You have workflows around posing and playback but also drawing. These issues are all tied together with Premo in better, more fluid workflows. As the scene complexity increases, the efficiency drops. Do two or three characters, figure out what you want those to do, then work on another two or three characters. But if there was a big scene with more interactions, you had to visualize how what that all needed to look like. A lot of times, we could only work on two or three characters. There was also the fidelity of the scene or the shot around it…the environment and number of characters. Like I was mentioning about the deforming geometry. The second thing is much better fidelity, such as with the characters. Premo refreshes in real-time, providing high-resolution fully deforming characters and environments that better resemble the final look.
For example, if they wanted to test something with a character, it would take hours.
They’d go get a cup of coffee…it really broke their process and efficiency.ĪWN: That meant they constantly broke their concentration and wasted a lot of time over and over again all the time. They would look at the movie, see what the motion looked like, go back to changing the stand-in, edit some more…it was a really clunky workflow. It was just doing a better deformation of the character for the whole shot.
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To see a higher resolution version of their animation, with the full rig and computations, they would have to switch to what we called a “recalc.” That would create a movie they could view of the whole shot. But, that view is only an approximation that kind of gets them in the ballpark. The system does it that way because there are fewer computations and the animator can view close to real-time posing performance. You’d see stand-ins…they’re low res or punched out cylinders that approximate what the geometry would look like. In the past, with our old software, Emo, when you were posing a character, you don’t see the actual fully deforming hi-res geometry. The first thing is character performance. Paul Carmen DiLorenzo: Three main things. Read the full Q&A below:įredrik Nilsson, Premo product owner and DreamWorks’ animation workflow director, demonstrating the Premo system.ĪWN: What are the practical animation challenges that Premo addresses? How does it make the animation production process more efficient and how does it enable and enhance artist creativity?
Please note, a complete list of contributors DreamWorks wishes to thank is provided at the end of this interview.
Each will receive Academy certificates in the Scientific and Engineering Awards category.ĪWN spoke with Paul Carmen DiLorenzo, DreamWorks’ R&D director overseeing Animation, Rigging, FX, and CFX, who explained Premo’s main features, how the system improves the creative process and enables a huge jump in production efficiency, and the challenges the studio faced building and implementing a software system that fundamentally changed the entire way they produced animated films. DreamWorks engineers were able to harness the full computational power of multi-core HP workstations, providing animators a real-time creative tool that not only introduced more intuitive and artist-driven workflows into the animation pipeline, but eliminated numerous time-consuming processes where animators would waste multiple minutes, over and over each day, waiting for the execution of simple processes like viewing shot changes or loading a new set of character assets for a scene.įor their key contributions to Premo’s development, the award, which recognizes individuals who have added value to the filmmaking process, will be presented to Alex Powell for the design and engineering, Jason Reisig for the interaction design, and Martin Watt and Alex Wells for the high-performance execution engine of the Premo character animation system.
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Initiated in 2008, first rolled out on production during How to Train Your Dragon 2 and used on all subsequent studio-produced feature films including the current Oscar-nominated Boss Baby, Premo was designed from scratch to take advantage of the then relatively new multiple core CPU technology through the scalable use of parallel processing. One of the many achievements being honored at this Saturday’s annual Motion Picture Academy Scientific and Technical Awards is DreamWorks’ Premo animation platform. ‘Boss Baby’ image courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.