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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."

5 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 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

  2. 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

  3. 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