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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.
That's incredible.
Is he artificial too?
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.
If you agree with any of this, feel free to repost it in the future.
* If you expect companies to follow the copyright of the GPL, you should support the RIAA going after infringers of its copyright. If not, you're a hypocrite.
* There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company being upset that its product is being pirated freely over online networks. A recent Slashdot poll showed that the majority of Slashotters are unemployed or are students ("academics"), which explains a lot. Try getting a real job sometime and see what it feels like when your work is everywhere, and you start worrying that your days are numbered. Does John Carmack want you to "sample" his new game via the "free advertising" happening on eMule?
* Artists "deserve their money" only in cases in which the RIAA is the bad guy. When it's a P2P article, suddenly ripping artists off and not paying for their music via piracy is magically different from some record companies not paying royalties. This mindset is supposed to make sense.
* At the 2004 WinHEC, Allchin demonstrated an alpha version of Longhorn that played six high-resolution videos at the same time while playing Quake III in the background. An equivalent XP machine couldn't play more than four videos. Meanwhile, I can't even get xmms to play without skipping, and windows to drag without visual tearing! That's because KDE and GNOME are hacks to emulate a desktop on top of the crufty XFree86 architecture that people won't let die (the majority Linux users absolutely fear change...there are rational ones, but they are outnumbered by zealots).
* VA Linux-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk
about.
* Speaking of VA Linux--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with VA Linux, it's okay.
* Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.
* Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.
* The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.
* Linux rules the desktop, when in reality: Windows = 91%; Mac = 4%; Linux = 1%
* Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember The Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off as though he was a stalking victim, which made it a
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?
Hmmm.
maybe they need to donate one of those powerful animation clusters to this website..
slashdotted already.
slashdotted already, you know.. for a group of people that never RTFA we sure do a lot of damage.
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
Obviously employed by Pixar.
/.'ed already? How did that happen?
...seems about as animated as Charles Bronson's facial muscles.
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.
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."
It's too bad SquareSoft screwed up so badly with the Final Fantasy movie. I'd have liked to see them be the third big player in this field. Their visuals were absolutely stunning, but the plot left a lot to be desired.
Pixar and Dreamworks, as far as I know, haven't tried to do a non-cartoony movie, but even with knowing how good their teachnology and artists are, it would be quite hard to compare to the level of detail the FF movie had.
Am I alone in wanting a completely computer-generated movie that looks real instead of cartoony and actually has a good plot?
If you agree with any of this, feel free to repost it in the future.
Song of the piracy apologist:
(1) I don't personally believe in copying CDs illegally-- but I think we should avoid using unkind words like "piracy" to describe those that do -- instead, we should describe it as an "infringement", much like a parking infringement.
(2) I don't believe in the record companies emotively abusing the word "theft," but I do believe in emotively abusing words like "information," "sharing," and "Copyright Enforcement Militia."
(3) I believe that piracy is driven by "overpriced CDs" even though CDs have dropped in price over the years.
(4) I believe that piracy is driven by overly long copyright duration, even though most pirated works are recent releases.
(5) I believe that illegitimately downloading music is giving the author "free advertising". I don't buy any of the music I download, of course--but lots of other people probably do.
(6) I believe that ripping off the artists is wrong. The record companies always rip off the artists. Artists support P2P, except the ones that don't (like Metallica), and they don't agree with me, hence they're greedy or their opinion doesn't count or something.
(7) I believe that selling CDs is not a business model, but giving away things for free on the internet is.
(8) I believe that artists should be compensated for their work -- preferably by someone else. I mean, they can sell concert tickets (which someone else can buy) or sell t-shirts (to someone else) or something. As long as someone else subsidises my free ride, I'm coooooool with it.
(9) I believe in capitalism but only support music business models which involve giving away the fruits of ones labor for free.
(10) I believe that copying someone elses music, and redistributing it to my 1,000,000 "best friends" on the internet is sharing. Music is made for sharing. It's my right.
(11) I believe that record companies cracking down on piracy is "greed", but a mob demanding free entertainment is not.
(12) I believe that it's not really "piracy" unless you charge money for it, because, receiving money is wrong, but taking a free ride is fine.
(13) I believe that disallowing copying and redistributing music over Napster is the same as humming my favourite song in public. Because when I hum my favourite song in public, everyone likes it so much that they run home, get out their tape recorders and once they've got a recording of it, they aren't interested in hearing the original any more.
(14) I believe that when illegal behaviour destroys a business, it's "free enterprise at work".
(15) I believe piracy is simply "free advertising." Even though that's what radio is, but with the legal permission of the copyright holder. Basically, what I really want is to be able to choose the songs I want, listen to them whenever I want, but I don't want to have to pay for it. Essentially, I want the whole thing for free with no strings attached.
(16) I believe artists "deserve their money" only in cases in which the RIAA is the bad guy. But in piracy situations, I'm fully justified in ripping them off.
What I find amusing is that the pirates seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between creative activity and brainless copying.
Since a lot of the people here are GPL/OSS advocates: the "OSS way" applied to this domain is to learn how to play an instrument. Or how to sing or whatever. Then get together with a bunch of other people who can also play music, and make some noise.
One of the unfortunate things that has happened to the OSS movement is that a lot of the loudmouth advocates for it don't understand what it's really about. They view it primarily as a means to get free stuff, and then they turn their eyes from the free stuff to the non-free stuff and think to themselves "maybe I'm entitled to get that one for free too". The noble ideals of grass roots participation in the creative
Google Cache of the article
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
As CG gets more and more realistic, I think we'll start to see a different kind of movie star, one who can do excellent voice work instead of just looking daring/pretty/hunky/etc.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
There are several CGI movies comming out of France that look to blow away anything done in the US to date.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If you happened to be cruising the parking lot at PDI/Dreamworks' Northern California studio during production of Shrek 2, you might have seen something that looked like a stunt for the David Letterman show -- containers of water being dropped from ladders, with several people scrutinizing the splashes when the containers hit the ground.
"We always shoot live-action references for ourselves," says Shrek 2 visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg about PDI's approach. "On Halloween, we had cauldrons in the cafeteria with dry ice that gave off a smoky effect, and our effects guys came by and said 'Oh that's perfect!' They shot footage and used that as reference, too." So audiences at Shrek 2 can expect to see more realistic-looking effects than they've seen before in the computer-animated ogre's stylized world.
It's a high standard to exceed, since the original Shrek won the animated feature film Oscar for 2001, the first winner in that category. Bielenberg, who earned a BAFTA nomination for the visual effects in Shrek, garnered wide attention for breakthrough work in several areas, including an innovative approach for animating fire. For this sequel, Bielenberg says, "We've raised the bar again. The overall level of complexity is two or three times the complexity of the first Shrek. For instance, in the forest scene where Donkey and Shrek first met there was a certain simplicity to the environment. There was moss-like grass and not much ground cover. This time, in a similar forest scene, the amount of detail that we have in the environment is much richer. There are vines and flowers and grass, and the leaves on the trees flutter in the wind. It's not photoreal, but the richness has increased."
For this new film, Shrek co-director Andrew Adamson paired with co-directors Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon, and the voice actors from the original are back in force. Newlyweds Shrek and Fiona (Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz) are once again accompanied by sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy). They're also joined by some major new characters -- the tabby cat Puss-in-Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) and a quartet of humans, including King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews) as Fiona's royal parents.
Up Close and Personal
When it came to the look of the characters, reports Bielenberg, "There were a lot of refinements done 'under the hood.' We've added more muscles, especially in the necks of the characters -- for example, the male characters have Adam's apples now." Using the sci-tech Academy Award-winning facial animation system developed by longtime PDI animator Dick Walsh, the studio was also able to achieve what Bielenberg calls "amazing close-ups where the acting shows through. You're no longer looking at an animated character -- you're really looking at an actor."
Overall, asserts Bielenberg, "We did very little to change Shrek's and Fiona's appearance, so they're very consistent with the first film. We've done a little bit of upgrading, adding a little bit more subsurface scattering on their skin, but not a lot, actually. We did use subsurface scattering to soften the area around Shrek's nose, and also with his ears so that when they're backlit the light shows through. And we've redone Fiona's hair a little bit, but I don't think it will be an apparent change."
"The bulk of visual development time was spent working on the new human characters and developing new technology for modeling and moving hair," says Bielenberg. "Modeling hair is a real challenge because you're not dealing with something that's hard and easily definable. You have tens of thousands of hairs that you're trying to move around. We came up with new programs and techniques for modeling hair." Compared to PDI's previous method of modeling a "clump volumes" of hair, the new approach enables PDI to interpolate the movement of neighboring hairs on a much finer level. As a result, the characters' hair parted in more convincing ways and the haircuts showed off some better-looking bang
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
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.
For a similar story about Pixars The Impossibles, check out the june edition if Wired, they should also have it on thier site, www.Wired.com
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I liked both Shrek movies for what they were... funny movies that relied on a lot of good sight gags.
Beyond that, Pixar is absolutely head and shoulders above DreamWorks in storyline, casting, (which is an underappreciated aspect of their films imo) and digital effects. Their movies are significantly more complete, better voiced, and more visually stunning than anything else, hands down.
Just imagine if for once we all decided to RTFA. Nothing could stand in our path.
Evolution or ID?
"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..."
Ok, this is for your own good.
There were no locations, props or actors... That's the whole point.
There's no Santa Claus either.
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.
I walked into the local video store the other day and stopped, staring at the "life size" Shrek2 display. Every single hair on the donkey had been rendered. Fabulous detail.
Obviously the donkey had the Frizzled6 gene, too.
--
E_NOSIG
Okay, I don't have kids, but the annoying excuse for a poor mother who was sitting behind me when I was watching it (and yapping through the whole damn movie) did... and among her continuous commentary track, I caught her during the thong scene saying "what kind of movie is this?"
What in the world is wrong with a thong making it something parents wouldn't want kids to know about? Of all the other stuff in that movie, violence, and the (make me laugh my ass off) scene where the three women were fighting to rub down Shrek and the black haired one complained she had nothing to rub and the other girls rolled their eyes, why in the world is the thong a big deal?
Thanks for the info... Will be seeing Shrek 2 very soon :)
Hmmm.
May 19, 2004
By Ellen Wolff
If you happened to be cruising the parking lot at PDI/Dreamworks' Northern California studio during production of Shrek 2, you might have seen something that looked like a stunt for the David Letterman show -- containers of water being dropped from ladders, with several people scrutinizing the splashes when the containers hit the ground.
"We always shoot live-action references for ourselves," says Shrek 2 visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg about PDI's approach. "On Halloween, we had cauldrons in the cafeteria with dry ice that gave off a smoky effect, and our effects guys came by and said 'Oh that's perfect!' They shot footage and used that as reference, too." So audiences at Shrek 2 can expect to see more realistic-looking effects than they've seen before in the computer-animated ogre's stylized world.
It's a high standard to exceed, since the original Shrek won the animated feature film Oscar for 2001, the first winner in that category. Bielenberg, who earned a BAFTA nomination for the visual effects in Shrek, garnered wide attention for breakthrough work in several areas, including an innovative approach for animating fire. For this sequel, Bielenberg says, "We've raised the bar again. The overall level of complexity is two or three times the complexity of the first Shrek. For instance, in the forest scene where Donkey and Shrek first met there was a certain simplicity to the environment. There was moss-like grass and not much ground cover. This time, in a similar forest scene, the amount of detail that we have in the environment is much richer. There are vines and flowers and grass, and the leaves on the trees flutter in the wind. It's not photoreal, but the richness has increased."
For this new film, Shrek co-director Andrew Adamson paired with co-directors Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon, and the voice actors from the original are back in force. Newlyweds Shrek and Fiona (Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz) are once again accompanied by sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy). They're also joined by some major new characters -- the tabby cat Puss-in-Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) and a quartet of humans, including King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews) as Fiona's royal parents.
Up Close and Personal
When it came to the look of the characters, reports Bielenberg, "There were a lot of refinements done 'under the hood.' We've added more muscles, especially in the necks of the characters -- for example, the male characters have Adam's apples now." Using the sci-tech Academy Award-winning facial animation system developed by longtime PDI animator Dick Walsh, the studio was also able to achieve what Bielenberg calls "amazing close-ups where the acting shows through. You're no longer looking at an animated character -- you're really looking at an actor."
Overall, asserts Bielenberg, "We did very little to change Shrek's and Fiona's appearance, so they're very consistent with the first film. We've done a little bit of upgrading, adding a little bit more subsurface scattering on their skin, but not a lot, actually. We did use subsurface scattering to soften the area around Shrek's nose, and also with his ears so that when they're backlit the light shows through. And we've redone Fiona's hair a little bit, but I don't think it will be an apparent change."
"The bulk of visual development time was spent working on the new human characters and developing new technology for modeling and moving hair," says Bielenberg. "Modeling hair is a real challenge because you're not dealing with something that's hard and easily definable. You have tens of thousands of hairs that you're trying to move around. We came up with new programs and techniques for modeling hair." Compared to PDI's previous method of modeling a "clump volumes" of hair, the new approach enables PDI to interpolate the movement of neighboring hairs on a much finer level. As a result, the characters' hair parted in more convincing ways and the haircuts showed o
I haven't seen Shrek 2 yet, but the previews seemed lacking all-the-same. They just don't have fluid motion of clothing done yet!
The best clothing motion I have seen to date is in the cut-scenes for WarcraftIII. Unlike other things, it not only had complex folding, it had complex clothing and robes as well.
The clothing was the most dissapointing graphical aspect of Spirits Within.
Shouldn't it be "the making of"?
Or will reading it teach me enough to create a comparable movie?
the fact that someone took time to write this makes my head hurt. No one would care enough about this without getting paid.
Arrrrrrr
There are physically based fluid simulators that find a solution of the Navier-Stokes equations. Nextlimit is a company that produces such simulators. They did for instance the lava sequences that you could enjoy in Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Light reflection in water is governed by Maxwell's equations and it's a very easy simulation as well. As for particles floating, refer to the previous paragraph.
IMHO, a good story and animation are much more difficult to achieve nowadays.
For quick reference:
>man 2 shrek
Unknown host pong.
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)
Honestly, I'm quite a critic of computer animation and Shrek 2 was outstanding. I think it even topped Final Fantasy in some aspects of skin quality and diffinately character animation. Sometimes I looked at things like walls and the fireworks and thought "I can't even tell". I think Dreamworks is already outdoing Pixar.
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
others what to had become like is EFNet, and you would cHoose to use live and a job to = 36440 FreeBSD grandstanders, the
And when I said Finding Nemo wasn't a good animated movie because it was detailed in any way, I wasn't saying the film wasn't detailed--I was saying it being detailed was not why it was a good animated film.
Shrek, Donkey, and Puss are hanging in the dungeon. Their friends are trying to break them out. Pinocchio is dangling a la "Mission Impossible," but has gotten tangled up in his puppet strings. The Gingerbread Man is on his back, and has the keys to their manacles. Donkey says "Tell a lie! Say something crazy like 'I'm wearing women's underpants!'"
Pinocchio says "Uh, um, I'm wearing women's underpants." And his nose stays the same size.
Shrek says "You ARE wearing women's underpants!"
"No I'm not" says Pinnochio, and his nose grows.
Gingerbread man pulls lifts Pinnochio's pants away from his back and screams "It's a thong!"
So, yes, they now know what a thong is. I don't care, I'm just their uncle. Their parents are the ones that have to deal with it now. LOL
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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
There are several on the market, and there are plenty of easy ways to simulate light rays passing through water. I use Maxwell's and they work great.
And if you're seriously arguing that volumetric particle effects are some sort of new groundbreaking visual, welcome to 1997.
I haven't seen Shrek 2, but from what I've read and heard, it's very much like the original, which is a lot like Toy Story, Ice Age, Finding Nemo, etc. Why do all big cgi movies have to follow the same basic comic plot. I'm wowed by the animation, but bored by the stories of these flicks.
According to this article (free registration required), Microsoft Research in China is working on realistic voice synthesis, with the explicit goal of creating a completely virtual actor. Soon we can outsource Hollywood as well...
Ellen Wolff takes a look at new advances in Shrek 2.
May 19, 2004
By Ellen Wolff
If you happened to be cruising the parking lot at PDI/Dreamworks' Northern California studio during production of Shrek 2, you might have seen something that looked like a stunt for the David Letterman show -- containers of water being dropped from ladders, with several people scrutinizing the splashes when the containers hit the ground.
"We always shoot live-action references for ourselves," says Shrek 2 visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg about PDI's approach. "On Halloween, we had cauldrons in the cafeteria with dry ice that gave off a smoky effect, and our effects guys came by and said 'Oh that's perfect!' They shot footage and used that as reference, too." So audiences at Shrek 2 can expect to see more realistic-looking effects than they've seen before in the computer-animated ogre's stylized world.
It's a high standard to exceed, since the original Shrek won the animated feature film Oscar for 2001, the first winner in that category. Bielenberg, who earned a BAFTA nomination for the visual effects in Shrek, garnered wide attention for breakthrough work in several areas, including an innovative approach for animating fire. For this sequel, Bielenberg says, "We've raised the bar again. The overall level of complexity is two or three times the complexity of the first Shrek. For instance, in the forest scene where Donkey and Shrek first met there was a certain simplicity to the environment. There was moss-like grass and not much ground cover. This time, in a similar forest scene, the amount of detail that we have in the environment is much richer. There are vines and flowers and grass, and the leaves on the trees flutter in the wind. It's not photoreal, but the richness has increased."
For this new film, Shrek co-director Andrew Adamson paired with co-directors Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon, and the voice actors from the original are back in force. Newlyweds Shrek and Fiona (Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz) are once again accompanied by sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy). They're also joined by some major new characters -- the tabby cat Puss-in-Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) and a quartet of humans, including King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews) as Fiona's royal parents.
Up Close and Personal
When it came to the look of the characters, reports Bielenberg, "There were a lot of refinements done 'under the hood.' We've added more muscles, especially in the necks of the characters -- for example, the male characters have Adam's apples now." Using the sci-tech Academy Award-winning facial animation system developed by longtime PDI animator Dick Walsh, the studio was also able to achieve what Bielenberg calls "amazing close-ups where the acting shows through. You're no longer looking at an animated character -- you're really looking at an actor."
Overall, asserts Bielenberg, "We did very little to change Shrek's and Fiona's appearance, so they're very consistent with the first film. We've done a little bit of upgrading, adding a little bit more subsurface scattering on their skin, but not a lot, actually. We did use subsurface scattering to soften the area around Shrek's nose, and also with his ears so that when they're backlit the light shows through. And we've redone Fiona's hair a little bit, but I don't think it will be an apparent change."
"The bulk of visual development time was spent working on the new human characters and developing new technology for modeling and moving hair," says Bielenberg. "Modeling hair is a real challenge because you're not dealing with something that's hard and easily definable. You have tens of thousands of hairs that you're trying to move around. We came up with new programs and techniques for modeling hair." Compared to PDI's previous method of modeling a "clump volumes" of hair, the new approach enables PDI to interpolate the movement of neighboring hairs on a much finer leve
What's the point of using CG to make absolute 100% photorealism if you could just stick a guy in front of a camera and film the same thing without having to wait for the scene to render for two days?
What a waste of time. Why would you go through all the trouble of photorealistic humans, animating their facial muscles, voicing them with actors, animating them, lighting them, rendering them for weeks at a time, when you could just hire a real guy and film his scenes in a day and have it as photorealistic as you'd ever get?
Sounds like George Lucas syndrome to me. If he had directed Lord of the Rings, Bilbo's house would have been an entirely CG backdrop. Luckily, Peter Jackson built to versions of the damn thing, big and small, just to film real actors inside it and composite them to get the sizes right.
I managed to pull this from teh site miraculously.. only the first page though If you happened to be cruising the parking lot at PDI/Dreamworks' Northern California studio during production of Shrek 2, you might have seen something that looked like a stunt for the David Letterman show - containers of water being dropped from ladders, with several people scrutinizing the splashes when the containers hit the ground. "We always shoot live-action references for ourselves," says Shrek 2 visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg about PDI's approach. "On Halloween, we had cauldrons in the cafeteria with dry ice that gave off a smoky effect, and our effects guys came by and said 'Oh that's perfect!' They shot footage and used that as reference, too." So audiences at Shrek 2 can expect to see more realistic-looking effects than they've seen before in the computer-animated ogre's stylized world. It's a high standard to exceed, since the original Shrek won the animated feature film Oscar for 2001, the first winner in that category. Bielenberg, who earned a BAFTA nomination for the visual effects in Shrek, garnered wide attention for breakthrough work in several areas, including an innovative approach for animating fire. For this sequel, Bielenberg says, "We've raised the bar again. The overall level of complexity is two or three times the complexity of the first Shrek. For instance, in the forest scene where Donkey and Shrek first met there was a certain simplicity to the environment. There was moss-like grass and not much ground cover. This time, in a similar forest scene, the amount of detail that we have in the environment is much richer. There are vines and flowers and grass, and the leaves on the trees flutter in the wind. It's not photoreal, but the richness has increased." For this new film, Shrek co-director Andrew Adamson paired with co-directors Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon, and the voice actors from the original are back in force. Newlyweds Shrek and Fiona (Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz) are once again accompanied by sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy). They're also joined by some major new characters - the tabby cat Puss-in-Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) and a quartet of humans, including King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews) as Fiona's royal parents. Visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg does his second Shrek tour of duty. Up Close and Personal When it came to the look of the characters, reports Bielenberg, "There were a lot of refinements done 'under the hood.' We've added more muscles, especially in the necks of the characters - for example, the male characters have Adam's apples now." Using the sci-tech Academy Award-winning facial animation system developed by longtime PDI animator Dick Walsh, the studio was also able to achieve what Bielenberg calls "amazing close-ups where the acting shows through. You're no longer looking at an animated character - you're really looking at an actor." Overall, asserts Bielenberg, "We did very little to change Shrek's and Fiona's appearance, so they're very consistent with the first film. We've done a little bit of upgrading, adding a little bit more subsurface scattering on their skin, but not a lot, actually. We did use subsurface scattering to soften the area around Shrek's nose, and also with his ears so that when they're backlit the light shows through. And we've redone Fiona's hair a little bit, but I don't think it will be an apparent change." "The bulk of visual development time was spent working on the new human characters and developing new technology for modeling and moving hair," says Bielenberg. "Modeling hair is a real challenge because you're not dealing with something that's hard and easily definable. You have tens of thousands of hairs that you're trying to move around. We came up with new programs and techniques for modeling hair." Compared to PDI's previous method of modeling a "clump volumes" of hair, the new approach enables PDI to interpolate the movement of neighboring hairs on a much finer level. As a result, the characters' hair parted in more convincing ways and the haircuts showed off some better-looking bangs.
Open Your Mind. Open Your Source.
Could there be a bigger ripoff of the Fantastic Four than The Incredibles? Originality indeed.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
The, err, "effectiveness" of the effects fades away pretty fast, leaving the story as the only resource the movie has to pass the test of time.
That is where "Shrek" and [haven't seen it, but judging by its style and contents] "Shrek 2" fail miserably, whereas most of the Pixar films (particularly "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo") and even "Ice Age" stand a better chance. I really wanted to like more the first "Shrek", but couldn't. I never understood why it was as successful (and why it took that Oscar away from Pixar's hands).
Pixar and Dreamworks, as far as I know, haven't tried to do a non-cartoony movie, but even with knowing how good their teachnology and artists are, it would be quite hard to compare to the level of detail the FF movie had.
Look, it is CG. It is, for many years at this rate of technology, going to look like CG if you do the entire movie in it. You can either play with it or you can look like a clown trying to ignore it.
I think that the biggest problem with Final Fantasy was the fact that it did look animated. There was too much seriousness going on with animated characters. It just didn't sell as a human drama. It wasn't a human drama. It WAS A CG DRAMA. This is the difference between the best film you've ever seen, and being up front row with the worst play you've ever seen. The play is still more immersive.
The movie was, in a nut shell, as well thought out as one would making Shindler's List an animated movie... or telling Frank Zappa to keep it clean, straightforward, and don't go over anyone's head. Even Mizayaki doesn't try to give a 'most realistic looking people' project. And he does animation like a master.
Final Fantasy the movie failed because it played to all of the disadvantages, and none of the advantages of the medium. ART is never about, "toning it down."
"Let's impress people by how real we can make it."
NO! NO! NO! Bad idea! Comics and animated characters are loved for their elasticity and style. You just don't try to make a style that is "indistinguishable from normal." That is playing to all of the disadvantages, and none of the advantages of the medium. Good actors don't try to be "normal." They try to be extraordinary. All good art tries the same.
If they wanted drama, good acting, and suspense, they should stick with real actors.
If you want unreality... elasticity... uniqueness... style and art, then you go with an animated medium.
Final Fantasy was shortsighted. They thought the cutscenes in the game could be a movie. It is like saying, "let's remake the Godfather movies, but use CG instead of actors! Make it real serious! That'll show this CG is a serious medium!"
The water effects were unbeleiveable. More difficult than it appears, but thats the point. Your not supposed to think about what your seeing.
I think Nemo sold quite a few tickets as well.. More the "Lion King" for petes sake.
Guess you missed the waves of ocean water crashing over Shrek and Fiona on the beach, or the splash liquids throughout the film.
Having said that... what is the deal with Dreamworks ripping off ideas from Pixar?
I'm talking about Antz and the forthcoming Shark Tale. The Bug's Life/Antz controversy, as you may recall, caused quite a stir in the computer animation circles - I seem to recall someone at Pixar complaining about being the 'R&D dept. for PDI'. But now we have this other underwater movie, which seems an awful lot like it was inspired by Finding Nemo.. but with massive cash thrown at voice talent (check it out) and dumber-looking sharks.
'Bruce' and gang from Nemo were much more interesting visually than this goofy Dreamworks clown-shark if you ask me.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Sorry about the screaming kids. We have our first on the way and I swear none of our kids will scream at the movies (to the best of my ability; that's the best I can do).
I've had to sit back and think about this for a while. There is a curious intersection of the "religious" and secular here; /.ers are speaking two different languages. I've caught this flavor a couple of times on Slashdot today (for instance, also in the thread on Bozell's sexy games editorial). This secular argument goes, these kids are biologically ready for sex, it's the most natural thing in the world, your mom had sex, everybody's doing it, it doesn't hurt anything.
I hear this and I go, these guys just don't see sex the way I do. As a grown-up married guy, of course I know sex is all those things they say it is. I see this as a major cheapening of what sex means (because it doesn't mean anything; if sex does mean something, then the secular attitude is a dangerous one). Put it another way: I am going to keep guys trained in this viewpoint of sex away from my daughter (switch the genders and the same is true again).
Sexy adult jokes in kids' cartoon movies cheapen sex again, shoot another "it's ok, it's natural" across the bow of my parenting. That's what the grandparent post was talking about. Because he cares about stuff like this, in the future that guy would be wise to preview the movies his kids are going to see, or at least check a parent-friendly movie review site like ScreenIt. Here's the Shrek 2 review. The specific content is at the bottom of the page.
But I agree with you too, that the thong was not the most sensitive thing in that movie.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
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.
Everybody says they are reading the articles but all they really wanna do is see the pictures
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
This was covered a long time a go on slashdot, I'll give you the summary. It was not like a final fantasy game. It's kinda hard to show a character 'leveling up' before a big battle. I think that they could have had better luck showing a hero rising instead of giving us caracters that were already advanced, but I understand that that is time prohibitive. I. however, digress. My point is that when I watch that movie I can forget that I am watcing something that was animated, I get sucked right into the movie (see what happens when you station you animators within a few miles of a hawaian beach =), and suspenidng my disbelief is not even a conscience thing, it just happens.
I believe that is the key for a movie. No matter how you do it, get your audience to make it their reality for a little while. If you screw up to bad in any one spot, the audience will not like the movie while they watch it. Graphics is not the only way to do it, Final fantasy seven had horrid graphics, but I forgot I was playing a game at times.
Over anal-lizing any one part of a piece of art will get you no where. You have to look at the whole. That is how it is intended to be viewed.
--
I learned there are troubles
Of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead,
And some form behind.
But I've bought a bit bat.
I'm ready, you see.
Now all my troubles,
Are going to have troubles with me!
~The good Doctor Seuss
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
You are right, things like: "Make that specular glare move a bit to the right, and make the shadow more bluish" are common. I was only answering from a technical point of view.
Certainly I respect the work of the animators and all the other staff. It is just that I'm an engineer and tend to see the problem from the technical point of view.
Cheers! I saw the movie and you've done a great job!
quoth the article "PDI leveraged a lot of the water effects work that the company did last year for Universal Studios' special venue stereoscopic film Shrek 4-D."
;))
Woah - anybody know anything about that? Can we buy a copy? My 3D glasses are ready to go
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
Here's a torrent for a DVD quality trailer.
More movies can be found here
The quality of animation is simply stunning.
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.
imo it's just another Eddie Murphy gag movie and I don't see it making any waves. Shrek 2 looks like a animated boring theater play. I guess its a cultural thing, Cat in the Hat would have been a Direct To Video production if it didn't do so well in America.
:-)
Maybe we just don't get it
The clothing was the most dissapointing graphical aspect of Spirits Within.
Agreed. Ditto for the Matrix Reloaded, by the way. Check it out if you have it on DVD; it is painfully obvious to tell when Burly Brawl (Neo vs 100 Smiths) switches to "CGI mode" - your "suspension of disbelief" vanishes as, within a split second, every detail on Neo's robe and the reflections off everyone's sunglasses (guess thesun.exe just crashed) disappear and you get to watch in shock how what was a complex pattern turns into the plainest grey ever seen.
Uh, that and the rubber-made spinning Agent Smith anyways.
Sailors. Oh man!
I Love Pixar movies, including the animation, but especially the stories, plot and performances and I would love their stories even if [they were] drawn in ketchup.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Always, always, *ALWAYS* post as AC.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Oh, c'mon, it is The Incredibles, not The Impossibles. This name is even featured in the story.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Have we all forgotten this movie? I really wish it would of done better, imagine what they would be working on now if they didn't go under..
but it's not in theaters in Europe yet, you insensitive clod!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Actually I can... well not beowulf, per se, but there was a large farm used to turn out the frames.
Between in house and off site boxes, there were a lot of cpus thrown at this.
Goodness, I love my job...
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Were you at a screening a few months ago in Phoenix, AZ? I saw this movie a couple months ago, and even with all the breaks in the animation with storyboards and stuff, it was still awesome. Can't wait to see the whole thing.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I think this is the beginning of the end for the motion picture industry. Virtual visualizations are going to get cheaper and easier. Eventually anybody with an idea will be able to make a movie so good that there will be no technical advantage to being a studio. The only thing studios will have going for them is the ability to hire really good actors and musicians. Production costs will be so small and theater tickets so cheap that the industry won't be able to support itself. Moviemaking will become more of an art form and hobby than a business. That's what my crystal ball says anyway.
Actually, you can buy it
(3-D since they can't spray water from your DVD player. )
SP
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." - Voltaire
You could be correct about ironic characters and what not.
How does this relate in any way to the realism of the art? Can you not have ironic characters in live action movies?
Cartoons with more abstract styles can have plenty of depth character and story wise. Emoting is always more difficult (or at least should be more difficult) in animation when compared to live action.
A few years ago, when I was peripherally involved with the effects industry, everybody was looking forward to the coming era of low-budget effects. "Reboot" and "Starship Troopers" (the TV show, not the movie) seemed to herald the beginning of a new era of feature films at TV production prices.
Didn't happen. The first problem was with live-action directors who didn't understand the inflexibility and costs of CG. As one art director with experience from the pre-computer era put it, "now you can make changes until you run out of money".
Then came the "no limits" problem - "Let's have a drive-through of ancient Rome". Speilberg started it with Jurassic Park, and now everybody expects it in every film. Minor directors plan shots DeMille would have envied. And somewhere, a modelling department has a hundred people busy for months, often for less than a minute of screen time.
The result has been $100M animation budgets. Even "Sky Captain", which was supposed to be a low-budget effects movie, is headed towards that figure. (The production team screwed up, and now ILM is bailing them out. ILM makes a sizable fraction of their money bailing out the botched productions of others.)
It's not about compute power. It's a labor cost issue. It still takes too many bodies to do this stuff.
For anyone who hasn't done so, I urge you to follow the link in the parent post. I honestly thought it must be a joke when I saw the intro page, even the font screams Finding Nemo!
How do companies get away with this? Legally I guess they just to make it sufficiently differnet, but from a moral perspective this is just sad. The characters look far more human than fishy. I think I may deliberately not see this movie to protest the fact that they couldn't come up with an original style.
Three cheers Pixar, but also three cheers to whomever makes a good, original movie these days!
Shrek and Fiona get ready to interact with fluids in this homage to From Here to Eternity.
Is it just me or does that have a dirty ring to it?
It'd also be great if Photoshop, Illustrator and Maya where open sourced, and Blockbuster films and Music where legally free for downloading and trading.
But until developers, producers, and musicians start working for free, it'll never happen.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Already been done by Michael Ninn, he has a fully animated porn called 2Funky4U
Cheesy even by porn standards
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
One of the most impressive things to me from Finding Nemo wasn't so much how it looked. It was how it moved. That's one of the things I was disappointed in with Shrek 2. A lot of the characters didn't feel like they had a physical presence in their own world. I can't exactly explain it, but it felt like I was watching puppets instead of actual characters. The characters in Shrek 2 many times moved like puppets (was especially noticable when they were walking). The horses in the beginning looked as if they were floating off the ground.
But in the end, it comes down to the sensations a film can draw out of me. In Finding Nemo when they went zipping through the jet stream, I felt the rush. In Shrek 2, I felt nothing.
Little Bricklets
... 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.
Heh. Art directing fluids. Tough Job.
Bleh!
In terms of production, the software code is more closely analagous to the schematics for a particualr car than the car itself. Cost of replication of the schematic is near zero, just as cost of publication of code is near zero. Of course, a company might still not want to release its code. There is such a thing as competition. The thing with software, it's both the instructions and the product.
Companies that spend money creating software for internal use are 'making it worth their while' when they sell their product. IBM makes money from its hardware, so it can fund linux and give it away without damage to its business model. Of course, a company still needs an incentive, such as outside coders fixing up its code or somthing similar, or it's not going to want to distribute the code, even at near zero cost.
Pixar probably doesn't want competition. Or do you see a different reason?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
At least one commentator has truly read the article!
The animation was great, the acting was astounding, and the donkey was funny as hell, :D
No, just American :-)
"o A computer program however, is infinitely replicable by the magic device known as a computer."
"infinitely replicable" only applies to "distribution", not creation.
Personally, I'm waiting for the world where everyone can recognise the difference between the physical and the ephemeral"
Physical and ephemeral both require a finite amount of effort to create.[1]
"and didn't resort to dumb analogies to further their ridiculous agenda."
As opposed to your own "ridiculous agenda".
[1] Ephemeral applies to physical (cars) and things made of bits (look at all the Cobol code out there).
Disney can't do superheroes. They do quacking ducks and silly mice and goofy and pluto and all those super friendly type of characters. But superheroes? The type that get pounded through several floors of concrete, and rise up shaking off the dust and mutter stoically 'That hurt a bit'. That's Marvel's job.
I watched a movie drawn in ketchup once.
Everything was so red!
I kept thinking, "Damn commies."
Totally ruined it for me.
The books start getting older and darker (some of the stuff with Voldemort in book 4, I associate loosely with necromancy and devil-worship), but the movies started out basically kid-friendly. I will be curious to see the direction they take it when Prisoner of Azkaban comes out next month.
There will probably be screaming kids at that one too.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
s/below intelligence/below average intelligence/
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke