Slashdot Mirror
Shrek 2 How-To
mblase writes "Animation World Magazine has an article online about some of the technical hurdles Dreamworks Animation had to overcome in making "Shrek 2". With November's "The Incredibles" being Pixar's first movie to feature an all-human (er, superhuman) cast of characters, it's interesting to watch how these two studios push each other to the limits of computer animation."
Mod this as a troll if you want, but I really wanted to like Shrek and it just couldn't compare to anything else on the market.
For me, the best aspect of the Shrek 2 experience was the movie itself, not the locations, props or actors necessarily, but that whole experience. The graphics were just right, right enough to allow the experience of the film to come to life. That's what has been missing for so many years in animation. And that's why the tech is important so that the audience can see past the technology and get the point of the picture. I can see oscars for Shrek 2 and more than a few, methinks. It was splendid.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
As part-time animator myself, I think that is probably some of the better compliments you can receive. If it's real enough to get passed that you are watching an animated film and bring your characters to life, mission accomplished!
Hmmm.
Animation is not necessarily at its greatest when it is the most like the real world. Yes, Pixar did quite well with the modeling hair in the wind, etc., but that doesn't necessarily make for a better animated movie. It has to be a good mix of realism and fantasy.
Dreamworks and Pixar have both done very well with their CG movies, but they both have different styles and both have their own animation engines. They deserve a pat on the back for all their hard work.
As an animation major (and a slashdotting girl) I enjoy almost all "cartoons" but I don't think the final product of CG should be ultimate realism. I like the direction Dreamworks and Pixar are taking - I call it "realism with style". If we wanted ultimate realism we could just film people, but it's the style, characters and the ability of the viewer to suspend belief that makes an animation special.
Dreamworks and Pixar have both done excellent animations - if they're trying to be competitive I think it's all the better for us - we get twice as many good films. All I can say is that both of these companies are much better at creating sequels than Disney is.
As 3D begins to produce photo-realistic humans at low cost, I expect large-scale 3D pornography to hit the market. Photo-realistic tentacle porn anyone? Impossibly large wangs and breasts? You know this stuff would be a huge hit, IF it looks good enough.
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
Now. Consider the fact that you have millions of dollars at your disposal, some absolutely brilliant CG engineers, and a very clear set of needs and goals. Would you rather take an existing renderer, analyze it, tweak it, adapt it, hunt down bugs, et cetera--or would you rather simply build a system from the ground up? After all, you're going to need to be able to tweak things throughout, and if something goes wrong with the software, you could save days of debugging by using an internally-built system...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
They re-wrote an entire renderer? Granted, Shrek is still behind some of Pixar's work but i've got to ask... Why not use some of the other renderer tools out there?
Because PDI is a mostly propietary place. They wrote their own renderer years before there was anything commercially available. As such they have an R&D team continually updating their infrastructure. Interestingly enough I saw a couple of PDI guys at the SIGGRAPH photon mapping course by Henrik Wann Jensen a few years ago in San Antonio.
The upside is you don't have to wait for a commercial vendor to get those new features. They control their own destiny rendering wise. Witness for example how long it took Pixar to make Depp Shadow maps available in PRMan (something like 2 years) even though they had published a SIGGRAPH paper and were using it internally (for Monsters Inc.). Some clients were a bit upset about that.
Dan Wexler used to write their renderer (he is now at Nvidia with Larry Gritz and those crazy Entropy guys). He has some interesting statistics on the first film:
Renderfarm Statistics
Shrek Rendering Statistics
Alrighty, I admit it -- I went to Shrek 2 for the story and experience...not because I wanted to gawk at purtty graphics. Isn't that what movies are about?
Let's face it, I saw Titanic, all the Jurassic Park movies, the Matrix sequels, and the Star Wars prequels for the effects. Not expecting a story...just give me the oohs and aahs and wows and I'll concede the plot. With Shrek, the animation was secondary to the writing. I mean even Banderas made for a good cat!
Just making a point that pretty isn't always the best thing to have. If nothing else, the moral and plot of both Shrek movies tells us that.
Ok, there are a level were animation could be so worse that you note the bad animation instead of the movie itself, and a level when is so good that you lose track of the movie and watch the animation (i.e. when Donkey now as a horse moves its head and you notice the hair animation).
But the middle point, where what you are actually watching the movie and don't letting the animation distract you because is too bad or too good, should be the best approach (er, unless is desired to go at least once more to see the movie to watch the animation or certain effects more in detail, of course)
Granted they've only ever done 2 minute long CG intros for their games, but Blizzards animation quality is almost unparraleled when it comes to game cinematics. If they ever got together and made an epic braveheart/gladiator style movie, entirely CG I think they could easily rival Pixar or Dreamworks. Not to mention bring the field to a more mature audience (even though everyone at college i know has seen shrek 2, monsters inc, finding nemo, etc.
Of course, that's just my own personal dream...
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
While I agree with you, I think that a realistic looking CG movie is still a ways off. I saw the FF movie, and though the details of the face, etc., were pretty realistic, the movements were just awkward enough to prevent me from believing that this could have been, in some way, real.
Audiences are very forgiving of a make-believe world in terms of character movement, but in a "real" movie (a world populated by humans in real human environments), any amount of unintential stilted movement is suspect, and I think keeps you from totally believing that this is real, not memorex.
I'm not arguing that they shouldn't try and make a decent movie that uses CG human characters; it is, after all, all about the story. But if one of the goals of your movie is to make it seem 100% "real" (filmed, not CG), then you will have to spend a *lot* of time making sure that they walk like the real thing.
I propose to anyone interested the "iPod Dance Test", named after those commercials that show profiled people dancing, listening to their iPods. Can you create a clip that reproduces that commercial, using only CG, *exactly*. What I mean by exactly is that it would look completely indistinguishable from the real thing. In theory, it's easy...you don't have to concentrate on what the character looks like. You only have to make him or her dance. I think doing even that would be very very very hard and make it absolutely realistic.
PDI/DreamWorks vs Pixar, Ford vs Chevy, Pepsi vs Coke. Come on guys, understand that these are companies that make products with the intention you will buy them. That "customer faithfulness" rings silly in my mind, given that after all, we are the consumers and in general have little interest on the well being of those companies.
For the record, the cg industry is a small one, and there's a lot of coming and going of people. I've been at PDI for more than seven years, and thus know tons of people working here who used to be at Pixar, and tons of people at Pixar who worked here and are my friends, and the same could be said about any of the other major cg companies. There's no inherent difference between the talent of people in one place or the other.
j
In a film, however, there's usually a director, an art director and a visual effects supervisor telling you to please move that splash a bit to the right, and make it happen three frames later. Oh, and sometimes there's also a story that those people are trying to tell, and your water sim is one of the tools they are using, so the *need* that kind of control.
Then there's rendering. Is there any foam? Splashes? Do things around the water get wet? Can you make that foam not *darker*, but *less bright* please? (this is a real comment I got during dailies in Shrek 2).
So, simulating water is easy. Simulating water making it do what you want, and rendering it so it looks the way you want it to look is extremely hard.
j
I went to the film to see the story. In the first few minutes I was amazed to see how much they've come along in the animation. The rain and water scenes where incredible. There was a bit of flash in there, where you can tell a toss of hair, etc was done just to play with animating it, but overall the animation was spectacular. Story wise, I found that it wasn't a good as the first movie, but entertaining enough with some good laughs along the way. What I think the discussion of Pixar vs. Dreamworks misses on is just looking at how much they both improve from film to film. In just a few years they've development new ways to animate the films that make the previous ones seem almost silly. For a techinical discussion, I think it would be more interesting to look at what they have done to improve the animation than whose is better. There is nothing like a good competition to keep this moving too. Shrek 2 shows that Dreamworks is keeping up and making sure to push Pixar. I wonder what we'll get to see when Shrek 3 or the next Pixar after incredibles comes out. Remember, this are animated movies. Realism isn't the goal, hell, Shrek stars an Ogre, a talking Donkey, Cat, and Gingerbread Man amoung others.
Well, I think there's going to be a Pixar vs. DreamWorks debate raging for a long time. I've seen all of Pixar's movies and most of the DreamWorks flicks that were computer animated, including Shrek I and II. I tend to try to stay out of these types of debates but I do have some opinions on this one.
First off, I've felt that DreamWorks has been unfairly riding Pixar's coattails for a long time now.
They find out about Bug's Life, they release Antz.
They find out about Monsters Inc., they release Shrek.
They find out about Finding Nemo, they start work on Shark Tale.
(I would expect the announcement of a super hero flick really soon now.)
It always came across to me as being a dirty practice meant to intentionally cause confusion in the marketplace and get people to see their movies thinking there was a connection to the Pixar films.
Secondly, I feel DreamWorks' stories are lacking - particularly when it comes to Shrek I and II. To me, watching Shrek was like watching the best of Saturday Night Live. There were lots of short parody bits, many targetting Disney movies or traditional fairy tales - most targetting current pop culture. I think that between these bits and the modern pop music, these movies are not going to stand the test of time well. In my mind, they were well worth the ticket price at the theatre but I wouldn't dream of purchasing them on DVD.
As for the quality of the animation, I think anybody would be hard pressed to say that Shrek I and II weren't extremely well done. They were certainly cinema quality productions. I still think Pixar does it better though. There's something about the movement of the characters in Pixar movies that is more emotionally expressive and natural looking. It's just a tad more polished and artistic than the DreamWorks stuff.
Well, it would be very easy to provide you with that, and very hard for you to prove that I didn't actually render it ;)
No Comment.
It would also be cool if Ferrari gave away free cars, and everyone had all the food to eat that they wanted... free of charge! And everyone was given a MOON PONY!!!
Oh, yes, what a wonderful world that would be!
I felt that Shrek 2 wasn't as good as the 1st one, in script, and in style. Never mind about animation, that's not very important.
Many things in Shrek 2 have the potential to be great, but the ideas weren't fully realised. I loved how the environment in the original shrek brought the world of story books and fantasy stories alive. In Shrek 2, the only thing that captured my imagination was the fairy god mom's factory. Everything else is not as detailed / well developed as I would like.
I gave up on Dreamworks' animation after viewing Antz vs. Bug's Life. Two totally different attitudes towards what cartoons should be. DW has always been a Pixar wannabee. Small Soldiers vs. Toy Story. Shrek vs. Monsters, Inc. Instead of playing to the "child" in everyone, they feel it's necessary to insert "adult" asides to keep the parents amused.
Slight topic drift: If you've seen the extra making-of material on the LotR extended disks vs. the new Star Wars, I think it reflects a bit on this. You can feel the love behind Jackson's film; Lucus just comes off as a PHB.
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
Happens all the time.
Armageddon = Deep Impact = that terrible NBC movie about meteorites.
Volcano = Dante's Peak.
Antz = Bug's Life.
Mission To Mars = Red Planet.
Lake Placid = Anaconda.
That ABC movie about Jessica Lynch = That NBC movie about Jessica Lynch.
o There is only a finite amount of food available at any one time.
o A computer program however, is infinitely replicable by the magic device known as a computer.
Personally, I'm waiting for the world where everyone can recognise the difference between the physical and the ephemeral and didn't resort to dumb analogies to further their ridiculous agenda.
And good job to all those who modded somebody insightful for comparing giving away free cars to giving away software and ideas.
Oh yeah, some of this post is tongue and cheek... better make that clear for those mod point kiddies out there. :)
... when the movie's water/liguid effects look like randomly changing goo. Gosh that was horrible, the human characters are expressionless and are reminiscent of what you would see on a saturday morning (3D) animated show.
...
... a young girl, dares to defy the ancestral beliefs. Her name is "Kaena".
And let's not talk about the generic dialog in the trailer
"To free her people
LOL!
- sigs are for wimps.
Jeffrey Katzenburg was one of the Disney executives who heard the original "Bugs Life" pitch from John Lasseter. Then he leaves Disney to become the 'K' in Dreamworks SKG. Then Dreamworks starts their own CG ant movie.