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Final Fantasy Movie Interview
Wuhao writes: "Ars Technica managed to snag an interview with some of Square's 3D artists to discuss the Final Fantasy movie. It is filled with graphics jargon, but there's quite a few juicy bits that even I could understand."
Hannibal: So did anyone stop to consider that the cost of making this movie is not likely to be easily recovered at the box office? Doesn't it seem like one big circle-jerk for graphics programmers?
I mean, come on. You know they rendered secret porn shots of Aki and Gray. Where are they?
Go to http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Server/9029 / then click aki_nude.jpg... Geocities doesn't allow off-site image linking, AFAIK
Seems like that link is bust ...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
No mate.
.rib scene files of 1-2 GIGS in size, its very hard to beat an SGI in performance.
SGI's will not disappear. SGI's have FANTASTIC charachter mode devices, and when dealing with
The OS that it runs means little or NOTHING to an animator.
jeremiah();
Shaders.
Shaders are simply procedures programatically defined used to define things such as surface bumping (through simple bumpmaps or less simple displacement maps), volumetric shading (glass w/bubbles in it), painting on a texture, reflections, translucency, transparency, opacity, color, specularity, diffusion, and things like that.
www.pixar.com has many, MANY documents on how shading works with the RenderMan interface (NOT ONLY THEIR RENDERER, but the RenderMan standard)
www.bmrt.org has a freeware raytracer that does global illumination, raytracing, true displacement, full support of the shading language (very much like C) arealights, and tons of things that Pixar's PRMan doesn't support. Most definately worth a look.
The RenderMan Interface Standard is a very intriguing standard, attempting to be the "PostScript of 3D". It is succeeding.
.rib files, which are exactly what were used in rendering this movie. Beware though, to get the polygon counts that they have, you'll need about 1-2 gigs of disk space available for EACH FRAME, and about 1-2 gigs of free memory available to render them. Also, there is a C binding of the RenderMan Interface in which you can write a program that defines the placement of objects in a scene, and pipe the output of this program straight into the renderer. Instructions for this are available with BMRT, as is an example. All the tools to do any of this also come with BMRT, free of charge.
Pixar's Photorealistic RenderMan is the RenderMan compliant renderer that is most used in movies, because it is very fast, but at the cost of several cool things. PRMan can't do true reflections, refractions, or even transparency, because it can't compute global visibility.
Ray tracers on the other hand, such as BMRT (which is fully compliant with the RI spec, and includes many extensions to the interface, which PRMan does not support) is a freeware RI raytracer. This is much slower than PRMan, because with raytracing you have to maintain all geometry in the scene in memory at all times, because you don't know where a ray will bounce until you fire the ray. (Because PRMan doesn't do reflections, it doesn't need to keep all the geometry in memory, and can discard anything not *directly* visible to the camera)
PRMan can however, fake lots of things that can give a nearly realistic effect, saving tons of time. Reflection maps, environment maps, and ambient light all simulate the true effects of things like reflections, and radiosity that all of us see when we take our eyes off of our monitors. BMRT does all of this without any faking.
Both PRMan and BMRT use the RI shading language to programatically define surfaces and volumes. Smoke in a room is a volume (or atmosphere) for example and can only accurately be controlled using a shader. The shading language of the RenderMan Interface is UNPARALLELLED in the industry and can produce some of the most realistic looking surfaces/volumes you'll ever see.
Both renderers read
Radiosity is something that PRMan cannot do. Check this stuff out: Radiosity images. These were not done with BMRT but easily could be. These were test renders for Arnold, a global illumination renderer. BMRT does global illumination and could easily (but slowly) produce images just like these. PRMan cannot do this, it simply takes too long.
So satisfy your curiosity about modern day rendering and read up on this. It is very interesting stuff.
Well, it won't be as bad is the 80's since women these days are 1/100th as prone to starving themselves to death to look like movie characters as they were in the brah burning/dual breadwinner euphoric 80's. That stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
Then of course, as chip makers swap higher clockspeeds for slower/portable chips, the cost of attaining reasonable rendering speeds on computers is going to skyrocket.
You won't be able to get the fastest chip in the world at dime stores like you could in 2001. The CG industry is small enough that chip makers can't afford to keep pumping clockcycles into chips that 99% of the world uses in nothing but wristwatches and PDA's.
I sure hope somebody's fixed the ttim-epoch problem by then so we don't have our OSes screwing up while we're all manipulating Aki around on our respective screens...
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Incorrect.
Everyone knows the reason unix has a year 2037 problem is because that is the year that Richard Stallman will personally lead the jihad of the trees against the dirty upright walking apes.
In other words the world will end slightly before computers become powerful enough.
--- I do not moderate.
I have to give the Final Fantasy staff credit for aiming incredibly high with the quality of animation they were attempting in The Spirits Within. That being said, though, they didn't really get it to work effectively in all cases. Movements that were motion-captured looked good, but the stuff that wasn't motion-captured (facial expressions and hand movements) looked awfully stiff. I kept thinking of Gerry Anderson Supermarionation shows.
Shrek, on the other hand, went for "cartoony," a look that is easier to do than "photo-realistic." And they hit it dead on, 100%. You stopped thinking about it and enjoyed the movie.
Overall, I'd have to rate Shrek as being a better film, because the bottom line is: "Was it good to watch?" Shrek was fun, FF:TSW was interesting on a technical level, but I wouldn't want to go see it again.
It's a little like FF8 vs. FF9 on Playstation, where FF:TSW is like 8, and Shrek is like 9. I am enjoying 9 a lot more than I did 8.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Even though I found my eyes glazing over at some of Jonathan's questions (He being a student of CG and obviously asking the complicated questions), The interview was much akin to the standard fare of Ars Technica writing, that being excellent.
I think the interview actually answered a lot of MY questions and interests with the movie, but I do hope that the Square team will continue to be open to questions here and there for maybe another batch of questions.
Anyway, I'm glad I was able to read the interview even before it gets slashdotted (Ars servers were down just before I read it?)
--Onyx
--onyx--
hey anyone here know anymore about the software they use to control the cluster
;-) where used
this is not a Beowulf cluster so tools from Scyld not her and I dont think that the google tools (1million and one xterms on screen
I know that you can use LSF & Gridware
+ all the beowulf tools
BUT
what else can you use ????
regards
john jones
p.s. intresting that they use renderman + maya because thats what more and more people seem to use
SGI have to be careful because the maya release on macOS X means that alot of artists will move to the mac and ditch the SGI's UNLESS SGI can ship a decent LINUX model
thank you very much
regards
john jones
Although I applaud the use of the thousand-odd linux boxes that Square used for scene rendering, I still maintain that it would be super cool for someone to create a distributed rendering client. How many millions of geeks would jump at the chance to use their screensaver and some extra cycles to help create the next Final Fantasy or Star Wars sequel? I know I would. Sure, there would be issues regarding the distribution of images and such before release, but those seem like tech problems that could be sorted out fairly easily. Still waiting for someone at an animation house to pick up on this idea, though...
what about taking into account the trend of leaving a lot of things up to the graphics card. That figure would drop tremendously when we realtime raytracing, and a whole slew of other rendering tricks right on the card.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
...I look forward to the day when such technology is used to put professional athletes out of work. Instead, 2 or more geeks will simply play a REALLY intricate game, and it'll be broadcast on TV. :)
Dude, 1000 roothat boxes... Imagine installing the patches on those. ;)
Imagine the automatability of most sysadmin activities.
Actually I'm pretty sure Gundam is the most successful franchise to come out of japan. It's like the Japanese star trek to the japanese but more popular.
--Bruce
Non gratis rodentus anus
They mainly used Avid Media Illusion and Nothing Real's Shake. I think they had a few discreet boxen (flint, flame, inferno) too. I'd guess everything was comped on the octanes, except for the stuff comped on inferno, which only runs on onyx(1|2|3000) machines. -Phred
Yeah, i thought that at first. But then I remembered that Aki is actually a fake anyway. And even though two wrongs don't nescessarily make a right, two fakes kinda make one real...or something like that.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I know that some companies have implemented filters to prevent "getting in touch with yourself" at work, but did these guys get this desperate?
Anyway, the story is that in order to get the clothes to work out right, they had to do this.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Hopefully FF:TSW will get most of it's money back when it comes to international and DVD markets, however I can't imagine this bodes well for the future of photorealistic movies. (or maybe it just doesn't bode well for the future of Square movies)
from the talking-with-smart-people-gud dept.???
jeez, hemos, can't you spell properl-
oh.
it's a joke...i get it.
Redhat 6.2 burned: worthless
Redhat 6.2 in a box: $30
An advertisement for Redhat 6.2 from Sony and ArsTechnica without paying: priceless
-------------------
arcane for life
at least the "graphics jargon" is useful to some of us...
subatomic
http://www.mp3.com/subatomicglue
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
SGIs are so slow. The thing that make them fast are their mobo. Very fast bus, multichannels, etc... Their processors are ok, but price vs value doesn't make sense.
really they only make sense when you're finely tuning your code to them, but you can't expect all software to be written to take advantage of them.
so, IMHO a render of farm of PIIIs would be much faster in certain cases. and definately makes much more sense for cost. Renderman is free, the hardware is virtually free (real cheap). Expand your farm to make it faster.
I didn't even touch the subject of GeForce vs Onyx3. For most rendering (especially architechture/games/etc..) geforce is going to kick SGI onyx.
subatomic
http://www.mp3.com/subatomicglue
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
Besides the Linux renderfarm, the article mentioned that they took advantage of idle CPU time on artists' Octane workstations as well. I wonder if they ran Renderman as well, or if they did other stuff?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Modeling, animation: Maya with proprietary tools added
Lighting: Maya
Rendering: Renderman + lots o' custom shaders + a bit of Maya for VFX
Texturing: ???
Compositing: ???
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Damn, I thought it was with Aki.
Got Rhinos?
Dude, 1000 roothat boxes... Imagine installing the patches on those.
Err, keep in mind that the game won't have to be NEARLY as high-resolution as the movie.
Oh, also, I think the movie was closer to 2.5 hours. Don't recall exactly.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
There will indeed several places where FF will be discussed at this years SIGGRAPH. The Advanced RenderMan course will have 2 sections with Kevin Bjorke, rendering supervisor, about the work. The original AWGUA (Alias/Wavefront) plan had also a talk about FF, but now it's scaled down. But there will probably be presentations at their booth. Mach Tony Kobayashi will have 2 presentations at the RenderMan user group meeting part of the Stupid RAT tricks part. There might be other here and there.
SIGGRAPH 2001 Course 48: Advanced RenderMan 3SIGGRAPH 2001, Stupid RAT Tricks
Remember though, that's TOTAL time. Individual scenes may have been much more processor intensive (in fact, you note he specifically mentioned that he was giving a total rather than an average, because averages were more or less meaningless). So, it will probably be at least another 18 or 36 months.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
When Hannibal asks when we might play "a game that looks like FF," Troy Brooks, the Production Systems Supervisor says he "can't even imagine."
Well, if it took 934,162 processor-days to render the final movie, thats...
22419888 hours or...
11209944 times real-time (assuming a 2hr movie)
Assuming computing power doubles every 18 months, computers will be 16777216 times faster in 36 years (24 18 month periods = 2^24 times faster)
So, a single workstation will be able to render the whole movie in real-time in the year 2037 (at 66% capacity!) Use the remaining third of the processor for game logic and A.I., and you have a game that looks like FFTSW.
Can't wait.
-Erik
If the interviews were with the CG 'actors'? Like how did Aki find wearing that suit? I think I'm in love... I should stop reading Gibson. --AQ2 its Jerry Springer for the net!
...this coming monday is the day for me.
hate to say it, but the shots in the article look just like...a video game.
i hope it is more realistic in the theatre, maybe the big screen, motion and sound will blur out the scenes?
what will all the actors do for money when linux takes all their jobs away? who *will* we worship then?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
- The renderfarm consists primarily of ~1000 Linux machines (PIII, custom-built, rack mounted)
Glad to see I'm not the only one getting raped on the price of prebuilt rackmount computers...I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Any artist doing 2d stills will want an SGI box. theres just no comparison. Watch some "Making of...." specials and see what all the artists use.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
fill rate =! performance
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
actually pixar uses a buttload of Sun machines for the renderfarm. Sgi machines are mainly used for modelling and animation
The renderfarm consists primarily of ~1000 Linux machines (PIII, custom-built, rack mounted), running Red Hat 6.2. These machines do all the RenderMan renders, as well as a number of other tasks.
Schweet!!!
I assumed they'd use a buttload of SGI systems like Pixar does.
Pixar, like Square, uses SGIs for the initial modeling and animation. They also use SGIs for the final (post-render) compositing. Neither Pixar nor Square use SGIs for rendering, though. Square used a huge Linux farm and Pixar uses a huge Sun farm.
SGI have to be careful because the maya release on macOS X means that alot of artists will move to the mac and ditch the SGI's UNLESS SGI can ship a decent LINUX model
Ahh, but remember, SGI owns Alias|Wavefront (the company that makes Maya). There is a very good possibility that SGI may bring A|W back into SGI and become a software-only company.
After seeing what they had at SIGGRAPH last year, I can't wait to see what they have this year! (It said it would be cool in the article - look at the last line). The GSCube demo last year really was awesome.
Only if you think of it in terms of the movie. The Final Fantasy brand is the most successful franchise of any kind ever spawned from Japanese soil.
Actually, that's not something I pulled out of thin air. NPR mentioned it (IIRC) when they were discussing the movie a couple weeks ago. Final Fantasy is the most successful franchise ever spawned from Japanese soil.
SquareUSA, not Squaresoft, made the movie. Squaresoft is the video game localization company; the American sister to Square, the parent in Japan. SquareUSA is the arm in Honolulu which, so far, only makes movies.
That link is broken now. Perhaps this one will help?
funny munging
He doesn't live there any more. Moved away to college and didn't come back. Don't blame him. I don't plan on going back there from college. At least not right away.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
Open Source business??? I thought they were mostly projects. And I didn't think making money was the goal.
Next time give yourself a pat on the back and just don't post personal stuff about other people, even if you knew them, eh?
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That's insane, especially since they said that it (their storage) was amlost always full. that, and something like 98,000 processor-days of computational power. Damn, that just makes the end product all the better. Maybe we'll see a FF Movie style game in a few decades ( or when we all have 10TB drives in our 256 processor boxen...
I think the people above me are having sex - or they're sleeping restlessly and agreeing with each other a lot.
but did these guys get this desperate?
This is not really Aki!
It is well constructed fake image of her face pasted on to some other body from a porno flick!
Aki has never done nudity in any of her films!
Mwahahahahaha, bow down before the mighty power of the slashdo . . . wtf? The page loaded? In under 5 minutes? Geez, I don't know if Ars just rules, or if all the slashdot readers are getting lazy.
----
One of us needs to stick ones' head in a bucket of ice water.
- Hobbes
Regarding the voice synch issue, see my comment in the Discussion Link attached to the front page post. Basically, it's going to be an issue for quite a while with CG, photorealistic movies. It goes much deeper than just a standard synching or tech problem.
Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
As other people point out, Pixar uses Suns for rendering, not SGIs.
Now, what is interesting is that you need about the same or larger load of SGIs to do the rendering. For something that doesn't benifit specifically from things like craylink (used for the really monstrous origins), a network of lintel machines is probably faster and definately cheaper.
Now, the question that Pixar asked them selves was something like, do we want several hundred linux boxes, or do we want to spend more and get 250 Suns (quad processor machines) which will cost most, but take less effort (real employees) to keep running? I guess which is better depends on the renderfarm size, and how you feel about the cost of keeping PC hardware running.
Myself, for small render farms, I'd look to Athlons, but if I got stuck running a large one, I probably would also look to Sun (sorry, love SGIs, but they wouldn't be the best here IMHO), although I would pause to check out IBMs and HPs as well.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
and your point... sorry, and the worth of this comment is?_ __
____________________________________________
How do they define success? I find it hard to believe that Final Fantasy, while the games do sell many copies, is more successful overall than, say, Pokemon.
Though Disney is evil, their animations work much better (even with celebrity voices) because they generally tweak the character design to more accurately match the look of the real person behind the voice. This tends to make it much more believeable, because while there are odd exceptions (Mike Tyson comes to mind), people generally have a voice sound that matches their look.
Anyway, the one thing Final Fantasy has in common with Open Source business is that it lost a huge ton of money.
Bingo. FF looks like they were so busy beating off about their polygon count that they forgot that they were actually making entertainment for humans. Mind you, an actual plot might have helped too. ;)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You take that back right this minute, young man!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
And in some cases (specifically Steve Buschemi's character) the character look just didnt match the voice at all
Voice types don't match face types. It was jarring because you know what Steve Buschemi looks like, and the character didn't look like him. Disney's characters work because they make them look like the people you already associate with the voice. Ever see a popular radio host for the first time? Often a surprise, because you may have pictured them differently.
Voice types don't match face types.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
a smart deduction would say that number was the single-cpu estimation of time to resolve the calcs. Hence, divide 40 years by 1000 PCs and derive the net (before revisions) cpu-bound portion of the project.
Not Ben Affleck, Will Ferrell I half expected him to develop a tic in his head a la Night at the Roxbury.
I'd rather have a couple RD5000 RenderDrives from www.art.co.uk myself, even if they are a little pricy.
Wow, are there any CG movies anymore that _aren't_ rendered on Linux?
"The renderfarm consists primarily of ~1000 Linux machines (PIII, custom-built, rack mounted), running Red Hat 6.2. These machines do all the RenderMan renders, as well as a number of other tasks."
I assumed they'd use a buttload of SGI systems like Pixar does. Which is cheaper? Loads of PIII, or a smaller load of SGIs with the same total rendering "power"?
And hey, more proof that Linux rocks.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
Thats a pretty cool interview... especially since I love the Final Fantasy Movie
Karma Whore ... that's funny!