SIGGRAPH 2017 is nearly upon us, and pretty much all the big players in CG imaging will be there to show off the latest stunning achievements under their belts. One of these is MPC Film, which is sending its R&D team to LA to present on the technical and creative challenges of water simulations as seen in the new Pirates of the Caribbean, the future of VR in film production, and the advantages of cloud-based resources — to name a few choice topics.
Here’s where you can find MPC around the conference!
It’s Complicated: Cloudy With a Chance of Rendering
Sunday, 30 July, 10:45 am – 12:15 pm, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 403AB
Hannes Ricklefs, Daniel Bergel, Craig Dibble, Pauline Koh, James Pearson
Disney’s The Jungle Book required MPC to deliver work of unprecedented visual complexity. The main challenges was to ensure that excess capacity was provided through the flexible and scalable nature of cloud-based resources, while meeting the client’s strict security requirements.
Wet and Wild: The Water Effects of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Monday, 31 July, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 150/151
Rob Hopper, Kai Wolter
In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, ships emerge from the bottom of the ocean, an ocean parts and collapses, a ship floats in a bottle, and dozens of characters interact with the surrounding sea. This talk discusses MPC’s approaches to these epic full-CG shots.
When Film Meets VR
Wednesday Aug 2, 11-11:30am, SIGGRAPH Theater Talk, NVIDIA Booth #403
Francesco Giordana
MPC present their journey to creating real-time VR experiences leveraging film VFX workflows and assets. They’ll illustrate this by talking work in projects including the Passengers: Awakening VR Experience and ground-breaking research and development in the virtual production space. The presentation will detail some of the challenges that face developers, from asset building technique complexity to major differences in offline rendering and 90 fps real-time VR workflows. Concluding with a look at future work and discuss where these VR workflows can directly apply to film visual effects and virtual production.
Autodesk Exhibition Sessions: How MPC Brought the Sea to Life in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Wednesday, 2 August, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 409B
Kai Wolter
For Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales MPC faced the creative challenge to produce highly believable ocean and water effects interacting with full-CG ships and characters. In this talk they will present the team’s approaches to animate, simulate and rendering these using a newly developed ocean toolkit and tighter integration of Autodesk Bifrost into MPC’s FX and rendering pipeline.
NVIDIA Exhibitor Sessions Path Tracing in Production – Part 2: Making Movies
Wednesday, 2 August, 2:00 pm – 5:15 pm, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 408AB
Rob Pieke
MPC’s Head of New Technology Rob Pieke joins the Path Tracing in Production course as an instructor, taking a closer look at the workflows that have emerged at a number of large production facilities. While path tracing was introduced at most VFX and animation studios at a time when a physically based approach to rendering and especially material modelling was already firmly established, the new tools brought with them a whole new paradigm, and many new workflows have evolved to establish a new balance in the production process.
Pipe Dreams: From VFX Project Management to Predictive Forecasting
Thursday, 3 August, 9:00 am – 10:30 am, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 402AB
Hannes Ricklefs, Stefan Puschendorf, Brian Eriksson, Sandilya Bhamidipati, Akshay Pushparaja
This talk proposes a novel solution centered around a general-evaluation data model and APIs that convert production data (job/scene/shot/schedule/task) to business-intelligence insights enabling performance analytics and predictive analytics for accurate forecasting of future VFX production-process performance.
Tools of the Trade: Optical Flow-based Face Tracking in The Mummy
Thursday, 3 August, 10:45 am – 12:15 pm, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 402AB
Curtis Andrus
To simplify the addition of CG elements (runs, split eyes, torn skin, etc.) on Ahmanet in The Mummy, MPC’s software team built several usability tools around its optical-flow system.
Computer Animation Festival
Mon, 31 Jul, 6-8 pm, Wed, 2 Aug, 8-10 pm, Electronic Theatre South Hall K
The Electronic Theater showcases outstanding achievements in animated feature and short films, scientific visualization, visual effects, real-time graphics, game excerpts, and more from the past 12 months. This year the theatre will include a behind the scenes look at the MPC’s Academy Award winning work on Disney’s The Jungle Book.
