Calendar
Virtual Production: What It Means to Combine Animation, Visual Effects and Live Action Filmmaking
Joe Letteri, Senior VFX Supervisor, http://www.olm.co.jp/digipro2012/keynote/Four-time Oscar-winning Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Letteri will talk about what Weta Digital has learned from pioneering Virtual Production projects Avatar and The Adventures of Tintin. The talk will delve more deeply into the R&D challenges and interesting insights that came out of reworking the digital film pipeline to accommodate a more holistic view of production. This holostic view meant bridging animation and live action to bring out the best of both worlds and rethinking rendering, lighting, compositing and just about everything else. This presentation shows why this way of working enables greater creative freedom and has attracted directors like Peter Jackson, James Cameron and Steven Spielberg. And it shows how much more there still is to solve...
Camera Space Volumetric Shadows
Johannes Hanika, Peter Hillman, Martin Hill, Luca FascioneA Facial Composite Editor for Blendshape Characters
Wan-Chun Ma, Marco Barbati, J.P. Lewis, http://www.olm.co.jp/digipro2012/program/Camera Space Volumetric Shadows
This work transforms irregularly sampled shadow map data to deep image buffers in camera space, which are then used to create volumetric shadows in a deep compositing workflow. This often avoids costly re-rendering, enabling short turnaround times for cinematic lighting design.
A Facial Composite Editor for Blendshape Characters
This work presents an interactive editing system that allows digital modelers to rapidly create new blendshape face models for incidental or background characters, starting from a small number of given face models. Selected facial features from the source are blended in gradient domain, and the final face is produced by integrating the resulting Poisson equation.
Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 502AB
Wayne Stables, VFX Supervisor, http://s2012.siggraph.org/attendees/sessions/virtual-production-branches-outA panel of leading virtual-production practitioners discusses and debates:
- Advances and considerations in motion capture
- Relative benefits of separate vs. in-scene facial capture
- SimulCam – its evolution and where it is heading
- The client/filmmaker experience
Moderator: Ray Feeney
RFX Inc. and former Co-Chair, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Science & Technology Council
Panelists: Wayne Stables - Weta Digital, Dave Cravens - High Moon Studios, Gary Roberts Digital Domain, Matt Madden - Giant Studios
LA Convention Center, South Hall K
Joe Letteri, Senior VFX Supervisor, http://s2012.siggraph.org/attendees/sessions/assembling-vfx-marvel%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9C-avengers%E2%80%9DFour-time Oscar-winning Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Letteri will talk about what Weta Digital has learned from pioneering Virtual Production projects Avatar and The Adventures of Tintin. The talk will delve more deeply into the R&D challenges and interesting insights that came out of reworking the digital film pipeline to accommodate a more holistic view of production. This holostic view meant bridging animation and live action to bring out the best of both worlds and rethinking rendering, lighting, compositing and just about everything else. This presentation shows why this way of working enables greater creative freedom and has attracted directors like Peter Jackson, James Cameron and Steven Spielberg. And it shows how much more there still is to solve...
LA Convention Center, Room 502AB
Spacetime Expression Cloning for Blendshapes, J.P. Lewis – Weta Digital, http://s2012.siggraph.org/attendees/sessions/100-51This novel spacetime facial animation retargeting method for blendshape face models is based on the velocity domain transfer combined with a model-specific prior and produces successful retargeting results. The paper shows that this novel retargeting method has obvious advantages over conventional per-frame transfer methods.
Yeongho Seol
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Weta Digital
J.P. Lewis - Weta Digital, Jaewoo Seo - Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Byungkuk Choi - Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ken Anjyo - OLM Digital, Inc. and JST CREST, Junyong Noh- Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
The Belasco Theatre, 1050 South Hill Street
Open ExR 2.0 release – Peter HilmanPixar Booth
Martin HillnLA CC Room 507
http://s2012.siggraph.org/attendees/birds-featherFor attendees interested in OpenEXR version 2, including support for deep data and multi-part image files. This evolution of OpenEXR was co-developed by Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Digital.