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Looking to increase quality, efficiency and the creative life of its animators, DreamWorks explores the outer limits of animated features with its new animation software, Apollo
Looking to increase quality, efficiency and the creative life of its animators, DreamWorks explores the outer limits of animated features with its new animation software, Apollo
Upon the film’s wide release this summer, the company will unveil to the public the work of their home-engineered animation software, Apollo, that has involved a five-year research and development. Apollo was started in 1980, two years before Sun Microsystems. In addition to Poduska, the founders included Dave Nelson (Engineering), Mike Greata (Engineering), Charlie Spector (COO), Bob Antonuccio (Manufacturing), Gerry Stanley (Sales and Marketing), and Dave Lubrano (Finance).
Apollos main components are Premo for animation and Torch for lighting
Sometimes, California couldnt be any more California if it donned a pink bikini and sipped on an appletini frozen yogurt smoothie under the shade of a non-native palm tree.
Case in point: Arriving at the DreamWorks campus on a sunny day in Los Angeles, the first thing we see is a health fair. Dozens of young, fresh-faced fitness purveyors, representing active lifestyle options ranging from yoga to cross-fit to spinning studios, lined up in an area that amounts to DreamWorks massive front lawn. DreamWorks employees mill about, browsing the literature and chatting among themselves, imagining the ways that they, too, can get even fitter.
Case in point: Arriving at the DreamWorks campus on a sunny day in Los Angeles, the first thing we see is a health fair. Dozens of young, fresh-faced fitness purveyors, representing active lifestyle options ranging from yoga to cross-fit to spinning studios, lined up in an area that amounts to DreamWorks massive front lawn. DreamWorks employees mill about, browsing the literature and chatting among themselves, imagining the ways that they, too, can get even fitter.
Premo lets DreamWorks artists pose their characters using an intuitive tablet-based interface, and implement changes to high-res character models almost instantly
As tempting as they are, however, were not here for the fitness opportunities. Rather, were here to see how DreamWorks got its workflow in shape - namely, its development and integration of Apollo, its next-gen animation software.
Apollo was created in collaboration with Intel, over the course of roughly 5 years. The resulting software takes advantage of Intels multi-core technology, along with its hybrid cloud computing resources; essentially, DreamWorks has come up with a head-to-toe platform for visual computing, making the most of the many, many CPUs DreamWorks has both on premises and off. Its artist-friendly, fully scalable software, and helps the animation giant with nearly every aspect of making its animated films.
Essentially, Apollos main components are Premo for animation and Torch for lighting. For its part, Premo lets artists pose their characters using an intuitive tablet-based interface, and implement changes to high-res character models almost instantly. What used to take up to 20 minutes now happens in a matter of milliseconds, thanks to a more efficient code base and the softwares ability to make use of the multiple cores inside each of the animators PCs (the animators near constant rendering ping pong breaks - that is to say, actual games of ping pong between changes - are a thing of the past, for better or worse).
Apollo was created in collaboration with Intel, over the course of roughly 5 years. The resulting software takes advantage of Intels multi-core technology, along with its hybrid cloud computing resources; essentially, DreamWorks has come up with a head-to-toe platform for visual computing, making the most of the many, many CPUs DreamWorks has both on premises and off. Its artist-friendly, fully scalable software, and helps the animation giant with nearly every aspect of making its animated films.
Essentially, Apollos main components are Premo for animation and Torch for lighting. For its part, Premo lets artists pose their characters using an intuitive tablet-based interface, and implement changes to high-res character models almost instantly. What used to take up to 20 minutes now happens in a matter of milliseconds, thanks to a more efficient code base and the softwares ability to make use of the multiple cores inside each of the animators PCs (the animators near constant rendering ping pong breaks - that is to say, actual games of ping pong between changes - are a thing of the past, for better or worse).
What used to take up to 20 minutes now happens in a matter of milliseconds, thanks to Apollo by DreamWorks
Premo allows artists to manipulate the skin, muscle and facial expressions of their characters in real time, which helps immensely with the creative process; its significantly more artist-friendly than Emo, which required a great deal of data entry.
We watch as Senior Animator Lief Jeffers works with multiple high-resolution characters onscreen at once, making various adjustments to each of them on-the-fly. This makes creating physically and emotionally complex interactions between characters massively more functional; for its part, Emo could only handle changes to one character at a time, often creating a disconnect for the artist when working on a scene. Its very fast in action: grabbing one of the characters upper lips with his stylus, Jeffers is able to transform it in real time without the slightest hitch, causing the corresponding muscles around the mouth contort realistically.
As an animator, when I want to interact with characters inside of a scene, the goal is always to focus on the artistry, and not be hindered by the technical limitations of the software, says Senior Animator Leif Jeffers. Having the freedom to pose a high-resolution character in real time allows me, for the first time, to focus fully on the artistry without ever having to wait for the software to catch up to what I'm thinking.
We watch as Senior Animator Lief Jeffers works with multiple high-resolution characters onscreen at once, making various adjustments to each of them on-the-fly. This makes creating physically and emotionally complex interactions between characters massively more functional; for its part, Emo could only handle changes to one character at a time, often creating a disconnect for the artist when working on a scene. Its very fast in action: grabbing one of the characters upper lips with his stylus, Jeffers is able to transform it in real time without the slightest hitch, causing the corresponding muscles around the mouth contort realistically.
As an animator, when I want to interact with characters inside of a scene, the goal is always to focus on the artistry, and not be hindered by the technical limitations of the software, says Senior Animator Leif Jeffers. Having the freedom to pose a high-resolution character in real time allows me, for the first time, to focus fully on the artistry without ever having to wait for the software to catch up to what I'm thinking.
Premo allows DreamWorks artists to manipulate the skin, muscle and facial expressions of their characters in real time
Indeed, when Emo was first created, spreadsheets were the only way to animate. With the switch to Premo, Dreamworks decided to remove spreadsheets altogether and institute new methods to control animation. The graph editor allows animators to visualize every control's timing and intensity in graph form. The second method is more artistically driven through the direct manipulation of character with a Cintiq and digital pen.
With Emo, the more characters I loaded, the slower the software became, Jeffers continues. Even using low-resolution proxies didn't help with interactivity. For this reason, we would only turn on the bare essentials. This became problematic when you were trying to work out a strong composition for the shot, or animate an important interaction between two or more characters. Turning characters on and off, or switching between a low-resolution proxy to the high resolution model, was both cumbersome and time consuming. Using Premo, I can display all of the characters in a scene at their highest resolution, and interact with them in real time. This allows me to focus on artistic choices, without any slowdown from the software.
The aforementioned Torch, meanwhile, is used to design the look of a project and its environments. The production team hired a number of cinematographers, including 11-time Academy Award-nominated Director of Photography Roger Deakins, to help the lighting understand his visual approach, and how it could be applied to their digital process. An animated feature has roughly half a billion digital files, many of which include shape, color data, and texture maps, all of which are being continuously revised over the course of development; the Torch Project browser manages these assets in a more future-forward, visual approach.
With Emo, the more characters I loaded, the slower the software became, Jeffers continues. Even using low-resolution proxies didn't help with interactivity. For this reason, we would only turn on the bare essentials. This became problematic when you were trying to work out a strong composition for the shot, or animate an important interaction between two or more characters. Turning characters on and off, or switching between a low-resolution proxy to the high resolution model, was both cumbersome and time consuming. Using Premo, I can display all of the characters in a scene at their highest resolution, and interact with them in real time. This allows me to focus on artistic choices, without any slowdown from the software.
The aforementioned Torch, meanwhile, is used to design the look of a project and its environments. The production team hired a number of cinematographers, including 11-time Academy Award-nominated Director of Photography Roger Deakins, to help the lighting understand his visual approach, and how it could be applied to their digital process. An animated feature has roughly half a billion digital files, many of which include shape, color data, and texture maps, all of which are being continuously revised over the course of development; the Torch Project browser manages these assets in a more future-forward, visual approach.
DreamWorks created more than 100,000 storyboards for How to train Your Dragon 2. Plus! The animators created more than 500 million digital files!
To bring to life its last feature, How to Train Your Dragon 2, the team at DreamWorks created more than 100,000 storyboards for the 90-minute film. It took more than 18 months to complete, and the animators then created more than 500 million digital files, stored across 398 terabytes. It took a fleet of cloud computers in data centers more than 90 million render hours to render the 129,600 frames in the final film. But DreamWorks had so much computing power on hand that it could render those frames inside of a week or so for the last cut. Dreamworks also shares three data centers based in their respective studios in Los Angeles, northern California and Bangalore. Each center houses HPs Generation 8 servers that are 40% faster, and like most technology these days, now also use 40-percent less power.
One of the more exciting new pieces of DreamWorks arsenal is its new video capture studio, where the director can visualize a scene before the animators draw it. Manny Francisco, DreamWorks Director of Technology for Performance Animation, shows us around the tools:
One of the more exciting new pieces of DreamWorks arsenal is its new video capture studio, where the director can visualize a scene before the animators draw it. Manny Francisco, DreamWorks Director of Technology for Performance Animation, shows us around the tools:
Apollo's graph editor allows DreamWorks animators to visualize every control's timing and intensity in graph form
Essentially, a shoulder-mounted camera is operated in front of a giant green-screen, where the films animated characters are effectively physicalized in 3D space. This means that the camera operator can choreograph shots using traditional means - that is to say, using their hands and feet - rather than faffing aboutwith virtual cameras and the like.
We were able to try this for ourselves, and the effect is very impressive: its like shooting a live-action film with animated characters, the camera reacting without missing a beat as you pan and rotate around them. Its a fantastically intuitive way of defining the timing, blocking and cadence of individual scenes, and its become an essential part of the studios workflow.
We were able to try this for ourselves, and the effect is very impressive: its like shooting a live-action film with animated characters, the camera reacting without missing a beat as you pan and rotate around them. Its a fantastically intuitive way of defining the timing, blocking and cadence of individual scenes, and its become an essential part of the studios workflow.
Apollo Animation Softwares
Using Premo, DreamWorks artists can display all of the characters in a scene at their highest resolution, and interact with them - all in real time
Apollo Animation Software Engineer
When working with film directors, the focus is about creativity and their need to convey the idea they have in their head, says Director of Technology for Performance Animation Manny Francisco. This requires a workflow design where the technology is transparent and the tools are tuned to how they want to work. The motion capture stage is successful in this because we created a method for them to use a camera in a virtual world like they would for a live action workflow. This familiarity enables them to immediately begin working without having to learn a new process.
The technology is used to solve creative problems when setting camera movements for a shot. Having a virtual world and using a virtual camera helps the filmmakers to explore the right angles and performances that help to tell the story. The data is then used by the artists as reference for what they create on the computer, thanks to the fact that the motion capture system is fully integrated into the production pipeline. The camera data is recorded in parallel with the actor performance, and digitally handed off to the respective department making the data instantly available.
The technology is used to solve creative problems when setting camera movements for a shot. Having a virtual world and using a virtual camera helps the filmmakers to explore the right angles and performances that help to tell the story. The data is then used by the artists as reference for what they create on the computer, thanks to the fact that the motion capture system is fully integrated into the production pipeline. The camera data is recorded in parallel with the actor performance, and digitally handed off to the respective department making the data instantly available.
Apollo technology is used at DreamWorks to help solve creative problems when setting camera movements for a shot
With Emo, the emphasis was on spreadsheets with names and lists of controls. With Apollo, the idea was to combine the intuitiveness and immediacy of hand-drawn animation on paper, with the tangible aspect of stop motion, where the artist can touch the character and move elements around, getting immediate feedback. Of course, Apollo brings to this recipe the many advantages of the computer, where the artist can then edit to their hearts content (or their schedules allowance, anyway).
Torch simplifies data management by showing the data in a visual graph, making the work of maintaining the correct assets for a scene easier, says Shadi Almassizadeh, workflow director and product designer for Torch. Torch also enhances shot lighting with visualization tools such as preview lighting and asset visualization in a 3D Viewer.
Almassizadehs experience as a stage lighter and visual effects artist for live-action movies provided the engineering team with a great amount of information to develop the types of tools and features that would make his workflow more intuitive and less technical. Torch enables him to light his scenes the way he expects real light to work, such as light bouncing off objects, providing a full range of options to set the mood of a scene.
There are two elements to Torch that empower my creativity, says Almassizadeh. The first is dealing with the complexity of a CG-animated movie. Our scene files have millions of objects and attributes to deal with. Using Torch, we were able to consolidate the information needed for artistry, while hiding many elements to reduce complexity. Using the data project and version control system, I also have the highest level of collaboration with my team. All the artists on the movie can do their work in parallel, and I dont have to be concerned with missing critical changes that are sent to me.
Torch simplifies data management by showing the data in a visual graph, making the work of maintaining the correct assets for a scene easier, says Shadi Almassizadeh, workflow director and product designer for Torch. Torch also enhances shot lighting with visualization tools such as preview lighting and asset visualization in a 3D Viewer.
Almassizadehs experience as a stage lighter and visual effects artist for live-action movies provided the engineering team with a great amount of information to develop the types of tools and features that would make his workflow more intuitive and less technical. Torch enables him to light his scenes the way he expects real light to work, such as light bouncing off objects, providing a full range of options to set the mood of a scene.
There are two elements to Torch that empower my creativity, says Almassizadeh. The first is dealing with the complexity of a CG-animated movie. Our scene files have millions of objects and attributes to deal with. Using Torch, we were able to consolidate the information needed for artistry, while hiding many elements to reduce complexity. Using the data project and version control system, I also have the highest level of collaboration with my team. All the artists on the movie can do their work in parallel, and I dont have to be concerned with missing critical changes that are sent to me.
The idea for Apollo was to combine the intuitiveness of hand-drawn animation with the tangible aspect of stop motion, where artists can touch the character and get immediate feedback
Home Free
DreamWorks is continuing to make rapid technological innovations for the upcoming film /Home/, slated for release next year. Itegrating Apollo is said to not only improve quality and workflow, but also reduce the budgets of the studios films to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars.
Oh, and the productivity gains are said to be enormous: Rather than releasing one film every 18 months, DreamWorks believes its now capable of releasing three movies each calendar year. Thats a mighty big leap, and what industry types like to call a competitive advantage - which is to say, the studio has no plans to license the software anytime soon.
Oh, and the productivity gains are said to be enormous: Rather than releasing one film every 18 months, DreamWorks believes its now capable of releasing three movies each calendar year. Thats a mighty big leap, and what industry types like to call a competitive advantage - which is to say, the studio has no plans to license the software anytime soon.
Related links:
Visit DreamWorks Animation's official site
Head to the How to Train Your Dragon 2 movie site
Read more about Apollo
Head to the How to Train Your Dragon 2 movie site
Read more about Apollo
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How to Train Your Dragon 2 is a visual delight that has entertained millions of moviegoers this summer.
But you may not realize that it’s also a technological wonder, made with a technological infrastructure that represents the state of the art in enterprise computing.
How to make How to Train Your Dragon 2
We went deep inside DreamWorks to find out how it used cutting-edge enterprise and animation tech to make this summer’s blockbuster animation.
Animated movies take a lot of computer know-how, but they have brought in more than $11.5 billion in revenues for DreamWorks Animation since its inception.
And How to Train Your Dragon 2 has generated more than $384 million in box office revenues so far this summer. That’s a good return so far on a film that was built on a $147 million budget (without cost overruns).
The marriage of technology and art at the Silicon Valley campus of DreamWorks Animation is what makes computer-animated movies possible. We took a tour of the Redwood City, California-based company to unmask the process behind the making of the movie.
‘No limits’
“There are no limits on what we can do now,” said Dean DeBlois, director of the film, said in an interview. “Having so many dragons and an army of thousands of soldiers is something we couldn’t have done before. The software is extremely powerful and it allows our artists to express themselves.”
Part of the reason for that return on investment is the efficiency of the cloud computing infrastructure that DreamWorks Animation built over the last decade, said Lincoln Wallen, chief technology officer of DreamWorks Animation, in an interview.
During the making of the film, DreamWorks built a software platform dubbed Apollo. It also created an artist’s animation software program called Premo, made so that artists could get back to drawing their characters and landscapes with pens and touch-sensitive computer displays. Those tools transformed the way that animators worked from a process of tweaking spreadsheets to something that resembles the old-fashioned way of drawing images with pencil and paper.
“Moore’s Law [the doubling of computing transistors every 24 months] has been a key transformer of every business and every product, including ours,” said Wallen. “That’s why we have Intel as a substantial partner in all of this.”
Such alliances are aimed not only at making the best film possible, but doing it in a cost-effective way.
Above: How to Train Your Dragon 2 features detailed characters.
“Our business is telling stories, but we are focused on visual stories,” said Katie Swanborg, director of technology communications and strategic alliances at DreamWorks Animation, in an interview.
When the artists need the computing power to create and modify film-quality images in real-time, DreamWorks taps the 16-core processors from Intel on every animation workstations, as well as the computing power from cloud-connected data centers.
495 artists and 398 terabytes
The numbers behind the effort are impressive, both in human capital and computer resources. It took about 495 artists to make the movie. Dean DeBlois, director and screenwriter, worked on several scripts and went through about two years of prototyping the film on comic-like storyboards. The storyboards are the first part of a dozen steps that have to happen before a film makes it to thousands of theaters.
To visualize Dragon 2, the team created more than 100,000 storyboards for the 90-minute film. It took about 18 months to two years to craft the film, with a lot of back-and-forth to get the look of every frame just right.
The animators then created more than 500 million digital files. It took a fleet of cloud computers in data centers more than 90 million render hours to render the 129,600 frames in the final film. If one computer had worked on the rendering task, it would have taken 10,273 years to complete. But DreamWorks had so much computing power on hand that it could render those frames inside of a week or so for the last cut.
The data is stored across 398 terabytes, or equivalent to the storage of 25,742 smartphones with 16GB of flash memory each. Each tree in the movie takes about four to six weeks to model, with 4,000 to 6,000 control points in the 3D animation.
Above: DreamWorks Animation’s Premo animation tool
Before a film gets to the theaters, it is really just a collection of digital files. Each one of the 129,600 frames goes through a dozen compute-intensive animation processes before it is finally finished. So a single frame may be associated with thousands of assets, said Stephen Bailey, CG supervisor at DreamWorks Animation.
Dragon 2 is just one of 10 films that DreamWorks Animation has in the works at any given time. That means it has to have the computing infrastructure for 5 billion digital files.
It has its own data centers, but it also taps Hewlett-Packard and other providers of public cloud technology for extra computing power. To do that, it has built a Linux-based server infrastructure.
It may sound like DreamWorks is throwing every ounce of computing power it can afford at moviemaking. But it’s also working smarter than it has in the past by building tools like Premo and a video capture studio where the director can visualize a scene before the animators draw it.
“Our audience has become very critical of cinematography even if they don’t know it,” Swanborg said. “It’s a very personal choice, with the director making a decision about how we’re going to see the world of the film. It influences how we subconsciously feel at any given moment. That’s why we are doing cinematography in a far more intuitive and interactive way.”
Storytellers and computer animators don’t always get along. For example, Pixar’s film executives told a story last year about how they changed the gender of the villain in Monsters University from male to female, late in the process. That caused the animators to have to go back and re-animate a lot of scenes throughout the film.
Above: DreamWorks Animation CTO Lincoln Wallen helped create Apollo tools.
DeBlois said that he had a chance to rewrite the script several times during the concept stage, so he didn’t have a last-minute problem Pixar did. But he did realize how important it was to get the voice acting, the script, the story, and the cinematography in place before the artists went to the work of setting it in stone.
For tech people like DreamWorks’ Swanborg, it’s been a long march to produce technology that can properly support the vision of the creators. She has been at the studio more than 17 years and was production manager on the first Shrek film, which debuted in 2001.
Pacific Data Images, the predecessor of DreamWorks Animation, was started in 1994, the year that Netscape went public and the internet itself started taking off.
“We have reinvented the technology animation platform here at DreamWorks Animation, and that means a lot to our business,” Swanborg said. “The creative process can’t exist if we don’t have a viable enterprise and business that sits on top of it.”
Apollo Animation Software Project
Massive collaboration
Wallen said that the team decided to build its Apollo software suite on top of the company’s cloud technology, and to use it in the making of Dragon 2.
The Premo animation software was meant to replace DreamWorks’ aging Emo software, which dated from the 1980s, and to enable artists to think of an idea and to immediately draw it on a computer.
All of the digital files created with Premo are fed into the Apollo production system. Shaders and lighting specialists like Stephen Bailey, a CG supervisor, can check out a file. They use a program called Torch to apply the final shading and lighting to the files, making them more realistic.
Four lighting artists are so productive that they can deliver 90 shots in four weeks. That’s far more than in the past.
“I can view all of those assets at once, wherever they are stored, if I wish,” Bailey said.
Above: Stephen Bailey of DreamWorks Animation.
The creation of Apollo coincided with the larger technology trend of cloud computing in data centers and scalable multicore processors on client computers.
Still, it took a lot of custom work between DreamWorks Animation, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard to build the necessary software and hardware.
The tools allow creators to refine their creations like craftsmen do, changing the images through trial-and-error until they look just right. Technology has made that happen so that the turnaround time between when an artist creates something and the director approves it is much shorter.
Once the storyboards are done, they are handed over to the production animators, who use Premo and other tools to put the concepts into moving animations. The same animated scenes get more and more detailed the further into the process they go.
Apollo Animation Software Tutorial
“We start with crude dragons, stage a fight scene, and then figure out exactly what will pass in front of the camera during that fight,” said Jason Schleifer, character animator. “When we are finished, we sit with the director to see if it really does work.”
The tech is perfect for characters who are caricatures of real people.
But DeBlois looks forward to the day when animators can capture every nuance of human faces and human expression.
“We’re not there yet,” he said. “With Dragon, you forget you are watching a cartoon. We want it to feel whimsical.”
Still, he’s confident that lifelike realism is around the corner.
“If the task ahead of us is creating a computer-generated character that blends into a real environment, the tech is getting there.”
Above: The numbers on How to Train Your Dragon 2.
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