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Recommended Reading: 'Wonder Woman' is a timely superhero movie
Wonder Woman, Heroine of the Post-Truth Age Megan Garber, The Atlantic Wonder Woman may be set in the time of World War I, but the movie's themes are particularly relevant right now. The Atlantic analyzes how a female superhero rescues a solider on the run before taking on a much bigger foe -- and what all of that means for in the present day. That Lasso of Truth sure would come in handy for us in 2017.
'Avatar' sequels start arriving on December 18th, 2020
James Cameron has spent years drumming up hype for his Avatar sequels with little to show for it (the first sequel was originally due this December). However, his team is finally ready to commit to specific release dates -- for all the new movies. The production team has revealed that Avatar 2 should arrive on December 18th, 2020, with the rest staggered throughout the next few years. The third movie is slated for December 17th, 2021. There will be a 3-year gap between that and the fourth movie, which debuts on December 20th, 2024. The fifth and final (?) title will appear on December 19th, 2025, 16 years after the first.
Carrie Fisher will be in 'Star Wars: Episode IX' without use of CG (update: no)
Lucasfilm swore that it wouldn't create a digital version of the late, great Carrie Fisher for future Star Wars movies, but that doesn't mean she'll be cut out entirely. Her brother Todd has revealed that Disney still wants to include Carrie in Episode IX, but that it plans to use recent footage of the actress instead of relying on a computer generated facsimile. Both Todd and Carrie's daughter, Billie Lourd, have granted permission to use the shots.
Researchers digitally reconstruct the face of a legendary Scottish king
Robert the Bruce, a medieval warrior and hero-king of the Scottish people, is something of an enigma. While his exploits in battle against both domestic rivals and British occupiers have been well-documented, descriptions of his physical appearance have long been lost to history. But thanks to a collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Glasgow and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), we may finally know what he looked like.
ICYMI: Halloween Spooktacular 2; The CGI reckoning
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: Disney figured out a way to make digitally generated faces in a fraction of the time it used to take with a head-worn camera rig. Designers in the Netherlands created a stilt-like elevator that relies on human power to get a person to climb up, though they say it requires very little effort to do it.
Disney makes facial capture tech more practical for movies
If you don't see facial motion capture everywhere in movies and video games, there's probably a good reason for it. In order to train a capture system to match expressions, you frequently have to record the actor making all kinds of faces in different conditions... that's a lot of effort, especially for studios that don't have much time or money. Disney Research has a better way. It recently developed a face capture system that uses only a tiny number of recordings and synthetically generates the data you need to train the system. The solution is a uniformly-lit multi-camera rig (only one camera is active, the rest are for lighting) that creates an adjustable 3D model of the actor's face that you can use to create the info you need.
ICYMI: The CGI car stand-in and smart pill dispenser
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: The Mill Blackbird is a vehicle chassis that car commercials can use as a stand-in, rather than getting to film with an actual new car. The Pillo is a smart medication dispenser that can recognize family members and automatically give their pill dosage. It's up on Indiegogo now. And we wanted you to see both the Converse sneakers made to play guitar with, and the autonomous light show that drums. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
Lytro's first pro movie camera is designed for visual effects magic
While there are plenty of advanced digital movie cameras, most of them aren't really designed for the modern realities of movie making, where computer-generated effects are seemingly ubiquitous. You'll still have to bust out the green screen if you want to put those real actors in a digital world. Lytro might have a better way, though. It's introducing the Lytro Cinema, a movie camera built with digital effects in mind. Since Lytro's light field technology captures a massive, 3D picture of the environment (755 RAW megapixels at up to 300FPS), you might never need a green screen again -- you can accurately determine the objects you want to keep in a given scene.
'Deadpool' used way more CGI than you probably think it did
The folks behind last month's raucous Deadpool movie lied to you more than you probably could've imagined. That intro sequence that serves as a narrative framing device for practically the whole flick? Almost entirely composited together in post processing. As you'll see in the video below, during the opening car chase, even the merc with a mouth kicking the goon riding shotgun out of the Chevy SUV was a collection of polygons. But when an entire movie is as over the top as Deadpool, finding stunt performers who could withstand the level of abuse that's on display would probably be pretty difficult.
Disney Research has a faster way to render realistic fabrics
Computer graphics have come a long way, but there are still a few aspects that are pretty time consuming to get right. Realistic fabric movement that reacts to gravity and other forces is one of 'em and the folks at Disney Research have found a way to make life-like cloth simulations by six to eight times in certain situations. Walt's science department says that using a technique called multigrid, specifically, smoothed aggregation allowed it to make clothing worn by a main character or fabrics that make up the foreground of a scene at a much faster clip. There's an awful lot of science and equations behind the concept (PDF), but the long and short of it is that this should allow for more realistic cloth simulations that stretch and act like fabric does in the real world and even aid in virtual try-on situations.
Pixar will open-source the code for a key movie-making tool
Fancy that you could create the next Inside Out if you only had the right tools? Pixar just made that dream a little more realistic. Mere months after giving away Renderman, the studio has announced plans to open the source code for its Universal Scene Description software, which gives multiple computer animation apps a common "scene graph" to work from. It should help movie makers streamline the production process (particularly if there's more than one company involved), but it'll also be a boon to animation app designers who want their various programs to play together.
Watch how a CGI-heavy 'Game of Thrones' zombie battle was made
(Warning: spoilers ahead.) The spectacular Game of Thrones 'Hardhome' battle scene with white walkers, zombie-like wights and wildings is pretty VFX-heavy, judging by a new video from effects house El Ranchito. Highlights include Jon Snow slashing a walker into shards of crystal, battle scenes with the giant Wun Wun, and wights -- so many hordes of wights. Despite having TV's highest budget, the show doesn't rely overly on digital effects, using them sparingly on gore and dragons, we imagine. However, Snow actor Kit Harrington said that the 'Hardhome' battle "is so CGI-heavy it's unlike anything I've ever done on Thrones."
Celebrities get digital puppets made from paparazzi photos
Typically, recreating a celebrity as an animated 3D character requires painstaking modeling based on motion capture and laser scans. In the future, though, all you'll need is a few limo-chasing photographers. University of Washington researchers have developed a system that creates digital face "puppets" by running a collection of photos -- in this case, paparazzi shots -- through special face tracking software. The digital dopplegangers (such as Kevin Spacey and Arnold Schwarzenegger) bear an uncanny resemblance to their real-world counterparts, but are sophisticated enough to mimic the expressions of virtually anyone else. Want the Japanese Prime Minister saying Daniel Craig's lines? You can make it happen.
Chill out with this 'holographic' virtual aquarium
There's something inexplicably tranquil about gazing at fish in an aquarium as they swim back and forth, darting about rocks or that tacky plastic treasure chest sitting in the corner. But what if you could have one on your desk, without all the water changes, filter cleaning and general maintenance? That's probably a ways off, but Memukhin Oleg's "Fishing Day" explores such a (not entirely virtual) reality. As you'll see in the video below from The Creators Project, he's used a handful of different 3D modeling techniques to bring artificial fishies to life. They react to a handheld submarine, schooling and separating as they might in the real world, flitting through a gaudy shipwreck you'd find at a pet store's aquarium aisle. It's all really, really impressive and there's even a breakdown of how the effects shot came together. The only bad part? The video's a bit on the short side.
Adorable new 'Star Wars' droid proves it's not CGI
When the first trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released, the internet lost its collective mind. Not only were people up in arms over the fact that a stormtrooper could be *gasp* black, but also nobody could believe that this incredible rolling droid, dubbed the BB-8, was actually real. It must be CGI, right? Well, during today's Star Wars Celebration convention in Anaheim, California, the BB-8 made its first real-life debut by rolling onstage to riotous applause from the crowd. Check out the video below to see the BB-8 and the venerable R2-D2 engage in a beeping, tweeting chirp battle.
Watch 'Tomorrow's World' show off CGI, 1982 style
These days, CGI is everywhere, but in 1982 it was an emergent technology that signalled a new era for movie makers and broadcasters. Always on the cutting edge of technology at the time, popular BBC show Tomorrow's World (we miss you, Phillipa!) documented some of the very first machines capable of delivering real-time effects. Back then, turning a 2D image into a three-dimensional cube wasn't easy, it required a 900lb machine made by Hewlett Packard that relied on effects coded in Pascal. Certainly a far cry from the full-length movies we see being created on Macs today. It's a nostalgic look back at what older generations would once have considered bleeding edge technology, but also to see how far we've come in a few decades.
Disney Research crafts a more realistic way to capture the human eye
We're keen on checking in with the folks at Disney Research from time to time to see what crazy projects its been working on. At SIGGRAPH Asia this week, the outfit is presenting recent work in crafting more detailed 3D-rendered eyes. In order to properly capture all the details needed to make things appear realistic for things like character generation, the studio has crafted a method for nabbing those intricacies based not only on appearance, but taking into account how the eye responds to light, too. "Generically modeled eyes may be sufficient for background characters, but it now takes significant effort to manually create realistic eyes for heroes and other leading characters," says Disney Research Zurich's Pascal Bérard. The project is nothing new for Disney's experimental arm, as the folks there have been looking into a method for more detailed ocular representation for quite some time. The method not only cuts down on the work required to manually produce believable results, but the tech could also drastically improve modeling in ophthalmology as well.
Go behind the scenes on a Bless cinematic
Remember Bless? It's been a while since we've heard from the Korean fantasy import, but today we learned of a new video that takes you behind the scenes for the making of a cinematic as well as a 1,000-player focus group test slated for the Korean market on November 6th. MMO Culture reports that Bless features "an epic storyline and conflicts between various factions and races which will lead to massive PvP battles." You can view the trailer after the cut.
Here's how digital effects give 'Game of Thrones' its grand scale
We've already seen how digital effects make Game of Thrones' world more believable, but there were some spectacular scenes in the show's fourth season: giant city-states, an undead horse and battles involving thousands of cavalry. Want to know just how important computer graphics were in bringing those moments to life? Graphics house Rodeo FX will gladly show you. As you'll see in the footage below, some environments (such as Meereen's pyramid-laden landscape) depended very heavily on computer effects, with only a few live humans and real-world places involved. And that cavalry battle demanded even more work -- animators populated the field with "smart" horse soldiers that reacted both to each other and the world around them. You may not want to watch the demo clip if you haven't caught up on the show, but it's otherwise worth checking out to see how fantasy and reality can blend together.
Maybe it's not Maybelline: Omote paints your face with digital makeup
Enhancing the world around us with projectors and 3D scanners is nothing new. But what about stylizing yourself? With Omote, you can use face-tracking tech to paint on digital makeup -- or anything imaginable, really. In the demo below, it renders a variety of makeup styles and visual effects (like changing eye color) on a model's face. What's most impressive, though, is that the CGI-like projection reflects her movements in real-time. This doesn't necessarily mean your face-painting days are coming to an end though, ladies. Omote's visual magic is equipment-heavy and limited; the woman in the video below never leaves her seat and doesn't crack so much as a smile. But if you someday find yourself using the technology to virtually try a new shade of foundation, we wouldn't be surprised.
