Real time animation at Dreamworks

DreamWorks announce they’ve found the “Holy Grail” of Digital Animation

http://www.slashgear.com/dreamworks-announce-theyve-found-the-holy-grail-of-digital-animation-14195215/

This week while speaking at this year’s Techonomy conference, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told audience members that they’d formulated the solution for real-time rendering of animation for video. Katzenberg told the audience that they’d been working hand-in-hand with Intel in order to rewrite their software to take advantage of scalable multi-core processors, this allowing them to achieve advances that will, for lack of a better term, revolutionize the animation process. While before recently DreamWorks had been considered mostly a story-telling company, Katzenberg now says they’ve becoming “as much a technology company as we are an animation company.”

DreamWorks for those of you unfamiliar is a group responsible for such blockbuster digital animation films as Antz (their first animated film from 1998), Shrek, Madagascar, and more recently both Megamind and Kung Fu Panda. As the group certainly has a bunch more films in development and coming soon, everything from How to Train Your Dragon 2 to The Grimm Legacy to the everloving classic Captain Underpants, they’ve got more than a little incentive to make their animation process streamlined and improved.

What Katzenberg calls the holy grail and is saying they’re on the verge of using is the ability to work in real-time. Where animating just a few seconds of video can take even the most skilled animator a week to make a reality now, a 50 to 70 percent speed increase in the whole process can be expected with the methods DreamWorks and Intel are working on now. Artists will be able to do effects and color work in real time, while the implications Katzenberg says are revolutionary can be seen to be working with any type of high-end rendering, from oil simulations to airplane design to medical imaging.

DreamWorks and Intel are on a four-year effort to make this software re-write a reality and Katzenberg said today that they were just about two-thirds done at the moment, with the product already having been used on a number of products. Real-time digital animation rendering is and has been a goal of any dreamer in the animation industry for more than anyone’s fair share of time sitting around waiting for a scene to fill itself out and the characters to start moving.

If DreamWorks and Intel succeed here, there will be much rejoicing.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/11/14/techonomy-can-intel-and-dreamworks-cross-the-uncanny-valley/

DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg had some exciting news for the desktop computer at Techonomy Monday. According to the head of the animation company, new collaboration with chip-maker Intel is leading to rendering that is 50 to 70 times faster than anything being used today.

This has far-reaching implications that go well beyond the world of animation. According to Katzenberg it takes an experienced 3D animator a week to animate three seconds of finished product. This is due to the amount of time waiting for images to render. The holy grail of animators, Katzenberg said, is to be able to work in real time. The collaboration with Intel is bring us just that.
Cutting Wait Time: DreamWorks-Intel Partnership to Revolutionize Rendering
Adrienne Burke Adrienne BurkeContributor
Dreamworks: Katzenberg Says New Software Makes Animation 50-70x Faster
Eric Savitz Eric SavitzForbes Staff

This will certainly have an impact on the multi-billion dollar gaming industry. Currently gaming graphics lag well behind the animation you see in a movie like Puss in Boots, the latest film from DreamWorks. This is because an animated film has been rendered already, whereas games have to render images in real time requiring powerful graphics chips.

But if Intel and DreamWorks have developed technology that can render animation in real time, think of what that means for games. If gaming consoles and PC’s could render 50 to 70 times faster than they do now, games could have far better graphics in the very near future.

Which leads me back to the question of the uncanny valley. If you’re not familiar with that concept, it’s the hypothesis that the closer replicas of the human face and form get to reality – whether in animation or robotics or other attempts by tech to replicate humanity – the more disconcerting they become.

The closer to perfection they get, the more we feel a sense of revulsion to them. Whereas when you see an obviously cartoonish attempt to mirror the human face you hardly think twice, when you see a graphic that looks almost real you notice all the ways it isn’t real.

This could also apply to AI or voice recognition software like Siri, and I’ve heard it suggested that the Uncanny Valley can occur the closer movement comes to actually replicating human movement.

But what if animators start working in real time? What if games can render dozens of times faster than they used to be able to render? Can we cross the uncanny valley? Or will that valley, as it narrows, become all the more discomfiting and bizarre?

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