R&H glimpse

yeah, they're not much to look at, huh?
icy now looks alot more like digital fusion, with little rounded buttons, and they've rounded the corners of the nodes.
yeah, icy's fast, i guess. the network here is pretty fast, but the workflow pipeline is... poor, to be kind.
icy's a good program though. it is lacking some things - darken/multiply transfer modes, track averaging is kinda awkward until you get used to it. its got pretty cool roto stuff and interface navigating.
nothing extraordinary. if they marketed it, it wouldn't be breaking any new ground. it would just be another option.
the splash screen is nice. the programmers here have alot of fun with the splash screens.

just for the heck of it, here's some screenshots of some of ILM's proprietary software.

again, posted publicly.

the first is CompTime, their compositing program. I no absolutely nothing about it, but it looks like whoever grabbed this screenshot opened as many windows as possible to make it look as confusing as possible to regular joes.

the second is their facial animation plug-in system for Softimage.

thats what it looks like when I close my eyes.

-Z

This girl works here at R&H and posted a screenshot of Icy over at VFXTalk. I wouldn't dare take a screenshot of something here at work and post it, but since she did, here's a look at R&H's in-house compositing system.

So...many...nodes.

That's crazy. Over on vfxtalk, one of the guys was giving a breakdown of some scenes from hellboy. There were a bajillion nodes in those comps too.

Thanks for sharing, hype!

~Mechis

It looks crazy, but only because you're looking at the nodal tree....in AE, it's not uncommon to have 25-100 layers, all with 1-10 filters applied, as well as masks.

Hi Hype, thanks for posting these. It's interesting to see things like this, especially in-house software. I guess the advantages are that you've got a development team local and ready to fix bugs and implement new features. Do you use it in conjunction with other comping software like Shake or Fusion, or is R&H 100 Icy?

Cheers, C

Cool! I remember seeing people using voodoo working on shots for Garfield last spring when I got to visit.

I had a teacher who made us use Shake for a semester. It was really confusing at first, and most of the time I was doing things trial and error rather than actually knowing what to do at all... Would you recommend learning it more to get used to node based compositing? I prefer using AE for compositing because I am more familiar with it...should I give Shake another chance?!

Thanks for the heads up Hype.

I've been exploring the virtues of node-based comping lately with an eval of Nuke. To be honest (and I feel like something of a dunce!) I'm not getting on with it. On one particular shot I'd previously comped in AE, I found it impossible to get my head round how to do it. Something with a matte pass I'd rendered out of Maya just wasn't working, probably down to the way that Nuke handles alphas and all the other channels. I'm sure an experienced Nuke user could get it working in a few minutes!

I can see the power in it though, and I've been thinking how AE could change in future to allow this kind of flexibility.

karnage, if you were looking to be a compositor, I'd definitely say learn some nodal thing or another, just to get the idea of nodal comping. But it's certainly not necessary. The ideas and problem solving is what's really important. How to do a lightwrap, an edgeblur, take out spill, raise the black levels, color match, adjust motion blurs, match grain... All those things can be done in every comping program.

Yeah, going from AE to a nodal comper is tough. I struggled for a few weeks when I first did it, thinking every day that I was going to get fired for taking to long to get the hang of it. You bring up a good point, Christian, about mattes. Mattes are handled very differently in AE and nodal compers. AE likes to try and keep all that stuff under the hood, so you don't have to deal with it. Nodal compers don't bother.

In all honesty, all comping programs do the same thing. It just a matter of understanding the layout involved in getting to the solution. Everyone and their mother involved in effects will tell you which program they think is the best, and chances are it's the one they learned on and are most comfortable in. Anytime anyone ever tells you "This program is the best because...", ignore them.

Nuke is interesting. It has one of the most universally hated interfaces, but I hear it's really powerful, and people who work at Digital Domain and leave always talk about how great it is.

I mean, really... what makes a compositing program "powerful"? No one's ever answered that, or said what it is. Some people think it's the amount of cool plug-ins that come with it. Other people think it's how fast it calculates big composites. All I can offer to the argument is my own experience, which is that there are powerful artists who work the software. If you struggle in Nuke or Shake, but the guy sitting next to you just finished the shot in 10 minutes and it looks perfect, that guy is obviously a "powerful" compositor. If you asked him what it was, he'd say it was the software and how great and powerful it is. Bull. It's the fact that he knows the program in and out, and understands compositing really, really well. That is what's powerful. his knowledge of the software, not the software itself.

Christian, when you see things that could be changed in AE to make it more "powerful" like Nuke, what are you thinking of specifically? From where I'm sitting, if you can't figure out Nuke, and you did your comp in AE, AE is definitely the more powerful one.

ridestowe - i don't know if Pixar uses proprietary stuff. I mean, I guess they use renderman, but do you know the names of any of their other software? I've never heard anyone mention their stuff. I'd be very curious.

Oddly, I really like Maya's node-based material system. But then Maya's the only 3D app I've used, so I know it pretty well. Which I guess reinforces Hype's point - it's not the app that's all powerful, it's how well you know it. Within reason there's not a material in Maya I could create that you couldn't create in a different way in Max.

Hype, when I said "power" I was referring to node-based comping, specifically you get to make the decision of the render order, rather than the app making that decision for you. In AE, you're stuck with it rendering first masks, then effects, then transforms. In node based apps, you decide where to put each one in the tree. There's a few times I've wanted to apply a transform (like a stabilize) then add a static mask on top, but the render order means I've got to precomp first (nit-picky? Sure! But sometimes it's the little things that niggle!). I'm waiting to play with AE CS3 to see the differences between it and v7 but there are a few things I wish Adobe would implement that would turn AE from being a great compositing app into an awesome compositing app.

Anyway, I've gone and made this thread off-topic again! My apologies.

Thanks for sharing Sean!

I watched a few fusion videos on their websites "21 reasons to use Fusion" and I must say it looks GREAT! I thought it would scare me the whole node base approach but honestly the videos made sense to me. I will download the PLE of fusion 6 when it comes out and start learning it. Seems it will only help me to try in break in the industry!

Fusion seems a little prettier ui wise than icy and certainly looks better than Nukes ui.


thanks again

Josh

yeah, fusion is fine. They all do the same thing. I watched the "21 Reasons" video, since I haven't used fusion since CafeFX on Sin City, and it looks fine. Looks like they improved on some UI things since those days, but otherwise the same. I didn't see anything that AE couldn't do. But I agree, if you intend to do this for a living, it's good to learn how node based works.

Thanks for the screenshots Hype! I recently rewatched Narnia 1 on dvd and caught a glimpse of icy & voodoo on the bonus disc:




Heres the same shot from the comp:



Re: Nodal based comping, is there an interactive preview window to help you dial in elements like shadows, or do you have to render out the whole tree each time? Or can you render once and the changes are the only things calculated?

I guess working with nodes you get into the practise of doing little bits at a time and then wiring everything together for a final image. In AE if the layer stack gets too much I just toggle layers on/off so I can work with a decent amount of feedback.

Icy looks a bit fugly, they should add some thumbnail + icon support on the nodes as well as improve the text label appearance if they wanted to release it as a commercial app.


Josh: Theres a collection of Sin City matte paintings over at: