Final Fantasy: The Movie

Epiphani writes: "It's been known for quite some time that Squaresoft was in the process of making a full length CG movie, however I never imagined it would be like this. 'Next to the beautiful Pacific Ocean, Square has selected Harbor Court in downtown Honolulu as the home to more than 150 computer graphic artist from all over the world, including Hollywood, Tokyo and Europe. There, surrounded by state-of-the-art computers and software programs, artists are able to transform their vision into reality set on a computer screen.' Square has really outdone themselves this time, with an amazing voice cast and unbelievably realistic CG -- this one is sure to be a hit considering Square's emphasis on plot. Be sure to check out the featured trailer (req. quicktime)."

Comments

IF it ever comes out...

[Godai]

Last thing I heard about this movie was that it was 2 years late and a few million over budget. Sure, the scenes look nice, but it seems it's taking them 6 months to do that single, break-taking scene. Uh, that is not good. Another thing: I like - rather, used to like - the Final Fantasy series quite a bit, but as much I think Square's got some killer CG artists, I can't see this flick doing all that well in North America. There are really only two audiences for this movie: fans of CG (geeks) and FF fans. Are there enough fans betwen the two groups to make Square back its investment? I'm not sure...
Wood Shavings!

Can't wait, but...

[Zone5]

While I'm eager to see this movie, and I'm sure many other geeks are as well (be they anime geeks or FF geeks), I'm not sure how the general North American movie-going public will accept it. Let's face it, whenever a movie like Forrest Gump wins Best Picture while Fight Club is almost univerally hated, you have to question the average person's taste and capacity to enjoy something different. Square has always done a great job with warped plots, which should make this movie different enough to trouble the average nimrod who laid out $10 to see a pretty animated film expecting another Toy Story.

I'd like to know more about their Iron

[Sawbones]

In reading the bits and scraps I've found about the movie for the past year or so I've only ever managed to find two interesting tidbits.

1) The rendering horsepower was/is supplied by something like 2 full floors of sgi onyx boxes. That even with that it was limited to something like a second of film rendering per day and that they anticipated technological advances to be able to render the entire film in time.

2) Square developed a few new algorithms to help with animation. Namely one for hair blowing in the wind (sort of interesting) and the way cloth folds and bends as a "actor" moves (very interesting).

Anyone else with unsubstantiated rumor/facts? :) Or better yet, a more indepth site for details? :)

Re:I'd like to know more about their Iron

[hkon]

In the credits for "A Bugs Life" I noticed that Pixar uses Sun Microsystems for rendering the final theatre quality version, however they use SGI workstations. I would imagine that Squaresoft has a similar setup. Pixar probably has several fully loaded Sun Enterprise 10000 machines that do their rendering.

You would think so, but I guess they got a better deal on E4000 servers, as they used 100 of them for A Bug's Life. See http://www.sun .co m/smi/Press/sunflash/9812/sunflash.981215.2.html for more info.
Since then, they've got a new one, tho. 120 Enterprise 4500s, which are $223,000 EACH.... http://www. sun .com/smi/Press/sunflash/1999-08/sunflash.990810.2. html

Someone mentioned that he thought the Final Fantasy people used Onyxes, but that'd really surprise me, since the Onyxes usually are used for realtime graphics things, and not rendering. It would seem kinda pointless to put a really high-end graphics system in a box that's gonna do cpu-intensive things only. Unless, of course these boxes can use some of their graphics hardware for rendering nonrealtime stuff as well. You'd probably want to have one Onyx to see quick previews without having to push it through your rendering farm, but that won't be production-level quality.
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The best thing about CGI.

[Julius X]

I've seen the trailer for this, and I have to admit it looks beautiful. Even though, part of me is itching to say that it still doesn't look completely real.

The fact is that CGI movies shouldn't look real. There is a certain magic that CGI can create in a film that makes it look...perhaps more than real... CGI can allow things to look real enough, but then allow us to go beyond what is actually possible, and then take us there.

That is what I'm looking forward to about Final Fantasy. A movie that doesnt even pretend to be a cartoon, and a film that will take us past where reality has ever gone.

-Julius X

More FFM Pictures

[dew]

There's one at Ming-Na's website (she's one of the lead vocalists) not on the main site (picture), another from Animation Artist herepage for the movie).

The dmoz category for the movie is here with a fair number of links to sites about the movie (like the GIA).

David E. Weekly

Common Lisp used in Final Fantasy

[lispbliss]

just had to point out that Square used Allegro Common Lisp for the movie. The link below has a nice discussion about why they chose Common Lisp and has a picture of the cool photo realistic computer graphics they have in the movie. http://www.fra nz. com/success/customer_apps/animation/squareusa.php3

Real time on a PS2

[SIGFPE]

If you were at SIGGRAPH 2000 you may have seen a shot from this movie running *real time* at HD resolution on a Sony box consisting of 16 PS2's running parallel in one box. It was pretty awesome! The camera was movable by the viewer and the image quality was pretty much the same with wonderful lighting, texturing and hair dynamics.
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