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MillimeterBeta Sight: Autodesk Toxik
Apr 10, 2009 12:00 PM, By Christopher Wirth, executive vice president and creative director, Universal Images
Universal Images puts Toxik through its paces.
The Motio feature in Autodesk Toxik helped Universal Images artists create a U.S. Navy commercial through ad agency GlobalHue.
Indispensable features
There are several features within Toxik that we find indispensable, such as its nondestructive rendering capabilities, which lets you put an effect or treatment on a layer and then cache it. You can then layer around it and when you want to get a preview, it plays back in realtime. It allows you as an artist to go back up and down the stack to make changes upstream and downstream and not get punished with long render times.
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We recently used Toxik on a U.S. Navy commercial through ad agency GlobalHue. We were going for a grainy, handheld camera look, like in the movie Cloverfield. In the spot, a man rips an anchor out of the ground and walks away. The footage had a lot of motion blur with cameras panning in and out, which made tracking the anchor and the actor very difficult.
There’s a feature in Toxik called Motio, which analyzes the forward and backward motion vectors of the footage. That tool allowed us to take the forward vector and pipe them into a 3D blur module. We could then apply that blur module to the forward vectors of the footage, which added a blur to the 3D render in the footage. So every time the camera would go in, pull back, or pan around, the object rendered in the scene would have the same look. We then used the Garbage Mask tool in Toxik to feather out the edges and make things tight.
The Garbage Mask tool—one of Toxik’s “super tools”—is a rotoscoping cutting-out utility that allows you to key undesired elements in an image. It has superior handles and allows you to cache images so you can rotoscope with a tremendous amount of performance. And because Toxik’s playback is disk-based instead of RAM-based, you’re not caching your previews to RAM, so you’re freeing up the system to perform more crucial tasks.
Universal Images used its Autodesk stable to create this "Jeep Graffiti" spot through ad agency GlobalHue.
But the feature I find the most valuable is how Toxik handles metadata when doing a ZDepth pass to render out depth of field. So when you’re creating elements in 3D, you can take handles such as specular passes from your elements, resulting in superb handles for enhancing and sweetening your projects.
Toxik also allows you to browse directly from the Autodesk’s direct Fibre Channel digital media storage solution called Stone, thus improving the interoperability between Toxik and our other Autodesk visual-effects tools. This enables us to cache our data onto the Toxik bay, do the work, and render back to the Stone—so we’re able to better control, maintain, and organize our project through Toxik’s powerful database system.
Of course, no matter how great a software’s feature set is, it needs to be complemented by attentive and helpful customer support. The Toxik help team really shines. Whenever we’ve run into issues with the software, we’ve been able to get assistance in a very quick timeframe with solutions to our problems, so we’re back to working in no time.
Toxik’s excellent R&D team continues to make Toxik better and better with every new version, patch, and update. If you’re looking for a compositing tool to integrate into your Autodesk pipeline, your money is well-spent with Toxik.
Editors note: The Mac version of Toxik 2009 is shipping in May; both Mac and Windows versions include new stereoscopic 3D capabilities.
Based in Southfield, Mich., Universal Images (UI) provides visual effects and postproduction for advertising agencies, creative editorial houses, and production and communication companies. In business since 1983, Universal Images has done work on TV episodics (Journey to 10,000 BC, Battles BC) and commercials for companies including Jeep, Adidas, GM, Chrysler, Chevrolet, Pontiac, and ESPN.
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