Slashdot Mirror
Improv Animation as an Art Form?
Dean Siren asks: "When will mainstream moviemakers, such as Lucasfilm, finally replace their render farms and Renderman with a GPU (Geforce or Radeon) and Cg based renderer? Would the savings in equipment cost and rendering time be worth the learning curve? Is anyone developing such an app? We've had the tech for years with video games, but the art form hasn't really been tried. Is anyone working on this now?" An interesting thought, and it puts an interesting spin on the old computers-will-replace-actors argument. It also means good planning ahead of time, since there will be no "post-production" stage where you can clean up the mistakes, and perform the minute adjustments needed to make things just right. Do you think such an art form will ever catch on in Hollywood, or will small shops have to be the ones to pioneer this before others follow suit?
"There's a forum called Machinima whose main idea is that not only should the final rendering of a movie be generated in real time, but so should the animation, implying that computer animation should be performed, maybe even improvised, live by motion captured voice actors. Accomplishing this goal would require replacing not only Renderman but Maya and Softimage as well. A developer named Strange Company took the challenge and started writing an app in this direction called Lithtech Film Producer (interview here). They even made easy porting a high priority. But they soon realized that they were tiny and the project was huge so they quit. But the idea of improv animation is full of potential."
well the advantage of the render farm is that they work in parallel to produce the final result. You had better be able to use a lot of GPU's in parallel to get all that out of one box in real time. Or mayby you could if you put GeForce 4s in all the boxes in the render farm. Though that wouldnt help costs or heat issues any.
But will they go on strike when we turn them off?
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
If all animations were live with done with motion capture, what is the point of even making them into animations. Tell me how you could do movies like Ice Age, Toy Story, and A Bug's Life with motion capture. Animation takes time and talented people. There are many interesting animations, with animals and the like which could not be motion captured. A trend like this would be horibble.
I don't think this will be accomplished with current technology. While realtime rendering is very advanced, to get the detail and control over an animated sequence such as you see in Toy Story or in Star Wars is still way in the future. I don't think the GeForce is up to it. You would still need some massively parallel processing to be able to do tat kind of imagery in real time.
Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes
"It also means good planning ahead of time, since there will be no "post-production" stage where you can clean up the mistakes, and perform the minute adjustments needed to make things just right." Where did this come from? Without actors or a standard "crew" pickups and such would be unnecessary...and any new scenes or modified scenes could be done cheaper and less costly. Scenes still have to be rendered and edited, but if somethign isn't right, they can go back an add a scene or modify and re-render an existing one for a fraction of the cost.
"If you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now, quiet! The're about to announce the lottery numbers... " -Homer Simpson
Is it a slow news day or what???
In a nutshell, this topic makes zero sense.
Nobody is going to drop PRman for Cg anytime soon. Why? Because they have two different target markets and address two different needs.
Talk to somebody like ILM or PIXAR thats doing renderings that take 70 hours a frame (like some of the frames for Toy Story II did) and talk about real time cards. They have a good laugh and say "go away kid".
Can these cards handle anti-aliasing like RM can? No.
Can these cards handle DOF like RM can? No.
Can these cards to programmable shading like RM can? No.
These cards are designed to do graphics real time with the best quality they can squeeze out while still hitting their timing targets. RM is meant to get the best possible quality - and who cares about time?
This is a silly pointless discussion. Yes, in 10 or 20 years maybe the hardware will be there, but it isn't now and you sound silly making speculations like these.
I'm wondering what the final result will look like. I've always felt that actors, even if clad in rubber suits like in Predator, look far better and more realistic than CG graphics. I also feel that CG should just be for the background, or other special effects, never for characters. It's hard for me to 'suspend my disbelief' when I'm watching a scary movie and a computer generated villain walks on the screen.
This is off topic, I know, but I read that as "Improve Animation as an Ant Farm."
The visual quality would be too far below what the public expects at this point.
It doesn't seem to me that this would be a practical alternative. The only advantage that I can see of real-time processing is savings in start-up capital. Lucasarts and others already have spent the mass $ for their rendering farms, so what advantages would they get from switching to real-time rendering?
By first post I mean first post for this account. It's brand new, baby.
I'm reminded of the classic SNL piece.. Deep Thoughts by jack handy... or in this case by Cliff
Who makes you Sig?
I think rather than having impromptu animation, why not write a rendering engine that would take advantage of the awesome GPUs out there instead of using all processor to get the job done.
Right now the render times for movies is months, even if your Geforce4 chokes horribly on each and every frame because they're so big and you only get maybe 1 frame per second. Thats 2 seconds of video per box per minute.
Spread that across a render farm of 30 boxes and you get "realtime" rendering which would make life for the animators much nicer I would think.
A software renderer is just plain more flexible. When there's something you want to change in the rendering process, fix the code, recompile, distribute to the renderfarm. Done.
When there's something you want to change in your hardware-based rendering, what are you going to do, re-fab the silicon and solder it in?
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I personally think all 3D animation should revert to the days of Dire Straits' Music Video....
"I want my, I want my, I want my mtv..."
Now *there* is high tech animation.
Seriously though, the geometry nor resolution of even the most cutting edge graphics cards are anywhere near the level required to produce the high quality images, especially an image that wouldn't turn to crap on a typical movie screen. For the mainstream this just wouldn't cut it... Imagine the jaggedness and polygon count on your monitor scaled to a theater screen.... scary.
And for the people who would appreciate this sort of thing and would enjoy watching or seeing what they can do with a restriction on polygons and resolutions, there is always the demo scene dedicated to showing off what they can do at any level between all processor load to entire system in realtime. For movies I remember watching a couple of films written as Quake demos, I presume this is still happening somewhere on some level.
This appeals to some people, but those people are already served...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So essentially this would be the technological version of a stage theatre production? If it's done right it could merge the uniqueness of a live performance with some spiffy effects that would not be possible to create otherwise. Sounds cool to me!
The current generation of "GPUs" (ick, I hate that term) are neither powerful enough nor flexible enough to handle something as complex as a Rendeman shader. Go pick up a good Renderman book and look at what the spec requires from the implementation.
;-)
Stuff like DX8/9, which the gfx chip companies design to, is a very very small subset of what Renderman specifies. I suppose in theory you could build a tool that split shader work between the main CPU and the gfx card, but, I really don't think it would be worth the effort.
That's not to say that future hardware won't be able to do this kind of thing, but I'm not going to violate any NDAs on Slashdot
Come back and ask the question again in 18 months or so.
What would Lemmy do?
We wish to express our sympathetic apology to all our regular Clone Cinema viewers. Unfortunately, Toy Story 3 requires at least a Quad-Pentium projector with a GeForce 6 card to display properly.
Replace Renderman with a fuckin' PC video card? Maybe if the folks at LucasArts were weaned on paint thinner.
This sounds like your typical PC blowhard who believes his DVD player, Playstation, telephone, and eventually his computer will be replaced by a graphics accelerator.
Hey, you might need some justification for dropping $400 on that latest waffle iron from ATi, but you'll get none here.
And as for "improv animation," blow it out your ass. The reason that company quit is that it looks like shit. The closest you're going to get to that is games like Samba de Amio and Dance Dance Revolution.
Lastly, Mr. Dean Siren, what's your relationship with Strange Company and Machinima? Cause this sounds an awful lot like a puff piece from a PR flack...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Fans like to follow the lives of their favourite actors, not just watch them in movies. A computer character won't have a 'real life'.
Part of the reason is that people wish they could be like that. Who will be able to live vicariously through a computer program (slashdot crowd excluded).
Jason
Shader languages such as Cg (Indeed, even Cg itself) is supported by many software renderers. Software renderers use pixel shaders, they just don't do it in realtime or in hardware.
So it is in fact conceivable that we can see professional pre-rendered animations done using Cg.
Looks like you people don't know what you're talking about. GPUs and shader languages are independant.
Regards, Guspaz.
Right now the problem with movies is that they're costing more and more to make. Studios looking to pop out more movies for less money will probably do it. A studio generally doesn't like putting a bunch of money into a computer-animated movie, only for it to come out terribly (see Final Fantasy movie). So pushing out more movies will help them to hedge their bets.
The immediate advantage in Cg is allowing independent film makers to make special effects more easily and faster than before. It helps the push towards giving computer animating power to the masses. But this doesn't mean that computers will replace actors anytime soon. Think of what will happen to Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood!
A lot like the facial "actor" implants in Diamond Age.
Take a real-time rendering system and a complex 3D matrix plotter and combine them and you can have real-time digital actors modeled by RL people.
Add a lot of CPU power and a genetic algoritm and the computer should be able to, after some time gathering information, immitate the "recorded" actor much like voice recognition learns your voice patters.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Geforce video cards okay but remember...their catored to gaming. The graphics / rendering / core of the cards is nothing compared to SGI / Sun video cards. Keep in mind that you will still need a farm because even though you $900 Geforce 6 gets 1,000 fps in quake 3, it's no rendering beast. You'll still need Maya, Soft Image, Lightwave, and Renderman. The only difference if nvidia improves performance for a workstation market (even including the quadros) is it'll probably be slightly cheaper then an sgi card. The downside, visual quality. SGI owns visual quality.
So these people want to put massive multimillion dollar renderfarms in theatres just so it can be done in real time? Sounds like a bad idea to me.
Even rendering the sound in realtime just doesn't sound feasable. Csound couldn't do a whole orchistra with voice modeling and effects in realtime on even most nice clusters...
Moreover, will the audience care? It's not like the CG actors are going to 'screw up' so it's not interesting like seeing a play. I personally don't see the point.
Well, the answer to the question of the topic is......
Never, or when StarTrek and Holodecks become reality. It's just not feasable, and with 40-70 hours a frame for current movie renders, you can't move that into 29.97 times per second for the sake of it being realtime..
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Personally, I think Cg (or a derivitive) will eventually be used for movies. Eventually these kind of tools (and hardware) will reach a point where they can compute the same algorithms that renderman, etc. use internally (to something very close to the same precision). This then can be executed on a graphics card at much greater speed than can be done on a traditional CPU.
However, this doesn't imply that the rendering by the graphics card will be real-time. Renderings per frame may drop to minutes instead of hours, but it probably won't be interactive. Also, the same amount of work by artists tweaking animation and doing post production still applies. Basically, graphics hardware will replace 1 portion of the pipeline, not the entire thing. It will probably be many years before hardware can generate really convincing photorealistic images at interactive rates (don't listen to the marketer speak of graphics IHV's!)
Post-production will always exist, it's not like it was invented with CGI. They use post-production techniques on live-action film sequences as well, why would it be any different if the CGI was generated in real-time (like camera photography already is).
Dan
Um, so that's all I can think up. I'm goin' to get some chili. (Another reason for virtual videoconferencing....)
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Lest we forget Triton and Future Crew and the rest of the demo scene? If you have
you better remind yoruself.
The 4k demo contests have always been the pinacle (IMO) of art as not only did you have a visual experience but the wonderment of how much was packed into a 4k executable. It was art in design and programming.
And all done with typical PC hardware. No fancy render farms. Hell, FC's Second Reality ran on a 386!
And now look torwards all the work being done with Flash, especially with respect to animation. But I think the author of this post means to focus on realistic animation.
There was a pretty cool little windows demo a few years back from the GODS demo crew called TOYS. It wasn't realy improv.. but it had a story and a plot (somewhat)... which was a nice break from just the flashy gee-whiz only factor that alot of other demo's had. The graphics are pretty crude looking back on it now but it was a slick preview of what a movie/cartoon rendered in real time would be like.
Blender And Linux Fan
I've always felt that actors, even if clad in rubber suits like in Predator, look far better and more realistic than CG graphics. I also feel that CG should just be for the background, or other special effects, never for characters.
I couldn't agree more. I'm really baffled at the constant attempts to shove CGI down our throats. You really can't help but cringe in those scenes in AOTC when Anakin is riding some beast (both in the field and in the gladiator arena). I mean, it's so obviously a CGI effect. It just doesn't move right. And this is LucasFilm -- CGI doesn't get better than that.
With all the time and money they've spent on trying to improve CGI motion, I would think it could be better spent on developing more realistic and movable costumes. I'm not trolling -- I really want to know if anyone thinks that CGI living creatures have realistic motion.
As far as I'm concerned, CGI has its place. And it's not for recreating living creatures.
GMD
watch this
Judging from past experiences, does Lucas know the difference?
A GPU make sense to view the improvised motion capture result in real time, but the motion capture stage has nothing to do with the final product. The rendering farms will still be used to make the final image with much inproved quality, and the post-production obviously has to take place too.
Motion captured acting is bad. Really bad. I've seen believable acting in a few video games (notably a couple of the cut-scenes in Onimusha), and it shocked me. Most of the time, it looks like the actors are all on `ludes. They are quite literally in their own little worlds, going through the motions.
Now, real-time rendering, even if it wasn't production-quality, could change this. Just giving the actors decent HUDs so that they could actually talk to the CG creatures would help a lot. Real force-feedback stuff would mean that they could actually touch each other. This is what we need for cg to replace real actors. Then it would really be the Future, what with Virtual Light and etc. being reality. (And we'll have flying cars, damnit.)
Even if its rendered through a GPU, it doesn't have to be improv.... they can control exactly what happenes...
"...computer animation should be performed, maybe even improvised, live by motion captured voice actors."
Computer graphics and rendered animation isn't replacing live human actors. If motion capturing and voice over is used you're still going to see the actor/actresses unique style in the finished product... I'm picturing some of the characters in Shrek/Toy Story(2), and how they were obviously very digital, besides of course the voice overs... If motion capturing is used, the emphasis will be squarely back on the actor animating the character. If Jim Carey was the actor behind a character in one of these new mtion captured productions he would be instantly recongnizable because he is such an animated person to begin with, and if the digital character is animated by his motion captured movements and vocalized by his voice overs it's would be 100% classic Carey, and wouldn't come close to putting human actors out of work -- if anything this would force the actors to develop new strenghts and talents to make their animated characters -- which *they* animate through motion capture suits, come to life!
dmarien
Sure sure... hardware rendering...
When a gpu can handle 20+ million polly's with 4k textures on them... and 600+ MB scene files.
And 2gb of system ram.
If you look at what a cpu based render has to handle and all the files it has to generate, it would have to be an extremely specialized machine that would cost an extreme amount of money. I would rather throw my money at more dual 2.2 Ghz P4 rackmounts.
They prove they work. And they are standard hardware. So anybody that makes software will support them.
It is all pretty much a pipe dream to get realtime renders at the quality needed for film. As soon as that happens, I am out of a job. The amazing thing about CG Studios is that they keep raising the bar as hardware comes out... so the faster the machines the heavier the scene is.
Its not that artists are getting much better as much as machines are able to handle more.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
"I'm Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but due to a small bug in Maya Realtime 2004, the theatre has crashed."
Or Better yet
"Part of our cluster is now out... but instead of compromising the movie and showing this prerendered reel, we will show the movie at 1 frame/sec for the rest of the movie, LoTR will now finish in 27 days..."
Come on people, we can't even get digital screens and real THX in all theatres, let alone renderfarms, Machiimia is crazy...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I think this is an unreasonable goal (replacing offline rendering with motion capture and realtime rendering, for motion pictures), and Dr. Alvy Ray Smith agrees with me. (And he knows more about the subject than anyone likely to post on Slashdot, myself included.)
Yes, I've heard him talk, and I know he's not addressing exactly what this article talks about. What I'm saying is that the task of making computer animation truly realistic is more difficult than we are capable of, using the most advanced tools available today. That, to me, means that it's much, much more difficult to do it in real time using algorithms and hardware that is much less sophisticated.
Can you do something cartoon like? Certainly. Look at Clippy. Can you make it believable and real? No.
Education is the silver bullet.
i just saw a film called Missing Persons at the LA film festival that was done this way. Not realtime rendering i don't think, but they used geforce hardware. www.missingpersonsmovie.com, very cool but weird movie.
...that in 10 to 20 years when we can render images such as those in Toy Story (or even in something like Star Wars: AotC), the new hardware will be there taking 70 hours per frame still; albiet that new hardware will be producing images that are indistinguishable from real life.
There are things in RenderMan/non-realtime rendering programs that simply cannot be done by realtime renderers.
For one thing - programmable shading. Programs like PRMan and BMRT support programmable shaders - which are incredibly important for photo-realistic effects. They also are expensive in terms of processing, which is why realtime is going to have some problems with them.
Another thing is resolution. I don't remember what resolution the images need to be for film, but I think that it's pretty high. More pixels = more processing.
Realtime effects for games are getting to be stunning, but motion pictures are another thing entirely.
I meant "ractor", standing for "inter-actor" :/
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Blizzard makes all-cgi cutscenes that are better than 99% of all movies out there. The infusion of character into their creation is unbelievable. Blizzard games are worth buying just for their cinematics. It seems more realistic, because they've created a whole new world, and have made that world vibrant with life.
The graph on that linked page seems very objective.
Cg quality is no where near to close the quality of modern ray traced images and movies. When Cg can produce an image like this , then maybe things will change.
I still haven't found the "any" key.
Yea, the demos are great, but really, it can't catch on for the mass public and theatres. I love demos, but who will watch a 2 and a half hour demo and pay 8 dollars to do so...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Current "High-End" DLP projectors for digital movie theatres have a resolution of about 1024 x something.
I remember playing Quake III in 1600x1200..
But ok, the next-gen projectors are planned to have 4096 pixels horizontally - I admit that 1024 is just not enough to be better than celluloid.
I read this and immediately remembered when Brian Henson (Jim Henson's son, of Muppets fame) came and gave a talk at my school last year.
One of the things "The Creature Shop," the company he runs, is working on, is digitally animated puppets which are played in real-time the way that a normal puppet would be. He didn't give too many technical details then, but I found this press release, check it out:t ml
http://www.henson.com/company/press/html/060601.h
It would probably work for making some crappy saturday morning cartoon (I could've sworn I saw one once that was doing something like that), but for good quality animations, you need good animators.
What's more interesting is the work for physics-based animation. Again, you won't get good movies out of it, or even "realistic" human characters, but it will be a big advance for games -- though I doubt it will make a dent in the demand for good animators.
It's not at all clear to me that Cg provides any advantage over OpenGL used from C/C++ for the sort of work that the high-end studios do.
The vanilla CPUs in render farms and the software renderers that run on them could be replaced by hardware rendering for the lower-quality work, but never for the highest. First, the render farm doesn't need the real-time facility of the GPU - the part the GPU does best, and the part that contributes most of the cost to the GPU. The render farm just needs to render a frame to disk, and can do this more cost-effectively with a software renderer and a general-purpose computer. Second, the GPU isn't as extensible as the software renderer, because it's cast in silicon. There will always be an effect you want that the GPU can't handle. And then, the GPU is built to render video fast, and trades off many aspects of the rendering algorithm that we really want when we render to film.
You will, however, see all of the studios buy arrays of GPUs for making rushes. These are less-than-full-quality playbacks that they use to review the animator's work-in-progress before final rendering. If we got some really fast programmable gate-arrays, or GPUs with documented and programmable microcode, we could use them as a GPU is used, but in a way that might support the highest-quality rendering.
Pixar tried to make high-speed hardware for years, and we always found it to be a losing game. I wrote microcode for one of these beasts, a parallel bitslice engine that inspired today's MMX instructions. We could not keep up with the development of vanilla CPUs, and the CPUs ended up being more cost effective.
Bruce Perens.
How would real-time animation be different than puppetry? Modern puppets often have more than one person controlling them, and the controls are arcane to say the least (each finger might control a different part of a face, say.) In my experience with puppeteers and animators, I have found that you can teach any competent visual artist animation -- some will be better than others, no doubt -- but puppetry is a much more rare talent.
Real-time rendering of CG puppets has been done by Brad de Graf, now at Dotcomix and several other people over the years; but it's never been easy or particularly successful.
Real-time capture of data for later non-real-time rendering is much more common. Graham Walters and I did the Waldo puppet for The Jim Henson Hour back in 1988. One might also consider the motion-capture technology now widely used in visual effects production as a type of whole-body puppetry -- the robots in the latest Star Wars movies are animated by having people perform the parts, and then capturing that motion.
There may be a future in multi-track puppetry; where you can lay down a track at a time, each pass recording a few more paramters until you get the whole sequence done. This would be of course analogous to multi-track audio recording. But recording a whole complex character in real time would mimic puppetry with all of its limitations and flaws, but more expensively.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
There is a project to make a movie using standard render tools and such. There is a single guy trying to make a quality feature film using a regular computer not a render farm. Check out his site for more info http://www.rustboy.com
Dan Mayer: my blog, essays, art, etc
The problem here is that every time someone comes up with a better "fog" effect or new shiny texture that the hardware can't handle, the hardware needs to be changed to deal with it. At least in software when innovations come out to make the images *look* better (not animate faster), studios can take advantage of them.
That being said, it would seem reasonable to use equipment like that to do real-time checking of actors/characters. Use the fast HW cards for prototyping and then use the slow software to make it look presentable.
Dear god... it sounds like they're simply describing Evercrack except with realistic graphics and a good speech synthesizer.
It's the people acting out part and taking quests that could be entertaining, if viewed from afar. Also since the world is so big you could have an interactive component for the "viewer" to play god and jump about watching what everbody is doing....
The artform of interactive machinima has interesting enough prospects in the potential for virtual performances to be carried out by tele-present actors from different corners of the globe. Tele-present tecnnicians could operate and modify the virtual set. 3D artists become the set designers and costume designers. Machinima is a logical extension of theater into the virtual realm.
I saw Final Fantasy, and the major drawback I noticed (storyline aside; OT) was that the characters still looked (up close) and often moved like computer animations. The most realistic action in the movie happened when they used the recorded movements of real actors (stunt men) to define how the computer generated characters should move. For other scenes, they had animators tweak the characters' motions by hand or let the software handle it, and they were glaringly obvious fakes.
It was an impressive achievement to be sure, but still nowhere near as photo-realistic as films such as T2, Jurassic Park, or Star Wars.
do a Google Search on
4 9. htm
Dean Siren then
one on his email das@iu.net
he has some other 'gem' posts I particularly like
what he says about Americans here:
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/review/film/s3501
(scroll down as his post is near the bottom)
what a stupid question.
-= Briareos =-
One of the biggest problems behind animated movies currently is the lack of quality acting. You'll never get an Apocalypse Now or True Romance in a rendored-actor movie, because there is no room for improve. It's flat-out harder to act in a sound room with earphones on, than it is on set with other actors to play off of. One of the most important aspects of acting is listening. Can't do that in animation, at least not now and not at the same level.
But total improv is a different sort of thing. Watch "Whose Line Is It Anyway" and compare to regular sitcoms. So a technology that allowed real-time rendering and broadcast of improv actors could be neat. But it ain't a film. And it won't ever be.
I've seen a plethora of posts that basically argue "today's tech can't do it, so this is a stupid discussion."
Remarkable.
Technically savvy poeple, of all people, should realize that simply because Farscape-style special effects cannot be done in realtime today with today's low end consumer graphics GPUs doesn't mean the concept of 'live performance animation' as such is flawed at all.
First, much lower quality 'live performance' animation is possible with today's consumer hardware, and the improv aspect alone makes it an art form worth persuing in and of itself. The possiblity for algorithmic and technical enhancements that could be driven, or at least explored, by such an art form make it a worthwhile endeavor as well.
Second, in another 5 or 10 years (at most) it will almost certainly be possible to do live performance, farscape quality digital animations (assuming the technological development of the computer hasn't been brought to a standstill through stupid legal 'innovations' like DRM and Palladium). While movie makers would likely simply add this to their set of tools and not replace post-production entirely, the ability to create 'live theatre' digital productions and interactive, perhaps even submersive, two or multi-way environments if not completely synthetic realities is an intriguing one, to say the least, and certainly a worthwhile endeavor whether or not Hollywood can make use of the technque in their movie productions. Indeed, such systems could well render the movie as obsolete as the live stage play is today: in other words, no longer the main popular attraction, but a continuing artform valid in its own right, if no longer the center of public attention.
8 years ago I was at the U of Illinois' virtual reality lab and had an opportunity to play around with some of simulations they run, including one which allows the viewer to explore a three dimensional (submsersive) grey-scale view of the mega-structure of galaxies in the universe (to study large scale structures such as strings of galaxies, etc.).
8 years later I can explore the universe in living color on my GNU/Linux box running Celestia, in 1920x1200 24-bit color, in realtime. While it isn't submersive 3-d VR just yet, it is much higher resolution and full color, and while I can't explore the farthest reaches of the universe, I can explore the immediate galactic neighborhood in incredible detail (much greater than the old simulation allowed). All of this on a $400 Nvidia card, running a free operating system on commodity hardware.
So, in other words, dismissing this possibility simply because you can't do it with perfect, photo-realistic effects today shows a remarkable lack of vision, and a blindness to similiar leaps in technology that we've all beeen taking for granted for the last decade or two. We will be able to do this sort of thing, photorealistically, much sooner than most people probably realize, and the art form can be persued long before the final polish is available.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What an idiot. Final Fantasy movie is "a cool foreign film?" How about "halfway inbetween a really bad movie and a really bad video game"? There's a reason why that was the biggest money losing movie in history...and it wasn't because it was "ahead of its time". Do the math.
Is there any way to mod the entire story as flame bait?
Consider that they need render farms in order to create the final frame, not lay out the scene. The latest GPU's are more than adequate for putting together the objects that will be eventually rendered using a higher-end machine. This would save costs, since they could buy a Linux box using an nVidia card, instead of a far more expensive Indy.
Hey if your comedy troupe is that ugly, mabie you should spend the money on plastic surgery.
I don't understand what the point would be really.
My answer would be never.
Hardware such as the Geforce series is made to support Microsofts monopoly in the graphic space (DirectX), where all of the output is meant to look the same and support the same abilities.
One of the greatest strengths of high end rendering packages like Maya, Brazil, Mental Ray and Renderman is the ability to augment it with programmable abilities.
Although ILM and Pixar would love to be able to spit out movies faster, they are not willing to sacrifice the ability to add their own secret sauce.
Why would a customer want to see such a film anyway? Right now a film producer would have to give up ray-tracing, radiosity, global illumination, most particle effects, depth of field tricks.
And where do you draw the line? Would you expect the whole film to be edited in real-time, and played back in real-time, in front of an audience?
As an animator, I'm a bit offended actually. Obviously you don't understand all of the work an animator puts into a character. Yes, you could have some actor acting out the part of Bugs Bunny, but he would never be able to perfectly add anticipation like an animator can. I don't claim to be any better than a professional actor, it's just that I'd have the advantage of running through the action a million times until I got it just right.
Maybe someday people will demand to see live animated films...but as long as their is 15 minutes between the filming of content and the display of that content, film producers will choose to make their content better through "post" production.
Just look at that kaboki (sp?) theatre! Guys in dark clothing move life-sized wooden puppets around in a play.
Okay, my bad. That's not kabuki theatre. Does anyone know what the hell the name of these Japanese puppet plays is?
GMD
watch this
It seems to me artists and filmmakers are just now starting to play with the possibilities brought out into the open by the power of consumer-grade computers and other electronics. Maybe not to the level of replacing render farms and the like, but more like "playing with the possibilities" and creating entirely new animation possibilities.
Check out Austin,Tx director Richanrd Linklatter's latest DVD Waking Life... the film was shot entirely on consumer-grade DV cameras, imported to standard Macs and PCs, and using a techinique called rotoscoping, they created a hybrid live action/animated feature.
Although, as a technique, Rotoscoping has been around for awhile, I think it's artists like Linklatter who are really pushing the envelope, so to speak, of just how far art and animation on the personal computer has come.
When Max Fleischer's studios did this with cel animation 'way back in the '20s and '30s, they called it Rotoscope. :) I seem to remember seeing a really cool short with Cab Calloway drawn as a dancing figure doing his famous shuffle and singing "Saint James Infirm'ry Blues."
Then again, I'm a Luddite who really, genuinely prefers cel animation, and if it ever dies out completely, I'm going to take it up for spite.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
There has alway been a place in the arts for the improviser, think possibly of a smoky club in a run-down neighborhood where people gather after hours. Maybe the visual artists can hold forth while the band takes a break and vice versa.
I was thinking that with real time CGI characters, there could be a call-in TV show where viewers could speak with their favorite characters, sort of like "President Clinton Answers Childrens' Questions". It's probably already possible with puppets, but perhaps with CGI it could be more elaborate.
Unfortunatly all these /. people don't any imagination. OH that's a stupid idea, why would you ever want to render a movie in real-time?
The point isn't to render a movie, the point is to use your computer like a canvas to paint on. Only instead of making a picture, you make an animation. Maybe you use one computer (or many) to control it and then feed all the control data to a main computer system that renders it in real time for the audience to see it. Maybe you've got 10 people controling monsters, beasts, and other imaginary characters, with people doing their voices (and probably also controlling the facial animations at the same time. Think like how TV is done, with make camera men , a control booth that splices all the sound together from different sources, the guy who's job it is to overlay different titles on the screen and do transistions between show segments. Just replace the 'real' life actors with computer generated ones.
It would be easier to do a cartoon style show because people prefer actual actors to computer generated ones.
The big problem with this idea is a lack of understanding of how simplistic GPU capabilities are compared to high end software rendering today. This isn't going to change in a few years. The current shader capabilities are really primitive, they are fast, but it takes real trickery to get a good looking result.
Current, next-gen, and forseeable future GPU's are horribly outgunned by state of the art rendering approaches. In order to get there, they need capabilities much closer to a CPU, and truly massive bandwidth.
However, they *are* going to make a huge difference in current animation. Why? Until recently, the feedback loop for artists working on rendering was horribly slow, because they had two choices:
1) see a really crappy representation of what you are doing now.
2) wait a longish while for a low-quality render (forget about full quality)
so iterative improvement was slow. this hardware allows for a third, in-between option:
3) get reasonable approximation in hardware. it looks like crap compared to the software render, but all the elements are there and you can play with them.
this is going to make animators *much* more efficient, which will seriously improve overall quality.
You folks are missing the point.
This technology would work great for training, re-enactments, and hobby cartooning.
How many amateur enthusiasts would love to play out a favorite novel, or create their own anime-esque space opera cartoon?
This would be easy to accomplish by adding dramatic and close-up elements to any one of the popular 3d gaming engines out there.
Are the people posting to front page on slashdot really so stupidly out of touch with reality. COME ON! How does this shit get posted. I used to think slashdot was a helpful filter of interesting things.. but I'm thinking you people get stupider by the minute.
If this were on the everyday common PC, it would improve rendering performance awesomely.
Are you listening, game developers?
ANIMATE YOUR CUT-SCENES WITH THE GAME'S OWN GRAPHICS ENGINE WHENEVER POSSIBLE!
Sure it has. The demo scene has been around for decades. First they were doing 3D w/o graphics hardware assistance at all on 286's, then 386's, 486's, 586's, Amiga's, etc. Nowadays, the demo scene seems much smaller, but they do use the 3D graphics cards to make much more elaborate demos. Funny, however -- they don't *seem* that much more impressive than they did. (I've probably just been jaded by modern games. And I'm probably not the only one, which might explain the smaller demo scene.)The Inquirer has a nice story about rendering Final Fantasy in real-time with GeForce4.
Scene is vastly simplified (polygon count was 10% of the original), but it's still an impressive achievement. In a couple of years we could have Final Fantasy graphics in our games.
I think that it will be only a matter of time before GPUs replace (atleast partially) CPU renderfarms:
1. "Lack" of Renderman isn't a problem. Cg has almost same syntax as Rendermans shading language, you can do any Renderman effect in Cg.
2. Memory bandwidth is another strength of the GPUs. Pentium4 has a biggest memory bandwidth of single CPU systems, still it's "only" 4.2GB/s. Current GeForce4 has over 10GB/s of memory bandwidth. By moving to 256bit memory bus and DDR-II we will get 256MB framebuffer with incredible 30GB/s memory bandwidth by the end of the next year in consumer levels cards. Combine this with eight rendering pipelines and more advanced shaders and you will get incredible processing power for just $400.
This reminds me of the first time I went to SIGGraph, the big convention for computer art geeks. It was really cool, since there were lots of high-end toys to play with. It was about 6 years ago, and VR was really big at the time. Everyone had some sort of poor headset display that would make you sick or give you a headache. Many people had special "3D input devices" like a mouse with a stick at the end that you drew NURBS in real time or somesuch.
Anyways, the other really big thing were the motion-captured, live 3D actors. They'd project an avatar of someone up onto a big screen, and have them try to talk to hold conversations with you and the like. It was actually kind of annoying.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
It's coming, but having a card that can swallow that kind of BW and not burst into flames is still a ways off.
A basic PCI bus can carry 128 MB per second (33 MHz * 32 bits/cycle = 1 Gb/s), and there exist double-speed and 64-bit variants of PCI. The faster 4x AGP runs at 1 GB per second. If each frame requires 1 GB of data transfer using a PS2-like approach of bringing in each set of textures and then rendering the corresponding triangles, you get 1 fps. Render this on a cluster of 24 machines, and you get the 24 fps of 35mm cinema.
Will I retire or break 10K?
have you ever seen a quake movie? or quake2 movie? the actors are the models, in scenes (aka maps) made for the purpose of recording the scene ... cameramen (aka spectators) record the action from different angles and then it is edited into a movie. this is what they are talking about ...
... then people control these models inside the game while its being "filmed" by spectators ... its all very plausable ... yes the quality isnt there yet, but Doom3 is bringing the possibility that mcuh closer
picture special charachter mdoels made for quake, and scenery in a quake3 map
Isn't there some Simpsons' gag (maybe the one with "Poochie") about how they had to give up doing the animation at the same time as the voices, the animator hands were getting too tired?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
my opinion of the constitution of art (or artform):
A product is commissioned or purchased by private industry or individuals (not gov.), from a creator who wishes to be called an artist, the result having a specific (monetary) value and deemed to by art by the consumer.
Anything simply is not art. "Piss Christ" is not art - it was "purchased" with NEA grants. Flourescent case mods MAY be art, but if any of the requirements above aren't met, I don't consider it art.
Does anyone know what the hell the name of these Japanese puppet plays is?
that's called bunraku
this new "art form" is digital puppetry
Will I retire or break 10K?
So what, when you say that renderman will never be replaced by shaders languages
I think they were trying to claim that preprocessing-oriented shader languages such as Renderman will never be replaced by real-time-oriented shader languages such as Cg. Yes, they both look like C, but their designs seem subtly different in that Cg is optimized for a much lower complexity per pixel than Renderman.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Uhhh, "a far more expensive Indy"? When was the last time you checked out SGI equipment? I can't remember the last time I saw one of those.
"Very few cartoons are broadcast live; it's a terrible strain on the animator's wrist."
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Just plain old realism. You can always say, 'in the future X technology will be cheaper and faster than today's Y technology'. C'mon, it doesn't take a genious to say that.
The thing is, that the original poster has a tone of "we've been doing real time animation for quite some time" and asking why movies studios are not going in that direction. The answer to that is pretty obvious too.
- sigs are for wimps.
I think that whoever submitted this is missing the point of post production, renderfarms, and tools like Maya and SI.
These are for making FILM QUALITY output for movies as SPECIAL EFFECTS and COMPOSITING. If they had the computing power, this could be done in realtime, but currently, they would need something on the scale of the earth simulator (40 GFLOP/Sec) to achieve that kind of performance. It is also comparing a pinto to a rolls, in as far as the tools are concerned. Sure a profesional graphic designer COULD use WindowsPaint 1.0 to edit their stuff in, or they could get the RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB.
Also, most 3D work and such ALREADY USES motion capture to get the basic telemetry for the animations. All 'actor' movements, and even things like car movements and the dropping of objects are mo-capped for more realistic movement. Unfortunatly, the available resolution on affordable mo-cap makes it necessary for the animators to go back in and do manual touch ups to fill in missing frames and fix 'wonky' movements. To improve this, you would again need more CPU power and more money.
The things they are talking about (Lithtech) are the same as the movies guys are making with Quake3 (see planetquake.com for examples). they are fun and ammusing, interesting for learning how to do it, but UTTERLY WORTHLESS for anything that requires more then 10,000 polys at 1024x768X72dpi w/o antialiasing. Most tipical 'Flim' work is in the naborhood of 250,000 polys @ 1280x1024x300dpi w full AA.
As for getting rid of Maya and SI, take your head out of your ass. These are MODELING and ANIMATION tools. Where do you THINK all the game engines get their character, weapon, and level models, textures, and animations from? It's not some dude writing 3d coordinates into a text file, idiot. These are tools for artists to create the stuff you want. This is like saying costumes don't have a place in movies, so lets fire the art department.
Not to mention that most films and film models are completly spline based, and there are no hardware renders available that do NURBS, mesh-deforming, and other complex 3D transformations. Maybe when we have that, we'll talk.
Sum up: Yes, you can do it for fun and experiance and all those other reasons, but it has no place, for the time being, in pro movie graphics.
S'funny--I instead see a significant number of posts poking holes in Dean's original argument("when will Hollywood replace their render farms "), with the really good reason of "render farms are a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run".
I don't really see a lot of "we shouldn't ever explore this artform period!" posts.
--
don't sweat it, like 95% of people who post on Slashdot, he has absolutely no idea what he's on about. Worse still, he can't be bothered to go to SGi's site and get educated. And even if he DID, he'd look at the clock speed of the CPUs and laugh.
This type of package allready exists! It's called Filmbox.
http://www.kaydara.com
It can do real-time animation, real-time DOF, real-time mocap, real-time toon rendering, everything REALTIME! And they have been doing it for years. PLUS! They run on Linux, IRIX, Win32 and OSX. Can't beat that.
I don't exactly know that the poster ment with her question, but isn't the film made with counter strike an example of her idea?
;)
I think that film has prerecorded stuff in it, but you could make one with life action characters.
Somebody must have a link
GNU guru and mainframe hacker
I believe most readers are missing the point all together. The idea is to split the workload, not to move the entire workload to another proc. To answer the main question:
No, cg will not replace renderman (any time soon) for a couple reasons... Firstly, many things we do in renderman are FAR from realtime. There is a reason for this. Lots of effects are done with shaders that just will not be possible with cg. We don't work with scenes with 100k tri's and reflection maps. We work with scenes that can range from 5 million to 15 billion primatives (tri's). Not only the shear volume, but complexity of shaders will determine rendertimes. In fact, scene density is only of minor importance. Shading the scene takes the bulk of the time. Other things inclued lighting. How exactly would you accomplish some of the lighting situations with the GPU? Some scenes have 100's of lights. Fur/Hair, is another thing. Compare the wolfman demo to a a CGI film, even in the early 80's, we could achieve better hair than in the wolfman demo.
I'll end this now... Time will go by and things will get faster. When cards contribute to final renderings, I'll be VERY happy, but that time just isst now...
When will mainstream moviemakers, such as Lucasfilm, finally replace their render farms and Renderman with a GPU (Geforce or Radeon) and Cg based renderer?
That will never happen. You are comparing oranges and apples.
GPUs are emulators.
In the sense that they try generate realistic looking images. Take reflection and refractions, these are based on bump maps or similiar technics, which limits the effect to a few passes.
Renderman (and raytracing) are simulators.
They are based on simulations of real world physics, that means the refraction and reflections are calculated, the simulation is only limited by how detailed the image has to be when done.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
....the most fucking stupid Ask Slashdot I have ever read.
Do you have any idea the level of complexity involved in rendering realistic movie-quality graphics vs. a fucking game of Unreal Tournament?
Yet another one for the Slashdot-Retarded pile.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Ok, while I think its obvious that movie makers and gamers have WAY different needs, the technology is approaching a point where a single programmable GPU will be capable of handling what software and big number crunching provide now. The big question is, when desktop video processing gets to the point where it can do movies in real time, where will the movie production tools be? They move almost as fast as gaming cards.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Everyone seems to focus on how far ahead movie quality CG is, and how realtime will always be lagging behind, and even Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within wasn't convincingly realistic, so how could a GeForce card keep up?
However, does that really matter? Isn't art more than just technical concerns?
I've recently seen a import copy of Xenosaga for the Playstation 2, and let me tell you, it's a truly gorgeous looking 3D anime. (It has some RPG elements, too, but back to my point :) )
I know I'd be happy to sit down and watch a Xenosaga TV series, if it looked just as good as that, and even if it didn't look any better.
Inferior CG quality? People happily watched Rocky and Bullwinkle.Shaky looking motion capturing? I've watched puppet shows before, and I'll watch them again. CG with unrealistic motion capturing is just like a puppet show to me. Heck, wasn't Thunderbirds (with SuperMarionation!) a cult hit?
An effect you want, but can't get it out of the GeForce card? Roll with it. If a poet can write in iambic pentameter, you can get by the occasional artistic limitation yourself.
Now, I'm not all that interested in the idea of improv'd realtime animation. But I do want to point out that there's a role for scaling back your ambition when it comes to animation - in favor of getting your ideas out cheaply and getting your ideas out quickly. A lot of the more insulting posts I see in this thread seem to be overlooking that viewpoint.
-Sean GivanWe've had the tech for years with video games, but the art form hasn't really been tried.
Video games are not art? Wha'chu talkin bout?
-DG
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
In a fit of nostalgia, I bought an SGI Indy a few weeks ago (check it out right here) and it cost $100, and was manufactured in the early-mid 90s. Definately not SGI's latest and greatest.
SGI's latest workstation is the Octane2. I think the Indy was first previewed by BYTE magazine (or a similar mag) in 1993!
with the release of the GeForce 5 and quake 4 all rendering will be ray traced and run at max frame rates of 1 fps on P5 10GHz cpus
Enjoy
Our little buddies at Brilliant Digital Entertainment have been doing this for years with their 3d web products. Basically, they have a browser plugin that installs on your computer that is a 3d engine. When you view one of their cartoons instead of streaming audio and video data they send over the audio data + models and character movement. Its ultra low bandwidth. Its kind of like the old Quake movies. Pretty cool stuff, though low quality. mspykerm
For all the comments that Geforce9's or whatnot might be able to do what Maya can do now, I think everyone's missing the point that the algorithms that go into either program/hardware are completely different. Raytracing, one of the oldest methods of creating pretty pictures, is a very flexible method, and can create realistic pictures very simply.
Geforce/Radeon cards and their brood use triangle rasterization in an attempt to approximate what raytracing can do in real time. They accomplish this through using various hardwired buffers that can do reflections, refraction and a few other nice effects. However, this is not a flexible solution, because each of these effects has to be hardwired into the silicon in order for triangle rasterization to be able to do them. Granted, pixel shaders HAVE been able to allow some pretty cool things, but the language itself is just plain limited. Cg may give a nicer looking front to a limited language, but you still have a 'C'-like language that doesn't allow case statements and a whole host of other almost necessary abilities to do some of the things that Renderman can do.
The Geforce9's might very well be able to approximate what Maya can do now, but what everyone's missing is that the raytracers out when the Geforce9's hit the market are going to be able to do that much better looking graphics, and be that much more flexible. The two are designed differently, and the hardware is always going to be trying to catch up with the software.
As to statements that a "farm" of Geforce4's might be able to do what a standard renderfarm can do, I simply have to say that they're dead wrong. There are any number of reasons this is the case (not leastly being that I'm fairly sure no nVidia driver allows for movie-level resolutions), but just one that I have to point out is that 128MB of video memory is going to create very serious limitations on voxel render abilities within a given scene. There are methods that allow for fire indistinguishable from the real thing, but the sheer number of data points within the 3D texture that makes up the fire would be far too much for a card to handle. Furthermore, trying to split up such a calculation to make up for the hardware's limitations would be far more trouble than it's worth.
Right now, we might be able to render a real-time "Luxo Jr." Five or ten years down the line, we might be able to render a real-time "Shrek." But we can't assume that software developers are just going to sit there and not introduce improvements of their own.
Is a gcc port for GPUs so I can offload processes to it when I'm not playing games. :)
Remember, Perlin's got a patent on Improv: US 6,115,053
This is already happening (and has been for years) with video games. I know what you're thinking, "It's not the same!" and you're right. But go play Metal Gear Solid 2; the game honestly plays like an interactive movie. Games will only get more cinematic (MGS2's credits are filled with Hollywood talent) as companies like Capcom, Konami and Square find better uses for the hardware. This style of game hasn't really caught on with PCs, but I have a feeling it may only be a matter of time.
I am very impressed with the results that have been coming out of NVIDIA and Stanford, such as their work on ray-tracing and global illumination (!) on commodity graphics cards.
The one thing, however, that I see blocking the use of GPUs for general-purpose high-quality rendering is sampling (the technique of avoiding aliases by low-pass filtering the scene at various stages of rendering). All of the GPUs I have seen are limited to dumb box filtering of texture and pixel samples. (i.e. calculate the color at several points inside a region and average the results). The best software renderers do a much more careful job of surpressing high frequencies while keeping the good low frequencies. (e.g. using a several-pixel-wide Gaussian or windowed sinc filter). While these methods are more computationally expensive than the box, they are much better low-pass filters. It makes good sense to choose them for final high-quality rendering.
High depth (10-16 bits/component) framebuffers are another necessity, but I hear they will be available in hardware very soon...
If I understand the original post correctly, then Sony's GSCube is basically the device that the author describes.
2 00 00912/scei.htm
http://ps2.ign.com/articles/082/082490p1.html
is an article that describes it. The gist of it:
"The GScube prototypes are powered by sixteen Emotion Engines and sixteen Graphics Synthesizers. Yes, this is sixteen PlayStation2s rolled into one. It is NOT a game system, though,
It's a computer graphics workstation, comparable to the systems created by Silicon Graphics and other companies to produce high-quality CG movies.
The difference between GScube and some of its predecessors in this field of computer equipment seems to be that GScube is being created with real-time content generation in mind. The overall plan seems to involve generating content with this development system, which is then streamed from a powerful server to viewers downloading it via broadband Internet connections. "
Plus, it's a sexy beast. Check out pictures here:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/pc/docs/article/
Cheers,
Paul
There are some colorful comments here about how studios will never-ever-ever replace tools like renderman on render farms with hardware accelerated rendering. These comments are wrong.
The current generation of cards do not have the necessary flexibility, but cards released before the end of the year will be able to do floating point calculations, which is the last gating factor. Peercy's (IMHO seminal) paper showed that given dependent texture reads and floating point pixels, you can implement renderman shaders on real time rendering hardware by decomposing it into lots of passes. It may take hundreds of rendering passes in some cases, meaning that it won't be real time, but it can be done, and will be vastly faster than doing it all in software. It doesn't get you absolutely every last picky detail, but most users will take a couple orders of magnitude improvement in price performance and cycle time over getting to specify, say, the exact filter kernel jitter points.
There will always be some market for the finest possible rendering, using ray tracing, global illumination, etc in a software renderer. This is analogous to the remaining market for vector supercomputers. For some applications, it is still the right thing if you can afford it. The bulk of the frames will migrate to the cheaper platforms.
Note that this doesn't mean that technical directors at the film studios will have to learn a new language -- there will be translators that will go from existing langauges. Instead of sending their RIB code to the renderfarm, you will send it to a program that decomposes it for hardware acceleration. They will return image files just like everyone is used to.
Multi chip and multi card solutions are also coming, meaning that you will be able to fit more frame rendering power in a single tower case than Pixar's entire rendering farm. Next year.
I had originally estimated that it would take a few years for the tools to mature to the point that they would actually be used in production work, but some companies have done some very smart things, and I expect that production frames will be rendered on PC graphics cards before the end of next year. It will be for TV first, but it will show up in film eventually.
John Carmack
While 3D hardware cards do a fine job of rendering with various textures, lighting,etc., they still in no match the subtle effects that are available in software renderers. The wonderful freeware renderer POVRAY knows or simulates about incidence-of-refraction, all sorts of shadows, media such as fog and fire and so on. Plus the ability to anti-alias /jitter enables very high resolution images.
Check out http://www.irtc.org(mostly pov images) for what a skilled "amateur" artist can accomplish.
Cel animation has been around for a long, long, time. Both it and movies are still popular.
The motion picture has not replaced the stage.
The television has not replaced film.
The record has not replaced concerts.
In fact, I don't know of any new artistic form that has replaced another. Computer generated characters are different from live actors, and always will be.
-twb
As it's been stated, the convergence of real-time & off-line rendering is not too far off. As someone who's been working with off-line renderers for a number of years (cut my 3D teeth on an Intelligent Light system years ago), it's inevitable to see software features make their way onto on hardware. If you look back 10 years & recall what real-time rendering looked like & look it it today (John's DOOM III engine is a nice example), it looks obvious that the quality will reach similar levels to today's "film-quality" visuals soon enough.
That said, this is where machinima shows up. Machinima is defined as " filmmaking within in a real-time 3D virtual environment ". To the extent that most of this discussion is hardware render-bashing, machinima is not just about real-time animation (although that is a component), but also about how it allows for more flexibility in the production & post-production process.
To break it down:Scenes are "shot" in real-time, much like an actual film, recording in a data-file format (rather than lofty bitmaps). Good & bad takes are logged for editing in post.
In the post-production process, editing is also done using the real-time engine, using the data files to edit. In here, everything can be changed, tweaked, added or deleted - camera placement, models, animations, event triggers, backgrounds, attributes, etc. - editing only the data file for the real-time engine to read.
Scenes are edited with music/sfx for output to screen or recording device - again, because of its resolution-independance a number of formats can be supported with the same source (low-res video streams to high-end video).
So, machinima is not only about real-time animation, but about filmmaking within a real-time virtual environment (which includes animated elements).
And why is that it's not more popular? I think the responses on this board are indictive of that. No one seems to know enough of it & what it offers.
To that point, we are doing our best to give & get more visibility. My former group, The ILL Clan, is one of the few award-winning teams to use machinima for production. Our last machinima film, Hardly Workin', was produced using id Software's Quake II. It went on to take both Best Experimental & Best of SHO in Showtime Network's Alternative Media Festival in 2001. It also won a number of other awards in various festivals It was also the focus of a number of broadcast & periodical pieces (CNN, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out NY, etc.).
So the word is starting to get around. In a few weeks, the first annual Machinima festival will be held as well as certain other events to help forward machinima as a new medium.
Now, onto improvised animation. Our machinima films use dialogue that is entirely improvised. Now, we didnt film while improvising the dialogue (not in the last two films at least), but we did record the prior to filming & filmed the action to the improvised dialogue (similar to animation - but filming in real-time). We have, however, recorded improvised pieces (which use improvised animation to a degree) while filming and see it's promise as a production method - allowing a certain amount of human performance into the piece.
So, as I step off the soapbox, I realize I'm not about to shift the thoughts of the naysayers. but at least allow a few to ponder machinima's capabilities & approach.
Thanks,
Paul "ILL Robinson" Marino
We're doing it already. It's called actors. They should've gotten a clue and shot Final Fantasy with the actual actors they were paying for, instead of buying expensive voices, and using some nameless schmuck to generate an insipid, generic, motion catpure file. It sure would have cost them a whole lot less.
On the other hand, if you don't have decent script, dialogue, and direction (ie, ATOTC), even with the best of digital and a cast of good actors you might as well save your money and go home...
Anyone know of research into modeled voice synthesis? I don't mean wavetables and phoneme - I mean physics modeling of the windpipe/vocal cords/chest/nasal interactions that determin voice tone and inflection. Code up an engine to do this realtime, which you could train to take inflectual cues from a reference voice, and you could have voice impersonations, just as they've proposed to graft a digital makeover onto actors. Or you could apply this technology to games, and make a killing...
They'll never replace the current solution with a solution running on proprietary hardware whose specs are closed source. Why should they anyhow?
There's a "law" proposed by computer graphics pioneer James Blinn (the inventor of stuff like Blinn-shading and if I remember correctly, bump-mapping). Blinn's law states that rendering time is constant - throw more computing power at artists and they will swollow it up by adding more stuff and better quality rendering techniques.
:)
So ILM an Co will probably always have a rendering fram taking at least a few minutes per frame to do the job. Relatime hardware-accelerated programmable shaders will still have use at effects houses for realtime previewing though. Cg and other high-lever realtime shader languages will help bring that technology closer to the artists.
OK, so let's say a pc with a GeForceXXX can actually do all the operations needed for a big effects house's rendering pipeline - only that it doesn't run anywhere near "realtime" speed... That piece of hardware should certeinly be faster than a general purpose CPU - couldn't you just cluster a bunch of pcs with such gfx cards? Possibly. I doesn't seems as if it is going all that über-great for Advanced Rendering Technology (www.art-render.com) though - they make ray tracing acceleration hardware that accepts Renderman files. Seems to be a great idea to me, but I haven't seen much of it being used at big effects houses... But check it out, it's really neat!
Regards / ushac
The art form mentioned has nothing to do with live performance and motion capture.
Real-time 3d Animation as an art form not done?! Bupkis!
LONG LIVE STUNT ISLAND. You'll have to google to even begin to understand the sheer eliteness that was the Disney Interactive DOS-based program STUNT ISLAND circa 1993 or so, a game with a filmmaking feature, the original intent of which was to edit films of yourself playing the game. Soon, it became a flat-out low-end easy-to-use 3d engine (mostly polygon based but had sprite support w/limited 2d mapping) that people used to design their own films, complete with invisible triggers, audio importing features, and multi-camera support with object tracking. It ruled.
Anyway, if you weren't there, you just don't know. Those were the days.
-barkode
great news
ART produce RenderDrive, a network rendering appliance, and PCI render processing card to run in your MAX/Maya workstation. Their whole business is render-optimized processing.
Anyone have any experience with these? Is this middleground this thread's looking for - high quality, quick and (relatively) cheap - between render farms and GPUs? Are GPUs a better price/utility tradeoff?
(I attended a lecture by the founder of ART a few years ago - their technology looked staggeringly impressive back then.)
Having never bothered to learn Maya or ever even given the opportunity to try Renderman, I can't really comment, but Mental Ray for 3D Studio MAX on the other hand takes ages to get anything rendered if there's a decent amount of complexity. The results, however, are nothing short of believable. If Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within looked anything like Dungeon Siege, I don't think anyone would have gone to see it. At the moment, I haven't seen even an attempt to get ray-traced reflections, let alone radiosity/secondary illumination. These two things are just an example of what is required in order to get a decent looking render, and even on simple scenes at 640x480 they can push render-times up past one hour per frame... no GPU is currently capable of approaching this, and it'll be a few years yet before anything does. And even then, that's just simple scenes covered - what if we want to try to render Aki's dreams in real-time? The cost of the technology would be ten times the already enormous budget for a CG film. If render-farms can't do it in anything approaching real-time, I don't really think that GPU's stand a chance yet.
Well i know it isnt exactly movie-making, but for those of us who have seen a live visualisation at a rave being nicely synced to the music with some images of the crowd overlayed will know that there is some damn good improv graphics ppl right in front of them.
I suppose I must be misunderstanding this, because to me this is totally backwards.
I don't think most people have an excess of time nor resources to spend on rendering, even with a renderfarm. If anything, the colossal amount of time/resources to invest in the rendering process is a reason for good planning ahead of time. If something turns out wrong, post-production may not always be able to fix the problem satisfactorily, and the scene may need to be re-rendered.
On the other hand, with realtime rendering, a mistake is not so costly, so good planning ahead of time is not as important.
And there's no reason the processes have to be mutually exclusive. People can use realtime rendering for early drafts of a film and use offline, higher quality rendering for the final version.
This has been debated at SIGGRAPH the past couple years. The game boards, e.g. Nvidia/Geoforce do not provide full feature rendering. For example movie makers prefer 48 bit full color, but the game boards or only 8-16 bit indirect color.
The new announcement from 3Dlabs - http://www.3dlabs.com/product/wildcatvp/index.htm
talks about a new grapics hardware architecture that seems to be programmable. A step towards enabling Renderman-class shaders to be accelerated in hardware?