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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?
Somebody cue Ackbar.
It's a trap!
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and nothing says that like a musical number. Get those legs up padiwans!
-Teiresias
Further proof that George Lucas has lost his mind...actually, he can stop with the proof now, this is like the 200th thing so far...
It's like Lucas, Michael Jackson, and the guys who did the Matrix Reloaded rave got together and brainstormed. If that's even physically possible.
It's a boob!
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
That's not a moon!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
That is the most blatant example of a prior art rip-off I have even seen...
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
Why would a humanoid squid have breasts?
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
The "previous image" shows a vehicle with wheels.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
. . .tits on a squid.
KFG
Why do all female aliens have boobs?
Forget the water spectacular. This phallic image is sure to have feminists commenting the male dominated society that the Rebels promote.
You can briefly see the water dancing after about 1/4 of the length of the trailer, after Obi-Wan says "We are at war, Anakin".
http://www.starwars.com/
I hate to show my Star Wars geek side but...
The dancer shown is a Mon Calamari. They were very important in Return of the Jedi. The giant pod looking ships in the Rebel fleet were Mon Calamari Star Cruisers, and the attack was led by Admiral Ackbar, a Mon Calamari. You can see him in Return of the Jedi. Admiral Ackbar also made a cameo in the X-Wing game. He's the guy who orders "Launch the X-Wing fighters!" (I loved the game, what can I say).
So, Lucas isn't pulling this out of his ass. It is consistent with Episode 6. Whether or not having a Mon Calamari dance is a good idea, thats a different story.
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).
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.
DankLogic - There is a system to everything.
As Lucas has aged his sexual tastes have drifted to the rarefied realms of his wealth.
Does she hand out lightsabres?
Namaste
no capes!
George murdered my childhood with Episode I.
Then he dug up the corpse and slapped it around a bit for Episode II.
Now it looks like he's preparing to dig it up once more to further defile its memory by fucking it right in the mouth with a god damned water sequence in Episode III.
Somebody should have taken his camera away after the first Ewok adventure was shot.
I mean, anybody could have made that mistake once... But *twice*?
There is no excuse.
- Rory [Microsoft Employee] | Free dirt: neopoleon.com
What absolutely kills me about the Star Wars prequels is that despite all the bitching and moaning I read here about Jar-Jar, and the excessive digital effects and bad dialog and whatever, episodes one and two have still grossed over 1.5 billion. Everyone I know who actually cares enough one way or the other to bitch about the movies has seen both multiple times. I personally feel, and this may just be me, that after you've paid to see a movie for the fifth time you lose the right to complain about how bad it is. So lets just all calm down here and if you don't think you're going to like the Episode III, this may seem drastic, but do keep in mind you're free not not to watch it.
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org
Often some combination of Maya on the front-end with lots of custom scripts is used to generate RIB data which is rendered by a RenderMan interface compliant renderer. You won't get PRMan (Pixar's implementation) very cheaply, but there some other good implentations. You may still be able to dig up a copy of the Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT) somewhere. RenderDotC has a resolution limited evaluation version. There's also Aqsis and which is GPL, but I haven't used it so I can't really speak on its quality or how complete it is. Pixie is another GPL renderer which seems pretty cool. All of them can run on Linux.
Part of the reason that RenderMan renderers are so popular is that they let you write custom shader scripts which they interpret to shade and deform the geometry. It's kind of the equivalent of GPU pixel and vertex shaders (which are partly inspired by RenderMan, by the way.)
If you want books, Advanced RenderMan is excellent. (My copy is well worn.) The RenderMan Repository has some examples and some good basic information on RenderMan. They also have a nice collection of PDF's of the course notes from the RenderMan SIGGRAPH courses over the years. Those typically have chapters by folks from the studios describing how they accomplished certain effects. I highly recommend it for getting the flavor of the the thing. Lastly, there's the RenderMan spec itself from Pixar, though I certainly wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to all this.
My suggestion to start trying this stuff out would be too Google for RIB export scripts/plugins for Blender (I know they exists, but I don't use Blender), grab one of the GPL renderers out there and pick up a copy of Advanced RenderMan to start learning the shading language. Good luck!
Why would a humanoid squid have breasts?
Same reason humanoid vaginas smell like fish?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Actually, it would be "mon calmar."
"Calamari" is Italian.
Proof yet again that Lucas is a pretentious know-nothing hack. "Mon Calamari," being a bastardization of both French and Italian isn't, even forgiving that, gramatically correct as it uses a singular possessive with a plural noun. Lucas, you ignorant slut...
Damn enter key... let's try that again.
My squid,
Whom I did,
Not so groovy
Is your bad movie.
Sticky-floored prison,
My bile's risen.
Life's two hours less
In this cinematic mess.
Swim off the set
If the director will let.
Come to Sloppy
And you'll be happy.
A new role, you'd
Play in the nude,
Though budget's not high
You'll moan and sigh.
Your DVD will be
Released to all the
Perverts who enjoy
Tentacle porn toys.
Be remembered as a squid
In porn for a few quid.
That Innsmouth look
Is a good niche for a spook.
It will be so much better
Than Lucas' memory-shredder.
You'll be glad you did,
My squid.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And not just humanoids! Uh..I mean...
> Terrible.
> Piscene face, mammalian, uhhhh... mammaries.
"Oh, why couldn't she be the other kind of mermaid?! The kind with the fish part on top and the lady part on bottom!"
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
That's my wife you insensitive clod!
Slashdot has really gone downhill when Admiral Ackbar in a swimsuit makes the front page before this does... Bring on the grits!
You may be thinking of Massive, which was written by devlopers at Weta to drive the crowd behaviour in Maya, and has since been spun off to its own product.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
Smaller shops might use more (but still not entirely) off-the-shelf Maya, XSI, max, Houdini, Lightwave, etc. seats, to get the job done.
I think very few places use blender at all, however(other than the FX house that wrote most of it) because its UI and workflow are so very different than most other 3D packages, which makes it harder to throw extra artists at a particularly big job or farm out work.
You also see less and less IRIX around, as the SGI hardware is becoming hopelessly outdated. Hence the interest in Linux by the big studios.
Ok, obviously not. But even though all his public statements make it seem like Lucas really takes Star Wars seriously, I wonder if really he's laughing his @$$ off as he purposely makes fans get crazy upset. It's just the sort of emotional manipulation Andy Kaufman thought was hilarious. It's not like Lucas has to worry about commercial success. People are going to see this movie no matter how awful it is, and even if it's a total flop Lucas is, shall we say, "independently wealthy". Anyone else get the feeling he's just having a good time screwing with people?
However, has it ever been stated that Calamari are not mammals ?
Whoever told you that is a total liar. Like other mammals Calamari can either have breasts or be totally flat.
Facts:
(1) Calamari are mammals
(2) Calamari nurse their young ALL the time
(3) The purposes of Calamari are to flip out and warn "It's a trap!"
Tweet, tweet.