Main Page |
Satori |
Tutorials Page |
Next Page |
So Many Pixels
Four years ago, I was working on Warner Bros' "Space Jam" in L.A. as part of the Uli Meyer Animation studios crew. An outfit called Cinesite produced several hundred digital effects shots for the movie.
On a day off, I was rollerblading along the beachfront at Santa Monica when one of the Cinesite crew overtook me. He was wearing the company T-shirt. It had a legend across the back that read: "So many Pixels, So Little Time". Back then, I thought that was quite a neat slogan, but the intervening years have made me wonder: If pixels are the problem, as identified on the T-shirt, why not just get rid of them?
So what has changed in four years?
So Many Choices, So Little Time.
The whole nature of animation has changed for one thing. The relentless move to digital production has permeated the industry, and shoved it into a bright new shiny future in a very short space of time. The rostrum camera has (almost) gone, replaced by the scanner. The small armies of cell painters who laboriously hand traced and painted the animation drawings onto acetate sheets have gone too. Cell painting and compositing software have replaced them. Working practices have been overturned now that post-production techniques are applied all the way through the animation process.
My work as a background painter and art director has had to change as well, to integrate into the digital workflow. I had to make some hard choices, at least in terms of painting tools. I wanted the move to workstation-based painting to provide me with a significant gain in flexibility and productivity. Colleagues all around me urged that I work with Photoshop, a pixels-based program, but I resisted. The slogan on that T-shirt hovered in front of me.
It was not just the pixel problem that made me waver when it came to decision time. It was Photoshop's poor brushes and the lack of editability that convinced me that this was a funnel-shaped program. It forces the user to jettison the freedom of output resolution as soon as he or she starts a painting, and to obey the constraints imposed by the pixel-based working method inherent in the software. What comes out the other end, of course, is very easy for others to deal with, but hey, that's only a file format after all. Bitmap-based packages require whopping amounts of RAM to operate properly, and when I'm working on feature film picture sizes, RAM can become an expensive issue.
What convinced me that the move into digital production and manipulation of images would give me the required gains was finding a program called Satori FilmFX 64 (developed in the UK by Spaceward Graphics Ltd).
TOP
The benefit to me as a painter after shelling out what amounts to several years' worth of spending on paint, paper and brushes for all the necessary kit, is that I can now do more with my workstation than I could dream of doing with traditional media. If there is a change of brief, changes are easy to accommodate. The director wants a zoom into a tiny area? No problem. Change the colour of the cloudy sky? Easy. Insert a new pack design, and move another element deeper into the picture? A cinch. Change the size of the whole picture to twenty times the size of the original? Of course...
The only drawback to Satori is that it is not available to Mac users.
As an (extreme) example of the power of vectors look at the sequence of images. Each zoom shows a blow-up of the screen resolution image. Satori boasts a button called Hi-Rez that will re-render the view at high resolution. So the sequence proceeds: Zoom, screen resolution, high resolution, zoom again, etc. The zoom sequence reaches the mind-boggling figure of over 1,078,000 to 1, before the renderer gives up in the knowledge that there is no viewing device on Earth that can actually see the data at this size.
The Satori 64bit, resolution-independent, vector painting.
The 1,078,000: 1 zoom starts from here
Of course, the print world has been using vectors for years for scaling type and illustrations in Encapsulated PostScript (EPS). But now vectors are making advances in two of the most leading-edge computer graphics fields: The Web, and 3D-computer animation rendering. Vectors will give both of these technologies a tremendous boost in productivity and flexibility.
TOP
Main Page
Satori
Tutorials Page
Next Page
SITE MAP
