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."

Comments

They'll probably transition to it, but very slowly

[sgtsanity]

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!

So we want renderfarms in theatres?

[TibbonZero]

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..

Never Be Replaced...

[dmarien]

"...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!

Re:CGI not appropriate for the living

[DLWormwood]

As far as I'm concerned, CGI has its place. And it's not for recreating living creatures.

Even if such creatures are extinct or never existed in the first place?

I have to disagree that the arena beasts in Ep. II seemed unreal; the cat-like creature seem rather convincing to me. Also, understand that CG is only the most recent "nonliving" technology to do FX. King Kong, et al, were stop motion, and I found them more convincing than Godzilla, which was a man in a costume.

The only shortcoming of CG right now, IMNSHO, is in modeling human motion and expression. But this is only because we, as humans, have much more experience observing each other than animals, so we tend to be more discriminating. In time, we will learn enough about out physiology to model our actions convincingly up close; CG can already do so at long distance in "crowd scenes."

This is old hat, it is puppetry.

[Thagg]

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

Rustboy

[wastedbrains]

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