May 19
What is ILM’s Zeno?
In every business there is a benchmark. In the film business, more precisely the Visual Effects business, this benchmark is named Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), George Lucas’ effects unit. What started out as the VFX department on Star Wars is now the top production house for computer generated images (CGI), and everyone working in the FX domain (and isn’t employed there) is obsessed with getting a glimpse at their tools and procedures which help create “that magic”.
Over the past years ILM has used a number of off-the-shelf commercial 3D and effects software products like Softimage and Maya. But as every hero needs to have his custom weapon, ILM is recently moving away from commercial packages towards a proprietary in-house solution called Zeno.
Now, what is ILM’s Zeno? While venturing a bit into the CGI-VFX world myself I happened to run into this nebulous tool mentioned in VFX related articles. Time to start some online research:
Over at cgsociety, the ILM wiki page gives some insight. Zeno is now the main building block of their in-house pipeline, kind of a backbone serving the artists and various stages throughout the production cycle. More can be found out on vfxworld, where Lucasfilm’s CTO Cliff Plumer gives away some information about the nature of Zeno: Zeno is like a collaborative scene file, a concept CG artists might know from blender and the Verse extension. All artists work on a common stage where changes applied by one artist migrate across the whole project. Zeno is also a set of tools, modules that aid in the creation of certain effects. Some additional information can be found here and here. The modular architecture allows ILM to hook-in even the game development department. Lucasarts works with the help of a module called Zed. Lucasarts’ Brett Rector talks a bit about it in the “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed” game production diaries, here and more in diary #13 (go here and in the flash applet navigate to “Game Info” > “Production Diaries” > “Brett’s Production Diary #13″ - or read a german translation).
We have learned that ILM Zeno is more like a framework and not a magic tool that replaces original ideas (surprise!). Every FX shop in the world uses more or less sophisticated collaboration tools, the local LAN, shared folders, frameworks like Verse or in-house tools and helpers.
This thread at vfxtalk opens the scope and is a good snapshot of what other top shops like Rhythm & Hues are using. Go there to see some actual screenshots from their proprietary software. Anyone with screenshots from Zeno? 
