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The Sony Imageworks crew open up with the meatballs at VIEW.
Thursday, 05 November 2009
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Today at VIEW, Rob Bredow had a light informative talk about the character development on the new 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' movie, about to be released worldwide. With a vast batch of files to show, slides to flip through and detailed QuickTimes to show, the creation of each character was quite an adventure. Flint, the gawky hero, had over 200 controls to his face alone.
In Concept, the sets and colors were developed with a 'Sasek' style. The work from that stage onwards included color keys matched to the story arc, visual dev and concepts. The communication between departments. A new technique called global illumination was used with Arnold, a render which had lighting component that was a lot like real-life lighting. Now the lighting crew was sent to Mole Richardson Lighting in LA, the premiere lights supplier, so they could observer a life-like lighting application at work.
Danny Dimian was up next. As Lighting Supervisor on 'Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs', Danny was in a perfect one to talk about the massive eight core machines with eight gig of RAM that were used in the production's creation. For instance the Roofless Restaurant sequence and the Spaghetti Twister used an incredible amount of power in rendering so many elements. ODE rigid body dynamics for destruction, Particle simulations for sparks, CFD simulations for flames and smoke; and Volumrtic rendering for flame and smoke.They used SVEA, an inhouse voxel rendering engine. In these 'foodalanche' scenes, rendering time per frame was over 20-hours.
Glenn Entis talked about the gamification of Digital Media, giving a spree of examples where even an eBay sale is a game. Before he did that however, he told of the procedure of retail was very social before the modern times. Bartering and gameplay for the best price, face-to-face, was the order of the day. People never had that feeling of being separate from the transaction, instead they were very much part of the 'game'. In the online world, the same banter can be had, but now can be between two people on the opposite sides of the Earth. His personal example was of a search for a logo for his new company VanEdge Capital Inc., and how he found what he was looking for by setting up a web competition so designers, anywhere, could compete for the prize he put up. This phenomenon called cloud-based commerce is promoted where everything is web-based, everything is nowhere, if you like. There are so many places on this planet now where the use of interactive, web-based commerce is available. If you think about the spread of interactive, interconnected surfaces over the planet, if game designers can redefine ways of making each of the lights shown in the picture (above) as an interactive, fun way to make money, instead of thinking about the traditional lines of media creation, the world would be a happier place.
