Computer Graphics World 2004 12

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Previous Page Contents Zoom In Zoom Out Front Cover Search Issue Next Page
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The Magazine
for Digital Content
Professionals
ComputerGraphics ®
World Dream Machine Live-action animation portrays a child’s

imagination in The Polar Express
Interactive Horror
Game makers
go for the gory
Generation 2.X
Today’s consoles
get an upgrade
Creative Compositing
New tools push the art
of video production
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‘‘‘The Incredibles’ is THE YEAR’S BEST MOVIE “ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST
so far, and by far.’’ FILMS. Brad Bird has crafted
Joe Morgenstern, a film that breaks fresh ground
and defies fogy rules.”
“Bird has dreamed the animator’s big dream Peter Travers,
of doing it all, and he’s made it come true.
He has created the UNPRECEDENTED FILM “As worthy of a
that is not just a grand feature-length cartoon BEST PICTURE NOMINATION
but A GRAND FEATURE, period.” as any made with fleshly stars.”
Kenneth Turan, Lisa Schwarzbaum,
buenavistapicturesawards.com
©Disney/Pixar
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December 2004 • Volume 27 Number 12
www.cgw.com for computer graphics

Also see AAAAAAAAAAAAAA
news, special surveys and reports,
and the online gallery.
16 Features
Cover story
Locomotion 16
FILM | Innovative performance-
Departments
capture techniques help transport
Editor’s Note 2 the extreme movements of
A Few Good Mentors Tom Hanks and a cast of live
actors into the 3D animated
Spotlight 4 world of The Polar Express.
Products
By Barbara Robertson
27 NewTek’s VT 4 Live
Eovia’s Cararra 4
Fear Factors 26
@Last’s SketchUp 4.0
GAMING | Our three-part report
Maxon’s Cinema 4D Release 9
reveals how developers create
Celco’s FilmOut Pro 2.0
hair-raising experiences for players
User Focus of some top horror game titles.
Hi Def Jam
27 Doom 3—Id Software crafts
Slam Dunk Effects
hellacious scenes using advanced
Market Outlook
CG lighting and shadow effects.
DCC Industry Forecast
28 28 Silent Hill 4: The Room—A dark
News In Brief
setting and story heighten the
Video Viewpoint 12 terror of this nightmarish scenario.
Uncommon Compositing
29 Missing: Since January—Video
Portfolio 40 blurs fiction and reality in this
Albert Kiefer’s Future Fossils novel first-person murder mystery.
By Karen Moltenbrey
Snapshot 42
3D Animation Software
Consolation Prizes 36
Reviews 44 HARDWARE | While next-generation
29
Discreet 3ds max 7 consoles wait in the wings, current
Adobe Atmosphere models continue to evolve.
Products 48 By Jenny Donelan
36 On the cover:
The magical train in The Polar Express
was crafted to appear just as it did in
Chris Van Allsburg’s illustrated book of
the same name. For more, see pg. 16.
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editor’snote
Phil
LoPiccolo
E d i t o r- i n - C h i e f
A Few Good Mentors

P H I L L O P I C C O L O : Editor-in-Chief
phill@pennwell.com
C O U R T N E Y H O W A R D : Senior Technical Editor

courtney@pennwell.com
K A R E N M O LT E N B R E Y : Senior Technical Editor

Last spring, the editors received a rather cryptic e-mail from an animator at a karenm@pennwell.com
major studio about a “side project” that he and a few of his friends were work- CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:
Jenny Donelan, Audrey Doyle,
ing on. When we checked it out, we learned that the group was planning to Evan Marc Hirsch, Doug King,
George Maestri, Martin McEachern,
launch an animation school with a couple of novel twists. Rather than follow- Stephen Porter, Barbara Robertson
ing the typical instructor-in-the-classroom model, the school would be online and avail- S U Z A N N E H E I S E R : Art Director
suzanneh@pennwell.com
able to anyone, anytime, anywhere. And instead of providing boilerplate responses, as
D A N R O D D : Senior Illustrator
danro@pennwell.com
is often the case with any sort of online services and support, a staff of professional ani-
B A R B A R A A N N B U R G E S S : Production Manager
mators would offer personal, video-based, one-on-one mentoring. barbarab@pennwell.com
Intrigued with the concept of personal online mentors in an age of impersonal elec- M A C H E L E G A L L O W AY: Ad Traffic Manager
MacheleG@pennwell.com
tronic communication, we invited the three founding members of the group to put on a K AT H L E E N G R E AV E S : Reader Service Manager
greaves@pennwell.com
Q&A demonstration over the summer at our booth on the SIGGRAPH convention floor. (843)705-9243
We were curious about what issues were on the minds of those in the animation com- S U S A N H U G H E S : Marketing Communications Manager
shughes@pennwell.com
munity and how much interest they would have in posing questions to these animators. M I C H E L L E B L A K E : Circulation Manager
michellb@pennwell
What transpired during the demonstration surpassed expectations. Hundreds of
M A R K F I N K E L S T E I N : Group Publisher
attendees stood for hours at the booth querying the trio of self-proclaimed “animation mark@pennwell.com
mentors”—Shawn Kelly of ILM, Bobby Beck of Pixar, and independent artist Carlos
COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD
Baena—with questions ranging from the simplistic to the sublime. Executive and Editorial Offices:
98 Spit Brook Rd.
The session, in fact, was similar to an experience two of the artists shared years earli-
Nashua, NH 03062-5737
er when teaching an animation course in a traditional university program. Kelly, who had (603)891-0123; FAX:(603)891-0539
been the instructor for a couple of semesters, invited Beck to deliver a guest lecture to his C G W O N L I N E : www.cgw.com
class. During what many of the students would later say was one of the most inspirational For customer service and subscription inquiries only:
cgw@omeda.com TEL: (847) 559-7500 FAX: (847) 291-4816
nights of their education, the instructors let the class run over a couple of hours while POSTMASTER: Send change of address form to Computer
Graphics World, P.O. Box 3296, Northbrook, IL 60065
they were bombarded with questions about the finer points of animation. Kelly says, “We
We make portions of our subscriber list available to
couldn’t help notice the hunger for the type of knowledge we were trying to pass on, and carefully screened companies that offer products and
services that may be important for your work. If you do
the apparent scarcity of it in the school system.” As Beck drove home that evening, the not want to receive those offers and/or information,
please let us know by contacting us at List Services,
basic idea for the online animation school was born. Computer Graphics World, 98 Spit Brook Road,
Nashua, NH 03062.
Immediately following the demonstration at our
Professionals who are SIGGRAPH booth, we asked the artists to continue their
passionate about their conversation with the animation community and par-
work are eager to pass ticipate in a Q&A dialogue with the visitors to the R O B E R T F. B I O L C H I N I
President and Chief Executive Officer
Computer Graphics World Web site. To view the results
on their expertise to
of their efforts, or to pose questions of your own, go to A D VA N C E D T E C H N O L O G Y D I V I S I O N
the next generation. www.cgw.com and click on the Ask the Animation- ADAM JAPKO
President & COO
Mentors icon in the left margin.
GLORIA S. ADAMS
Why has this concept of asking questions of personal mentors been so appealing? In ret- Director, ATD Audience Development
rospect, the positive response should have come as no surprise. Students who are passion-
ate about their field of endeavor naturally generate questions that fall outside any linear AT D P U B L I S H I N G D E PA RT M E N T S
MEG FUSCHETTI
path to knowledge. And professionals who are passionate about their work are eager to give ATD Art Director
back to the community. As Kelly puts it, “We hope that by bringing the knowledge of all MARI RODRIGUEZ
ATD Production Director
these ninja animators to students, we can help them grow into the next generation of ani-
mators who will blow us all away and push our art form to a whole new level.” PRINTED IN THE USA GST No. 126813153
Publications Mail Agreement No. 40052420
By featuring the animation mentors on our Web site, we hope to play a key role in build-
ing a stronger graphics community. And to that end, we invite people with all levels of
expertise to participate in the Q&A sessions as well as in our online forums. Bringing
together people with passion is a powerful way to advance the state of any art.
2 | Computer Graphics World DECEMBER 2004

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LightWave [8]
Secret Weapon of the World’s Most Innovative Indie Filmmakers!
“Kaze, Ghost Warrior was made, in part to
blow away the idea that feature-quality CGI
needs to be expensive, because it doesn’t.”
“I came back to LightWave with renewed

respect after delving deeply into learning other
3D programs, having seen just how much
LightWave is capable of, how much creative
freedom it affords and how rare it is that
software actually delivers on what it promises.”
“LightWave is able to give me the

dependability and out-the-box usability I
need not to frustrate me when subjected to
the pressures of my production methods.”
—Timothy Albee
Producer, Writer, Director, Animator,
Kaze, Ghost Warrior
www.newtek.com/ghostwarrior
LightWave [8] is now shipping! To learn more about

the Emmy® award winning LightWave 3D®, please call
800.862.7837 or visit www.newtek.com.
LightWave and LightWave 3D are registered trademarks of NewTek, Inc. Emmy is a
registered trademark of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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spotlight
NewTek Unveils VT4 Live
video
Your resource
NewTek has released VT4
for products, user Live, an integrated production
products
suite of hardware and software,
for professionals in SD video
applications, news, production.
Among the many features
and market research new to VT4 Live are support
for Microsoft PowerPoint pre-
sentations, DVD Authoring
with instant project import
For a direct link to more
and playback, and VT-Stream
product information and
vendor Web sites, click on one-button streaming. The
www.onlinecenter.to/cgw upgrade adds more than 200 new digital video effects and transitions, bring-
ing the total number of DVEs in VT4 above 500. Image Super-Scaling for
sharp picture-in-picture, real-time DV out, integrated genlock, MPEG-2 encod-
ing, and CG for titles, scrolls, and crawls round out
the new version. The bundle also includes LightWave
3D Version 8 for high-end animation, as well as DVD
Workshop 2 SE for DVD authoring.
Eovia Introduces
3D animation
Complete with an SX-84 Switcher Expansion, an
Cararra 4 RS-8 Remote Switcher, and software, VT4 Live is priced

at $5995. VT4 software bundled with the VT-Pro I/O
Eovia has started shipping Carrara 4, the latest version of card costs $3995. Registered users of previous versions
its 3D animation, modeling, and rendering software, in can purchase an upgrade to VT4 software for $995.
Standard and Professional versions. ■ NewTek; www.newtek.com
New to Version 4 are an updated Scene Wizard,
products
faster OpenGL functionality, and the ability to apply

shaders to a group. The upgrade also features new ter-
rain and sky modules, shader transforms, new texture
@Last Software
previz
and lighting controls, raytraced depth of field, and im-

provements to rendering, motion paths, IK, and time-
line support.
Upgrades SketchUp
Carrara 4 Pro exceeds the Standard version in its Maker of conceptual design software, @Last Software has
products
capabilities and power, adding vector and 3D motion unveiled Version 4.0 of its SketchUp 3D design tool for
blur, network rendering, previsualization in the entertainment, film, and gaming
and Amapi Designer 7 and industries. Designed for quick and easy sketching, modi-
Eovia’s TransPoser and fication, and presentation of 3D models, SketchUp has
CADstyle plug-ins. The Pro been upgraded with a Ruby scripting interface; Face Me,
version also extends the which makes 2D components look 3D; Texture Tweaker,
user’s file import options
to include BVH, COB, FBX,
and LWO files.
Carrara 4 Pro is priced
at $579 for the full version
and $189 as an upgrade from Versions 2 and 3, where-
as Carrara 4 Standard costs $279 for the full version
and $119 as an upgrade.
■ Eovia; www.eovia.com

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3D modeling/animation
Maxon Launches Cinema 4D Release 9

Maxon Computer has intro- Release 9 boasts Sub-Polygon
duced the ninth generation of its Displacement, which generates more
modeling and animation tool, details during rendering and lessens
Cinema 4D. both memory consumption and ren-
As well as housing more der times. Cinema 4D also now sup-
than 100 new functions and ports the direct export of multipass
features, Cinema 4D Release 9 rendering data to Discreet’s Combus-
offers a re-engineered modeling tion and Apple’s Final Cut Pro, as
core, designed to ease and speed well as Adobe’s After Effects.
the process. The modeling core ■ Maxon Computer;
products
gains support for N-Gons, with www.maxon.net

which users can create models
based on polygons having virtually any number of points.
At the same time, Cinema 4D’s modeling tool set adds
improved polygon knitting and stitching and a new brush
Celco Advances Film
film recording
tool for painting point deformations on a model.
Cinema 4D’s user interface is made more intuitive by
HeadsUpDisplay (HUD). By bringing the necessary tools Recording Software
within the editor, HUD provides access to configurable
information and functions, and enables users to take
advantage of a full-screen editor. For character animators,
the upgrade offers new Clothilde functions that ease the
products
process of adding clothing to characters and simulating

cloth. Hard-IK sports more kinematics for character
motion, whereas Motion Blending enables motions to be
blended into each other. And the cloth dynamics engine,
made specifically for simulating cloth, ensures fast colli-
sion detection.
Celco has announced the availability of Version 2.0 of

its FilmOut Pro advanced film recording software.
enabling textures and photos to be stretched and manipu- The newly upgraded film recorder and image con-
lated across a continuous surface; Follow Me, for pushing trol software is designed for use with the latest gen-
and pulling a surface along a path; and The Intersector, aid- eration of the company’s Fury and FireStorm digital
ing users in intersecting complex shapes with a single motion picture film recorders.
mouse click. SketchUp 4.0 is available now for $495 for a Sporting a new user interface, FilmOut Pro 2.0
new license and $95 for an upgrade. provides users with various image processing and
The company also has debuted a previsualization viewing tools with which to define aspect ratios and
extension for SketchUp 4.0. SketchUp 4 Film & Stage, now formats, crop and resize images, and more.
available for Windows and Mac OS X platforms, assists Version 2.0 further offers an automated color-man-
SketchUp users in storyboarding, scene design, layout, and agement utility, an interactive A/B image-comparison
logistic planning. SketchUp 4 Film & Stage includes a slider, image-sharpening algorithms, degrain func-
library of pre-drawn film-specific components, as well as a tions, and the ability to display image histograms by
Camera Tool with which to control aspect ratios and cam- color channel. FilmOut Pro is bundled with FinalView,
era position. Users also have the option of exporting AVI an image-viewing software solution that provides
and QuickTime files for use with such professional video users with a final look at the image, in its exact size
applications as Apple’s Final Cut Pro. and position on film, before it is sent to the recorder.
■ @Last Software; www.sketchup.com ■ Celco; www.celco.com
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Hi Def Jam
music video
Most music videos, which are cre- original film frames. This makes it ideal
ated on a “fast track,” are not fin- as a master file format, since it can be
ished in HD. The format is expen- ported to other formats for future needs
sive, the postproduction work is without image degradation.
time-consuming, and, above all, Ch-Check It Out itself is a blast from For the video’s Star Trek sequence, the
user focus
artists used Avid’s DS Nitris to mimic the

music video channels do not push the past, with an eclectic collection of
low-tech look of the original TV series.
for it. But when the Beastie Boys nostalgic-style beats and rhythms. The
tapped Northern Lights Post to video is a similar bizarre mix of hip- the visual effects and the compositing
create a video for their song Ch- hop humor and visual non sequiturs of numerous greenscreen shots.
Check It Out, they required that it that range from a parody of the Star For the Everglades scene, for example,
be done in high def. Trek TV series to a chase through the the artists used an Avid DS Nitris system
“It was important to the band Florida Everglades. to composite the 16mm footage of the
to have a 24p HD master because While some of the styles look dated, band and the boat, which were filmed
the musicians are not only interested all the imagery was shot in the present. against greenscreen and composited with
in the technology, but they also want to Nevertheless, the music video was shot the background plates of the swamps,
preserve their work for years to come,” in a number of formats, including which were shot in the less-expensive
says editor/effects artist Ross Shain of 16mm, 24p, HD, and NTSC, all of which 24p HD. The scene was augmented
Northern Lights Post. A universal mas- had to be converted to HD resolution. with animated water splashes, mist,
tering format, 24p is not interlaced so it In addition to finishing the video in and particles created in Wondertouch’s
results in a 1:1 relationship with the HD, Northern Lights Post also handled ParticleIllusion. —Karen Moltenbrey
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Slam-Dunk Effects
broadcast
Audiences can expect plenty of some’s above-the-rim duel becomes inspired by the real talents and personal-
action when two of the NBA’s more extreme, with the stars trading ities of the players.”
best point guards go head-to- stunning three-point shots and devas- To create the CG athletes, Blur
head on the court. But when their tating slam dunks that eventually artists met Francis and Davis while they
user focus
digital doubles play an intense leave the basketball court in ruins. were on the road, and acquired high-res
game of one-on-one in a grungy Despite the unbelievable stunts, the digital photos of their facial and body
industrial back-lot setting, the spot, created entirely by Blur Studio, fea- features that the artists used as a refer-
feats escalate from the superhu- tures photorealistic animation created ence while modeling the characters in
man to the totally outrageous. Discreet’s 3ds max. The Blur team also
That’s what transpired when used the photos to texture the models,
computer-generated versions of which was done in Adobe’s Photoshop.
Steve Francis of the Houston Next, using a Vicon mocap system,
Rockets and Baron David of the New the group acquired motion data from a
Orleans Hornets faced off in an all- performance by two players recom-
CG television commercial for Ree- mended by Davis who mimicked the
bok. As the spot progresses, the two- moves of the two stars.
The artists then used Eyeon Soft-
Digital doubles of two NBA stars show
ware’s Digital Fusion to composite the
off their athletic superpowers, and their
footwear, in an all-CG Reebok TV spot. CG players into the scenes, which are
brimming with detail. For instance, a
with motion-captured data. In one number of close-up shots reveal the
scene, for instance, Davis ricochets the granularity in the asphalt surface of
ball off an air duct and light stanchion the court and the cracked and fading
before catching it and dropping it paint of the free-throw line. In addi-
through the rim in a backward slam tion, panoramas offer sweeping views
dunk. He then flips his body over the rim of the gritty urban environment, com-
and lands gracefully atop the backboard. plete with spray-painted scrawls creat-
“It’s pure fantasy,” says Blur president ed by a graffiti artist commissioned by
Tim Miller, “but it’s a fantasy that is the studio. —KM
Get Smart,
Get Ahead
Avid Training.
Get it.
800.867.AVID (2843)
www.avid.com/getit
© 2004 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Avid is either a registered trademark or trademark
of Avid Technology, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks contained
herein are the property of their respective owners.

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The DCC market at year’s end

market outlook
In its updated “Digital Content Creation Report,” Jon market leader. Moreover, Roxio sold its CD/DVD products
Peddie Research calls attention to several industry trends to Sonic Solutions this year. Despite all this activity, the
that emerged over the past 12 months, as well as pro- DVD authoring and audio market segments are forecast to
vides a forecast for 2005. realize only small gains throughout 2007.
3D modeling and animation software experienced Evidence indicates that the 2D graphics segment leads
growth in 2004, a trend expected to continue throughout the DCC market, and its dominance is expected to con-
2005. The 3D modeling and animation segment saw other tinue through 2006. With its Photoshop products, Adobe
profound changes in 2004 as well. Alias emerged from the has maintained a firm hold on the high end of the 2D
shelter of parent company SGI to go private and shook up graphics and imaging markets, which experienced a rise
the market with a dramatic in digital photography in
price cut for Maya, a move DCC Market Forecast 2004. Although longtime
that increased unit ship- 3500 competitor Jasc remained
ments and overall revenue. 3000 Interactive Content doggedly on Adobe’s heels
Millions of Dollars (US $)
Competitor Softimage, own- 2500 Desktop Publishing with its PaintShop Pro prod-
ed by Avid, followed suit 2000 DVD uct, it has been acquired
with price reductions, in- 2D Graphics by Corel, a company unwill-
1500
cluding a $495 version of Audio ing to cede the professional
1000
XSI. The trend has driven imaging market to Adobe.
DV
down prices across the 500 All in all, the digital con-
3D Software
board, which is offset by 0 tent creation market weath-
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
increased unit sales. Price- Source: Jon Peddie Research ered a difficult period. The
cutting has been beneficial decline of world economies
overall and has spurred sales as artists show a willingness had a profound effect on the DCC market, as advertising
to experiment with new products. revenues declined and budgets tightened. Although
In 2004, several companies hoped to build a high-vol- almost every DCC segment suffered, the trend reversed
ume consumer market with CD/DVD-burning products, itself in 2004. Casting an eye on the future, Jon Peddie
an idea that originally spurred the organization of Roxio. Research suggests that the DCC market as a whole will
Pinnacle acquired VOB Computersysteme GmbH, adding continue to rise through 2006, after which time it is like-
CD/DVD-burning products to its arsenal. With OEM deals ly to begin tapering off.
for its MyDVD products, Sonic Solutions is the venerable — Kathleen Maher, senior analyst, Jon Peddie Research
In Brief
news
Newly separated from parent company Entertainment Group stocks in 1998. will collaborate on technology innovations in
DreamWorks SKG, DreamWorks DreamWorks Animation shares are trading such market areas as digital editing, digital
Animation SKG (Glendale, CA) premiered on the New York Stock Exchange under the cinema, and digital asset management.
on Wall Street, offering 29 million shares of ticker symbol DWA. Hewlett-Packard BioWare Corp. (Edmonton, WA), maker of
common stock at an opening price of $28 per (Palo Alto, CA) revealed that it has signed a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and
share, a price that quickly rose by nearly 40 three-year extension of its multimillion-dollar Neverwinter Nights, was awarded Game
percent. Raising roughly $819 million, agreement with DreamWorks SKG. The Developer of the Year at the 2004 Billboard
DreamWorks Animation is the first major new alliance designates HP as DreamWorks’ Digital Entertainment Awards. The company
stock debut to hail from Hollywood since the sole preferred technology provider for its core also debuted its BioWare Online Store at
public offerings of Lion’s Gate and Fox technology purchases. The companies also http://store.bioware.com.

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viewpoint Video
Uncommon Compositing By Jeff Sauer
Compositing. It’s arguably the

part of postproduction in
which the graphic artist meets
the videographer. Composit-
ing is about designing the
frame, and building and layer-
ing images. Simplistically, whereas
video editing assembles clips linearly
over time, compositing mixes images in
the visual moment, vertically, on a
timeline, rather than horizontally.
There was a time in
digital video’s relatively
distant past when com-
positing was viewed as
an exclusive craft. Com-
Apple’s new Motion software provides a layer palette along with drag-and-drop simplicity
positors and editors were
for applying filters and motion behaviors. These features make the program feel more
almost thought to be
like a graphics editor than a video editing application.
Jeff Sauer from different planets,
is a contributing editor
or at least of differing has become a regular, indeed expected, part of postproduction. Today, it is just about
of Computer Graphics
World and director of
artistic strengths and assumed that all video projects—from wedding videos to corporate promotion to TV
the Digital Video Group, sensibilities. That per- advertisements—will include titles and graphics with production values similar to
an independent research ception was fed by the those we’ve all come to know from watching television. Fancy motion graphics, flying
and testing organization (very expensive) dedi- logos, and montages are all standard fare. Much of the time, those “enhancements” are
for digital media.
cated Unix workstations expected for free, and most video editors are automatically enlisted as compositors.
He can be reached at
jeff@dtvgroup.com. that compositing requir- Certainly compositing is more accessible now. Video editing system timelines
ed and by the specific regularly support multiple layers, as well as keyframe control of effects, objects, text,
and detailed training it transitions, and layers. That blurring of the lines between video editing and com-
Compositing took to capably operate positing is nothing new, of course, going back to the mid-1990s when video editing
them. Few professional software began to include the ability to layer tracks and visual effects. The develop-
has fueled video editors would ven- ers of the first release of Apple’s Final Cut Pro started with the stated goal of match-
ture there. In those days, ing at least 80 percent of the video editing features of Avid’s industry-standard Media
expectations compositing was a big Composer as well as 80 percent of the features of Adobe’s dominant compositing
line item on a production application, After Effects.
for creativity budget typically reserved
for premium clients and Built-in Compositing
high-profile jobs. Today, just about any serious non-linear editing (NLE) system or software supports
at all levels
Most of that has multitrack editing and the ability to layer images, effects, filters, transparencies, and
changed. Compositing graphics in a single timeline. Applications such as Avid’s Media Composer Adrenaline,
of video has exploded, driven Pinnacle Systems’ Liquid Edition, Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Leitch’s Velocity, Ulead’s
primarily by the rapid Media Studio Pro, Canopus’s Edius, and others all have significant multitrack, motion
production. growth of computer pro- control, and effects-creation capabilities that were once the domain of compositing
cessing power, and it engines. What’s more, because software alone can handle just about any basic edit-

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©2004 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.
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ing function without rendering, real-time compositing visualization—functionality Perhaps most important for profes-
that once required that big Unix iron—is the carrot that now drives many digital video sionals, Motion integrates directly with
hardware vendors (see “Hardware-Enhanced Editing,” November, pg. 14). Apple’s Final Cut Pro HD. It launches
Yet in many ways, the transition to compositing within video editing applications directly from within Final Cut Pro and
has just traded one type of complex process for another. Whereas training was once includes support for real-time visualiza-
needed to drive the Unix hardware of old, today one often needs to understand the tion with HD sources. Motion can even be
most intricate levels of often very advanced and complex video editing interfaces in used as a DVD motion-title and motion-
order to create multilayer motion animation. menu creation tool for Apple’s DVD
For example, to create simple motion text in an NLE interface, you might have to Studio Pro authoring application.
start with a title or character-generation utility, an interface that may or may not On the surface, products like Motion—
include any motion capabilities and is even less likely to include filters and effects. as well as the wide availability of com-
Perhaps you’d create a title, save it, then open it in an effects editor, work there, then positing capabilities in video editing soft-
save that to the timeline to mix it with the other tracks. Dedicated compositing tools ware—may seem like they will spell the
offer greater control of the elements in a unified interface. death of compositing as a craft, just as the
Apple’s new Motion software was designed for just that purpose. Motion is a dedi- use of canned effects and stock motion
cated motion-graphics tool that may not seem so special when its list of features is animation may appear to dumb down
compared to those built-in capabilities of non-linear editing applications. But the $299 video creativity. And in some cases, that
price is a bargain for the facility it offers for handling common compositing tasks. will certainly be true.
Motion builds visual sequences in a timeline that is similar to that of a video edit- However, the proliferation of com-
ing application. But much of the interface feels more like a graphics tool. Most notably, positing at virtually every level of pro-
Motion has a dominant layer palette, much like that of Photoshop, that offers the abili- duction ultimately drives expectations
ty to non-destructively add objects and view groups of objects. And dozens of canned at the highest levels of production to
filters (including various blurs, color and brightness correction, distortion, and glow) find creative differentiation. That offers
as well as visual and particle effects (such as fire, smoke, and bouncing balls) can be opportunities for imaginative designers
applied by simply dragging and dropping. working at all levels of video production
Motion follows the same simplicity in its approach to creating movement. “Be- to produce uncommonly creative com-
haviors” are something like movement templates that can be added to create motion posites. Indeed, this is true whether they
animation as easily as adding a filter. The roughly 40 supplied behaviors (including use straightforward tools, such as
throw, gravity, grow, and spin) are stackable and can create complex movement Motion, or more transitional composit-
sequences with little effort. Naturally, with both filters and behaviors, you’ll always ing tools, such as Adobe’s stalwart After
have the ability to fine-tune, edit, Effects (now in Version 6.5), a wide
Because detailed motion and effects parameter
controls are now standard fare in just about
and alter the defaults, but they offer array of tools from Discreet (ranging
every non-linear editing interface—including invaluable time-savings for both from Combustion all the way up to Flint,
Pinnacle’s Liquid Edition, shown below—they mundane text animation and cre- Flame, and Inferno), or Apple’s increas-
afford significant compositing possibilities. ative experimentation. ingly robust Shake.

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Film
Loco mo
Live-action film techniques
t r a n s p o r t To m H a n k s a n d c a s t i n t o
t h e C G w o r l d o f T h e P o l a r E x p re s s
W hen filmmak-
ers think about
bringing a story-
book to life, they usually imagine
re-creating the fantasy world by using
animation or by putting actors into the
roles of the storybook characters. Shrek is a
good example of the former; last year’s Peter
Pan is a good example of the latter. This year’s
The Polar Express is an example of neither...or, per-
haps, both.
The film, based on Chris Van Allsburg’s illustrated
book of the same name, The Polar Express tells the story of
8-year-old Chris’s train ride to the North Pole on Christmas
Eve. It looks like an animated feature, and it was created entirely
with 3D computer graphics, including the IMAX release. But it was
directed by Robert Zemeckis like a live-action film, in which actors
performed nearly all the human characters.
“Bob wanted to direct actors, not a bunch of animators,” says Sony Pictures
Imageworks’ Jerome Chen, co-visual effects supervisor. What he wanted, to be
precise, was Tom Hanks—whose production company had optioned the book, and
with whom he worked on Cast Away and Forrest Gump—to play the part of the
boy...and the train conductor, the hobo, Santa, and the boy’s father. “He didn’t want Tom
to just voice the characters,” says Chen. “He wanted him to act them.” And he wanted adults
to play all the other children, too. Imageworks made it possible.
The actors—Hanks, other adult actors who played the parts of children and adults, child actors,
acrobats, small people, and even musicians—performed on three stages. They were all fitted with
costumes and some wore makeup. The dialogue was recorded while they were filmed, much as it is for
any live-action film. But it wasn’t like any other live-action film. The stages were motion-capture stages.
The sets and props were built out of blue chicken wire, and when the actors wore costumes on stage, the cos-
tumes were made of mesh so they wouldn’t occlude the motion-capture cameras. Rather than one cameraman
working with the director, 12 cameramen using off-the-shelf video cameras filmed the actors in the round. And
motion-capture equipment recorded the actors’ every movement.
“The set looked like the holodeck from Star Trek,” says Chen. “Everything was gray and black with
all these high-tech looking lights. And 20 feet away, inside the “widow maker” [a separate room], peo-
ple were making sure the computers were working and the network cards weren’t failing. It was so

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Film
ot ion B y B a r b a ra R o b e r t s o n
Before The Polar

Express train finishes
its journey to the
North Pole, it takes its
passengers on a wild
ride that becomes
even more exciting in
the 3D IMAX version
thanks to 3D graphics.
All images ©2004, courtesy

Sony Pictures Imageworks.
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Film
weird. I never thought I would see Tom Animation for the train conductor, one of five
characters acted by Tom Hanks, was derived
Hanks in a motion-capture suit with Bob
from performances directed on stage by Robert
Zemeckis directing him.”
Zemeckis and captured with a 360-degree facial-
ting him.”
and body-performance capture system
Performance Capture
developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Once the crew members knew they would
be capturing Hanks while Zemeckis was directng him, they be- faces and bodies of up
gan looking at existing motion-capture technology. Until then, to four actors working
body and facial performances had been captured separately, and on a 10- by 10- by 8-foot stage using 64 motion-capture cameras
often the facial performance was hand-animated rather than cap- linked together. Demian Gordon, motion-capture supervisor,
tured—as it was for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, for example. designed the camera placement: Each camera had a 3- by 5-foot
Animators then pasted the two separate performances together. field of view. Vicon’s IQ software was upgraded to handle the mul-
That was not what The Polar Express crew had in mind. “When tiple cameras and dense facial capture; the upgrades were incor-
you have an actor like Tom Hanks, you don’t want to split him porated in version 1.5 and later into the company’s new MX sys-
apart,” says Chen. “We needed a place where four actors could tem. The House of Moves’ Diva software was also tweaked to
look at one another and move in any direction, and we could handle the heavy load.
record their faces and bodies.” The actors each wore 151 markers on their faces and 32 mark-
As a result, Imageworks, with the help of Vicon, developed a ers on their bodies. The markers were the size of a pencil lead,
performance-capture system to do exactly that. With this system, 2.7mm in diameter. Fifteen makeup artists applied these dots to
based on Vicon motion-capture equipment, they captured the the actors’ faces using a map drawn by Alberto Menache, senior
CG supervisor, who developed the facial muscle system for the
digital models. “The markers had to be painstakingly glued onto
the same places every day,” says Gordon. “After every scene, a
host of people with flashlights inspected each marker and
searched the ground for any that fell off.”
The crew also applied markers to the sets and props, which
were built in two sizes—an adult size and a larger size so that the
adults would look child-sized next to them; the markers helped
the crew place matching objects in the CG
environment more precisely. The sets and
props were moved between three stages—the
performance-capture stage and two larger
stages for body capture only—which were
managed by Giant Studios.
Most of the characters in the film were motion-
captured (body only) or performance-captured
(face and body simultaneously), including the
waiters. Giant Studios handled the body capture
of multiple actors on large motion-capture stages.

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Film
One sequence supervised by Menache takes place in a small two Matrix films, says that number is five times the total amount
passenger car on the train and has 30 characters, including waiters of data captured during six months of working on those films.
and chefs serving hot chocolate to the children. “But they’re danc- At the end of each day, Zemeckis picked performances from
ing and doing cartwheels and walking on the walls and ceiling, and videos shot during the day. The motion-capture team, using time
the conductor is dancing and doing the moon walk,” he says. For codes from the video, selected motion-capture data to match.
this, the second-unit actors and acrobats playing the waiters, chefs, The selected body performances for each character were then
and children were captured on the large stage, while Hanks’s per- assembled into scenes in Alias’s MotionBuilder, and video clips
formance was captured on the performance-capture stage. of matching facial performances were placed around the perime-
ter of the screen.
Zemeckis then “shot” the scenes with Robert Presley, a cam-
era operator, who used a camera head as an input device. When
he turned the wheels on the camera head, he moved the virtual
camera in MotionBuilder—one wheel would tilt the camera; the
other would pan it. The system, dubbed Wheels, was developed
by Imageworks.
“He was working in real time with the motion capture applied to
the low-res characters that were in CG sets,” says Chen. “The sets
were in the same place as the chicken wire on the stage. It was a new
experience for Presley, and yet the device was familiar.” Using this
system, Zemeckis created master shots, close-ups, over-the-shoul-
der shots—just as he would have done with a live-action film. “The
only difference was that he was filming a digital character that did
exactly the same thing on every take,” says Chen.
Meanwhile, a separate crew applied the facial-animation data
to the digital models. The data, once fastened
to 300 digital muscles, drove the facial per-
formance—except for the eyes—although ani-
mators fine-tuned the expressions. The eyes
and eyelids were entirely hand animated.
To create the digital muscle system anat-
omy for characters performed by Hanks,
Menache started with 80 photographs of the
actor doing different facial expressions. “I
traced where I thought his muscles would be
on waxed paper,” he says. “The only thing I
guessed about was his jaw pivot.” The map he
Performances from videotaped capture sessions were applied to 3D proxies (top) and
derived was used in two ways—to place the
put into simple sets (middle) so Zemeckis could design camera moves interactively. Later,
motion-capture markers on Hanks and, simi-
facial animation was applied and sets added (bottom) based on the camera moves.
larly, to create the digital muscles. “We put
Because Hanks performing as a child and as an adult would markers on the digital face just like on the actor,” Menache says,
often be in a shot with adult actors playing children, a team of “and then ran a program that created all the muscles.”
“triangulators” kept track of all the different scales for eyelines,
props, and sets. They also blocked out how many steps an adult Model Makers
actor should take to walk across the set when the action was des- Character technical directors used the same system for other char-
tined to be scaled down to child size. Each scene with children acters, all of which had the same number of facial muscles. Thus,
was filmed and motion-captured twice—once with the adult even though the markers roughly matched a performer’s anatomy,
actors and once with child actors; however, the data from the the data could be applied to other characters. “The data is con-
child actors was primarily used for reference. verted to the anatomy of the character,” Menache says. “We tried
After each take, a team of 18 people from Imageworks and to keep the rigging as straightforward as possible so it could be
Giant Studios would check the data—massive amounts of data. duplicated.” Similarly, the motion data captured from one per-
“We shot 50 gigabytes a day,” says Gordon. By way of compari- former could drive disparate characters. By scaling the data, adult
son, Gordon, who was also motion-capture supervisor for the last actors could perform child-sized characters.

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Film
All the models were created in Maya using

subdivision surfaces for the bodies and skin; the
characters’ costumes were created with NURBS.
To create the models, actors playing the main
characters were scanned and photographed.
“For Santa and the hobo, we scanned Tom
[Hanks] wearing make-up, prosthetics, and a fat
suit,” says Sean Phillips, senior CG supervisor.
“We also scanned 24 kids, but ended up using
five body types mixed and matched to reduce the
load on the modelers.”
The costumes were simulated using the same
object cloth system in Maya that was used for
Spider-Man 2 (see “Another Big Leap,” July, pg. The hobo and the child were both performed by Hanks. To help actors playing chil-
22), developed by Imageworks and Alias. For hair, dren, the crew made props out of blue chicken wire and wire mesh in two sizes—
the crew used a variety of methods including normal and large enough for an adult to seem child-sized.
dynamics in Maya and a proprietary simulation
engine. “If the character was a hero, we’d use one system, but if it helped herd thousands of digital caribou in one of the many envi-
was in the background, we used simpler hair that approximated ronments the train passed through on its journey north.
the right motion,” says Rob Bredow, senior CG supervisor. “We “One of the hardest things about the environments was that
simulated subsets of the hair in a way that is similar to the way we didn’t know where the camera would be when we were build-
guide hairs are used, but we don’t like to go into a lot of detail about ing them,” says Phillips. “We had blueprints, but until we got the
our system.” The studio’s patented work on clumping, however, is camera move, we didn’t know how much detail we’d need. So,
documented in SIGGRAPH papers. especially for Santa Square, we rolled the dice.”
“The challenge for this film was not whether we could do the Much of the film takes place in outdoor environments or
simulations, but how to set them up for 40 characters with often inside the train. “The environment changed as the train got clos-
three or four characters per shot for the hour-and-a-half film,” er to the North Pole, from semi-urban to rural to forested, and
says Bredow. The most extreme setup was required for the scene then into tundra in a great arctic wasteland,” says James
in Santa Square, where 30,000 elves mingle with the children, Williams, layout supervisor. “Because we built the environments
Santa Claus himself, musicians, and reindeer. in a one-to-one scale with the real world and because the motion
As with the other characters in the film, the performances for data is one-to-one, we were very creative in how we dressed the
the elves were based on motion-capture data, in their case from sets so we could reuse a lot of them.”
Cirque du Soleil acrobats and little people. To manage 30,000 elves,
the crew used crowd-simulation software. The same program also Magical Worlds
Although many sets were made with 3D objects, some were
The 30,000 elves in Santa Square were animated using motion-
capture cycles applied to crowd-simulation software. Tom Hanks
matte paintings created with Maxon Computer’s Cinema 4D. To
plays Santa, the child Chris with Santa, and the train conductor. handle textured 3D objects and sets, the crew used a new envi-

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Film
ronment-assembly system. “We’ve got thousands and thousands The camera follows a train ticket that flies out of Chris’s hand into
of objects—from a marble that rolls across the floor to the train a magical CG winter wonderland complete with CG wolves and lit
only by moonlight and the train windows.
itself—and everything was painted in our texture paint depart-
ment,” says Mark Lambert, senior CG supervisor. “We had to Bredow, senior CG supervisor. “It had to hold up for many min-
have a system to keep up with what texture goes on which object utes because it established the scene and the mood of the film.”
and provide it when it was needed.” For these effects and others, including atmospherics and
In one shot, for example, the camera moves through four cracking ice, the crew used Side Effects Software’s Houdini with
miles in two and a half minutes. “We follow a train ticket through a new custom tool called SPLAT (Sony Pictures Layered Art
the moonlight in a forest where we see wolves, an eagle, and Technology). “SPLAT uses a painter’s algorithm to draw all of our
waterfalls,” says Lambert. smoke and steam,” says Bredow. “It sorts the particles from back
The animals were all hand animated as was the train, which to front, draws the back one first and the next one on top of that.”
is an enormous model. “It’s based on an actual train,” says Because the algorithm is accelerated in hardware (Nvidia cards
Phillips. “The hydraulics and the steam vents, for example, are using OpenGL), volumetric renders that might have taken 20
accurate almost to a fault. It is so heavy that we had fairly elabo- hours were output in three to four minutes per frame. “The nice
rate scripts for stripping out the undercarriage.” thing is that an artist can move lights around almost in real time
The effects department added the smoke and steam. “When and see the effect on the smoke,” he says.
Chris first walks out into the street, the train looks just like it does The lights helped keep the imagery from becoming too photore-
in the book, with smoke and steam pouring off,” says Rob alistic. The film takes place entirely at night—inside the train or
later, in Santa Square, and outside in the moonlight, which
encouraged dramatic lighting. “I wasn’t lighting like I would
for a live-action movie,” says Lambert. “It’s Christmas Eve
and time is magical. We had beams of light cutting through
the dark with fog in the air. We used color in ways that
wouldn’t happen in the real world. If I wanted something
moodier, I could try it. It was a great thing to play with.”
The crew members who worked on this film believe
they have taken part in filmmaking magic, in helping cre-
ate a new filmmaking medium.
“This is a medium where we get the best of both
worlds,” says Williams. “We get the exactness of the ani-
mation process in which you can go back again and again
and refine each take, but at the same time, we get the spon-
taneity of live-action performances and live-action tools. It
breaks through a glass ceiling we never knew was there.
It frees us to redefine the way we make movies.”
Because the motion-capture data was most easily applied to CG characters on
a one-to-one basis, the train was built on a one-to-one scale as well. Smoke Barbara Robertson is an award-winning journalist and a
and steam were added using a new custom drawing tool called SPLAT. contributing editor for Computer Graphics World.

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U sing various technical and artistic approaches,

three developers have injected fear and horror
into their recent game releases, producing unique and
terrifying experiences that are not for the fainthearted.
Game developers In Doom 3, Id Software crafted a hellacious sce-
nario—using state-of-the-art computer graphics and
use the latest tools and
techniques—in which the player assumes the role of the
t e c h n i q u e s t o c re a t e main game character to confront horrific demons and
zombies unleashed from hell. Meanwhile, gaming giant
frightening experiences
Konami employed both a riveting story and compelling
graphics to place the player in the middle of a psycholog-
B y Ka re n M o l t e n b re y
ical nightmare for the latest release in its frightening
franchise, Silent Hill 4: The Room. In Missing: Since
January, game studio Lexis Numerique devised a new
approach to instill fear, using reality and unusual mixed
media—video, the Internet, and graphics—to immerse
the player (acting as himself or herself rather than a
game character) in the gripping story line, as the person
matches wits against a serial killer.
Through spellbinding stories augmented with CG
innovation and invention, these studios are delivering
what, in effect, are real-time horror films that, because
of their interactivity, deliver far more chills and thrills
than a typical scary movie.

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Gaming: Computer Graphics
Cutting-edge CGI, including unified lighting and shadowing,

gives players a hellish experience in Doom 3
I n 1993, Id Software set a new standard

in first-person shooter games with its
flagship sci-fi horror title Doom, which,
Doom 3 engine built by [Id founder and
technical director] John Carmack.”
through a revolutionary game engine, Engineered for Fright

upped the ante in gameplay and interac- Doom 3, in fact, more closely reflects the
tive graphics. Recently, Id and Activision vision Carmack had when he created the
gave the classic release, and the technolo- original Doom more than a decade earlier.
gies used to create it, a total makeover, the After completing Quake III Arena in late
result of which is Doom 3. 2000, Carmack began developing the new
A retelling of the original tale as op- Doom 3 rendering engine, now available
posed to a sequel, Doom 3 employs state- as a commercial license, to take advantage
of-the-art 3D technology, enabling the of some of the advancements the card
player to again assume the role of a marine vendors were making in hardware accel-
stationed at a Union Aerospace Corpora- eration, particularly for calculating geom-
tion facility, only this time on Mars instead etry and real-time lighting and shadow-
of on one of the Martian moons. Just as ing. “Lighting and shadowing can be very
Images ©2004 Id Software.

before, a portal opens and demonic crea- moody and atmospheric, which is perfect
tures from hell spring forth, forcing the for the level of fright we wanted in this
main character and a handful of other sur- game,” states Hollenshead.
vivors into a clash between good and evil. In fact, as programmer Robert Duffy
Taking advantage of a state-of-the-art
With the game’s sophisticated graph- points out, the Doom 3 engine is pro-
graphics engine, Id Software raises the
ics, players are drawn into a frightening grammed for cinematic gaming, provid-
terror level in Doom 3 with film-like
first-person gaming experience rife with ing a landscape in which the Id designers imagery, including detailed demons,
moody environments and scary monsters. and artists could utilize revolutionary moody environments, and eerie shadows.
“From the near-cinema-quality visuals to graphics features and techniques, among
the terrifying atmosphere and hyper-real- them unified lighting and shadow-volume immersed in the story and the action.”
istic environments, the whole game calculation, in which every light can cast In addition, Doom 3 uses normal map-
screams ‘interactive horror film,’” says Id shadows. “We are using the features of the ping, a variation of bump mapping that, in-
co-owner and CEO Todd Hollenshead. latest graphics cards, but the actual image stead of just applying grayscales, uses all
From the beginning, players are im- rendering is done in the engine, not the color channels (RGB) for per-pixel lighting.
mersed in the title and remain so through card, and that’s what gives the imagery its The color channels, obtained from a higher
the last level largely because of the tight in- unique look,” says Duffy. detailed version of an object to produce the
tegration of the cinematics and the game- Id’s former engines, such as those em- same effects, allow an artist to add more
play. As lead designer and Id Software co- ployed in Quake III, used “pre-baked,” or shading to create the illusion of high detail on
owner Tim Willits explains, in most games, static, lighting. However, with unified a low-res model. A sophisticated graphics
players know they aren’t in gameplay mode lighting, the dark areas of the long, creepy technique, normal mapping had not been
anymore when they watch the cinematics, corridors become that much darker. “You used to this extent in previous games because
which are usually a higher quality because can really appreciate all the subtle shadows the imagery could not be processed fast
they are rendered outside of the game’s and the way the light moves around objects enough on current hardware to support inter-
graphics engine. “But when we pull the in the environments,” says lead artist activity. However, Carmack, known for
camera back and show the players a Kenneth Scott. “In Doom 3, the lighting is devising technical solutions that push the
glimpse of some monsters they’ll be en- dynamic and realistic. If the player moves a gaming industry forward, developed in-
countering, those monsters in the cinemat- flashlight over a corrugated surface, the house techniques that overcame that hurdle
ic look the same as those in-game,” he says. tiny shadows pouring over all the surfaces and enabled the Doom 3 engine to “draw”
“The visual quality and fidelity are exactly will shift based on the direction of the light. what appear to be detailed characters and
the same, rendered in real time through the It looks real, and the player becomes more imagery in real time.
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Gaming: Computer Graphics
The team built high-poly (300,000 to shadows will move accordingly.

three million), cinematic-quality models For the character and monster ani-
for the characters and monsters using main- mations, the group used a commer-
ly NewTek’s LightWave, in addition to Pixo- cial package, Alias’s Maya, and for
logic’s Zbrush. Next, the artists built lighter managing all the source code and
versions with lower poly counts of 1800 to assets (which total 2.5GB), it used
3000. Then, using the normal mapping Avid/NxN’s Alienbrain software.
technique, they generated the normal maps “This is the first shipping game
from the high-poly models and applied the title that gives you near-cinematic
maps to the lighter models. As a result, the image quality in real time,” says
The dim, industrial style of the game’s indoor envi-
lighter models render almost like the dense Duffy. To put the team’s accom-
ronments, set upon a reddish Martian landscape,
models, conveying height and surface plishment into perspective: One
provide a sense of foreboding.
anomalies, revealing, for example, every level of Doom 3 has more media
wrinkle, cut, and crease on a demon’s skin. and art assets than the entire Quake III Without a doubt, Doom 3 raises the
Meanwhile, the group generated the tex- Arena game, which is only a few years old. level of graphic quality—and virtual ter-
tures from photographic references and Another of the group’s hurdles was get- ror—in a game, and has been called one of
from scratch, and applied the surfaces to the ting the title to run on a range of computers, the scariest games ever by the Associated
models using Adobe’s Photoshop. With as the team spent the last few months of the Press. Thanks to the slow pace, players em-
Right Hemisphere’s Deep Paint, the artists project tweaking the engine and the game bark on a suspenseful journey through the
fixed and smoothed the exposed seams on so it would run on a “typical” gaming com- gloomy environments, where, lurking in
the creatures’ bodies. They then augmented puter. Currently, Id is working on an Xbox the dark for their next victim may be some
the details by adding bump mapping to the version of the release, which is expected to of the most nightmarish creatures ever con-
flat surfaces, making them appear uneven be available next year and will incorporate ceived, from an array of flesh-torn zombies
and curved, a key feature because the light new Xbox Live features including a co- armed with their own brutal strength or
and shadows react appropriately based on operative mode. The console game will weapons of mass destruction, to deadly
the contour of the bump map. maintain Doom 3’s unique look and state- demons of every size and shape, including
To complete the game, the group de- of-the-art features, since Carmack devel- a mechanical/organic bull-like creature
vised a customized particle editor and ef- oped the Doom 3 rendering core with the with razor claws and needle-sharp teeth,
fects compositing system for realistically Xbox in mind. However, the console’s to the gruesome, bodiless flaming heads
generating fire, smoke, hair, and weather memory limitations are requiring the team whose shrill cries often can be heard in the
effects. The team also created a proprietary to rework some of the assets found in the distance as they search for their next soul.
physics system, so if the player shoots a PC version. Meanwhile, Id and Activision “Doom is so dynamic, it’s hard to not
hanging light fixture, for example, it will just announced Doom 3: Resurrection of feel as if you are a part of this frightening
swing back and forth, and the projected Evil, an expansion pack for the PC version. experience,” says Scott.
mystery,” says Wilson Cheng,

Silent Hill 4’s product manager.
The story unfolds in a
sleepy village near the infa-
Fear hits home in Silent Hill 4, which uses compelling CGI mous town of Silent Hill, the
setting in the series’s previous
and a terrifying tale to create a horrific ‘head game’ titles. It’s here where the new
protagonist, Henry Townshend,
B y enhancing the features that have defined its Silent Hill

brand of psychological horror—intense gameplay, dark,
highly detailed imagery, and a bone-chilling story—Konami
awakens from a nightmare to find that he is trapped in his apart-
ment, where a portal has appeared, through which heinous
creatures and the ghastly undead lie in wait.
Digital Entertainment has raised the terror level in gaming with According to sub-producer Akihiro Imamura, users who play
Silent Hill 4: The Room. “By transforming a would-be sanctuary— horror-genre games expect to be horrified, and one way the team
the player’s room—into an unpredictable and inescapable night- met that challenge was with a riveting narrative. “In a game en-
mare, players will find themselves in uncharted territory as they vironment, the player controls the main character, so it’s necessary
explore a nightmarish alternate reality to unravel a truly unnerving that the player relate to the character’s emotions, or the story will

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Gaming: Video
usually found in adventure games with a

style of play that blurs the line between
gaming and reality, and takes problem
Missing brings fear to life in this video-based reality game solving in computer games to a new level.
At times, players must use their In-
I n most computer games like Doom 3 and

Silent Hill 4: The Room, developers
immerse the player in the action using a
The PC game also features an innova-
tive blend of mixed-media gameplay in
which the player uses a CD-ROM and the
ternet browser to search more than 300
Web sites—some are real-world pages,
while others are phony, set up for the
range of tactics: an engrossing story that Internet to solve the disappearance of game. And little do players know that their
elicits emotion, a first-person viewpoint journalists Jack Lorski and his girlfriend progress is being tracked, and that as they
that places the player in the middle of the while they were investigating a series of work to unravel the mystery, they’ll catch
drama, or compelling, lifelike imagery that serial killings for a documentary. Soon the attention of others involved in the
helps suspend disbelief, if even for only a after they vanish, SKL-Network, the case—other players and central story fig-
moment. Despite these efforts, a person is agency Jack works for, receives a haunt- ures, as well as the serial killer.
still usually acutely aware of playing a ing CD-ROM showing video footage he “As the game progresses, the player
character in a game. However, in Dream- had obtained throughout his investiga- will begin receiving e-mails from virtual
Catcher/The Adventure Company’s Miss- tion. But the disc is more than a prop in the characters as well as disturbing messages
ing: Since January, a player actually be- story; it marks the start of a chilling game from The Phoenix,” explains Kemal.
comes a character in the game. The result of cat and mouse between the player and Some of the messages are automatically
is a frighteningly immersive experience a mad killer known as The Phoenix. generated; others are personalized by a
unlike any other. The player is drawn into the drama after real-life support team.
“In most games, you play someone the police and SKL-Network ask the public
else who has great superpowers, such as for help. The person is then provided a Mixed Emotion
big firepower or unrealistic physical abili- copy of the CD-ROM, which, in addition to One unique aspect of the game is that it
ties,” says Djamil Kemal, editorial man- the video footage, also contains a number blends fiction and reality on multiple lev-
ager at French game studio Lexis Numer- of clues and puzzles constructed by the els so the player finds it difficult to distin-
ique, which developed the title. “In killer to draw the player deeper into his guish between the two, from the e-mails
Missing, you play as yourself, with your web. Yet, unlike other adventure games, to the Web sites to the locales in the video.
own skills.” Missing mixes the kind of arbitrary puzzles Sometimes the information sought by the
not be entertaining and the player will not experience the intended The group set the player view to a first-person “real-world”
horror,” he says. “From a story perspective, we created a strong perspective inside the room, making it easier for players to relate
motive, like how to get out of a locked room that is gradually being to the character. Alternatively, the game engine, developed in-
invaded. Early in the game, the room is still safe, but the player house, uses a third-person “alternate reality” view when the
senses that something is wrong, and as the story progresses, we player travels to horrific other worlds, allowing the player to wit-
raise the level of horror, turning the room into a deadly place.” ness the fear and pain of the main character as he encounters the
monsters, says Imamura.
Complementing the story are stylized motion-captured charac-
ters, horrific creatures, and dreary, institutional-like environments
filled with rusty, decaying objects, all created using Sony Computer
Entertainment’s development tool set and Alias’s Maya. Because of
platform limitations, the artists were forced to reduce the number of
polygons for each character on the screen, making up for this deficit
with rich, precise textures created in Adobe’s Photoshop.
Using fog and other elemental effects, the artists created an
unsettling game atmosphere. They augmented the style with an
Image ©2004 Konami.
extra layer of “creepiness” achieved with a grayish filter that gave

some scenes a grainy, scratched film effect. Aside from adding an
edgy quality, this look becomes quite chilling when used with the
The artists augmented Silent Hill 4’s imagery with a grayish filter haunting music, bizarre monsters, and dramatic narrative—so
that gives this psychological thriller a dingy, institutional look. much so that players may never again feel safe in their rooms.
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Gaming: Video
player is fake, and other times it relates to actual events,

locations, and people.
When Lexis Numerique first devised the concept for the
game four years ago, it had so-called actors begin laying a
trail by sprinkling information on the Internet about them-
selves that would give them a “history,”
thereby making them seem real. Later, the
developer spent another year setting up a
more elaborate system of truths and decep-
tions, even soliciting actual news organiza-
tions to participate. “The missing person is
a French journalist, and we knew that if this
event had occurred in real life, every news-
paper would have covered the story,” In Missing, gameplay becomes real as
explains Kemal. “So we asked news organi- players use the Internet and other media,
zations to allow us to plant information including nearly an hour of video footage
containing real and synthetic locations,
regarding the characters on their sites.
to solve a contrived murder mystery.
Many of them declined because of ethics.
But, eventually, we were able to persuade some of them, including authentic sites, which blurs the fact/fiction line even more.
Liberation, one of the most important French daily newspapers.” “We provide the information in layers—with some locations
The agreements came after the developer devised a technical containing totally useless data—to make the experience seem
solution, an Internet intelligence engine created in Java for the real,” says Kemal, noting that players will have to search only
Internet search engines on partners’ sites, to circumvent the about 25 or so sites, not all 400, to acquire the clues. Some of the
issue of planting “false” information on legitimate sites. “Every- hints are about actual events, which required the development
one who is playing the game knows the name of the missing per- team to thoroughly research locations, happenings, and people,
son, Jack Lorski, so when they search legitimate sites, they will including a real-life 17th-century alchemist who is at the heart of
find the planted articles. Those not playing the game will not be the killer’s vengeance. How well players do and where they end
looking for that person or even know who he is,” explains Kemal. up in the game, however, depends on how well they complete the
“But if a player sends a link for a fake article to someone else, a research and decipher the clues.
‘smoke’ line appears saying the article is fiction.” The Web searches are just one function of the Internet engine’s
Using this methodology, Lexis Numerique was able to sign on AI. The intelligence also determines whether a person is taking a
300 official Web sites to embed game information. Players will break from gameplay or struggling to find a certain solution. And,
even find fake book titles on online shops, though they will be it serves as the “eyes” of the serial killer, recognizing when to send
“sold out.” “We believe Missing is not just entertainment, but a e-mails, which usually occurs immediately after a major clue is
form of art, and many of our partners wanted to participate on that found. “We want players to feel like this guy, this serial killer, is
basis,” says Kemal. Augmenting the real pages are 100 “dummy” now watching them, and that he is a real person,” notes Kemal.
Web locations set up by the developer to serve as backups, ensur- Moreover, the system must determine when the e-mail should be
ing that players will have access to the desired information. automatically generated or sent by a live person.
Players will not be able to distinguish between these and the In addition, the engine analyzes a person’s progress and,
depending on how he or she is doing, will increase or decrease
At times, Missing the difficulty to meet that level of play. In this way, the game
employs jittery appeals to a range of people, from hard-core gamers to casual
video images to
players. For example, the engine may help the player along by
mimic a handheld
sending e-mails from fake partners who are willing to share
camera look, adding
clues. “In this way, the game is playable by everyone,” says
a mysterious quality
to the visuals. In
Kemal. “And the process occurs seamlessly. If we were to ask the
fact, the game player what level of difficulty he or she wants to play, then the
Images ©2004 Lexis Numerique.
studio received a experience would become less real.”

prestigious French
film award for its Mixed Media
video techniques Taking another novel approach, Missing uses live-action video
used in the title. (nearly 45 minutes), rather than CG or animated cut-scenes, to

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Evolve7 > Your work. Your way. Introducing 3ds max 7.

“Why do we use 3ds max? Simply put: Productivity. 3ds max represents a key element in
our production pipelines for the multiple games and SKUs we have at any given time.
We are able to customize every production pipeline for every game and then leverage
our efforts by sharing tools and production methods between projects. With 3ds max,
we are able to efficiently produce the highly detailed and high quality games we're
known for in record time.”
Try 3ds max 7 free for 30 days. Download the trial at www.discreet.com/3dsmax.
3ds max
/Sébastien
Technology Director
Sébastien Lavier
Studio
Ubisoft's Montreal Studio
Games
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell® Chaos Theory™
Prince of Persia® Warrior Within
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six® Black Arrow
Myst IV® Revelation
Far Cry® Instincts
Discreet is a division of Autodesk, Inc. Autodesk, Discreet, and 3ds max are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk Inc./Autodesk Canada Co., in the USA and/or other countries.
All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. © Copyright 2004 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Gaming: Video
reveal past and present events that make the experience more In addition to the high-quality SD and HD video, the game
authentic. Using Sony’s TRV900 and PDX-10 digital cameras, the contains an eclectic mix of 2D and 3D visuals, as well as photo-
team spent one year filming those scenes in eight countries across graphs, documents, and drawings. The graphics, created in
Europe using a cast of professional actors. The group even added Adobe’s Photoshop and Discreet’s 3ds max, appear within the
a scratchy quality to the video and introduced camera jitter to sim- various puzzles and mini-games. According to Kemal, the team
ulate a handheld look, as if the journalists took turns filming each reviewed a tremendous amount of information about serial
other during their investigation. “We didn’t want anyone to think killers when it began exploring the game’s art direction, and
there was a third person there filming the action,” Kemal says. came up with a design that could have been made by The
After acquiring the footage, the group edited it in Adobe’s Phoenix, as opposed to an accomplished digital artist who would
Premiere and After Effects, augmenting the segments with have tremendous programming skills. “The killer wouldn’t have
effects or enhancements using After Effects plug-ins and propri- spent hours learning programming tools,” Kemal reasons. “So
etary software. “Many of the problems we faced were resolved we used Macromedia’s Director; it’s a program the killer could
through lighting. Everything was filmed outdoors and in many have learned to use in a short period of time.”
locations, and the lighting conditions were always changing,”
explains Kemal. “So we used the tools to create the same levels Breaking New Ground
of density and contrast in the video.” Enabling users to to play themselves in a computer game is indeed
a unique approach. EA’s Majestic attempted the concept earlier,
but the game failed for a number of reasons, among them the
communication methods—late-night phone calls and faxes—that
proved too intrusive, a problem that Lexis Numerique appeared to
have considered and overcome with its AI engine.
According to Kemal, it was only a matter of time before the var-
ious media—the Internet, movies, and games—converged. Yet, far
more important than the particular technologies is the storytelling.
“The technology is not supposed to be the core of the game, so we
made it seamless to the player,” says Kemal. Like in the early days
of the film industry, games are slowly evolving from mere techni-
cal exercises to titles that evoke emotion. “Technology has reached
a level where we see amazing CG in titles like Doom 3, but to make
an experience seem all the more real, we need to generate feelings,
and that’s easier to do by showing real people,” he says. “So after
you see clips of the journalists
interacting and slowly falling in
love, you are far more affected by
In an unusual approach for a game, Lexis

their abduction than you would
Numerique used video and 2D graphics have been if they were a pair of
that have an amateurish quality, which rendered characters.”
supports Missing’s story line that the In fact, Lexis Numerique’s
killer himself has created the imagery. novel approach in Missing earned
the developer a number of acco-
According to Kemal, the group was lades for game innovation at this
challenged with achieving a high-quality year’s E3 game conference.
video image that looked authentic and Perhaps the best comment
was crisp enough to let a player zoom into certain segments to Kemal has heard, though, concerning the game was from a player
find clues. The team solved this by making two movies for the with bandaged knee. “He had been playing In Memoriam (Lexis
same scene, with the exact same points of view, except that one Numerique’s European version of Missing) and was so startled
was filmed in high definition and the other in standard definition. after receiving an e-mail from The Phoenix that he had jumped up
The software loads the HD movie only when the player wants to and hit his leg on the table,” says Kemal. “For him, the experience
magnify the imagery, which eliminates computer RAM issues. became real. And that was our intention.”
As a result of all its efforts on the video front, the developer
received the prestigious French film industry’s CNC Award for Karen Moltenbrey is a senior technical editor at Computer
Interactive Creation, given for artistic and technical achievement. Graphics World.

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IT WORKS FOR ME “…the performance and quality of

ATI’s FireGL ™ graphics and the
HP nw8000 Mobile Workstation
enable great artists and designers
to be that much greater.”
When world renowned Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) chose ATI’s FireGL™graphics and HP’s nw8000 Mobile Workstation
it gave faculty and students the ability to maintain their competitive edge while developing award-winning digital content.
MARK THOMASSON , DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGY, SCAD said, “…this is where ATI’s FireGL™ technology proved itself.”
FireGL™ graphics accelerators are certified and optimized for professional CAD and DCC applications. ATI delivers a top to bottom
range of trusted graphics solutions for mobile and desktop workstations with support for dual monitors, both Windows® and Linux
platforms and native PCI Express™ x16 lane support.
Find out how ATI’s FireGL™ graphics can W O R K F O R Y O U at: ATI.com/firegl.
™ ™ ®
© Copyright 2004, ATI Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. ATI and FireGL™ are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ATI Technologies Inc.
All other company and/or product names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
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Hardware
Consol Though the next-gen game
c o n s o l e s a re n ’t h e re y e t , c u r re n t
offerings provide plenty of
engaging play and graphics
By Jenny Donelan
The “big three” next-generation consoles—Microsoft’s Xbox 2,

Nintendo’s GameCube 2, and Sony’s PlayStation 3—are expected to
ship in 2005, or perhaps even in 2006. Though these units are fre-
quently discussed and anxiously awaited by the gaming community,
hard details are limited; the consoles’ names and even their existence
are officially “unofficial.” A few particulars are considered common
knowledge (see “Machines of Mystery,”
pg. 37), but for the most part, informa-
tion about the next generation is being
gleaned from a number of uncer-
tain sources such as the companies’
job postings for software en-
gineers and the like.
At press time, software
development kits for the new
platforms were either unavail-
able, top secret, or both. But the situa-
tion has hardly slowed game development. New
titles ship every week, and highly anticipated games, Nokia’s N-Gage game deck
such as Halo 2 for the Xbox, continue to generate extraor- offers 3D graphics on a
dinary end-user excitement, as seen in the first-day 4096-color screen, and
sales of the title, which reached $125 million. multiplayer gaming via
For now, users’ voracious appetite for com- Bluetooth technology.
puter games is being satisfied by the current generation of consoles,

which are still evolving. Sony’s PS2, for example, has a new, slimmer pro-
file, while Microsoft continues to push online gaming with its Xbox-based
subscription service, Xbox Live. This fall, Sony and Microsoft announced US price
decreases for their systems—both are now available for about $150, and some
experts were predicting further price drops in November.
Perhaps some of the most exciting developments in game consoles are in the
handheld arena, with Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) poised
to do battle with each other. Pre-existing products—Nintendo’s GameBoy Advance
and Nokia’s N-Gage game deck, for example—have their niches as well. GameBoy

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Hardware
obviously takes advantage of Nintendo’s Machines of Mystery

extensive and popular software library, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony haven’t had much to say about their next-generation con-
including the Mario and Final Fantasy soles—the so-called Xbox 2, GameCube 2, and PlayStation 3. And in the absence of official
series, and the immensely popular Metroid announcements, the following speculation thrives.
Fusion. The N-Gage, sometimes referred to Xbox 2: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the
as a “game phone,” features online 3D mul- Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this January, and many experts believe he will reveal the
tiplayer gameplay over Bluetooth wireless company’s plans for Xbox 2 at that time. Meanwhile, one unsubstantiated but far-flung notion is that
technology. And Tiger Telematics’ Giz- the company will use chips of its own design in the new console, rather than the silicon from Intel and
mondo, released in the UK last month, is a Nvidia it employs in the current Xbox. Other sources say the company will switch to IBM processors,
sort of do-it-all entertainment device that while others maintain the company will stick with its original Xbox sources.
features MP3 and MPEG 4 video playback, PlayStation 3: Sony Computer Entertainment’s next console will almost certainly utilize the new
a digital camera, and gameplay, with multi- Cell (also an unofficial name) processor from Toshiba and IBM.The Cell, which is made up of many small
player gaming supported via Bluetooth. processors and is said to handle up to one trillion floating-point calculations per second,will also be used
Last month, Tiger completed a deal that to power a variety of other electronic devices,including household appliances.Many experts believe that
will bring many titles from Microsoft Game the PS3 will incorporate a broadband modem and a hard drive, underscoring manufacturers’ recent
Studios to the Gizmondo handheld, includ- emphasis on downloadable and online gaming.
ing Age of Empires. GameCube 2: Little is known and even speculated about Nintendo’s next-gen gaming con-
Adding interest to the current develop- sole.The company is making no announcements at this time other than to drop hints that consumers
ment scenario are two new categories of should get ready for “something brand new.”
console-type entertainment that aren’t
really consoles—Infinium Labs’ Phantom, paign (there are nearly 3 million connect- own Graphics Synthesizer chip, capable
best described as a game subscription and ed consoles to date), is online gaming. of processing 75 million polygons per sec-
delivery service, and the EyeToy, a camera- “Xbox,” notes a company spokesperson, ond. Complex graphics features like Z
and-software package that works with “is the only video game system designed buffering, textures, lighting, and alpha
Sony’s PS2 to deliver a new kind of inter- from the ground up to harness the future blending have the Graphics Synthesizer
face between the game and the player. of broadband online gaming with its built- outputting a sustained rate of 20 million
So, while the next-gen consoles are on in hard disk and Ethernet port.” polygons per second.
the far horizon, content developers have Comparatively, Nintendo’s GameCube
plenty to concentrate on in the here and is powered by IBM’s customized Power PC New Handhelds
now, as online gaming, downloadable con- chip, called the Gekko, which runs at Nintendo DS, the vendor’s latest hand-
tent, and hard-drive interaction serve as 485MHz. Image-processing capabilities in- held, which is to ship in November, has a
.
kia
No
the current buzzwords in console gaming. clude fog generation, sub-pixel anti-alias- two-panel display that incorporates a
sy
rte
ing, bump mapping, environment map- built-in stylus for

cou
ge
Ima
The Consoles ping, MIP mapping, bi-linear filtering, tri-

Microsoft’s Xbox is based on a custom- linear filtering, and anisotropic texture
Image
designed 233MHz Nvidia graphics process- filtering. The GameCube handles poly-
courte
ing unit, which is a programmable 3D gons at the rate of six million to 12 mil-
sy Nin
processor containing more than 60 million lion per second. Rather than a CD-size
tend
transistors. According to the company, hard drive, it has its own 3-inch Nin-
o.
polygon performance equals 116.5M/sec, tendo GameCube Game Disc system,

with a pixel fill rate for textures equaling which holds 1.5GB of information.
3.7G/sec. All this contributes to the con- Meanwhile, Sony’s PS2 is getting
sole’s admittedly impressive graphics. The slimmer, as the company announced a
Xbox’s built-in hard drive, claims a Micro- lighter version of the machine that’s
soft spokesperson, “enables game devel- 2.8cm thick, compared to its former
opers to create larger, richer, more detailed 7.8cm size. The PS2 now comes with a
worlds and game environments.” More- built-in Ethernet port for online gaming,
over, the Xbox’s compatibility with Micro- feeding Sony’s online console community
soft’s Direct X API makes it especially at- of 1.4 million users, which the company The Nintendo DS mobile gaming device
tractive to PC game developers. claims is the largest in North America. features two screens for options such as
A major emphasis of late, as evidenced The PS2 is powered by a 300MHz CPU it simultaneous bird’s-eye and close-up views
by Microsoft’s vigorous Xbox Live cam- calls the “Emotion Engine,” and also by its of the action at hand.
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use with the device’s lower touch screen, 60mm in diameter and can hold up to The Phantom is not really a new plat-
a microphone for voice recognition, and 1.8GB of digital data. Besides game con- form for content developers, as it makes use,
wireless capabilities via local network and tent, a range of digital entertainment such at least for the time being, of existing content
Wi-Fi. With two screens, players can expe- as music video clips, movies, and sports and supports multiuser play. Getting that
rience the game from two perspectives at programs can run on the UMD. content ready for streaming represents the
once. In a role-playing game, for example, The PSP’s shipping schedule includes R&D challenge, according to Bachus. Using
action might take place on the lower screen an end-of-year launch in Japan, and re- proprietary algorithms, Infinium Labs ana-
while the player’s tools appear on the upper lease in Europe and the US in early 2005. lyzes the software registers, graphics struc-
one. So, in a football application, the whole ture, stability (with regard to crashing), and
field might be visible on the top screen, and Something Different more of each game and prepares it for opti-
the immediate action concerning the play- A novel offering, The Phantom Game Ser- mal streaming to users.
er might appear on the bottom. In the vice from Infinium Labs is not a console, “It takes 10 or 15 minutes of buffering for
future, notes the manufacturer, titles could but rather an on-demand game distribu- players to get started, and then the rest of the
be created that allow users to play games tion system designed to appeal to casual as game file streams during play,” says Bachus.
on one screen while text-messaging a per- well as avid players. “The thing we hear “It’s completely transparent to the user.”
son on the other. Meanwhile, each backlit over and over is that people like gaming Once a game is downloaded, it resides on
screen provides 3D viewing. but don’t want to make the commitment,” the Phantom receiver and no longer needs
“Graphics on the DS will be better than says Infinium Labs to be streamed.
those on the Nintendo 64 in terms of president Kevin Bach- The other novelty item, the EyeToy
quality,” notes Anka Dolecki, direc- us. That’s especially true, from Sony, consists of a little camera that
tor of public relations for Nin- he notes, when it comes sits on the TV and EyeToy software (a
tendo of America. Games to buying a game, learning PlayStation 2 is also required). To use the
will run at 60 frames per sec- its ins and outs, and so forth. device, a game player stands in front of the
ond, and allow details such as With the Phantom, which TV, while the camera picks up the per-
fog effects and cel shading. consists of a keyboard, soft- son’s image and projects it on the screen
amid game imagery such as attacking nin-
jas, as occurs in Kung Foo, part of the
EyeToy: Play Pack of Games. The person
uses his or her hands and arms to interact
with objects on the screen by “swatting”
them—in this case, batting away the
Image courtesy Electronic Arts.
marauding ninjas. Though most gamers

seem to regard EyeToy applications as
“party fodder” rather than serious gam-
ing, the interface is unique and seems to
beg for rewarding content.
The EyeToy from Sony uses a camera on The diversity of current gaming hard-
top of a TV (right) to film a player who ware—whether updates of pre-existing
Images courtesy Sony.
interacts with software imagery on screen,

products or new handhelds, or even new
as in the current EA title Harry Potter and
game distribution systems—demonstrates
the Prisoner of Azkaban.
that innovation and evolution are present in
Those developing content for the DS can ware, a receiver that sits atop the TV, and the marketplace, despite the hurry-up-and-
utilize the dual-display capability or simply a networked library of games accessed wait atmosphere surrounding the next-gen-
generate content for the single screen. through a broadband Internet connection, eration consoles. The new offerings are also
Meanwhile, the new handheld player a person can download a game and play it whetting the appetites of game players look-
on the block, the PSP from Sony, will run on the television at will—once or many ing for something, anything, new and excit-
three-dimensional CG games that incorpo- times. “Think of it as iTunes for games,” ing in this space until the big three manufac-
rate high-quality, full-motion video similar Bachus says. turers release their next big things.
to that of the PS2, according to the compa- Users will pay a monthly fee of about
ny. The PSP will feature the UMD (Uni- $30 for the service, set to launch in 2005, Jenny Donelan is a contributing editor
versal Media Disc), Sony’s newly devel- which includes access to the Phantom for Computer Graphics World. She can
oped compact storage media, which is games library as well as the hardware. be reached at jdonelan@adelphia.net.

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Portfolio
Albert Kiefer
While working on advanced plant research, To illustrate the application of the Superformula, Albert Kiefer, 3D product
Belgian scientist Johan Gielis discovered that any specialist at Genicap, used the code to create naturally complex shell shapes
natural shape—circles, squares, stars, ovals—can that he calls Future Fossils. “I wanted to show the versatility of the Super-
be defined digitally by changing a few variables in one basic equation. This mathe- formula, the infinite ways to vary shapes in 3D space,” he explains. After
matical principle, which Gielis dubbed the Superformula, also is the underlying mulling over several ideas about how to best explain this concept, he recalled
foundation on which the content creation software company Genicap was formed. a childhood friend’s elaborate boxed insect collection that contained a variety
Genicap’s contention is that all graphic shapes derive from that single fundamental of unique-looking creatures that belonged to the same species. This prompted
formula, and through the use of that formula (contained within its Supergraphx Kiefer to digitally create a so-called species box, only this one comprises virtu-
plug-ins or stand-alone programs), any computer graphics program can be al shell-like shapes that evolved from the same family.
enhanced to enable greater creativity and efficiency. “Symbolically, the shells display digital diversity,” Kiefer points out, “even
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though they share the same ‘genetic’ digital code.” that look nothing like any other shape, using
As Kiefer explains, shells are usually too com- the built-in Superformula algorithms.”
plex to create with a standard 3D modeling pro- After generating the raw geometry, Kiefer exported the data
gram because they are asymmetrical, and they spiral and into Maxon’s Cinema 4D, where he textured, lit, and rendered the objects, turn-
twist while changing width and height. However, he was able to generate ing them into natural-looking seashells.
dozens of unique shapes using the spherical variation feature in the soft- “I see the 3D Shape Explorer as an idea catalyst,” Kiefer says. “I can best
ware’s 3D Shape Explorer. “With a typical 3D application, you would create a describe it by comparing it to the proverbial ink blot, the cloud in the sky that
form and then, by tweaking the mesh, vary the shape in certain places to cre- sparks an idea.”
ate new versions, but they still look like a variation of the original mesh,” he A sampling of the untitled images from Kiefer’s virtual Future Fossil collec-
says. “Conversely, the 3D Shape Explorer generates a variety of these shapes tion appears on these two pages. —Karen Moltenbrey
DECEMBER 2004 Computer Graphics World | 41
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Snapsh t
3D Animation Software
By Courtney E. Howard, Senior Technical Editor
In recent months, the industry has Alias Maya 6

been buzzing with news, such as The latest news surrounding Alias’s
updates and price reductions, sur- Maya involves a new agreement
rounding tools for 3D animation. As with BOXX Technologies whereby
these pages indicate, today’s market Maya Complete and Maya
bears a wealth of options for pro- Unlimited software are bundled
fessional 3D animators. Whether with Boxx professional worksta-
creating content for films and tions. Alias also recently introduced
videos, games, the Web, or another Maya Unlimited for the Mac OS X
medium, consider the solutions pre- operating system. Now available
sented on these two pages to aid you in and priced at $6999, Maya
your work. To gain additional information Unlimited combines Maya Complete Platinum, Maya Silver, and Maya Bronze
about any of the products listed, visit the software with Maya Hair, Maya Fluid Memberships—of programs to provide
corresponding manufacturers’ Web sites. Effects, Maya Fur, Maya Cloth, and Maya support, maintenance, and education
Live for advanced special effects. to Maya and Maya Personal Learning
Moreover, the company has launched Edition customers.
the Maya Membership family—Maya Alias; www.alias.com
NewTek’s LightWave 3D Version 8

NewTek has announced its intention to port its Emmy Award-winning LightWave 3D
application, now in Version 8, to the Intel EM64T and AMD64 platforms. With this
news, NewTek becomes the first company to publicly reveal its plans to port a profes-
sional 3D graphics application to the 64-bit format. The 64-bit version of LightWave will
reap the benefits of 64-bit technology, including increases in both processing power and
memory. For the production of complex
Discreet 3ds max 7 motion graphics and visual effects, this
Discreet has begun shipping Version 7 of its higher-performance version of LightWave
3ds max professional 3D modeling, anima- will benefit users with time-savings,
tion, and rendering software package. Version increased efficiency, and higher-quality
7 benefits not only from an update to Mental graphics. The 64-bit edition of LightWave
Images’ Mental Ray Version 3.3, but also from 3D will become available when the 64-bit
the full integration of the company’s own Windows operating system is released
Character Studio advanced character motion commercially.
tool set. Helping streamline film production, NewTek; www.newtek.com
Version 7 also incorporates normal mapping,
a technology designed for game development
in which detail is added to low-polygon mod- Carrara Version 4 Cinema 4D Release 9
els with high-resolution maps. 3ds max 7 is Eovia has introduced an upgraded ver- Maxon Computer has unveiled the ninth
priced at $3495. Upgrades from Versions 5 sion of its Carrara 3D animation, model- incarnation of its Cinema 4D software
and 6 are priced at $1295 and $795, respec- ing, and rendering application. Version 4 solution. Release 9 offers a re-engi-
tively. In other news, Discreet revealed that is available now in Standard and Profes- neered modeling core, new modeling
3ds max enjoys an installed base of more than sional versions, priced at $579 and tools, an enhanced user interface, and
280,000 registered customers, including 3D $279, respectively. Carrara Version 4 is more than 100 new features. For
artists and designers in film, television, games, described in detail within this month’s specifics about Cinema 4D Release 9,
and visualization. Turn to pg. 44 for a review. Spotlight on Products section, pg. 4. turn to Spotlight on Products, pg. 5.
Discreet; www.discreet.com Eovia; www.eovia.com Maxon Computer; www.maxon.net

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Softimage XSI 4.0 3D Character Animation Software

Softimage’s new pricing structure for all
versions of its XSI 4.0—Foundation for Alias MotionBuilder 6
$495, Essentials for $1995, and Advanced Having acquired Kaydara, Alias has unveiled MotionBuilder 6, an upgraded version of its
for $6995—continues to be a topic of con- character animation software. Alias MotionBuilder 6 incorporates hundreds of enhance-
versation among industry professionals. Yet, ments, including improvements to keyframe animation and character animation capabilities,
Softimage has been extending XSI function- the story timeline, inter-character rigs, scene management tools, and a simplified user inter-
ality through key partnerships. The company face. MotionBuilder 6 Standard is priced at $995, whereas the Pro version includes 12
has announced a strategic alliance agreement months of support and upgrades at a cost of $4195.
with Criterion Software, a provider of middle- Alias; www.alias.com
ware for the gaming industry, that offers
Criterion RenderWare users access to plug-ins
Curious Labs’ Poser 5 and Shade 7
Curious Labs has released its Poser 5 figure design and animation solution for the Mac OS X
operating system. The OS X version of Poser 5 sports displacement mapping, collision detec-
tion, procedural textures, photo-based facial mapping, new 3D human figures, Dynamic Hair,
Dynamic Cloth, and a Morph Putty tool. The company also introduced Shade 7, a 3D graph-
ics suite for designers, illustrators, and architects that encompasses modeling, rendering, and
animation tools. For the creation of 3D imagery and animations, Shade offers bezier curve/
surface modeling, integrated plug-ins, and a global illumination renderer. Shade 7 is available
in Standard, Designer LE, and Professional versions.
Curious Labs; www.curiouslabs.com
and import/export tools that enable the inte-

gration of 3D content created in XSI. Also, Side Effects Software’s Houdini 7
Softimage has entered into a technology Side Effects Software has upgraded its Houdini 3D animation package to Version 7, as well as
alliance with Virtools, maker of interactive 3D introduced Houdini Escape, a new product designed to work seamlessly with the Houdini
authoring tools. As a result, characters, family of software. For animators, lighting artists, and effects artists, Houdini 7 is intended to
scenes, objects, and animations created with streamline the animation work flow with the help of such enhancements as interactive view-
XSI software can be exported directly into the ing, improved transform handles, and a new online help interface. Also new to Version 7 are
Virtools Dev 3 environment, thanks to a new expanded support for RenderMan and advanced character rigging tools. Houdini Escape,
Virtools exporter for XSI software. priced at $1999, provides professionals an environment for modeling, animating, texturing,
Softimage; www.softimage.com lighting, and rendering. The company also announced that its Houdini Developers Kit (HDK) is
free with all Houdini workstation products, including the Houdini Apprentice Edition.
Side Effects Software; www.sidefx.com
Caligari’s TrueSpace 6.6
Caligari has announced TrueSpace 6.6,
with roughly 24 general enhancements Swift 3D Version 4.0 Hash’s Animation:Master
and more than 120 fixes to various tools Electric Rain has introduced Mac OS X ver- Designed for advanced and beginner
and functionality. UV editing is improved sions of its recently upgraded Swift 3D animators and priced at $299,
by UV vertex welding, whereas the built-in 4.0 stand-alone application and Swift 3D Animation:Master from Hash is newly
particle system now provides interaction Xpress plug-in. Swift 3D Version 4.0 aids available in Version 11.0 for the Windows
with TrueSpace physics, environments, designers in creating and exporting vector platform and Version 10.5 for Mac OS X
and objects and control over life and par- and raster 3D animations to Macromedia and 9. The program offers spline-based
ticle type. Particles also have real geome- Flash or another format, whereas Swift 3D modeling, animation, and rendering, as
try, enabling them to reflect and cast Xpress enables users to convert 2D art well as IK, UV decal mapping, lipsync
shadows. A new Viewer frees users to and text to 3D animations within Flash. keyframing, motion libraries, and skeletal,
preview scenes and objects in Windows Currently available for Windows and Mac morphing, and bending actions. It also
Explorer. And Version 6.6 boasts perform- OS X operating systems, Swift 3D and provides channel-based motion control,
ance gains: Real-time preview of an ani- Swift 3D Xpress are priced at $189 and patch-based animation, rotoscoping,
mation is reportedly 300 times faster. $129, respectively. onion skinning, and other features.
Caligari; www.caligari.com Electric Rain; www.erain.com Hash; www.hash.com
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3 D M O D E L I N G / A N I M AT I O N
reviews
Discreet 3ds max 7
A popular 3D tool gains new
features and functionality
B y G e o rg e M a e s t r i
Discreet has begun shipping 3ds enables you to select vertices

max 7, the latest version of its ven- using a brush, a method that
erable 3D modeling and animation is more interactive and easier
application. The upgrade includes new to use than selecting pixels
modeling and texturing features, as well with a lasso. Other model-
The new skin shader for Mental Ray takes advantage
as an update to Mental Ray rendering. ing enhancements include
of subsurface scattering to produce realistic results.
And Discreet’s popular Character Studio a Turbosmooth modifier,
is now included in the base application. which simplifies 3ds max’s Meshsmooth low-res model for the price of a texture. This
The interface to Version 7 is almost modifier, making it work more quickly. technique is taking the gaming world by
identical to the previous editions. This is Rendering is improved with the inclu- storm; many developers are using normal
good news because I find 3ds max to be sion of Mental Ray Version 3.3. This ren- maps to increase the fidelity of their console
one of the easier 3D packages to use. The derer is more tightly integrated with 3ds games.
new version is incredibly stable and fast. max. All of Version 7’s new rendering fea- Animators will be happy that Character
Subtle interface improvements include a tures are geared toward Mental Ray. New Studio 4 is integrated into 3ds max. A com-
flat shaded view, for better viewing of lit Mental Ray features include subsurface plete character animation tool, Character
models, and new snapping and array tools. scattering, which simulates the scattering Studio provides built-in skeletons, called
Version 7 improves on 3ds max’s polyg- of light within a surface and is helpful in bipeds, that have the intelligence of human
onal modeling tools. The poly surface type creating semi-translucent surfaces, such as motion. It is a great tool for anyone using
in 3ds max has been very popular, as it has human skin, marble, translucent plastics, motion capture, creating crowds, or doing
built-in subdivision surfaces and a number and other organic surfaces. Discreet has character animation in general.
of other cool features. The new Edit Poly written several new Mental Ray shaders New deformation tools make rigging
modifier is one of my favorite new features. that ship with 3ds max, including a robust characters easier. The Skin Wrap deformer
Edit Poly (finally) allows you to create a skin shader and an ambient occlusion uses a piece of geometry to guide the defor-
stack of modifications to a Poly object shader that serves as a good alternative to mation of an object. It can be used in a num-
without turning the object into a mesh. global illumination without the render ber of ways, from creating realistic muscles
One of the best aspects of Edit Poly is that times. to making sure clothing doesn’t intersect
it enables you to animate virtually any Lighting for global illumination is made with a character’s body. Along similar lines,
parameter. It also offers the ability to auto- easier in Version 7. Lights now automatical- the Skin Morph deformer is a stack-based
matically bridge open parts of a model, as ly adjust the number of photons emitted modifier with which to control the way a
well as to relax and smooth parts. depending on the size and intensity of the skeleton joint deforms a mesh. I find it easi-
Paint deform provides tools similar to light. It makes rendering easier, and auto- er to use than the deformation controls in
Maya’s Artisan, enabling modelers to sculpt matically optimizes the scene for faster ren- 3ds max’s skin modifier, and the separate
a polygonal surface by pushing, pulling, dering. Mental Ray shadows are improved, modifiers are much easier to manage.
and smoothing vertices with a paintbrush- and now allow for transparent shadows. Special effects animators will appreci-
like interface. The new paint-selection tool Artists, such as game developers, who ate the new Reaction controller, which cre-
work with low-poly models ates a relationship between objects so that
3ds max 7 will appreciate 3ds max’s animation on one object can control anoth-
Price: $3495
stats
new normal mapping tools. er. The Reaction Manager replaces the old
Minimum System Requirements: Normal mapping takes the method of setting up connections.
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www.discreet.com
Windows XP Professional, XP Home, or surface information from a 3ds max, a powerful modeling and ani-
2000; Intel Pentium III or later or AMD
processor running at 500MHZ minimum;
high-resolution model and mation tool, competes well with any pack-
512MB of RAM; 500MB of swap space; applies it as a bump map to a age on the market. It is great for creating
Discreet
and a graphics card supporting 1024x768 low-resolution model. The high-end animation and special effects.
resolution, 16-bit color, and 64MB of
results are quite amazing,
RAM (OpenGL and Direct3D supported)
essentially adding detail to a George Maestri is president of Rubber-

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model at the speed of thought.
To learn more about the next leap in modeling

check out www.luxology™.com
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M U LT I M E D I A
reviews
Adobe Atmosphere
A d o b e ’s n e w t o o l e n a b l e s
rich, interactive experiences
By Doug King
Interactivity. Real-time imaging. immersive illustration. This

Immersive environments. These buzz- is the beginning of interac- Atmosphere’s easy-to-use tools aid in the creation
words have floated around the industry for tive storytelling. of impressive environments for publishing online.
years. Software developers continue to pro- Atmosphere’s interface is
duce products that change these words into not the most intuitive, and will take some could not be simpler. Add them to your
reality, even virtual reality. Adobe is no getting used to. The opening screen de- Object Preset palette and click in the scene
exception. The company launched Atmos- faults to a rather cramped work environ- or on the object to which you want the
phere, a software tool for creating interac- ment; yet, thankfully, every floating palette script applied, and you’re done. Fine-tuning
tive, immersive, 3D multimedia environ- can be resized and moved to provide more can be completed in the Inspector palette.
ments to be delivered via the Web or PDF. elbowroom. The one World View defaults When creating an environment, you set
Through 3D objects, directional sound, to Top View, but I changed it with a few the entry point for the viewer and any por-
streaming audio and video, SWF anima- simple hot keys. Other palettes include tals that allow you to change Stages seam-
tions, and physical behaviors, Atmosphere Object Hierarchy, Scene Hierarchy, Light, lessly when a viewer passes through. It
creates what Adobe calls “Stages,” using a and Inspector. offers the ability to create what appear to be
live-theater metaphor. Visitors to (or, more A Player window boasts a real-time vast, complex environments; in fact, they
appropriately, viewers of) Stages can freely preview of how a scene will look when are many small files that launch automati-
navigate and interact with the environments. published. Each change made in the work cally when a user passes through a portal.
Atmosphere is an easy-to-use authoring environment is updated instantly in the When your environment is complete,
tool for the creation and publishing of real- Player view, where I could easily navigate publishing your work is simple. Selecting
time environments. It is essentially a game the scene using the mouse or arrow keys. Publish from the File menu creates both an
engine in a box. I am impressed by the abil- The package includes basic 3D modeling AER file, which is the environment itself,
ity to create great-looking environments. tools. Overall, the modeling in Atmosphere and an HTML file. You can upload the files
This solution holds potential for visual is rudimentary; it would take some time to to a Web server, or place the AER file into a
effects specialists, film producers, multime- build anything other than simple primitives PDF file with Adobe Acrobat Professional.
dia designers, and architects. Yet, I am most fitted together. The best option is to import One of the first commercial uses of
excited about its application by authors. models or sets from a 3D program. Such Atmosphere is by 20th Century Fox for I,
Imagine reading Alice in Wonderland imports must run through Viewpoint’s Robot. At www.irobotmovie.com, you can
online or in a PDF document and coming to media format, as only MTX and MTZ file for- navigate a robot manufacturing room and
a beautiful image of the Mad Hatter’s tea mats are accepted. I hope future versions custom-build your own servant robot (see
party. Clicking in the picture, you enter the will offer a greater selection of file formats “Build a ’Bot,” August 2004, pg. 12). The
illustration and move around as the action for import. Atmosphere supports a variety experience is a good example of what this
unfolds. Click on the teapot and find the of image graphics and multimedia formats. exciting program can do.
dormouse sleeping inside. When finished Placing textures on an object is simple. Atmosphere is heralding an age when
with the scene, you return to the story First, add Texture Presets in the Paint buzzwords used to excite us are realistic
where you left off and read on until the next Presets palette and then simply drag and descriptions of what a program offers.
drop onto the object you wish textured. Atmosphere helps non-programmers cre-
Atmosphere
You instantly see the texture in the Player ate and publish fantastic-looking environ-
Price: $399
stats
Window. Tools for adjusting a texture are ments for real-time, interactive experi-
Minimum System
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Adobe Systems
found in the Inspector palette. ences, and Version 1 is a fine platform from
www.adobe.com
Requirements:
One of Atmosphere’s best features is the which to grow.
Pentium III or 4 processor,
Microsoft Windows XP, Havok physics engine. And more than 20
128MB of RAM, 50MB of scripts are included for dynamic lighting Doug King, a contributing editor based
hard-disk space, and a effects, physical effects, and interactive in Dallas, develops animated projects
high-end graphics card
controls. Applying these to your scene for his company, Day III Productions.

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A Graphic Arts Contest From Computer Graphics World:
A s the magazine of innovation in visual submit any copyrighted, trademarked,

computing, Computer Graphics World has or sexually explicit images. Images will be
a rich history of recognizing what’s new in selected and featured that are most suit-
the digital arts. Now we are proud to put able for a professional audience.
the spotlight on the future: the talent and
How to Enter:
imagination of student artists and anima-
Please submit your entries at our website,
tors. To showcase the creativity of this new
www.cgw.com, where you’ll find instruc-
generation, we are pleased to announce
tion for uploading images. Please include
a student art contest for the Fall of 2004,
your name and contact information. We
titled “What’s in Your Dreams?”. Open
are accepting JPEG files, 7 x 10 inch
to anyone enrolled in a college-level
@72dpi.
program, the contest seeks to identify
the most promising new digital artists and Judging and prizes:
reward them with prizes and recognition. The entries will be judged by the Computer
Graphics World staff and other professionals
When to Enter:
in the industry. Prizes include graphics
The contest begins September 15 and
software, a workstation, design software,
closes November 15, 2004. The awards
and more. Plus, the selected images will
will be announced in March 2005, and
be featured in Computer Graphics World.
the selected images will be featured in
Computer Graphics World. More information:
Complete contest information can
What to Enter:
be found at:
Any digitally created or enhanced still image
will be accepted that illustrates the theme
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“What’s in Your Dreams?”. Please do not
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products
For a direct link to more product information and vendor Web sites, click on: www.onlinecenter.to/cgw
SOFTWARE ware systems. Moreover, the plug-in gains STORAGE

support for Discreet’s 3ds max 7, various
TRACKING Maya 6 render nodes, bitmap files measuring Seven Feet Tall
200MB or larger, and high-dynamic range Ciara Technologies has introduced the
A New Generation imaging (HDRI). Rounding out the upgraded VXR-96, the latest product in its line of
Win Mac Linux Boujou Three, the third
• • software are faster transfer times for meshes VXRack ultra-dense servers. A compact
generation of 2d3’s 3D camera matchmov- having up to 30 million polygons and a new cluster technology, VXR-96 is capable of
ing software, takes advantage of a new fea- light-sampling engine designed to adjust hosting up to 96 of the company’s VX-
ture-tracking engine. With improved accu- lighting effects as necessary. Free to current Blades inside an 84-inch rack enclosure. As
racy and performance, the latest version is ART VPS software subscribers, the RenderPipe a result, the 7-foot VXR-96 is able to
effective in tracking thousands of features in upgrade is offered to non-subscribers for $360. accommodate a maximum 192 Intel Xeon
ART VPS, Ltd.; www.artvps.com processors with a 800MHZ system bus based
on Intel’s new E7520 chipset, up to 1.5TB of
DDR/DDR2 ECC/registered memory, a max-
HARDWARE imum 24TB of aggregate local storage, and
192GB of network throughput.
D I S P L AY Ciara Technologies; www.ciara-tech.com
Multimedia Monitor
Mintek Digital has launched the DTV Series, a
family of HDTV-ready flat-panel displays. To
events
date, the new product line boasts a 17-inch
each frame of a shot, despite motion blur, DTV-17 and 23-inch DTV-23, both offering a JANUARY
variable lighting, and a fast-moving camera. wide viewing angle of nearly 180 degrees. The 10–14
Moreover, it is designed to work well with Macworld Conference and Expo,
sand, snow, and sky shots having little detail held in San Francisco. Contact
to track and shots with repetitive structures
www.macworldexpo.com.
or patterns. Adding to the upgrade are a new
automatic solver for lens distortion, automat-
25–27
Video Forum 2005, held in London.
ed tracking of free-move zoom shots, and
Contact www.videoforum.co.uk.
path-smoothing algorithms. Boujou Three
also sports a lens distortion plug-in for Shake,
FEBRUARY
a new timeline design, and support for a
2–5
wider range of bit depths and file formats,
Imagina 2005, held in Monte Carlo.
including Maya IFF. Boujou Three is available
Contact +377-93-10-40-54 or
at a cost of $10,000 per license.
www.imagina.mc.
2d3; www.2d3.com two models feature a built-in, slot-load DVD
player, HDTV-ready television tuners, Memory
MARCH
RENDERING Stick and SD Memory Card readers, and a USB 7–11
port. Priced at $800 and $1500, respectively, Game Developers Conference,
RenderPipe Release the DTV-17 and DTV-23 also sport DVI, VGA, held in San Francisco. Contact
Win ART VPS, Ltd. has updated its Render- PC audio, S-video, and two-channel audio www.gdconf.com.
Pipe software with support for the company’s inputs, as well as AV input/output.
own Pure and RenderDrive raytracing hard- Mintek Digital; www.mintek.com

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NOW AVAILABLE
ONLINE
Computer Graphics World

invites you to view one of our
Now archived at
online Webcasts. www.cgw.com
Each Webcast focuses on specific topics and
Trends in Graphics
can affect the way you do business.
Board Technology
Archived Webcasts are free and available for viewing 24/7. from July 13 presentation
Learn from industry experts as they share their ideas,
opinions and expertise. Viewers must register to attend.
Next-Generation Workstations:
Visit www.cgw.com to register and for more information. Technologies, Trends,

and Forecasts
from Sept. 28 presentation
Webcast Sponsor Webcast Sponsor
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advertiser phone or web page

3D Labs www.3dlabs.com C4 Group Korea
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Okino Computer Graphics www.okino.com 51 TEL: 91-11-2686113/14/ 98 Spit Brook Rd.
26865103/26861758/ Nashua, NH 03062-5737
Sony Electronics, Inc. www.sony.com/luma 13 268617666861113 TEL: 603-891-9128
FAX: 91-11-26861112 FAX: 603-891-9341
E-MAIL: E-MAIL: bobd@pennwell.com
TerraMetrics, Inc. 888-44-TRUEARTH 51
rajan@interadsindia.com
Vancouver Film School 604-685-5808 51

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World Dream Machine Live-action animation portrays a child’s

December 2004 • Volume 27 Number 12

www.cgw.com for computer graphics

Products 48 By Jenny Donelan

A Few Good Mentors

C O U R T N E Y H O W A R D : Senior Technical Editor

K A R E N M O LT E N B R E Y : Senior Technical Editor

2 | Computer Graphics World DECEMBER 2004

“I came back to LightWave with renewed

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Maxon Launches Cinema 4D Release 9

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The DCC market at year’s end

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Uncommon Compositing By Jeff Sauer

Compositing. It’s arguably the

12 | Computer Graphics World DECEMBER 2004

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16 | Computer Graphics World DECEMBER 2004

Before The Polar

All images ©2004, courtesy

18 | Computer Graphics World DECEMBER 2004

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