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Completely-CGI people for FF movie 87

Posted by CmdrTaco from the replacing-actors dept.
Roger writes " Check out this page (the Honolulu Star-Bulletin), which has a pic of a completely CGI person. Thing is, you can't tell she is until you read it below the picture. She will apparently be the female lead in the Final Fantasy Movie. "
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Completely-CGI people for FF movie More

Completely-CGI people for FF movie

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  • Porn Implications (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Interesting...

    How bad would child porn be if you weren't harming any children in it's creation?

    Just a thought from up here in Canada, where it's illegal to write a description of sexual acts involving children on a piece of paper, even if you never show it to anyone (I wish I was joking...)

  • rube goldberg is making movies (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Recent movies have been so lousy that no one seems to think about what real acting is.

    Even if the cg mannequins were implemented perfectly they won't be human, there won't be that mental connection between the character and the audience.

    A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a radio show about cloning. The guests were all academics. One guy finally made the point that everyone seems to miss -- why would people make clones, when it's expensive and difficult and not nearly as much fun as having sex?

    So the question here is why would you spend a kazillion dollars to make phony cg people who move unnaturally (yes, I've seen characters who are modeled from video of real people) and whose voices are dubbed? Why not just film a person? It's a lot cheaper and easier, and the results are better. The first couple of movies that are all cg will do well because of the novelty. I'd go to see it. But over the long haul, it's an inefficient rube goldberg way to make movies.

    If they think that a cg brad pitt is going to be competition for the real brad pitt, they've got a nasty surprise in store for them. Hollywood is full of beautiful people, but very few of them are stars. There's more to it than a face.

    Rent there's something about mary, and look at cameron diaz's eyes. Think about modeling it, how complicated it is, how the way the move and flash is tied in perfectly with the rest of her facial expressions, which are in turn synced with the emotions of the scene and the reactions of the people opposite her.

    They're not going to duplicate that in the forseeable future.

  • I've put the image up on my site [ci-n.com]. Now we get to see how well a 486-66 behind a 33.6k modem handles the Slashdot effect. ;)

    If someone who's got some real bandwidth could grab it and re-mirror it, that would probably be good.

    And I have to say... the image may not be perfect, but I've seen worse quality JPEGs of real people... If I hadn't known going in, I would have guessed that it was a real actress in a CGI scene. The one thing I did notice is that she hasn't got any finger/hand prints...

  • I'd love to see a GPL'd movie, but my feeling is that we'll never see anything of quality (longer than 30 min) come out.

  • But with an infinite amount of monkeys, er, programmers writing screenplay, we'll produce an infinite amount of screenplays/scripts/etc. Then it's just a matter of picking the best one!
  • Posted by Scott Francis[Mechaman]:

    While you'll probably respond that you wouldn't watch cartoons; I dare you to watch a Miyazaki film, say Nausicaa, and reply that you wern't moved by it.
    CG is just another medium to work in. Keep an open mind.
    (Although improperly mixing CG with cell animation tends to look badly; Spielburg's Invasion America is a prime example of this.)
  • It looks like they cribbed their descriptions straight from rpgamer.com. Ah well. Shouldn't be too harsh on them, though--it's just a fluff story.
  • In Sweden, you cannot use the name or photo of anybody (say, the Queen, or Björn Borg) for commercial advertising without their permission. Faking an image of the Queen drinking Coca-Cola would count as alleged endorsement of a product, and may (if reported to the police) result in damages to the person depicted as well as fines.

    It's at least as illegal as making false statements about the product itself (such as selling plain water but labelling it "vodka"). It has nothing whatsoever to do with intellectual property.

    I'm not sure though how the Swedish law on the subject [notisum.se] relates to dead people. For some reason, celebrities don't seem to pop up in random commercials in Sweden as soon as they are dead, and I think that would count as false marketing anyway. Maybe this is a real problem in Britain?

  • While I may have my doubts about your claim, I think you would be interested in joining the Internet Movie Project [imp.org] established less than a year ago. Ok, that web page may look pretty beta, and don't expect a fast race, but there are some serious minds out there willing to spend part of their spare time scripting, modelling, directing, and rendering an entire movie using PoV-Ray. Look around and see if you want to contribute.
  • Well, <URL:http://www.imp.org/ [imp.org]> works for me at least (the domain name was set up in December). If you can't reach it, could you be more specific as to what the problem is? Mail me directly; there's no need to bother Slashdot readers with local network trouble (and I have enough trouble reaching Slashdot to tell you this, since I don't know your e-mail address).

    However, you could also check the initial project website at <URL:http://www.algonet.se/%7Ejhubert/Mov ieProject/ [algonet.se]> (that space is in the anchor text only, not in the actual URL) which still links to all the relevant material.

    I'd rather not try to describe the project here, since I would be duplicating their own web info. Studio-quality? Yes, if you count television/video (as opposed to cinema) quality. GPL? No, but public enough for me. One has to register as a member in order to take part in the project, but much of it is visible to non-members as well. The distribution details haven't been worked out in detail, but as I understand it, the result will be made available for free (see the membership agreement [algonet.se] for legal details).

    As for high-quality script, I don't think you will be disappointed reading what has been done so far. I wasn't.

  • Realism is not achieved exclusively by the tool. The artist must participate the most.

    If you have 10 million programmers, but no artists, it's rather like expecting 10 million monkeys to reproduce *Watership Down.*
  • (on the unlikely chance someone actually reads this...)

    Would I hire someone who reads child porn as a sitter for my child? Irrelevant question. People don't get grabbed by kiddie porn and forced to read it, people who are sexually attracted to children seek it out. The rest of us look away in disgust, we don't become child molesters by viewing it. So of course a person who views it is more likely to be a child molester. The issue is whether, *given* a person with a sexual attraction to children, will they be even more likely to act on those desires if they read child porn. I say there's little or no evidence that this is the case.
  • "If you supply a person with suggestions that it is ok to think of children in a sexual manner (though why anyone would want to is totally beyond me) then you will ultimately see a rise in the real thing."

    But we're not doing that.

    Assume that child pornography was legal and available at your local adult bookstore. Would you buy any? I doubt it, most of us wouldn't. Only those rare people for whom it's a turn-on would. So what effect would it have on them? Would viewing the pornography (presumably while engaging in self-gratification) satisfy their urges or stimulate them into kid-nabbing? I don't think you can definitively say one way or the other. Playing Doom, D&D, and wargames never spurred me to violence, for example.

    Actually, I probably have seen a comic strip or two that would qualify as child porn in books about underground comic strips. Again, this in no way filled me with the desire to have sex with children.

  • Its not CG it's Katherine, my old girlfriend (now married.) Overall I like how her face has a more friendly tone, considering what they could have done.

    But I agree with another poster, the lighting seems to be created to cast the best light on the image. The more complex things like hair, etc... are in the dark, and her face and a cyber-phychedelic board are about all we see. Still i think it will be pretty fun to watch. I remember disliking Toy Story because the people looked more toy like than the toys.

    And as far as connecting with the charectar, people connect with written charectars all the time. (I even get bewildered by those that seem to connect with Lara Croft. Rachel had some interesting things to say about her, being somewhat an athority herself... and I'll stop there.)
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~ ^~
    ABORTED effort:
    Close all that you have.
  • So they couldn't convince a real woman to star as the a heroine in a movie so they synthesize one with computers and get men to act the movements. It reminds me of Elizabeth dole a little bit.
  • Yeah, maybe we'd actually get some porn with good looking women, instead of the usual revenge of the plastic balloon-boobed blonde bimbos.

    "It must be silicon, 'cause flesh don't refuse to shake like that"
  • Surely there is prior-art in the form of princess Diana herself? If this 3D model thing worked then by similar reasoning someone could patent all images of the moon, or even an unwilling subject's face! When will people recognise that intellectual property, and patents in particular, are a pandora's box of problems, and are fundimentally stupid in concept anyway. Information wants to be free!!

    --

  • US (Score:1)

    by Sanity ( 1431 )
    If they try in the U.S you can be almost sure that the nobrainer patent people will not be as stringent. The US patent office seems to delight in permitting the silliest things to be patented, with the excuse that it can always be fought out in court. That is assuming that the people hurt by the stupid patent can afford to go to court in the first place!

    --

  • Actually, BMRT and Radiance BOTH understand radiocity. (IMHO, BMRT does a better job of it, too.) Not sure about PoV-Ray, but I've been told it does.

    What do you mean by "have a plot"? A plot to the story could be open-sourced (as per my Free Film Project). That's not a hinderance. If anything, I think it might produce better results, as the open nature of it would iron out flaws in the script which are so often glaring in the major (closed) film productions.

  • Actually, your joke illustrates one of the reasons I think a GPLed movie would be very successful - you can have multiple versions of the script, each evolving in parallel. Those versions that work & are popular will survive. Those that don't & aren't, won't.
  • The homepage is over at: http://www.geoci ties.com/ResearchTriangle/Facility/6309/index.html [geocities.com]. Yes, I know, but the software side is being moved over to www.gnu.org Real Soon Now (the Free Film Project is part of Gnu) and I'm hoping to re-house the arts and FAQ sides shortly.

    There'll be at least one mailing list, also starting soon, and a CVS repository.

  • I'd check those numbers. According to various independent film making groups, you can make a full-length movie on $5,000, total. Yes, with real actors.
  • But you wouldn't have the "infinite monkeys" problem! Any more than you do with Gnome, the kernel, Flight Gear or any other "free" or "open source" product!


    Why? Because people have a natural tendancy to drift to do what they're good at & enjoy. It's my belief that the =ARTISTS= will drift to doing the ARTS side, whilst the PROGRAMMERS drift to the PROGRAMMING/COMPUTING side.


    Infinite Monkey problem negated.

  • We've got BMRT and PoV-Ray, and probably far more computing power (when combined) than any studio. It should be possible to produce far more realistic people than any proprietary, closed environment could achieve.
  • Amazing picture. I'm mirroring a copy at http://www.css.tayloru.edu/~bbell/fan tasy.jpg [tayloru.edu].
  • Just to play Devil's Advocate, and not voicing any opinion one way or another (as I dont think that is necessary), are not laws such as those preventing the use of children in pornography designed to protect the children as individuals who would be used in such productions? In the case of using CGI actors there would be no child harmed directly by the production of such material.

    However, if your position is that the laws are to protect social decency and moral standards, then I would have to object, as such qualities are not (or should not) be legislatable when it comes to issues of creative production (whether you find child porno creative is irrelevant, it should still be considered an act of self-expression as all other forms of speech are protected).

    Im sure Ill be flamed for this, but I dont feel the need to justify an argument based purely on principle.

    Hey! I didnt bring it up :)

  • That's all I can say. Copy can be found (when the site gets /.ed) at my site that doesn't do much. [the-corridor.com] Go easy on it please, only 64k upstream.
  • The only clue I had was the hair; that didn't look quite right.

    But you know, while such realism might make CG-movies seem more real, it also takes away some of the charm. I'm sure that we've all seen "Toy Story" by now; tell me, would it have been the same if all the toys had looked any more realistic than they did? I think it would have.

    Nonetheless, I'll be first in line to buy tickets to this movie. This is going to be cool...
  • The story said that the main character will look "like Brad Pitt". If this is successful, I wonder whether either Pitt or some future image-oriented actor will consider doing what the Princess Diana trust is now; i.e., having a 3D model made from photographs of their face and patented, so that they can sue those who replicate their image.

    If the Diana people get away this, how long until we have entire business specialising in this process in one shop, from digitisation and modelling to patent submission?

    The street finds its own uses for things.
  • Read about it at the BBC [bbc.co.uk].

    For my money the gal in the pic is very credible... but unlike the guy earlier I think that motion will not help hide detail, it will show up unrealistic physics and unnatural gracelessness.
  • pretty darn close if you ask me.

    The face is very good, the hair .. you can't really see the hair, so I'll hold off judgement. The hand and the sleeve though, are pretty unrealistic. Still, I think that hands are harder to "get right" than faces, so I can understand.

    This is going to be a severely cool movie..

    --------------------
    this space left intentionally blank



  • Wow, this is yet more stuff that makes me want to go work for Square once I get a degree or two.
  • It doesn't have to be perfect to work, just good enough to get the audience to buy into it. Look at Toy Story for an example: nobody would mistake any character in the movie for a real person, but you got involved and the movie worked.

    And the graphic I saw looked way better than anything in Toy Story.

    Jon
  • Well that took less than 40 minutes to /. that server out of existence. It leaves me wondering what the record is. It might be interesting to monitor these sites' behavior as the /. effect takes its toll. Sort of like that post a few days ago that monitored it from the viewpoint of the server - but from the outside, maybe using pings and/or simple fetches every minute, and plotting response time. Slashdot itself could do this, then maybe add a little icon to the headline when the server goes down. It would be nifty to be able to click to see a graph describing the death of these unfortunate servers.

    Lady Luck favors the hopelessly insane.
    - Brain : Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain
  • Well that was quick.
    ----
  • Your regurgitation of the party line sounds good, until you cross reference what you think you know with some facts.

    A study last year found that conviceted child molesters were not as likely to molest again if they had a ready supply of child pornography.

    The authors of the study reasoned that since it's difficult to reform people, and there's something about child molestors that is off-base, but unfixable, then the solution might be to find an outlet for their deviant behavior that didn't hurt anyone.

    The state has confiscated a great deal of child porn. The children who were abused by it have already been abused. Further use of the child porn doesn't further hurt the children. Thus, existing stockpiles of child porn could be used for this.

    Obviously, implementing something like this is way out of the question in current society. Even talking about it is somewhat taboo.

    My point is that use of child porn does NOT necessarily cause child abuse. The general lesson to learn is QUESTION EVERYTHING!!!

  • Anybody have the image cached?
  • I got bored of the ff series right around 4. Tried the ffvii for psx and was bored in 20 minutes.

    The shot is nice, but I really have a problem with game/movie sort of dealies (eg. Super Mario Bros. ack, Mortal Kombat suk, etc.)

    Just hope Doom and Quake don't suffer the same fate...
  • In this article it says the actors are completely computer generated - that nothing is scanned from humans. Then they tell you about how they put sensors on this guy and scanned in his movements!
  • The question isn't whether kiddy-porn is acceptable (by all social standards, it's not). The question is, is it so evil that we have to start prosecuting people for even thinking about it? Once we start going after thoughtcrime, it could be a slippery slope back to 1984...
  • DK-96 in Japan is the first (that I know of) completely computer generated character. FF's version is definately higher quality, but then DK-96 is going on 3 years old.

    http://www.dhw.co.jp/horipro/ta lent/DK96/index_e.html [dhw.co.jp]
  • Yeah, games-turned-movies usually suck, but the Final Fantasy series is kind of a different case; it's open-ended. One game has nothing to do with another in the series. I get the feeling the only thing this movie will have in common with the Final Fantasy series is its name and the people who worked on it. It has the potential to be really, really good.

    At any rate, I'm looking forward to seeing the new Wing Commander movie this year, too. :)
  • From the article, they make it sound like motion capture is this great new idea. It's used in almost every sports video game nowadays.

  • ...but thought the plots were always quite, no, REALLY dumb. I must say that you can't do anything in the 'fantasy' genre through Live Action however, and have been waiting for a CGI fantasy for a while. I still think anime is the way to go, however, and think they'd be best NOT trying to make it completely realistic, ya know, make the characters look kinda strange on purpose so people can't say 'that doesn't look real!!!' I mean I'm sure half the posts here are in regards to her skin tone/all that metal shit that looks totally fake. Actually what I think the real problem is that they are spending too much time on the PEOPLE and not enough time on everything else. Then it turns into the same whole problem of doing fantasy with live action where the people and landscape looks real but the magic looks like crap. All in all I wish them luck, however, and hope the magic looks cool cuz I mean those magic effects were some of the only things keeping on until ff6 (No I don't have a PSX).
  • I mean in 4 you couldn't change anybody's class or anything and it just sucked out loud, but in FF5 they have this whole skill system where you can build up peoples strengths in different classes, almost as if you were playing as seperate classes, but then you can start building up strengths somewhere else so all in all it's a lot more flexible. I've only tried out the translated ROM, but I heard they re-made it and translated it for PSX or something. Now, I'm not saying that this at all makes FF7 or anything after it any better, but I truly think FF5 is the best in the FF series. And yes, I WOULD pay money for it IF they ported it to LINUX!!! (not an emu that runs in linux mind you, linux itself)
  • I'm not sure of the value of CG movies trying to create reality; its power is in realistically creating fiction...

    There are reasons today why animated media can have a strength, value, and power that filmed media do not. It's particualarly hard in real life to coordinate lighting, atmosphere, humidity, and weather to get great dramatic moments in particularly beautiful places... CG will help there. For more mundane situations, CG can hide, alter, mask, and transform an alley in LA into an alley on an alien world, with alien culture, trash, and citizens.

    And CG people are very well suited for special effects that cannot or should not be done in real life, for stunts, for amazing transformations... For those who watch anime, a life-action Ranma film could be made with real actors and their CG counterparts stepping in at appropriate moments for transformations, as well as during battle scenes, chi-attacks, etc. T2 used CG, but they accepted the limitations and made it part of their look... Future tense, CG should be able to make the morphing of 2 individuals flawless, so that future Spielbergs, Lucases, and others can populate their worlds with changelings, dopplegangers, mutants, superheros, and things only dreamed of on paper and animated media...

    Twink
  • You can tell. Look at her sleeve. It is perfectly cylindrical. Also look at the smooth, symmetric texture of that sleeve. Then take a look at her hair.

    However, this is a still. A moving picture would be better since you can't look at the details.

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