This article was written for the August '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 342).

Chaos Vantage

I’m a little late on the Chaos Vantage story — so much so that I missed the 1.0 release and we are already at 2.5. So, let’s have a quick rundown of what Vantage is:

Vantage is a real-time rendering engine from Chaos, the guys who brought us V-Ray, which incidentally is my go-to renderer. But, given the heritage, you know that everything learned in V-Ray is applied to Vantage. However, it renders much faster — essentially in real time. The 3D scenes are brought into Vantage via a live link with 3D Studio Max or a saved out .vrscene file, but the live link reflects any changes that happen in Max and updates in Vantage automatically. In addition, the Chaos Cosmos library (which is essentially the Chaos flavor of Unreal’s Quixel) can be used to quickly populate and dress scenes with objects that are already textured and optimized for use in Vantage.

So, what’s new in 2.5? Initially, Vantage was great for arch viz — quickly setting up and dressing architecture interiors and exteriors and being able to render, present and iterate in real time. Since the 2.0 version, Chaos has brought Vantage more and more into the VFX realm, migrating tools from V-Ray into Vantage. These include such things as support for animated meshes, including support for animated vegetation from Chaos Cosmos, Chaos Scatter tools, GPU denoising support, VRayEdgesTex and round edges, scene state and render element support, displacement maps, hair and fur, ACEScg color space and chromatic aberration.

Along with new features, there are fixes, modifications and performance boosts. Texture loading is 5-10% faster in 2.5, and structure rebuilds and instance updates are faster. UI/UX adjustments have also been made based on user feedback.

Also, with this latest release, Vantage has initial support with OpenXR framework for monoscopic or stereoscopic output for VR headsets, with the caveats that this is just getting started and that tethered viewing gives the smoothest performance. But I think that it’ll ultimately catch up in later interactions for wireless headsets.

I feel that all Vantage real-time technology, along with the VR-headset support, has been paving the way for Project Arena, which marks Chaos expanding to virtual environments and LED volumes. I’d be happy to do a review if someone kindly lent me their LED volume for a day!

Website: chaos.com/vantage
Price: $42-$59 per month (solo, premium, enterprise)

V-Slate

Filmmaking is a complex process akin to waging war, but without so many casualties. There are many departments with their own series of tasks. Everyone has unique jobs, all created to support and focus on one cause — making the movie. There are also many phases: development, preproduction, production and postproduction. And at each phase, the parameters change. The scope changes. Scenes are rearranged. Scripts are rewritten, reedited, expanded, compressed. And we in the visual effects industry are affected by all of this, at all phases, and must keep track of it. (To be fair, I’m speaking myopically and somewhat selfishly — because I’m a VFX supervisor, but all departments on a film are critical.)

In many production-tracking systems out there, the focus is on postproduction. But VFX starts (or should start) during development. So, we need a production-tracking system where we can keep track of script versions, changes to those scripts, initial bids, subsequent bids, storyboards, animatics, previz — and then have all that information seamlessly migrate into the production phase, through postproduction and delivery. This is where V-Slate comes in.

V-Slate was developed by VFX producer Alejandro Diego von Dorrer, based on his multidecade experience as a partner/producer at Ollin VFX in Mexico City and as a studio-side producer on multiple shows for Amazon Studios. The backbone of V-Slate is FileMaker Pro (which is no stranger in VFX), but Von Dorrer has written a substantial tool set to track scripts, schedules, budgets, financials, vendors and deliveries. Further, reports can be quickly built and exported to be delivered to production so they also know how things are going.

V-Slate is primarily integrated with Autodesk’s Flow Production Tracking (a.k.a. ShotGrid, née ShotGun), but Von Dorrer has plans to expand into other systems such as FTrack. V-Slate pulls and pushes data from Flow, including access to clips. VFX supes can select multiple clips or playlists and download the clips for review, as opposed to hunting in the Flow interface.

We used this on Prime Video’s I’m A Virgo, which predominantly used old-school effects like forced perspective, miniatures, puppets and other in-camera gags — things that aren’t usually tracked in VFX production-tracking software — because all pieces were being created and prepped before cameras rolled — but the VFX team was still integrally involved. Von Dorrer customized V-Slate to track all that information and then export the VFX plans to PDFs, which were distributed with call sheets to the rest of the crew — all of whom were critical to executing the shots.

V-Slate is definitely meant for full film productions, and it comes with a per-production cost — but it also includes support. The “full production,” however, doesn’t exclude low-budget or indie films. In fact, something like V-Slate would keep costs down — because planning, prep work and tracking costs is all about reducing waste. That, of course, leads to leaner productions.

Website: v-slate.com
Price: $9,500 for 24 months per project

InstaMAT

The people who brought us InstaLOD have come up with a new product five years in the making: InstaMAT. It’s hard to qualify and quantify InstaMAT because it does so many things, and in fact, I’m barely going to scratch the surface. Let’s boil it down to the company’s own description: “Elemental tools for the design and automation of 3D materials, assets and texturing.” I think someone on Discord said, “It’s like if Houdini, Substance Designer and Substance Painter had a baby.” Both descriptions are a bit reductive but give us a good starting point.

On the surface level (pun unintended), you get a combination of procedural materials and painting tools. Choose from a library of prebuilt materials, like metals, woods or rocks, and throw it onto a mesh. It can be a layered system in a stack where you can blend materials, elements or textures. Paint hand strokes or add decals, all with UDIM support. And then bring them into other DCCs with integrations and plugins for Maya, Max, Blender, Unity, Unreal (and there are future plans for Houdini).

There are plenty of prefab accessory tools for anything you were doing in other software. For example, there is a Materialize Image function to convert photos into PBR materials, so your photo is transformed into a node-based shader with the albedo, normals, height, occlusion and roughness. There are scaling tools to dynamically adapt to resolutions. You can create instances of materials with promoted parameters (like in Houdini and Unreal). There is a neural style transfer node for stylizing the looks.

Further, InstaMAT looks beyond just creating textures for a single, unique object. Abstract is cognizant of larger pipelines for VFX and game development. That’s why there are lots of workflows for scaling processes — making things procedural. Functions like assigning materials across many objects, filtered by wildcards in the names of objects. Instancing materials with dependencies tied to data within the meshes. And trying not to depend on UVs for texturing but instead determining surfaces through mesh volumes.

But wait: This is just the bare-bones, top-level tool. The rabbit hole goes deep quickly. All these functions are based on nodal systems you can drill down into. Much like Unreal Blueprints, Substance Designer graphs or Houdini systems, you can get to a granular, programming-language level — all nodal. So, the amount of customization is essentially infinite. Through Element Graphs and what they call “Atom Graphs,” everything (or nearly everything) is an accessible node, and each system can be encapsulated in compressed functions.

It’s all a little intimidating if you haven’t touched the nodal workflows, but honestly, in a world with Houdini and Blender nodes (or Maya’s Bifrost, Max’s TyFlow or Mari and Substance Designer’s nodes), I think you might be intentionally avoiding it. So, InstaMAT might be a great place to start — because if you are an individual or small company making under $100,000 a year, you can get InstaMAT for free. And further, once you can afford it, you can opt for a perpetual license or a subscription — which is quite nice.

Website: instamaterial.com

Creation Effects: Black Hole

Noel Powell, the creative driver behind the Creation Effects tools for After Effects, has been busy creating a new set of After Effects templates geared toward updating its Space Effects kit with three new templates: The first one is the Black Hole template.

Based on NASA simulations and imagery, and no doubt influenced by the Kip Thorne-inspired imagery from Interstellar, the Black Hole disc template starts you out with the default accretion disc, with stars being stretched and pulled and around the event horizon. However, there are seven animations that Powell used to create the promo videos — just to get you started.

The scene is set in After Effects’ 3D space, so modifying your camera will give you the correct perspective as you change your vantage point. Plus, the background star field is on a huge cube, which provides flexibility with your camera — you will always see stars no matter which direction you face.

Each feature of the black hole is on a different layer with controllable features, but the best way to control the look is through the master control layer, which has parameters tied to all the layers with expressions. The list of parameters is much too long to list here. However, the response of the comp is fast enough that you can play with the settings and dial in the look you like. So, you can get to the Interstellar look, or you can turn off the accretion disc and the glows, and what you have left is the lensing effect of the star background getting warped and refracted through the gravitational field of the black hole.

And if you want to evoke Disney’s 1970s-era movie, The Black Hole, you have the option to go with the black-hole-funnel look as well.

As usual, the documentation is thorough and self-explanatory, with a darn good tutorial. Black Hole on its own is $39, or you can get it in the Space Effects bundle for $99. Either way, it’s a total bargain.

Creation Effects: Terra

The Terra template is specifically for making high Earth orbit or distant shots from space. Like other Creation Effects, you have controls in a master control with parameters that manipulate individual layers, which include the continents during the day or night, with the option of city lights. Water, clouds and atmosphere are on their own customizable layers.

Earth models are available at 32MP (8,000 x 4,000) texture maps or 128MP (16,000 x 8,000), depending on how close you want to get. These are mapped onto a 3D sphere, so lighting within After Effects will illuminate your Earth appropriately.

The water has specularity, brightness and saturation controls. The clouds offer parameters for the rotation that are separate from the planet. The density can be tweaked, which is a function of opacity. Plus, shadows can be added with a combination of embossing or an offset for long shadows.

And the atmosphere (as opposed to the clouds) is the dangerously thin layer around our planet, only really seen on the edges of Earth. More specifically, this looks more intense when the sun is behind the Earth — backlighting that atmosphere. For realism, this is usually pretty subtle — but if you want to go Bayhem on it, you have that option too!

The package is bundled with Creations 15 lens flares to take pace of the old, tired Adobe flares. You can drag the flare into your comp, and it will tether to the position of the sun. One bummer is that the flare isn’t automatically occluded, so it’s recommended to animate the flare — but I bet with some fancy After Effects-ing, you could get a mask from Earth and drive an occlusion in the flare layer. And as a bonus you get the Moon!

Each of the layers work pretty well on their own, but you can dig deeper into each pre-comp to customize everything to taste. Like Black Hole, Terra is a mere $39 but can be found in the Space Effects package.

Creation Effects: Solaris

As with the Black Hole template, Powell has turned to NASA as a resource for footage and inspiration to make a 3D template for creating glorious sun animation. Solaris uses footage of solar flares, prominences, coronal mass ejections and the sun’s surface from NASA. 25 different solar elements and five 8K surface textures.

The template is, again, in 3D space, so you have flexibility in where you place your camera, and the scene will remain appropriately in perspective. The solar elements are on planes attached to the surface of the sun, so when you adjust the parameters, such as positions and orientation, the flares and CMEs remain attached to the surface. There are also After Effects-made prominences that are more customizable than the footage-based elements, so you can keep within reality or make things more extreme if you like.

Although, as in the other templates, there are plenty of examples that match the shots in the demo reel for Solaris, Powell has also included a “Build Your Own Sun” template that can be used to follow the tutorial. But even better, stepping through building the sun gives insight into how the different components work together. What this means is that you can better build customized suns for your sci-fi short or DIY version of 3-Body Problem.

Like other Creation Effects templates, most of the controls are in a master control layer, where you can adjust the rotation of the sun, position and radius; the hue and glow controls, as well as some edge controls to roughen the edge to make it feel more organic. All the prominences have individual controls within the control layer.

The package also offers a Heat Haze control for that signature heat distortion. Powell has thrown in a few more lens flares from the Creation Effects Lens Flare Collection. Some sun/heat-themed titles from the Creation Effects Title Effects collection. And to top it off, you also get 19 appropriate sound effects.

Solaris is also $39. So if you splurge and get the whole Space Effects combo pack, you are already saving some money just on the Black Hole, Terra and Solaris templates alone.

Website: creationeffects.com
Price: $39 (for individual tool), $99 (for bundle)

Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist whose many credits include I’m A Virgo, For All Mankind and Black Panther. He can be reached at todd@teaspoonvfx.com.