VirtualArchaeology

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www.cgw.com September 2009

VirtualArchaeology

Happy MealSony Pictures Imageworks creates the deliciously appetizing Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

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September 2009 1

ON THE COVER

SEE IT IN

In the CG animated fi lm Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the team at Sony Pictures Imageworks has fun with food, fi lling scenes with delicious items of all sorts and sizes, and never letting the audience go hungry for visual excitement. See pg. 14 for the story.

How The Colbert Report goes off without a hitch.

Post pros add video cameras to their bag of tricks.

Hoyt Yeatman talks about G-Force.

Features

Food for Laughs

14 In Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a mad scientist turns water into food, but at Sony Pictures Imageworks, it was the 3D artists who were responsible for the transformationand everything elsein this CG feature fi lm. By Barbara Robertson

Power Play

21 As graphics processors continue to grow in strength, people are now rethinking how they use them for a wide range of applications. By George Maestri

Alien Achievement

24 CG aliens play a major role in the live-action District 9. Visual effects house Image Engine created the alien cast, while The Embassy crafted a mechanical exo-suit for the fi nal battle scene and Weta Digital built the spaceships. By Barbara Robertson

3D Wow!

30 Comic books, which have been a very traditional 2D medium, are beginning to venture into the 3D realm, as creators turn to digital techniques to add more punch. By John Gaudiosi

A Stitch in Time

36 In the feature fi lm 9, CGI is used to bring a dark, post-apocalyptic world to life, while evil forces do their best to destroy its inhabitants. By Karen Moltenbrey

Networking in Animation

45 Networking is the key to success when seeking employment. By Eveyln Gabai

COVER STORY

Web ExclusivesGo to www.cgw.com for a variety of Web-only stories, including a wrap-up of the Comic-Con show and an uplifting story of how the graphics community gave back to New Orleans.

September 2009 Volume 32 Number 9 I n n o v a t i o n s i n v i s u a l c o m p u t i n g f o r t h e g l o b a l D C C c o m m u n i t y

DepartmentsEditors Note Graphics, Gumbo, and More

2Attendance at this years SIGGRAPH was surely lacking, but the attitude was extremely positive. Spotlight

4 Products Adobes Flash Platform becomes open source. Apples Final Cut Studio updates. Autodesks Suites for Digital Entertainment Creation. Dells Precision M6400. AMDs ATI FirePro V8750. Autodesks Maya 2010. Intels Media Software Development Kit. Nvidias Quadro Plex solutions. News Graphics take a hit but are ready for a comeback.

Viewpoint

10 The highly parallel structure and computational power of todays GPUs make them effective for handling more general, computationally intensive, and demanding algorithms.

Back Products

47 Recent hardware and software releases from SIGGRAPH.

21

14

30 36

24

September

CHIEF EDITORkaren@CGW.com

EditorsNote

SIGGRAPH 2009: Graphics, Gumbo, and All that Jazz

The Magazine for Digital Content Professionals

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2 September 2009

L ast month, the graphics community celebrated the past, present, and future of cutting-edge CG technologies at the annual SIGGRAPH conference and exhibition in New Orleans. Last year, many were questioning the decision to hold the conference in the Big Easyand that was before we were hit with the current recession. Everyone wanted to

know, was the city ready to host the conference? The answer, as we have discovered, was Yes!

Sure, attendance was down. Drastically. But then again, who didnt expect that, given the grim economic situation companiesinside and outside the industryhave had to face this year. SIGGRAPH released the attendance figures: 11,000 artists, research scientists, gaming experts and developers, filmmakers, students, and academics from 69 countries filtered through the halls and aisles of the show. To put this into perspec-tive, last years conference in Los Angeles boasted 28,400 show-goers, while the 2007 conference in San Diego had just over 24,000. At the 2002 conference in San Antonioconsidered by many as the most dis-

mal SIGGRAPH yethad 17,000 visitors. Now, for the upside. The overall attitude of the attendees was extremely positive. Many

of them looked at the low attendance as a mere blip on the radar, projecting a This, too, shall pass attitude. Most of the major players were still represented. However, studios and companies had cut back on their travel budgets and sent fewer people than they had in previous years. Those they did send, however, were top-notch veterans, many of whom presented papers and participated on panels, rather than newcomers. In fact, the average attendee seemed to be someone with at least several years of experience. So while some vendors may have wished for more traffic, hopefully they will reap the same type of finan-cial benefit from exhibiting as they have in the past.

SIGGRAPH 2009 reminded me of the conferences of old, where the show floor down-stairs was secondary and the happenings upstairs (panels, papers, discussions) were pri-mary. After all, the latter is what SIGGRAPH is all about. According to the conference chair, SIGGRAPH management chose to provide a full, compelling program despite the economic situation. That was a fantastic decision. No one seemed disappointed, and if they were, well, they shouldnt have been. There was a lot of information to be had, and most seemed to take advantage of it. And although fewer folks were walking the show floor, those who did had buying power. They werent simply there to play; they could pay.

Outside the conference center, the weather was hot and sticky. But what about the heat wave that hit Boston in 2006? After-hours (and sometimes during show hours), the popular French Quarter was teeming with attendees. With such a confined space, chances were high that you would run into an old friend or acquaintancesomething that doesnt often happen when the conference is held in sprawling Los Angeles. What a nice treat it was to run into friendly faces along Bourbon Street, where people could just relax and catch up over a drink. After all, SIGGRAPH isnt just about the latest technology. It is also about sharing experiences and making connections.

Good times. Good food. Good people. Good technology. Just like a great gumbo, SIG-GRAPH is more about the quality of the ingredients than the quantity of them. And this years show sure was fine in this regard. n

Did you attend SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans? Share your experience in our online Blog section at www.cgw.com. Or, read about how others viewed the conference.

Maximum Speed. Zero Drag.

With LightWaves insane speed across the board, not to mention

its flexibility and ease of use, it has no equal. For WarDevil, it has

become the core of the project and continues to provide us with solutions where other 3D applications give us dead ends.

LightWave v9 Get it done.

LightWave 3D Kelly Myers, VFX Supervisor, The WarDevil Project, Digi-Guys, Ltd

LightWave and LightWave 3D are registered trademarks of NewTek Inc. NewTek Inc. 2009. All rights reserved. 2008 Digi-Guys. WarDevil is a registered trademark of Digi-Guys Ltd. All rights reserved.

4 September 2009

Apple Updates Final Cut Studio

PRODUCT: VIDEO

Apple has upgraded its Final Cut Studio with more than 100 new features, and unveiled new versions of Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, Color, and Compressor.

Final Cut Studio features Final Cut

Pro 7, which boasts new versions of Apples ProRes codecs, expanded support of virtually any workfl ow, Easy Export for one-step output to various formats, and iChat Theater support for real-time collaboration. Motion 4 sports

such enhanced tools as 3D shadows, refl ections, and depth of fi eld for motion graphics and visual effects, whereas Soundtrack Pro 3 streamlines audio post-production with new multi-track audio tools. Color 1.5 offers improved integration

with Final Cut Pro and support for full-

color resolution. Compressor 3.5 adds new features for easily setting up and customizing export options.

The new Final Cut Studio is priced at $999 and is available as an upgrade for $299.

Apple also introduced Final Cut Server 1.5, an asset management and automation tool for Final Cut Studio that features offl ine editing with ProRes Proxy, production hierarchies to organize media, and support for still sequences to view and manage image sequences for graphics and effects workfl ows.

Final Cut Server now includes unlimited client licenses and is available for $999 or as a $299 upgrade for existing users.

PRODUCT: MULTIMEDIA

Adobe Systems announced two new Flash Platform open-source initiatives for developers, media companies, and publishers. The Adobe Flash Platform is a complete system of integrated tools, frameworks, clients, and servers for the development of Web applications, content, and video that run consistently across operating systems and devices.

Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), part of the project previously code named Strobe, enables developers to quickly and easily build more robust, feature-rich media players opti-mized for the Adobe Flash Platform. The Text Layout Frame-work (TLF), meanwhile, will help developers bring sophisticat-ed typography capabilities to Web applications. Both OSMF and TLF are freely available as open-source software, helping content owners extend their online media efforts as they look to create new business opportunities and monetization strate-gies for publishing on the Web.

The OSMF architecture enables developers to easily create unique playback experiences that can leverage plug-ins for advertising, reporting metrics, and content delivery, along with standard video-player features such as playback controls, video navigation, buffering, and dynamic streaming.

As part of this initiative, Akamai has joined Adobe to advance the industry toward a widely adopted, cohesive standard for media players that support Adobe Flash Platform technologies. Akamai and Adobe are collaborating on the Open Video Player initiative, previously founded by Akamai, and the release of OSMF technologies. The goal is to ensure a consistent frame-work for media player development that enables developers, publishers, content owners, corporations, and others to more quickly and easily build new video players that create and sustain profi table new business models. By providing all the compo-nents for media player development, the combined efforts will help strengthen the industry shift toward open standards.

Meanwhile, TLF goes beyond what is possible for Web text layout using HTML and CSS technologies today, with support for complex languages, bidirectional text, multi-columns, and other advanced typographical features and controls. TLF is an extensible ActionScript library built on top of the text engine in Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5. Source code and a component library for TLF are available as open source at no charge under the Mozilla Public License at http://open-source.adobe.com/wiki/display/tlf/.

Adobe Releases F lash Platform as Open Source

September 2009 5

A number of digital content creation tool vendors unveiled new offerings during the annual SIGGRAPH trade show and conference, held in New Orleans last month. We have high-lighted some of the more signifi cant announcements here in our Product Spotlight sections and in our Products pages in the back of the magazine. Because so many upgrades and new offerings were released, we will continue to report on them in our next issue, as well. Meanwhile, be sure to go to www.cgw.com to read about all the major happenings at the conference. Also, be sure to check out our videos and blogs from SIGGRAPH.

PRODUCTS: MODELINGANIMATION

At SIGGRAPH, Autodesk rolled out its Suites for Digital Entertainment Creation, which give artists, produc-tion facilities, and educators access to more creative tools at a cost savings of more than 35 percent when compared to purchasing each product license separately.

Autodesk is introducing affordable Suites of its popular 3D tools to better help artists create innovative entertain-ment in todays tough economic condi-tions, says Stig Gruman, vice president, Autodesk Digital Entertainment Group.

Autodesk is introducing the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites and the Autodesk Real-Time Animation Suitesfor commercial use. The company has also launched the Autodesk Educa-tion Suite for Entertainment Creationfor postsecondary educators, and Autodesk Animation Academy 2010 for secondary schools.

The fl agship Autodesk Entertain-ment Creation Suites offer customers a choice of either Maya 2010 or 3ds Max 2010 software, along with both Mudbox 2010 and MotionBuilder 2010 software. Mudbox helps artists to sculpt highly detailed models more quickly and intuitively. MotionBuilder provides a real-

time animation engine for more interac-tive creative feedback and effi cient handling of large amounts of animation data. With FBX 2010 data exchange technology, the Suites provide a cohe-sive, effi cient pipeline.

The Autodesk Real-Time Animation Suites are designed for animation-inten-sive productions. These Suites also offer a choice of either Maya 2010 or 3ds Max 2010 software, in addition to MotionBuilder 2010 software. Motion-Builder provides animators with a real-time 3D engine and specialized anima-tion tool set to more quickly create, manipulate, and process large amounts of animation data.

The Autodesk Education Suite for Entertainment Creation helps educa-tors prepare students for professional careers in the increasingly competi-tive 3D job market. The Suite includes access to fl exible learning resources and the same software used by top creative professionals: 2010 versions of Maya, 3ds Max, MotionBuilder, Mudbox, Softimage, and SketchBook Pro soft-ware. The Suite is available for both institution and student purchase.

Autodesk Animation Academy 2010 helps inspire secondary school students

to explore careers in the arts, entertain-ment, and visualization fi elds. The Suite offers software and curriculum resourc-es that enable students to learn 3D technology while exploring new ways to visualize ideas. It includes the 2010 versions of Maya, 3ds Max, Motion-Builder, Mudbox, and SketchBook Pro software, as well as a Curriculum Resources DVD and access to online community resources. Animation Acad-emy is available exclusively for second-ary or high schools providing instruction for teenagers 11 to 17 years old.

All four Digital Entertainment Creation Suites are expected to ship for the Windows operating system during the fall. The price for the Entertain-ment Creation Suite is $4995, while the Real-Time Animation Suite costs $4795. Autodesk Subscription can be purchased for the Suites.

Autodesk Debuts New Product Suites

PRODUCT: MOBILE WORKSTATION

Dell and AMD joined forces to further power the mobile market, announcing the newest solution for content creators and CAD designers: the ATI FirePro M7740 graphics accelerator, set to power Dell Precision M6400 Mobile Workstations.

The Dell Precision M6400 brings swift real-time graphi-cal rendering and color representation to the forefront of large model design work, while giving professionals the

performance capabilities for multitasking and multi-threaded applications. The M6400 offers RAID storage options and memory scalability. The mobile workstation is also designed to meet the demanding needs of customers working with large models in Microsoft Direct X- or OpenGL-based applications.The starting price for the M6400 is $1759, which includes a $350 instant savings.

Dell Rolls Out the Precision M6400

6 September 2009

PRODUCT: GRAPHICS CARDS

To meet the extreme productivity needs of todays CAD, DCC, and oil and gas professionals, AMD unveiled the ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accelerator in the companys line of ultra high-end professional graphics hardware.

ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accelerator brings the highest number of shader engines (800) with the highest memory bandwidth (115.2GB/sec) in the 3D professional graphics offerings today, enabling professionals to render highly complex models and photorealistic images in real time.

The ultra-parallel processing architecture of the V8750 maximizes throughput by automatically direct-ing graphics horsepower where needed. Intelligent manage-ment of computational resources enables enhanced utilization of the GPU to support real-time rendering of complex models and scenes with high frame rates when animating.

This acceleration is accessed through ATI Stream technolo-gy, a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that allow a system to dynamically balance workloads by tapping both the CPU and GPU in a workstation for accelerated appli-cation performance. Now, applications that take advantage of the shader units and memory bandwidth perform signifi cantly better than with competing solutions.

The ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accelera-tor offers 30 percent more bandwidth than the comparable competing solution, and is equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 frame-buffer memory. The card also features two DisplayPort outputs: one dual-link-enabled DVI and one stereo sync output.

Concurrent with this product launch, AMD

announced the availability of ATI CrossFire Pro technology,

which enables users to combine the power of two discrete graphics cards to scale their application perfor-

mance for maximum productivity. This capability, which involves coupling the two graphics cards using an interconnect cable, is designed to provide a signifi cant performance boost to CAD and DCC applications.

In addition to the ATI FirePro V8750, ATI CrossFire Pro is planned for availability on the companys mid-range and above graphics cards, including ATI FirePro V5700, V7750, and V87003D.

Initial support is provided for Windows XP (32-bit and 64-bit), with support for other operating systems scheduled to follow in the second half of the year.

The new ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accel-erator is available now for $1799.

PRODUCTS: MODELINGANIMATION

One Maya, More ValueIn an unexpected move, Autodesk announ-ced its Maya 2010 software, which unifi es the Maya Complete 2009 and Maya Unlimited 2009 feature sets with match-moving, compositing, and rendering capa-bilities into a single offering. Now, Maya 2010 is available on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS operating systems.

Maya 2010 makes it easier and more affordable for artists to build a cohesive computer graphics pipelineintegrating 2D and 3D, simulation and animation, rendering, and compositing, says Marc Petit, senior vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment.

Maya 2010 has all the features of Maya Unlimited 2009 and Maya Complete 2009, including advanced simulation tools, such as the Maya Nucleus Unifi ed Simulation Framework, Maya nCloth, Maya nParticles, Maya Fluid Effects, Maya Hair, and Maya Fur; in addition to its modeling, texturing, and animation tools, brush-based 3D technology, an integrated stereoscopic workfl ow, Toon Shading, rendering, an extensive Maya application programming interface/soft-ware development kit, and Python and MEL scripting capabilities.

New features in Maya 2010 are Maya

Composite, a high-dynamic composting system based on Autodesk Toxik soft-ware, which is no longer available as a stand-alone solution; Autodesk Match-Mover advanced 3D tracking and match-moving system; fi ve Mental Ray Batch render nodes; and the Autodesk Back-burner network render queue manager.

Maya 2010 is also shipping as part of Autodesks new Digital Entertainment Creation Suites. A license of Maya 2010 costs $3495, with upgrade pricing avail-able; all Maya Complete and Unlimited customers with a current Subscription are entitled to the Maya 2010 release.

AMD Delivers Its Most Powerful 3D Card Yet

8 September 2009

PRODUCT: DEVELOPMENT

Intel introduced the Intel Media Software Development Kit (SDK), a new tool for simplifying the development

of hardware-accelerated video applications. Intel Media SDK Version 1.0 enables develop-ers to plug into many different componentsIntel

CPU, Intel Graphics, Discrete graph-ics, and other hardwarethrough a single API. The SDK delivers a single interface to optimize performance and accelerate video applications for processors and graphics chipsets. It can be downloaded online from

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/media/.Intel also announced Version 2.2 of Intel Threading Build-

ing Blocks (Intel TBB), a high-level programming method for parallelism. Intel TBB 2.2 improves performance with full support for the lambda capabilities of the new C++ draft standard (unoffi cially named C++0x) and added fl exibility for ISVs to redistribute with applications using Intel TBB, such as Autodesk Maya and Epic Games Unreal Engine.

Also, Intel announced a new low-voltage version of the Intel Xeon 5500 series processor, the Intel Xeon L5530, as well as the Intel Xeon W5590 dual-socket workstation chip and the W3550 and W3580 single-socket worksta-tion chips.

NEWS: GRAPHICS CHIPS

Intel Unveils Media SDK

NEWS: GRAPHICS CHIPS

Graphics Take a Hit But Ready for ComebackJon Peddie Research (JPR), the industrys research and consulting fi rm for graphics and multimedia, announced that estimated global graphics chip shipments for 2009 will see the worst-ever year-over-year drop in shipments. The decrease in shipments for 2009 will be even worse than the 2000-2001 recession. However, 2010 promises an amazing comeback.

Graphics chip shipments are a lead-ing market indicatorthe graphics chips go to the ODMs and OEMs, which then build and ship PCs.

Considering its data, interviews with suppliers, and world economic forecast models, JPR believes the worst is over and the third quarter will show recovery leading all the way through 2010, albeit

subject to seasonal adjustments.Portable devices, such as notebooks,

laptops, and netbooks, will be strong, but they will not overwhelm desktops, which are still the preferred choice of platform for power users and professionals.

Architectural changes, such as Intels Nehalem, and new product introductions from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, are going to be disruptive to the status quo and tradi-tional market share of the suppliers. The continued expansion and development of heterogeneous computing and GPU compute will stimulate growth in 2010, enabled by Apples and Microsofts new operating systems.

New programming capabilities using OpenCL, DirectX 11, and Nvidia CUDA

architecture will remove barriers to the exploitation of the GPU as a serious, economical, and powerful co-processor in all level of PCs.

The net result is a new PC environment starting in the third quarter, and this new environment will have a benefi cial impact on computing in 2010 and onward.

JPR provides consulting, research, and other specialized services to technology companies in fi elds including graphics development, multimedia for profes-sional applications and consumer elec-tronics, and high-end computing. Jon Peddies Market Watch is a quarterly report focused on the market activity of PC graphics controllers for notebook and desktop computing.

PRODUCT: VISUALIZATION

Nvidia unveiled new Quadro Plex solutions targeted at scalable visualization professionals who interact with 3D models and analyze large volumes of data, allowing them to seamlessly run any software application across multiple ultra-high resolution displays or projectors.

These cost-effective visual computing platforms are designed to power a wide range of ultra high resolution and multi-channel collaboration environments, ranging from interpretation desktops, to visualization walls, to network operations centers.

The solutions are built on the Quadro Plex visual comput-ing system, featuring two Quadro FX 5800 GPUs and 8GBof memory. By connecting two Quadro Plex systems to a single workstation, users can view images at a resolution of 36 megapixels, span visuals across two 4K projectors or eight auto-synchronized displays, and drive stereoscopic 3D content for a truly immersive experience.

Available from Nvidia partners, such as Cyviz and IGI, Quadro Plex scalable visualization solutions power environ-ments where high-res images and real-time data feeds are seamlessly blended for training, simulation, and operations monitoring.

Quadro Plex scalable visualization solutions are available now from Nvidia partners starting at $10,750 for a single Quadro Plex system.

Nvidia Ups Quadro Plex Power

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The Drawn Together images are courtesy of Comedy Partners.

September 200910

A Balanced Approach

A s evidenced by their use in the highly interactive 3D games available today, modern graphics processing units (GPUs) are very efficient at manipulating raster graphics. What is not as well known is that the highly parallel structure and compu-tational power of GPUs also makes them extremely effective for handling more general, computationally intensive, and demand-ing algorithms.

Using graphics processors to do things other than graphics is a disruptive technology (it has a large impact within the industry) that has been an active area of research as far back as the late 1970s, with work on Ikonas [England, 1968], one of the first commer-cial graphics companies and chips. Using rasterization hardware to perform motion planning [Lengyel, et al. 1990], calculate Voronoi diagrams [Hoff, et al, 1999], simulate neural networks [Bohn, 1998], and crack passwords [Kedem and Ishihara, 1999], among many other examples, became the basis for continued ac-tive research as commodity graphics engines became more widely available and powerful.

The first wave of truly programmable GPUs, early in this de-cade, brought about many more advanced algorithms running on them, including advanced image processing, raytracing, cellular automata, linear algebra, physics, and database operations. Run-ning these applications on programmable GPUs was the start of the general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) computation revolution. In graphics-oriented conferences, such as SIGGRAPH, there was

an increased interest in advanced research in computational photography, image processing, raytracing, and advanced shad-ing effects, all going beyond what is available using traditional graphics application programming interfaces (APIs). This is also when the immense processing power of GPUs was noticed in other fields, and publications about their use can be found in areas from finance to biology, often demonstrating large perfor-mance increases.

Most of the original GPGPU work was done by changing the compute algorithm to fit the programming models of graphics APIs, such as OpenGL or Microsoft DirectX. As a simple example, to perform computation at each pixel in a 2D image, developers would bind a simple shader program, written in a graphics shad-ing language, like HLSL or GLSL, and, at times, even pseudo-assembly, like ARB_fragment_program, then render a full-screen quad the size of the output image.

While there was a tremendous amount of research using graph-ics APIs, this was a difficult approach for developers who were not proficient with graphics APIs. Consequently, the academic research community began to design languages to abstract the GPU as a compute engine, hiding the use of the graphics APIs behind more compute-friendly programming interfaces. Per-haps the two best-known examples of this are Brook, developed at Stanford, and Sh, developed at the University of Waterloo. (Brook evolved into AMDs Brook+; Sh eventually was commer-cialized by RapidMind.)

Until recently, even with more compute-oriented program-ming interfaces, computation on GPUs has remained primarily a research technology used by early adoptersa new, promising, experimental capability for scientists, engineers, financial profes-sionals, and others running computationally intensive applica-tions. Mainstream adoption, however, was low.

Basically, two issues have kept GPU computing from gaining wide adoption: First, available GPU compute APIs were propri-etary, targeting a single vendors architecture; second, the GPU has been treated as an independent application accelerator, as opposed to being part of a larger, balanced, heterogeneous plat-form working with other computational resources.

GPUsBy Mike Houston

Mike Houston is a senior system ar-chitect in the Advanced Technology Development group at AMD in San-ta Clara, CA, working in architecture design and programming models for parallel architectures. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, focusing on research in programming models,

algorithms, and runtime systems for parallel architectures, including GPUs, cell, multi-core, and clusters.

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12

n n n n Viewpoint

September 2009

Recently, there have been two APIs created to address cross-vendor computation on GPUs: DirectX 11 DirectCompute and OpenCL. OpenCL goes further by targeting parallel processors more generally and providing cross-platform support.

Apple provided the initial proposal for OpenCL and the cata-lyst to gather the major silicon vendors to work on an industry standard for compute in 2008. The main goals of OpenCL are to provide a cross-platform, cross-vendor, cross-architecture, roy-alty-free industry standard for parallel programming. While hav-ing solid support for GPU compute, the working group strove to make OpenCL applicable beyond GPUs, providing a framework for writing software that can exploit the vast, heterogeneous com-puting power of multi-core CPUs, GPUs, cells, and DSPs.

Thus, OpenCL addresses the need for a cross-platform, indus-try-standard approach toward development for heterogeneous architectures. OpenCL is a C-based language, with a structure familiar to parallel programmers. This allows developers, who are used to programming in C for multi-core CPUs and other GPU computation languages, to easily transition to OpenCL, providing portability of their applications/programs across a wider range of devices and platforms.

OpenCL includes a platform API that lets developers query, select, and initialize compute devices, as well as a run-time API to execute the compute kernels and manage the scheduling of compute and memory resources. It is designed as a low-level inter-face to maximize the performance that can be extracted from the

targeted devices. By creating efficient, close-to-the-metal programming inter-faces, OpenCL forms the foundational layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform-independent tools, middle-ware, and applications.

Of course, no application runs en-tirely on the GPU. Beyond the obvi-ous need for CPUs to drive execution, most mainstream applications are het-erogeneous in nature: They have some functions that accelerate well on multi-core CPUs and others that are per-fectly suited for a GPUs data-parallel architecture (see Power Play, pg. 21). GPUs excel at mathematically inten-sive algorithms with a high degree of data parallelism. Many algorithms, like those discussed above, can be excellent candidates for acceleration; however, some algorithms generally thought of as perfect GPGPU algorithms, such as

image convolution with small window sizes, may be faster on a multi-core CPU system than on a GPU because of the expense of off-loading the computation to the GPU.

Current GPUs require a high degree of arithmetic intensity, a measurement of the amount of computation performed per data read, to effectively accelerate algorithms. A developer must take a balanced approach and match the algorithms to the best-suited device in the system. For some algorithms, that may be just the GPU, or just the CPU, but many algorithms benefit from using both the GPU and the CPU.

AMDs first public beta release of OpenCL targets multi-core x86 processors. Beyond being part of a full-platform approach to OpenCL, it also enables developers to begin exploring OpenCL on the systems they already have, without having to first invest in new hardware. Moreover, the techniques critical to GPU per-formance, such as data locality awareness, use of vector types, and large amounts of parallelism, are also critical to CPU performance. Coding in OpenCL provides a solid methodology for writing par-allel code that is scalable on multi-core x86. In fact, AMD has shown some applications scaling well on a 24-core system based on four Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.

Programming that takes maximum advantage of all the parallel-computing resources in the system is the next frontier of applica-tion acceleration. OpenCL and the burgeoning ecosystem around it form a solid foundation for this up-and-coming revolution to flourish and take off. n

Traditional GPUs used for manipulating raster graphics can also handle demanding algorithms

CGW :808_p 7/16/08 11:45 AM Page 1

In the totally uninhibited fi lm Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the characters stand open-mouthed while hamburgers fall from the sky, tomatoes roll down sidewalks, chil-dren ride sleds on mashed potato moun-tains. Its diffi cult to imagine subject matter more fun for computer graphics profes-sionals: e colors look saturated in the way that only digital colors can look. e characters stretch the bounds of 3D ani-mation. Cartoon physics has never been so appetizing, bananas so aggressive.

Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller,

the animated feature from Sony Pictures An-imation based on the popular childrens book of the same name, tells the story of a young mad scientist who converts water into food to help an impoverished town. Meatballs rain from the sky and he becomes a hero. at is, until the welcome food showers be-come violent storms. An enormous pancake dripping with butter and syrup smothers a school. A giant banana stabs a building.

I like to say this is the fi rst cartoon Ive ever worked on, says Rob Bredow, visual eff ects supervisor, who moved onto this

fi lm after completing Sonys Surf s Up, which received an Oscar nomination. For Cloudy, Bredow led a crew of 250 people at Sony Pictures Imageworks who worked on the fi lm. Its our most ambitious animated movie to date, Bredow says.

e fi lm features approximately 30 main characters who live in a world created with 4000 hard-surface models. From the fi rst character to the last soda can took exactly two years, says modeling supervisor Marvin Kim, adding, the can was a garbage piece that we crushed and put next to a dumpster.

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Images 2009 Sony Pictures Animation.

Flipping the Animation Style e characters move using a style of ani-mation inspired by United Productions of

America (UPA), which was especiallypopular in the late 1940s and 1950s,

with Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing among the most famous examples. e [UPA] animators werent constrained by accurately moving volumes in space, explains animation director Pete Nash.

ey wanted something more abstract and conceptual, so they fl attened the imag-es and did simplifi ed graphic designs. e principles of animation took a backseat to concept; that is, they could break any rule if it supported the concept. An arm could grow, a character could be off -balance as long as it supported a strong idea.

Applying that idea to CG characters was tricky. In 3D, youre more confi ned by realistic stuff , like textures, Nash says. If you stretch a texture too far, it looks like rubber. So the crew found ways to have

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Flipping the Animation Style e characters move using a style of ani-mation inspired by United Productions of

with Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing among the most famous examples. e [UPA] animators werent constrained e [UPA] animators werent constrained by accurately moving volumes in space, explains animation director Pete Nash.

Weather station intern Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) reports on the latest climate change, a giant pancake that fl opped from the sky.

Sony Pictures mageworks artists twist computer graphics into a colorful, cartoony, and hilarious animated feature for Sony Pictures Animation By Barbara Robertson

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concept drive everything without, neces-sarily, stretching limbs and body parts.

The main character Flint, for example, who is skinny, awkward, and nerdy, has hoses for arms. No elbows or knees. He was a loose, gangly character, Nash says, so it made sense not to give him a skel-eton in some cases. But we still kept him grounded.

For example, when Flint walks, he often doesnt move up and down; he moves in a straight line, with only his legs animating. That bolstered the concept of an intensely focused inventor, and it fit with the UPA style of animation.

When a UPA character walks into a room, Nash says, the upper half might lock [while] the lower half keeps walking, and then the upper half would catch up. So, with our rig, animators could change pro-portions and lock parts of the body so those parts couldnt move when others did. For example, we could put the chest in world space or in body space, and then switch back. With that kind of control, the ani-mators could have Flint and the other char-acters sometimes act in this unique style and still have seamless performances.

By contrast, the animators created a real-istic performance with accurate mechanics and follow-through for the self-important Brent, the towns only celebrity, albeit a

performance they still sometimes exag-gerated. Earl, the towns cop, on the other hand, moves in more extreme ways. He is an incredible athlete with nothing to do, so he overstates everything physically.

When he moves, its like a sprinter explod-ing off the blocks, and he stops on a dime, Nash says. He does that even when its not necessary. Hell do a flip and two somer-saults, and land just before telling someone they got a parking ticket. I loved [this style of animation]. The very idea of concept driv-ing everything is, to me, what animation is all about. Its the reason to animate a movie instead of doing it live action.

In addition to creating performances, the animators also sometimes created char-acters using the flexible rig to transform a generic model into a specific secondary character. The directors wanted 80 char-acters, Bredow says. It wasnt feasible to build that many modeled, rigged, textured characters in time, so we came up with a clever compromise. Modelers built the 30 hero characters, which could morph into new characters, and added a generic male and a generic female to the digital crew list.

We could change their proportions, skin color, costume, lots of things about them to create a rich set of background characters who could deliver lines at cam-era, Bredow says. Pete [Nash] and his

team created characters on the fly as need-ed from artwork and inspiration.

Imageworks proprietary crowd system provided the means to control large num-bers of characters when needed. Its basi-cally a [Side Effects] Houdini-based system that allows you to place characters, bring in motion libraries, and choose what executes when and where, says Dave Davies, effects animation lead. It uses goals and steering behavior to get characters from one place to another.

ChewandswallowThe characters populated the town of Che-wandswallow, as in the book, so for the film, modelers built a city 14 blocks long from east to west and 22 blocks long from north to south, with eight buildings on each block. Four times.

The modelers built this huge town, where pretty much every street was shootable for wide, medium, and close-up shots, and then in the second act, the mayor takes out a loan and converts it into a food utopia, says Bre-dow. So we built a second town. And then the food falls, so we rebuilt the town with a food layer. And then, its destroyed.

Although texture maps handled some variations, for the most part, modelers created each version anew, including all the props that dressed the setcars, street lamps, trash cans, and so forth. In addition, the modelers added items for the interiors

Layout artists filmed about 20 percent of the colorful film using a handheld camera to compose the CG scenes.

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to the parts library and did the initial set dressing for the layout teams.

We built detailed interiors for places the characters would go into and out of, and low-res interiors when you could only see inside the windows, Kim says. To sim-plify the modeling task, the team altered and replicated base models whenever pos-sible. A hallway made from thousands of egg cartons, for example, started with two models that the crew bent and placed in various ways.

The largest interior set was Flints labora-tory, and the biggest geometric part of that lab was a wall with 62,233 buttons. We tiled sections and copied them, but we modeled each button that someone would push during the movie, so the amount of geometry on that wall was amazing, Kim says. And, all the buttons had to work.

For modeling, rigging, and animation, Imageworks uses Autodesks Maya en-hanced with custom tools; for cloth simu-lation, an in-house solver called Tango.

Tami, a custom renderer, works with hair groomed in Maya. Swami manages mo-tion cycles and paths for crowds. Painters and texture mappers work with Adobes Photoshop and Maxons BodyPaint 3D. Technical directors create the primary ef-fects tools within Houdini. For some ef-fects, they use a custom 3D sprite renderer called Splat, and for others, SVEA, a volu-

metric renderer. Imageworks Katana han-dles 3D lighting and 2D compositing. And Imageworks in-house version of Arnold, raytracing software developed originally by Marcos Fajardo, now a software architect at Imageworks, rendered the film.

Crazy ColorsOur bible for the movie was the artwork the production designers gave us, and we adhered closely to the artwork, from light-ing, to design, to the stylization of the food, says Bredow, so much so that when we compared our shots to the artwork, as we wiped over the art, you could hardly tell where the transition was.

All well and good, except that stylized food doesnt always look delicious enough to eat. It was up to the look dev team artists, four CG supervisors, and a team of TDs to make the 50 different edibles believable enough to be appetizing yet fit within the films brightly colored style.

We were excited that the directors

wanted a stylized look in terms of charac-ters and shapes in the environment, says Danny Dimian, CG supervisor, who laid the groundwork for the Arnold shader writ-ers. We had two shader writers and a lot of support from the Arnold programming team, he says. For our show, they wrote the shaders in C++, so it wasnt as simpli-fied as it will be later with the open-source

language Larry Gritz is working on. Early in the film, when the people in the

town were poor and down on their luck, the lighting team created a muted environ-ment using only a few colors. When the food began to fall, the colors intensified.

We had purple skies and incredible or-ange skies, Dimian says. At one point, we heard that we werent pushing the colors and the look far enough and that we all needed to go to crazy school. So we took that comment to heart. When the charac-ters go inside the meatball, we went as far into the color space as we could to get lots of crazy hues. But, the lighting needed to behave realistically, partially because the movie would be in stereo 3D.

The team believes that the global illumi-nation built into Arnold made it easier to achieve the realistic lighting they wanted. In Arnold, wed set up a sun and a sky dome, and wed get a really beautiful look right out of the box, says Daniel Kramer, digital effects supervisor.

Because lighting with Arnold closely re-sembles lighting with real-world lights and because many of the lighters had worked only with scan-line renderers, Bredow sent them to classes at Mole-Richardson, a well-known Hollywood lighting company. With Arnold, the size of a light dictates its shape, the size of the shadows, and how soft or hard the shadows are, which is much more like lighting on set with live-action photography, Bredow says. So, at Mole-Richardson, we had DPs walk our guys through live-action photography.

The DPs lit sets mocked-up from art-work of a bedroom, complete with a bed, tables, sheets, and a window, noting how lighting they would use for characters walking through the set would differ from that in the artwork.

It was refreshing for me to have con-versations with the lighters about where to place bounce cards, Bredow says. Because Arnold is a raytracer, it renders the shadows right in every shot, whereas on previous

Modelers built four versions of the town Chewandswallow. The mad scientist Flint and his sidekick Steve survey the damage in a detailed model of a building destroyed by the falling food.

September 200918

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movies, we needed to dial in shadow bi-ases. And when we transferred our lighting rigs from one scene to another, the results were more predictable.

The trick was in knowing when to stop. If we turned the knobs too high and in-creased the sampling too much, it was easy to turn a four-hour render into a 16-hour render without any appreciable increase in quality, Bredow points out.

Because Arnold renders entire scenes each time it renders, to give the lighting team the ability to work interactively, the Arnold crew created a system in which they rendered a first pass at low resolution with low anti-aliasing. This gave the lighters a way to quickly show me the lights blocked in, says Kramer, who spent much of his time during production sitting in a dark room and giving comments on lighting ef-fects, cloth, and hair.

The artists had eight-core machines, Kramer says. So, we could load in all the geometry and move lights in near real time. The next level was 1k resolution with better anti-aliasing. Then, if we liked that, wed go to full resolution and full quality.

One of the problems the group ran into,

however, was in rendering hair. When the strands of hair became too fine, the ray-tracer had sampling problems. Wed get lots of chattering, Kramer says. So Rob [Bredow] came up with a control so the hairs would never be smaller than the size of pixel. Once the characters moved away

Senior CG supervisor Grant Madden Anderson, who had last worked on Beowulf, took on the role of stereoscopic supervisor for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. While some stereo films these days are using depth subtly, this film provided the perfect settings for stereo gags.

This is a fun movie, so we could bring objects into the audience, Anderson says. You dont want to do too much of that, but audiences seem to like it, and it can be fun. We had food falling, being thrown, exploding. Its the very nature of this film, and also a personal preference, to have things coming out into the audience. It was like being in a food fight. It was a blast.

The first scenes in the film, before Flint invents a way to turn water into food, are flat, and then as the film progresses, the scenes get deeper. We have a shot at the end where Flint is holding onto the machine for dear life while its shoot-ing food out the bottom, Anderson explains. We pull his legs way out into the audience, and you wonder whether hell make it or hell fall. It added to the sense of peril.

Working with Anderson was a small team of assistant technical directors and camera artists who helped manipu-late the left-eye and right-eye cameras to give the scenes

depth and the characters roundness.Basically, we create two 3D cameras and dial two pa-

rameters: convergence and interocular, Anderson details. Convergence, which describes how cameras are angled, determines the depth. If you angle the cameras in, objects push back. If you angle them out, objects push forward. In-terocular, the distance between the cameras, stretches ele-ments within a scene and, thereby, makes characters look rounder, especially ones close to the cameras. The stereo operators usually start with an interocular distance of 2.4 inches, the average space between human eyes.

Generally, wed dial in the interocular to get the round-ness we wanted, and if that moved objects too close, wed tweak the convergence to shove them back, Anderson says. If objects are too close, its painful. You can have only so much depth, close or far away, before it becomes too deep, so we tried to maximize that stereo budget to use it to our best advantage for every scene and still have the scenes cut together well. At the very end of the movie, we did an overall tweak of the convergence to make the scenes fit to-gether better.

As is the case for most stereo postproductions, the Cloudy

Animators used a flexible rigging system to create background characters from generic models. The studios version of Arnold rendered the colorful, highly saturated scenes.

Fun with Stereo

September 2009 19

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from camera and the hairs became too small, the system automatically thickened them and used transparency to render the fatter hair.

We accumulated a lot of transparency, Kramer says. But we didnt have aliasing artifacts, which would have been expen-sive. The big challenge with inexperienced lighters was optimizing scenes to make the raytracing efficient.

Arnold provided other advantages, though. Because the raytracer rendered en-tire scenes, and because the modelers built entire city blocks, the artists could freely move the camera and see fully rendered scenes. Kramer provides an example: We were test-shattering a building by dropping a banana into it. The rendering artist placed cameras all around the building so we could intercut close up and far away to create the shot. To our surprise, when we looked at

the backside of the building, we saw glass busting out. We didnt know that was hap-pening. Being able to set up lights for one simulation and get coverage without having to explicitly dial each view was cool.

Food FightAlthough modelers, animators, and light-ers adhered closely to the production art-work in order to create the stylized, satu-rated look of the film, effects artists were left largely spinning on their own. The only area where production designers gave us guidance, but didnt take us all the way through, was in the area of effects, Bredow says. Theyd give us inspirational paintings, and our effects supervisor Dan Kramer and his team worked out how things moved. It was great to give them a playground for blowing our socks off.

At first, normal-size food rains down, but

in the third act, the townspeople must fend off massive amounts of colossal chow. We drop food thats made of more than one piece, and that interacts with whatever it hits, Bredow says. A pancake hits a school. A jalapeo pepper explodes into a giant fire-ball. The interactions are extreme.

To handle the dynamicsthe dropping food and the destruction it causedthe crew used the open dynamics engine (ODE), a rigid-body dynamics solver that the studio had integrated into Houdini for previous films. By connecting many rigid bodies with joints, they could simulate soft bodies, like food, as well as hard bodies, like buildings, and more easily simulate the interaction between them.

In sum, operators in Houdini shattered objects into complex, low-resolution parts connected with breakable constraints, simulated through ODE, and parented

team used multiple cameras to help enhance story points. Sometimes you might increase the interocular to make a character round, but that makes the whole scene too deep and separates the characters too much in depth. So, we might use multiple pairs of cameras to adjust convergence and interocular for characters and objects independently in the background, midground, and foreground.

In one shot, for example, the mayor, who had been a small man, has eaten so much free food that hes grown im-mensely. Flint barely recognizes him, Anderson says. So we really tried to play with his roundness.

One difficulty the stereo team had with Cloudy was that

the scenes were so complex they couldnt always dial in the cameras interactively. The entire town was a model, Anderson says. It took so long to open the files, Id give a camera artist parameters, say, an 8.6-pixel offset. The artist would make the change, and then wed bring up the scene and review it.

The huge town also made bal-ancing the depth in the establish-

ing shots tricky. The city scenes used such wide lenses, we didnt have a lot of depth at that distance, Anderson says. But, if we gave too much depth to objects far away, they looked like miniatures.

One thing the crew learned with this film, though, is that they can push the depth back farther than they once thought. Weve learned that our eyes are more flexible than weve given them credit for, Anderson says. This stuff is all so new that for the first set of films, we concentrated on get-ting stereo 3D right technically. Now, we can start breaking the conventions to use it creatively.

No better event than a food fight. Barbara Robertson

The subject matter of this film, falling food creating catastrophic weather, created the perfect opportunity for stereo gags.

September 200920

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to high-resolution geometry that the team rendered through Arnold.

More specifically, although ODE easily handles volumes, such as buildings, to han-dle organically shaped food, like bananas and hamburgers, as well as buildings, the Cloudy team gave the dynamics engine the ability to calculate the movement of con-vex hulls.

ODE is fast and stable when you use spheres and boxes, Davies says. But, it takes a lot of manual setup to approximate an arbitrary-shaped object, such as a tur-key leg. You cant easily represent it with a sphere or box, but if you can divide it into sections and each is a convex body, you

can approximate the exact shape of many pieces. By using convex shapes, we could build any arbitrary shapes we needed. We got less interpenetration between objects, the simulation was faster, and it looked more realistic.

To begin, the effects team used operators in Houdini to divide objects into convex shapes via a program called Qhull, which shatters volumes into convex hull parts based on predefined patterns. The hamburger bun, for example, became 24 rigid bodies bound together loosely. Fortunately, it all happens procedurally in Houdini, Davies says. If you give it a shard, it returns a convex shape that wraps around it. We compiled those and fed them into the simulator.

A shard might be pieces of pipes, dry-

wall and studs, and other internal geom-etry for a house, or a hierarchy of shapes that make up a banana or a hamburger. When you see a rough approximation of a banana, it looks like armor, with all these rigid shapes parented together in a chain, Kramer says. To rain hamburgers, we had many semi-rigid convex bodies stuck to-gether with flexible constraints and layers for the buns, meat, lettuce, tomato, and pickles. Each was its own collision object, and all the layers had breakable constraints. When a hamburger hits the ground, the bun might pop off and a tomato might roll away on its edge. It was all based on physics and dynamics.

Mathematical glue held the rigid-body parts together during the simulation; the joints between could be breakable or soft. Constraints specified how much force would break the glue for breakable joints to, for example, shatter a building into pieces, pop apart the layers of a hamburger, or, for soft joints, bend a noodle.

Once the simulation is done, Davies says, we have tools for mapping the high-resolution data onto the rigid-body repre-sentation. If something bends or crumples, we used a polygonal bind to have the high-resolution geometry reflect what was going on in the sim. In other words, the high-resolution banana is bound and deformed to match the movement of the low-resolu-tion, rigid-body armor.

When the bouncing burgers numbered in the thousands, the effects artists would drop 20 or so, then bake the resulting ani-mation cycles out and attach them to par-ticles later, again using Houdini operators. The particles would tell the system, Hey, Ive hit the ground, and that would trigger a new animation state, Kramer explains.

One of the most dramatic sequences in the film revolves around a tornado made of spaghettiand meatballsthat rains down on people in a restaurant.

Each strand of spaghetti was a chain of rigid-body boxes, Davies says. Using our [Houdini] tool sets, we built collid-ers for the characters and the tables in the restaurant. The rigid-body boxes in the chains could interact with the characters and tables, and could pile up on each oth-er. For each chain, we generated a curve, and then generated noodle geometry for each curve that we sent to the renderer. I think the result looked convincingtech-nically and artistically.

And, funny. This film never got old for me, Kramer

says. Even after seeing shots many times, I still laughed. The crew would be cracking up in dailies every day.

One reason might have been that the directors encouraged them to come up with gags.

We had such creative freedom, Bredow says. We had ideas come straight off a tech-nical directors desk and into the film. He gives one example in which animators had posed Flint, who nearly electrocutes him-self while working in a high-voltage area. The technical director took that cartoony pose, put a skeleton that he designed in-side, and lit it to expose the skeleton. The directors and production designer flipped, Bredow says. It was like Wile E. Coyote. They loved it. n

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at Barbara RR@comcast.net.

TDs created the spaghetti tornado using chains of rigid-body boxes to facilitate collisions with other objects, and then rendered a curve drawn through each chain with noodle geometry.

raphics processors have come a long way during the past few decades. Over the years, these cards have

added greater and greater processing power to handle ever more sophisticated graphics. It has now gotten to the point where the graphics card can actually possess more computing power than the systems CPU. is increase in power is causing many people to think twice about how the graphics card is actu-ally used. e graphics processor has now become a co-processor in the system, allowing for a much wider range of applications.

At fi rst, graphics cards were nothing more than display adapt-ers, leaving all the number crunching to the CPU. As process-ing power was added to these cards and the clock speeds of chips became faster, so, too, did the speed of the work stations graphics. ere came a time, however, when faster clock speeds simply werent enough, and companies started adding more processors to distribute the load. Graphics are particularly well suited for parallel processing, since diff erent parts of a display can be handled with discrete processors.

September 2009 21

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Graphics processors have come a long way over the past few years, taking on more processing tasks.Im

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Parallel processing has been so successful that more recent graphics cards can now sport GPUs with hundreds of processors each. While these processors are primar-ily tuned for graphics applications, they are still processors, and like every proces-sor, they can crunch numbers. In fact, the processors on graphics cards are especially good at floating-point math, which makes them very suitable for tasks like simulation and other math-intensive applications.

More Power, More WorkThe first applications to use this processing power for work other than graphics were the gaming companies. They moved com-plex calculations, such as particle systems and physics, to the graphics card, which al-lowed for faster games with richer content. The fact that this processing happened on the graphics card saved the CPU from get-ting bogged down and also saved band-width on the graphics interface.

Soon, a number of industries were us-ing the power of graphics cards to aug-ment their applications, and graphics card vendors were quick to offer tools to help these developers tap into the power of their cards. These days, graphics cards can be

used as parallel computing platforms, per-forming such tasks as physical simulation, finance, fluid dynamics, and particle-sys-tem generation. The line where the com-puter stops and the graphics card begins has become very blurred, indeed. In fact, a whole new term has been coined for this: general-purpose graphics processing units, or GPGPUs.

Nvidia has jumped headfirst into the GPGPU pool, and actually sells a gen-eral-purpose supercomputer called Tesla. This computer is essentially one of Nvidias top-of-the-line graphics cards stripped of the display connectors and configured as either an upgrade card or an external box. The high-end version, dubbed the S1070, is a rack-mount system that offers its users four teraflops of computing powersev-eral hundred times that of a standard PC. Many of these can be connected together to create a very powerful supercomputer.

In fact, just a few years ago, Nvidia claimed that four of its S1070s connect-ed together would have enough comput-ing power to qualify it as one of the top 100 supercomputers. These days, who knows how it would stack up, but it still represents an enormous amount of com-

puting power for the desktop.With graphics cards encroaching on

territory formerly the domain of systems vendors, there is also movement in the other direction. Intel, famously known for its x86 CPU platform, which drives the vast majority of desktops, is no stranger to graphics. In the consumer space, Intel does very well with its integrated graph-ics chips. These chips are great for the average home user, but those who need higher-end graphics, such as gamers and content creators, will usually add a third-party card from Nvidia or ATI to boost graphics performance.

A New Game?Intel is trying to take on the major graph-ics players not by competing directly with them, but by subtly changing the rules of the game. This will happen when Intels new Larrabee chipset is set to ship at the end of this year. The chipset is designed primarily as a high-end graphics card, but with a twist. The Larrabee chip takes a completely different approach than tradi-tional graphics cards in that it doesnt use a dedicated graphics processor, but instead uses a massively parallel version of Intels x86 chip geared toward graphics.

Larrabee will include very little specialized graphics hardware, instead performing tasks like z-buffering, clipping, and blending in softwareusing a tile-based rendering ap-proach. This simple method could change the rules as to how high-end graphics are developed, because such processes as ren-dering will be left to software rather than the hardware traditionally used on graphics cards. This means developers would be free to customize the way an application renders its images, allowing for a much wider palette in the way the graphics look.

Having x86-based processors on the graphics card also hits directly at the desk-top supercomputer paradigm put forth by Nvidia. The problem with a dedicated graphics processor is that it requires a dif-

Developers in markets such as medical, bioscience, finance, oil and gas, and others can build programs using standard C language to run on Nvidias graphics processors via the companys CUDA development environment.

September 2009 23

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ferent set of programming tools. Learning the skills to master these tools takes an ex-tra degree of time and effort, something that can be in short supply within a soft-ware development environment.

By using the very common x86 com-mand set, Intel opens up sophisticated graphics to far more developers. It also could open up the graphics chip as a direct extension of the systems CPU. Since they both speak the same language, the same code could conceivably be shared between the CPU and the GPU, thus speeding up just about any application in the computer. Of course, all of this will be dependent on the actual chips that Intel produces. The perfor-mance of a Larrabee chip has yet to be formally measured, so who knows how well it will stack up against next years top-of-the-line chips from AMD and Nvidia.

To open up its graphics chips to a wider range of developers, Nvidia launched the CUDA development environment. This allows develop-ers to build programs that run on Nvidias graphics processors using standard C-language tools instead of a more esoteric graphics language. While this can address some developer con-cerns, it still might not offer the degree of integration that Larrabee would provide.

Not to be left out of this burgeoning battle is AMD, the other major x86 chip vendor. The companys recent acquisition of ATI was part of its plan to integrate the CPU with graphics on the same chip. This could boost throughput significant-ly, since it eliminates one of the biggest bottlenecks in a graphics computer: the graphics interface bus. As graphics get faster and faster, the standard bus has to be continually updated.

From the original ISA bus to PCI, AGP, and now PCI Express, every few years the graphics bus changes. An integrated chip would sidestep this issue nicely. Integrated

chips also will reduce power requirements, making such a chip ideal for the growing market focused on mobile devices, such as netbooks and tablets.

At this point, however, AMD has not shipped any integrated chips. It is, however integrating the companys graphics chips more tightly with its CPUs on the mother-board, allowing for increased performance. For developers, AMD offers its Stream computing platform, which provides a de-velopment environment that is friendly to the average programmer.

The CPU/GPU MarriageAll these developments represent a conver-gence of the GPU and CPU that could eas-ily change the way graphics are managed within a computer system. Right now, it seems as though the two CPU manufac-turers are lining up their graphics solu-tions, which could leave Nvidia as the only high-end graphics vendor without an x86 chip of its own.

This may suit Nvidia just fine, as the company seems to be publicly pushing the GPGPU concept as a replacement to the CPU. In response to an ongoing court battle with Intel over a 2004 cross-licens-ing deal, Nvidias CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated, At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the

PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.

While this comment should be taken with a big dose of CEO hubris, there is still some technology to back up this state-ment. One of the most important is soft-ware-based. Last year, Apple, Nvidia, and AMD helped create a new standard called Open Computer Language (OpenCL), which is a framework for writing programs that execute across a wide array of process-ing devices, including GPUs. OpenCL of-

fers parallel programming tools and could become a very common stan-dard like its cousin, OpenGL.

An open programming standard is nice, but it does not entirely re-place the standard x86 CPU in a computer system that most likely runs an operating system written for the x86. This brings up the on-going rumors that Nvidia also may be looking to enter the x86 market. The company has already dipped its toe into the integrated CPU/GPU chip market with the Tegra chips for mobile devices, which integrate Nvidia graphics with an ARM pro-cessor. Integrating an x86 CPU may

be the next step, most likely for the low-power netbook market. Where Nvidia gets that technology, however, is up for debate.

This leaves the graphics industry at a turning point. There will be increasing pres-sure to integrate the CPU with the GPU, as well as open up the processing power of graphics cards to more general applications. How this will all play out is up for specula-tion, but it will most certainly result in not only faster graphics, but also in better ap-plications and software that can tap into the power contained in these chips. n

George Maestri is a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World and president/CEO of RubberBug animation studio. He can be reached at maestri@rubberbug.com.

AcrSoft Total Media Theater, a consumer video app, gets a quality boost (right) when accelerated with AMDs ATI Stream.

The word Oscar buzzed around the surprise sci-fi hit District 9 within days of its opening. Filmed in South Africa with postproduction in New Zealand and British Columbia, the low-budget TriStar feature fl ew to number one at the box offi ce on opening weekend. Critics loved it, too, giving it an average 88 percent approval rating at the Rotten Tomatoes Web site, a rarity for a fi lm starring aliens. e consensus: technically brilliant and emotionally wrenching.

David Edelstein of New York Magazine stated, To call this the best shrimp-from-outer-space South African apartheid allegory ever made does not begin to do it justice. But its a start.

AO Scott of e New York Times wrote, In the midst of it all, you almost take for granted the carefully rendered details of the setting, the tightness of the editing, and the inventiveness of the special eff ects.

Steven Rea, critic with the Philadelphia Inquirer, agreed: What is absolutely impressive are the visual eff ects: the hordes of aliens, the mother ship, the seamless blending of the real with the fantastic.

High praise for any visual eff ects fi lm. Outstanding for one made with a $30 million budget. Remarkable for a low-budget movie starring three CG characters and hundreds of CG second-ary characters.

e CG characters are the aliens, disgusting creatures that look like a cross between a seven-foot-tall grasshopper and a lobster.

ey speak alienese, clicks and clacks that the South Africans un-derstand and that the audience sees translated into subtitles. e hero aliens are a father and son, Christopher Johnson and little CJ, and Christophers friend Paul.

Image Engine, a relatively small visual eff ects studio in Vancou-ver, British Columbia, created all the aliens, which are always CG. e Embassy, also in Vancouver, created an exo-suit that plays a big role in the fi lms climax. Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zea-land, created the spaceships.

Based on writer/director Neill Blomkamps short fi lm Alive in Joburg, District 9 is the fi rst feature the 29-year-old had directed. Blomkamp, an award-winning visual eff ects supervisor, was raised in South Africa and graduated from the Vancouver Film Schools 3D Animation and Visual Eff ects program in 1998. He created District 9 using a blend of invented documentary, corporate video, television news coverage, and live-action footage shot as if by a camera operator on the run. Image Engine inserted its CG aliens into it all.

e fi lm begins as a mockumentary, with talking heads analyz-ing and video footage documenting the arrival of an alien spaceship 28 years prior. We learn that when the ship arrived, it hovered over Johannesburg because it ran out of gas. When the South Africans became brave enough to pry open a door, they discovered thou-sands of starving, sick, half-dead aliens. ey segregated them into

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An MNU offi cer holds a computer-generated alien,created at Image Engine,at gunpoint.

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a refugee camp. Two decades later, millions of aliens live and scavenge for food in what has become a harsh, garbage-strewn, dusty slum. Street signs read No nonhuman loi-tering. The alien mother ship still hovers.

When the mockumentary switches to present-day interviews, we meet Wikus Van De Merwe (actor Sharlto Copley), a spineless but eager corporate lackey who works for Multi-National United (MNU), the company hired to keep the aliens un-der control. MNU has decided to evict the aliens from their shantytown homes and relocate them to a concentration camp in the middle of nowhere. The company puts Van De Merwe in charge.

While Van De Merwe organizes his troops, we meet the aliens Paul, Christo-pher Johnson, and little CJ, and learn that after 28 years, Christopher has created enough biofuel in his secret lab to power the mother ship. But, Van De Merwe ar-rives to evict them, discovers the biofuel, and accidentally splashes some on his face. The alien DNA begins taking over his body, which makes him especially valu-able to MNU: He is the only human (now, part-human) who can operate the aliens bioweapons. When Van De Merwe escapes from the evil corporations biolab, his only refuge is the aliens camp. Chases ensue. Characters interact. Battles take place. All

seen through the news footage, documen-tary-style camera, which keeps the audi-ence transfixed in the moment.

Alien MotionThis quick, handheld shooting style af-fected Image Engines animation process in two ways. Neill [Blomkamp] didnt want the aliens to move like guys in suits because they look different physically, but he also wanted their motion to be realistic to fit into the genre of the film, says Steve Nich-ols, animation supervisor. We drained the BBC motion library for reference.

To capture that realism, actor Jason Cope (who also played Grey Bradnam, UKNR chief correspondent) performed the parts of the adult hero aliens during filming while wearing a gray suit decorated with patterns. Our idea was to have wit-ness cameras and on-set motion tracking, says Dan Kaufman, visual effects supervi-sor. But, the documentary-style filmmak-ing made it too difficult to put our cameras in good locations for triangulation. The cameras were in frame all the time.

Thus, the animators instead started with rotomation, that is, copying Copes action from the filmed plate onto the CG aliens. This provided the believable interaction between hero aliens and actors on set that the animators and Blomkamp wanted.

For aliens moving in the background, the animators used motion data captured from Cope and stunt actors. This movie is so different from other sci-fi films in which aliens roar, run, attack, Nichols says. We wanted to show what its like to live in a slum. So we have wounded and hurt aliens sitting down, lying on a wall, acting aggressively, dying, and rummaging through the trash.

Data captured from a child helped the animators perform little CJ. It took lots of reference to nail a six-year-old and not caricature him, Nichols says. But, we still had to make him a bug.

At first, the animators matched the rotoscoped and motion-captured perfor-mances exactly, but the aliens looked too human. It didnt work for these massive bugs, Nichols says.

To compensate for the size, the anima-tors tried having Cope wear stilts at one point to lift him to Christopher Johnsons six-foot-eight-inch height, but exactly matching that motion produced an alien that looked like it was walking on stilts, which didnt work.

We wanted them to be completely unpredictable, Kaufman says. Most of the time, theyre on two legs, but some-times theyre on all fours, scrambling like chimpanzees. Sometimes they act all wild. And, their legs are like dog legs. So it was better to scale up the motion than to have stilts.

Ultimately, the animators used key-framing to add the physicality Blom-kamp wanted for the skeletal creatures. Special rigs helped. When we maneu-vered the data into [Autodesks] Maya, Kaufman says, we corrected for the dif-ference in how the joints in the legs fit together, and added more movement to the lowest joints.

Once they achieved the overall perfor-mances, the animators gave the aliens little tics and other non-human behaviors that complemented their look. We added in-

Alien technology powers the robotic CG exo-suit created at The Embassy, which the protagonist Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) climbs into for the final battle.

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sect jitters, Nichols says, fast, razor-sharp, hyper-real movements. The aliens have the physicality of humans but with extra twitches and fast motions that humans couldnt do.

Only a Mother Could LoveInitially, Image Engine scanned a maquette created by Weta Workshop, and created the 3D hero alien model from that. But during postproduction, Blomkamp asked the modelers to make the characters more insect-like, particularly the faces, and the aliens evolved into the grotesque grasshop-per/lobster creatures that the humans in the film called Prawns.

The original concept was a prosthetic outfit an actor would use on set, Kaufman

explains. But the costume was bulky, and Neill wanted thin limbs, like an insect, skin-like cartilage, and so forth. But the biggest change, and one of the last things we did was make the face more insect-like yet capable of showing emotions and ex-pressions we could recognize.

James Stewart, creature supervisor, sculpted the new alien face to have small, interlocking plates that move to form ex-pressions, and he led a modeling team that worked in Maya and Pixologics ZBrush to create the creatures in 3D. I tried to have

people focus on the construction, the lines of the polygons, to make sure they would deform correctly, Stewart relays. In mod-eling today, people sometimes create turn-tables without considering that the things have to move, articulate, talk, emote.

Take, for example, laugh lines. For the face, modelers created what Stewart calls subtle linear shapes. We animate faces muscle by muscle using linear shapes that can combine, but the root is simple, he says. For a laugh line, if you dont build a shape with a crease down the middle, you cant blend that shape into a realistic fold. On the other hand, if you make it too com-plicated, as you increase the deformation, it becomes tough to figure out which fold is what. So, we add shapes in an almost road

map waythis area is that polygon.In addition, a proprietary tool called

Mayhem handled the constantly moving tentacles and mandibles on the front of the aliens faces. It does rigid-body dynam-ics, says Shawn Walsh, executive producer. But we used it to simulate these soft-body tentacles, so we could tailor the simulation and have control over close-up shots. We use this idea of jangling rigid-body objects against each other to drive a simulation in a number of ways.

Image Engine also used Side Effects

Houdini for volume rendering, footfalls, and dust hits, Next Limits RealFlow for fluidsspittle, vomiting, urine, and so forththat helped make the aliens believ-able, and Mayas nCloth, Houdini, and the rigid-body simulation for clothing and other soft bodies. A new project manage-ment tracking system, called Jabuka and developed by Image Engines R&D de-partment, managed the hundreds of as-sets needed to create aliens with individual looks for the secondary characters, and provided shot continuity.

We tried to create a diverse textural palette of aliens living in a Soweto-like place, Walsh says, referring to Johan-nesburgs infamous shanty-town. Neill [Blomkamp] asked what we could do to bring them into the environment, and we started riffing on that idea. They gave some aliens torn T-shirts and wrapped stuff around others arms; they imagined each alien would choose stuff it liked or needed. Some chose garbage bags. Some had splashes of paint and graffiti on their bodies. Others pasted skateboard stickers on their shells and wore hats.

We had a number of hats in the asset management system and 12 different stick-ers, Walsh says. We could publish a set of assets with each character; it was literally like building a wardrobe that we could save on a shot-by-shot basis. This alien dressed like this exists in these three shots.

On the SurfacePainted texture maps created in Adobes Pho-toshop and Maxons BodyPaint 3D com-bined to create varying patterns of color and displacement, as well as to provide lighting information for 3Delight, a RenderMan-compatible renderer from DNA Research. A behemoth shader provided controls for specular, wet specular, and so forth. [The aliens] necks had a wet, slug-like feel, Stew-art says. To get that feeling and at the same time have the aliens look dirty without kill-ing render times was a challenge.

Animators at Image Engine gave the alien Christopher Johnson emotional facial expressions by moving the plates that make up his face. Procedural animation helped move the tentacles.

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When the look dev team began work-ing on the charact