ILM Now Capable of Realtime CGI 262
Sandman1971 writes "According to the Sydney Morning Herald, specialFX company ILM is now capable of doing realtime CGI, allowing actors and directors to see rough CGI immediately after a scene is filmed. Actors on the latest Star Wars film watch instant replays of their battles with CG characters. ILM CTO Cliff Plumer attributes this amazing leap to the increase in processing power and a migration from using Silicon Graphics RISC-Unix workstations to Intel-based Dell systems running Linux."
Errm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't realtime by WHILE the scene is filmed?
further proof (Score:2, Insightful)
Two Towers (Score:5, Insightful)
So does this make this old news??
I dunno, I feel the ILM have been behind the bleeding edge for sometime now...
alnya
Re:Errm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Errm... (Score:2, Insightful)
not if your name is George Lucas. then it is all about the eye-candy
Re:Errm... (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be like saying videotaping isn't "realtime" since you have to rewind!
Re:Errm... (Score:5, Insightful)
WIth HD Lucas is shooting actors on Video...and now doing previsualization with the CG elements on set.
Did Liam look in the general direction of, but not AT the eyes of the CG character? Reshoot. etc. etc. etc.
Additionally a rough edit can be done off the video tap on set with the rough CG edit.
Unfortuantetly this still means nothing without good acting, a good script, or alternate footage to make decisions from.
You make a film three times.
Once on the page, once while directing, and once in the edit. But if everthing is so storyboarded and timed down the moment that you can't have options, you can't discover anything in the edit at all.
Oh well, at least you can see what the giant CG creature looks like
Not new.. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the video card, not the CPU.... (Score:5, Insightful)
SGI laughed at the unassuming threat of the video chipsets, thinking that they would never be as fast as brute force. Even Pixar thought the same [siliconinvestor.com]. Boy, were they wrong though. You can set up a cheap-ass render farm for about $250k, taking up minimal space that can do the same job as a SGI render farm that costs a cool $2 million (Shuttle SFF PC w/ 3 gig CPU + ATI 9700). Of course, there's still the software side.
The Nvidia's GeForceFX and ATI's Radeon 9800 both contain features that even through the marketing-hype has some real value to programmers out there. Just look at Doom 3. It will run well on some computers that are just 6 months old. Now, imagine taking 250 of them, as a Beowulf cluster!!1
Re:Errm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How long til... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I agree... somewhat (Score:2, Insightful)
As an aside, I would say that you can buy 2nd hand Octanes, phone up SGI, and they will give you a support contract - they will even check the machines over for you.
The total cost will be a fraction of the cost of a new dual Xeon workstation.
Again, this would be a foolish decision to apply across the board, but if you're doing the sort of effects work where the strengths of something like Octane are a bonus, it's a good solution.
I know someone who runs an effects house who has bought dual CPU Octanes and 4 way Origin 2000 desksides for each of the animators.
The Octane gets used for the creative work, the Origin for the render.
They're using Maya5, and this solution cost them less than the cost of dual Xeon gfx workstations for each animator, and a render farm. A renderfarm sounds like a cool idea, but it's not just the cost of the kit (something people on
Re:Errm... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're George Lucas, you don't discover anything in the edit, you simply use CGI to change the actors' bodies to fit what you want. If you listen to the Episode I and II DVD commentaries, you will hear some very interesting details about how actors' positions on "set," their limbs, and even their faces were changed in post to suit Lucas' direction. It's no wonder the new Star Wars films seem so flat and lifeless -- why have a collaborative experience with an actor when you can do CG puppetry?
I'm not a big anti-Lucas guy (his money = his prerogative), but I am a big fan of actors. I find this sort of gimmickry very off-putting and definitely detrimental to the quality of a film. It's not that you can necessarily finger it on-screen while you're experiencing the film (although the fireplace scene in Episode II is an exception), but it can't help but contribute to a sense of detachment in the actors' performances, and thus it makes their scenes stilted and somehow "off."
Re:Serious Question (Score:4, Insightful)
More and more manufacturers are coming out with blade servers using x86 processors which will increase this density and likely increase the use.
This is not saying that the studios are not running SGI kit for animation, modelling etc. Linux/x86 kit has a way to go to catch up there.
Re:Two Towers (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as motion capture goes, I remember seeing a Phantom Menace special which showed exactly that. Ahmed Best in a motion capture shoot, and a rough CG of JarJar on a monitor moving along with the actor. So to those neisayers out there, this was being done way before WETA did it for LotR.
doesn't seem that great (Score:2, Insightful)