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Visual Effects Oscar Shortlist
nurble writes "The short list of films being considered for a best visual effects Oscar was released today. The biggest news is that the final two installments of the Matrix trilogy were snubbed in favor of Universal Studios' "The Hulk," New Line Cinema's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," 20th Century Fox's "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," Universal's "Peter Pan," Buena Vista Pictures' "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," Warner Bros. Pictures' "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" and Fox's "X2". Finalists will be announced following the effects "bake-off" on January 21st."
Anyways, I think it's cool they nominated a movie whose visual effects were subtle but convincing.
19th century New York was recreated on the lot of Cinecitta studios in Rome. When George Lucas visited the massive set, he reportedly turned to Scorsese and said that sets like that can be done with computers now.
When I saw TPM and AOTC, I thought the effects were really cool and impressive, but not 'realistic.' They looked too perfect. I think if Scorsese had seen ROTK in 2002, he might have decided to use computers for the sets. Peter Jackson has definitely raised the bar.
I was in geek heaven during the whole movie. I saw things in Return of the King I have never seen in a movie before. The rich story blends perfectly with the FX to make them almost real. Even with all the bloopers, it's believable (I didn't notice them). I don't think that anyone will come close to the quality that is Return of the King for ten years. They might get better tech running the show, but nothing like the sheer wonder between the cast, story, crew and director in RotK.
Don't forget Titanic :P
And yeah, I think Matrix 2 or 3 deserved a nomination. I mean, what on Earth is Pirates of the Caribbean doing in that list? The CGI skeletons were just grotesquely bad. The highway fight in Matrix: Reloaded, on the other hand, was one of the coolest things ever. Sure, the movie was dull, but that's not what the visual effects category is concerned with.
I just watched "Reloaded" on DVD and was appalled by how obvious the CGI was in the big "army of Smith" fight scene. From all the cool "bullet time" photography and Hong Kong wire action we shifted to Street Fighter 6. It was a great looking video game, but it was still painfully obvious when they switched over. It's one thing for distant battle scene but when you are "close" enough to see facial expression, or lack thereof, it's just not cutting it. The faces were smoothed over and static.
Morpheus addressing Zion early on didn't convince either. It looked washed out and projected.
It probably didn't help that I just saw ROTK a few days ago on the big screen. I'm still amazed at how well that was done. There was barely a single moment of being distracted by obvious CGI even though it was far more ambitious than Reloaded. My suggestion, stay away from close-ups of human faces in CGI action sequences.
Even speech is still very tough. The only moments of CGI weakness in Gollum, who was staggeringly well done, were speaking close-ups, not action. So many muscles go into saying the letter "M" and it's a familiar look to every human (unlike leaping around on a mountain ledge).
They didn't only use Pixar's renderer, and here is a dark tale of what Pixar did to another small startup Exluna
Notice how that link goes to Nvidia? There's a reason why. Quite a few years ago, a rather genius programmer left Pixar and started up his own company to write a competing renderer called Entropy. Pixar's renderer, while very fast and the basis for many effects and animation piplines throughout the industry, was getting a bit long in the tooth. It didn't have any raytracing abilities (outside of some clever hacks), and completely lacked the global illumination abilities that were neccassary for some believable lighting models.
Why do I bring this up? Because Gollum was almost exclusively rendered on this renderer. Pixar's Renderman was not capable of doing some of the stuff they needed for that beautiful skin shader at the time they developed Gollum.
Pixar didn't take lightly to this. They launched a lawsuit against Exluna saying they were violating certain patents they held regarding some antialiasing algorithms. Never mind that the renderer was far more advanced and was a complete drop in replacement for Pixar's competing product. This was a straight up ploy to get rid of the competition.
To this day, the Exluna developers still say they did not violate those patents and that they would have won in court. However, winning in court would have destroyed the company. Instead, they sold the company to Nvidia, where they are working on some even more advanced stuff, but under the protection of a larger and well financed (and lawyer'd) company.
There are may other Renderman based renderers out there, all of varying capabilities. Pixie, while technically advanced and written by a brilliant graduate student at berkely, has a few rough edges and is missing some important features. Aqusis is progressing nicely, but doesn't have many features that I rely on. Mental Ray, while not renderman compatable, has all the features and more, but you pay for it in speed. Right now, I'm using Pixie for my tests. It's free for me, but I wouldn't trust it in production just yet. For production I would still choose Pixar's Renderman, which has since incorporated much of the lighting features available in other renderers (somewhat pushed by the demands of their clients, but mostly because they used a lot of those special lighting tools in Finding Nemo).
For more information on all available Renderman capable renderers and how to use them, I suggest visiting the Renderman Repository
Alright, back to work for me. I'm supposed to present this skin shader after new years.
Rich
I hadn't seen any other movies on the list but the matrix sequels, so I donno how the special effects were in the other movies.
forget the final award but not even a nomination for Revolutions?!?! Whoah
To my knowledge the wachowskis had to send only Revolutions for the Oscar nominations ( Yohooo the Academy has some rules/guidelines too )
May be the ppl who decide the nominations had thought that there aren't visual effects other than the super brawl at the ending.
For their benefit i'll try to list down a few
i) The opening sequence
ii) The hovercrafts and all the places they move along ( mostly tunnels )
iii) Smiths, smiths and more smiths with the oracle, seraph and sati
iv) The Dock with the APUs and whatever other structures
v) The fight with the swarms of sentinels and the diggers
vi) The surface with the earth with those huge guarding machines churning out the squiddy bombs (sry this fool doesn't know what they're called), the sentinels again, the breeding fields, neo's orange vision and the machine city
vii) the super brawl
( Note : The next poster can do all these things on his pc with maya or 3dsmax )
Flame me but I guess all these as a whole deserve atleast a nomination.
But who "really" cares for an oscar??
which finally brings us to the question that drives us
what is reality??
Back in the mid-90s, a guy named Larry Gritz wrote a RenderMan-compliant renderer called BMRT (Blue Moon Render Tools) that could do raytracing and global illumination. BMRT was made freely available (though closed source) over the internet. He was eventually hired by Pixar to work on their own RenderMan implementation called PhotoRealistic RenderMan (PRman for short). This, if memory serves, was around the the same time that Pixar was working on A Bug's Life.
Eventually, Larry Gritz left Pixar, and he and a few other people started Exluna. You see, Larry had managed to keep the copyright to BMRT while he worked at Pixar, and he intended to use BMRT (which, while producing film-quality images, was very slow and buggy) as the basis for a new, production-quality Renderman renderer called Entropy.
When it came out, Entropy got a lot of attention from VFX people. Not only did it cost less that PRman (something like $5000 per CPU for PRman vs $1700 per CPU for Entropy), it could do more. You could turn off Entropy's raytracing and global illumination if they were too slow for your liking or if you didn't need them, but the fact that they were available if you wanted/needed them (and you didn't have to do any ugly hacks to enable them) made a lot of people take a long, hard look at Entropy. Since Entropy was RenderMan-compliant, it was basically a drop-in replacement for PRman (as others have mentioned).
Throw into the mix the fact that Pixar was no longer the only major contender in the computer animated feature business. DreamWorks had done two successful computer animated features (although they used Pixar's PRman to do the rendering). BlueSky Studios was doing a computer animated feature called Ice Age, had their own proprietary renderer (CGI Studio), and unlike Pixar's PRman, it could also do raytracing and global illumination (it isn't RenderMan compliant from what I've heard, though, but that doesn't matter since CGI Studio isn't commercially available). BlueSky's renderer was also production-proven, having been used on various BlueSky projects since somewhere around 1996 (BlueSky used it to do the CG aliens in Alien: Resurrection in 1997, for example).
Facing serious competition in both the computer animated feature business and in the renderer licensing business for the first time, Pixar was probably getting nervous. So, they did the natural thing: bring out the lawyers. Since Exluna's founders were ex-Pixar employees, that gave Pixar everything they needed to file a lawsuit (albeit a shaky one) against Exluna.
The dispute, according to Pixar, was over trade secrets and a (bogus) software patent issue. I don't remember the exact details, but it was over some Pixar-held patent for a technology that Entropy didn't even use. The official response from Exluna, as posted on their website during the lawsuit, follows: