Autodesk Brings 2D and 3D Closer Together

Feature: Page (1) of 2 - 04/29/06

Autodesk Brings 2D and 3D Closer Together NAB announcements include new collaborative CG pipeline strategies By Frank Moldstad

Toxik 7.5 includes enhancements to its 3D compositing super tool, Reaction, as well as to the animation editors.
Autodesk came to NAB 2006 with new 2D and 3D tools, plus new pipeline paths that build the relationship between 3D and compositing. Among the introductions was Toxik 2007, a new version of Autodesk?s collaborative compositing software that includes an interactive Paint system ? as well as a full 3D environment.

?We really believe in CG pipelines, and we believe that a lot of the great film work and high end television work is driving the procedural pipelines that combine 3D and compositing,? said Bill Roberts, Director of Product Management, Autodesk Media and Entertainment Division. The scale of current films and the time pressures of the industry are increasing the need for people to do things in a parallel fashion -- as opposed to sequentially, he added.

Another big announcement was the porting of the Inferno visual effects system to Linux, which Autodesk says brings a 5x performance boost over older SGI machines such as the Onyx 2. ?Up until now we haven?t had a workstation that was capable of delivering an experience that was on par with some of our legacy systems,? said Roberts. Also announced at NAB were new 10-bit versions of Autodesk?s entry-level Flint vfx and Smoke editing systems, enabling them to fit better into 10-bit broadcast pipelines.

Inferno is now available for Linux
For the 3D world, Autodesk is committed to uninterrupted development for both Maya and 3DS Max, said Rob Hoffman, Senior Entertainment Product Marketing Manager. NAB was the second trade show where 3DS Max and Maya have both been flown under the Autodesk banner, since Autodesk?s acquisition of Alias closed three months ago. ?The important thing for 3DS Max, Maya, and Motion Builder is that the road maps remain intact. The road maps that we had development-wise prior to the acquisition have not changed since the acquisition,? said Hoffman. ?What this really means for our customers is they?re going to end up with better tools, more efficiency, and more interoperability in the long run, seeing that both of these tools are now under one roof.?

MotionBuilder, which came from Alias along with Maya, has just been upgraded to version 7.5. And Autodesk also has big plans for the fbx interchange format developed by Alias, Hoffman noted.

But with the 2D emphasis of NAB, the new Toxik 2007 capabilities took center stage. Autodesk built the Toxik compositing architecture prior to the Alias acquisition for large pipelines where dozens or even hundreds of artists all need to work together. ?We launched the architecture last year, and it was a very basic compositing framework at that time. But its big unique value add is the collaborative data base that sits underneath,? said Roberts.

Autodesk has undertaken a fast ramp-up for the Toxik toolset, now in its fourth release. It?s added filtering tools for compositing, blending and comping tools, and at NAB it announced a full-on HDR paint system inside of Toxik. ?The connection with that and 3D is completely strong,? said Roberts. ?Having that HDR compositing environment, an environment that can take every single value of color and light that can be produced by a 3D system, and actually work with it without planting it in any way shape or form, is huge. The other thing is, it does have a full 3D environment as well, so it?s not just a 2D environment.?

The 3D environment is not designed as a modeling system for creating 3D, he said. But it has a complete 3D scene graph that allows full lighting and retouching of imported 3D objects. A technology demo at Autodesk?s NAB user group meeting showed how 3D and compositing can be tied together, using footage from Fast and Furious 3 that included Maya 3D elements.

?We showed a scene including 3D elements combined in an explosion, and how we?re able to render out all the different passes ? a beauty pass, an occlusion pass, a motion vector pass, a depth pass,? Roberts said. ?And the interesting thing is, we?re able to hook it up because of the open nature of our systems, so that Maya not only rendered to the open storage, but created a data base entry inside of Toxik which pulled a whole comp together that preserved all of the values for the blending of the layers straight into the compositing compartment,? he said.

?So the compositor sees exactly the work, it?s already put together, there?s no work to combine all of it,? Roberts added.. ?And because it?s HDR, we used an example where there were highlights in one of the scenes. You want to punch them up a little bit? No problem. You?ve got your highlight pass, but you can paint through that and because it?s HDR paint, you can set values higher than one. So on the 2D/3D side, that was huge. And all of the sudden people were saying, ?I get this whole procedural CG pipeline,? ? he said.

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