Yes! We have done it once again! Cebas is featured on the cover page of today’s Times Colonist newspaper 
Check out the full article below:
[SIZE=3]The Innovators: Making catastrophes appear all too real[/SIZE]
By Michael D. Reid, timescolonist.com October 7, 2011 11:53 am
Edwin Braun leads Victoria’s Cebas Visual Technology, known for its high-tech special effects tools that reduce cities to rubble.
Photograph by: Darren Stone, timescolonist.com
As bumper-to-bumper traffic inches across the Lions Gate Bridge, the Vancouver landmark suddenly starts to buckle and collapse. Steel suspension cables snap and ricochet, the blacktop bulges with cracks and the bridge spectacularly splits, causing passengers to scream for their lives as they plunge into Burrard Inlet.
It’s hell on Earth, B.C.-style. But mercifully, it’s only a movie Final Destination 5. Still, this horrifying scene is chillingly realistic thanks to the genius of companies like Victoria’s Cebas Visual Technology and Prime Focus Film, the Vancouver visual effects studio that used Cebas’s tools to create the movie magic and mayhem in that film’s opening sequence.
For the special effects innovators headquartered at Vancouver Island Technology Park, “keeping it real” is all in a day’s work.
“That’s always the key,” said Cebas CEO Edwin Braun, whose company is best known for its
sophisticated tools like Thinking Particles, used by Uncharted Territory Studios to reduce Las Vegas and Los Angeles to rubble in Roland Emmerich’s doomsday thriller 2012, and VolumeBreaker, their powerful demolition tool often used in tandem.
“It’s famous for its physics simulation,” said Braun of ThinkingParticles, his rule-based particles system. “It’s about how rigid bodies collide, and it uses VolumeBreaker to destroy objects and create chunks of debris.”
All it takes is a visit to the multiplex to see why these digital weapons of mass destruction are so popular.
“Hollywood is destroying a lot of things lately,” Braun said with a laugh.
“I don’t see us being out of business that way.”
Part of their appeal is affordability during an era when, even on TV shows, buildings are routinely trashed.
“To destroy a real Ferrari might cost you $600,000, but a ThinkingParticles destruction you could afford,” he said.
What is it about Cebas’s tools that have put them on the leading edge? Said Braun: “It’s the German engineering.”
Cebas is one of several visual-effects companies that typically contribute to a project. Its other credits include Lost In Space, Starship Troopers, Black Hawk Down and Spider-Man 3, and computer games like StarCraft and Tomb Raider.
On Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, the international visual effects company Pixomondo worked with Final Render, Cebas’s rendering software, and used ThinkingParticles to create a Second World War scene depicting a Zeppelin crash.
“The idea was to show the complexity of the structure as much as possible and build it in a fictional way so we could pull it apart as realistically as possible,” said Mohsen Mousavi, Pixomondo’s FX supervisor and head of technology.
Cebas was also tapped by Spatial Harmonics Group to create “fluid effects” for Green Lantern.
“We had to develop integration of Real Flow, a fluid system, because ThinkingParticles doesn’t offer fluid effects right now,” Braun said. “You can load that into our application.”
That’s one of the most attractive features of Cebas products, which are shipped with software
development kits (SDKs) flexibility that lets users adjust their tools to meet specific needs.
“In the case of the bridge, with steel cables, we didn’t have rope simulation software so they needed to work around that,” Braun said. “You need that flexibility because it’s all about doing new things. We can’t have every effect possible.”
Cebas, with a staff of 14 software specialists worldwide, recently signed a long-term deal with Los Angeles-based Pixel Magic to create software that allows the company to convert existing 2-D footage to 3-D. It’s being used to convert the Harry Potter movies to 3-D stereo and, before that, The Chronicles of Narnia The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
“Doing a 3-D conversion is a complex beast,” Braun said. “It involves a lot of time, steps and human resources.”
The $64,000 question is whether 3-D will achieve the potential that studios such as Warner Bros. are banking on.
“I wish I could tell you. Everyone’s guessing,” said Braun. “We can’t control it. It depends on so many factors.”
He’s optimistic given the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for 3-D movies and content.
“If it hits critical mass, it will be a huge plus, but if 3-D dies silently, we have other options movies and games effects,” said Braun. “It’s a huge playing field.”
Continually having to update software thanks to rapidly changing technology is a challenge, he
admits.
“It’s the curse of the industry software,” said Braun. “If you don’t update constantly, you lose the race.”
One of Braun’s priorities is recruiting more local talent. After moving Cebas here from Heidelberg, Germany, two years ago, he was pleasantly surprised to learn that Bruce Gooch, the respected computer scientist and author (Non-Photorealistic Rendering), was assistant professor of computer science at the University of Victoria.
“They have this amazing lab. We didn’t even have that in Germany,” said Braun, referring to the Intel computer company’s computer graphics research lab at UVic, staffed by six Intel researchers led by adjunct professor Dr. Paul Lalonde.
Braun enlisted Gooch’s expertise and some of the computer graphics guru’s protegés, including
Gaslamp Games founder Nicholas Vining and recent graduate Jonathan Cobb.
“We’re working on water simulation,” said Gooch, referring to a challenging process that requires sophisticated physics, mathematics and programming skills. “My assumption is Edwin has something on the horizon. They want something that ‘looks’ real and is directable.”
Gooch said much of what Braun has done for movies recently could be included in the next
generation of computer games.
“Vancouver’s the axis on which the game world turns,” he said. “And B.C.'s the centre of the universe as far as games are concerned.”
Watch some clips from movies in which Cebas tools were used:
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Cebas Team