How do you pick content to fit in 7 hours that you have experienced over the course of 15,000 hours?

That is the question I’ve been grappling with for the past few weeks since we announced the Master Class. The overall list of items to cover has been ready for several months and keeps on increasing. It is clear that everything cannot be covered, so what should be kept and what should be saved for another class?

Good Vue training is not that hard to find. (In fact, we have some good training videos if you want a head start before the class.) The problem is that large scale animation needed for film and television is vastly different than creating still images. The latter is where most Vue training products excel, but unfortunately the pros can become cons when applied to an animation project. What makes our Master Class different from any other training seminar is that it is built specifically for such large scale animation projects.

My basic formula for the content became:

realism + superior creative control + cost-effective implementation + fast render output

The following is a list of aspects and specific items that are the central pillars of the content of the Class.

Visuals

That is almost a given. First and foremost, everything in the class must count towards the end-goal of excellent visual realism. This thread is richly interwoven throughout the entire presentation.

Interpreting Nature in Vue’s terms

This became the first segment of the class. The majority of attendees are familiar with Vue or at least the general concepts of the software. The core fractal nature of Vue is similar to the hypothesized Higgs boson particle – understanding that most basic element can open you up to all the possibilities of Vue.

The harder part is translating something you see out in nature in Vue terms. This is where all the Vue expeditions come in.

Hundreds of hours spent in the field, interpreting natural patterns into Vue fractal space are merged with an understanding of integrating artistic/creative flexibility. The resulting set of design principles are explained in the primer part of the class and then spread throughout the rest of the content in context-sensitive blocks.

The end-goal being that if you follow these principles, even the most outlandish, alien environments can be made to look real and believable.

Erosion

This is a huge, huge deal! So many people have expressed interest in better terrain design. This is where the Vue-World Machine pipeline comes in. One entire segment of the class is dedicated to integrating World Machine into Vue.

By using complex graphs on top of imported Vue procedural terrains (below), or designed from scratch (above) we redefine the entire process of terrain design.

Great terrains are at the heart of just about any environment you create. The unique techniques presented in the terrain segment of the class are geared towards broader usage of the terrains, and not just simply having the terrain be the goal itself. In other words: material, texture, ecosystem, and other aspects of the scene are taken into consideration when crafting the terrain and then special excerpts and outputs of the terrain are used to achieve both superior realism and incredible creative control.

The procedural nature of this pipeline allows for instant and vastly powerful editing. Allowing for creative direction to alter the design without rupturing the delicately balanced procedural graphs was a key aspect when this pipeline was being built.

Atmosphere + Light

Lighting a scene in Vue often becomes quite different – if you are intent on realism – than in any other 3D package. Lighting is the de facto key element for any environment, and the entire segment on Atmosphere and Lighting in the Master Class focuses on how a 3D artist needs to realign their thinking for Vue.

Economy

This is perhaps the hallmark of this class. A whole segment at the end of the class is called ‘The Economy of Natural Design’ – roughly translated to ‘what you can get away with’.

The entire content of this segment focuses on maintaining a balance between pushing the software for better visuals, while pushing it for faster output.

The most basic result of this is speed in terms of rendering. But at the same time, it also talks about minimizing the effort needed to be applied, cutting corners in crafting the scene, and creating massive scenes without a massive budget.

Blazing Renders

Clicking the image above will bring up a 4000px version. We ran many tests on an i7 laptop, i7 980 Extreme workstation, and thanks to my friend Marek Mihok, a dual Xeon (24 cores, gazillion GBs of RAM, etc.). The Xeon config is roughly equal to 3 or 4 typical render nodes found in any modern render farm.

On the i7 machines we could easily get 720p frames between 10 to 30 minutes per frame. On the Xeon, again equivalent to a very small render farm, we could get it to under 10 minutes.

As one of our focuses in the class is about large scale production, we decided to test frames from the trailer at 4000 pixels wide output. The render times are significantly low for 4k frames, and can still be optimized further.

If the requirement is matte painting where you need an image base as opposed to a full animation, then this opens up the avenue for rendering several thousand pixel tall images.

Matte + Compositing Considerations

Speaking of matte paintings, spread throughout the class is special content for matte painting and compositing considerations. This can be as simple as a set of filtered output techniques, to complex multipass renders where layers and layers of visual data are separated from the overall render for further enhancement and compositing.

Layered output in matte paintings is nothing new, but the class also focuses on structuring scenes specifically for layered output so that if the direction changes or something new needs to be tried, the amount of work is minimized.

 

I will continue to write more about the class and share some visuals from the content, so stay tuned.

If you still haven’t signed up for the Master Class, I recommend you register before we run out of seats.

This scene is a live exercise I’ll be showing at the Master Class.

One of the key things that helps rocky scenes like the one below is granularity. But that effect is difficult to achieve and sometimes slow to render if you go for good quality. The balanced solution lies in HyperTextures and HyperBlobs.

HyperTextures are common enough in 3D, but in Vue they take on a whole new process which is extended by the HyperBlob feature. The cave in the scene below is constructed entirely of HyperTextures and HyperBlobs. The central rock obelisks are HyperTerrains.

HyperTextures/Blobs can carry granular detail that you can’t accommodate in materials or are just too expensive to render with displacement.

Below is a breakdown of the single HyperTexture material used to power all the blobs in the scene. The essential HyperTexture material is created with a simple Fast Perlin Fractal which is the most economical for render speeds. The resulting untextured output can be seen on the left. That is what will shape the HyperBlob. The granular detail is present in the physical shape rather than simply painted as bumps on the material. On top of this HyperTexture, we have the GeoAffinity “Lavaline” material applied for the coloration and some minor bump texture.

Below is a close up of the left side of the image. You can see that even in indirectly lit parts, the granular nature of the HyperTexture is visible. A bump map cannot give you that light/shadow play in shadowed or under-lit areas.

The creation of this scene, building HyperTexture materials from scratch, and using HyperBlobs effectively will be covered in the Master Class in detail. Visit www.quadspinner.com for details.

Or ‘Eating your own dogfood’

In my past life in the technology industry, we threw around the term ‘dogfooding’. Essentially, it means using your own product.

The Master Class trailer was a formal dogfooding project for us. Last month I was in Los Angeles, visiting the amazing Doug Drexler (of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica fame). We have embarked on some Vue adventures where we were able to do something great, but as always rendering the result took too much time. So I made a bold statement: “I can get HD per-frame times down to 2 minutes.”

Anyone who has worked with Vue will gladly agree that it was a bold and somewhat suicidal thing to claim. But back in our secret volcano lair, surrounded by sharks with laser beams on their heads, a simple i7 980X w/ 16GB RAM was churning out frames at exactly that time. Granted they were 480p not 720 or 1080, but hey, 2 minutes is pretty darned awesome! Especially considering that previously those same frames were coming out 25 to 40 minutes per frame.

The challenge is not in simply lowering the per-frame render time, but in maintaining the quality while doing so.

I am fortunate to enjoy a good friendship with the folks who created Vue and they’ve been kind enough to share their knowledge of Vue’s inner workings – and even add some crazy features I’ve come up with. Or sometimes they found new features for Vue because I created a hugely complicated scene. (Complicated enough to require new code to be written.) One case in point is the Subray Quality Drop you find in materials.

The ‘Glory’ scene (below) was an experiment I did with the beta of Vue 7.5. The result of the new Godrays optimizations they did were fantastic, but the water took hideously long to render. They took the scene and ran some tests. Apparently the water took longer to process because the Subrays were working overtime under the water where they didn’t really need to. They can’t explicitly program Vue to exclude those Subrays because you may lose quality in scenes. So they added the Subray Quality Drop for such scenarios where you don’t want underwater overkill.

Vue’s simplicity in both UI and how you get things done in the software can distract us from the complex nature of the monster that is its renderer.

My natural masochistic tendencies have helped me over the past 5 years since I decided “No, Vue can do greater things than what we have seen”. Since then I’ve been working almost constantly on finding ‘better’ ways of doing things inside Vue. Methods that give both quality and speed, and sometimes even ease-of-use. I won’t lie to you, getting both quality and speed can be hard work.

These optimizations are loosely grouped together in what I call ‘Super Settings’. They’re nothing fantastic or monolithic. They’re small tweaks and budget cuts across the planes of Light/Atmosphere, Materials, Objects/Terrains/HyperTerrains, and the Renderer.

So back to the trailer. We had a VERY small window to work in before we announced the class. I needed a minute-long animation in 2 weeks. To ensure I could back up my statement of fast HD renders, I had to dogfood. It was a matter of pride (because I’ll be demonstrating this in front of a live audience at the Master Class in September). Everything had to be rendered in full Global Radiosity – the toughest, meanest lighting model available in Vue.

I wanted to further prove that all this could be done on individual machines – not needing giant render farms. But I did make the good decision of enlisting the help of my friend Marek Mihok – the ‘Render Lord of Slovakia’. As I worked on new scenes, he used his computers (we used a dual XEON and an i7 980X, but most of the time they processed different scenes simultaneously) to render the animations.

The first animation we tried was the Montaña Sunrise opening shot (below).

The volumetric lighting was intense and the clouds needed to be of high quality as they used a new coloring mechanism for the soft morning hues.

After just two optimization sessions, we experienced ~10 minute per frame render times for this animation. The frames were 1920 x 817 in size. Well over 720p!

The same scene, if sent to a proper render farm, would get this done in less than a minute or two. The joy of getting great quality renders at large frame sizes is eclipsed only by the time (and money!) you save.

That, of course, is the point of the entire Master Class. Let’s look at the this:

• Faster renders, without quality loss, can help meet deadlines faster
• Comp animations, pre-viz, and mockups of any form get a good boost of broader realism as artists can render such lower-significance items at greater speed (with more sophisticated visuals, no less!)
• Faster renders help lower costs when something needs to be re-rendered.
• Total man-hours and total render farm uptime goes lower, saving the facility a good chunk of money
• And we all know how helpful it is to have some extra space left in the budget to apply to other needs in the production

Here is the unspoken truth about Vue: it requires some special considerations when using it for animations, and practically everything out there available in the Vue community – products, tutorials, or any form of learning – is about still images.

Vue is used more for giant still images with extreme detail. The creation techniques for that are very different than using them for animation. A giant chunk of the difference is found in the Function Editor and the Renderer.

The dogfooding focus was specifically on such differences:

• Avoid flickering in materials by recreating them for animation
• Restructure certain material properties for better multi-frame antialiasing
• Find very specific settings for antialiasing for each scene to avoid excess rendering time and memory load
• Modify plants for flicker compensation without having to use insane texture filtering
• Alter Vue’s default lighting and cloud coloration systems for a more realistic sunrise/sunset animation
• Remove, disable, or bypass every setting or generator that you can do without (you’d be surprised just how many there are!)
• What is better done in Vue and what is better done in post by using multi-pass renders
• Use the diagnostic tools in Vue for animation bottlenecks
• etc. etc. etc.

These differences were the original inspiration for a running segment we will have in the Master Class entitled ‘What you can get away with’ which create the stepping stones for the final session of the class called ‘The Economy of Nature’.

Here’s a practical example you can try right now:

If you have a bright open scene, disable Indirect Skylighting. Compensate with the Skydome Lighting Gain. Render a before and after and see how much it improves your render time.

Of course, there are other related changes you need to make, but if I tell you that, you won’t come to the class.

The list of such tiny tweaks currently runs at a few dozen (about 60+, I believe) but it will increase in the two months between now and the Master Class as we further optimize the Super Settings for even better results.

The great thing was, by keeping all these things in mind and planning it all properly, not only did we render everything in time, at proper quality, but we also rendered a few other shots that we decided to use elsewhere in the class.

The dogfooding worked. We rendered well over 2000 HD frames with decent quality, all within time and surprisingly under the budget.

If you still haven’t seen the video, head on over to official Master Class page. And if you’re in the LA area, come join us at the Master Class on 9.10.11. Seats are limited, so grab them before you lose your chance.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be posting more about the Master Class and the new creation techniques we will be showing exclusively at the event.

We have just announced the Master Class in Los Angeles on 9.10.11. You can find out more at: the official page 

I will be blogging more about the class and the making of the Master Class trailer (see the link above) this weekend.

In the meantime, check out the Master Class page.

We’ve been receiving a lot of questions about the upcoming workshop in LA, so I figured I should post some basics.

Two weeks ago, Cynthia and I were in LA meeting with some friends in the industry and scouting out the details for the Master Class workshop. Everything looked great and so we are now finalizing the minutiae. What I can tell you right now is that the class is intended to be in early September in Los Angeles. It will be a full one day intensive.

While we intend to make it easy for people who are new to Vue to consume the content of the Class, this is an intermediate-advanced level workshop aimed at professionals in the TV and film industries.

The entire learning experience is tailored very specifically to tight production scenarios – limited workforce, limited budget, limited time. This is where Vue can shine – and if you find that a surprising sentence, this Class will definitely open your eyes to some lesser known secrets of the software.

Over the course of the last 5 years, I have travelled to various environments to study nature in Vue’s terms, which has helped empower all the QuadSpinner products and training you may have seen. In the first half of the class, I will be teaching the methods of creation (terrain, HyperTerrains, vegetation, materials, etc.) those expeditions have borne. Several new techniques of creating HyperTerrains will be taught as well.

In the second half, a detailed tour through Vue’s Function Editor – the place where most of the real work takes place – as well as the Renderer will show you the power of Vue when it comes to being flexible. I will be showing special techniques that can help bring per-frame render times down to a tiny fraction.

And those are just the larger subjects. The entire Class is based on new techniques, new technologies, and existing stuff that has been reconfigured to meet the needs of film/TV production.

If you’re interested in attending this event, or would like more information, please email info@quadspinner.com. Please note that there will be limited seats.

Studios interested in reserving multiple seats, you can ask for group discounts.