Water Spectacular in Episode III?

An anonymous reader writes "From StarWars.com: 'With the prequel trilogy lacking in elaborate musical numbers, Aaron McBride and the rest of the Art Department were given the task to create visuals for a new spectacular in Episode III.' Lucas didn't piss off enough people with Jar-Jar?" The link is to an image of a Mon Calamari^(?) woman in some sort of performance outfit. A water spectacular ala Esther Williams, perhaps?

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Re:Water spectacular?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this isn't much of a spoiler considered the thing was shown in the trailer released in March [img164.exs.cx]. The fish people are performing a type of ballet that Palpatine and Anakin attend. This is in the trailer where Palpatine says, "The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural." Anakin then asks if it's possible to learn those abilities.

It's on the trailer

[cy_a253]

You can briefly see the water dancing after about 1/4 of the length of the trailer, after Obi-Wan says "We are at war, Anakin".

http://www.starwars.com/ [starwars.com]

Fits With Classic Trilogy

[goMac2500]

I hate to show my Star Wars geek side but...

The dancer shown is a Mon Calamari. They were very important in Return of the Jedi. The giant pod looking ships in the Rebel fleet were Mon Calamari Star Cruisers, and the attack was led by Admiral Ackbar, a Mon Calamari. You can see him in Return of the Jedi. Admiral Ackbar also made a cameo in the X-Wing game. He's the guy who orders "Launch the X-Wing fighters!" (I loved the game, what can I say).

So, Lucas isn't pulling this out of his ass. It is consistent with Episode 6. Whether or not having a Mon Calamari dance is a good idea, thats a different story.

Re:How do they do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you need to ask you can't afford it, so I'm guessing this is curiosity. The companies that make this software will make a custom installation for the needs of one moviehouse -- and often a single movie. The price of the software will include n techs working for you throughout the life of the project, training for your artists, and so on... Basically hiring a software team to complement your software team to and work subordinate to the true artists.

Most often you'll be looking at Mac workstations (a recent change from SGI) and linux for the renderfarm (often SGI in the past as well, but SGI had less of a stranglehold outside of the workstation).

Yes, you could do this with Linux and Blender provided you had a full-time development team to tweak Blender to do exactly what you want, a big enough cluster to render a single preview frame fast enough that the artist doesn't loose their rythm, and another full-time development team working on the tools to move the objects (plot the arc for the ball when it's thrown, and so on).

Re:How do they do this?

[albieomoss]

I love Blender to death but it is by no means capable of the kind of effects you are seeing now in films. I'd say most movie special effects are done in Maya right now. The MEL scripting makes it very easy to program custom behavior and huge crowd scenes like those in The Lord of the Rings. Some studios use Softimage|XSI, some, like Pixar, use custom software developed in house to work on their computer systems. But I'm just talking about 3D animation packages, half of it is the compositing software. As far as OS goes it varies. You'll probably see a lot of Irix and UNIX boxes. Lots of clusters. Render Farms.

Re:How do they do this?

[The boojum]

Often some combination of Maya on the front-end with lots of custom scripts is used to generate RIB data which is rendered by a RenderMan interface compliant renderer. You won't get PRMan (Pixar's implementation) very cheaply, but there some other good implentations. You may still be able to dig up a copy of the Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT) somewhere. RenderDotC [dotcsw.com] has a resolution limited evaluation version. There's also Aqsis [aqsis.com] and which is GPL, but I haven't used it so I can't really speak on its quality or how complete it is. Pixie [berkeley.edu] is another GPL renderer which seems pretty cool. All of them can run on Linux.

Part of the reason that RenderMan renderers are so popular is that they let you write custom shader scripts which they interpret to shade and deform the geometry. It's kind of the equivalent of GPU pixel and vertex shaders (which are partly inspired by RenderMan, by the way.)

If you want books, Advanced RenderMan [amazon.com] is excellent. (My copy is well worn.) The RenderMan Repository [renderman.org] has some examples and some good basic information on RenderMan. They also have a nice collection of PDF's of the course notes [renderman.org] from the RenderMan SIGGRAPH courses over the years. Those typically have chapters by folks from the studios describing how they accomplished certain effects. I highly recommend it for getting the flavor of the the thing. Lastly, there's the RenderMan spec [pixar.com] itself from Pixar, though I certainly wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to all this.

My suggestion to start trying this stuff out would be too Google for RIB export scripts/plugins for Blender (I know they exists, but I don't use Blender), grab one of the GPL renderers out there and pick up a copy of Advanced RenderMan to start learning the shading language. Good luck!

Re:Mon Calamar

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Why would a humanoid squid have breasts?

Same reason humanoid vaginas smell like fish?

Re:Mon Calamar

[Nonoche]

Actually you can say both calamar and calmar for squid in French, except for the giant squid which is only called calmar géant.

This pretty much says it all

[cranos]

Linky [penny-arcade.com]

Re:Mon Calamar

[Surgeon606]

"Calamar" is the Spanish word for squid [wordreference.com], so it seems a mixture of both French and Spanish. Has Lucas been at the Pyrenees [pyrenees-pireneos.org] recently?

Re:How do they do this?

[brainstyle]

Weta used Maya for LOTR quite a bit actually - read all about it here [alias.com] if you want.

You may be thinking of Massive [massivesoftware.com], which was written by devlopers at Weta to drive the crowd behaviour in Maya, and has since been spun off to its own product.

Re:Mon Calamar

[Rolan]

Lucas told SWG [starwarsgalaxies.com] that Mon Cal females didn't have breasts (not being mamals afterall). There was an on going fight about if they should or shouldn't on the SWG boards, wouldn't want to be there now.

Re:How do they do this?

[jackbird]

Most big shops largely use Maya, but not as much more than a plugin loader for custom code that handles most aspects of the pipeline, and tons of custom MEL to handle routine tasks, so it's hard to say with a straight face that most film effects shots are "done in" any package. They'll also split a shot between several applications/renderers sometimes, though, to get the strengths of each (a few shots in the Incredibles used 3ds max with the Brazil renderer, for example, for generating matte paintings - and this is at Pixar, the home of Renderman).

Smaller shops might use more (but still not entirely) off-the-shelf Maya, XSI, max, Houdini, Lightwave, etc. seats, to get the job done.

I think very few places use blender at all, however(other than the FX house that wrote most of it) because its UI and workflow are so very different than most other 3D packages, which makes it harder to throw extra artists at a particularly big job or farm out work.

You also see less and less IRIX around, as the SGI hardware is becoming hopelessly outdated. Hence the interest in Linux by the big studios.

Re:No imagination

[Artifakt]

Platypi do not have breasts, or even nipples. Females lactate through many small, pore-like openings on their bellies, and must lay on their backs and allow the milk to form pools for the young to nurse from. (Even your link touches upon this)

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/mammals/ platypus/Duckbillprintout.shtml [enchantedlearning.com]

In addition, Platypusses do not waste their time seeing this movie. Platypoids have better things to do.

Re:smart move

[Grab]

Hate to be the one to tell you, but Red Dwarf did that joke way earlier.

Grab.