Water Spectacular in Episode III?

An anonymous reader writes "From StarWars.com: 'With the prequel trilogy lacking in elaborate musical numbers, Aaron McBride and the rest of the Art Department were given the task to create visuals for a new spectacular in Episode III.' Lucas didn't piss off enough people with Jar-Jar?" The link is to an image of a Mon Calamari^(?) woman in some sort of performance outfit. A water spectacular ala Esther Williams, perhaps?

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Re:How do they do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you need to ask you can't afford it, so I'm guessing this is curiosity. The companies that make this software will make a custom installation for the needs of one moviehouse -- and often a single movie. The price of the software will include n techs working for you throughout the life of the project, training for your artists, and so on... Basically hiring a software team to complement your software team to and work subordinate to the true artists.

Most often you'll be looking at Mac workstations (a recent change from SGI) and linux for the renderfarm (often SGI in the past as well, but SGI had less of a stranglehold outside of the workstation).

Yes, you could do this with Linux and Blender provided you had a full-time development team to tweak Blender to do exactly what you want, a big enough cluster to render a single preview frame fast enough that the artist doesn't loose their rythm, and another full-time development team working on the tools to move the objects (plot the arc for the ball when it's thrown, and so on).

Re:How do they do this?

[albieomoss]

I love Blender to death but it is by no means capable of the kind of effects you are seeing now in films. I'd say most movie special effects are done in Maya right now. The MEL scripting makes it very easy to program custom behavior and huge crowd scenes like those in The Lord of the Rings. Some studios use Softimage|XSI, some, like Pixar, use custom software developed in house to work on their computer systems. But I'm just talking about 3D animation packages, half of it is the compositing software. As far as OS goes it varies. You'll probably see a lot of Irix and UNIX boxes. Lots of clusters. Render Farms.