Art Tools, Artist Features, Cinema, Featured

Fuzzy Pixel’s “Spanner”: Interview and Breakdown

Spanner and SpeedTree

Spanner, a gorgeous short by the industry-veterans at FuzzyPixel, doesn’t just take place among the clouds, it was created as a proof-of-concept for a workflow based in the cloud! Read our interview with the team about their experiences bringing the animation to life, learning SpeedTree for the first time, and developing a remote workflow using the AWS service, Amazon’s Nimble Studio. 

Interview conducted by Katly Hong.

Meet the FuzzyPixel Team

Cris Fudge: I’ve been working in the commercial, film, and games industries for 14 years. I’ve been at Amazon for the last six-and-a-half years. My specialty is in character art, lighting, and compositing. I was the Art Director on the Spanner short film.

Jen Dahlman: I’ve spent 25 years in the animation industry. I worked at DreamWorks Animation, working on films such as Shrek, Madagascar, and How to Train Your Dragon. From there, I worked at the animation start-up Nimble Collective and headed up their pilot program where I produced five short films with five first-time directors. I came to AWS through the acquisition of Nimble and have been here for two years. I am the producer of Spanner.

Haley Kannall: Over the last 7 years, I’ve worked on advertisements, commercials, films, and interactive content. I’ve mostly worked on lighting, but have also done a lot of compositing, surfacing, editing, color grading, and a little modeling and animation. I was the CG Supervisor on Spanner.

Amaru Zeas: I’m originally from Ecuador and have been working in the CG industry for about 13 years in different areas such as games, marketing, commercials, and now film. I consider myself a generalist, as I like to be involved in everything that is related to art creation, but also a creator because I love to tell stories with single images or motion. I was the Associate Art Director for Spanner.

Katly: What was your focus on Spanner?

Cris: I was heavily involved in the production design, coming up with what the environment could be, and maintaining the vision throughout the film. I also re-concepted from the ground up previously existing characters for a different time period, location, and art style. Next, I modeled, textured, and shaded the characters and then groomed their hair to film-quality fidelity. In addition, I worked on lighting and compositing throughout much of the film.

Jen: I was responsible for the production budget, the schedule, the crew, and ensuring that the vision of the director, Rex Grignon, came to the screen.

Haley: I helped define the technical and creative workflows for our pipeline. I also helped build the environment by using SpeedTree to model the trees, and I helped establish the strategy for set dressing and assembling our master environment. I was also part of the team that lit and composited the film.

Amaru: Right before actual production, I was involved in doing research on technology and workflows to create the content such as SpeedTree, Substance Painter and MASH Network for the airship, rock pillars, some tools/props, and the bridge. I worked on the concept, modeling, surfacing, and look development. I was also involved in lighting and compositing.

Katly: Are the Amazon Web Services creative teams formed around specific projects? Do multiple teams contribute or collaborate when necessary? Would the Fuzzy Pixel team be the one to call for building a cloud studio? 
 
Haley: The FuzzyPixel team worked closely with the engineering and product teams developing Nimble Studio, as well as other services built specifically for creative studios. We curate our projects to test out these services and bring in extra talent to round out the core team when necessary. If studios are interested in trying Nimble Studio, they can reach out to AWS sales and will be put in touch with someone who can give them the information they need to get started. 
 
Cris: I can only speak to the purpose of our FuzzyPixel team. We are embedded with the product and development team to produce art at the quality of customers and to test Nimble Studio in real production environments. This enables the development team to make the right enhancements to improve the overall experience for our customers. By acting like a customer first, we allow others to be confident that they, too, can use Amazon Nimble Studio to produce visually compelling artwork.
 
Jen: Our internal creative team, FuzzyPixel, is made up of artists. We are early adopters of all of the products and services our team builds, and use the tools as our customer would.

About Amazon Nimble Studio
Katly: What advice would you have for studios intimidated by the transition to a cloud-based workflow like Amazon Nimble Studio?
 
Haley: My advice would be to test it out. You can spin up a studio, launch a virtual workstation, send some renders to the farm, and experience the performance of the virtual workstation without having to fully commit to moving your entire studio. It’s a big decision to migrate your pipeline to cloud infrastructure, but there’s no risk in trying it out and deciding if it’s the right move for your studio. I do see this as the future of animation and visual effects production. Once studios test it out and see the power and flexibility that the cloud gives them, I think most will decide to make the transition.
 
Amaru: I believe that new technology, most of the time, will help us create art faster and take it to the next level; that is the main reason we want to use all the best, most current tools when we produce CG content. So the fact that Nimble Studio will give you that on-the-go is priceless. As an artist, logging into a powerful virtual machine and having all the tools I need is key to producing content.
 
Cris: I would say that transitioning to the cloud was something I was skeptical of at first, but it really is a seamless experience. I can work remotely and not have to constantly upgrade my hardware because, through the cloud, I get easy access to a powerful machine. And the thing is…you can get access to even more powerful virtual machines. The scalability of the virtual machines in power and number is so easy and is really, really useful when crunch time hits and you need to get more done, faster. On top of this, you have the peace of mind that all your data can be constantly backed up and secure. As an artist, the only thing you really need is a decent internet connection and you’re set.
 
Jen: Most studios these days have made some sort of transition into the cloud, most likely the ability to scale up rendering capabilities when a deadline is approaching. By having your whole production process in the cloud, you can scale to add resources as your production slate expands, and then scale back down according to your studio’s needs.
Katly: What changes or improvements might we see to this cloud system in the future?
 
Haley: For studios moving to the cloud, it is a big shift and is a very new, innovative way of working, but this is really just the beginning. I see a lot of potential for how studios can use Nimble Studio as their base infrastructure and how studios can integrate with other tools and services to fully customize their creative working environments. For example, studios working in the cloud could integrate with machine learning services to help make their artist’s workflows more efficient.
 
Jen: Working in the cloud adds a level of flexibility and transparency to the animation workflow that I’ve never seen before in my years of animation production. With Nimble Studio, we can onboard artists quickly and securely. They spend more time in the creative process rather than worrying about updating software and moving files around.

Building a World (and Workflow) in the Clouds

Katly: What were some of the challenges your team faced when tackling this project? How were they resolved? 

Haley: One of the major challenges was that we wanted every aspect of this film to be complex and detail-rich. This means our scenes consisted of extremely large files and we needed to figure out how to optimize them so that they were useful, while allowing our artists to work with the scenes as they would look fully rendered. The environment was a very heavy asset, and we took several steps to lighten and make it usable.
 
First, we ended up converting the foliage to Arnold stand-ins, which gave us the option of displaying proxy geometry while in the Maya files and then render with the full resolution geometry later. We set up low resolution pillars that were set-dressed with low resolution foliage and placed them in the background where we didn’t need all of the high-resolution detail. We also used layers to hide parts of the environment when it wasn’t going to be seen in a shot, which meant that all of that geometry wasn’t drawn into the viewport.
 

Katly: How long have you been using SpeedTree? What would you say were the most vital features and how did they fit into production?

Haley: I had never used SpeedTree before working on Spanner. Once Amaru suggested that we use it and we got approval to buy a license, I began reading documentation, watching tutorials, and asking Amaru lots of questions to get up to speed. I was able to begin generating trees very quickly because the UI and node graph were very intuitive. Within a day or so, I was creating trees that were close to the final look of the conifer trees we used in the film. I love how easy it was to create trees and randomize them based on the parameters that I chose. The other thing that made this process so much easier was the ability to add wind, dial in the look, and export the trees out of SpeedTree with the wind baked-in. The wind looks so natural and realistic. I especially love the gusts!

Amaru: I started using SpeedTree right after 2009’s new version, SpeedTree Cinema, was released. The UI of the software has become so artist friendly and fun to work with, and the node-based workflow is clean and simple to use. Getting to create foliage in real-time is priceless, and being able to see the assets before exporting is amazing. Wind is also extremely important and we can preview it as we create the assets. The fact that SpeedTree provides high quality textures and the ability to import your own makes the software very versatile.

Cris: I didn’t use SpeedTree, but in the overall production I’d say the ease of use and the quality of the results that SpeedTree produces made it possible to iterate very quickly.

Jen: SpeedTree allowed the director to envision the world we were creating very quickly. The variations it provided propelled the creative conversations forward.

SpeedTree Breakdown

Haley: We created the trees in SpeedTree and did our initial reviews based on screenshots of the trees directly in SpeedTree. We added wind and exported them as alembic, which we brought into Maya. We then exported variants—being able to easily randomize a tree to create a new variant is an amazing feature! We also generated low-res versions of each tree type and variant by putting a render on a card. The cards were distributed across low-res rock pillars and were used in the background of the master environment. The foliage gives the Spanner world life, history and visual interest, and we couldn’t have achieved this without SpeedTree.
 
How FuzzyPixel Decided to Use SpeedTree, Step by Step
    • We created a piece of environment concept art that had lots of foliage growing on rock pillars above a layer of clouds.
    • We wanted the world to have a history to it and wanted the environment to look harsh. We didn’t want it to look like a lush, easy place to live, but that anything that was living there had overcome many hardships. We applied this same thinking to our main characters, Noa and Ulysse.
    • In order to hit this level of complexity in the amount of time we had available, we needed to rapidly model multiple types of foliage with enough variants to create an organic forest look.
    • Hand-modeling the foliage would take too long, so Amaru suggested that we use SpeedTree.
    • Since he was working on modeling the rock pillars, the bridge, and the airship, Haley decided to learn SpeedTree and model the foliage.
Creating the Foliage

We looked at a lot of references and narrowed down the different types of foliage we wanted to create. 

    • Conifer tree
    • Broadleaf tree
    • Shrub
    • Vine
    • Grass

Haley then created five different variants of each foliage type.

Adding the Wind

To make our world more dynamic and alive, we decided that everything that would move in nature should move in our film. This meant we needed to add wind to all of the foliage. It sounded like a big undertaking at first, but SpeedTree made it super easy! (Minus the learning curve. See the blooper videos below.)

After some trial and error, Haley added the wind in SpeedTree and exported the foliage with the wind baked-in. To make sure that each foliage type had the right amount of wind and looked good with the other foliage types, we brought one of each foliage type into Maya, placed them on a low-res rock pillar next to our main character, Noa, and made adjustments so that the wind looked natural and believable.
Set Dressing the Rock Pillars

Once we were happy with the wind, we exported all of the foliage types and their variants with the wind baked in. Dave brought them into Maya, converted to Arnold stand-ins, and distributed across the rock pillars using MASH. We then added some random rotation and scale to the foliage.

We used the Terrestrial Ecosystem node to grow the foliage in a more realistic way, including seed count, growth rate, model size, and slope threshold. 

The rock pillars were used to dress the master environment, which we could bring into shots or hide parts of to make sure that we were only dealing with the parts of the set needed for each shot.

Optimizing the Environment

Our environment file was really heavy and we wanted to lighten it up, so Amaru created some low-resolution rock pillars. Haley rendered each foliage type’s variants with a transparent background, and set them up as cards so we could distribute them across the low-resolution rock pillars with MASH. It was surprisingly effective to use these for the rock pillars that you see off in the distance.

Katly: Is there anything else you would like to expand on?
 
Haley: I loved using SpeedTree on Spanner and I’m looking forward to using it again on future projects! 
 
Amaru: Not sure if this question is specifically for SpeedTree, but I would love to see how the software expands into photogrammetry since SpeedTree already offers some assets with that tech, but is still in beta. I am definitely looking forward to test even more and excited to see how SpeedTree takes this tech even further.

Create a SpeedTree Animation of Your Own

CONNECT WITH SPEEDTREE