Soapbox Autodesk Toxik © 2005 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved. Image courtesy of Weta Digital Ltd.Universal Studios.

Autodesk Toxik
Autodesk's Ben Dair explains the workings of their Toxik product

A
s if we need reminding, year on year film post
production is becoming ever more challenging,
especially with the increase in the quantity,
complexity and quality of FX shots. Is it just
about working harder?
that can address both the creative and operational aspects of
working in digital media production pipelines – involving teams
of artists working on multiple high-resolution formats from
different sources.
One core aspect of film production often taken for granted is

When Weta Digital wanted to give Universal Pictures’ King Kong a stunningly distinctive 1930s feel, they chose

environment. Lustre gives DPs, colorists and cinematographers new tools to help them collaborate on set and
Today we can shoot film, video, and digital and even create the process of creative iteration and the need to track creative

Autodesk’s Discreet Lustre system to help them achieve it. The Lustre system’s software-based technology
virtual images (CGI), resulting in different formats, colour assets as they evolve throughout the production lifecycle.

spaces and image data types. We can work in any resolution -
2K, 4K and even 8K or higher for background plates. Moreover,
4K is starting to become the new benchmark for high quality
digital film acquisition and post production - in Los Angeles it’s
and its creative toolset make it an obvious choice for colour grading and look design in a cutting-edge DI
This lifecycle involves not only multiple iterations from say a
single artist or compositor, but multiple iterations and changes
based on a large team of content creators including editors
and colourists. This is not counting the review and approval

in the studio to push the boundaries of their art. The result? Motion pictures with emotion.
increasingly the norm. With this in mind, it’s easy to understand iterations required by various supervisors, directors and
why it’s not uncommon to hear certain sentiments voiced in the producers.
film production community: (see box left). Generally, every major facility or post house has developed

The Challenge of 4K
The hair of many facility owners, managers and system
administrators turns white at the mere thought of the technical
challenges that lie ahead in migrating from 2K to 4K production.
It’s not just a matter of quadrupling the facility’s network,
storage, processing and archiving capacity, of using lossless or
near lossless compression or even of asking the question "Is
the technology affordable to do this today?” The implications
are far broader - involving both human and technical resources
and requiring ever increasing rigour in operations science.
IT and post are on a collision course and just throwing more
staff and equipment at a problem is no longer the most efficient
solution and is generally cost-prohibitive. The good news is that
4K, while four times the data of 2K, does not require four times
the investment. New technologies like Autodesk Toxik can help
To learn more about Discreet Lustre and King Kong, visit Autodesk.com/KingKong.
their own way of doing the same thing. They all have created
processes and procedures to go from source, mainly OCN
(Original Camera Negative), to final print. But what is the digital
glue which ties all these processes together? At the moment
the digital glue is different and unique to each facility, yet it
determines what makes the company not only profitable but
competitive.
Autodesk technologies both for 2D and 3D take a radically
different approach. They are designed to provide superglue
that ensures maximum process efficiency when it comes to
creative iteration in the parts of the processes we address, while
at the same time providing a customisable operation that can
be holistically integrated into the facility’s overall pipeline.
Not surprisingly, in the world of automotive and architectural
design, there are large render pipelines too. Here the quality of
the final image is critical to successfully pitching design ideas.

®
reduce the costs of scaling to 4K. It provides a broader solution Photo-realistic, high-resolution digital media has replaced

®
– Post Production Wish Lists –

Realized:
“I want more detail in the image, 2K, 4K and higher resolution plates, whatever it takes to make my shot look great…within budget.”

“I want rich colours that will make my shot shine. I want day for night, night for day, to fix the lighting, I need higher dynamic ranges of
colour.”

“We need more digital visual effects shots for the film, and I want the process to be completely visible to me as a producer.”

“I want more complex visual effects: more CG characters and elements, more detailed environments and more layers. Oh and by the way you

Unleash the power of colour.

have the same time to produce it!”

“I want to use the best results, the best tools for the job and I don’t care if it means using multiple applications: they all need to work
together.”

“I need to get more freelancers working together and I want to break out the tasks of compositing, rotoscoping, grading or CG design to
maximise my efficiency.”

Idea:
Autodesk, Discreet, and Lustre are registered trademarks of Autodesk Inc./Autodesk Canada Co. in the USA and other countries.
All other brand names, product names or trademarks belong to their respective holders. © 2005 Autodesk Inc. All rights reserved.

online content june 2006 • www.definitionmagazine.com

Soapbox Autodesk Toxik
traditional 1:1 clay and precision modelling as a more effective
means of communication.
The major difference between visualisation pipelines
compared to those in film post production is in the amount of
development effort that is concentrated at pre-design, while in
the production stage – be it 2D or 3D – the rendering process
is more automated. It would seem that in this respect design
visualisation has the upper hand over film when it comes to
process automation. We have recently seen the film industry
start to do the same with an increasing use of both technology
and talent for pre-visualisation.
Not only are we trying to squeeze more creative information
into the production of the final film image but we are doing so
at an ever earlier stage. This means that from pre-visualisation
to final display the image goes through even more variations
and iterations. Even though creative iteration may be taken for
granted that does not mean we can’t make it a more efficient
process.
So how can we make the creative iterations required for visual
effects easier – more traceable, more visible, more efficient,
more interactive and more scaleable to meet the ever increasing
demands of high value post production? Well, it can help to
have technology which has the following characteristics:
1) Automated image processing/rendering
2) Automated file I/O, image-caching, data exchange and
layer assembly
3) Standardised scripting using open languages such as
Python
4) Local and wide area collaboration using centralised
databases
5) Version tracking and control capabilities
6) Interactivity at ultra-high resolutions: 4K, 8K and higher
7) Scene referred image processing that is agnostic to source
colour space and that supports high dynamic range imagery
8) Increased storage efficiency for data and image
In developing Toxik, Autodesk worked closely with several
leading film facilities to determine the production challenges
and requirements for large-scale visual effects production for
the next five to ten years. This involved close collaboration with
companies like Escape Studios, who were facing significant
production hurdles on the Matrix trilogy using current visual
effects technologies. Our findings were a critical component to
defining the core architecture of Autodesk Toxik and coming
up with a radically different new design that could encompass
all of the above characteristics.
With Autodesk Toxik 2007 announced at NAB this year, Toxik
provides a comprehensive creative toolset - including HDR paint
capabilities for Linux or Windows - and has the potential to be
the central hub of the whole visual effects pipeline, aggregating
all 2D and 3D components into the final image. In comparison
to current pipelines which are predominately ‘Shake-based’, the
digital glue is non-generic and non-proprietary (it does not use
proprietary scripting languages), nor does it rely on the user’s
intimate understanding of their file-system to manage and
online content
Soapbox
track assets. Toxik’s architecture makes it possible to implement
a more effective scene-referred processing pipeline capable of
handling both normalised and HDR image values effectively.
Pipelines can and do change on a per production basis. Re-
using scripts is sometimes more difficult to do than re-writing
them from scratch. Solutions are required that can make this
both easier and faster. One key advantage of Toxik is that
instead of having to design, create and maintain systems for
tracking and managing the compositing process, the facility can
access an off-the-shelf platform for doing so. Toxik project and
asset management can be centralised on an Oracle Enterprise
Edition database.
The benefits to facilities and film post production pipelines
are improved visibility, customisation, integration and
scalability.
The Autodesk Pipelines
The highly simplified pipeline diagram above illustrates the
core concepts of the Autodesk digital film pipeline.
From left to right the diagram shows three phases of film
post production - 3D CGI with Autodesk Maya and Autodesk
3ds Max; 2D rotoscoping, compositing and visual effects
consolidation with Autodesk Combustion and Autodesk Toxik;
and conform, grading, finishing and mastering with Discreet
Smoke, Discreet Lustre and Discreet Flame.
A combination of Python and Mel/MaxScript scripting can be
used to automate the render process and 2D pass assembly,
removing the manual requirement for compositors/artists to
search and import media. Many film productions use either
Maya, 3ds Max or a combination of both. Whichever 3D tool is
utilised the 3D scene and animation is typically rendered as 2D
passes using a render farm. These passes break the 3D scene
into layers or elements such as specular, beauty, diffusion, z-
depth, ID-map, normal maps that can be used more effectively Autodesk's digital flm pipeline
in the compositing process.
With Toxik the 2D passes/plates can be automatically
assembled in the correct order using a Python script. By
automating the process, both the 3D and 2D artist can
focus more on the creative aspect of the job rather than be
Autodesk Toxik can be configured from as few as two seats manageable sub-composites utilising a procedural hierarchical
distracted with administrative details of exporting, searching
to many and is fully scaleable and configurable to match the approach. This new way of collaborative compositing enables
for and importing material every time a new render is executed.
dynamic production requirements. Configuration management VFX supervisors and producers to have full visibility on the
Similarly scripts can be used to transfer and preload images
is a very important aspect of large pipelines and Toxik was evolution of the visual effects for each project or production.
that have been scanned onto a SAN (Storage Area Network) or
designed from the ground up with this in mind. What will prove Toxik has been designed to address the next five to ten years
NAS (Network Attached Storage) device.
to be very useful is accessing the dataset/information contained of increasing complexities in feature film production. Facilities
Autodesk Toxik 2007 also allows easy exchange with
in the database via remote or background scripts. These scripts will be instrumental in its development as no movie, or system,
Discreet Lustre allowing iterative grading throughout the
can be used to interrogate the data or synchronise other data is ever made alone. HD
process from first scan to final output. It also enables effective
sets within the facility.
exchange of shots and elements with Discreet Fire, Discreet
Compositing in a Toxik team is seamless and quick. It
Smoke, Discreet Inferno and Discreet Flame via WireTap for
provides a facility view over the state of every artist’s work.
collaboration on film finishing, trailer work, final mastering as SOAPBOX PROVIDES A PLATFORM FOR NEW TECHNOLO-
Artists can see each other’s work and work on the same shot GIES, COMMENT OR NEW WAYS OF THINKING.
well as visual effects design. This means faster, more efficient
concurrently, though to avoid conflicts only one artist can write
workflows than was traditionally possible between a facility’s
to a compositing set-up at a time (multiple artists can read IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY EMAIL: soapbox@definitionm
high-speed compositing suites and its CGI/compositing agazine.com
it). Complex composites can also be broken down into more
pipelines.
june 2006 • www.definitionmagazine.com www.definitionmagazine.com • june 2006 online content