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Article about The Lord of the Rings MASSIVE Crowd
TheOneRing.net has posted an article going indepth about LotR CGI, and specifically the rendering of extremely large crowds being done byWETA Digital. With the special edition due out soon, and TTT coming out in december, well let's just leave it at "Yay".
C'mon CmdrTaco. We need one :)
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
This ain't aHollywood film in any meaningful sense. The main Hollywood thing about it is New Line having the sense to stay the fuck out of Peter Jackson's way.
I'll see the movie.. probably several times. I'll buy the DVD.. and probably at least one collectors edition.. and probably the complete set when all the movies are out.. but I'll still copy the DVD's, play them in Linux, and burn DiVX versions so I don't risk tearing up my originals. I might even get really evil and give a copy to a friend now and then or play it in a public place without paying a licence fee.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
It's funny how the double standard works. LOTR uses heavy amounts of CG to create CG crowds, when arguably they could have filmed with extras in costumes and makeup (even just a few and replicated and composited to create a crowd), and is heralded by many, but have Lucas do the same with the Clones and many complaing about the fakeness, coldness, overkill, or some other nonesense by many others.
;-).
He can't win can he
Next up is the discussion of CG Golum vs. CG Yoda.
Not trolling, but the parent post touches on an interesting point.
/. community cheer the said production similarly? ;^)
You can use fuzzy logic to govern group-battles. By the same line of reasoning, it shoud be similarly probable to use the said engines to govern "actors" and "actresses" in pornographic productions.
I suppose it will just take some time for the price of this sort of computing to come down to the porn-budget, or for people to make porn with such high budget that they will be able to do this.
I would not be surprised if the exact same kind of setup / method is used to generate CGI pornography several years down the line.
Have to wonder, though - will the
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Who the fuck was Feanor anyway? (I know. I'm just making a point) I'm reading the Silmarillion now and I can't even recall one of his sons!
But c'mon. Where else are you going to hear Sindarin, Quenya, Dwarvish SUNG in a choir? The Lament for Gandalf, sung in Elvish? DANG!
Where else are you going to see Barad-dur or Orthanc, or Minas Tirith? Or Shadowfax, or the Argonath? Or Fangorn, or Minas Morgul, the Dead Marshes, Oliphants, Fell Beasts, Balrogs, Nazgul!
PANT PANT PANT...
Disappointing?!!? You been smoking the pipeweed?
We believe that Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema's actions are in fact hate speech. The movie is intentionally being named The Two Towers in order to capitalize on the tragedy of September 11.
Um, you don't think maybe it was named for the book written like 30 years ago?
Search first, ask questions later.
the protest site says they believe Peter Jackson
is engaging in hate speech.
the petition site has all these signatures but you temporarly can't see them because of sircam
virus....they have been saying that since last
spring.
I think you can't see them because most of the
people who have responded have actually entered
comments telling them to get a life.
Truth is they are the ones soiling the memory of Sept 11 by attempting to attatch a bogus
issue to it.
Fortuneately no one is taking them seriously
and they are being ignored.
Looking forward to seeing " The Two Towers"
Funny that, I always thought it was because nobody in his right mind would buy or read a novel of that magnitude. Granted the complete LotR pales in comparison to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, but nobody who reads that (myself included) can be considered in his right mind.
Oh cruel fate, to be thusly boned! Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee. -Bender
is that you assume, in the form of moderation points, exactly what you set out to prove.
What's wrong with PJ's LOTR? I think these are the main thing people complain about:
1. It's too fast! They left out too much stuff!
You need to keep one thing in mind: this movie is not a "book moved to the silver-screen". It's a movie adaptation of a book. Movies and books are completely different kinds of media. Movies are a visual media that can be only few hours long. Books rely on the imagination of the reader, and they can be of any length. You can spend, days, weeks, months reading a book. And because of that, the book can be full of characters and details. That's just not possible in a movie. Movie of a book WILL be different, that is a fact. They will be different for the simple reason that books and movies are completely different medias.
2. Where's Tom Bombadil?
Tom Bombadil had nothing to do with the story. He would have just made the movie longer (20 minutes?), and the movie was already as long as it could be. What would they then remove from the story in order to fit in a Bombadil-sidetrack? And I don't know about you, but Tom Bombadil would have looked stupid in the movie
3. What's the deal with Arwen/Glorfindel?
Glorfindel had no major role in the book. You could remove him, and it would not change the story one bit. Arwens character needed to be widened, so that viewers would have at least one female character. And besides, had they handled Arwen like they did in the books, they would have mentioned Arwen in one half-sentence, and then, in the third part, Aragorn suddenly marries her! Viewers would have been too confused.
4. But the movie ends differently than the book does!
Yes it does. For the simple reason that the books ending would not work in a movie. Movie needs a climax in the end. In the book, there was no real climax. It was spread between the end of first book and the beginning of the second. That would not work in a movie.
5. But they changes Saruman as well!
Read my first point. Saruman was a complex character. They needed to simplify him for the movie. a few hours long movie simply doesn't have the luxury a book does when it comes to complex characters.
Seriously: you seem like one of those fanatics who think that "any change to the book = bad!". They needed to make changes to the book in order to make a movie out of it. Had they not made any changes, each episode would be about 20 hours long, cost about one billion each and be a commercial flop.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Actually dude, that article was about a Bayesian filter. That means it uses a probabilistic reasoning system called a Bayesian Network, or uses the "naive" Bayes rule to reason about the data.
In fact it uses *real* mathematical probability about things that are knowable(if you knew what things they were, you wouldn't need him to write the filter) and some magic called
Conditional Independance
to create the Bayesian Network. Now thanks to our assumptions, conditional independance, about the things we know probabilities of, the resulting Bayesian Network is in fact a representation of the universe of possible emails. Conditional Independance is a short cut for certain problems when the "full joint distribution" is too big to deal with. (Yeah i said joint, but no it wasn't regarding the dizank)
Fuzzy logic, like you said, and the parent said, and as I said in response to the grand parent, doesn't use probabilities. But your Bayesian example does indeed use *real* *mathematical* probabilities.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
Autonomous computer animation is the future. Unfortunately, while it is intended to lower the amount of work required to achieve a scene, it's sure to be built up to a level of detail requiring the same armies of hundreds of animators that previous computer animation required.
ILM has done this (not Lucas AFAIK) in The Mummy Returns, and it looked terrible. They shot about 50 guys on horseback and cloned them into something like 8000. They also did CGI versions of the Anubis warrior swarms, they weren't a helluva lot better, but they were more consistent and beliveable.
[WETA] is heralded by many, but have Lucas do the same with the Clones and many complaing about the fakeness, coldness, overkill, or some other nonesense by many others.
George Lucas's philosophy is more about the fact that he CAN do something, not whether he SHOULD. He hates to shoot film because he cannot change it as easily as a digital image. He hates the traditional production process because he was always an editor first, a director second, third, fourth, hell, maybe even never. He lives in the editing room where the film is assembled, and if he wants to change something now he can call it up on the computer and just drop it in. He can change his mind 24 times a second and never have to commit to an idea or an image. For Christ's sake, he shoots with actors for a couple of hours, gets 4 or 5 takes, then has some CG plebe compositor spend days cutting and pasting one take's eyes over another take's nose over yet a third take's mouth, instead of SHOOTING ANOTHER TAKE and DIRECTING the actor to do it the way he wants! And the actors know this; it's no wonder the performances blow, they're not motivated to do better because they know George will just cut their heads off and paste it onto another body. The same applies to the fully CG characters; CG Yoda can jump and spin and slash with the best of them, but he can't evoke emotion because Frank Oz wasn't there on the set to provide it, and the other actors don't get the benefit of that feedback. Look back at Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi; for all their faults, they felt a lot more real because George & Co. had to do it for real, the old-fashioned way, and make a decision and stick with it.
Peter Jackson, OTOH, will do another take, or 10, to get the right performance from a real actor. He'll construct a (partial) set for them to perform in, instead of standing around a blue stage with blue cubes substituting for furniture. He'll have a stand-in or the real voice actor on stage to do the scene instead of having the actors look at a ping pong ball on a stick. He will push technology to deliver new images, but he will stick with an image that works and not change it because he can. He doesn't complain about shooting film or working on a year-long shooting schedule, or make elaborate, bullshit excuses for not doing something the old way, or self-aggrandizing statements about how he's changing the entire industry for the better. He has 100 times the respect for the art of filmmaking that George Lucas has, and won't abandon a perfectly good tradition simply because there's a new way to do something.
And think about this: by the time Episode III is done (2 years after LOTR is), the two trilogies will have cost about the same, but LOTR will also have a real STORY with real CHARACTERS played by real, talented, motivated ACTORS, something that CGI cannot deliver. Nor, it seems, George Lucas.
He can't win can he ;-).
Dunno, he seems to have the most toys, maybe they've been lying to us about that. :-)
And personally, I would've loved it if David Lean were still alive; he would've hired 100,000 extras in costumes and filmed it FOR REAL! :)
A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's an erection for?
Ummmm, stage actors have an audience to react to. You have heard of the concept of an "audience" right? It's not the same as a camera crew either, and yes, I've done both stage and film/video work, I know what I'm talking about.
And when you have a good actor, like, say, Bob Hoskins, and you have a good director like, say, Robert Zemeckis, you end up with a movie like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, where the actor is able to convince EVERYONE that the characters he's supposed to interact with are actually there. I've seen several stage actors perform who were also that compelling, that gripping, on stage, without any special effects or even props for that matter. Stage acting has always been better and more convincing than film acting. I only wish George Lucas would realize this and hire more stage actors and actually let them act.
A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's an erection for?