.

from what i can gather, its possible to attach a spotlight to the camera
with a volumic shadow matching the camera fov.
the depth information saved in the volumic shadow file can then be used
to composite varying depths of semi transparent objects.

any leads?
_sam

[Sebastian Kowalski]

congrats to chris and tim for that great spot. from what ive heard its
all xsi. maybe one of them can give some insides.

----
Sebastian Kowalski
3D Animation and VFX

http://www.sekow.com

Elbchaussee 15
22765 Hamburg
Germany

# 0049 172 9739028

[Sam J. Bowling]

The "music" made me want to turn it off. Love the visual though.

--
Sam J. Bowling

[Morten Bartholdy]

Whatever they did use, I would like to know. It looks really good.

- MB

[adrian wyer]

looks like EM-fluids

http://mootzoid.com/html/XsiCorner/emFluid2.html

lovely!

a

[Morten Bartholdy]

Well yes, unless they wrote their own fluid sim they must have used emFluid
I guess, but I was contemplating whether they used Krakatoa or another
renderer.

Lovely indeed - concept, motion and rendering :)

[adrian wyer]

with the sheer number of particles, you might get away with hardware
renders?

[julien....@free.fr]

the ability of emrpc to write multiple tga simultaneously make it perfect for post processing passes of such high number of particles.
Though at that time there was no antialiasing but it could have been rendered at twice the resolution.
----- Mail Original -----
De: "adrian wyer" <adria...@fluid-pictures.com>
À: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Envoyé: Mardi 7 Avril 2009 16h02:57 GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin / Berne / Rome / Stockholm / Vienne
Objet: RE: Audi commercial

[Marc-Andre Carbonneau]

I'm pretty sure it's Krakatoa since you can feel the self-shadowing in
the beginning of the ad.
emRenderPointCloud doesn't support self-shadowing yet. But perhaps where
we only see the black silhouette of particles then it could be only
hardware.

But overall I think:
EmFluids & ICE + Krakatoa

[Sebastian Kowalski]

got this confirmed, xsi only
its all possible, with talent and skill

----
Sebastian Kowalski
3D Animation and VFX

http://www.sekow.com

Elbchaussee 15
22765 Hamburg
Germany

# 0049 172 9739028

[Sebastian Kowalski]

and emFluids ;)

Am 07.04.2009 um 16:11 schrieb Marc-Andre Carbonneau:

[Bradley Gabe]

Regardless of how it was done, it's still quite beautiful and hypnotic to watch. Still, it has to be said that it's a nice warm fuzzy to see that kind of effects work being done successfully in XSI. It was a long time coming, and let's hope to see more.

Last Siggraph, I had a few opportunities to watch the annual demo reel while talking with various employees of Softimage. "Mark this year's reel in your memory" I would say with a smile. "From now on it's going to look different."

-Brad

[Jules Stevenson]

> I've been asked to provide our renders in WMV format (a first).
>
> Can anyone can recommend a decent program to do this?
>
> When I search I get lot's of small DVD rip/Ipod convert type of
> software showing up. I wondered if there's any "professional " packages
> that can do this.

AfterEffects has a pretty good WMV output, but is still a little bit fiddly.

[adrian wyer]

i'd second afterFX, although all wmv output is fiddly 'cos there are about a
million flavours!

[Rob Wuijster]

MS Windows Media Encoder? It's free as well.

vr.gr.,

Rob Wuijster
Schorpioen 62
2221 NA Katwijk
T +31 (0)6 289 474 71
W www.rowu-media.nl
E in...@rowu-media.nl
E ro...@casema.nl

\/-------------\/----------------\/

Adam Seeley wrote:
> Hi,

>
> I've been asked to provide our renders in WMV format (a first).
>
> Can anyone can recommend a decent program to do this?
>
> When I search I get lot's of small DVD rip/Ipod convert type of software showing up. I wondered if there's any "professional " packages that can do this.
>

> Windows Movie Maker will, but I think it will only read in these formats:
> * Video files: .asf, .avi, .wmv
> * Movie files: MPEG1, .mpeg, .mpg, .m1v, .mp2
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Adam.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 8.0.238 / Virus Database: 270.11.44/2044 - Release Date: 04/06/09 18:59:00
>

[Leoung 0Young]

Adobe Premiere will do the job

[Ponthieux, Joey]

Cleaner XL will also perform the task. What file format will you be
generating it from? I wouldn't create a WMV from anything that is
already compressed. Starting with a DV file or an uncompressed quicktime
as your source will produce best results. WMV 9 is typically highly
compressed and a very clean format for playback but most apps that
generate WMVs use core MS libraries to do the job on Windows
exclusively. Building WMVs on anything other than Windows is an
absolute pain. What platform do you need to do this on?

Joey Ponthieux
NCI Information Systems Inc.
NASA Langley Research Center
____________________________________________________________
Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and
do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.

[Adam Seeley]

Hi,

Happening on 64XP.

Wmv's seem to come out with more contrast/darker than the QT's. Haven't used After Effects yet though.

A.

This e-mail may contain confidential information and is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient you may not distribute or copy this document in any manner whatsoever. The sending company does not accept liability for any damage, loss or expense arising from this e-mail or from accessing attachments.
 please consider the environment before printing this email

[Ponthieux, Joey]

Yep. Thats what they do. Haven't figured what the deal is with that yet.
WMVs are typically for client preview here so it hasn't been a critical
issue. Even though we provide both, most people end up using Quicktime
anyway because they are can be scrubbed at the timeline. WMV isn't so
good with that.

Joey Ponthieux
NCI Information Systems Inc.
NASA Langley Research Center
____________________________________________________________
Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and
do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.

[christian]

eh. i wish i could get my h.264 quicktimes from looking lighter and
low on contrast.. wmv usually looks closer to what i see in my comp
app than (h264) quicktimes

[Alan Fregtman]

>From what I've read in the past, the h264 lightness is a bug in the
Quicktime player for Windows about misinterpreting gamma information
contained within. The Mac QT player supposedly plays at the correct
color and so does VLC.

While it's not a fix, have you tried MP4 video? It looks pretty sweet
and doesn't seem to change all that much.

[Matthias Worch]

VLC will also show the .h264 mp4 files at the correct gamma level, I believe.

.wmv is actually a very good format for encoding movies. It's basically VC-1, which is a mandatory spec that needs to be supported by both HD-DVD and BluRay players (one of the reasons why the PS3 can play Windows Media Files). There've been quite a few recent 1080p movies (mostly HD-DVD, with a few BluRay) that were encoded in what amounts to Windows Media Files :)

[Ciaran Moloney]

Not a bug, but by design. Apple place gamma tags in the video, since they know best which gamma we should be using...
If you want to stick to H264, try the freeware x264 encoder.

[Stefan Andersson]

We use a program on the Mac called "Episode Pro" which does this
really really well. They have a windows version too, but we have never
tested that one.

http://www.telestream.net/telestream-products/desktop-products.htm

regards
stefan

On 4/7/09, Adam Seeley <Adam....@vtr.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been asked to provide our renders in WMV format (a first).
>
> Can anyone can recommend a decent program to do this?
>
> When I search I get lot's of small DVD rip/Ipod convert type of software showing up. I wondered if there's any "professional " packages that can do this.
>
> Windows Movie Maker will, but I think it will only read in these formats:
> * Video files: .asf, .avi, .wmv
> * Movie files: MPEG1, .mpeg, .mpg, .m1v, .mp2
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
>
> Adam.
>
>
>

[christian]

tried that on a mac, and while the files looked great, for some reason
they started stuttering when embedded in flash. so that was a no go.

[Morten Bartholdy]

No Krakatoa - I am impressed, and happy like with a warm fuzzy feeling :)

MB

----- Original Message -----
From: "Marc-Andre Carbonneau" <marc-andre...@ubisoft.com>
To: <soft...@listproc.autodesk.com>

Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2009 6:10 PM
Subject: RE: Audi commercial - How it was done.

Well, here's Tim Borgmann's official answer on how it was done...

"to answer your question: the workflow was XSI only. We used EmFluid for
some takes (which was luckily anonced just at the moment we started with
the project). The rendering was done with the volumeshader. Really hard
to setup for some takes, but it works ;) So the workflow was mostly ->
setup and design of the simulation -> cache writting (which eats a lot,
really a lot, harddrive space). Loading back the cache, some duplication
of the cached particles with clone point, setting the size of the
particles and finally setting up the volume shader and the light(s)."

Cheers

Tim

[christian keller]

hi,

no i first thought we should use krakatoa and fume fx,
and try to get it it done in in max and xsi.
but i wanted to use mainly xsi. when i started the research
how we could do the fluid stuff, there was no way to do it in
xsi. i played a little bit with the maya fluids and remembered
that i started to code an importer for maya fluid caches some
time ago.
after a bit of digging i had a prototype in python which was working, to use the caches as flowfield. but in the second week of research
the nice emFluid was ported to ice and we gave it a go.
quite easy to use and as a node in ice quite powerfull.
you could enhance the resolution of the simulation with simple
turbulence nodes. for example using the velocity as a multiplier
for the turb or the turb size ...
rendering was an other thing. first we wanted to stay away from
selfshadowing and do something in comp, but after i set up the first
shot with shadows, just for fun , it was not that problematic
as i thought. everything on 64 bit because of the massive data amount.
some shots with over 50 mio particles - mentalray was quite nice to us ;-)
it was a bit painfull ,because we had to tune the shader settings of every shot seperately, there was no way to use settings from other shots. the volume shader worked quite well but it´s hard to tune.
we found one limit with the mental volume thing - you could not
allocate more than 4 gig.
the other nice thing is - youre not used to produce such an large amount
of data with cache files. we had around 1 terra of cache files
only with the pointposition because of the file size. then we loaded it back in ice and calculated the size, velocity etc on the flow.
otherwise it would have killed our server.
3 months of hard work in the production submarine, but tim and me had
a nice time.

chris

[Sam J. Bowling]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

Works great, used it many times.

At 09:00 AM 4/7/2009, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I've been asked to provide our renders in WMV format (a first).
>
>Can anyone can recommend a decent program to do this?
>
>When I search I get lot's of small DVD rip/Ipod convert type of software
>showing up. I wondered if there's any "professional " packages that can do
>this.
>
>Windows Movie Maker will, but I think it will only read in these formats:
>* Video files: .asf, .avi, .wmv
>* Movie files: MPEG1, .mpeg, .mpg, .m1v, .mp2
>
>Thanks,
>
>
>
>Adam.
>
>
>

--
Sam J. Bowling

[Adam Seeley]

Hi,

Tried it but it only seems to output specific video format sizes up to 1280x720 HiDef.

We need to export a more specific 1440x1050 piece.

Ta,

Adam.

-----Original Message-----
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sam J. Bowling
Sent: 08 April 2009 11:32
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: WMV format !!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

--
Sam J. Bowling

This e-mail may contain confidential information and is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient you may not distribute or copy this document in any manner whatsoever. The sending company does not accept liability for any damage, loss or expense arising from this e-mail or from accessing attachments.

 please consider the environment before printing this email

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com

Version: 8.0.238 / Virus Database: 270.11.44/2044 - Release Date: 04/07/09 17:53:00

[Mikko Ronkainen]

Hello,
didn't see anyone mention Super. Encodes any proportions, any pixel
proportions, unlike many xvid decoders or lowend editors. Super, don't
really think would be a professional software, very nice the same. Not too
many parameters exposed, unfortunately.

Mikko

On Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:15:50 +0300, Adam Seeley <Adam....@vtr.co.uk>
wrote:

[Maerz, Marcel]

Hi Chris (and Tim),

thanks for the explanation of production details here and
the making_of about this project. Impressive work!

Cheers,
Marcel

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] Im Auftrag von christian keller
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 8. April 2009 10:43
An: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Betreff: Re: Audi commercial - How it was done.

[Stephen Davidson]

Although their website is horrible and the interface is somewhat confusing,
I use Super C for most of my video file translations. Hey...it's free and
the final product is good.

http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html

Best Regards,

Steve Davidson

(954)552-7956
www.3danimationmagic.com

[Sam J. Bowling]

I don't think I've ever had to go that high, but I'm pretty sure you can do
custom resolutions (I haven't used it in a while). If I remember correctly,
the settings aren't in the most obvious place.

Ok, create a custom session, Chose "file" for "source from:" chose your video.

on the output tab chose "archive to file" and set your file name and
destination.

Under the compression tab click edit next to "destiantion". In the second
tab you can set your video size, and change any other settings you need.

Seems to work fine here.

--
Sam J. Bowling

[George Christacopoulos]

Amazing guys.... Hats off!!

hi,

volume shader worked quite well but it愀 hard to tune.