An expense account, 100 flights a year around the world demoing Softimage 3D, then XSI, just sounded like a bloody good laugh. He said yes and my window to weight gain had begun. I thought it looked like the dog’s bollocks. I asked Adrian if I could come into the softimage office and learn SI3D. I started, weirdly enough, in 1996 in the Pitcher and Piano in Dean street London, sitting next to Adrian Hill (formerly Special Projects now Cinegroupe) at Ben White’s (formerly Softimage now Framestore) leaving do. Over seven years of fun and an additional 40lbs of weight, I would like to think of it as additional charisma but I have a feeling I am just kidding myself. Interview with Chinny Brynford-Jones: The XSI Product Manager of Softimage talks about version 4, the cg industry and his past career as a comedian - May, 12th, 2004, by Raffael Dickreuter, Bernard Lebel, Ed Harriss ‘Land of the Mammoth’ airs on the Discovery Channel on March 11. Careful scheduling was required to avoid any compositing bottleneck. Once rendered the animation was taken into one of two compositing systems, Avid Illusion or Avid DS, to be composited with the backplates. The mammals were modelled in Softimage v3.9, animated using SOFTIMAGE|XSI and then brought back into Softimage v3.9 to render the fur. There is also a sequence to illustrate what the mammoth evolutionary process was thought to have been. Specifically created sequences include birth, mating, fighting and, finally, dying. The sequences were created to illustrate the life pattern of mammoths, where and how they lived and survived. The backplates themselves could be made up from anything up to six different layers.” This included the commissioning of a life size mammoth model for blue screen shoots, travelling to places as far apart as Siberia and America to film realistic backplates through to actually creating and animating all required 3D mammals and finally compositing all the shots. A large amount of the project was completed in SOFTIMAGE|XSI version 1.0 and final stages in version 1.5.Īndrew Hunter, Digital Effects Director, Skaramoosh, said: “What excited us about this project was that we were involved in the entire production process for all the special effects shots, right from the storyboarding stage. The project, involving in excess of 100 computer generated (CG) shots, took a core team of eight people four months to complete and includes the animation of not only mammoths but also a woolly rhino and a giant deer. Other people from the list past and present who make an appearance are Sebastian Read, Olly Nash, Maarten Heinstra and Keith Fallon.Īnd from a news release, here’s some more background on the project:ĭIGITAL effects company Skaramoosh have created over 23 minutes of computer animation for Discovery’s flagship documentary ‘Land of the Mammoth’, a two-hour programme. I’m the guy in the grey shirt, studiously taking notes at 2:13. It was featured in the first edition of the XSI magazine (I say first edition, I think it was the only edition!) which I still have kicking about somewhere. I don’t know if Stefano will remember, but we looked into PhoenixTools fur for Mental Ray (which he wrote iirc) at the time and I had some direct conversations with him while I tried to get to grips with it. It was summer and everyone had to work with an rendering Octane between their legs so the office was toasty to say the least! The fur renders were OpenGL in Fur Designer so there was LOTS of post fudgery, but damn it was fast! Despite the speed, we still had to rent in a ton of Octanes to push it through. We did all the animation in XSI v1 and transferred actions back to Soft 3D (can’t remember the exact version, the last before v4 iirc) for rendering due to the fact that we created the fur using Nordisk Film Fur Designer (my responsibility on the project). I recently found a Quicktime of the behind-the-scenes film for a project we did at Skaramoosh for The Discovery Channel back in 2001. Some screenshots of Softimage software from the video:
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