Talks - PIXELvienna7

In my 20 years of directing, I have storyboarded every single project I have ever worked on, and I have placed cameras for every scene I have ever shot.

This staple of the director’s craft – working with cameras – is one of the most neglected domains in the field of computer graphics. Your shot flow, camera placement and camera movement can boost and intensify the emotional impact of your animated shot, your cut scene, your vfx shot and even you CGI still. It can make your audience read your character’s minds. It can make your shot flow invisible. It can save you thousands of dollars in rendering time.

How to best stage a shot? What messages do different point of views and cuts convey? When is a camera move a creative option and not just eye candy? A fascinating journey into the craft of guiding your audience’s eye, directing emotional expectations with a lens and creating the visual clarity of a feature film look.

With the practicalities of how games are distributed and consumed in an exciting transitional phase, Crytek’s Paha Schulz looks east to examine the vibrant online gaming market in Asia and the growing influence of the publishers driving it. With those publishers now moving to extend their reach into the West, Paha will explore the reasons behind the explosive growth of freemium gaming in Asia and consider the likely effects of Eastern and Western markets becoming increasingly integrated in the near future.

The introduction contains a quick intro to CUDA, the computing aspect of NVIDIA graphics hardware platforms.

The main presentation demonstrates how ripmaps (an extension of mipmaps) can replace Summed Area Tables (SATs) for the purpose of computing a large number of spatially varying box filter kernels throughout the input data, providing both higher accuracy and higher speed for typical use cases. For this purpose, we demonstrate an implementation of ripmap generation in CUDA C (accelerated by shared memory usage), and a texture-cache based box filter for spatially varying kernel sizes, which can be implemented in both CUDA C and graphics-based APIs (e.g. OpenGL and DirectX).

(An overview over the new OpenGL compute shaders will be added if time permits.)

Thanks to the popularity of various game download services there is a new demand for games that don’t necessarily need bigscale game development team sizes. Still the expectations of the consumer are visuals that match the quality of large scale Triple-A titles.

This presentation explains various ways and techniques how the artists at Bongfish manage to deliver such quality with just the fracture of the expected teamsize. From global strategies like automatizations, asset management and outsourcing to pro-advice and -techniques on next-gen-shader, photoshop-effeciency and general work-shortcuts the artist reveals his tricks how deliver Triple-A graphics for downloadable games.

Do’s and Don’ts for Kickstarter campaigns.

“If you’re writing a book about Animation Layout, you have to begin by talking to Roy Naisbitt…!”. With these wise words ringing in his ears and with eager support from renowned American publisher, Chronicle Books, Fraser began work in late 2007 on the daunting process of interviewing over 100 different layout artists, camera operators and scene planners. Finally published 4 years later, “Setting The Scene: The Art & Evolution of Animation Layout” went on to be short listed for the 2012 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award and was described by Total Film magazine, in a 5-star review, as “..a museum, a film school and an art gallery all in one”. In this presentation Fraser and Roy take the audience on a guided tour of the first 100 years of animation layout design and technique.

The video game industry and the computer animation industry are practically joined at the hip. It wasn’t always this way though. Throughout history, video game development has struggled to catch up with linear media. Join Ben Long as he shares the audio side of the story. Learn what it takes to make a game look and sound great

Serious games are a tough business: Publishers keep their hands off them, because they don’t sell, game designer look at them with a skeptical gaze, players don’t like them because they’re boring and teachers don´t like them because they’re too complicated. Still, in 2012, after more than 3 years production, ovos released Ludiwg, a physics adventure for adventurers from 12-14 years. Meanwhile, more than 10.000 licenses are distributed to schools all over Austria. Ludwig has been published as a retail product in Austria and in the near future, Ludwig will even go abroad to Asia and South America. Jochen Kranzer, managing partner of ovos will share a glimpse behind the scenes with you and talk about what it takes to make a serious and yet fun-to-play game, find the money to do so and how Austrian schools are using Ludwig to teach Physics.

After success of original Mafia in 2002, the team wanted to do a sequel in a fast and efficient way. On the end it was neither quick nor easy. The session is a postmortem on 8 years of Mafia II development from inception to release in 2010 and also focuses on how the local development team Illusion Softworks has changed into a premium international development house 2K Czech.

From concept to in-game model the talk will give insights on how to create high quality hard surface models. Best practices, meshflow, tools available and common mistakes to avoid.

In this presentation MPC Stereographer Damien Fagnou will explain the important concepts behind Stereo Visual FX in movies, followed by examples of MPC’s workflow and the complex shots the team created for Ridley Scott’s return to Sci Fi, Prometheus.

TeamUP’s co-Founder Thiago Costa will talk about content creation as it transitions to the cloud, and the new types of workflows that are being designed at TeamUP that will accelerate the process of start and develop creative projects.

The presenter will demonstrate the Rendering features of the new ultra fast Multi-Optics render engine and demonstrate how to handle complex materials and the Realtime collaboration platform.

When studios say “it is about the story!” everyone nods in agreement, but the narrative elements of a story often remains elusive because there just isn’t time to take a full course in screenwriting. This is a course on story structure that has been designed specifically for technical directors, artists, animators, modelers, designers etc. who’s work is critical in making “the story” come to life. This session covers the universal elements of story distinct to screen media, with many clips to illustrate the concepts.

This session emphasizes story elements (i.e theme, plot, character, setting, conflict etc.) and their relationship to classic story structure (i.e. setup, inciting incident, rising action, climax, resolution etc). It analyzes conflict (i.e. internal, external, environmental), turning points, cause & effect, archetype vs stereotypes, and how choice defines character. In all stories there must be narrative questions raised and “change” to keep the audience engaged. Stories need to have something at stake (i.e. survival, safety, love, esteem, etc.) that motivates the main character (protagonist) to move from their ordinary world to a different world, where the action takes place.

An overview of the process used at Aardman Features for the film ‘Pirates!’. From CG Facial Rigs through to physical 3D printed puppet faces used on set.

Micheal Shantzis will give a behind-the-scenes peak into Pixar’s animation pipeline.
From developing a story, to creating a storyreel in editing, to art, modeling,
animation and simulation. Shantzis will show examples from well-known Pixar
movies like “Brave”, “Toy Story 3”, “Cars 2” and “Up”.

Oscar Grillo will talk about his life and work, directing and animating numerous TV series and short animation films.

I’ll talk with Florian Satzinger, answering to his questions about my work. During the speech I’ll show three different shorts, made with completely different styles:
– Flash animation
– 2D Limited animation
– 2D Full animation.