CGI in TFA

As for TFA I'am really suprised that they did not use miniatures. With all that talk about practical effects, I thought that they would use way more of practical effects.

They use less CGI creatures, that part is true. And that is not good in my opinion. I like CGI creatures. Mix of physical and CGI creatures would look even better. Some creatures can be done only with CGI.

For example I was not impressed with most of the creatures in Maz Kanata castle. They looked really fake in my opinion.

That bird on Jakku looked bad and very fake.



I liked the look of this animal. But movements also were really fake. And they ruined that creature for me. Maybe with the help of CGI that creature would look more natural.



On other hand, that ''pig'' really looked great and real..

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 16, 2016, Original Post Date: Jan 16, 2016 ---

All shoots of Jedi temple are done using real sets and miniatures.
Actually miniatures are used in OT for the same purpose also.

That shoot is done using practical effects ( miniatures ) with the help of CGI ( depth, CGI Yoda ).

Well that scene looks great in my opinion. And CGI Clone trooper looks perfect. Just look at all these details on his armor. Great work.
It is done that way because of the stunt.

 

Yeah I heard you the first two times. But would you please share the sources for your claim?
Its stated in the avaiable documentaries that Weta started to proof-of-concept Gollum as early as 1998 which would coincide with TPM post-production.
Be that as it may I find it highly unlikely that ILM transfered technology to Weta Digital and even if they for some impossible reason did it wouldn't detract from that achievement.

Regarding HP I brought it up precisely because neither it or SW in any way outshine the work done on LotR.


As to ATOC I think @ArynCrinn meant this location:

EDIT I'm too slow at typing this early in the day

In general I think - broken record I know - ATOC and ROTS suffer from one thing above all else:
They were shot on 1080p and further trimmed to 2.35 (making it closer to 720p in vertical frame resolution).
That is less than 1/5 of your average 35mm definition and at best one third of actual colour information (applying modern logarithm standards here).
I'm convinced the televisual/video looking "fakeness" stems largely from that fact.

TPM still holds up apart from the CGI characters for the inverse reason too (its rather similar to LotR in that regard) and both will continue to stand up and reward with increasing consumer product fidelity and sure to come rescans of the negatives.

 

Funny enough the TFA CVI Video showed that a some of the sets implied soooo much more CGI in-frame .

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 16, 2016, Original Post Date: Jan 16, 2016 ---

Someone might want to confirm or deny this but people from ILM also jumped to WETA when they were working on Gluim one all .

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 16, 2016 ---

ILM helped to pioneer photo realism as well with Davy Jones, the AWE battle at the end, and the skeleton pirates in the first POTC .

 

Yup, some amusing moments in the ROTK extras about them changing the ghost army because Pirates had gone there and dunnit ^_^

 

Wait what ?lol

 

The green "flush the orcs away deus ex ghost army"?
They had them prepped to look very much like the skeletons in the first Pirates.
Until that came out whilst they were in post and everyone scrambled
I'm sure its on the youtubes somewhere.

 

I disagree. Gollum is done first time on screen in ''The two towers'' And they were using tehnology originaly developed by ILM.
After development of that technology by ILM ( 1997 ), all other studios have embraced that technology.

As for LOTR. VFX look dated now, also.

 

*resignes in balance with the force*
Those are not the factoids I was looking for.

 

It's basically AOTC in terms of its VFX since it used groundbreaking VFX like AOTC except WETA had way more time with their effects. We can't forget that the majority of APTC had great VFX up until the droid factory and the climactic battle because it was all basically last-minute additions added on by Rob Coleman and John Knoll and GL to use as a sort of POC for ROTS which is how the coding tech was developed for all of the background ships in ROTS and as well as the opening battles .

 

The CGI in TFA:

 

I'm not seeing it.

Here it is the location in AOTC:


And here's the updated verion in ROTS:


And here's a full CG version from TOR:


I could believe that the ROTS version is a miniature...
But the AOTC version looks entirely CG. The scene lighting is painfully digital, and I can see the bump mapping from a mile away.

And I know they used plenty of miniatures in the OT... but never as a replacement for an actual set (and by that, I mean that they still built life-size sets for the portions that the actor's actually performed in).

Look closer at the feet next time... it's pretty bad.

What stunt? Padme rolling down it?
Easy solution, get a stunt double and drop them in a pile of sand.
Then cut to Natalie Portman in costume, and bring in Bodie Taylor/Temuera Morrison/stunt in an armour costume.

There is no reason why that scene couldn't be filmed on a studio set with an actual pile of sand.|

Too bad it's not the full video.

 

No...AOTC was a real set. CGI was used to extend the set and add in digital lighting. Yoda was originally going to be WALKING alongside them in that screenshot you posted but Yoda uses a cane and couldn't walk fast enough in a "realistic" motion as his was his first movie as a fully-realized CGI Character which is why he is floating .

 

Bollocks.
There's no chance that's a real set. Their shadows and reflections are artificial for starters.

I'm sure I've even seen the behind the scenes of that shot, where Ewan and Sam J. are walking around in a blue screen room with blue floor and everything.

 

Well yes, as I said, it's an extended set as in the hallway plus (I think) one of the pillars is real...Yoda and the rest is CGI .

 

No... seriously.
The floor is fake, the cast shadows are fake, the low barrier on the side is fake, the column is fake.

I've seen the animation tests with the walking Yoda... but that is not a real set.
If that's a real set, then it is one of the worst sets constructed in the history of cinema. What did they do... paint a single large sheet of vinyl flooring? I can't think of anything else that could give something close to that texture.

I could make a better CG set than that.... and I'm not very good at 3d modelling.

 

Regarding the flooring, I saw in one of the scenes of the set decoration s for AOTC and The PT is that that is exactly what they did or something like that...I do agree it's terrible lighting though but I think that has to do with the lighting. When you film a movie it's usually better to have as much "reference" and in-frame lighting as possible. Digital lighting can work and is tricky without he modern day simulations hat AORC had a primitively version of. They could have added more texture but obviously it didn't work as planned for a lot of people .

 

This might help you:

"Many of the hallways in both Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith were realized as partial sets with miniatures added by ILM and in the cases where you see more then the hallway (like Episode II’s hallway with Yoda and Mace Windu talking or Episode III’s outside view) a matte painting was used to complete the shot."


SOURCE:

http://www.starwars.com/news/from-concept-to-screen-the-jedi-temple

 

What technology, exactly?

Jar Jar itself was never considered an innovation. Gollum was, because Jackson used real-time, full-on performance capture. Jar Jar MoCap was never captured on-set, Ahmed was there for refference and then did some MoCap without the actors to have a refference.

MoCap is not something ILM invented at all, it was used decades before plenty of times in different forms (to put an example, the old Lord of the Rings animated film).

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 16, 2016, Original Post Date: Jan 16, 2016 ---

I want to be 100% honest with you. I knew the glass tunnel was photographied real (there's this AOTC webisode featurette about the miniatures, showing at least Kamino, Padme's apartment and the arena), but you're showing many photos here that I had never seen, and I'm surprised, for instance, that the library or the blue-floor set are indeed miniatures.

However, it doesn't change much of what we are saying: The problem stays the same: the actors were shot too much times in front of green-screens with any other reference, and the light works pretty bad when there's no single object interacting with the actor, specially on situations where light is pretty flat, like any of the three examples I gave you.

In the other hand, it's clear that we have different sensibilities on this. Probably you grown

 

Let's put some order in the conversation.

- Did ILM created CGI? Yes. The first time used on live-action film was in Young Sherlock Holmes, and that wasn't released in 1999, it was released in 1985.



- Did the prequels revolutionized CGI? NO. Jurassic Park did.

- Did Peter Jackson used the technology of the prequels? He used the technology ILM created in the 80s, and that's not "the technology of the prequels". In fact, if you read the foreword of JW Rinzler Making of Star Wars, written by Peter Jackson, he's very thankful to George during three long pages, but he never states he helped to stablish his visual FX company at all.

-------

But if the conversation is about visual quality rather than technology used, I' say that Jar Jar looks gorgeous in The Phantom Menace, and besides he's pretty well animated together with Watto. Both characters are outstanding visually.

My visual problem comes with Attack of the Clones, were things started to look crappy. I don't know why you publish photos from one decade to another to show of CGI quality. In a three year difference, Star Wars suffered a clear involution, and the reason for that is to switch from 700 CGI shots to more than 2000 (every single shot in the movie).





^^ I wouldn't call the second snapshot "groundbreaking".