CGI just wasn't finished?

[Tripod]

Well, I've seen some clips from the movie and I don't know exactly what to think. But about the CGI, in the Chrome trailer which too was produced by Hines and Pendragon we see some pretty good Special Effects but in WotW it just seems unfinished. Could it be that the film's effects are strained by the movies deadline?
I think good CGI could make it an entirely different movie.

Tripod

[theredweed]

depends on which animation company they went to for the cg. some are crap and dont care much about detail.

I may be that they wanted so badly to release it before the paramount version that they rushed it and didn't finish it. from what i can tell the compositinf does look dodgy in some places and good in other almost like it is unfinished.

which company does it say did the animation

[thed0ct0r]

theredweed said:

which company does it say did the animation

For War of the Worlds they did it themselves (in-house). A lot of the effects for Chrome were done by "Foundation Imaging" - the now defunct company that provided effects for some Star Trek series. They ran out of money and that's why all we have is that stupid trailer. Even if the effects are decent it will still suck. It's a Timothy Hines vid-film ya know!

[theredweed]

Now see thats the first problem, having an i house animation company, is wrong wrong wrong, cos you need someone who is not going to be hampered by the filming, plus when another company does it a specialised company they can go away do their tricks and return pleasing you, rather than you watching the process, which causes many directors to go crazy as it seems to have no progress at all.

[jackson]

i think in house production is ok if you are not running sinclaire spectrums. Lets face it this is due to a lack of talent and imagination. Lets hope next time that the likes of hines choose a story that isnt loved by millions. but lets hope anthony piana(nothing like brad pitt) is cast in every film ever!

[theredweed]

I dont like in house animation, it never seems to have that touch you get from giving it to someone else not related to the production, personal thing

[Jacko]

CGI work experiance, what a wonerful idea that was!!

[jackson]

hartcliff youth experiment. . . . . .then the c in cgi stands for chav

[the Donal]

Trouble is, even if you have a very fast computer, it would take just one PC or Mac alone months to render every frame of motion picture quality CG at full resolution/colour depth and frame rate (30 or 29 fps for NTSC) for the number of effects that this kind of movie would need- not to mention the motion matching and colour matching etc that would need to be done in order to get it right- simply modelling and animating isn't enough, as I'm sure some of our movie-trained members would tell you.

This is why outsourcing of CG is done- to companies who have already invested in huge banks of processors to 'network render' the final product as well as have the experience to put together work of a suitable quality... (the days of Amigas with Videotoast have gone, sadly....!).

Of course, to do this, you would need to be able to work with other people and plan- and from all accounts, Tim Hines has neither of these skills....

[theredweed]

It doesn't take our computers ages to render CG. We can render 30 seconds in about 4 hours, so with a movie containing 30 minutes of CG would take 10 full days for one computer. Now with 10 computers it would take 1 day.

This is the reason it is better to not have in house animation as production companies, as they can't have ten high speed computers and 20 good animators working at them, due to the budget being shared out. But an animation company would be able to put this kind of effort into it as their budget is ment for computers and staff.

[Zero7756]

^ That is NOT true.


I happen to be deeply involved in CGI, and I can tell you for a fact that a fully processed render in lightwave (apparantly what Tim Hines used for his crap film) at full tilt takes about an hour for every twenty minutes on a NICE computer.

The problem with Hines effects is obvious;

The artists did not spend enough time fluidly animating the CGI characters, thus giving them that choppy appearance.

And two, the models were not constructed, and textured professionally.

The CGI screams rush job, but not because of rendering.

[theredweed]

We dont use lightwave, cos its a bit poop. still think animation should be left to animation companies

[Zero7756]

^ I would be curious to know what you use.


Ideas Studio?

Surely not Maya.

I fou have the talent, by all means do it in house.


Look at films like Casshern. Roughly a 30 million budget, and it came out astounding. All in house stuff.

But, yes... Unless your team is indeed nutsting talent on a regular basis. Go with an outside company.



> CASSHERN

lime.gofishpictures.com/casshern/casshern_main.html

[RossH]

I'm also involved heavily in CGI and I can testify that creating even DVD quality rendering can take ages... never mind all the rerenders to make it look right.

Add compositing into live action and particle effects and the time just disappears.

And if you're not using experienced people... well...

[theredweed]

We have some very talented compositors one of which is fantastic. The rendering farms we have set up can render things very quickly, I think our processor speed is 3.2 not fully sure on the renderers, but mine is 3.0

Yes we use Maya and use 3D studio, they are great, its not really the package that is a prolem its the operator, we can use it so we can create great stuff with it.

They only poo thing is when quicktime balls everything up by being its daft self

[jackson]

no body has mentioned that Hines film is blantently DV and if he says not then he's a liar (deinterlacing) and dogs@!*t colour correction. the film was graded with sweet wrappers.

[theredweed]

I still haven't seen it yet jackson so I have no idea, I have only been give my opinion of animation techniques. Will be giving a better review of what it is like in 2 weeks after I have returned from america. 3 days til take off!

[the Donal]

Fair points- but also, a big, outsourced team has another advantage that you touched on- no one person will be doing the modelling, texturing, lighting, animating, rendering and compositing etc- often, only one or a handful of people will have each job- therefore having better more specialised people for each area- though I don't doubt that there are people who are very good at all, you've only got one pear of hands!

[the Donal]

PS- didn't ILM start as an in-house FX department? Yes, there was a team there and a fair sized budget. And they were industry experienced fx specialists.... Ok..Ok....you get the picture!

But also great innovators- such big advances don't come about too often and look at the very early days of CGI- Tron (though mostly cell animated and rotoscoped) or The Last Starfighter (the CG in this doesn't look too bad even now...). Imagine what they had to work on- the supercomputers then probably don't match even the better desktops these days. And much of it would have been scripting, not GUI work.... more maths than art?!

But even the big boys mess up some times- look at the AWFUL compositing/animating of the creature in Alien 3- fox had the budget and resources to do far, far better...

Anyway, I diversify..... Maybe the jerkiness is down to a combination of low frame rate and bad keyframing- not smoothing the rates of motion out between keyframes- most people don't jerk their arm from one place to another- it accelerates/decelerates smoothly across the journey (unless you're hitting someone of course- then you only need one speed- bloody quick!)- I'm sure there's a term for that....

[I own a cylinder]

Can i ask a question. In this film do we see more than 1 tripod on screen or are they only ever 1 tripod in shot.