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Animated Short - This Wonderful Life
dfluke2 writes "It's been around for awhile, but Lian Kemp's This Wonderful Life is a very impressive animated short. Over at rendernode there is an interview with Lian, where additional background information can be found about the flick, including other plans for more animated movies. The author also features a gallery with photo shoot style images of the female actress from the short."
http://www.this-wonderful-life.com.nyud.net:8090/i ndex.htm
p hp?articleId=197
http://www.rendernode.com.nyud.net:8090/
http://www.rendernode.com.nyud.net:8090/articles.
There's a link at the top of the download page to cgchannel.com. I couldn't get that one to load though - just the previews on the homepage.
you moron, had you bothered to read the website you'd have found that it was made with a 1.4 gig athlon, not a renderfarm
What do you mean "they"?
his is one guy, who spent most of his professional life doing models for Games where they do not have to ba accurate at all.
Liam did all the work on his own with no "they" at all to help him.
Cripes, he used photoshop to make his own textures for her!
Computer generated images and animations are improving all the time, however, they are not quite there yet.
Look for example at this image : it is almost natural, like a real photo. No CGI hints there.
However, look at that other image, and although the hair is done OK, the eyes and hands still look fake.
That same eery feeling
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Um, given that I had to really screw around with the contrast and brightness to see what you're talking about, you've either got a seriously messed up monitor (I guess you never complained about DOOM3 being too dark?) or a really twisted need to look for those types of things.
:) And besides, I thought you were really talking about this one.
Of course, given that I felt compelled to verify doesn't say a lot about me either
Here's the vid..yay coral cache. http://media01.cgchannel.com.nyud.net:8090/images/ news/2003_10_liamkemp/TWL360x208.mov
What made this annoying was the way they showed off their achivement (two models with facial expressions): They artificially constructed a 'storyline' in which the woman got to show as many emotions as possible, and due to the lack of a talented writer they ended up with nonsense and kitsch galore. The animation process doesn't use motion capturing or a physics engine or anything else that would further realism; it's old-school keyframe animation, which looks (in scenes like the one in which she jumps from one stone in the water to another) artificial and very out of place with these partly near-photorealistic images (she looks like a marionette draged along on wires). They're stuck deep in the uncanny valley (if you haven't heard that term before, google it;
This short looks like one painfully long commercial for the product they made; it's just a demo of the 3D models, and not a very impressive one. Also shown were the very humorous New Balls Please and the hilarious Pfffirate, which made the giggling audience gasp for air, but This Wonderful Life definitely got the most laughs -- they just weren't intended.
But don't take my word for it; if you want to see a recent animated short that's very impressive, check out the documentary Ryan: "The audience hears the voices of real people who accompanied Ryan as he made his way through life. In the world of computer-animated film, these people speak through strange, distorted, broken, disembodied beings, humans whose exterior appearance comes across as bizarre, humorous or irritating." The author calls this style psycholrealism.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
sorry folks, they deleted the torrent from the public tracker (theppn.com) for whatever reason and I'm sorry to say my home webserver isn't up for a slashdotting ;-)
That's mostly like the sort of tech used in today's 3D games. It would be real easy to make such a 'movie' interactive. Walk around in a scene, or choose a character to follow in the story, and tag along with another character when you view the movie next time.
The first time I ran it, I was very impressed with the intro of the game Half-Life. You sit in a rail vehicle, can't get out, so the story is very linear, but you can move, look around, all sorts of things happening around you. If you know the game, you'll know what I mean.
If you see that some skilled coders can cram incredible demo's, or even a FPS in a 100 KB., it's clear that the amount of data to process is do-able. It's really just computing power that's needed. Today's home PC's aren't yet powerful enough to pull this off, but we're getting there real quick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley
Here we go laides! A working download link.
They do have good algorithms for that sort of thing. Too bad they're not more widely used.
-jim
Alright, kiddies... you asked for it, so it's been done.v .torrent
http://torrent.youceff.com/torrents/TWL360x208.mo
Ya'll enjoy now, ya hear?
I have a torrent of both this and the animated short pfffirate up at http://147.126.53.117:6969/ Enjoy :)
michael greene
Here's a tracker with the complete 26 mb movie that actually seems to work:
http://147.126.53.117:6969
Plus the "Pffirate" animated feature is there too.