Strategic Developer | Martin Heller » TAG: Movies

December 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Beowulf Pre-viz used NVidia boards

TAGS: Hardware, Movies, Virtual Reality

I mentioned last month that I was interested in (and somewhat skeptical of) the Vicon motion capture technology behind the new movie of Beowulf. In fact, I haven't seen Beowulf yet myself: my wife and I decided that my twelve-year-old son wasn't ready to see it, and I haven't yet had the opportunity to go see it in adult company, given the concert for which I was preparing. I'll have to check and see whether Beowulf will still be playing in IMAX 3D this weekend.

I've recently heard from NVidia that Sony Pictures Imageworks used NVidia's professional Quadro boards to boost the creative pipeline for Beowulf. I can remember hearing a similar story from Silicon Graphics about 10 years ago: at the time, they had lowered the cost of a graphical workstation for CGI from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.

That number is down by another order of magnitude, to thousands of dollars. The NVidia Quadro boards that Sony used for pre-visualization, which is the step where you figure out the composition of each scene before you do the final rendering, sell for a mere $599 and up.

What's next? Kids, be the first one on your block to create your own photo-realistic animation! (Just kidding: it's hard work.)

I also asked about the software that Sony used. "The final images were rendered with RenderMan. Shot lighting and compositing was done with Imageworks proprietary software called Katana for lighting and Bonsai for Compositing. Animation working renders were done with RenderMan and Maya, and layout images were done in MotionBuilder in real time and Maya pending the purpose."

Posted by Martin Heller on December 19, 2007 01:21 PM

December 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Jackass 2.5 Uses Silverlight

TAGS: Movies, RIAs, Silverlight

Jason Snyder, quoting the Times, reported on Friday that Paramount Pictures will debut Jackass 2.5 online. This reporter has since learned that Blockbuster is using Microsoft Silverlight to "pioneer this movie experience."

According to Microsoft's press release,

The feature combines the rich media content delivery network from Limelight Networks and Microsoft Silverlight to provide first studio-backed feature streamed in its entirety.  Anyone 17 or older can check out the movie for free at Blockbuster December 19^th – December 31st.

For more information, please click here: http://www.limelightnetworks.com/press/2007/12_17_blockbuster.html

Comments?

Posted by Martin Heller on December 18, 2007 12:22 PM

November 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Beowulf: Does Motion Capture Make Sense?

TAGS: Books, Movies, Technologies, Virtual Reality

I'm a big fan of Beowulf: no, not the new movie, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem. I've read it several times in the original and in modern English translations, most recently in the bilingual edition with Seamus Heaney's fine verse translation.

I haven't yet seen the movie: maybe I'll get to it this weekend. I'd like to see it in IMAX 3D rather than at my local multiplex. I'm not sure I'll be able to do that, but I'll try. I may decide that's it's a travesty of the poem, but I'll try to judge it on its merits.

The new Beowulf movie uses motion capture to capture live performance data for use in digital animation. The technology used is quite a bit more sophisticated than rotoscoping, but not state-of-the-art: in Beowulf, the body and face performances were captured with Vicon, which captures a few hundred markers. The state-of-the-art is Mova Contour, which captures hundreds of thousands of points, in what Mova calls markerless high-resolution surface capture.

Reviewers are calling Beowulf "creepy" and "uncanny." The Times blogger David F. Gallagher said "When it was over, I felt relieved to be back in the company of uncreepy flesh-and-blood humans again."

I can certainly see using motion capture for video games. I can sort of see it for TV. I'm not sure whether it will ever make sense for movies, at least for movies being viewed on a big screen.

What do you think?

Posted by Martin Heller on November 16, 2007 07:05 AM