| The Ant Bully |
The Ant Bully animated features was produced at DNA productions in Dallas, Texas. It was the second animated feature to come out of DNA. The first being Jimmy Neutron. At its peak, DNA had about 250 people on staff to work on The Ant Bully.
I was a Rendering Technical Director on the project. Rendering Technical Directors (Render TDs) for The Ant Bully, dealt with everything rendering related. This included lighting, animation dailies, visual effects, compositing and IMAX. If an artist ran into a technical problem they couldn't solve they would work with a Render TD to find a solution. Or if they simply weren't getting a certain quality that they expected, the Render TD would offer technical advice. Render TDs also wrote tools to handle various tasks in the rendering pipeline. The last paragraph on this page describes a few of the tools I developed while on the project.
The images on this page are captures from the DVD of shots that I was involved with on the technical end. For the majority of the shots, the initial indication of a problem was the renderer failing. Failed renders weren't specific to the 3D renderer. The 2D rendering of compositing network had its fair share of technical issues. My task was to figure out why exactly and what a workaround for the specific case. Working with the other Render TDs, methodologies were developed to identify commonalties and patterns across failed renders. Once we knew exactly how to identify and resolve the problem, the information would be passed on to the Render Wranglers to use.
  In addition to resolving technical rendering issues, I also developed a series of OpenEXR utilties. Towards the end of the show, one of the primary core shader started exhibiting a strange problem. Invalid color values appeared in noticeable regions of the rendered images. These invalid color values caused the color space conversion program to crash. I developed a tool called exrfix that painted in valid color values over the invalid ones. These valid colors were estimations done by weighting the contributions of the surrounding pixels. The second tool in the OpenEXR utility set was exrcomplete. This tool was executed as post process when a render task was completed to determine of the rendered OpenEXR images were complete and valid. If they were not, a notification would alert the owner of the shot. The last tool in the OpenEXR tool set was called exrmerge. This tool was used to combine OpenEXR images that had been rendered as tiles. There were a series of marketing posters that needed to be rendered at 12000x8000. The image size alone wasn't a problem. But combined with the 30 something layers that were used for tweaking the look - the renderer would just crash. Shane Aherne - another Render TD, and I developed two tools used in combination to get around this limitation. Shane's tool took an existing RIB file a split it into 100 different RIB files - each containing a region of the image. Afterwards, exrmerge was used to combine the 100 different image segments together.
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