VES Production Summit 09

A gang of us attended the VES Production Summit last Saturday. It was a great event, attended by several hundred industry members and senior management folk convening to discuss various issues affecting production and post production.

We had several executives from Toronto come join us, including our President and Co-founder, Kim Davidson.

He was also kind enough to give me the photos below, which turned out far better than those taken on my iPhone.

Transformers and Houdini Mentions from DD

Matthew Butler, a long time Houdini user and VFX Supervisor at Digital Domain has been mentioned in today's LA Times!

No green screen or motion capture was used when shooting actress Isabel Lucas. But it took seven months for a team of 20 to create countless layers of effects, devised with complex equations and meticulous rendering with the software Houdini to create the six-second shot.

An even more in-depth look here on the LA Times Blog!


Nice work Matthew!

More nerdery can be found in Millimeter here from Paul Palop.

“I think we did 30,000 CG ball bearings,” Palop say. “We had to develop a crowd system in [Side Effects Software] Houdini to be able to control their behaviors. Houdini can assign a charge to a particle and you can set up rules that define how that charge changes over time depending on what’s happening around it. We could define, based on the reference from Michael’s photography, what these guys needed to do to make it to seem like they had some level of intellect. The approach we took was to simulate particles, give them a behavior, and stamp prebaked animation cycles from our library onto those particles. Our system chooses—depending on the action required—which animation cycles we would stamp on the particles.”

Special thanks to Tim Enstice over at DD for giving us props :)