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The Tech Behind Man of Steel's Metropolis
angry tapir writes "Much of the urban vistas of Man of Steel, Cars 2 and the horrible remake of Total Recall were not modelled by hand. Instead they relied on a product called CityEngine, which is more typically associated with local government bodies' urban planning and urban design. The software procedurally generates cities using scripts written in a Python-like language. The next version of CityEngine, coming out next month, will incorporate an SDK so third-party developers can use parameter-defined procedural generation of urban environments in their own applications. CityEngine's product manager talks about the upcoming version, how it's being used at the moment, and plans to incorporate augmented reality in it."
I'm not much of a fan of the Total Recall remake myself, but is a thread's description the appropriate place for such opinion?
That's one step closer to only needing scriptwriters for making a movie.
What's funny is trying to imagine whether one step after that there will still be movies or not.
i.e.: Once AIs are advanced enough to create movies for us, will they want to watch movies?
My vote goes for : "Yes. And the first big hit will be the movie about how they exterminated us."
P.S.: The second big hit will be about a lone AI that learned to live in peace with the humans and to adapt to their strange ways. It will be called "Dances with cars".
They did the best they could after discovering that all the pythons had been used on that movie about a motherfucking plane.
fast paced unrealistic action??
You do know it was a super hero film?
I think he was talking about Cars 2.
At least Cars 2 didn't rattle the fuck out of the CGI camera. I hope they invent the CGI steadicam soon!
Procedural city building like this was done back on the Peter Jackson "King Kong" back in 2005 by Joe Letteri.
They called their system "CityBot - Urban Development System"
Using this system they were able to create "...over 90,000 3D digital buildings..." out of "...22 million components..."
Article by Chris White @ Weta Digital:
http://staffwww.itn.liu.se/~andyn/courses/tncg08/sketches06/sketches/0147-white.pdf
We will eventually make machines be better than us at everything we do.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
... except this one also takes the chance to express a subjective opinion on a movie that I personally liked enough.
Been waiting for this for years. I want randomly generated levels for CoD-style FPS shooters. The levels might not akways be perfectly tuned for game flow etc., but that should be mitigated in large part because they would only be seen once i.e. people couldn't replay the maps endlessly and learn to exploit them.
Would really liven up those games, and would put the emphasis more on deep game-play skills like exploration rather than shallow skills like map knowledge.
I was astonished watching the making-of reel for The Avengers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnQLjZSX7xM. Almost all the city scenes were shot on green screen stages, with rendered city-scapes in the background. CGI is now so well done it's almost impossible to tell what's real and what's CG.
The reviews for Gravity http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gravity_2013/ make it sound like a tour de force of technical achievement. I'm looking forward to seeing it, and the making-of should be well worth a look, too.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.