 Michael Wolf is a hybrid between artist and
developer. Being in the film business for many years, he has
developed talents which lend themselves to creating an
improved working environment for the artist.
Technology seems to be Michael's first love and has
partnered with him throughout his life to enhance his career
and the work of his teams.
We spoke with Michael about
how he became a plugin developer, his work as a vfx artist,
and where he believes the industry is headed in 2012. |
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Q. Can you tell me a little about
yourself? | |
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I'm 40 years old, tall, and handsome... seriously, I was
one of those kids that had a home computer in the mid-80ies
and somehow got stuck. I co-ran a small boutique studio for
twelve years and, for the past eight years, I have co-owned
and co-run db&w. We specialize in tools for cg
professionals.
I still work on cg projects, mainly to
keep in touch with what's happening in the industry.
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Q. What made you decide to become a VFX
artist? | |
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I
don't think it was ever a conscious decision. I don't see
myself as an 'artist' in the traditional sense. My background
is in computers and this knowledge is coupled with an avid
interest in film, visual language, and design. I guess that
automatically leads to vfx, doesn't it?
I started with
a focus in 3D and then extended that to video editing and
finally compositing. Due to the small nature of the studio
back then, I worked in just about every role; from being my
own rotoscoping slave to producing videos. My tasks included
3D animation, software development (both in-house tools and
interactive authoring), editing, and supervision. I suppose,
in this neck of the woods, this is a fairly common career for
a generalist.
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| Q. What artist/event/person
inspires you?
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This
one is actually a lot easier to answer than expected.
Andreas Hykade (www.hykade.de), we worked together on
his short 'Ring of Fire' for two years. I designed,
implemented, and worked on the digital pipeline. This was new
to both of us and my first venture out into the world of
traditional cel animation. He's got a very specific style and
the best pair of eyes for the timing of animation that I've
ever come across. That, and he's totally nuts, witty, and
obscenely creative. Working with him helped me realize that my
talents aren't in storytelling or creating outrageous visuals
but in making technology accessible in pipelines. I sit
happily between the artists and the technology.
As for
an event, that would have to be Siggraph every time. It is
bustling with energy and a wild mix of people from all areas
of the industry.
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| Q. How long have you been
working with Fusion as an artist? Where did you learn
your compositing skills, and how did you first get
started in the industry?
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We
purchased our first license in 2001 to composite footage for
CeBit in Germany, when German Telekom introduced G3 to the
market. Wow, that's 10 years ago already!
As for most
people of my generation (and earlier), it was learning by
doing. I have to admit that I'm an avid reader of manuals.
It's usually the first thing I do with a new piece of
software. Read the documentation from front to back to get an
idea of what it is capable of doing. That way, I also tend to
remember that there's something, somewhere that I could use in
a certain situation.
Courseware that was released
later also helped a lot in gaining new insights and learning
alternate ways to solve problems.
I got started by
having a computer and knowing a bit of 3D. I met a few people
that were actually willing to pay for the work and later I
co-founded a small studio with three other people. That was
the point where I actually wanted to move into this specific
industry.
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| Q. What shows have you
contributed to in the past?
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Most
of the customers in Germany are medium to large sized
businesses in the industrial sector, there's a lot of product
visualization and corporate video.
I was lucky enough
to work on a few short movies such as 'Ring of Fire'
(http://www.wicked-images.com/2011/02/ring-of-fire/) and
helped out on others such as 'The Raft'
(http://www.the-raft.de/).
We also developed a
pipeline to visualize individual stages for the Tour de France
for German television.
One of the highlights was the
VFX for 'Bye Bye Blackbird' by Robinson Savary
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0395488/), which involved a heavy
dose of Fusion.
I also worked as a compositor on Roman
Polanski's 'Oliver Twist' as well as 'Book of Blood', both via
MotionFX in the UK.
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| Q. What are some of your
favourite tools in Fusion?
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Can I mention the Merge tool because it's the one I use
most often?
There is the Text+ tool which is extremely
powerful and almost an application on its own, especially once
you add the text modifiers.
There isn't a single
favourite tool. It's the way one can combine them all that
makes Fusion my favourite compositing tool.
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| Q. Yourself, and your team
at db&w produce plugins for vfx software. Tell me
about how you started your company and how your plugins
are used by artists.
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Our
first product, infiniMap, emerged from the needs of a
production at the studio. Eventually, Dagmar and I decided to
jump in and turn that need into a company that specializes in
product development for the vfx market and custom software
development.
We shipped infiniMap in December of 2005,
just in time for Christmas. It is a complete re-write of a
tool that was initially developed for in-house use that took
three years to turn into a product. infiniMap is a plugin for
LightWave 3D that swaps in image textures while rendering. Our
first test included using a 2TB texture on a machine with
512MB of RAM. There were a couple of big lessons to be learnt.
It is quite a big step up from an in-house tool designed for
specific tasks to a more versatile (and stable) product.
exrTrader was initially a project to check out the
OpenEXR library but quickly evolved into our second project
after enthusiastic feedback from our team of beta testers. It
has become the de-facto standard image exporter for any
pipeline that renders in LightWave 3D and then proceeds to
composite. It is still our best seller.
shaderMeister,
our third product, is a global, node based, shading override
for LightWave 3D. This product also evolved from a proof of
concept.
Since I'm still working on vfx projects from
time to time, we have the advantage of being able to use and
test our software in production ourselves. I hope it shows.
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| Q. What about Fusion and the
SDK, any products in the making by db&w?
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We
thought about writing plugins for Fusion but eventually got
sidetracked. While I love the SDK itself, which I consider a
very good example of how an SDK should work, I wish that the
requirement to work with older compilers wasn't a necessity.
Fusion certainly comes with an array of tools that makes it
less dependent on native plugins in a production environment,
such as fuses or macros.
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| Q. What are your feelings
regarding GPU Computing?
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GPU
Computing is certainly gaining ground but, at present, it is
also a lot slower than users would like. It's certainly not
all its hyped up to be for our industry just yet.
It
makes sense to see compositing embrace it first, many of the
requirements for GPU computing lend themselves to the
operations performed on images. I have to admit that I really
like how eyeon leverages OpenCL through fuses. It makes a very
nice playground for OpenCL development.
It will
certainly be interesting to see which standards will emerge in
the future. The CUDA vs. OpenCL vs. Directcompute situation
isn't really helping at the moment.
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| Q. What trends do you see
emerging in visual effects? How do you see the role of
the VFX artist changing, and where do you see yourself
in 10 years?
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This is the big question, isn't it?
As for trends,
there are plenty. Most of them, unfortunately, are only along
the lines of faster-and-cheaper.
One of the biggest
challenges will be the management of the increased complexity
of projects, both within individual packages and across
pipelines. The former will require a lot of thinking when it
comes to the user interface. The latter will take advantage of
tools such as GenerationAM which are slowly starting to emerge
as off-the-shelf packages. The feature disparities between
software packages also seem to level out except for special
cases.
I also see a trend of the 'prosumer' or
'enthusiast' level of hardware for the budding artist slowly
disappearing from the market. The gap between consumer
hardware and workstations has seemed to widen again.
I
don't see much of a change in the role of the VFX artist to be
honest. However, while there is now more work to be done than
ever, the business has also spread out across the globe and is
a lot more competitive. This is probably less of a problem for
small boutiques that serve local customers.
As for
db&w and me, ideally I would like a Technical Achievement
Award from the Academy ;).
I hope that within the next
ten years we'll have our very own standalone product and
manage to make a dent in the world of vfx production.
Visit the db&w website here. |
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