Red Vision succeed with a little help from Pixar's RenderMan!
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Back in January 2007, Red Vision were approached to produce the animation for ‘HEADCASES’ a ground-breaking comedy for British broadcaster ITV. After completing a four minute pilot Red Vision received the commission. Needless to say the whole team at Red Vision is proud and very excited about the production. How many people did it take to make this project happen? In total there was 60 staff (20 permanent & 40 fixed term contracts) working on a variety of programs, Photoshop, Maya, Fusion and RenderMan. How long has it taken? The Pre-production lasted 3 months then the work started in earnest: Modellers started work in August 2007 and animation started in October whilst lighting and render started in late November. Animation and final renders are being delivered throughout right up until the final episode so there is still a lot to produce - also Red Vision are to produce 2 minutes of topical material per week written midweek before TX on the Sunday! Why RenderMan? RenderMan already played a large role in our pipeline. We've become quite dependent on many recent RenderMan features such as fast flexible baking that aren't as accessible or production ready in some other renderers. But perhaps the most important factor was the production schedule. The whole lighting and rendering schedule ran for about 15 weeks over which time we delivered around 2500 shots. So with that much to get through we really couldn't afford to take many chances with the renderer. How did RenderMan help, how was the Pixar's support? Speed was a big factor so effects like baked occlusion became very
important. Typically we'd have multiple point clouds for backgrounds
and characters. We'd bake anything expensive and keep the pointclouds
around on disk just for a few days so that second or third renders of
shots would go through much faster. Pixar's support is always very fast which can be critical if there are any problems. It's so valuable to have the 'basics' covered in such a robust way because it gives everyone the confidence that it’s ok to concentrate on the creative aspects of the lighting and shading. If that weren't the case everyone would just be worrying about getting frames out and nothing else. In terms of learning RenderMan, did you find it difficult, what was your experience? I wouldn't say any of our crew has struggled getting to grips with RenderMan. In many ways it's actually more straight forward in the sense its way easier for artists to produce very high quality renders. That's in part because RenderMan has a very small number of parameters to control fundamental features. For example high quality antialiasing, smooth subdivs, motion blur, displacement and dof all boil down to tuning ShadingRate and PixelSamples. All of us here at Escape wish Red Vision the very best with this and future productions. |
