Dan Seddon is currently the head of 3D commercials at Framestore CFC in London. He kindly spoke to us about his journey to his current role and various projects he’s worked on.

od[force]: You’re currently head of 3D/commercials at Framestore CFC in London; what responsibilities are involved with that?
Dan Seddon: A range of responsibilities really: it varies from bidding on jobs, to supervising specific projects, deciding on the general running of the department, to staff issues, and more I’m sure…

od[force]: Do you work on specific projects or do you supervise a whole bunch of projects running at the same point in time?
Dan Seddon: Well both. Currently I’m not on a specific project and I’m watching a number projects and will be likely to do so to a greater extent as more come in. However over the last year (since becoming head) I’ve worked on 7 projects and directly supervised 5. Which was a tad tiring…

od[force]: How many people are under your supervision?
Dan Seddon: Good question – somewhere between 20 and 30.

od[force]: And what range of tools are used in your department?
Dan Seddon: Our main packages are Houdini and Maya – with the TD-ing being about 50/50 and the animation being solely Maya.
We use Maya’s renderer and Mental Ray in Maya and PRMan and Mantra in Houdini (mainly PRMan).
We will also use Z-brush and Boujou, 3D Equaliser and Photoshop + other smaller packages. Also Shake (we are currently trying to move over to Nuke).
Most of our jobs go through Flame in the end.

od[force]: Now it would be interesting to learn a little bit about you: How did you arrive at Famestore? Where did you work before?
Dan Seddon: I’ve been in Framestore for slightly less than 7 years – I worked in Film when I first arrived on a number of Houdini FX based projects and then moved over to Commercials about 3 years ago.
Although film can be very satisfying in terms of the high profile work you can get, I find commercials more interesting due to the length of the projects and the greater personal involvement.
Prior to Framestore I worked in a small commercials company called “Clear” – where I mostly used Houdini on a number of promos and commercials; before that I worked from within Clear in a smaller company which I ran along with Jerry Corda-Stanley.
Before that… I worked at the BBC on the Human Body series of documentaries – which the Planets was a follow up to and I also worked on with Jerry.

od[force]: So you’ve been a Houdini user for a long time?
Dan Seddon: I started with version 1.0…

od[force]: Great! Did you use PRISMS before?
Dan Seddon: Nope – I like to think I’m too young to have

od[force]: So basically all along your career you have used Houdini.
Dan Seddon: Pretty much – I started out using Softimage but quickly picked up Houdini when I got frustrated with being able to do so little with it’s “modelling relation” and could see the benefits of proceduralism.
I also use Maya a little now of course, although it would be fair to say I’m primarily Houdini.

od[force]: You’re a supervisor but speaking from a personal point of view, which area of 3D you feel more attracted to? Development, effects, character?
Dan Seddon: Ermm… all of it, if that’s not a weak answer…
I guess I like to build systems – which is why I’m attracted to Houdini. I don’t tend to lean towards FX as much – which is what many people expect from Houdini people (fire water etc). I guess I’ve done a lot of character stuff in the Commercials department – in terms of fur and feathers.
I enjoy that quite a lot – but I like anything with visual complexity, which Houdini is very good for – it’s being able to control almost all aspects of what you are doing. Houdini is for control freaks .

od[force]: Speaking of that, I understand that Houdini/Maya ratio is around 50/50. What is Houdini used for? You said TD-ing, could you elaborate a little?
Dan Seddon: Well… To answer that I’ll talk through some of the work we’ve done.
When I started 2 years ago (when Andy Boyd was running the department) we did the “Guinness Noitulove” commercial – we did a range of stuff on that project. We did trees growing (using lsystems) rocks eroding, ice forming and also some grass growing (time lapse style) across a field, along with other foliage and things. That was very much an all round use of the package on an FX level – we didn’t know every effect we ended up doing in advance.
od[force]: That’s a great commercial! Did you use only the built-in stuff or also some proprietary extensions?
Dan Seddon: We didn’t write any “code” for Guinness – but we developed lots of “methods”. In my case for the rock erosions – I use displacement feedback loops to gradually erode geometry away. For the grass I used ribbons of grass growing sequences and copied them to particles.

The next project after that was our first fur project (using Houdini). This was the Rexona project for which we developed our own fur pipeline – from the grooming inside of Houdini to the fur generation using a renderman DSO. This is where I personally got in to witting DSO’s and this has given me a slight slant towards Renderman since. But, also a good basis for the department doing a lot of projects since then. We did two Rexona projects in total.

After Rexona we did a project for British Airways where a child saw dolphin shapes swimming through the clouds as he looked out of the plane window. We used some of Framestore Film’s Houdini tools (developed for Superman) to generate the dolphin shapes in the Clouds for that project – it was very successful. For that we used mantra and i3d. It was a system of copying “i3d sprites” to points to build larger cloud shapes.

After that we did a couple of smaller projects another Rexona and then I worked on Famous Grouse. Which was my first “feathers” job. It was a short project (surprise surprise) of 6 weeks and that time the feathers were done with textures on grids – the textures being scanned from a stuffed grouse.
We have the grouse in the department still – it makes most people sneeze as it’s fairly old.

od[force]: And since then the feather systems were developed more and more?
Dan Seddon: Yes – I’ll skip some smaller projects and move on to Smirnoff which was the first major Houdini project since I took over. It was quite an unusual project because it had a mixture of everything in it. It had lots of stuff raining out of the sky, a lot of conventional hard body rendering and water fx in terms of dripping water and a CG sea.
It was quite a lot of work. It was for the same director we did BA and Guinness for – Daniel Kleinman. We later did “Monster Stork” for him of course.
But, last year, we did a lot of character jobs in Houdini – we did BBC Penguins, 2xAbbey Squirrel, Monster Stork and a German commercials for Evonik with closeups of CG Robins in them. The latter two involved the more advanced feather system I talked about at FMX. The first two involved the original Houdini fur system we developed for Rexona.
Additional to that we’ve done a number of small crowd jobs that we developed a renderman DSO for – that allows better instancing of deforming geometry, that works pretty well.
So…. actually there is a fair variance of work in there.

od[force]: You say character jobs: this means also the animation of the characters? or was that done in Maya?
Dan Seddon: We had two jobs where the animation was done in Houdini. The wolf was animated in Houdini for Rexona and the Grouse was animated in Houdini on Famous Grouse. Generally that doesn’t happen however – usually the animation gets done in Maya. I’d say, on the whole, there aren’t so many benefits as you might be thinking to keeping the animation in the same package as long as you have a good system for getting stuff between them.

od[force]: Do you find the FBX tools useful? Or do you have your own format/system for scene exchange?
Dan Seddon: Yes we’ve used it more recently instead of some in house scripts for exporting cameras and geometry. It’s really quite good – though not everything works yet.

od[force]: What do you like about Maya over Houdini and about Houdini over Maya (and if you have experience with XSI, include it too)
Dan Seddon: Houdini you can do almost anything in and it takes little time to solve almost any problem. Maya is good if you want to do something relatively simple quickly. Maya has a very good selection of default shaders via Mental Ray – using final gather and or refraction/reflection is very straight forward and subsurface is very easy too. I think this should be fairly easy to do in Houdini – there should be a better range of default shaders, but we don’t seem to have them.

od[force]: Is there something you really dislike in Houdini?
Dan Seddon: I don’t like the management of VOP assets. If you make a VOP SOP or VOP Shader there is no easy way to save that out as an asset and bring it back in it’s VOPs form at a later date. You could argue that other packages don’t have VOPs – but other packages do have those nice “default” tools and the thing stopping Houdini having them to me is this one thing. Currently any VOP asset you develop becomes written in stone by turning it in to *.vex or gets lost in an old scene.
od[force]: How true.

od[force]: I understand you use Renderman/PRMan mainly. What’s your opinion on Mantra? some Mantra vs Renderman/PRMan vs Mental Ray opinion?
Dan Seddon: PRMan is very-very stable and has a large development team. Mantra has many of the features that PRMan has. But I usually find PRMan gives better results on the whole – at the time I last used Mantra, it was much more difficult to do HDR type lighting. Of course, since then they’ve introduced their PBR renderer – which gives amazing results, but is very slow…… PRMan has some great features when it comes to it’s point cloud rendering – the occlusion, subsurface and colour bleeding is incredibly quick. I am also more familiar with Renderman than other renderers – I can write DSOs in Renderman whereas I wouldn’t know where to start with mantra as the HDK is pretty hard.
Mental Ray gives results very quickly and is easier to use for the novice – but is more of a black box and is difficult to develop for.

od[force]: what OS are you using at Framestore commercials?
Dan Seddon: We are on Linux.

od[force]: What’s your relationship with Side Effects? Did you need to involve them in some projects?
Dan Seddon: We talk quite a lot – I know a few of them fairly well. I often given opinion to them on where I think Houdini should be going. I like them quite a lot in terms of their responsiveness. I don’t always get my RFEs though .
They need to clone themselves.
od[force]: twice

od[force]: Since you mentioned it: where do you think Houdini should be going?
Dan Seddon: I think they have the interface now so they need to start building in more push button stuff. I think the toolbar stuff is brilliant – such as the FX stuff – and as it builds over time will be the answer to much of the Maya type tools.
I think the biggest thing is shaders though. I think they should get a copy of Maya and copy the whole darn lot – I don’t think it would take that long for a good shader writer. I think if they employed a good one for a year they’d have it done – I think they should look at Renderman Studio and rip that off too whilst they’re at it
Also, they should get their Mental Ray interface working and move some of that methodology over to Mantra PRMan – currently it’s very easy to develop shaders in Houdini but quite hard to use them. They need a higher level interface (perhaps built around materials and I’m sure this is what they are thinking) that is more similar to materials in Houdini 1.0 like Maya’s Hypershade – currently if you want to drive a parameter by a texture you need to edit the shader (something that will scare many people) or build a massive shader with options for everything. To take this one further – what if you want to put a ramp in to one of the inputs instead of a texture. I think this may mean VOPs and or Mantra need a little bit of development, but it should be possible and once it’s been developed then this type of interface would be more appropriate to Mental Ray as well of course, given the similarity in what I mention above to Maya/Xsi.
So. That was the shading and “tooling” up. I think the next thing should be “speeding” up – currently many of the SOPs seems a little slow and in the future should probably take advantage of threading. I’d like to see SOPs like the ray sop (nearest point) get a lot quicker – I think if people want to drive rigs with Houdini this is going to be necessary. Threading is something I think they know about.
Oh – one other thing. We’ve been quite slow to pick up 9 compared to other departments because we are so PRMan centric. The support has gone backwards a bit in 9 (no auto archives for instance) . I’m pretty sure they’re working on that too though.
It’s funny. I keep mentioning things I want them to do in Houdini. But I’m pretty much hooked on Houdini! It’s mainly because I’m so keen on using it that I feel so strongly about them doing more stuff.
od[force]: I think many users feel the same. they like Houdini so much that they’d prefer not using other package for anything so they pile SESI with requests.

od[force]: What else? I mean all those are (important) developments of existing things. There are people who say they’d like completely new stuff like 3D tracking for example (I personally strongly disagree) or Massive-like tools, 3D paint. Is there any special functionality you’d like to see?
Dan Seddon: I don’t want them to waste time on stuff like tracking either (they have too much to do). I think they should hold off on stuff like Massive. I think there’s a lot of development to get something with the same level of AI – I think the most they should do is write some more interaction stuff for POPs, DOPs, that would be interesting as an on going development. I think 3D paint would be very useful – I think they need to create another attribute type “point, primitive, vertex, detail, texture”. This would enable you to paint/rasterise attributes to a higher level of refinement than the topology – it would clearly benefit texturing as you could just paint “spec” and this would be promoted at render time in the same way as primitive/detail attributes (by reading it as a texture instead). But, clearly this could also be used for many other things such as fur and fluid sims.
To go back to Massive. I think the power of Houdini is what a TD can do with it. I think Massive is too “high level”. Maybe massive like functionality could be added later when they’ve solved the other issues I’ve mentioned.
I think at the moment Houdini needs more market penetration – I don’t think having Massive like functionality will help that. But I think better default shaders will.

od[force]: Tell us about Houdini people. How hard is for you to find people to hire? What do you look for in someone who would use Houdini at Framestore commercials?
Dan Seddon: It can be very tricky finding good Houdini guys (although Bournemouth was a bumper year last year). The main thing I would look for is keenness and the ability to creatively solve problems – it’s also good to look at someones reel, as it’s very easy in this industry to spend a lot of time playing but not actually make any pictures
I think a lot of the younger guys are learning Houdini as opposed to other packages because they like the look of the power it gives them – it will be interesting to see if this changes things at all. I think young people can be very good.

od[force]: What would be your advice to someone who thinks of learning Houdini? And why would you advise someone to learn Houdini in the first place?
Dan Seddon: I think Houdini is the best learning tool as it teaches you the basics of how many packages work. This is going to sound patronising – but there are far fewer Maya guys who truly understand what is going on under the bonnet than there are Houdini guys. Maybe that’s a good thing, that Maya is able to let you work without you knowing those things. But, I think if you want to learn 3D, Houdini is a great place to start. Even if you don’t intend to be a Houdini TD in the long term it’s worth having a look at Houdini in just the same way it’s worth reading a good book.
I would start in SOPs – as this to me is the engine room of Houdini and where you can learn it’s true power. Most things can be done here and it’s the one part of Houdini you can surely say no other package has.

Tags: commercials, Dan Seddon, Famous Grouse, framestore, Guinness, rexona

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Interview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.