In 'Up,' the new Pixar film due out Friday, the studio had to figure out how to animate the more than 10,000 interdependent balloons that hoist the main character's house aloft.
(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)If you want to consider a difficult computational problem, try thinking of the algorithms required to animate more than 10,000 helium balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest, which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house.
That was the challenge the production team at Pixar faced when it set out to begin work on "Up," its tenth feature film, five years in the works, which hits theaters on Friday.
There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons. Not with their numbers in five-figures, and especially not when you consider that within the cluster, every interaction between two balloons has a ripple effect: If one bumped another, the second would move, likely bumping a third, and so on. And every bit of this would need to be seen on screen.
In "Up," the story revolves around the main character, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, who, frustrated with his mundane life, ties the thousands of balloons to his house and sets off for adventures in South America. A small boy ends up marooned on board, and hilarity ensues.
The cluster of balloons is so central to the film's branding--it's called "Up," after all--that to promote the film, Pixar teamed up with two of the world's cluster ballooning experts for a nationwide tour involving a real-life flying armchair and dozens of huge, colorful balloons.
"You have a movie that's about a house that flies, which is a pretty far-fetched idea," said Steve May, the supervising technical director on "Up." "We all know, from kids' parties, how a bunch of balloons behave, so if we could animate balloons in a realistic way, the believability that the house could fly would sell."
For May, "Up" producer Jonas Rivera, director Pete Docter, and the many others involved in making the film, believability was key, even within the context of a story about a flying house. And while a major part of instilling that believability must come from a well-conceived and executed story and script, the animation is no less responsible for winning over potentially skeptical audiences.
Balloons, the mother of animation invention
May said that the animation department at Pixar never even considered hand-animating the balloons. But even standard computer animation wouldn't be up to the task, because of the N-squared complexity involved in the thousands of interdependent balloons. Instead, the studio's computer whizzes figured out a way to turn the problem over to a programmed physical simulator, which, employing Newtonian physics, was able to address the animation problem.
"These are relatively simple physical equations, so you program them into the computer and therefore kind of let the computer animate things for you, using those physics," said May. "So in every frame of the animation, (the computer can) literally compute the forces acting on those balloons, (so) that they're buoyant, that their strings are attached, that wind is blowing through them. And based on those forces, we can compute how the balloon should move."
This process is known as procedural animation, and is described by an algorithm or set of equations, and is in stark contrast to what is known as key frame animation, in which the animators explicitly define the movement of an object or objects in every frame.
Procedural animation has been around for some time, but May suggested that even the most difficult uses of it in the past don't come close to what Pixar had to achieve in "Up."
Pixar fans may remember the scenes in "Cars" of a stadium full of 300,000 car "fans" cheering on a high-speed race below, each of which was independently animated. That, too, was done with procedural animation, May said, since creating so many cars individually would have been a non-starter. But even that complex computation problem didn't approach the balloon cluster issue in "Up": the "Cars" scene involved no interdependent physics.
Another animation challenge for Pixar was figuring out how to handle the feathers on Kevin, an important bird character in the film.
(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)Getting the simulator humming properly is no easy task, as one might imagine. May said it involves setting rules for how individual objects should behave, giving the computer these initial conditions, and then "let it run."
Oddly, because the simulator does indeed run with those conditions and rules and the peculiarities of physics, the animators found themselves without precise control of what would happen with the balloons--or other objects in the film animated using these techniques.
"If the (balloon cluster) is moving too slow, we increase the amount of wind, and then run the simulator again," May said. "Then maybe we turn the wind down. It's a little fun science experiment where sometimes, hopefully by the end, we're getting what we want."
Losing control of balloons
Sometimes, given the vagaries of physics and chaos theory, unexpected things happen. The computer team inputs the rules and because some of the initial conditions are random, "you get semi-random results." One of May's favorite examples is that early in the film, when the house first is hoisted aloft by the balloons, a small group of the balloons actually broke off of the main cluster.
May said that this breakaway group of balloons is actually visible--albeit very briefly--in "Up." Eagle-eyed moviegoers can see the escaped balloons in the upper right-hand side of the screen, he said.
"We didn't mean for that to happen," he said, "but (we said) 'It's cool, let's keep it.'"
Even being able to make such choices wasn't possible at the beginning of the film's production, however. May said Pixar's physical simulator, an open-source program called ODE, couldn't initially handle the complexity of modeling the behavior of more than 10,000 balloons.
"We could handle about 500 (balloons), and we knew we needed tens of thousands," he said. "We knew we needed to develop a new simulator software pipeline...to handle an order of magnitude more complex simulation."
Of course, at Pixar, adjusting to evolving computer needs on the fly is nothing new. In fact, May said the studio has done so in one form or another on many of its films. For example, he said that when the studio made "Monsters, Inc.," it had to figure out how to animate the movie's monsters' fur. Similarly, when Pixar made "Finding Nemo," the animators had to figure out how to simulate underwater scenes.
"We had to learn about (how light refracts under water), and murk and how particulates float under water," May said.
And in "Up," too, there were additional animation challenges. Among them were figuring out how to animate and render the feathers on Kevin, a bird that is a major character in the film, and how to make the cloth on (main character) Carl's clothes seem believable.
Carl's threads were "the hardest clothing we've ever had to animate here," said May, "in part because Carl's a (small) man in an oversized suit. That was another case of (using) the physical simulation, and of setting up rules for how cloth should behave. And the looser the clothing, the more it can behave badly."
Even Carl himself presented some animation difficulties, May said, because the character's head is shaped like a cube.
Even the face of Carl Fredricksen, the films main character, presented a new animation challenge. His face is presented in a cube-like shape, which represents his lifelong sense of being boxed in by soulless development. But for animators, making him smile was hard, since his mouth would have to curve around to the side.
(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)Like many other elements in "Up," the cube-shape of Carl's face wasn't a random whim of the director. Rather, it is a story element: May explained that Carl's character is based on someone who, as a young man, was vivacious and adventurous. But as he grew older, his small house became more and more surrounded by buildings, and "it's like his world has compressed him into a square."
Thus, a cube-like face. But May said animating his facial expressions, which must fit into this cube shape, was complicated. Smiles, for example, had to come up and wrap around his cheek.
Still, for the award-winning filmmakers at Pixar, the goal is to make even the hardest animation problems look simple on the silver screen.
As producer Jonas Rivera put it, "The audience looks at (the balloon cluster) and says, 'Oh, that's pretty.' But they have no idea how much work went into it. We worked on that for over a year. (Then) the kid takes off his hat and runs his fingers through his hair. My mother will never know that took 15 people six weeks."
On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
ILM visual effects and animation teams had to employ some of the latest tricks in the industry to make the new "Star Trek" film feel both realistic and true to the classic franchise. Among the biggest challenges was updating the Starship Enterprise for 2009.
(Credit: Industrial Light & Magic)SAN FRANCISCO--For Paul Kavanagh, the animation supervisor on the new "Star Trek" movie, one technical element of the film was particularly challenging.
During live-action filming, director J.J. Abrams had done something unusual: In a bid to incorporate a shaky, handheld effect, Abrams would frequently sit behind the camera and literally tap on the back of it with his fingers. But "Star Trek" is jam-packed with computer graphics, and for Kavanagh, it was imperative to find a way to replicate the effect of that finger tapping, even in the purely digital sequences. Not to do so, he said, would have created a visual inconsistency that threatened to disrupt the audience's experience.
Back at Industrial Light & Magic, where Kavanagh works, he considered several ways to solve the problem. He talked to the people in ILM's motion-capture department, who showed him a number of 3D mo-cap cameras and techniques, but he felt those were too time-consuming and expensive.
Still, the mo-cap folks had another technology that was both simple and cheap: an orientation sensor that could be plugged into a computer with a simple USB connection and used to record motion. So Kavanagh and his animation team figured out that if they tapped on a desk while filming scenes with CG cameras--on-screen camera viewers that incorporate realistic lenses--and layered the motion from the orientation sensors underneath, they could get the same effect as Abrams got with live-action.
"J.J. did come down to visit us, and he loved it," Kavanagh recalled. "He definitely wanted the same kind of handheld look, but (what we did) was a big surprise for him. He loved that the look carried across the shots."
As you might imagine, "Star Trek" is a feast of effects and animation. According to ILM's Roger Guyett, the film's visual effects supervisor, it has a full hour of visual effects in all. "Every aspect of (the effects has) to be planned and thought through," Guyett said. "It's easy to underestimate the amount of work that goes into creating" an entire world.
Yet Abrams wanted a very tactile feel to the movie, Guyett said, and that meant filming as much as possible and adding in visual effects, rather than relying entirely on CG. "It was closer to the model of the original 'Star Wars' movie"--building actual sets that audiences can react to--"not filling in all the blanks (with CG) later on."
For example, when considering how to create a shuttle hangar, Abrams decided he wanted an actual set, rather than crafting it digitally. That meant finding a suitable space and then lighting it to match the look and feel of the rest of the film.
One benefit of that, Guyett said, is that it helped the actors to have a real set to work on, because they had to imagine less. "You've got actual wind blowing in your face," he said, rather than having to act like there's wind.
For Guyett and his team, another big challenge was figuring out how to handle a massive amount of destruction in the film.
For example, he said, they had to bring photo-realism to the way two colliding spaceships would fall apart. But the physics involved in something like that happening in space are far different than they would be inside the Earth's atmosphere. Similarly, the team needed to figure out how to realistically show what the explosion from a missile hitting the Enterprise would look like.
"The rules of physics aren't the same" in outer space, Guyett said. "Explosions behave in a different way."
Making the physics of an explosion in space look right was no easy task. But Guyett said one of the biggest advantages of working at ILM is that the company is rife with "geniuses" who he can consult with on just about any kind of scientific conundrum.
"You can e-mail a guy," Guyett said, "and say, 'When a ship explodes in space, what actually happens?'"
Then, because of ILM's latest tools--which accurately model the way gravity, or the lack of it, would affect an explosion in space--the filmmakers can find a way to make it look as close as possible to what the in-house science experts say it should.
Guyett explained that ILM's computers allow teams like his to simulate happenings like a nuclear explosion on film and not have it be prohibitively expensive. Just four or five years ago, he said, such a thing wouldn't have been possible. As an example, he said that creating a crash sequence in "Men in Black" had been very expensive because it involved breaking up a costly model. On top of that, they'd had only one chance at getting the shot. But back then, he added, doing it in CG wouldn't have worked because the technology didn't yet exist to get the physics right.
Another challenge, Guyett said, was finding a way to update iconic "Star Trek" elements for a 2009 film without upsetting hard-core Trekkies.
For example, he said that he and Abrams had labored endlessly to try to create a transporter effect. "It's a very iconic thing in the 'Star Trek' world," Guyett said. "It's a sound that everyone knows."
One problem they had to solve was that the transporter ended up looking different on each of the different sets were used in the film. "So we'd just have to adjust it (each time)," Guyett said. "The seemingly smaller challenges can take the longest to figure out."
In animating the new "Star Trek" film, animation supervisor Paul Kavanagh crafted a unique hybrid team of animators interested in camera work and camera department people interested in animation. Each member of the group would be given responsibility for working on individual shots.
(Credit: Industrial Light & Magic)For animation supervisor Kavanagh, working on "Star Trek" presented the chance to do something he'd never done before: create a single working group of animators interested in camera work and people from the camera department interested in animation, and let individuals take responsibility for individual shots.
"We haven't tried that before at ILM," Kavanagh said.
He explained that for his eventual team, "Star Trek" was start-to-finish crunch time. They had to work on 860 shots in less than six months, and sometimes Abrams would toss in wild cards by deciding to change the story during sequences, and ask the animation department to do their own pre-visualization, something the director is usually in charge of.
In the past, it would have taken too much time, but because Kavanagh had created his hybrid working group, they were up to the task. "The benefits that came from it is that we came up with new camera techniques for all-CG shots," he said.
One of Kavanagh's favorite sequences is one in which Captain Kirk is banished to an ice planet and ends up in a battle with a beast known as a polarilla.
Crafted in CG and meant to be a hybrid of a polar bear and a gorilla, the polarilla was the animation team's responsibility, and Kavanagh said it was up to them to find a way to both breathe life into the creature and give it character.
He said they did a number of animation tests on the polarilla, trying to find the best creatures to base it on from a series of reference sources, including the BBC's Motion Gallery, YouTube, and visits to the San Francisco Zoo. In the end, they decided it would run like a polar bear, but have the rear quarters and hanging knuckles of a gorilla. It would also feature the weight of a grizzly bear.
In the sequence, however, they had to animate another creature, known as Big Red, a lobster/crab hybrid that jumps up through the ice to challenge the polarilla for the chance to attack Kirk.
Big Red "was fantastically fun to animate," Kavanagh said of the beast, which has 120 eyes in the back of its head.
As the chase sequence evolves, he recalled, they had to figure out how Big Red would reach out to grab Kirk's leg, as spelled out in the script. But because the creature's mouth was "so long," the animation team felt it didn't work to have it grab Kirk with its arm.
"We thought, what if its tongue is what grabs Kirk's leg?" Kavanagh said. "We had to figure out how that creatively looks. And that's really the fun part of the job."
They decided to have it slip and slide, Kavanagh said, but no so much "that it looks comical.
It seems that in the end, that was a challenge that both Guyett's visual effects team and Kavanagh's hybrid animation team had to tackle. But in updating "Star Trek" for 2009, will true Trekkies recognize the latest iteration of the franchise?
Judging by the mostly enthusiastic reviews, the answer seems to be yes. But Guyett's less interested in reviews than whether he did his job.
"Oh yeah," he said. "There are nods to the history of the series, what has happened and what will happen....But we just made it contemporary."
On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
A gorilla does his best to ignore everyone around as a Monday afternoon crowd at Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Fla., looks on.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)ANIMAL KINGDOM, Fla.--And so it begins.
For the third year in a row, I've set out for a lengthy journey through one of the United States' major geographic regions. It's time for Road Trip 2008, several thousand miles of traveling the American South.
Last year it was the Southwest, and in 2006 it was the Pacific Northwest.
And since I've started this trip in Orlando, there's only one way to really begin: total immersion in Disney World.
That's why at about 9 p.m. Sunday--after checking into my hotel and getting situated, I jumped on a shuttle and headed on over to Magic Kingdom, where I was able to stay--standing up most of the time, mind you--until nearly 2 a.m. Monday.
But more on that later.
A meerkat looks for danger at Animal Kingdom. Most likely, it is safe from the hordes of 9-year-olds who come to stare at it intently each day.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Today, after taking care of a few Road Trip practicalities, such as buying a USB hub and getting all my camera gear taken care of, I hopped another shuttle and made it here, to this family-packed, animal-theme wonderland.
Fortunately, since I'm staying at one of Disney World's resort hotels, I'm able to stay late at some of the parks. That's why I was able to play around in Magic Kingdom so late last night and why I'll be able to patrol Animal Kingdom until 11 tonight.
Which is good, because I haven't gotten to see that much.
Mainly, I wanted to orient myself and take this first opportunity to share some of what I've been doing.
One of the first things I did was wander into the domain of a rather paranoid meerkat. But, despite its cuddly visage, it's actually quite the nervous animal, so it being hyper-aware of everything around it wasn't surprising.
Nearby was the gorilla enclosure, and sure enough, an adult male and adult female ape were happy to indulge the oh-so-eager masses wanting to see them. Whether they were willing to express their happiness at our presence is another matter. Their faces were more the picture of pensive solo thought.
I myself have spent much of my time here, and at Magic Kingdom last night, wondering about these places and what they mean in our society. And while this might not be the place for my philosophical ramblings on the matter, I will say one thing: if you have some choice of when to come to Disney World, I'd suggest maybe staying away when the world's kids aren't in school--it is a madhouse here.
But, there's still fun to be had if you're willing to wait, or to try the ride less traveled.
For instance, last night--I guess more accurately, early this morning--after walking around for hours and being rather exhausted and unable to deal with the still imposing after-midnight crowds--I alighted on Alladin's magic carpet ride in Magic Kingdom.
There were no lines, and it was possible to get on and stay on as long as you liked. So, needing a little peaceful solitude, that's just what I did, staying put for six full go-rounds, rising up as high as I could each time and enjoying the lovely breeze and sense of being alone that came from riding above everyone else.
Back here at Animal Kingdom, I was struck by the One Tree. This is a masterpiece of man-made detail, a phenomenal faux-tree with endless animal life carved into its synthetic trunk and roots.
The One Tree, the centerpiece of Animal Kingdom. Though from afar it looks real, its actually man-made on top of an old oil platform.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)From what I gather, the "tree" was actually built on top of the structure of an old oil platform, and looking at it from below, it's easy to see why they needed to use something that big: this is one mammoth plant.
Speaking of things man-made, that leads me to technology, one of the things that will feature prominently throughout Road Trip. I'm testing out a number of devices, and I had one of them on-hand with me today: a smartphone loaded with Qik's live streaming media service. This is a device that allows you to live-broadcast low-fi video to the Internet. I encourage you to stay tuned to my Qik channel throughout Road Trip, as I'll be incorporating this a lot.
For the time being, though, I am still in learning mode with this thing. So if you do peruse my channel, I beg a little bit of indulgence as I master this thing. Rocky video, poor timing, and even the wrong orientation are things that may frustrate you today but which I promise you will get better as I go.
Lastly, I had with me a Pal Mickey, a little toy Mickey Mouse that senses where it is in any one of four Disney World parks and blurts out little pieces of trivia or jokes about the parks' many features.
This is definitely for kids, as the information really doesn't lead to much actual understanding of what's going on, but it does serve to alert you to what you're walking around, as, for example, I neared the gorilla enclosure, Mickey vibrated and laughed and prompted me to squeeze his belly to tell me a bad joke about the gorillas.
And, well, I'm an adult, but if I was a kid, I'd probably really have enjoyed that.
But since Mickey is a little bit age-inappropriate for me, and since I've already gotten the idea of what this interactive toy does, I'm going to give my Pal Mickey away sometime in the next couple of days.
If you're in Disney World right now, and are reading this, and you're the first person to Twitter me (my ID is GreeterDan) the name of the animal that shares space with the meerkats, Pal Mickey is yours. But only until the end of business Wednesday. After that, I won't be here to make the hand-off.
And since you'll be heading on over to Twitter anyway, please consider following me there, as I'll be posting updates there about Road Trip constantly.
And that's because there's still a long way to go now that I'm on the road. Please stay tuned. I promise a fun ride.
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