History of autodesk flame software#
History of autodesk flame series#

History of autodesk flame software#

As powerful as our 3D tracking software can be on the Flame, we often a bid a job to get three weeks of CG tracking, and they just give us an FBX camera for every single shot, with locators inserted in areas of the scene, so that you can basically re-dress the scene. We do a lot of commercials with environment replacements. There’s always a way around it – and you can actually punch something out with it.įxg: Do you find compositing in three-dimensional space pivotal to your work?ĭavies: Yeah, absolutely. When it comes down to it, whether it’s for budgetary or scheduling reasons, you can actually take a piece from beginning to end, and you don’t have to rely on anyone else for anything. The Skynet displays from Terminator: Salvation.įortunately, what I love about the Flame is the ability to be self-sufficient. So I thought the best way to approach this is to imagine the entire piece as a move through a studio with a camera and get them to buy off on the camera move, and then position things in 3D space that they wanted in that environment, so that at any point in time if they didn’t like a piece, I’d just swap that out for something else and I wouldn’t have to start again. They came up with a whole new one and I thought, ‘How the hell am I going to get that much duration done in a month?’ with all the approvals. They’d done one a few years previously where they’d basically just moved the Flame camera through 2D dimensional cards within a 3D environment. The thing I loved about the Flame was that – well, they’d say, ‘You’ve got four weeks – you’ve got to come up a two-and-a-half minute title sequence to tell the story of National Treasure‘.

It was basically an ever-expanding network of computers that were all connected, metaphorically.įxg: You also did some titles work on features?ĭavies: Yeah, I did National Treasure 2. I did a big section of Terminator: Salvation – we were brought on to create what Skynet would look like if you could get inside Skynet’s brain. My background was graphic design and I often got brought into some features at Asylum as far as look development was concerned.

And I never looked back.įxg: You were at Asylum and were working on commercials, but now you’re working at The Mill LA – is that also on commercials?ĭavies: At Asylum I actually got a good run of features as well. Just doing good compositing using all the common software like the trackers and the keys and the sparks which were very much a wow thing in their day. So back in the day, with its poor reputation, we managed to get a lot out of that machine by pulling out shots and using the Fire as if it you’d use it like a Flame. Then they brought in the Fire, and I thought that was a good stepping stone – I can’t knock Alex off his perch, so I’ll go over there and learn all the tools. He was being given these incredible opportunities and I thought that’s the future and I need to get into that.

I was at Digital Pictures in Sydney and I was running the HAL over there, and Alex Catchpoole was on the Flame. Tim Davies.įxg: You’ve been on a Flame how long now?ĭavies: I think the first time I jumped on a Flame was around 1996/97, so that’s about 14 years now.

History of autodesk flame series#

In the first of our For Example series – which look at how key visual effects artists work with their tools of choice – we talk to lead 2D artist Tim Davies about Autodesk’s Flame and what tools in Flame he uses, for example, in his work.