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LucasFilm Combines Video Games and Movies To Eliminate Post-Production
llebeel writes "Lucasfilm is currently prototyping the combining of video game engines with film-making to eliminate the post-production process in movies. 'Speaking at the Technology Strategy Board event at BAFTA in London this week, the company's chief technology strategy officer, Kim Libreri, announced that the developments in computer graphics have meant Lucasfilm has been able to transfer its techniques to film-making, shifting video game assets into movie production. Real-time motion capture and the graphics of video game engines, Libreri claimed, will increasingly be used in movie creation, allowing post-production effects to be overlayed in real time. "We think that computer graphics are going to be so realistic in real time computer graphics that, over the next decade, we'll start to be able to take the post out of post-production; where you'll leave a movie set and the shot is pretty much complete," Libreri said.'"
Games are typically designed with ultra-high res textures and ultra-high poly or NURBS models which get transformed into something which will run on PCs. For textures this is a relatively simple resize (I say relatively because many of them actually get it wrong!), and for models this means generating bump/tessellation maps, etc.
It doesn't make any sense for them to make multiple sets of these high-quality assets because whichever has lesser quality (games) can be generated from the one with higher-quality.
This will never work. ;)
In the next Star Wars movie the rebels will fling themselves at the stormtrooper pigs with a giant slingshot.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball models, in swimsuits, in all the future movies!
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Someone has to do all the effects. It'll just have to be done before the film is shot.
It just transforms post production into preproduction, even if the composition of effects can be done concurrently with filming actors, you still have to actually produce the effects. And in this case, you have to rely more on the actors syncing correctly with the effects instead of adjusting the affects to match the actions of the actors.
Post-production work can be cut with this approach, but it means more pre-production work. The background art and animation produced in pre-production has to be good enough for final output.
Take a look at Before VFX, which shows how little of what appears on screen today exists in the real world. The latest Star Trek was almost all green-screen, of course. But movies which don't seem to be "effects movies", like The Great Gatsby, were done that way. If no actor touches it, it's probably CG.
Now to get rid of the actors...
putting on costume and makeup is a major part of an actor's transformation process. Andy Serkis seems to get it though.
Ever watched good actors? They don't need costumes. It's really pretty scary, they can get into character in seconds and if you're not ready for it it's quite a shock.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I've seen so much Z flicker in modern video hardware (especially AMD) it's almost like playing stuck in 16bpp with Voodoo-based hardware again. Same goes for the 24-bit precision regarding the depth for shadow map accuracy. Do you really want to see flicker and shadow jagginess along angles in feature films?