The Dreamhive Studio Blog

This was a great talk by the folks at Pixar on both a high level and low level. The following are my notes from this course. Feel free to post comments if you’d like clarification on some point.

Modeling & Dressing

• Kitchen Space organized based on the concept of Mus-En-Place (everything in it’s place). Practically this meant organizing set dressing into meaningful groups to provide a visual rhythm/staccato and also to help frame the characters.
• Focused areas of detail
• The kitchen was organized special based on tasks
• Varying groups and density can alter the scenes mood
• Goals for Food models
  • translate visual design of fine quisine
  • found in nature look
  • aviod plastic feel
• Used Soft Body simulation to help fill crates and bins with food
  • Scripted setup
  • Initially resulted in flat sorting (not mounded veggies)
  • Solution was to place sculpted collision surface in base of crate to achieve art dirrectable mounding
  • Also used invisible wedges and collision shapes to add more interesting gaps and break-up
  • Yields organic results without hand-placement
  • All veggies low-res cage of sub-d surfaces
  • Key to simulation control was layering
• To create static mounded food on plate. Soft-body sim each layer separately then freeze.
  • Use low gravity to achieve better control
  • For cavier modeled shape then filled with simmed soft body “eggs”
• For compost heap sculpted top surface mounding then flipped up side down and dropped rigid body simmed garabage into the volume to mold the shape of the mound. Then freezed and flipped back over.

Okay I’ve still got pages of notes to go as well as notes from Sunday afternoon and Monday and I have no doubt we’ll have pictures from the exhibition floor tomorrow. Stay tuned

Wow, what a difference SIGGRAPH is from Comic-Con. We’ve been out here in San Diego since July 25^th. We attended a packed Comic-Con and I’m happy to say the halls of the San Diego convention center were serene in comparison with cattle drive that filled the hallways one short week ago.

Another welcome relief is the new merchandise bags this year. For those of you who have never attended SIGGRAPH before, in the past you would get a merchandise voucher with your conference badge which allowed you to pick up a plastic bag filled with a conference DVD and printed conference proceedings/papers to take home for later reference. In the past the combined contents of this bag weighed in at around 5-10 pounds. Not the sort of thing you want to lug around with you all day. While I enjoyed perusing the printed papers book (about the weight of a telephone book) in the past I was thankful to find that the bag no longer included this heavy addition and instead contained only the DVD version. Another cool new concept is the ability to get your favorite courses/sessions burned to DVD overnight. Hats off to the SIGGRAPH organizers for these changes and additions.

Hello everyone and welcome to our coverage of SIGGRAPH 2007. This blog will focus on key takeaways from courses and sessions that we attended this year and hopefully give those of you who didn’t make it out to San Diego some useful info you can use within your own work. For those of you who don’t know me (which is likely almost everyone reading this), my name is Wes Grandmont III and this will be my tenth year attending SIGGRAPH (1997-2007). I started my career in NYC working for Curious Pictures as a 3D artist/animator, then worked for nine years at Electronic Arts beginning as a lead artist and eventually evolving into one of the studio’s Technical Art Directors. After working on many different game genres (Madden, NCAA Football, Superman, NASCAR, NFL Street) and platforms (XBOX360, PS2, XBOX, Gamecube, PS1, PC), I left to form The Dreamhive Animation Studio with a group of very talented friends and colleagues I’d met over the years. We are currently closing in on the end of our first year of business and we’re working on some really cool projects with some fantastic clients. If you get tired of reading the blog, check out our studio site www.thedreamhive.com (end shameless self promotion)
Now on with the show coverage…

Hello all, this is an an addendum to our main studio blog located here…

http://dreamhive.blogspot.com/