UeberTage|2016: Friday, September 16th 2016

[owei]

Thanks Rob for posting ;) This is what I wanted to say..

Due to the low interest in our meeting this year, I made the decision to end it after this event taking place coming Friday.
I organized this event for 8 years and it was always fun and pleasure to meet so many nice people here. I´m thankful for so many good things. We had great talks and a pretty nice time together. Though, it´s hard to see Softimage and its community die out slowly and there is no way to stop, or even slow it down a little. My effort to transform the SI meeting to an open 3D usermeeting did not succeed in the end. There seems not enough motivation out there to make the effort, to take that day(or two) to come over and take part. I totally understand that. Thanks for all the support from sponsors and all the people who were speaking and sharing stuff with us. Thanks to those, who visited us and took part. Thanks a lot an take care! Maybe we will met in some other kind of meeting. Anyway, looking forward to this Friday and meeting some of you guys again in the old spirit!!

Cheers,
Oliver

[FXDude]

I don't think it's necessary to be so dramatic, or for this to be such an "announcement".

SI users are of course greatly diminished
(people have to eat and pay bills, despite to possibility of living off SI, it's certainly more difficult, so that's it).

Nevertheless, even if this event has always been open to cg enthusiasts at large (as since the start I think, or not just later) gathering them at any one place while advertising the event here... I don't see how but a few would turn-up anywhere,

Yet apart those that are oceans away (including myself), even for those that may be but a few hours out, I'm sure quite a few would go if it was in their town (also including myself).

I would be one for making them even if it was to mostly to record to-be-posted-making-of-sessions
with the few locals that are around that do turn-up, but I can understand why not, depending on what motivates.


Yet I don't think paintbrush users need a summit to know that others are around.

What's your favorite paintbrush?

Do you need confirmation that the paintbrush you are using is the right one for you?

I for one know what my favorite paintbrush is, and it's the one that allows me to do what would otherwise as far as I can tell, would involve multiple layers of relative technical (over)complication.

Or weather for the still quite exceptionally straight forward base (that others are still trying to match), or the level of ease of combining self and community made processes, or the ease of getting to all sorts of things by noddleing nodes or more or less fumbling your way there, or for the extra reachable access to the basic elements otherwise pretty "deep" unless explicitly brought up to the surface and frozen there by developers among other frozen things...

I just made a new rather elaborate system out of elaborate "systems" others made out of elaborate systems, with no 'programming' per say, just intuition and (very) visual trial and error, while still only scratching the surface.

What other thing allows to do that today? Houdini? Maybe to an extent (with a long long way to go I think in terms of approachability and plainly-ness)

Or as if most of everything was comparatively quite biased towards being either blackboxed OR rather technical,
OR BOTH blackboxed AND (over-)technical-wherever-not-blackboxed in the same package.


And not having this ability, I can't see how I couldn't consider that as considerably 'stepping backwards', something which I also get over to pay bills (while still enjoying it after all)

But the point is, while at some point something could very well substitute it for what it's good for (something which I'd be totally up for),
as far as I can tell especially after a few years checking out different potential alternatives, and gauging progress and direction of various things,
as someone who I think does what he does mostly for the passion of doing and pushing what is possible,
for the foreseeable future at least for me, this site could go offline, AD could pull the plug on the list, until something more-or-less as "versatile" (which I think is the word) as SI as a whole comes up, it will personally remain my favorite paintbrush, and will clammer to whatever's left of it, and to whatever's left of "the community" !

[owei]

Huh..Sorry for being to dramatic for you..."announcement"..pfff
I don´t get your point. I did not want to wine about the EOL of Softimage or 3D tools in general or fu**in AD or something, I just wanted to say, that a organizing a meeting like this in my sparetime does not make sense any longer, as the response loweres from year to year. It did not work out to "get" people over to an "open meeting". That´s it. I did not want to sound dramatic, though a ten year story ends this year. And it hurts a little, as this was more than just a "software" meeting, if you know what I mean.

[FXDude]

I understand. And I dont think I was critisizing for putting an end to them, which as mentionned I can see how demand can be somewhat yet further deminished.

I think I'm just not too fond of seeing it happen, the to-be-expected furthering of the diminishment, and that is because of nobody.

[owei]

And some other productions that will be part of ÜberTage this year ;)







cheers,
oli

[rray]

Have fun all who are going!
planed to come as it's not very far. but so utterly exhausted this week I won't be able to .. at least not in a state where it would make any sense

[owei]

Thanks rray! A pity you can´t make it

cheers,
oli

[Rork]

!!Warning!! Long post ahead ;)
or...
TL:DR: Great day! Again!


Some bits of history
Over 10 years ago, a handful of users of the German Softimage forum started to come together every year, just chatting and meeting up with old friends.
Every year this meeting was in a different location in Germany, so sometimes a bit inconvenient for travel plans.

After Oliver was asked to help out on organizing things, this small user meeting grew into the yearly meetings we all know now as the Uebertage in Siegen.
And as we all know, it was centered around the software we all use(d) and love, Softimage (XSI) ;-)

Year after year we could meet up again with old friends and colleagues, meet new people and saw stunning work people did with Softimage.
After the EOL of Softimage, Oliver decided to keep the Uebertage going, but invite other people in to show what they could do with programs like Cinema4D, Houdini, Vray, Arnold etc.

Unfortunately, after the EOL of SI, the Uebertage visiter numbers started to drop a little every year, so the decision was made to make this Uebertage the last one (snif...)
But that didn't mean we didn't have a great time. All the presenters were so enthusiastic, that in the end we ran over 2 hours late to the original program!


Report Uebertage 2016
So.......
As we were waiting for some people to come in, we started a tad later than planned.


Luxion - Keyshot 6
Our first presenter of the day was Dries Vervoort of Luxion, showing us their rendering tool Keyshot 6.
KS is a real-time rendering solutions for stills and animation, running on the CPU for Windows pc's and the Mac.
It has it's feet in the product design area, and it shows when you open up the file import menu.
Lot's of CAD related formats are there, and import with ease.
For anyone who had to deal with IGES, STEP or CATIA files for rendering, KS will be a great program.
KS can be used as a standalone application, but plugins will connect your 3D application with KS, so you can send (or sync) your scene to KS with one click.

Dries showed this part with C4D and KS, having a scene of a kids cart moved over to KS, where he could start on shading and lighting.
Interesting part is that the full hierarchy from the 3D scene is moved over to KS, so all elements are still to be founds in the scene graph easily.
The UI is easy to understand too. A tabbed panel on the left for materials, lights etc., the scene overview and properties overview on the right, and some basic function buttons at the bottom of the screen.

After the import, Dries started to shade the parts of the cart, and showing off the different controls for them. In KS6 there's also a node based material editor, making it very easy to create more integrate materials via blending etc.
It's something SI users would feel right at home with.
As KS isn't a modeler, but a renderer, some parts might feel a bit restricted to some users. There's no way to edit UV's for instance, but KS has a smart way of applying labels via normal mapping on the object.
It was very easy to place logo's and labels, and than dragging them onto the correct locations on the model. Procedural materials worked as in any other 3D application with all the stuff we are used to.

KS assigns materials on grouped objects, so sometimes you have to go back to the 3D scene to split some parts of the model up for shader changes.
In KS6 there's the ability now to split up some parts of the model into it's own group, so you can add different shaders to it.

For lighting KS has some nice features. There's a big library of HDR environments to choose from, but you also have the ability to 'roll your own'.
With the HDR Editor you can start building your own light setup, and see it update in real time. What's nice as well that you can pin point highlights for your model.
Just click a spot, and the editor will add a spot for that highlight. Really nice.
For rendering multiple camera angles and environments, KS uses something that is called Linked Sets. For SI users this is basically a Render Pass with the proper camera and settings, and a override on the HDR lights.
But you can quickly set up camera angles, assign environments, and create sets. After that you can render all these sets quickly.
There's also 'scene sets', which adds the ability to create sets which has different materials in the scene. Like a SI override on material groups.
So it's easy to combine lights, materials and camera angles in KS, to present different versions of a product.
All in all a great overview of what KS is capable of.


AixSponza - Nike Air Max 1
After a short coffee brake, we continued with Matthias Zabiegly from AixSponza. Work ranges from commercials, tradeshows and videos for the internet, and the crew is hovering from appr. 11 people to 40, depending on the jobs.
They showed off their impressive demoreel, before digging into the process that finally resulted in a commercial for the new Nike Air Max 1.
For this project there was no agency involved, so there was a lot of freedom in the creative process.

Matthias showed us lots of renders that showed the idea process of how to present the lightest shoe ever. Bubble spheres, shoes out of foam, merging bubbles, shoes with balloons, it was all there at some point in the creative process.

At some points of these separate ideas come together in one final idea, and that's what Matthias showed us for parts of the commercial.
In C4D they set up a system for a knitted(!) balloon, with a little from Houdini as well for some parts. But the balloons also went through a design process, showing some interesting results.

Matthias explained the setup of all the knitting, and various knitting techniques, they did in C4D, and how they tackled some of the more complex things to get that balloon rendered in the end.
Helix curves projected on top of a balloon shaped, that was used as a base for distributing a small patch of the knitting pattern.
With espresso, the scripting language of C4D, they were able to animate the knitting growing over the helix curve. Some additional noise deformers made everything more organic and random.
They even build a tool called the 'clothinator', to quickly set up knitting patterns.

Matthias showed us a great example of the freedom and creativity on a project, and how all these little ideas in the end come together somehow to make that commercial.


Maxon - Cinema4D (C4D)
Again, after a short coffeebrake, it was Orestis Konstantinidis from Maxon to show us Cinema4D.
In this case version 18, as the new version just rolled off the programming line so to speak ;-)
Orestis started off explaining C4D as easy to use, procedural and fun

After firing up C4D, he took us quickly in the mechanics of C4D innards, and explained how C4D geo and tools are setup. Always //generator tool>point object>deformer.
After that, Orestis showed us one of the new tools in C4D, the Voronoi tools.
"Certain companies" might add the tool and leave it with that, but the C4D implementation is quite awesome.

It's not just the ability to create a bunch of particles driving the shatter effect, but they added a ton of stuff on top of that.
You can drive the effect with another geometry, with open or closed splines, and the ability to move, rotate or scale the effect itself. All this can be stacked and combined too.
And of course all can be driven by other tools, like dynamics. Setup was easy and quick, and a lot of fun to play with.
A great next example showed a imported zombie animation, that was shattered via Voronoi into chunks.
With some effector magic all the animation was moved over to the separate pieces, so we had a chattered zombie walking around.

Orestis also showed the power of C4D and Espresso by quickly building a car rig, where the wheels would stick on the uneven terrain, and the chassis would react to the different position of the wheels.
Softimage ICE users would instantly recognize certain workflows here, by piping in math nodes, and constrains. Orestis indeed showed C4D can set up thing quick and easy.


Infected - Mercedes Sprinter
After a quick lunch (Thanks sponsors!!), we continued with the program.

Henning Westerwelle from Infected Post showed us the making of for their Mercedes Sprinter commercial, a 'one take' camera move through a frozen rock concert.

Henning started out with some of the 'problems' of the project, and how pre-production saved them a lot of time later in the process.
With a budget that was all-in, and didn't really had a lot of room to spend for extra's, they started of with a lot of talks and sketches to see where the problems would be.
This all resulted in animatics which contained all these ideas. After the final animatic and sketches were approved, it was time to move the production to Bucharest for shooting.

With only a handful of shooting days, the set was build, pre-light was done and rehearsal for the crowd started. The soundstage for the concert, and the 'tunnel' at the end of the commercial were build in two pieces. All this was stitched in production.
Due to budget constrains, a milo camera wasn't possible, so all shooting was done with a steadycam, and some solutions to get the steadycam guy where he was needed.
Henning showed us a crazy video of a steadycam operator during the Eurovision Songcontest and his crazy actions. They picked up on that for this commercial.

Because this would be a post-heavy job, the opted for shooting in 4K on a ARRI, and use the full plate for tracking and stabilizing. More pixels = more control.
They also made a Lidar scan of the soundstage, so the tracking crew could merge plates and 3D via tracking markers.
All the backgrounds, smoke, confetti and fluid effects in the video are CG.
For the smoke and beer splash they used their phones for recording high-speed footage. There were some funny videos to see.

And only a handfull of extra's in front of the stage are real extra's, all the attending people in the background were done in Softimage with ICE.
With a Kinect they scanned people doing waves, holding smartphones atc, and build up a small library of moves. Very cool and ootb idea.
Start shuffling textures and you have thousands of people attending your concert

After 5 weeks of post with appr. 12 people doing the edit, comps (lots of roto), 3D effects, backgrounds etc. the continuous camera move was done.
We often watch a commercial, and don't realize how much work something can be. This presentation showed us how much technical stuff is often needed when 3D and 'live' stuff needs to be merged somehow.


Tricks Studios - Mollie Monster (2D)
And you guessed it.... break time!

As far as I know, the only 2D production to ever visit the Uebertage?
Christian Asmussen from TrickStudio talked about the making of the kids movie Mollie Monster.
Tricks Studio also does a lot of 2D animated work that is very familiar to the German audiance.
Their funny short animations of 'program mit die mouse', and 'Elifant und Hase' have been on German TV for decades.

After this short introduction Christian started explaining the proces of creating the 'Mollie Monster' movie, based on the character created by Ted Seager.
With a budget of appr. $4.000.000 they created a 2D animated movie of 72 minutes, with the help of Storyboard Pro and Harmony.
All of the movie was story-boarded extensively, also for getting the sponsors in for this movie.
Storyboard Pro was used to create all the animatics, often based on temporary voice-acting and sound FX.
Christian showed us some nice examples of this process with images and videos.

Like in 3D, all the characters and props were heavily locked down. Christian showed us 'character sheets' with the do and don'ts for the miscellaneous characters.
Eyes, hands, feets, bodyposes and size relationships between characters were carefully documented so every animator would draw he same thing.
This even extended to all the props, no room for mistakes ;-)
Harmony was used for the final animation frames for the movie, some nice examples were shown here as well.

Photoshop and After Effects were used for background and "FX", while the work was split up between studios in Germany, Switzerland and Sweden for the overall work.
In-betweens were mostly done in Korea for this project.
An interesting fact was that all vehicles were created in 3D, and carefully 'massaged' into a 2D look with textures and smart modeling.
One of the few (if only)'real 3d' shot in the movie is in the intro, a quick flyover over 'Monster land'.

As I have a soft spot for 2D animation and projects like this, it was a great treat to see 2D animation for feature films is still alive and kicking.
And Mollie is just cute ;-)


Tim Borgmann - Toyota Infinity
Break time? Yes! Why not?

In the Softimage community I think Tim Borgmann doesn't need much introduction. We've seen his work on the splash screen every time we started Softimage
So it was great to finally meet him in person, and hear him talk about some of the work he did in the last couple of years with the help of ICE.

Tim started off with work he did for Toyota on their new Infinity series. Several design concepts of a 'particle wave' between the old car and the new model were explored.
Test animations were shown of the several ideas that went into the 'wave'.
Tim showed us his elaborate ICE tree setups, which he constantly addressed as not quite complicated with lots of caching going on, and a bunch of simple control objects to drive to effects.
When you will see his setups in the video, you will have a chuckle or two, trust me.....

This work resulted in additional logo animation, that was shown in the "Mind over Eye" work Tim did.
Various concepts were shown, also with the same 'simple' setups from Tim ;-)
All comped in Nuke, these logo animations looked really cool.

The next project Tim showed us was more in the realm of work most of us do.
The 'Kinderriegel' project was a commercial for children's chocolate completely in 3D with animated characters.
With a crew of only 5 for the whole production, this again showed that a 'certain company' had no idea what powerhouse of a software they bought and axed.
Tim -of course- used ICE for a lot of the vegetation, rain etc., Some geo was created in Speedtree as well.
Redshift was used for creating the styleframes and final renders. Comp was done in Nuke.

Another project Tim was involved with was "Inn Saei", from two Icelandic directors.
A very philosophical story, this resulted in some interesting 3D visuals.
Ocean scenes being morphed into square muddy holes that contained people, or a camera diving into the ground near the base of a tree.
From there following the roots and finally ending up at the base of a glowing root/nerve like system.
The scenes were fill of ICE trees and looked awesome.
Have a look at the trailer, as it is a bit hard to explain correctly.

Last, but not least Tim showed us some slides and videos with R&D work, and expressed his ideas that without experimenting with your tools you will stagnate as an artist. This seemed to be of a theme this year, as a lot of presenters mentioned this.
The slides showed us some ideas, going into very interesting ways.


Jasper Scheepbouwer - PlanetX FX - Clarisse 3
Whee.... Break! Despite running late.

Jasper started his presentation with a personal piece, that probably everybody on this forum has seen something of.
This project got him a job at PlanetX FX, where he is now running the 3D department of the movie and TV series FX orientated company.

After a quick run of the PlanetX showreel, he opened up Clarisse and Softimage and showed us what he did for the movie.

First he explained what the (kids) movie was about, and how the cathedral is the central point in the movie.
One of the first problems they ran into, was the fact that there's not a lot of things to find on Antwerp from 1521.
Maps of that time are often exaggerated, or extremely inaccurate. Although lots of the old street plans are still there in some form, despite the city burning down the city in the mid 20's due to war.

With some luck they found maps of the street plan that matched, and with some trickery & tools from the web they were able to extract the street plan into Illustrator curve information.
That file was brought into Softimage as the basis for the city plan, and for the ICE scattering of houses, trees and more.
Jasper set up a smart ICE system where he was able to mix and match house 'blocks' for random building styles.
Also, based on the distance to the cathedral, the houses were form merchant or workers. Hint: workers lived on the outskirts of the city.
When this ICE system was finalized and multiplied for everything else, it was time to look into asset building.(no pun intended....)

For the cathedral they went on a photography excursion to Antwerp, and made lots and lots of photos. They used Agisoft PhotoScan for 3D asset creation, and split this up in parts for the scatter tools.
They also visited a themepark in Belgium, where they rebuilt some medieval houses and streets. This was also meticulously photographed and converted into assets.

Now with everything into place, it was time to move to Clarisse for scene construction and rendering. And for people who know a bit about Sony's/The Foundry's Katana, it's more or less the same concept.
With Clarisse open, Jasper started by importing a simple asset created with PhotoScan of a merchant house, and showing off the ease of use of the scatter tools.
Very quickly he was generating thousands of houses, and polygons counts ran up into the billions. Clarisse doesn't care and keep on rendering.
With Clarisse it's all rendering, there's no OpenGL or something like that. All things like wireframes, AO, DOF etc. can be rendered instantly by just selecting it from a drop down menu.

Next Jasper showed us a simplified version of the city setup, with all the house assets. Fun fact: Clarisse can already start rendering while it's still loading the scene assets.
And because Clarisse doesn't really care about geometry numbers, everything in the city scene is geo. No matte paintings were make, even for far away forests. It's all geo.
Jasper showed a quick top view of the city and zoomed into cobblestone street level. Even the grass and straw in the street is geo! Crazy stuff.

In the background Jasper loaded the final scene, with everything in there. As it takes a while to load such a large amount of assets, he entertained us with zooms and pans of the city, all instantly being re-rendered.
Already being impressed by the billion numbers of polys in the simplified scene, with the final scene the numbers went up to trillions.
But as before, even with just a part of the scene loaded (and Clarisse was still loading the remaining assets), Jasper was able to show us various parts of the city in full detail.
Again with every (poly) blade of grass, straw on the (displaced) cobblestone streets, and Speedtree forest trees. I'm pretty sure everybody was impressed of the power that is Clarisse for project like this.

Finally, he was able to show the teaser trailer for the movie with a fast zoom-in into the city.


Moritz - AixSponza / Entagma Tutorial website
Running very late on schedule now, but break time!!

Moritz Schwind was the last presentation of the day, talking about exchanging knowledge.
He and Matthias felt so strongly about this, that they started a tutorial website called Entagma for Houdini and C4D tutorials.
Their goal is share knowledge and become (nerd) famous, I can only guess after all this, traffic will increase to the website.

A hardcore user of C4D from more than 7 years, he found himself looking for a tool that would extend the already great workflow and tools of C4D.
He ended up with Houdini, and his first reaction after playing with it was very recognizable: "WTF Houdini??!?"
Or said differently "How I learned to love Houdini after the third attempt to learn it".
So after the first hurdles, Moritz fell in love with the highly versatile and transparent tools inside Houdini. Especially the VDB tools.
As most users starting with Houdini, the oddforce website is a big help. This website is (besides the SideFX forums) the place to be for Houdini questions and solutions.

Moritz showed us a small example of the ease of use in Houdini, by creating a tool which selects all polygons within a certain normal angle.
And use that selection for scattering points an just parts of the model.
Some VEX code (yes..) was used, and quickly enough, with some additional nodes inside Houdini, a tool was created for further use down the pipeline.
It might have looked daunting for non Houdini users, but it is something you quickly recognize when fiddling in Houdini for a few weeks.
If you want to try to learn Houdini, of already using it, I highly recommend the website. There's some great small project examples on how to do things in Houdini.
They're a great and fun watch.

Some small goodies were given away, including bags with texts like "VEX Machine" and "Let's talk about VEX".
About that getting nerd fame.... There you go! ;-)


Prizes to Win
The final part of the day, after all the presentations were done, was the tombola with nice prices, generously donated by the sponsors of the show.
I was lucky to win a 3DCoat license! woot!


Food and Drinks
And after the Uebertage we had a great evening with food, drinks and nice discussions about what we saw that day.
Thanks to all who could stay, and I hope everybody got home safe who had to leave again.


Videos
For the complete presentations you have to wait for the videos to show up, as I probably forgot some stuff here and there, and my notes weren't always very organized LOL.
And no, I don't know when the videos will be online.


Final Words
So to finish this bit of rambling, from all of us to Oliver I want to say:
"Thank you for organizing the Uebertage all these years, and your massive hospitality".
And a warm thank you to Wolfgang helping out Oliver again during the day for grabbing all the presentations, like last year.

From the 'pre-Uebertage pizza nights' to the event itself, and the parties after that, it was great fun every year.
And as I managed to visit the Uebertage for some years in a row, it will be a strange empty calender slot in 2017.......

To everybody who ever visited, thank you for coming in, meeting up, for all the great stories, presentations, food, beers and laughs.
But hopefully we will meet up again in unsuspected places!!


p.s. Eric, it's still 5 bucks....

[Hirazi Blue]

Thank you very much for this detailed write-up...

[owei]

Hey Rob!

Thanks for your biiiig effort to write this down!! Great! That´s the spirit ;)

It was a great event, thanks to all presenters, sponsors and the (sadly small) number of visitors..!!
It was a great show for saying "good bye" ;)

cheers,
oli

[face]

I can only agree with Rob, it was a realy realy cool day in Siegen.
Many thanks to Oli to organize and spend his time to manage this event every year.
I had much fun the whole day to meet new and old users, listen to the presenters and their projects and drink one or more drinks after the event.

Hope to find another event every year, so that the spirit will never die.
The king is dead long live the king...

Cheers,
Stephan

[Rork]

Hey Rob! Thanks for your biiiig effort to write this down!! Great! That´s the spirit ;)

Yeah..... Somehow it kept getting longer and longer.. LOL!! But you can never be too thorough

rob

[whurst]

lė cup

[Bullit]

Very nice Rork all detailed explanation about projects and software employed.

[51M0N]

And here's mine:

Thanks a lot for hosting the event Oli, it was really great, and thanks everyone for being there. Regardless of the relatively small attendance, I felt I was in a VIP group of people that taught each-other. I learned a lot from the presentations, and it's bittersweet to know that it was my first and last Übertage.

Good to meet everyone there, and apologies for leaving in a hurry to catch the train.
I look forward to meeting you guys again.

- Orestis

[owei]

Hey Orestis!

Thanks for being here and being part of the show! You are welcome, it was my pleasure ! And yes..we will see, if there will be some other event next year to meet again ;)

cheers,
oli