Dimension-Z Studios started out as a studio handling games & ad films and converted into a 3d animation institute because we felt that the animation institutes operating in India were not doing a good enough job.

There are many differences in the way we train our students compared to other institutes and I thought of listing them here.

1. Modular, Upgradeable Animation Courses –

Ive realized that many students joining animation courses have no idea what they are getting into. Neither do they know if they are suitable for this field nor do they know about the specialization they should be getting into.

Our animation course has taken this into account and all students are encouraged to start with a 1 month 3ds Max Course. On completion, I guide the students on whether they should upgrade, the specialization they should take or if they are not suitable for the field.

2. Flexible Duration -

Every student has a different learning curve, there are some who pick up 3D very fast, while others take a longer time.

We understand this and allow every student to learn at their own pace.

3. Project Based Courses –

Most students learning 3D Animation don’t realize that learning software tools is very different from being able to create projects using those tools.

Other animation institutes focus on teaching only these software tools resulting in the student leaving without a professionally made showreel or having the much needed experience that Studios ask for.

Our students on the other hand, start working on projects right from the second month itself.

There are new 3ds Max & Vray Batches starting 1st May. Students interested in joining are requested to call me on +91-9833141276 to book their seats at the earliest.

One of our students has just finished a pretty impressive piece of work that I’d like to share. Comments and Critique welcome

The making of Rango
3D World | Movies | Showcase | 27/02/2012 16:49pm
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VFX shop ILM took a bold step into feature-length animation with Rango and its paid off, bagging an Oscar for Best Animated Feature! Barbara Robertson shows you behind the scenes…

Gore Verbinski, Crash McCreery and a gang of VFX cowboys from Industrial Light & Magic stampeded into ’toon town last year with Rango, and now the celebrated CG spaghetti western has won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature!…

Produced by Blind Wink, GK Films and Nickelodeon Movies, and distributed by Paramount Pictures, Rango is the first animated feature for Verbinski, the director who spun an amusement park ride into three Pirates of the Caribbean box office hits.

It’s also the first animated film for production designer McCreery, a visual effects concept artist and creature designer known for Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Pirates and other blockbusters, and the first for the artists at ILM, a studio famous for 35 years of award-winning visual effects.

“We thought maybe not knowing how you’re supposed to do things might be a good thing,” says animation supervisor Hal Hickel.
Rango

Johnny Depp’s physical performance inspired Kevin Martel as he animated the lead character

Other than the fact that the stars are animals – although almost none act like one – Rango is a traditional western, albeit one with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. One of the animal characters, for example, is a porcupine named Mr Snuggles.
Welcome to the town called Dirt

The story goes like this: a city slicker named Rango becomes lost in the desert and meets Beans, a beautiful, feisty woman. He follows her into town, defeats a villainous hawk and becomes the sheriff. Then he uncovers an insidious plot hatched by a tortoise and saves the town.
Rango town shot

John Bell’s art direction ensured that the town of Dirt has a classic Western feel

Rango (Johnny Depp) is a chameleon. Beans (Isla Fisher) is a lizard. The town is Dirt, a drought-stricken, ramshackle place in the desert, inhabited by dusty, thirsty citizens.

Before he landed in the desert, Rango was a terrarium chameleon riding in a car. The terrarium bounced out and Rango with it. In the terrarium, he’d played many roles, entertaining himself by telling stories to his only companion, a wind-up goldfish. So when Rango ambles into Dirt’s local saloon, a grungy place filled with nasty-looking critters, he quickly reinvents himself as a hero.

“Nasty was a good word on this film,” says Tim Alexander, who took the visual effects reins from John Knoll during production. As with most animated feature productions, visual effects on Rango included everything except animation.

Alexander moved onto the film after completing work as a visual effects supervisor on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which had a relatively small crew compared to Rango, and a smidgeon of shots – albeit challenging ones: it was his crew who had to split the wall of fire for Dumbledore. Prior to Potter, Alexander was visual effects supervisor for The Spiderwick Chronicles, which had its own set of weird animals.

“I took everything I learned from Harry Potter and Spiderwick and applied it to Rango,” he says. “We had 1,000 assets with 130 unique characters, plus 48 more based on those.”
Model citizens

The first character the modellers built was one of the townspeople called Priscilla, a little girl with big eyes who looks something like a rat found in Madagascar.
Priscilla from Rango

Priscilla was the first character the modellers worked on. “At first we had so many questions,” says model supervisor Geoff Campbell

Geoff Campbell, who was the model supervisor on all three Pirates films, Star Wars Episodes I, II and III and other projects tracing back into the 90s, supervised the work on Rango.

“We started to build Priscilla as soon as we had [Crash McCreery’s] artwork,” says Campbell. “At first, we had so many questions. We weren’t matching live action, so we didn’t know the rules. But it quickly became clear that we were to match the artwork, not actual animals.”

As they would for a live-action film, the modellers started by sculpting the characters in Maya, then moving the models into ILM’s Zeno software to create shapes for facial animation. It soon became obvious, though, that they had a problem: the three weeks they’d scheduled for modelling each character was too short, but the schedule couldn’t change.

“Gore wanted to see work in progress, and iterations were eating up the time,” says Campbell. “Crash does a beautiful job with illustrations, but it became clear that we were missing maquettes.”

Rather than having someone sculpt maquettes from clay, they decided to do digital ones using ZBrush. “We gave ourselves three days to do a maquette with textures,” says Campbell. Once modelled, they put the digital maquettes on turntables for approvals.

“These characters were placeholders,” says Campbell. “They weren’t rigged, and there was some confusion in the beginning when people asked to see them move. But everyone could see if we were on target with proportions and quality. We could then take the rest of the time to work out the details.”
Rango bar shot

Bad Bill (centre of shot) is one of Dirt’s low-life locals that newcomer Rango has to deal with

Roughly 12 modellers worked on the characters and other assets; some long-time hands at ILM, others hired straight out of school. They shared assets when they could – the characters’ hands, for example, most of which had three fingers and a thumb.

“You could borrow meshes, cut and re-establish them again,” says Campbell. “There was lots of borrowing of parts. Boots. Vests. Pants. Neckscarf. We entered any costume parts we’d built into a wardrobe model database.”

After the maquette stage, the modellers worked back and forth between Maya to rough out models, Zeno for final sculpting, ILM’s proprietary program Fez within Zeno for facial expressions, and ZBrush for displacement. Zeno was the hub.

“The modellers hand-sculpt the facial expressions and then package them in Fez, a program based on FACS [Facial Acting Coding System],” says Campbell. “The system puts in place all the expressions you can pull with your facial movements and categorises them. It also takes care of clean-up between shapes.”

For the eponymous hero, McCreery would often come to ILM to work with the modellers. “Things changed sculpturally all the time,” says Campbell. “It had a lot to do with the size of his eyes. We had a lot of back and forth about how they’d move, how he could handle a facial performance.

Rango close up

The scale of Rango’s eyes posed challenges for animators trying to solicit a strong facial performance

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“He has tiny eyes that aren’t like human eyes. The eyeball is covered in skin. And Gore really stressed – with all the characters – that he didn’t want any symmetry. No animated character look. So one eye is slightly offset from the other.”
Directing the ensemble

Unlike most directors of animated films, Verbinski recorded the dialogue with the ensemble cast, rather than having each actor work individually in a sound booth. “He wanted the freshness,” says Hickel, “and it gave him the opportunity to block out scenes.”

The actors wore costumes and worked in sets on sound stages. Neither the costumes nor the sets were elaborate, but they were enough to provide atmosphere. The recording session lasted 20 days, the length of time Depp was available.

During the previous year, Verbinski had worked with artists in his offices to create a story reel from 2D drawings cut together. During the recording session, a script supervisor checked the animators’ pacing against that story reel.

Afterwards, his editors added sound to the story reel; and in the spring of 2009, ILM’s animators began work. Hickel and the lead animators would look at the story reel and videos of the dialogue sessions, then show those, along with Verbinski’s ‘turnover’, to the animators.

Each character had a low-resolution model without a face and a higher-resolution model. The animators would pantomime the body first on the low-res model, then work on the facial animation using the higher-res model.

“On this show, we knew the animators would have to work at a faster rate than normal, so we upped our game,” Hickel says. “We added things to the rigs – a switch to go from IK to FK and other attributes to make the animators’ job easier. And we asked for a GUI for each character. We had an animator working directly with James Tooley in creature development.”
Noodling and fine-tuning

Tooley came to ILM from Disney, where he’d been one of the few computer animators on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. At ILM, he was a digital artist on Twister and quickly became a technical animation supervisor, leading teams of artists who rigged characters and handled cloth and hair simulation for the Star Wars and Pirates franchises, as well as other films.

“For Rango,” he says, “I began by looking through all the sequences to see what the characters had to do, the behaviour of their skin, feathers and hair, to make sure we’d build in the proper techniques on a shot-by-shot basis.

“It was probably the biggest project I’ve worked on, with the most characters. [There were] 130 unique [bipedal] characters all treated kind of like hero characters, and then 45 to 50 variants for crowds and backgrounds. We also had a couple of quadrupeds, bats and birds. We had everything. Surprisingly, though, we didn’t get asked for much more than usual in terms of rigging and simulation. Maybe less, sometimes.”

Rigging was handled within Maya. To create the newly requested GUIs for each character, the team used MEL and Python scripts. In addition, some characters needed specific rigging.

The snake, for example: “The two things everyone cringes about any time they come up for rigging are snakes and ropes,” says Tooley. “If you pull on the tip of the tail, the rest has to follow in a specific way, so the rigs are sometimes really complicated. The rig for this snake was very complicated.”

Snake in Rango

Every TD dreads having to rig a snake. The movie’s evil ringleader also features individual scales which required a lot of tidy-up by hand

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To move the snake, the riggers created a rail system, like a train track. Animators could move the track and the snake would follow; bend the track, and the snake would bend as well. “When the director wanted more snake, we might use two snakes – one for the head, the rest for the body,” Tooley says.

Unless the snake was far in the background, each scale was a specific piece of geometry, but in most shots, the snake is close to the camera. That meant the scales had to move correctly as the body moved.

“We used deformers and also wrote Python scripts to mathematically describe the motion,” Tooley says. “We could take a partial derivative and provide that to rotation controllers.”

If that didn’t work, the crew would fix the problems by hand. “People don’t like to talk about it, but we do a lot of manual clean-up, too,” Tooley says. “Maybe the feature animation studios try to make everything bullet-proof. We’re more down and dirty effects based. We do rigging as well as we can. And then we clean up. That’s the typical approach for ILM. Noodling and fine tuning.”
Clothing issues

Skinning was straightforward for the more human-like animals, made easier because clothing covered much of the skin. The clothing brought its own problems, though.

“Almost every character in every shot has multiple layers of clothing that we dynamically simulated,” says Tooley. “But ever since the first Pirates, we’ve had to simulate multiple layers of cloth. We’ve developed techniques that allow us to simulate one layer and have a second collide with the first. We simulate the layers in a specific order.”
Rango group shot

ILM’s experience on Pirates of the Caribbean helped it deal with the complex layered clothing on many characters

Generally, that means working from the under-layer out. When a heavy garment is on the outside, though, they create a gap between the layers, using another surface to control how much the heavy garment mashes the lighter undergarment.

Texture maps add specific controls that act like glue and keep a piece of cloth from sliding, for example, or cause two pieces of cloth to move together.

Unless two characters had to collide against each other, the character TDs ran the simulations for each character on separate machines, with several machines running at the same time. “The thing that makes cloth really look good is resolution,” says Tooley. “But that makes the cost of simulation go up.”
Rango owl shot

Rango’s varied cast, including this feathered Mariachi band, provided a number of technical hurdles in terms of clothing and skin types Rango’s varied cast, including this feathered Mariachi band, provided a number of technical hurdles in terms of clothing and skin types
Challenging hair

For the characters’ hair, the studio uses a typical system with guide hairs interpolated in rendering to produce thousands of strands that TDs could clump into tufts to create a mangy look.

“As far as simulation goes, we might run all the hair at the same time, or group clumps into different simulation passes to have the different clumps behave in different ways,” says Tooley.

In addition to characters, the creature development group rigged props, cars, building parts and vehicles. “If it moved or articulated in any way, my crew had to deal with it,” says Tooley.

“The wagons had to roll.” For example, to help the animators roll Beans’ wagon, which a javelina (or collared peccary) pulls, the crew connected the wagon dynamically to the wild pig. Wherever the animators moved the javelina, the wagon – a rigid body simulation – followed; and as it moved, it collided properly with the ground terrain.
Ground rules

The task of creating that ground terrain fell to the digimatte department. Typically, this ILM team creates 2.5D backgrounds for live-action films: 2D paintings projected into a 3D space for largely camera-dependant shots.

When a shot comes into the digimatte department, the artists know the camera move and the lighting. Originally, the department planned to create the same kind of exteriors for Rango.

With concept art turned over to the layout team, camera position, lens selection and shot framing can begin. Character models are brought into the composition and positioned, as are major scenic elements in the shot

“We did initial tests using our paint projection tricks and they looked good,” says digital matte supervisor Andrew Proctor. “They helped set the photographic look that Gore [Verbinski], Tim [Alexander] and John [Knoll] wanted. But once we started to work closely with Gore in pre-production, it became clear that we couldn’t tie down the environments that early. We went back to the drawing board.”

Instead, the team created a process in which they first established a rough layout that Verbinski and the layout artists could use to scout locations and establish camera angles.

The rough layout had an undulating ground plane with colour, detail from repeated fractal patterns, cliffs, rocks and buttes with rough textures, and a sky.

“We had a sky cyclorama based on time of day and key artwork,” says Proctor. “We built a full 3D cyclorama for Gore to give us feedback on whether the clouds and buttes were in the right place. We kept the sets alive as long as possible. Then we’d go in and polish, using our tools to make them more shot-specific.”

Because it wasn’t feasible for the painters to create the massive texture maps needed to detail the wide open spaces, the crew developed a procedural terrain shader.

“It would take full maps, colour and bump maps, and blend them across the whole set,” says Proctor. “We could control the size of the pattern and the harshness of the landscape.” The artists could also control the patterns so that they wouldn’t stack up at the horizon.

To add shrubs, cacti and other large elements, the matte painters could fill an area with pre-baked elements using a procedural map or paint proxies into the landscape using a tool similar to the paintbrushes in Maya Paint Effects.

“Crash [McCreery] would often sit with the artists and set dress the shots,” says Proctor. “We could move things around and he could art-direct to his heart’s content.”

For many of the matte painters, who typically stay outside the 3D pipeline, stepping more fully into the 3D world was a radical new way to work. But for Proctor, it was a way to use skills he’d learned at Aardman Animation and the BBC, thn moved into the digital world by creating hard-surface models for Flushed Away.

“My background is environments,” he says. “At Aardman, I did character sets, textures, lighting, art direction – everything except animation. I think that at ILM because I wasn’t from the digimatte department and had strong 3D and 2D skills, I could offer a lot to help set up the 3D stuff. The project was really exciting for me.”

Creating procedural textures to make it possible for Verbinski to do location scouting was just one way in which this production differed from a typical feature animation pipeline. Down-and-dirty rigging. Ensemble recording. Digital maquettes. Whether the process they created would work for a group of people with strong animation backgrounds isn’t clear, but this nimble crew took what they needed from the typical animation process, mixed in familiar and successful ways of working in live-action visual effects, and crafted one of the most distinctive animated features ever to grace the big screen.

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Hey everyone…ILM just released a behind the series video for the latest transformer series “Dark of the Moon” which shows a few techniques used to make the video.

I think this makes an interesting watch and gives viewers a bit of knowledge on the VFX creation process

Chaos Group announces V-Ray for Autodesk Softimage, the newest addition to the company’s suite of innovative rendering solutions. With support for Softimage’s award-winning ICE system, dynamic geometry, and V-Ray Proxy objects, V-Ray for Softimage supports the size and complexity of even the most demanding scenes. Its physically based toolset, including versatile shaders, lights, and cameras, makes it possible to standardize rendering workflow with the quality, speed, and stability of the V-Ray core. (continue reading…)

Stash Magazine has come out with the best commercials for 2011…I found a couple of them really interesting and worth a look.

To view all the Stash picks click here http://www.stashmedia.tv/stash-best-of-2011/#