No, the people having sex were real. What happened for ther US release is that they composited this people in the way so that it wouldn't be so graphic. You can spot like a few couples that don't move stratigically placed here and there.
The worst part was that they claimed Kubrick wanted it that way, but if that was the case then why did the European version didn't have that "censoring"?
For those interested, you can purchase Massive. Stephen Regelous, the brains behind this app, showed it last SIGGRAPH. You can check their website here:
It's funny how the double standard works. LOTR uses heavy amounts of CG to create CG crowds, when arguably they could have filmed with extras in costumes and makeup (even just a few and replicated and composited to create a crowd), and is heralded by many, but have Lucas do the same with the Clones and many complaing about the fakeness, coldness, overkill, or some other nonesense by many others.
He can't win can he;-).
Next up is the discussion of CG Golum vs. CG Yoda.
Ahhh I see your point. Well not liking their style is up to each one of us. I guess that's the style the people at Pixar like.
Besides the PRMan division has to respond to clients with different needs. They need to be able to make a renderer as flexible, feature full and robust as possible. After all it seems parts of Iron Giant were rendered with PRMan, so indeed even an extreme style like non-photoreal rendering is possible. "Work in Progress" and "Synchonicity" by ILM are other 2 pieces of stylized animation done in PRMan.
Besides who knows, maybe The Incredibles will have a diffrent style with Brad Bird involved.
Yes, but those are workstations. The 15 stations for production are probably for running something like Maya or menv, and the other are programmers workstations. I was aware of the switch also. Heck even Pixar said that they might try a few Macs with OSX
Workstations are completely separate from the Renderfarm which is mostly SUN machines:
Because they are making animated movies. They are necessarily stylized. By that logic, why wasn't Ice Age made like Walking with Dinosaurs/Beasts? They make stylized films. Some Japanese animated films dtrive for a lot of realism, why not make them live action instead? Animated films are an art to themselves. Yes of course Pixar, PDI, Blue Sky and many other deliberately goo for a stylized look.
You also have to remember Pixar's story. Ed Catmull was always interested in making animated films even before founding the Lucasfilm Graphics Group. One reason Pixar was spun-off was because Catmull wanted to make the animated films, while Lucas was interested in using computers to help the live action filming process, mainly for doing Visual Effects (though there were other efforts like the EditDroid and SoundDroid).
Actually it's Disney who wants a TS3. They can argue that it's not art of the deal and sort of get an "extra" Pixar film besides the others they have to do. Yes Jobs wanted the exception, and if TS3 went ahead Jobs would again plead that TS3 count towards their commitment.
The interesting part will be future negotiations because it has come to a point where it's debatable who need whom more. Pixar needs a studio for distribution, but I don't think finding a new one would be a problem (though going at it alone would be much more difficult). On the other hands Disney's traditionally animated films are kinda underperformers. Pixar is coming to a point of being on a better bargaining position.
By the way The Incredibles is directed by Brad Bird, who made the very underrated The Iron Giant. Some of those rumors say that about Nemo, becuse rumors have it that everyone wanted to be involved with Incredibles.
Also interestingly enough, Dreamworks is working on their own underwater movie, called Sharkslayer, which is kinda of a mafia like film.
Not quite. Everyone, except Pixar, uses the same version. Pixar has more advanced development versions in use. Case in point, deep shadow maps, presented at SIGGRAPH 2000, were used in Monster's Inc. for Sully's hair. But the commercial version has no deep shadow maps implementation until version 11 (to be released Q4?). SO they did have a more advenaced version than everyone else and in over 2 years made no mention of implementing it on PRMan. Who knows what else they had in house with no immediate plans to incorporate into the commercial release.
The other thing, well did you really miss the or notice any GI absence problems in Monster's Inc. Animated films are very art directed. One example, say you wanted to modify where a shadow falls without altering the compositon of the rest of the elements. With raytrcing and other such GI solutions it would be difficult or at leats much more than say in a renderer like PRMan wher you can generate the shadow map independently or even use a paint program. A specific example is Geri's glasses in Geri's game. The refraction you see there is not realistic, it was cheated to make his eyes look bigger and angelic. A raytacer would have put something else, not what the director intended.
As I mentioned Entropy was quicly catching up to PRman to the point where major Pixar clients were starting to use it. ILM needs a raytracer for specific techniques, like generating reflection maps, handling HDRI, and the all important occlusion maps used since Pearl HArbor and JP3. From what an important ILM VFX supervisor mentioned they were excited about a RenderMan renderer where they could combine the best of both worlds, the speed, flexibility and robustness of REYES plus the specific features of GI.
I doubt Ice Age had anything to do with it. After all PDI uses some sort of A-buffer scanline renderer as far as I know with no GI, or at least none for quite some time. Shrek looked fantastic basicly with no GI either. The lighting philosophy of both these places doesn't hinge on having GI on the renderer.
But you are also right, they might have the best of both worlds to compete, not only on their coomercial products, but on their animated movies. Last SIGGRAPH at the photon maps course, one of the presenters was a guy from Rhythm and Hues, so I guess their propietary renderer might get GI. I also saw people frmo ILM, PDI and a whole other studios. So maybe in the end or in the future you are absolutely right. Just to many facts and changes to deal with;-).
Nope, because Blue Sky's, and PDI's renderer for that matter, were not commercial products. They use in house renderes.
On the other hand Entropy was a commercial product much cheaper than PRMan (about 1/5 or 1/4 of the price). It was primarily geared towards small studios and 3DMax users, but many of the big studios used it at least a little bit, including ILM, probably Pixar's most important customer. It was even used in one small sequence on Attack of the Clones, and from a recent posting by Larry Gritz apparently it was also used in Reign of Fire and Stuart Little 2. I'm sure Pixar didn't like that.
Also at past SIGGRAPH you could hear some complaints that not enough was done to improve PRMan, and Exluna was much more responsive and much quicker on their innovations. One example is how Pixar didn't implement deep shadow maps (which came out from a paper they presented at SIGGRAPH 2000, used in Monsters Inc., but it won't come out until PRMan 11). While Entropy lacked some features they were making fast progress and in some instances apparently surpassing PRMan. Actually if you look at PRMan 11's list of features you get a feeling much of the new stuff is things Entropy had, some even have claimed that PRMan 11 has included some Entropy specific extensions, though I can't verufy 100%.
It's too bad this debacle happened. You have to wonder if Pixar will sue Colin or someone for providing a tool like Liquid. On the other hand hopefully Thad Beier from Hammerhead will just show how senseles some of this patent software business is.
Well if I remember right U$50 million is more or less what Shrek officialy cost. Ice Age around U$65 million. Either a Bugs Life or Toy Story 2 were also around that range. Final Fantasy and Monsters Inc, were over U$100 million though. But Jimmy Neutron, a bonafide hit was made for $25 million.
And it's not too bad, after all some of these films are developed over 3 or 4 years, so really they are kinda cheap compared to Summer popcorn extrabaganzas.
Heck, even better just check the pages of Matte World Digital. And it's also something that it's not recent, just check their pages of the SIGGRAPH 1998 presentations, or the brand new released book, The Invisible Art, by Craig Barron:
Yes, Liquid only allows you to connect (seamlessly) Maya to a RenderMan renderer. PRMan is U$5000 per license. RAT is even more expensive. Maya Complete now is U$2000, but Unlimited is U$7,000:
As you can see from the list prices with Liquid you are partially subsituting RAT, which is $8,500. Specifically you are substituting MTOR which is the bridge between Maya and PRMan, You would still miss on things like Alfred, Slim and It.
Why it does matter is that now small studios or even artists can afford a Maya to RenderMan bridge. Potentially they could combine it with cheaper alternatives like RenderDotC, AIR or 3Delight on the renderer part, and something like Smedge for distributing the rendering jobs. So potentially it could be easier to save the cost of RAT for artists workstations. Also if a studio has in house tools, they could potentially integrate them easier since the code for Liquid will be available.
Ahhh yes they are expensive but lets be honest, above the line talent is expensive too, which many times is attached to a film. You have actors that get 10, 15 or 20 million dollars for say 6 months of woork. Some directors and a few writers can also get a few millions here and there. Compare that to say 20 or 40 million for all the VFX but that might be used to pay 200 people over the course of a year or more to complete the visuals. Talk about priorities;-).
As far as expenses sometimes it's just cheaper to leave it for post. You sometimes hear that a day a production falls behind schedule or can't film (say the day is cloudy, when they need sunshine) costs the production X amount of money, say $100,000. It might be cheaper to just film and then do a sky replacement in post. There is also the matter of art direction, maybe you can't find the tree you need. Take the one from What Dreams May Come. And of course there are things you can't just plain film, where are you going to get out there a real dinosaur, Yoda, a balrog or 100 operational and flying Japanese Zeroes that you can also crash and destroy?
If there is a problem it's the studios approving these awful stories. You can have movies with good stories that use tons of FX like LOTR, Harry Potter or AI, but then you get all these projects that are just there for the "popcorn" value, say Armageddon, Resident Evil, etc. Worst part is that a lot of the general public enjoys and consumes this sort of movies, just look at the box office charts and see how many of these types of films become hits or at least rake in cash in the opening weeks.
Well why I agree that it's the filmmaker, it comes to taste then right? I know someone who would say the opposite, that LOTR was dark and flat while AOTC was vibrant and colorful.
Well PRman is really widespread in the VFX industry for rendering, so you usually export from your 3D apps (Maya, Softimage, Houdini, etc.) to PRMan. At Weta Digital it's mostly Maya to PRman, as well as Imageworks, MPC and many others. Big facilties use more stuff. At Digital Domain they sometimes export directly from Houdini. At ILM they animate in Softimage and Maya, sometimes go from Softimage to Maya and there to PRMan (though they also have their own propietary renderes like for hair and particles).
Yes Aqsis was written from scartch. It has only been recent that Aqsis went opensource. BMRT was closed source but free, and now it's dead, gone for good as well as Entropy.
Ehhhh, First LOTR was rendered with the standard Photorealistic RenderMan, they didn't use radiosity or global illumination.
Second you don't get MTOR automatically, it's part of the RenderMan Artist Tools (RAT). You can also buy PRMan separate with no RAT, after all why would you need RAT in render nodes.
Third over 90% of movies VFX are rendered with PRman and most of the time with no GI of any kind, for over 15 years that PRMan and Pixar came to being. That's what good lighting TDs do. GI is not the be all end all for movie VFX production work.
Fourth, Pixar announce this past SIGGRAPH that PRMan 11 will support GI via photon mapping, which included many interesting new shading language calls. This seems to have been in response to Exluna's Entropy before it's demise:
Yes but the standrd RenderMan exporter included in Maya is less than ideal for production work, mainly only exporting only geometry and not even doing a good job at that. That's why MTOR is necessary for good RenderMan connectivity.
BTW there was a Python script to export from Blender to RenderMan:
Might be a little bit of speculation, but they could do a bit of comparative studies. They could potentially know the size of infants (from nearly hatched egg fossils) and adults. Depending iftyou consider them warm or cold blooded you can roughly estimate their growth rate based on contemporary animals (say gators, birds and mammals) and extrapolate from there.
Also, some bones and teeth exhibit growth rings, like those of trees. Maybe this type of dino had bone growth rings that are clearly visible.
They are found all over the world, just watch a few documentaries on the Discovery Channel. There seem to be big finds in Mongolia and also South America.
No need to apologize, I didn't find you rude or anything, except maybe passionate. As I said on re-reading my first post I think I didn't do a good job of expressing my ideas. It's not that I don't think Carmack will be right eventually (I just disagree on the timeline) or that many FX are rushed (I sure know several examples), I just couldn't find the right words:-).
As far as people from ILM I've met plenty at SIGGRAPH (attendee since 95), usually I've spoken with a few of them for a few min. I've got an acquaintance there but we only email evry so often since he is to busy. Heck I interviewed once there but I didn't get the job, oh well. Also I've inherited a page about ILM, The Unofficial ILM website:
Because of that I now have a relationship with ILM PR and they are sometimes very gracious in providing info and scoops. They even introduced me to a fwe people where I almost had a heart attack but that's beside the point.
My best suggestion is to get involved with SIGGRAPH (if you have a local chapter). If not, start saving and go to next year's SIGGRAPH, in San Diego. That's the most important event for VFX and the biggestrecruitment event for ILM and other houses. You can certainly makes losts of contacts ther and actually talk to all these people and they can give you great advice. First time I went my eyes opened, I really didn't know how much was FX all about. In case you haven't gone to one I have a primer on the conference:
You do realize that both TPM and AOTC used tons of miniatures. ILM has one of the biggest model shops in the industry. At peak time ILM had 60 model makers working on AOTC besides whatever oterh they had for other productions. Same with Weta Workshop which boasta an impressive model shop. Acually most explosuions are done via practical pyro elements including AOTC and a host of other VFX movies.
Besides you could take the devil's argument and say that the ESB puppet loks exactly like that, a rubber pupett as opposed to a real brwtahing character;-).
Well I do know also several people at ILM. Maybe my wording was not right. I just find that the generaliztion that all the FX were rushed a bit misleading. I'm not saying that particular shots or sequences were not rushed. A ton of time they ar but there are also many times when they seem to take their time to get it right.
Anyway I do see the difference between thsoe 2 shots mentioned. C3PO looked way to animated and flexible for his rigd body.
Second as far as Toy Story, yes in total it took close to 5 years to make but more than half of that was spent developing the story. Besides the way Pixar (and other animation houses) works is a little different than the way VFX houses work.
You can take counterexamples also, fantastic FX that took much less than what Toy Story took and they matched it up to the eral people and places. How about the CG stunt double of Vin Diesel in XXX when hie land on the bike just after the explosion? Pretty much in your face.
I didn't imply also that artists were not overloaded, they are. But in the end if the studio, director supervisor are the one that tells the artist to stop well that is not their fault. I'm sure every artist would like to have a flexible schedule where he could refine a shot until he was more or les satisfied but that's not the reality in Hollywood FX.
The truth is that the manager/supervisor is not going to have any idea if the schedule's going to be blown
I agree ith you here. Then again in extreme cases the FX company has to step in and either ask for moer money or time or farm out shots. Sometimes it works sometimes it don't.
That's not a cliche, it's a myth.
Not it's not, though we are talking about slightly different things. I'm gonna paraphrase a somment Dennis Muren made at VES 1999. In one of the wide shots of the Gungan/droid battle, during dailes one of the artists realized that one of the energy balls rolling around didn't have motion blur and he was admanat to erdo it. Muren said it wasn't really necessary since it was a small detail and that's the way it stayed. They presented it to Lucas and he thought it was fin. The shot was final.
I mean a reqirement for that shot would be to have elemnets with their proper motion blur so they fit better. Muren himself said that's basicly what happened they just stopped working on it until it was good enough, not until it was perfect. On a case by case basis yes you can have shots that are basicly great while others seem to have been left midway. Spaz William said in an interview how the SE were rush jobs. So was the work on Deep Ble Sea or the Mummy 2. But on other cases sometimes you have to put a lot of crap on it. I mean if you have a planet which is covered with one big city you have to put a ton of stuff in the background. How realistic a movie set in NY would be if it looked almost empty mid day Manhattan? At least Vanilla Sky had a reason.
I think we more or less agree but we're coming from different directions.
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No, the people having sex were real. What happened for ther US release is that they composited this people in the way so that it wouldn't be so graphic. You can spot like a few couples that don't move stratigically placed here and there.
The worst part was that they claimed Kubrick wanted it that way, but if that was the case then why did the European version didn't have that "censoring"?
For those interested, you can purchase Massive. Stephen Regelous, the brains behind this app, showed it last SIGGRAPH. You can check their website here:
Massive Software
Softimage also just announced their own system:
SOFTIMAGE ANNOUNCES SOFTIMAGE®|BEHAVIOR
It's funny how the double standard works. LOTR uses heavy amounts of CG to create CG crowds, when arguably they could have filmed with extras in costumes and makeup (even just a few and replicated and composited to create a crowd), and is heralded by many, but have Lucas do the same with the Clones and many complaing about the fakeness, coldness, overkill, or some other nonesense by many others.
;-).
He can't win can he
Next up is the discussion of CG Golum vs. CG Yoda.
Ahhh I see your point. Well not liking their style is up to each one of us. I guess that's the style the people at Pixar like.
Besides the PRMan division has to respond to clients with different needs. They need to be able to make a renderer as flexible, feature full and robust as possible. After all it seems parts of Iron Giant were rendered with PRMan, so indeed even an extreme style like non-photoreal rendering is possible. "Work in Progress" and "Synchonicity" by ILM are other 2 pieces of stylized animation done in PRMan.
Besides who knows, maybe The Incredibles will have a diffrent style with Brad Bird involved.
Yes, but those are workstations. The 15 stations for production are probably for running something like Maya or menv, and the other are programmers workstations. I was aware of the switch also. Heck even Pixar said that they might try a few Macs with OSX
Workstations are completely separate from the Renderfarm which is mostly SUN machines:
Sun Customer Success Stories: Pixar
SUN MICROSYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY USED IN RENDERING DISNEY/PIXAR'S "MONSTERS, INC."
Well I guess I took your comment too seriously, didn't notice the tongue in cheekness ;-)
Because they are making animated movies. They are necessarily stylized. By that logic, why wasn't Ice Age made like Walking with Dinosaurs/Beasts? They make stylized films. Some Japanese animated films dtrive for a lot of realism, why not make them live action instead? Animated films are an art to themselves. Yes of course Pixar, PDI, Blue Sky and many other deliberately goo for a stylized look.
;-)
You also have to remember Pixar's story. Ed Catmull was always interested in making animated films even before founding the Lucasfilm Graphics Group. One reason Pixar was spun-off was because Catmull wanted to make the animated films, while Lucas was interested in using computers to help the live action filming process, mainly for doing Visual Effects (though there were other efforts like the EditDroid and SoundDroid).
I don't see what the problem is
Hmmm, Pixar's renderfarm is mostly SUN machines. The software used to distribute render jobs was written by Pixar.
Disney mostly is only involved in the film distribution, not in making it at all.
So exactly how much has the "community" done for Pixar?
Actually it's Disney who wants a TS3. They can argue that it's not art of the deal and sort of get an "extra" Pixar film besides the others they have to do. Yes Jobs wanted the exception, and if TS3 went ahead Jobs would again plead that TS3 count towards their commitment.
The interesting part will be future negotiations because it has come to a point where it's debatable who need whom more. Pixar needs a studio for distribution, but I don't think finding a new one would be a problem (though going at it alone would be much more difficult). On the other hands Disney's traditionally animated films are kinda underperformers. Pixar is coming to a point of being on a better bargaining position.
By the way The Incredibles is directed by Brad Bird, who made the very underrated The Iron Giant. Some of those rumors say that about Nemo, becuse rumors have it that everyone wanted to be involved with Incredibles.
Also interestingly enough, Dreamworks is working on their own underwater movie, called Sharkslayer, which is kinda of a mafia like film.
Not quite. Everyone, except Pixar, uses the same version. Pixar has more advanced development versions in use. Case in point, deep shadow maps, presented at SIGGRAPH 2000, were used in Monster's Inc. for Sully's hair. But the commercial version has no deep shadow maps implementation until version 11 (to be released Q4?). SO they did have a more advenaced version than everyone else and in over 2 years made no mention of implementing it on PRMan. Who knows what else they had in house with no immediate plans to incorporate into the commercial release.
;-).
The other thing, well did you really miss the or notice any GI absence problems in Monster's Inc. Animated films are very art directed. One example, say you wanted to modify where a shadow falls without altering the compositon of the rest of the elements. With raytrcing and other such GI solutions it would be difficult or at leats much more than say in a renderer like PRMan wher you can generate the shadow map independently or even use a paint program. A specific example is Geri's glasses in Geri's game. The refraction you see there is not realistic, it was cheated to make his eyes look bigger and angelic. A raytacer would have put something else, not what the director intended.
As I mentioned Entropy was quicly catching up to PRman to the point where major Pixar clients were starting to use it. ILM needs a raytracer for specific techniques, like generating reflection maps, handling HDRI, and the all important occlusion maps used since Pearl HArbor and JP3. From what an important ILM VFX supervisor mentioned they were excited about a RenderMan renderer where they could combine the best of both worlds, the speed, flexibility and robustness of REYES plus the specific features of GI.
I doubt Ice Age had anything to do with it. After all PDI uses some sort of A-buffer scanline renderer as far as I know with no GI, or at least none for quite some time. Shrek looked fantastic basicly with no GI either. The lighting philosophy of both these places doesn't hinge on having GI on the renderer.
But you are also right, they might have the best of both worlds to compete, not only on their coomercial products, but on their animated movies. Last SIGGRAPH at the photon maps course, one of the presenters was a guy from Rhythm and Hues, so I guess their propietary renderer might get GI. I also saw people frmo ILM, PDI and a whole other studios. So maybe in the end or in the future you are absolutely right. Just to many facts and changes to deal with
Nope, because Blue Sky's, and PDI's renderer for that matter, were not commercial products. They use in house renderes.
On the other hand Entropy was a commercial product much cheaper than PRMan (about 1/5 or 1/4 of the price). It was primarily geared towards small studios and 3DMax users, but many of the big studios used it at least a little bit, including ILM, probably Pixar's most important customer. It was even used in one small sequence on Attack of the Clones, and from a recent posting by Larry Gritz apparently it was also used in Reign of Fire and Stuart Little 2. I'm sure Pixar didn't like that.
Also at past SIGGRAPH you could hear some complaints that not enough was done to improve PRMan, and Exluna was much more responsive and much quicker on their innovations. One example is how Pixar didn't implement deep shadow maps (which came out from a paper they presented at SIGGRAPH 2000, used in Monsters Inc., but it won't come out until PRMan 11). While Entropy lacked some features they were making fast progress and in some instances apparently surpassing PRMan. Actually if you look at PRMan 11's list of features you get a feeling much of the new stuff is things Entropy had, some even have claimed that PRMan 11 has included some Entropy specific extensions, though I can't verufy 100%.
It's too bad this debacle happened. You have to wonder if Pixar will sue Colin or someone for providing a tool like Liquid. On the other hand hopefully Thad Beier from Hammerhead will just show how senseles some of this patent software business is.
Well if I remember right U$50 million is more or less what Shrek officialy cost. Ice Age around U$65 million. Either a Bugs Life or Toy Story 2 were also around that range. Final Fantasy and Monsters Inc, were over U$100 million though. But Jimmy Neutron, a bonafide hit was made for $25 million.
And it's not too bad, after all some of these films are developed over 3 or 4 years, so really they are kinda cheap compared to Summer popcorn extrabaganzas.
Heck, even better just check the pages of Matte World Digital. And it's also something that it's not recent, just check their pages of the SIGGRAPH 1998 presentations, or the brand new released book, The Invisible Art, by Craig Barron:
Matte World Digital film creditsMatte Painting in the Digital Age
The Invisible Art
Yes, Liquid only allows you to connect (seamlessly) Maya to a RenderMan renderer. PRMan is U$5000 per license. RAT is even more expensive. Maya Complete now is U$2000, but Unlimited is U$7,000:
Pixar software price listMaya store
As you can see from the list prices with Liquid you are partially subsituting RAT, which is $8,500. Specifically you are substituting MTOR which is the bridge between Maya and PRMan, You would still miss on things like Alfred, Slim and It.
Why it does matter is that now small studios or even artists can afford a Maya to RenderMan bridge. Potentially they could combine it with cheaper alternatives like RenderDotC, AIR or 3Delight on the renderer part, and something like Smedge for distributing the rendering jobs. So potentially it could be easier to save the cost of RAT for artists workstations. Also if a studio has in house tools, they could potentially integrate them easier since the code for Liquid will be available.
Ahhh yes they are expensive but lets be honest, above the line talent is expensive too, which many times is attached to a film. You have actors that get 10, 15 or 20 million dollars for say 6 months of woork. Some directors and a few writers can also get a few millions here and there. Compare that to say 20 or 40 million for all the VFX but that might be used to pay 200 people over the course of a year or more to complete the visuals. Talk about priorities ;-).
As far as expenses sometimes it's just cheaper to leave it for post. You sometimes hear that a day a production falls behind schedule or can't film (say the day is cloudy, when they need sunshine) costs the production X amount of money, say $100,000. It might be cheaper to just film and then do a sky replacement in post. There is also the matter of art direction, maybe you can't find the tree you need. Take the one from What Dreams May Come. And of course there are things you can't just plain film, where are you going to get out there a real dinosaur, Yoda, a balrog or 100 operational and flying Japanese Zeroes that you can also crash and destroy?
If there is a problem it's the studios approving these awful stories. You can have movies with good stories that use tons of FX like LOTR, Harry Potter or AI, but then you get all these projects that are just there for the "popcorn" value, say Armageddon, Resident Evil, etc. Worst part is that a lot of the general public enjoys and consumes this sort of movies, just look at the box office charts and see how many of these types of films become hits or at least rake in cash in the opening weeks.
Well why I agree that it's the filmmaker, it comes to taste then right? I know someone who would say the opposite, that LOTR was dark and flat while AOTC was vibrant and colorful.
Well PRman is really widespread in the VFX industry for rendering, so you usually export from your 3D apps (Maya, Softimage, Houdini, etc.) to PRMan. At Weta Digital it's mostly Maya to PRman, as well as Imageworks, MPC and many others. Big facilties use more stuff. At Digital Domain they sometimes export directly from Houdini. At ILM they animate in Softimage and Maya, sometimes go from Softimage to Maya and there to PRMan (though they also have their own propietary renderes like for hair and particles).
Yes Aqsis was written from scartch. It has only been recent that Aqsis went opensource. BMRT was closed source but free, and now it's dead, gone for good as well as Entropy.
Ehhhh, First LOTR was rendered with the standard Photorealistic RenderMan, they didn't use radiosity or global illumination.
Second you don't get MTOR automatically, it's part of the RenderMan Artist Tools (RAT). You can also buy PRMan separate with no RAT, after all why would you need RAT in render nodes.
Third over 90% of movies VFX are rendered with PRman and most of the time with no GI of any kind, for over 15 years that PRMan and Pixar came to being. That's what good lighting TDs do. GI is not the be all end all for movie VFX production work.
Fourth, Pixar announce this past SIGGRAPH that PRMan 11 will support GI via photon mapping, which included many interesting new shading language calls. This seems to have been in response to Exluna's Entropy before it's demise:
Pixar Announces Ray Tracing and Global Illumination in RenderMan® Release 11New RenderMan Shading Language Functions
On RenderMan 11 - Interview with Dana Batali from Pixar
Yes but the standrd RenderMan exporter included in Maya is less than ideal for production work, mainly only exporting only geometry and not even doing a good job at that. That's why MTOR is necessary for good RenderMan connectivity.
BTW there was a Python script to export from Blender to RenderMan:
Jan Walter's Blender PagesExport Blender Animations To Other Renderers
Might be a little bit of speculation, but they could do a bit of comparative studies. They could potentially know the size of infants (from nearly hatched egg fossils) and adults. Depending iftyou consider them warm or cold blooded you can roughly estimate their growth rate based on contemporary animals (say gators, birds and mammals) and extrapolate from there.
Also, some bones and teeth exhibit growth rings, like those of trees. Maybe this type of dino had bone growth rings that are clearly visible.
Age Determination of DinosaursBONE STRUCTURE AND HISTOLOGY
Dinosaur Metabolism
Bone Histology
Dinosaurs' metabolism
Dinosaur Growth and Behavior
Sea turtle bones bear rings that help scientists measure sexual maturity
They are found all over the world, just watch a few documentaries on the Discovery Channel. There seem to be big finds in Mongolia and also South America.
Actually it's the third trailer overall. There was a 30 second teaser around June, and then a trailer around August. I've had links for the 3 of them.
Actually I fail to see all the hoopla, it's already available on the official Potter site.
No need to apologize, I didn't find you rude or anything, except maybe passionate. As I said on re-reading my first post I think I didn't do a good job of expressing my ideas. It's not that I don't think Carmack will be right eventually (I just disagree on the timeline) or that many FX are rushed (I sure know several examples), I just couldn't find the right words :-).
As far as people from ILM I've met plenty at SIGGRAPH (attendee since 95), usually I've spoken with a few of them for a few min. I've got an acquaintance there but we only email evry so often since he is to busy. Heck I interviewed once there but I didn't get the job, oh well. Also I've inherited a page about ILM, The Unofficial ILM website:
The Unofficial ILM Website
Because of that I now have a relationship with ILM PR and they are sometimes very gracious in providing info and scoops. They even introduced me to a fwe people where I almost had a heart attack but that's beside the point.
My best suggestion is to get involved with SIGGRAPH (if you have a local chapter). If not, start saving and go to next year's SIGGRAPH, in San Diego. That's the most important event for VFX and the biggestrecruitment event for ILM and other houses. You can certainly makes losts of contacts ther and actually talk to all these people and they can give you great advice. First time I went my eyes opened, I really didn't know how much was FX all about. In case you haven't gone to one I have a primer on the conference:
SIGGRAPH 2003
SIGGRAPH Primer
If not you can contact me at the site forums.
You do realize that both TPM and AOTC used tons of miniatures. ILM has one of the biggest model shops in the industry. At peak time ILM had 60 model makers working on AOTC besides whatever oterh they had for other productions. Same with Weta Workshop which boasta an impressive model shop. Acually most explosuions are done via practical pyro elements including AOTC and a host of other VFX movies.
;-).
Besides you could take the devil's argument and say that the ESB puppet loks exactly like that, a rubber pupett as opposed to a real brwtahing character
Well I do know also several people at ILM. Maybe my wording was not right. I just find that the generaliztion that all the FX were rushed a bit misleading. I'm not saying that particular shots or sequences were not rushed. A ton of time they ar but there are also many times when they seem to take their time to get it right.
Anyway I do see the difference between thsoe 2 shots mentioned. C3PO looked way to animated and flexible for his rigd body.
Second as far as Toy Story, yes in total it took close to 5 years to make but more than half of that was spent developing the story. Besides the way Pixar (and other animation houses) works is a little different than the way VFX houses work.
You can take counterexamples also, fantastic FX that took much less than what Toy Story took and they matched it up to the eral people and places. How about the CG stunt double of Vin Diesel in XXX when hie land on the bike just after the explosion? Pretty much in your face.
I didn't imply also that artists were not overloaded, they are. But in the end if the studio, director supervisor are the one that tells the artist to stop well that is not their fault. I'm sure every artist would like to have a flexible schedule where he could refine a shot until he was more or les satisfied but that's not the reality in Hollywood FX.
The truth is that the manager/supervisor is not going to have any idea if the schedule's going to be blown
I agree ith you here. Then again in extreme cases the FX company has to step in and either ask for moer money or time or farm out shots. Sometimes it works sometimes it don't.
That's not a cliche, it's a myth.
Not it's not, though we are talking about slightly different things. I'm gonna paraphrase a somment Dennis Muren made at VES 1999. In one of the wide shots of the Gungan/droid battle, during dailes one of the artists realized that one of the energy balls rolling around didn't have motion blur and he was admanat to erdo it. Muren said it wasn't really necessary since it was a small detail and that's the way it stayed. They presented it to Lucas and he thought it was fin. The shot was final.
I mean a reqirement for that shot would be to have elemnets with their proper motion blur so they fit better. Muren himself said that's basicly what happened they just stopped working on it until it was good enough, not until it was perfect. On a case by case basis yes you can have shots that are basicly great while others seem to have been left midway. Spaz William said in an interview how the SE were rush jobs. So was the work on Deep Ble Sea or the Mummy 2. But on other cases sometimes you have to put a lot of crap on it. I mean if you have a planet which is covered with one big city you have to put a ton of stuff in the background. How realistic a movie set in NY would be if it looked almost empty mid day Manhattan? At least Vanilla Sky had a reason.
I think we more or less agree but we're coming from different directions.