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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."
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.
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--
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.
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.
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
- 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
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.
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.
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!
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/
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.