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I hope it's close to Tiny from Eureka http://forums.cgchannel.com/showthread.php?t=14142

I couldn't agree more. None of the major publishers are coming out with anything amazing. Like the other day I was watching Epics Unreal Engine 3 Samaritian http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHgWuxzuTIQ and was totally floored on how crappy the real time rendering looked.

You say that a better rendering engine, more polygons and better ambient is the ultimate measure of innovation, don't you? No matter that the demo requires no less than 3 graphic cards to run in realtime, isn't it?
As for the BASIC bananas/tanks, see my point here

Theres this guy daryl mandryk, his art is so dark... i thinkg he should be in the art team...
http://www.cgchannel.com/gallery/viewimage.jsp?img ID=36

dark, very dark, what you think, deserves to be in design or not?

http://media01.cgchannel.com/images/news/2003_10_l iamkemp/TWL360x208.mov

Where's the full length feature though??

Easy peezy. Silly rabbit, follow the link on the download page.

A few of us from Frantic Films Software wrote up summary of SIGGRAPH 2004 for CgChannel this past Thursday. It touches on many of the same topics in a slightly different light -- although not at all on open source in the industry.

I understand that open source is a hard sell for VFX companies. Most specifically while at SIGGRAPH I heard Steve Sullivan from ILM speak (at a discussion panel) about how even though they have had many users of OpenEXR and wide community adoption of the technology they have had very few people from other VFX companies contribute back to its future development. Steve said that ILM pretty much had to write version 2.0 of OpenEXR by themselves. Thus in effect they have had the problem of many people free riding on their large effort.

Thus for us, while we do plan on releasing smaller tools open source (similar to some of my past open source projects: ExoEngine and Exocortex.DSP), ILM's experience with a large costly open source endeavor scares me away from trying this with a larger project -- at least for the time being.

-ben

Seems like the biggest problem in character rendering today is animation, not appearence. The girl moved stiffly and unrealistically in the video, and while the facial expressions showed emotion, they were obviously not real. The Final Fantasy movie had the same problem with faces, though they used motion capture for the movements I believe. There's gotta be a way to create realistic looking human movements without motion capture.

You can find some more info about this project at cgchannel including a portion of the film here

The winner of that category, Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World was absolutely in a different class to the rest of the field, ROTK included. I don't think Peter Jackson would argue that he was slighted in that department, especially after his 11 out of 11 haul. ... and also used a heck of a lot of CG as well.

Read this

Master and Commander used fake sets as well. To about the same degree (if not more) as ROTK.

Yep, very old news. Even the interview linked up there doesn't reference the project that much. Both CGChannel and 3DVF ran interview with Chiang about it:

Interview with Doug Chiang
Interview de Doug Chiang (this one is back from November 2002)

Alos Sparx, the French studio who made the trailer is looking for financing to turn this into an animated feature:

The French like ROBOTA

Please grab a clue, high performance 3d graphics aren't done in assember. Its done in C with OpenGL calls. The OGL calls are quite high level, nothing as simple as 'put a point at x,y on the screen'. Why do I know? Because I know OpenGL perhaps?

Maybe I'm a bit paranoid (I probably fit right in on /.) but when I read news subheadlines like "Nvidia, the dominant PC graphics chip maker, has teamed up with Microsoft and developed a new cross-platform graphic language called Cg that it hopes becomes an industry standard" I don't really feel all warm & fuzzy inside. CG Channel states "NVIDIA's compiler toolkit would be more optimized for their own hardware owing to greater understanding of their own technology. ATI would have the option of writing their own backend compiler to support their hardware more optimally, but the exisiting NVIDIA toolkit should generate working code on ATI's part. [...] NVIDIA are hoping that Cg will be the industry's defacto standard simply due to its time on the market [...]" If NVIDIA can't be reasonably criticized for supporting their own chipset more with optimized code (and leaving it open to others with competing chipsets), can co-developer Microsoft be criticized for favouring their own software in this? Couldn't MS solutions (DirectX, XBox-specific tools, etc) be favoured under Cg merely by them investing more in Cg development and (as one of the two developers controlling the standard) updating compilers and shader functions for their software sooner or more completely than for others? If this was the case, Cg could just end up being another "embrace, extend, etc" scenario, this time in the graphics market to push MS & Nvidia techologies.

Nvidia has been fair to good in their cross-platform support so far, but of course MS has not been. To the relief of many CG Channel reports that "Interestingly, key components of NVIDIA's Cg compiler will be open-sourced and will work on Linux, Mac OS X and Xbox platforms. [...] Compiled code for Direct3D will be cross-platform (well, as cross platform as Microsoft might expect). OpenGL code should work much the same as long as the OpenGL extensions are supported on the target. NVIDIA says it will provide compiler binaries for all of the major platforms." The real proof will be in how Nvidia supports Cg on other platforms and OpenGL over the long term. Will these binaries be released at the same time and with the same feature sets? And will this continue to be the case or will full cross-platform support only exist in the beginning until Cg becomes a de facto standard?

I'm skeptical at this point, since we all know there's a world of difference between being merely compatible and being optimized. There's some evidence so far of how Cg is being implemented. For instance, it looks like there isn't an OpenGL fragment program profile for the Cg toolkit while there is one for Direct3D8. Nvidia says that the reason Cg has for no OpenGL ARB vertex_program extension while there are both dx8ps and dx8vs profiles is that OpenGL is dragging it's heels with the standard, perhaps valid but nonetheless the result is Cg is better implemented under DX8 than the OGL side. While it's theoretically possible to program Cg textureShaders and regcombiners in OpenGL, it's not currently supported. Much of the feature set in Cg looks like that announced so far for OpenGL2 - could nVidia just be trying to repeat OpenGL2 functions using their own identical and properitary Cg extentions instead? Finally, Nvidia announced support for Windows, MacOSX and Linux; the first and last platforms should have native Cg compilers (Linux soon apparently) but what about MacOSX?