How was Forest Pack or RailClone able to help you achieve your artistic goals and overcome these challenges?

iToo: How was Forest Pack or RailClone able to help you achieve your artistic goals and overcome these challenges? Were any other tools used in addition to Forest Pack, and how did they work together? 

In addition to Forest Pro, we use RailClone for some city elements like fences. V-Ray is our main rendering engine, so tight connection is very important for us. iToo is constantly improving this connection. The great thing in Forest is that we can count on a good default object library and build that up for our purposes. Meanwhile, we have extended it a lot and added objects from other libraries and self-designed objects. It has gotten more powerful with each project and we get faster results.

iToo:Were there any particular aspects of Forest Pack and RailClone that you found most useful?

Christian:Very useful for us is the ability to view the scenery in points-cloud mode, so we can see more details when we come closer in the viewport to get a better orientation, at the same time the scene is not overcrowded. That means it is easy to handle very complex scenes and still work in detail. The painting tools are also very good to handle, so building up a scene procedurally first and then removing or adding objects with the paint tool for more natural distribution works really great.

iToo: Has using Forest Pack and RailClone changed the way you’ll tackle future projects?

Christian:Yes, for sure. Both tools are in our daily toolkit and made many of our full CG environments for feature movies possible. In the past we had to work way more with V-Ray instances and place them by hand, now we can set a few distribution rules and work directly on details for sets. Same with Railclone: for Independence Day 2 we build a few skyscrapers procedurally with it, that saved not just time, but also keeps the complex scene memory optimized and fast in the workflow.

iToo:Is there any advice you could share with 3d artists who want to make their own independent features?

Christian:I am not sure if I have much advice for artists in this area. Making an independent movie is a completely different beast. First of all, create a powerful, deep story that you want to pursue for many years. Besides the VFX and animation scope of work itself, which is not so much different compared to working for good results as a vendor, the main challenge is financing and distribution of the movie. You have to work on the creative and the business side of the content to bring it to screen. If you focus on the business side, doing contracts, have meetings with financiers, visiting film markets to sell your movie, prepare advertising, fill out thousands of documents for funding and so on there is nearly no time for working the creative part. It is nearly impossible to do both. If you want to stay on the artistic side, find good partners and producers which support you and handle the tedious and sometimes frustrating, non-creative tasks.

iToo: You mention on your website that you have developed tools for a complete animation feature film pipeline for Manou the Swift. Can you tell us any more about these tools and how they helped your production?

Christian:Since 2011 we are developing our own production pipeline tool, named “Project Explorer”. It started very simple with some python code for doing conversions with Nuke and our Royal Render manager to send a list of shots and transcoded that into any other format including burn-ins, slates, name conversion, resizing and more. And because we used the regular windows explorer before to manage all folder, files and scenes, we thought about some easy interface to save repetitive clicks.

From that our ideas spread and it elaborated. We included a MySQL database on the backend and added more and more tools like internal email client, task system, spreadsheets, storyboard generators, backup systems, even a recruiting system is integrated. This system is highly optimized and connects many tools like 3ds Max, Nuke, Render manager, RAM Player in a smart and lean fashion into one UI. That way the artists can work their daily chores within this interface: including the ability to create new shots and scenes, rename, setup slap-comps, publish elements, build assets, send previews to Avid, manage daily sessions and control the progress of the project.

It is way more streamlined then commercial tools like Shotgun and tries to save every unnecessary clicks. People do not have to care about naming scene files, client vs in-house naming conventions, conversions, lookup colour tables and much more. Make a selection of a few shots, for example, press one button and the system automatically collects the last version of each shot, 3ds Max preview from shot A, rendering from shot B, compositing from shot C and storyboards from shot D, and put them together into a real time player. Even including the last voice wav files for each shot from editing, the corresponding color grading files and plays it right away, without any editing preparation. It compares different versions, allowing feedback by paint into frame and annotations.

Another example is our self-developed “LUXX Player” which replaced the good old QuickTime player, with many features for the creative process, including timecode and frame views, paint over clips, the ability to add annotations, tagging, command line support to include it into our “Project Explorer”, Voice Annotations with timecode sync, edit marker sync, excel task list export, safe frame overlay and many more features.

The great thing about self-developing these tools is that during production each artist can add wishes and we decide to include them in the process for optimization and improved usability. Select a comp, press play button and open the corresponding Nuke scene with another button is easy to implement. Or just a simple shortcut to decide if you want to see the uncompressed EXR or a fast jpg preview sequence. For the pipeline, it is often not a killer feature which counts, but the most efficient way of combining repeating tasks and workflow steps into a GUI which saves you endless time while keeping the artist free of organizational processes running fully automated in the background.

We had many visitors from other companies and after a short demonstration, they usually ask why we do not sell this system. We are looking thoroughly into that and maybe there will be some first software element available soon.

Christian Haas thank you very much for talking to us. The 2019 Manou The Swift Official Trailer starring Kate Winslet and Willem Dafoe is out now! Watch it on YouTube and follow the film on Facebook and Twitter.