"Salary of Microsoft coder: present Salary of Linux coder: absent Linux coders do it for fun..."
This is a shift of resources, not an addition. Niether commercial nor OSS software is perfect, and the motivations you've described negatively affect either side.
You put far too much faith in developers doing it for 'fun'.
"you mean the really insightful "learn from mistakes" part, the defeatist "you can't beat a creative hacker" part, or the useful "let's not talk about this anyway" part? "
You mean the points you didn't have an argument against, so you focused on one of them thinking you could put a dent in it?
You should be listening to AnonV instead of arguing with him. Agree or disagree, it's up to you, but you really should listen.
"T2 was phenominal, most will agree. Even now, the CG still impresses. I preferred it to Spiderman, for certain. "
I just watched T2 recently. I think the reason T2 is preferred to Spiderman FX wise has more to do with the director than with the technology. The T-1000 never tried to do anything completely impractical.
I have to admit, I'm curious who'd win between a T-1000 and Odo.
"A Space Odyssey was the beginning of the realistic stuff."
Not sure exactly what this sentence meant, but it reminded me of something little-known about 2001. The computer displays they had in that movie were not computer generated at all. They were hand animated.
The amazing thing is that they're damn convincing. They had rotating objects, for example. They actually shot video of a rotating object and the animator traced over it frame by frame to film and play on the screen.
If memory serves, Back to the Future 2 made good use of CG effects by removing the wires that held the hover-boarders over the ground to appear as though they were defying gravity.
True Lies is one of the milestones in the digital fx industry. Not so much for 3D rendering, but for compositing and for motion tracking. You'd be surprised what all went into making Arnie pilot the Harrier over a city block.
It's neat to use computer generated effects to wow people, but there's little attention given to the digital effects that are used to keep people from being distracted. Who would have enjoyed BttF2 if they could see the wires holding up the hovery things?
"So the Empire State Building is as flimsy as a clothespin? I think The Moderator Has Been Trolled... "
That might be a fair statement if AnonV's comment didn't have a good deal more content in it than the part you are arguing with.
Judging from the other ignorant replies, I'd say that he had an anti-troll honey token going on here. You're all busy arguing that detail of his post that wasn't critical to his point and not actually engaging his point head on.
Very clever on his part, assuming he did it on purpose. "Ah, he's trying to fight my analysis with a sarcastic response that sounds more relevant than it really is. I can safely ignore this troll."
"Reason Windows programmers program: Pay Reason Linux programmers program: Fun Chance of love and thoughtfulness put into code: ERROR: DISCREPENCY DETECTED Hey, you're right, there IS a difference! "
Um, the "programmers do it for fun" bit doesn't bother you?
"Yes, it's no wonder schoolchildren don't understand physics, when what passes for everyday experience violates it on a regular basis, and nobody tells them that what they see on telivision and in the movies isn't real."
Umm, everybody I went to school with knew movies and TV were fake.
"Obviously, without air, there would be no sound. I think it's much more dramatic to see the explosion without hearing the sound, like they did in 2001: A Space Oddessy, rather than the way they did it in Star Wars, which came across as rather cartoonish in comparison."
This is an old and tired argument. Sound is very much an integral sense in our lives. Our ears never blink. We're so used to having sound for everything we do that movie makers know they need to add a rich sound track. Audio is very much a huge part of a movie.
Realism is not the holy grail of a movie. Reality is actually quite boring. Ever watch Big Brother? Take the sound out of the space scenes in Star Wars, and you take out a good deal of information. Actually, Star Trek comes to mind. There's an episode of Deep Space Nine called Sacrifice of Angels. A massive fleet of Federation ships (600 or so) engaged a more massive fleet of Dominion ships. (1200 or so.) Explosions ensue. One scene in particular stands out in my mind. The Defiant and two other (Miranda Class?) ships were in formation trying to break through the line. Both were destroyed. The one closer to the camera took a hit that hulled the ship, and it spun off screen rather close to the camera. As it flew by, you could see the exposed frame. You could hear this loud creak of the metal as it started to buckle.
Yeah, you could watch this without sound and be 'more realistic', but what do you lose? The sound that ship made after it was hit let the audience know the ship died. In a form of personification, the sound you heard was its death rattle. 100's of people died defending the Defiant. The sound track for this ep really drove the point home.
The director's job is to entertain, not try to fool you into thinking you're watching a documentary. I think you should appreciate more the work that goes into communicating ideas to the audience. Maybe then, you wouldn't be 'gotten every time' there's sound in space.
"It's a win-win for me, since the amount of support you have to do for a Mac user is virtually nil "
He is right. It is easy to support a Mac user. It's not like they have to deal with Direct X or other game related features of the OS.
This can be taken as flamebait, or it can be taken as insightful. It's all just a matter of if you take into account that the variety of uses a computer has geometrically multiplies the number of support issues that came up. Not everybody sits at their desks typing up emails and looking at porn.
"Hand animation never seems to capture the feeling of "weightiness" properly. The models just jerk around as if they had no mass or center of gravity. With motion capture, the center of gravity is always apparent, and the model doesn't seem like a hollow marrionette. "
Well you've been a bit vague here. Possible reasons could be:
- Animators just getting started - Technical limitations such as limited RAM. (Very possible.) - Too little time. - Motions could have been intentionally simple because when you move the mouse, the character moves according to some equation. Ever notice that when you rotate a character in Quake, his feet just rotate like he's on a pedestal? - Intentional design. This may sound funny but maybe they didn't want the character bobbing around if you're trying to snipe it. - Bad implementation. Animation is very complex. Getting from the artist to the programer can be nasty, especially when unexpected nuances appear. - It wasn't an animator at all, somebody just trying to make the model move.
I could keep going but without a game in particular, I cannot give you an answer why you feel that way. I do think you're unfairly generalizing, though.
"Motion capture is fine and good, but what about when you are trying to model the movement of a 50-ton 20-foot tall rock monster or something?"
You use a poor-man's motion capture. You video tape an actor (or a creature?) and anlyze its movements. How many frames does it take a step? What frame does it shift its weight?
Walking with Dinosaurs comes to mind. I watched the making of it, and boy was that cool and insightful. They had these birds that were kind of like pterydactls(sp?) with features similar to bats. They did kind of a four-legged walk with their hands located at the mid-joint of their wings. They had a terrible time animating these guys because they've never seen a creature here on earth that does that. So, eventually they figured out that a guy using crutches walking like a four-legged animal worked quite well. They didn't mo-cap it (that I saw) but they did analyze the vids frame by frame.
Another example popped into mind: Monsters Inc. Got the DVD? Watch the making of it. You can see a guy walking on a treadmill with cardboard tubes hanging from his arms. He was acting like a monster who's arms were really really long.
Yeah I know you weren't quite looking for the answer to this, but what they do to figure these problems out is amazing.
"Who says motion capture has to be disjointed and separated? If you insert appropriate animations between different captured actions, the result could look very smooth. "
Your heart is in the right place, but in this case what causes disjointedness is the mocap actor not quite matching the proportions of the model itself. This is correctable, but sadly I've not personally handled this area of animation so I cannot explain to you how its done.
There probably is a relatively simple solution, but the temporal resolution that you've suggested isn't the issue.
"Actually, that is the entire point of motion capture: It captues the fluidity of the actor exactly."
Eh not exactly. Mocap has two problems.
1.) Capture's not always perfect. There are glitches. Bad tracking. Etc. You get a very noisy graph for each channel, and they are prone to error. Imagine a sound wave. If you take a tape recorder and record a solid tone, you'll see that the tone doesn't generate a perfect wave. Lots of tiny little zig-zags there. The more 'perfect' the mic and capture equipment is, the less visible those zig-zags are. Those variances from what the value should be are noise. Crappy mic = very jagged. Kick ass mic = very smooth. Mo-cap is very much like that. Actually the motion graphs resemble a sound in some ways. If you have a ball that bounces up and down, the motion is real simple. It, in an over-simplistic sense, is a logarithmic curve. But with mo-cap, you have all these cameras watching a sensor strapped to a ball watching its motion. There are inaccuracies there. Careful inspection will reveal tiny errors in the motion. If the sensor is obscured from view, then the computer has more work to do.
That sort of make sense? In a round-about way, I'm saying that capturing mo-cap is sort of like capturing sound. It can be error prone.
2.) Athletes operate in uniforms that are as least restrictive as possible. This is in stark contrast to what a mo-cap person has to wear. They have to mind all these little sensors. They have to stay in one little spot for all the cameras to watch. Etc. It can be a hinderance.
Sorry I haven't read the article, but I think from that quote that's what he was after. Even if I got the context wrong, it is interesting to know. Frankly, I'm scared to work with mocap data. In the ball-bouncing example, I don't have 3 keyframes to play with. I have one for every single frame. (Unless the software is nice enough to find a curve for me...)
If you can tell the difference either way, then the method was not implemented properly. There is no "is one better than the other?" there's only "which is best for the job."
Consider this: If you want to use mocap, but it causes wiggly meshes, then you have an implementation problem. Do you write the code or adjust the model/actor to solve it, or do you use the video as reference and manually keyframe it? Do you even care? Will the gamer care? Is it worth the money?
I realize this isn't exactly a either/or type of discussion, but it will quickly turn into one. One guy will have seen bad mocap, another will have seen bad keyframing. Done right, either technique will be extremely convincing. It's fun to discuss, but let's keep this out of the realm of absolutism.
Slashdot Mirror
Ready?
*SNXXXXxxxxxxxxxkkxkxkxkkxkxkxkxkxkxkx*
(Lameness Filter note: Before ya mod me as off-topic, look at my nickname.)
.. they'd release a "Story DVD" with games like this so you don't have to beat the game to find out what happens.
Wing Commander II drove me nuts with that when I reached a level I couldn't beat.
.. it's not a local area network, it's just a really complex peer to peer protocol!
"But this is an odd numbered day, so we like AOL. "
Wait a sec. Today's Monday. Is Monday a 1 or a 0?
"Salary of Microsoft coder: present Salary of Linux coder: absent Linux coders do it for fun..."
This is a shift of resources, not an addition. Niether commercial nor OSS software is perfect, and the motivations you've described negatively affect either side.
You put far too much faith in developers doing it for 'fun'.
"you mean the really insightful "learn from mistakes" part, the defeatist "you can't beat a creative hacker" part, or the useful "let's not talk about this anyway" part? "
You mean the points you didn't have an argument against, so you focused on one of them thinking you could put a dent in it?
You should be listening to AnonV instead of arguing with him. Agree or disagree, it's up to you, but you really should listen.
"T2 was phenominal, most will agree. Even now, the CG still impresses. I preferred it to Spiderman, for certain. "
I just watched T2 recently. I think the reason T2 is preferred to Spiderman FX wise has more to do with the director than with the technology. The T-1000 never tried to do anything completely impractical.
I have to admit, I'm curious who'd win between a T-1000 and Odo.
"A Space Odyssey was the beginning of the realistic stuff."
;)
Not sure exactly what this sentence meant, but it reminded me of something little-known about 2001. The computer displays they had in that movie were not computer generated at all. They were hand animated.
The amazing thing is that they're damn convincing. They had rotating objects, for example. They actually shot video of a rotating object and the animator traced over it frame by frame to film and play on the screen.
Kick ass stuff.
... are the ones you never see.
If memory serves, Back to the Future 2 made good use of CG effects by removing the wires that held the hover-boarders over the ground to appear as though they were defying gravity.
True Lies is one of the milestones in the digital fx industry. Not so much for 3D rendering, but for compositing and for motion tracking. You'd be surprised what all went into making Arnie pilot the Harrier over a city block.
It's neat to use computer generated effects to wow people, but there's little attention given to the digital effects that are used to keep people from being distracted. Who would have enjoyed BttF2 if they could see the wires holding up the hovery things?
"So the Empire State Building is as flimsy as a clothespin? I think The Moderator Has Been Trolled... "
That might be a fair statement if AnonV's comment didn't have a good deal more content in it than the part you are arguing with.
Judging from the other ignorant replies, I'd say that he had an anti-troll honey token going on here. You're all busy arguing that detail of his post that wasn't critical to his point and not actually engaging his point head on.
Very clever on his part, assuming he did it on purpose. "Ah, he's trying to fight my analysis with a sarcastic response that sounds more relevant than it really is. I can safely ignore this troll."
Um, the "programmers do it for fun" bit doesn't bother you?
"Yes, it's no wonder schoolchildren don't understand physics, when what passes for everyday experience violates it on a regular basis, and nobody tells them that what they see on telivision and in the movies isn't real."
Umm, everybody I went to school with knew movies and TV were fake.
"Obviously, without air, there would be no sound. I think it's much more dramatic to see the explosion without hearing the sound, like they did in 2001: A Space Oddessy, rather than the way they did it in Star Wars, which came across as rather cartoonish in comparison."
This is an old and tired argument. Sound is very much an integral sense in our lives. Our ears never blink. We're so used to having sound for everything we do that movie makers know they need to add a rich sound track. Audio is very much a huge part of a movie.
Realism is not the holy grail of a movie. Reality is actually quite boring. Ever watch Big Brother? Take the sound out of the space scenes in Star Wars, and you take out a good deal of information. Actually, Star Trek comes to mind. There's an episode of Deep Space Nine called Sacrifice of Angels. A massive fleet of Federation ships (600 or so) engaged a more massive fleet of Dominion ships. (1200 or so.) Explosions ensue. One scene in particular stands out in my mind. The Defiant and two other (Miranda Class?) ships were in formation trying to break through the line. Both were destroyed. The one closer to the camera took a hit that hulled the ship, and it spun off screen rather close to the camera. As it flew by, you could see the exposed frame. You could hear this loud creak of the metal as it started to buckle.
Yeah, you could watch this without sound and be 'more realistic', but what do you lose? The sound that ship made after it was hit let the audience know the ship died. In a form of personification, the sound you heard was its death rattle. 100's of people died defending the Defiant. The sound track for this ep really drove the point home.
The director's job is to entertain, not try to fool you into thinking you're watching a documentary. I think you should appreciate more the work that goes into communicating ideas to the audience. Maybe then, you wouldn't be 'gotten every time' there's sound in space.
"If you can strip out all of the characters and plot from a story and it's still interesting, it's probably sci-fi."
Name one movie where you strip out the plot and the characters and its still interesting.
"so, STOP IMAGINING a beowulcluster of ANYTHING.... "
Yeah! Instead, welcome your" & $ARTICLE_TOPIC & " overlords.
"...just is not a very friendly environment for men. Machines are much more suitable and they don't require a return ticket."
Must... resist... yo mama... joke...
"I mean Phoenix was a bird of fire, maybe ESA should name it after something that does not soar across the sky in fire? "
Well they'd already rejected the name Icarus.
"Imagine, just imagine......
A beowulf cluster of these! "
Imagine, just imagine, a beowulf cluster of monkeys typing out every permutation of this joke.
"It's a win-win for me, since the amount of support you have to do for a Mac user is virtually nil "
He is right. It is easy to support a Mac user. It's not like they have to deal with Direct X or other game related features of the OS.
This can be taken as flamebait, or it can be taken as insightful. It's all just a matter of if you take into account that the variety of uses a computer has geometrically multiplies the number of support issues that came up. Not everybody sits at their desks typing up emails and looking at porn.
"Hand animation never seems to capture the feeling of "weightiness" properly. The models just jerk around as if they had no mass or center of gravity. With motion capture, the center of gravity is always apparent, and the model doesn't seem like a hollow marrionette. "
Well you've been a bit vague here. Possible reasons could be:
- Animators just getting started
- Technical limitations such as limited RAM. (Very possible.)
- Too little time.
- Motions could have been intentionally simple because when you move the mouse, the character moves according to some equation. Ever notice that when you rotate a character in Quake, his feet just rotate like he's on a pedestal?
- Intentional design. This may sound funny but maybe they didn't want the character bobbing around if you're trying to snipe it.
- Bad implementation. Animation is very complex. Getting from the artist to the programer can be nasty, especially when unexpected nuances appear.
- It wasn't an animator at all, somebody just trying to make the model move.
I could keep going but without a game in particular, I cannot give you an answer why you feel that way. I do think you're unfairly generalizing, though.
"Motion capture is fine and good, but what about when you are trying to model the movement of a 50-ton 20-foot tall rock monster or something?"
You use a poor-man's motion capture. You video tape an actor (or a creature?) and anlyze its movements. How many frames does it take a step? What frame does it shift its weight?
Walking with Dinosaurs comes to mind. I watched the making of it, and boy was that cool and insightful. They had these birds that were kind of like pterydactls(sp?) with features similar to bats. They did kind of a four-legged walk with their hands located at the mid-joint of their wings. They had a terrible time animating these guys because they've never seen a creature here on earth that does that. So, eventually they figured out that a guy using crutches walking like a four-legged animal worked quite well. They didn't mo-cap it (that I saw) but they did analyze the vids frame by frame.
Another example popped into mind: Monsters Inc. Got the DVD? Watch the making of it. You can see a guy walking on a treadmill with cardboard tubes hanging from his arms. He was acting like a monster who's arms were really really long.
Yeah I know you weren't quite looking for the answer to this, but what they do to figure these problems out is amazing.
"Who says motion capture has to be disjointed and separated? If you insert appropriate animations between different captured actions, the result could look very smooth. "
Your heart is in the right place, but in this case what causes disjointedness is the mocap actor not quite matching the proportions of the model itself. This is correctable, but sadly I've not personally handled this area of animation so I cannot explain to you how its done.
There probably is a relatively simple solution, but the temporal resolution that you've suggested isn't the issue.
"Actually, that is the entire point of motion capture: It captues the fluidity of the actor exactly."
Eh not exactly. Mocap has two problems.
1.) Capture's not always perfect. There are glitches. Bad tracking. Etc. You get a very noisy graph for each channel, and they are prone to error. Imagine a sound wave. If you take a tape recorder and record a solid tone, you'll see that the tone doesn't generate a perfect wave. Lots of tiny little zig-zags there. The more 'perfect' the mic and capture equipment is, the less visible those zig-zags are. Those variances from what the value should be are noise. Crappy mic = very jagged. Kick ass mic = very smooth. Mo-cap is very much like that. Actually the motion graphs resemble a sound in some ways. If you have a ball that bounces up and down, the motion is real simple. It, in an over-simplistic sense, is a logarithmic curve. But with mo-cap, you have all these cameras watching a sensor strapped to a ball watching its motion. There are inaccuracies there. Careful inspection will reveal tiny errors in the motion. If the sensor is obscured from view, then the computer has more work to do.
That sort of make sense? In a round-about way, I'm saying that capturing mo-cap is sort of like capturing sound. It can be error prone.
2.) Athletes operate in uniforms that are as least restrictive as possible. This is in stark contrast to what a mo-cap person has to wear. They have to mind all these little sensors. They have to stay in one little spot for all the cameras to watch. Etc. It can be a hinderance.
Sorry I haven't read the article, but I think from that quote that's what he was after. Even if I got the context wrong, it is interesting to know. Frankly, I'm scared to work with mocap data. In the ball-bouncing example, I don't have 3 keyframes to play with. I have one for every single frame. (Unless the software is nice enough to find a curve for me...)
"An almost identical article appeared a couple weeks or so ago. "
Odd, someone's been driving my Delorean. That explains the copy of the New Zealand Herald sitting in backseat.
If you can tell the difference either way, then the method was not implemented properly. There is no "is one better than the other?" there's only "which is best for the job."
Consider this: If you want to use mocap, but it causes wiggly meshes, then you have an implementation problem. Do you write the code or adjust the model/actor to solve it, or do you use the video as reference and manually keyframe it? Do you even care? Will the gamer care? Is it worth the money?
I realize this isn't exactly a either/or type of discussion, but it will quickly turn into one. One guy will have seen bad mocap, another will have seen bad keyframing. Done right, either technique will be extremely convincing. It's fun to discuss, but let's keep this out of the realm of absolutism.