Mike King

Glago’s Guest CGW article

March 8, 2009 on 2:07 pm | In Animation, Movies and TV | Comments Off

You can read a great article about Glago’s Guest in the February issue of Computer Graphics World. Here is a link.

I’m going to add a few footnotes here to the article…

Although the crew based the pipeline on Autodesk’s Maya, they designed it to be independent.

This is true up to a point. We don’t ignore the fact that we are using Maya, but at the same time we don’t try to replicate functionality just so we can work without it. Think about recipe cards and their relationship to actual food. Our pipeline worked with the recipe cards. Maya files were like the food.

Yun-Chen Sung, who had worked on a lighting package for DreamWorks’ Shark Tale, created new lighting tools called Lilo…

Lilo was also used for applying shaders and adjusting materials in addition to being our lighting package.

Effects supervisor Cesar Velazquez… Effects animator Dave Hutchins

Actually, David Hutchins was the supervisor, and Cesar was the artist for the orb shots. At one point, we had pretty much every effects artist in the studio working on the short. We had close around 90 shots, most of which contained multiple effects elements or prop animation.

The nightly auto-render served as a troubleshooting tool.

The auto-render process and scripts were written by Mike Harris, a fantastic technical director. Every night, the process would query the production database for the list of shots that were done in animation and in inventory for the character effects department. We are using an evolved version of this process again on our current show.

Pixar’s Mike King helped the team develop the asset management tool, which they named Nani.

Another correction: I used to work at Pixar. But I have been at Disney Animation since late 2004.

Some trivia: Nani is the companion tool to Lilo, so we named it after Lilo’s sister from the film.

I also wrote a production notes & task database using Ruby on Rails. The intent was to make a more artist-friendly tool and help production management keep tabs on what was actually happening with pipeline data. The separation of show policy from the data pipeline helped to simplify the toolset.

iPlay, written by Sung, gave the artists the ability to look at the whole short and select what they wanted to see within a sequence.

iPlay lets you see the latest shots from any department that creates movies. So you can choose to see all the latest animation. Or just layout. Or just storyboards.

If you wanted to see all the latest lighting, but mix in animation where lighting shots are missing, you can do that do.