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ILM Now Capable of Realtime CGI

Posted by chrisd on from the ilm-has-a-raleigh-mann-too dept.

Sandman1971 writes "According to the Sydney Morning Herald, specialFX company ILM is now capable of doing realtime CGI, allowing actors and directors to see rough CGI immediately after a scene is filmed. Actors on the latest Star Wars film watch instant replays of their battles with CG characters. ILM CTO Cliff Plumer attributes this amazing leap to the increase in processing power and a migration from using Silicon Graphics RISC-Unix workstations to Intel-based Dell systems running Linux."

16 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Errm... by bconway · · Score: 4, Insightful

    According to the Sydney Morning Herald, specialFX company ILM is now capable of doing realtime CGI, allowing actors and directors to see rough CGI immediately after a scene is filmed.

    Wouldn't realtime by WHILE the scene is filmed?

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    1. Re:Errm... by UCRowerG · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Technically, perhaps. I think this is a great tool for directors and actors. Instead of having to wait weeks/months to incorporate CGI and see the interaction, it can be done in minutes/hours or as fast as the CGI people can splice things together. The director can give near-immediate feedback to the actor(s), which could really help the movie get done more quickly and with fewer costs in the long run. Think about it: changing the expression/pose/color on a CGI character is fairly easy. Re-filming live actors, especially with live fx, can take much longer and be more expensive (salaries for actor, director, film crew... lighting, film, makeup, fx expenses).

    2. Re:Errm... by sigep_ohio · · Score: 2, Insightful

      'Also the director is propably more concentrated on the screenplay.'

      not if your name is George Lucas. then it is all about the eye-candy

      --
      Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
    3. Re:Errm... by mrtroy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, adding the effects in "realtime" would still force you to rewind and watch it after.

      That would be like saying videotaping isn't "realtime" since you have to rewind!

      --
      [I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
    4. Re:Errm... by jeffgreenberg · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is particularly important as they aren't using film.

      WIth HD Lucas is shooting actors on Video...and now doing previsualization with the CG elements on set.

      Did Liam look in the general direction of, but not AT the eyes of the CG character? Reshoot. etc. etc. etc.

      Additionally a rough edit can be done off the video tap on set with the rough CG edit.

      Unfortuantetly this still means nothing without good acting, a good script, or alternate footage to make decisions from.

      You make a film three times.

      Once on the page, once while directing, and once in the edit. But if everthing is so storyboarded and timed down the moment that you can't have options, you can't discover anything in the edit at all.

      Oh well, at least you can see what the giant CG creature looks like

    5. Re:Errm... by UCRowerG · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Once on the page, once while directing, and once in the edit. But if everthing is so storyboarded and timed down the moment that you can't have options, you can't discover anything in the edit at all. I think this is exactly the point of this story. Whereas before, a director would have to fit the CGI to the live action already filmed, or expend a *lot* more money in bringing the actors, crew, etc. back to re-shoot the scene (several times). Now, a director can find a good "fit" for a scene almost immediately. It's like the CGI effects are almost the same as the real actors. Each can more easily react to the other.

    6. Re:Errm... by Stickster · · Score: 2, Insightful
      But if everthing is so storyboarded and timed down the moment that you can't have options, you can't discover anything in the edit at all.

      If you're George Lucas, you don't discover anything in the edit, you simply use CGI to change the actors' bodies to fit what you want. If you listen to the Episode I and II DVD commentaries, you will hear some very interesting details about how actors' positions on "set," their limbs, and even their faces were changed in post to suit Lucas' direction. It's no wonder the new Star Wars films seem so flat and lifeless -- why have a collaborative experience with an actor when you can do CG puppetry?

      I'm not a big anti-Lucas guy (his money = his prerogative), but I am a big fan of actors. I find this sort of gimmickry very off-putting and definitely detrimental to the quality of a film. It's not that you can necessarily finger it on-screen while you're experiencing the film (although the fireplace scene in Episode II is an exception), but it can't help but contribute to a sense of detachment in the actors' performances, and thus it makes their scenes stilted and somehow "off."
  2. further proof by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    that proprietary unix is dying

  3. Two Towers by alnya · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In the Fellowship of the Ring DVD, Peter jackson can clearly be seen watching golum on a monitor (low poligon, but golum none the less) performing the mo-cap Andy Serkis is performing IN REAL TIME; as it is happening (not after).

    So does this make this old news??

    I dunno, I feel the ILM have been behind the bleeding edge for sometime now...

    alnya

    1. Re:Two Towers by Sandman1971 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      *GASP* motion cpature is not the same thing as inserting a complete animated CG character out of thin air.

      As far as motion capture goes, I remember seeing a Phantom Menace special which showed exactly that. Ahmed Best in a motion capture shoot, and a rough CG of JarJar on a monitor moving along with the actor. So to those neisayers out there, this was being done way before WETA did it for LotR.

      --
      It's better to burn out than to fade away
  4. Not new.. by Lord+Grumbleduke · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Pah - Jim Henson's Creature Shop, Weta and Framestore have been doing this sort of thing long before ILM. Framestore did this for Dinotopia, Weta for Golum, and JHC for a variety of different things - all too numerous to mention here.

  5. It's the video card, not the CPU.... by Faeton · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Carmack himself (on Slashdot no less) has predicted this would come to pass, due to the increasingly feature-rich and faster video chipsets.

    SGI laughed at the unassuming threat of the video chipsets, thinking that they would never be as fast as brute force. Even Pixar thought the same. Boy, were they wrong though. You can set up a cheap-ass render farm for about $250k, taking up minimal space that can do the same job as a SGI render farm that costs a cool $2 million (Shuttle SFF PC w/ 3 gig CPU + ATI 9700). Of course, there's still the software side.

    The Nvidia's GeForceFX and ATI's Radeon 9800 both contain features that even through the marketing-hype has some real value to programmers out there. Just look at Doom 3. It will run well on some computers that are just 6 months old. Now, imagine taking 250 of them, as a Beowulf cluster!!1

  6. Re:How long til... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Quite soon. Just look at what can consumer-level GPUs produce in the real-time.

  7. Re:I agree... somewhat by sgi_admin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Good points, well made.

    As an aside, I would say that you can buy 2nd hand Octanes, phone up SGI, and they will give you a support contract - they will even check the machines over for you.

    The total cost will be a fraction of the cost of a new dual Xeon workstation.

    Again, this would be a foolish decision to apply across the board, but if you're doing the sort of effects work where the strengths of something like Octane are a bonus, it's a good solution.

    I know someone who runs an effects house who has bought dual CPU Octanes and 4 way Origin 2000 desksides for each of the animators.

    The Octane gets used for the creative work, the Origin for the render.

    They're using Maya5, and this solution cost them less than the cost of dual Xeon gfx workstations for each animator, and a render farm. A renderfarm sounds like a cool idea, but it's not just the cost of the kit (something people on /. seem to forget). It's the cost of the network infrastructure and storage to support it all. If people think SGI workstations, new, are expensive, you should check out the costs of a SAN to support the work of a renderfarm!

  8. Re:Serious Question by MrMickS · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Linux will be used on commodity x86 hardware for render farms by all effects studios, if not now in the near future. The reason for this. Bang for buck density. In order to render complex scenes you need a large render farm, the more faster units you have in the farm the better. It's cheaper to do this with x86 kit that anything else and the render software has Linux render engines written for it.

    More and more manufacturers are coming out with blade servers using x86 processors which will increase this density and likely increase the use.

    This is not saying that the studios are not running SGI kit for animation, modelling etc. Linux/x86 kit has a way to go to catch up there.

    --
    You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
  9. doesn't seem that great by dfj225 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As much as I love ILM and what they are able to do with technology and movies, this doesn't seem like that great of a thing. If all they are writing about in the article is being able to see how the film they just shot will line up with a rough animatic, then thats not that great. I'm guessing what they have is much like what Weta Digital had to make the cave troll and other stuff in Balin's Tomb. Now, I would have been shocked and surprised if they said they could render a CGI scene with full effects, shaders, and the like in real time. That will be an accomplishment. What they have now (if its really like what Weta has) is no more than a video game with input based on the positions of sensors rather than a controller.

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