CGSociety

Was that really a full year we just experienced?
Most people I talk to are happy to let 2010 slide into history but I enjoyed it. Plenty of milestones were passed, a great many software and hardware products brought out, and ground-breaking technologies let loose on the production industry.

For this extensive list, CGSociety was interested in anything related to the CG industry - software releases, movies, short films, games, products, or anything that had an impact on the CG industry at all. Thousands of people viewed the thread set up for suggestions in the CG Retrospective 2010 and offered posts that could make it the list. Here we now present the community-voted list of CG-related coolness!

Paul Hellard, CGSociety Editor

Avatar-The Last Airbender

Industrial Light and Magic took on the job of VFX in 'The Last Airbender', throwing balls of fire and water. This was just the start of the effects and ILM's Pablo Helman was brought in to supervise. Director Shyamalan knew what he wanted. He had it all in a big storybook he took everywhere with him. Helman told CGSociety, "The major barrier was that technology hadn't been developed to generate the effects that were called for."

Up to 70 takes were called for to ensure the correct lighting, camera motion, etc was captured on set. In the end, the challenge of 'bending' fire, water and air wasn't the problem. They had to make it behave in an unrealistic way and then make that believable for the audience. Not an easy task.

© Industrial Light & Magic

Iron Man 2

The second installment of Marvel Iron-Man franchise has more action than some could handle. And the series has a little way to run yet. ILM did their level best to produce the major upgrade to the suit and battles, and the modelers, animators and the other artists produced some amazing work. The action sequence of the Monaco Grand Prix was staged in the car park of Downey Studios after the real Monaco race board retracted an earlier offering to shoot at the real location. There's more to come. Iron-Man 3 will be released in 2013.

© Industrial Light & Magic

Octane Render

The Refractive Software Octane Render has become one of the first GPU based, un-biased, physically based renderers. I was personally surprised this made it to the final list but, there you go. Using Octane, the video card in your computer is used to render photorealistic results instead of rendering software. This allows the user to create stunning works in a fraction of the time of traditional CPU based renderers. You guessed it, the Octane Renderer runs on CUDA.

With a single, modern GPU you can typically expect to see a 40X speed increase over a typical un-biased, CPU based renderer. All traditional postproduction steps like brightness, color correction, contrast and tone-mapping operations can be completely done in Octane.

© Radiance

Prince of Persia

Fighting, storming and cranking time backwards in a sequence filled with bright sun, dust and a lot of sand was a challenge that not one but several VFX studios had a hand in. DNEG, MPC, Cinesite and no doubt a bunch of other studios fought bravely through the 400 VFX shots to bring this to the screen for the Disney Enterprises in under 18 months.

"The 'rewind' effect called for a completely reconstructed 3D live set with actors repositioned, so the same shot could be seen from a new angle, able to be busted apart and treated as a brand new scene," explained Paul Franklin.

© Disney Enterprises

Red Dead Redemption

RockStar Games dug into the depths of gameplay and story-telling with this amazing game. They squeezed character development thru the GTA4 filter, and dirtied them up a few notches, a'la Sergio Leonie. In doing so, they captured the grime and dust of the Wild West. As the winner of several 'Game of the Year' awards and having 95% as an aggregate score on top sites, RDR is an outstanding result for the art team.

As for game play, the accumulation of good and bad honor is a feature. Do good and it comes back to help. Bad honor will haunt you through the future levels as well as making the game a more, challenging experience. Midway thru 2010, Rockstar announced extensions as free downloadables, bringing new levels to the saga. Who needs another game when you have one that grows.

© Rockstar Games

Stereoscopy

In 2010, stereoscopy was having both a good time and a bad time. Several films repurposed after production as 3D were getting trounced, yet the films that carried the 3D from concept through to IMAX presentation where being celebrated. Ed Catmull spelled out the perils to the entire industry if our trash was left out.

Reports that the 3D effect shown on the Nintendo 3DS is bad for the eyes of the 'under-six' audience surprises no-one. The real litmus test will be the advent and release of the 3D projector being talked about from Apple that doesn't need glasses. In December, NVIDIA opened their new 3D Vision Galleries on the web, with competitions designed to generate new cutting edge content to use within the 3D space.

God of War 3

What an amazing collection of hot images! The God of War franchise is just a pot of sauce! Of course, Ballistic Media is also a little happy this was voted across to the list. The success not only of the game but our book about the Art of the Game, warms the cockles of our heart.

"I don’t mean to be cliché,” Art Director Ken Feldman explains, “but the best way I can describe the environments for 'God of War III' is ‘epic.’" Using ZBrush and Maya almost exclusively, the studio created a pipeline of character, fire and lighting construction for the game with blistering speed. The final gameplay is testament to their long hours and some solid direction.

© Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc.

Autodesk 3ds Max 2011

Celebrating 20 years of service to the digital creative industry, the 3ds Max community had some reason to be proud of the achievements. The toolset just keeps getting more prepared for what is required.

Modeling and texturing characters, props and environments is more efficient in 3ds Max 2011, with expanded Graphite and Viewport Canvas toolsets that deliver intuitive new brush-based interfaces for 3D painting, texture editing, and object placement.

'Whispers' by Olivier Ponsonnet

Blender 2.55

Already superceded by another update to 2.56, the Blender 2.55 upgrade was a major reworking of the interface and engine system for the Open Source tool and was extremely well received. Blender is avaliable cross platform, but utilizes OpenGL for drawing the entire interface. That means you best use a graphics card and drivers that conform to the OpenGL specifications.

Better rigging, animation modeling and rendering capabilities in the 2.5 version have brought Blender front and center for consideration by studios interested in the Open Source solution. Also, those wanting to educate themselves in the finer points of 3D are able to for very little outlay.

Everett Gunthe

Next Limit Realflow 5

RealFlow 5 continues in this tradition of innovation, introducing Hybrido, the new hybrid technology, making RealFlow the only product on the market (to date) which enables the user to simulate large bodies of water with sophisticated secondary effects, like splashes, foam and mist. And, due to its cutting-edge body dynamics solver, Caronte, RealFlow 5 also offers unmatched capabilities for large-scale, complex simulations.

© Blur Studios and BYVFX

Pixologic ZBrush 4

In July 2010 at the LA SIGGRAPH, Pixologic unveiled the very long awaited ZBrush 4.0 for PC and Mac, bringing it to the download market a couple of weeks later. There are so many scarily talented artists in the community who use ZBrush on a daily basis, I begin to wonder why anyone would NOT use it. While you can start from scratch within ZBrush and never leave it, the new GoZ allows you to transition between other apps on the fly. There is now an animation timeline allowing the user to create moving turntables for their demo reel.

“ZBrush 4 leaves me speechless. The breadth of new features and functionality has blown away any notions of what is possible in this program. My mind is still catching up to the possibilities!”
Scott Spencer

'New Fairy' by Jan Jureczko

TRON Legacy

Wow! The inclusion of TRON Legacy in our Top20 list, which was compiled and closed some three weeks before the film was released, gives me confidence that the votes came from those with a deep understanding of the production.

TRON Legacy hits the mark in another respect. It brings the video arcade world from the 70s into the 21st Century with a self assured confidence. Digital Domain (DD) was charged with wrangling that world under director Joe Kosinski and VFX Supervisor Eric Barba. The graphic feel of the world is still intact with bright lights and colors against a dark background, but the objects and the environment of this advanced digital civilization have far more detail, a by product of the advances in technology since Flynn first entered TRON world.

© Disney Enterprises.

Despicable Me

Demanding attention, the 'Despicable Me' storyline is of epic proportions. Wanting to steal the moon, the lead character Gru played by voice talent Steve Carell, is distracted by a trio of orphaned kids. On the strength of primary colors, brilliant animation and a long trail of impressive visuals, this gorgeous film became a $542 million dollar Box Office success.

Some of the characters were the strangest, most hilarious bunch I've seen on film since Willy Wonka's Umpa-Lumpas. Playing all the comic 3D tricks because they could, meant that they did them all upfront and laughing. At the end, I left the cinema chuckling, and wanting to see it again in whatever dimension I could.

© Mac Guff.

How to Train your Dragon

This is one of my favorite animated CG films of the year. Turning the classic book into a screen story arc, the characters, lighting and animation took many people by surprise. This was an unruly, furry, fire-breathing project which Animation Director Craig Ring and crew clearly had a lot of fun producing.

Besides having heaps of hair and shields, buckles and crazy looking hide clothes, each of the characters had to show extremes of emotion somehow from underneath all of this paraphernalia. Not an easy task, but the DreamWorks crew succeeded in taming that dragon.

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Autodesk Maya 2011

Autodesk Maya offers artists an end-to-end creative workflow with comprehensive tools for 3D animation, modeling, simulation, visual effects, rendering, matchmoving, and compositing on a highly extensible production platform. All these capabilities are combined into a single application offering CG artists an exceptional value. Newly available for the Mac OS X 64-bit operating system, Maya 2011 delivers a revitalized user interface, enhanced viewport interaction, new 3D editorial capabilities, integrated color management, and improved character animation.

Autodesk has set up bundle purchasing modes so Maya can also be bought with Mudbox in an Entertainment package.

© Bethesda Software. Image from Artificial Mind and Movement.

Autodesk Softimage

Autodesk has been a fabulous home for Softimage, and each update brings more accolades from users than there were critics. But the elements that sum up the reinvention of Softimage can be brought together as the GigaCore architecture and tools like ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) and the Face Robot facial animation toolset.

ICE can be used to drive the movement and behaviors of characters and scene elements. Advanced rigging elements, such as custom inverse kinematics, spines, constraints, and dynamic tails can be rigged to operate at a fraction of previous times for set up.

© Smoke & Mirrors

The Foundry's Mari

Bruno Nicoletti, Jack Greasley and the crew at The Foundry have all outdone themselves for years, (continuously if you ask me). Mari is a texture projection painting system developed by The Foundry R&D department and the texture department at Weta Digital. This 3D texture application is able to handle up to 30K textures and produce production-ready assets.

3D texture painting used to be such a headache but with Mari, the arduous task of patching, mixing, lighting and baking a texture to an environment, a character or any piece of a digital element can now be comparatively painless.

© Avatar 2009 Fox. All rights reserved. Images courtesy of Weta Digital.

Pixar's Toy Story 3

The Toy Story series of animated features surely must go down in history as the most complete PIXAR classic. This last instalment (I hope) sews up the ends quite nicely. In their best fashion, the new characters are a success and each keeps the story bouyant without taking too much attention away from Woody, the Potato couple, Buzz and the rest.

The garbage tip sequence is another triumph, where the crew are dragged along a conveyor belt at the tip towards a particularly low point in the story arc. The details in coloring, animating and lighting even the tiniest flotsam around the group, awash in a sea of dessicated rubbish, is not missed. The entire film is pretty damn gorgeous.

© Disney/PIXAR

Inception

Double Negative brought together an impressive VFX dreamscape for the Inception story. DNeg delivered some 500 FX shots for the film with a team of up to 275 people through various phases of production. The Folding City was just one of a wide range of stunning visuals bringing the dreamstate to the shaking foreground of the plot.

The VFX are actually so thick on the ground, and the story so enthralling, one just might need to buy the BluRay DVD and a bigger screen to get a handle on all the the elements of this incredible production.

© Warner Bros. Entertainment

Thiago Costa's Lagoa

CGSociety was privileged to be part of the release through Autodesk of this engine. Thiago Costa worked so hard, for so long, to make this the very best he could make it. Autodesk saw that he'd also successfully plugged it into Softimage and was able to do things only ever dreamed about previously. Adopting it into the application immediately brought forth tremendous results universally. This is a success story not many people saw coming, and CGSociety congratulates Thiago on becoming the surprise Number One holder in the CGSociety Top20 CG Retrospective for 2010!

The full list of items compiled by the community this year was generated in the thread promoted for the purpose on CGTalk. The CG Top 20 list is a result of public voting in that thread which was open for a month, from the 4th November through til the 12th December. If an item is not on the list, it wasn't suggested by the thousands of people who viewed that thread.

As the process of compiling and voting was public, there was and is no conspiracy or bias from the CGSociety towards any items listed in this year's Top 20.

2010 - The recession year

Alrighty then! Our community has voted for the Top 20 coolest, most influential CG events, films, games, VFX software and technologies. Autodesk certainly kicked goals, the studios have hammered the cinemas and consoles. This year was unkind to many, there's no denying. But as long as there is a hungry market, the need to produce quality content will always be present.

The very talented team here at CGSociety and Ballistic Media wish you all the very best for 2011.

20- Avatar - The Last Airbender
19- Iron Man 2
18- Octane Render
17- Prince of Persia
16- Red Dead Redemption
15- Stereoscopy
14- Sony's God of War 3
13- Autodesk 3ds Max 2011
12- Blender 2.55
11- Next Limit RealFlow 5
10- Pixologic ZBrush 4.0
09- TRON Legacy
08- Despicable Me!
07- DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon
06- Autodesk Maya 2011
05- Autodesk Softimage 2011
04- The Foundry's Mari
03- PIXAR's Toy Story 3
02- Inception
01- Thiago Costa's Lagoa

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