Aliasiwavefront: optimized performance delivers award-winning results - Special Advertising Section

Post, Nov, 2002

One mark of a successful advertising campaign is a tagline that becomes part of everyday speech, like the prominent examples 'where's the beef?" and "Wasssuup." Through a series of quirky, humorous advertisements, Docker's "nice pants" is quickly percolating into the public consciousness.

One of the more memorable Docker's advertisements, titled "X-Ray Vision," features a woman with X-ray glasses in an airport restaurant. As she spies on other patrons, she observes a woman taping an illicit conversation with her lover ("he's so busted," she whispers), a portly man complaining about his food while dressed in women's undergarments (" he's got issues," she observes) and the man wearing the new Dockers Mobile Pants, which look smooth and uncluttered, while the X-rays glasses reveal a cell phone and PDA in hidden pockets ("nice pants," comes the tagline).

Like all great audio/visual productions, the advertisement looks smooth and effortless, as if shot in one take of a newfangled X-ray camera. Of course, you don't have to be a radiologist to know that X-rays don't reveal layers of clothing or other details shown in the advertisement. It wasn't an X-ray device, but a team of animators from Rhinoceros Visual Effects and Design* (RVE&D) that produced this effective advertisement. And they were working with AliasIWavefront's Maya'" software on Intel-powered computers.

Arman Matin, RVE&D's OG director, explains the unique challenges posed by this project. "From the beginning, this was an interesting project because they wanted the X-ray look, but also to see clothing, which ordinarily would disappear in an X-ray. So we had to come up with custom shaders for this X-ray look." Another challenge with these projects is the need to precisely match the live video so the viewer can't tell the difference between live and animated footage.

The actual film was shot in one day at the Encounters Restaurant at Los Angeles International Airport. The ad was edited down to its final 30-second length and then handed over to RVE&D for post production.

During the shoot, RVE&D collected photographs of all the actors against a measured grid from various angles. This allowed the team to shape a unique skeleton for every actor to match the live action. The team also photographed all small objects including chairs, silverware, glass, cups, watches, eyeglasses, purse, briefcase, cell phone, and so forth. These objects were digitally modeled using Maya and then replaced the objects shot in the live action.

Most objects were modeled in the live plate to support the concept that everything had to be transparent. Some shots required subjects to be filmed against a green screen in order that they remain separate from the background. Other characters were manually separated from the background in a video compositing program.

Four animators were assigned to each shot to position each object and set piece in CGI to match the live action. Through a process called rotoscoping, the team rigged and painstakingly animated the skeletons to match even the subtlest motion of the actors, completing the process on a literal frame-per-frame basis.

Maya's Hypershade was used to develop the X-ray shader that rendered all objects, skeletons, and the set. Some shots involved more than 20 layers of CG rendering. In the end, the desire to create a natural Xray look while still allowing for real clothes and facial expressions to show through was achieved with their careful balance between OGI and live-action back plates.

"We did the whole rendering, animation and various aspects of modeling in Maya," commented RVE&D's Matin, "and the Hypershade engine let me create the custom look I needed. As CG director, it allowed me a lot of flexibility, and that really impressed me."

Matin wasn't the only one impressed with this project. X-Ray Vision received a New York International Film Festival Finalist Award for Visual Effects and Computer Animation and a Mobus Awards Finalist for Computer Animation.

Matin was equally effusive with his praise for the dual Intel processor-based workstations used by his team of animators. "Though six weeks sounds like a long time to produce a 30-second spot," he explained, "it wasn't in this case, considering the painstaking animation work and volume of multiple-layer rendering. Those computers were real workhorses."

Maya's performance wasn't an accident, explained Bob Bennett, General Manager, Product Development Group at AliasIWavefront. "With advice from Intel engineers, we compiled the Maya rendering code with the Intel compiler and used Intel processor features which optimized the performance of our rendering engine by 15 to 20 percent. On top of this, the Maya Renderer can use multiple processors to distribute the work among multiple threads."

AliasIWavefront Maya runs on Intel[R] Xeon[TM] processors. Maya Complete is available for $1,999 (USD) and Maya Unlimited is newly priced at $6,999 (U SD). For more information, visit www.aliaswavefront.com, or call us at 800-447-2542 (U.S. only).