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."
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
That's great... except where do you get those textures? You have to calculate them, most times frame by frame. The bleeding edge currently in CG animation is fur and hair modelling -- see Sully's fur in Monsters Inc. for an example of last year's Neat Thing. That's all sub-pixel stuff, even at 6000 x 4000 pixels resolution (70mm, not 35mm). Working out the mathematical dynamics of Sully's hair (collision, wind motion etc.) sometimes took minutes per frame.
Most top-notch cinema animation uses ray-trace in the mix of tools, especially for lighting effects, and no existing GPU can run a raytracer real-time, and especially not at 4k x 3k x 48 bpp.
The renderfarms you're talking about replacing with a 24-machine Beowolf cluster consists of four hundred or more Sun workstations, each hammering away 24/7/365. The producers have to allocate CPU time to various segments of the movie just like live-action movie producers allocate studio time or cash budgets. The directors have to cheat all the time to stay within that budget.
Your suggested system might be suitable for TV -- Max Headroom, maybe, with plastic hair and shiny suits, but not for the big screen, and not to compete in today's CG blockbuster film market.