Skywalker Ranch IS located in Lucas Valley. It's the compound where George lives -- and it's not going anywhere. The only thing that moved is the ILM crew (I think the game people were already somewhere else). Skywalker Sound is still out there.
Small calrification. Skywalker Ranch is where Lucas works. He lives elsewhere (though close). Skywalker Sound and the Lucasfilm production offices are at the Ranch. ILM and LucasArts, which used to be in separate locations, are now at the Presidio location, though ILM has retained a few operations in San Rafael.
I guess it depends on your point of view. You can say that VFX is the only thing that is good in many movies. Many movies have crappy stories and directing, but with a decent budget at least the VFX could be good and the only worthwhile thing in it.
Re:How many movies has ILM made?
on
ILM's Datacenter
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· Score: 1
Star Wars III. How many pure CGI characters were there? Yoda. Obi-Wan's ride. That's about it. Everything else was primarily actors in suits or animatronics; whatever looked the best, not whatever was cheapest.
Not really, there were countless digital characters and digital doubles, mostly in the background and compromising 70 min. of animation work. In several instances even OB1 is digital, you have main characters like Grievous and Yoda, and many supporting like most wookies, the clone troopers, etc.
ven Jar-Jar (who was created by George Lucas, not by ILM) was an actor in a suit, enhanced with a CGI head
They actually did tests of having Ahmed Best in a suit and do a head replacement. It actually turned out that it was cheaper to do a full CG jar jar, than go with the head replacement technique. There's literally a handful of shots in the first prequel where the suit was actually used (I think one was when his hand get caught in the pod trying to get a stuck tool).
ZERO
Well if you to be anal about it, they have actually made a few short films, but not done a full theatrical film (although they were listed as coproducers of a few films like Star Trek 3, though it's a more technical point).
Digital Domain was the main provider. There were other companies like Animal Logic that also contributed.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was done by over 12 different vfx houses.
Re:Hurray for Movie Technology!
on
ILM's Datacenter
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· Score: 1
You are absolutely correct, ILM just prvides VFX work. They are just a contractor, like the guys that do the catering on the set. They have absolutely no control over the story or directing of the movies they work on (except for a few exceptions).
Also, if I remember correctly, they were some of the first to experiment with particle renders for CG (they used it in the Mask to create some of the storm/tornado transformations).
ILM introduced the concept of particle systems for film. It was first used for the Genesis Sequence in Star Trek 2. William Reeves then presented a paper at SIGGRAPH 83. He was also awarded an Academy SciTech award for it:
Not really, Lucasfilm and ILM has been doing previs for ages. Although as far as games engines use is concerned, one of the big first applications at ILM was duringb the production of Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, where they built 2 systems.
As far as the market, it has really exploded lately. One of the first using modern technology was Pixel Libertarion Front (they use Softimage), but people from Lucasfilm/ILM left and created 2 companies specifically geared towards previs: one is Halon Entertainment (cofounded by Dan Gregoire) and the other is Persistence of Vision (cofounded by David Dozoretz).
Yeah, ILM keeps a sizeable Art Dept. which does illustrations, sketches, concept art and the like. Also people in the Model Shop do sculptures and maquettes of concepts for pre-production.
Yes, they have been doing it for ages and Lucasfilm has been a pioneer in movie previs.
What people seem to miss is what the article really is talking about. ILM and LucasArts for the most part worked with separate pipelines/infrastructures. Now that they're in the same facility in the Presidio, they share one. The new pipeline is based on Zeno, ILM's propietary 3D environment, which was first fully used on The Island and War of the Worlds (Zeno is actually based on dynamics code originally written for Star Wars Ep. 1).
Peter Jackson and WETA started using pre-vis before production began on LOTR. Other firms may have used it even earlier.
Yes and Lucasfilm was a pioneer of previs long before PJ and Weta. In fact Peter Jackson, Randal William Cook and a small group went to Lucasfilm around 1998 and visted ILM to see how previs was done there and later setup a dept. at Weta for the production of the first LOTR.
You could say storyboarding is a kind of previs, and Lucasfilm was a pioneer in using animatics for previs purposes (animated storyboard for Empire Strikes Back and using toys and a video camera to previs the Endor bike sequence in Return of the Jedi).
You misread that article. What Brian Gernand is talking about is design decissions (the visual aspects), how things should look like and the like. At least Lucas has a clear vision of what he wants but many times you have directors that don't which makes work fofr VFX people very hard. Brian Gernand is making no judgments in other aspects of the film like the story and characters, which is an entirely different deal.
Well, don't forget about Ed Catmull, who is president of Pixar. Pixar is his baby but he usually likes to be more in the background.
Re:What about Pixar's Software Arm?
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 1
Actually the name RenderMan refers to the standard. PRMan or Photorealistic RenderMan refers to the actual Pixar product (the renderer) that applies that standard. Sometimes the names are used interchangably, but since there are other RenderMan renderers (Aqsis, RenderDotC, AIR, 3Delight, Pixie) it's better to make the distinction between PRMan and RenderMan.
As far sa what RenderMan as a specification is, it's mainly composed of 2 parts: a scene description part and the shading language. The scene description describes the 3D world and can be called procedutrally via C/C++ calls (or thoer bindings) or via RIB (RenderMan Interface Bytestream whcih can be text or binary). The shading language describes the apperance of objects (what they look like and their interaction with lighting).
As far as the software development, it's actually split. Some of the development (I think most of the Artist Tools but also some of PRMan) is done in Seattle, where Pixar has an office headed by Dana Batali (he is director of RenderMan product development). Some of the stuff is also done in the bay, after many of the people who worked on PRMan since its beginning, like Tony Apodaca, Tom Duff, etc. are at Emeryville. If Pixar got sold it would certainly create some commotion as tons of VFX studios use it. And that's not counting the fact that Lucas had a deal with Pixar that they would get first look at any Pixar technologies and some ILM people have rights to access the PRMan source code. It could get messy.
Re:Guess who will buy Pixar?
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 1
Well, Lucasfilm Animation has 2 divisions, one in Singtapore and one in the US. The one on Singapore will concentrate mainly on animated films and projects. The one in the US is said to be gearing now towards the live action TV series.
Discusions at CGTalk (including people that work in Singapore like Steve Stalhberg) point that the salaries and standard of living will be comparable to that of US animators. Though the discussion doesn't take into account that Lucas received some tax incentive from setting shop in Singapore.
Re:Guess who will buy Pixar?
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 1
Small correction: it's not that Lucas has close ties to ILM, he owns it.
Actually Maya is only used for the interactive work. The batch 3D rendering Weta Digital uses is PRMan, and Shake for batch compositing.
Also it doesn't matter if you are using all the cache in the CPUs, say for example if the shots you're rendering use texture maps of a 100 MBs and the RIB file might be a few hundred megabytes as well (so that also causes some bandwidth bottleneck). Of course you are can exploit some coherence in data (between frames or even in the same frame). So in the end you won't get those extreme savings implied in the article (me thinks they messed up on the quote or calculations). Then again when you are rendering such huge numbers of frames, or more precisely layers, even saving of a few percentage points, of a few seconds or minutes per frames, will actually mean you can save days or weeks in the end and render the whole movie on time.
Comparisons with Star Wars aren't helpful. King Kong has more fur. Rendering fur is hard work.
There is no easy way to compare that. It's highly subjective, even when using the most basic comparison: number of shots. I believe Ep. 3 had 2400+ shots in the final film, although about 2800+ were rendered (about 400 were edited out). Don't remember how many shots King Kong has, though I think it's at least 1,500 though less than 2400. Then you get to the subjective part. for both films how many shots have major 3D work, how many it's mostly compositing, roto and paint, how many are miniature mostly, how many are mixed more or less equaly, how many minutes of digital character animation, etc. So when discussing those issues it's usuallyt a good idea to get as specific as possible and even then you can argue both sides.
It's probably better to wait for the Cinefex issue in January.
Those numbers are misleadingly wrong. Star Wars Episode III was rendered between the old ILM location and the new Presidio facility. The Presidio has about 4000 processors used for rendering, while old ILM had about 2,500 processors. The data center of the Presidio came online (I think) late last year. So frames from Ep. 3 and The Island were rendered both at the Presidio and old ILM. So surely ILM rendered Ep. 3 on a few thousand processors.
I think the misleading part is that some articles stated that the initial order for AMD Opteron based machines for the data center was 140 processors. But their renderfarm is crtainly 4,000 procs which I think includes about 1,000 workstations that are used for overnight rendering.
But it depends on what you call "movie industry" which in general terms is a huge and amorphous entity. You might not see it in your end of the industry, but ni VFX and CG animated movies, Linux is widely used. If you look at movies with considerable amounts of VFX (and even many with minimal ones), the images you are probably seeing on the screen are at least rendered under Linux, some even created mostly under Linux.
The Discreet systems most used in VFX and animated films are for compositing and color correction, mainly things like Infernos and Flames. Infernos are turnkey systems (they worked on SGI Onyx systems) use for composting. At ILM, their propieatry Sabre compositing system is actually built ontop of Infernos (basically Sabres are extensions wrtitten for Inferno) and has been used in countless films.
ILM suses Maya from Alias but it's not the only thing they use. ILM (like most big VFX and animations companies) use a large array of off the shelf and propietyary software.
More precisely it used in the digital matte department. Funnily a lot of that work was done on what was called the Rebel Mac Unit. Now it's called the Rebel Unit and is mostly PC based.
It's not exactly the same industry. Most VFX studios work as paid contractors for films. They have nothing to do with the movie studios and media conglomerates. Would you accuse the guy that caters food on the set, or the nurse on set, or the dog trainer for being part of the "evil Hollywood". Movie studios have nothing to do if X or Y VFX studio uses Linux or not, and VFX studios have nothing to do if media conglomarates or software companies release Linux viewers.
And VFX and animation studios do give something back from time to time (just check around SIGGRAPH). ILM released OpenEXR, FLTK was released by Digital Domain, etc, plus papers they publish. But they use Linux because it's what work best for them. Nothing says they have to release anything is they use it internally (and besides all are trying to have a competitive edge).
I wonder sine the financial services industry uses a lot of Linux, is there going to be an uproar they are not giving anything back.
Actually this linux movies conference is probably aking place because SIGGRAPH, the largest CG conference in the world, is taking place during that week in the LA COnvention Center. Weird hat they are having it for such a huge part of that way since most people would be at SIGGRAPH, not to mention there are alreasy a couple SIGGRAPH BOFs deaing with that, one for Cinepaint amd the other about Linux for VFX production organized by Dreamworks.
Actually they use both, but Softimage has fallen in use at ILM recently. Maya is the base off the shelf package at ILM (and several other places) and is the most extensively used 3D commercial tool in there.
Slashdot Mirror
Skywalker Ranch IS located in Lucas Valley. It's the compound where George lives -- and it's not going anywhere. The only thing that moved is the ILM crew (I think the game people were already somewhere else). Skywalker Sound is still out there.
Small calrification. Skywalker Ranch is where Lucas works. He lives elsewhere (though close). Skywalker Sound and the Lucasfilm production offices are at the Ranch. ILM and LucasArts, which used to be in separate locations, are now at the Presidio location, though ILM has retained a few operations in San Rafael.
IMHO, you are wrong. CG can make a movie suck.
I guess it depends on your point of view. You can say that VFX is the only thing that is good in many movies. Many movies have crappy stories and directing, but with a decent budget at least the VFX could be good and the only worthwhile thing in it.
Star Wars III. How many pure CGI characters were there? Yoda. Obi-Wan's ride. That's about it. Everything else was primarily actors in suits or animatronics; whatever looked the best, not whatever was cheapest.
Not really, there were countless digital characters and digital doubles, mostly in the background and compromising 70 min. of animation work. In several instances even OB1 is digital, you have main characters like Grievous and Yoda, and many supporting like most wookies, the clone troopers, etc.
ven Jar-Jar (who was created by George Lucas, not by ILM) was an actor in a suit, enhanced with a CGI head
They actually did tests of having Ahmed Best in a suit and do a head replacement. It actually turned out that it was cheaper to do a full CG jar jar, than go with the head replacement technique. There's literally a handful of shots in the first prequel where the suit was actually used (I think one was when his hand get caught in the pod trying to get a stuck tool).
ZERO
Well if you to be anal about it, they have actually made a few short films, but not done a full theatrical film (although they were listed as coproducers of a few films like Star Trek 3, though it's a more technical point).
Digital Domain was the main provider. There were other companies like Animal Logic that also contributed.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was done by over 12 different vfx houses.
You are absolutely correct, ILM just prvides VFX work. They are just a contractor, like the guys that do the catering on the set. They have absolutely no control over the story or directing of the movies they work on (except for a few exceptions).
Also, if I remember correctly, they were some of the first to experiment with particle renders for CG (they used it in the Mask to create some of the storm/tornado transformations).
ILM introduced the concept of particle systems for film. It was first used for the Genesis Sequence in Star Trek 2. William Reeves then presented a paper at SIGGRAPH 83. He was also awarded an Academy SciTech award for it:
Particle Systems -- a Technique for Modeling a Class of Fuzzy Objects
Particle Systems
Particle Systems SciTech Award
Look at all they have done. While some of the stuff on there may have sucked... there is some really fucking good stuff on there.
I have a more complete list and that doesn't even include the hundreds of commercials they worked on:
ILM credits
Not really, Lucasfilm and ILM has been doing previs for ages. Although as far as games engines use is concerned, one of the big first applications at ILM was duringb the production of Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, where they built 2 systems.
As far as the market, it has really exploded lately. One of the first using modern technology was Pixel Libertarion Front (they use Softimage), but people from Lucasfilm/ILM left and created 2 companies specifically geared towards previs: one is Halon Entertainment (cofounded by Dan Gregoire) and the other is Persistence of Vision (cofounded by David Dozoretz).
Yeah, ILM keeps a sizeable Art Dept. which does illustrations, sketches, concept art and the like. Also people in the Model Shop do sculptures and maquettes of concepts for pre-production.
Yes, they have been doing it for ages and Lucasfilm has been a pioneer in movie previs.
What people seem to miss is what the article really is talking about. ILM and LucasArts for the most part worked with separate pipelines/infrastructures. Now that they're in the same facility in the Presidio, they share one. The new pipeline is based on Zeno, ILM's propietary 3D environment, which was first fully used on The Island and War of the Worlds (Zeno is actually based on dynamics code originally written for Star Wars Ep. 1).
Peter Jackson and WETA started using pre-vis before production began on LOTR. Other firms may have used it even earlier.
Yes and Lucasfilm was a pioneer of previs long before PJ and Weta. In fact Peter Jackson, Randal William Cook and a small group went to Lucasfilm around 1998 and visted ILM to see how previs was done there and later setup a dept. at Weta for the production of the first LOTR.
You could say storyboarding is a kind of previs, and Lucasfilm was a pioneer in using animatics for previs purposes (animated storyboard for Empire Strikes Back and using toys and a video camera to previs the Endor bike sequence in Return of the Jedi).
You misread that article. What Brian Gernand is talking about is design decissions (the visual aspects), how things should look like and the like. At least Lucas has a clear vision of what he wants but many times you have directors that don't which makes work fofr VFX people very hard. Brian Gernand is making no judgments in other aspects of the film like the story and characters, which is an entirely different deal.
Well, don't forget about Ed Catmull, who is president of Pixar. Pixar is his baby but he usually likes to be more in the background.
Actually the name RenderMan refers to the standard. PRMan or Photorealistic RenderMan refers to the actual Pixar product (the renderer) that applies that standard. Sometimes the names are used interchangably, but since there are other RenderMan renderers (Aqsis, RenderDotC, AIR, 3Delight, Pixie) it's better to make the distinction between PRMan and RenderMan.
As far sa what RenderMan as a specification is, it's mainly composed of 2 parts: a scene description part and the shading language. The scene description describes the 3D world and can be called procedutrally via C/C++ calls (or thoer bindings) or via RIB (RenderMan Interface Bytestream whcih can be text or binary). The shading language describes the apperance of objects (what they look like and their interaction with lighting).
As far as the software development, it's actually split. Some of the development (I think most of the Artist Tools but also some of PRMan) is done in Seattle, where Pixar has an office headed by Dana Batali (he is director of RenderMan product development). Some of the stuff is also done in the bay, after many of the people who worked on PRMan since its beginning, like Tony Apodaca, Tom Duff, etc. are at Emeryville. If Pixar got sold it would certainly create some commotion as tons of VFX studios use it. And that's not counting the fact that Lucas had a deal with Pixar that they would get first look at any Pixar technologies and some ILM people have rights to access the PRMan source code. It could get messy.
You can get some RenderMan info here:
http://renderman.org/
Well, Lucasfilm Animation has 2 divisions, one in Singtapore and one in the US. The one on Singapore will concentrate mainly on animated films and projects. The one in the US is said to be gearing now towards the live action TV series.
Discusions at CGTalk (including people that work in Singapore like Steve Stalhberg) point that the salaries and standard of living will be comparable to that of US animators. Though the discussion doesn't take into account that Lucas received some tax incentive from setting shop in Singapore.
Small correction: it's not that Lucas has close ties to ILM, he owns it.
Actually Maya is only used for the interactive work. The batch 3D rendering Weta Digital uses is PRMan, and Shake for batch compositing.
Also it doesn't matter if you are using all the cache in the CPUs, say for example if the shots you're rendering use texture maps of a 100 MBs and the RIB file might be a few hundred megabytes as well (so that also causes some bandwidth bottleneck). Of course you are can exploit some coherence in data (between frames or even in the same frame). So in the end you won't get those extreme savings implied in the article (me thinks they messed up on the quote or calculations). Then again when you are rendering such huge numbers of frames, or more precisely layers, even saving of a few percentage points, of a few seconds or minutes per frames, will actually mean you can save days or weeks in the end and render the whole movie on time.
Comparisons with Star Wars aren't helpful. King Kong has more fur. Rendering fur is hard work.
There is no easy way to compare that. It's highly subjective, even when using the most basic comparison: number of shots. I believe Ep. 3 had 2400+ shots in the final film, although about 2800+ were rendered (about 400 were edited out). Don't remember how many shots King Kong has, though I think it's at least 1,500 though less than 2400. Then you get to the subjective part. for both films how many shots have major 3D work, how many it's mostly compositing, roto and paint, how many are miniature mostly, how many are mixed more or less equaly, how many minutes of digital character animation, etc. So when discussing those issues it's usuallyt a good idea to get as specific as possible and even then you can argue both sides.
It's probably better to wait for the Cinefex issue in January.
http://www.cinefex.com/magazine/next/next.html
Those numbers are misleadingly wrong. Star Wars Episode III was rendered between the old ILM location and the new Presidio facility. The Presidio has about 4000 processors used for rendering, while old ILM had about 2,500 processors. The data center of the Presidio came online (I think) late last year. So frames from Ep. 3 and The Island were rendered both at the Presidio and old ILM. So surely ILM rendered Ep. 3 on a few thousand processors.
I think the misleading part is that some articles stated that the initial order for AMD Opteron based machines for the data center was 140 processors. But their renderfarm is crtainly 4,000 procs which I think includes about 1,000 workstations that are used for overnight rendering.
Data Center Gets Star Treatment
Also while ILM does have an Opteron based renderfarm they run Linux on them, not Windows64 beta.
But it depends on what you call "movie industry" which in general terms is a huge and amorphous entity. You might not see it in your end of the industry, but ni VFX and CG animated movies, Linux is widely used. If you look at movies with considerable amounts of VFX (and even many with minimal ones), the images you are probably seeing on the screen are at least rendered under Linux, some even created mostly under Linux.
The Discreet systems most used in VFX and animated films are for compositing and color correction, mainly things like Infernos and Flames. Infernos are turnkey systems (they worked on SGI Onyx systems) use for composting. At ILM, their propieatry Sabre compositing system is actually built ontop of Infernos (basically Sabres are extensions wrtitten for Inferno) and has been used in countless films.
ILM suses Maya from Alias but it's not the only thing they use. ILM (like most big VFX and animations companies) use a large array of off the shelf and propietyary software.
More precisely it used in the digital matte department. Funnily a lot of that work was done on what was called the Rebel Mac Unit. Now it's called the Rebel Unit and is mostly PC based.
Painting the Town
It's not exactly the same industry. Most VFX studios work as paid contractors for films. They have nothing to do with the movie studios and media conglomerates. Would you accuse the guy that caters food on the set, or the nurse on set, or the dog trainer for being part of the "evil Hollywood". Movie studios have nothing to do if X or Y VFX studio uses Linux or not, and VFX studios have nothing to do if media conglomarates or software companies release Linux viewers.
And VFX and animation studios do give something back from time to time (just check around SIGGRAPH). ILM released OpenEXR, FLTK was released by Digital Domain, etc, plus papers they publish. But they use Linux because it's what work best for them. Nothing says they have to release anything is they use it internally (and besides all are trying to have a competitive edge).
I wonder sine the financial services industry uses a lot of Linux, is there going to be an uproar they are not giving anything back.
Are you talking about Shake? I assure you Shake for Linux is GUI as well.
Actually this linux movies conference is probably aking place because SIGGRAPH, the largest CG conference in the world, is taking place during that week in the LA COnvention Center. Weird hat they are having it for such a huge part of that way since most people would be at SIGGRAPH, not to mention there are alreasy a couple SIGGRAPH BOFs deaing with that, one for Cinepaint amd the other about Linux for VFX production organized by Dreamworks.
Actually they use both, but Softimage has fallen in use at ILM recently. Maya is the base off the shelf package at ILM (and several other places) and is the most extensively used 3D commercial tool in there.