Michael Reed of Blue Sky Studios

On Thursday, March 22^nd, Michael Reed and Debra Blanchard from Blue Sky Studios visited us, and gave us a talk about Blue Sky Studios and R&D group in Blue Sky Studios.

Blue Sky Studios is an American CGI-animation studio which specializes in high-resolution, computer-generated character animation and rendering. It is owned by 20th Century Fox and located in Greenwich, Connecticut. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, the studio concentrated on the production of television commercials and visual effects for film. In 2002, Ice Age was released to a great critical and commercial success.
The speaker, Michael Reed is a Senior Research Associate at Blue Sky Animation Studios, where he works on geometric issues in modeling and rendering.

The talk was very interesting. At first, he showed us a short animation produced by Blue Sky (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdeb7qGSnP4). After that, he began to talk about the pipeline in Blue Sky Studio, the R&D group, some techniques that they are using and how they work.

For the pipeline, Blue Sky uses Z-Brush for modeling, Maya for rigging and animating, CGI for rendering and they also developed a lot of tools to help the pipeline. CGI is a rendering software using ray tracing, and because of the potential in ray tracing technique and their insisting on developing this technique, now CGI is very famous for its high rendering quality.

Then, he talked about the R&D group. In Blue Sky, the R&D group sits among other people. Usually, artists will come with problems, and then R&D people will work with those artists to find solutions together. For R&D people, they have long-term research, mid-term research and short-term research. Long-term research usually lasts for a long time, like several years. Mid-term research is about the time making a show. And short-term just lasts about several months. Then, he gave us four cases in their short-term researches and provided us more details about how they work together. They are:

1. Voxel Rendering (A way that they use for solving large amount of complex geometries, like large amount of flowers)
2. Crowds in animation and rendering (A solution that they use to render large amount of crowds efficiently, two planes perpendicular to each other)
3. Implicit mid-ground geometry (A way to simulate background trees or other details without actually building those)
4. Procedural mosaicking (A way to render random and large amount of mosaics on the ground)

After all these, he showed us the second half of the short animation in the beginning (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzixp8s4pyg)

Michael Reed of Blue Sky Studios