ILM Uses Maya to Create Stunning Visual Effects In Summer Blockbuster MoviesSummer Hits Include ""Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace,"" ""The Mummy,"" And ""Wild, Wild West""

Alias|Wavefront, an SGI (NYSE: SGI) company, announced at SIGGRAPH '99 that Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) used its award-winning MayaÆ software to create breathtaking special effects in this summer's most successful films, including ""Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace,'"" ""The Mummy,"" and ""Wild Wild West."" All three films continue to set new standards for creating compelling visual effects and realistic character animation. ""The industry continues to get more competitive when it comes to realistic and believable animation,"" said Christian Rouet Senior Technology Officer at ILM. ""The Maya product line is an integral part of our effects animation process, allowing technical directors to streamline and simplify production to successfully deliver the most effective, realistic special effects on the big screen today.""""ILM and its fantastic pool of talent continues to entertain audiences and inspire animators around the world,"" said Warren Pratt, President of Alias|Wavefront. ""We are pleased that Maya played a significant role in helping create many of ILM's recent movie successes. Additionally, we look forward to a continued relationship with ILM as it leads the industry to the generation of awe-inspiring visual effects.""""Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace'"" - An Entire Galaxy of Special Effects""Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace',"" released May 19, 1999 by Lucasfilm, Ltd., was one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the summer. With over 60 digital characters and 1950 visual effects shots, ""The Phantom Menace"" includes some of the most artistic and technically challenging animated sequences ever faced by the ILM visual effects crew - it ranks as one of the most complex productions in film history. One particularly challenging sequence was ""The Pod Race,"" where pods destroy themselves at 700 miles an hour, hitting the ground and exploding into millions of pieces. The intense physical elements for this shot included metal being shredded, ripped and torn apart, pyrotechnic effects with explosions, flames and chunks of scattering debris with trailing sand and dust.""The destruction and deformation required for the ëPod Race Crash' sequence, made it extremely complex and one of the hardest to achieve from a CG perspective,"" said Habib Zargarpour, CG Supervisor at ILM. ""Maya's comprehensive tool set was the fundamental piece that allowed us to take the complexity of special effects for ëPhantom Menace' one step higher.""The biggest challenge for ëThe Pod Race' sequence was that all the technical elements for the scene were interdependent, which meant we really needed the ability to develop all aspects of the shot in one package,"" continues Zargarpour. ""With Maya, we were able to do everything - modeling, animation, dynamic expressions, rigid body and particles, all within one seamless UI. In general, overall production was much faster because we didn'thave to waste time converting between different packages.""""The Mummy"" Unearths Stunning Effects""The Mummy,"" released by Universal Pictures, is a suspenseful and horrifying epic chronicling a treasure hunting expedition in the Sahara Desert. Creating the visual effects for this adventure presented many design challenges for the creative team at ILM.""Our goal was to create very realistic scenes,"" said Erik Krumrey, Technical Director of ILM. ""The special effects -- specifically the motion, dynamics and the action - were needed to tell the film's story and not just exist as a display of computer graphics effects. Many of the scenes in ëThe Mummyí would have been impossible to achieve without Maya. Certain long shots were done almost entirely in Maya and we were able to get the desired result in half the time it would have taken using other 3D animation packages.""Using Maya, ILM was able to pre-visualize and produce some of the film's most stunning visual effects, including the ""Scarab Swarm"" in the temple, the ""Collapsing City,"" and the ""Sand Wall Storm"" scenes. The ""Scarab Swarm"" shot in particular involved four to five thousand scarabs, which presented an interesting challenge to animate and render. ILM used Maya particles and the Maya dynamic fields to move the scarabs around and animate them in a realistic manner. With Maya software's fast feedback, ILM's special effects team accomplished in one day what would normally take three or four days of production.Maya MEL, Maya software's scripting tool, was also used to write plug-ins for creating the ""Collapsing City,"" a complex scene that involved thousands of rocks falling and breaking apart with dust and smoke. The special effects team used Maya software's API to build, form and animate the rocks in correlation with Maya to animate the hills as they fell and collided with the correct gravity and action. Using Maya, the ILM technical team was able to complete the shot in two weeks instead of three to four weeks.""I am continuously impressed with Alias|Wavefront and the technical capabilities of Maya,"" said Ed Kramer, ILM Sequence Supervisor for ""The Mummy"" and Alias|Wavefront user since 1987. ""Maya has so many different robust options - a great modeler, animator, particles, and soft and hard body dynamics - all integrated seamlessly into one UI. It's an encompassing piece of software that is also open-ended, which allows us to develop plug-ins for films like ëThe Mummy,í that we can also use for creating special effects in future films.""""Wild Wild West"" Gets Visual Out WestReleased July 2nd by Warner Bros., ""Wild Wild West"" employs unique special effects to create a stylized world that is futuristic but within the context of the year 1869. One of the film's most spectacular characters is the tarantula - an 80-foot-tall, steam-driven, coal-fired creature which is the villain's form of transport and one of the largest and most challenging hard-surface models ever built at ILM.Since several shots of the creature would be viewed up close throughout the film, the tarantula model had to be very detailed. ILM used Maya and its MEL scripting language to create the simulations for the tarantula's 250 dynamic cables, emit the steam from its 47 steam vents, and animate the smoke from the smoke stack and dust pits from the footfalls of the tarantula.""The strong tool set offered with in Maya and MEL enabled us to create realistic dynamic simulation for the complex motion of the cables hanging from the tarantula,"" said Steve Braggs, CG Supervisor of ILM. ""Once the MEL script had been developed, it was a simple and fast process to generate the cables for each tarantula shot. We saved a lot of time in production by generating the cables using a procedural script in Maya, freeing the animators to concentrate on the performance of the tarantula.""About Alias|WavefrontAlias|Wavefront provides artists with open workflow solutions for creative advantage. As the world's leading innovator of 2D and 3D graphics technology, Alias|Wavefront develops software for the film and video, games, interactive media, industrial design and visualization markets. Alias|Wavefront's film and video customers include Blue Sky, Cinesite, CNN, Digital Anvil, Digital Domain, Dream Quest Images, Industrial Light & Magic, Pacific Data Images(PDI), Pixar, Santa Barbara Studios, Sony Pictures Imageworks, The Walt Disney Company and Warner Feature Animation. Games/Interactive customers include CAPCOM, Electronic Arts, Iguana Entertainment, Interplay, Kronos Digital Entertainment, NAMCO, Naughty Dog, Nintendo, Rare, Sony, SEGA, 989 Studios, Square, Virtual Worlds Entertainment and Williams/Bally Midway.Alias|Wavefront is a wholly owned, independent software company of SGI with headquarters in Toronto and technical centers in Seattle, Washington and Santa Barbara, California. Please visit the Alias|Wavefront Web site at http://www.aliaswavefront.com or phone 800 447 2542 or 978 466 7623 (outside North America) for additional product information or the location of an authorized Alias|Wavefront dealer.