I Robot Trailer

[cpnichols]

http://movies.yahoo.com/movies/feature/irobot.html

what I have been up to lately....

[cocolas]

nice!

I like the bots overall: good animation/ photo/match and lighting..let me guess, is that all renderman?........the only comment I have is the bot's facial expressions..from the little I see in the trailer the look a bit odd.....as if whoever animated them (you??) was trying to hard to make them look human....but it seem inapropriate because they're robots.....just seemed off.
Anyway, I don't wanna judge to much till I see the movie.....

so, the usual questions...what was your part in it???....how long have you been working on this film?

btw, they all seem the same at first look (the bots)...are there different types of them??....

nice work man!!..and thanks for sharing...

paul.

[cpnichols]

my role in the movie is a lighting sequence lead.... anything in the sequence that you see as a big attack sequence is part of my sequence. the robots climbing the glass a shot I did too... as far as if it will look good for the robots expression... yes... it is hard to judge from the quicktime. Is it distrubing to see a tranlucent plastic have a "human" expression? yes... I think it is the point... There are other robots. You can see a robot walking a dog for a shot... that was done by weta. Yes... all rendered with renderman and some very very very custom shaders and pipelines. The animation director for the movie is one of the best in the industry: Andy Jones...

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1002475/

his credit list is short but Godzilla, Final Fantisy, and Animatrix, are some big ones.

[cocolas]

Is it distrubing to see a tranlucent plastic have a "human" expression? yes... I think it is the point...

hehehe...yeah, I figured that was the point.......it is disturbing enough to be done on purpose...

hopefully Will Smith's performance won't ruin it :P (just kidding)

when you talk about custom shaders, you mean the ones on the robots/dogs?......
out of couriousity, how do you manage to match the lighting in the live shot/s to the lighting on the robots, so well?...especially since they are made out of reflective/translucent materials?....I've always wondered about that.......same w/ movies like LOTR, the lighting onthe cg characters matches perfectly the one on the live shots elements.....

and, what's your next project/film you'll be working on?

paul.

[cpnichols]

when you talk about custom shaders, you mean the ones on the robots/dogs?

The custom shaders I am talking about are the ns5's the translucent white plasticky robots.

Thanks for the compliment on the lighting... to answer your question about matching to a plate it takes a lot of work on the lighting side. Lighting is one thing. to do that, you need to study a lot of cinematography. That is only half the battle, the other half is compositing... they have to make the colors work for film... Film is actually a higher dynamic range then traditional 8bit/channel. plus it does not work like monitor space at all... half your film colors appear when you think that your monitor is showing black. then you have to match the film grain perfectly. DD has some amazing compositors.

[cocolas]

Film is actually a higher dynamic range then traditional 8bit/channel. plus it does not work like monitor space at all... half your film colors appear when you think that your monitor is showing black.

hmm...I didn't know that, about the higher dynamic range of film.....so is the film shot entirely digitally?.......when I was thinking about light matching I was thinking more in terms of light position/intensity of lighting in a live shot versus the matching one in cg...and the difficulties that that mighti bring.....but I see that color and grain play an important part as well....
as for the compositing, do you have specialty hardware for that??......on the software side I saw that Nuke comp prog DD sells......

very fascinating stuff!!

paul.

PS: did DD work on "Hellboy"??...I keep seeing the trailer every 10 mins....

[J_Bug]

Paul,
He's just being humble and saying that all the credit goes to the compositors

--Jon

[honzal]

interesting stuff you guys at DD did as you talked about the "odd" expresion in the plastic face, for me is odd more this: if the robot has such a graet mimics ( it means technology at that time is very high ), why whole robot body is not as realistic as the rest ( means the face created from a plastic ) ?

jan