Saw the preview before Constantine this weekend. Bring’n HAL 9000 Home huh :lol:
--Jon
great looking cg… i doubt my wife will go watch it with me though… plot looks a little derivative…
yeah… I saw your little rant on CGtalk Percy… 
what I can say personally about the director of this film, is that he is one of the best directors I (and many of my co-workers) have ever worked with in VFX. Super supportive of what we do, and very clear with the direction (what directors are supposed to do). I think the quality of the cgi may be a clear display of how he, the vfx supervisor, and the rest of the crew have communicated so well at what the vision needed to be.
That plane landing on the carrier is pretty impressive IMHO… you sould see it on film.
cool that the director was so cool to work with. Im sure it makes a big difference. hehe regarding the cgtalk thread, it was no dis to you and your crew, what can I say, the plots the plot… 
If this wasn’t the kind of stuff my wife hates, I really would go see it.
I like your Jessica Biel model - please show us your settings…
yeah looks un`biel`evable
get it..get it…huhhhh? :lol:
Some nice work there!
Percy… just kidding about the whole cgtalk thing. I know you were not commenting on our work.
Wow! to see a movie because you wanted to see the movie… for the movie, and not for some other reason. What is that like? I miss those days.
Yeah… we pretty much see Jessica everyday. Well in 2D at least.
Nice work mate! Looks like a very silly film, but i’ll be there in the cinema watching it (i got an unlimited cinema ticket you see).
Some very nice CG, the plane landing in the carrier especially.
Good one!
Marc
vray wasnt used on this? darn.
cpnichols what was used to render this movie?
it says in the article daelf posted that they used renderman.
renderman ey…shivers…im scared of that word. :lol:
I sat through a couple Stealth sketches at Siggraph, I don’t remember the exact rendertimes but they were way too long to be V-Ray 
Hi!
I´ve seen some videos showing the making of some of the effects, from clean plate, wireframe and so on…amazing! 
I´ve been always curious about rendering for film resolutions…Are u allowed to preview your results with a rough composition in big screen (35mm) or changes are made based on what u see in LCD or plasma TV´s? Do u think 3d benefits from the process of going from digital to film? I mean can grain and a huge screen help sell the effect or is it the opposite?
Keep up the good work nichols!
Actually the rendertimes were not that bad at all. 2k fully motion blurred maybe an hour. But that was not what was cool about it. With every plane we outputed a huge amount of data from renderman. To be exact, 63 channels of data. All of which came into Nuke (DD’s awesome compositing package) as one EXR file where we did all the “real” lighting on the plane. We called it Shader Compositing, or Shampositing. You could virtually relight the plane completely within Nuke.
With that said, that workflow is not unique to Renderman, Vray would do an awesome job of it.
Anyway, the shots that I did that I am most proud of are the ones of Edi (the robot plane) on the aircraft carrier taking off for the first time.
There are some images of it in this article:
ya great stuff. i am currently exploring the added possibilities of doing more lighting in post by separating out the individual lights and creating a quasi bent normal type pass. Its hard to explain cause I dont fully understand it alot myself…
any suggestion as where to look to get a grip on this more “feature film” style to lighting?
Now that you mention it it was the file size that I remember being huge, I think they said it was around 70 megs per frame? I was very impressed by the work you guys did with the clouds. Very nice work all around. I am also interested in how the shots come together in post.
Clouds were the big thing (size wise). Many a terrabyte was used to store all the voxel data. Especially when you have clouds that need to span 100s of KM of sky. DD used their amazing volumetric rendering system, which I guess is now officially called Storm to render the clouds. It is the same thing that did all the tornados and stuff in Day After Tomorrow, and the avalanche in xXx. I actually did not pay attention to the filesize of the exr files. EXRs are actually very smart at having effcient lossless compression. The can automatically draw crop boxes around your elements. So little planes take up very little in terms of filesize. The best part about EXR is that it is open source, so if you want it to do anything fancy, you can write it in yourself. I think you can even include the 3d model if you wanted. Not that you would need to.
cpnichols…can you explain why use renderman if you were going to entierly relight the whole shots in nuke anyway?