
Tron Legacy: how the special effects were done - basil
http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178
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nlawalker
What I love most is seeing how they go about thinking and producing the
effects used for computers used by characters in the film! From the films that
do it really poorly to the films that attempt something realistic, I always
wonder who's in charge of it, how they think about it, what tools they use to
create it, etc. For the films in which it's poorly done I always figure it's
the assistant FX designer's kid who has 4 months experience in Flash. For the
good movies I always wonder if they grab the DB administrator for all the film
assets and ask him some nerd questions :)

From the article:

 _In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he
was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him
pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal
more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the
editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got
emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I
do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant
to the world of Tron._

It's utterly fascinating to me that people have jobs like this.

~~~
pstack
I'm a fan of computer interfaces in film across the board. From the
intentionally tongue-in-cheek 'Hackers' to the downright unintentionally awful
and the occasionally vaguely bordering on something close to reality.

I haven't seen this movie, but I'm actually impressed by what I see in the
article. It raises the question, however, whether it's something that actually
pays dividends. That is, when you employ any sense of reality in this specific
domain, does anyone who isn't intimately familiar actually notice? Is the
subset of people like ourselves who notice even worth catering to in such
small ways? I know my mother, sister, grandmother, and most of the other
people in my life wouldn't recognize if it was accurate or not and I suspect
95% of the audience falls into that category.

On the other hand, small things can make a big difference, when you catch
them. They're like seeing a loose thread on a piece of clothing that you can't
unsee again. Or a stuck pixel on your LCD. For instance, I was watching a
marathon of Roswell on Netflix this week (hey, shaddup -- I've never seen it
before and wanted something awful to go along with feeling under the
weather!). At one point, a guy says to another who is holding a revolver "you
might as well just fire every bullet in your chamber!". Of course . . . a gun
only has one bullet in the chamber at an time, as far as I know. Most
certainly only one in a revolver. And it has bugged me ever since.

~~~
SimonPStevens
"I know my mother, sister, grandmother, and most of the other people in my
life wouldn't recognize if it was accurate or not"

I think each knowledge domain has it's set of experts that will spot mistakes
in their own areas of experience.

Every mother I know, when watching an on-screen delivery, will retort "that's
not a newborn" when the babies face first appears on camera.

~~~
pchristensen
_retort "that's not a newborn" when the babies face first appears on camera_

Some fathers too :)

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ENOTTY
This account goes to show how valuable domain-specific knowledge is in
creating a plausible space. The movie was such a visual masterpiece because
the artist used algorithmically-generated visual effects to illustrate a world
purportedly generated by algorithms.

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jedsmith
The computer visuals were great. One thing that I caught, being the complete
nerd that I am: if you look closely at the terminal that Sam sits down at
before going on-grid, there is a copy of top running. It reports the system
uptime as a few days (9?) even though that system was supposed to be up for
years.

Rebooted Tron for a kernel upgrade?

The rest was great though, and I smiled too. I wonder if the author knew how
his terminal footage was going to be used...Cillian Murphy's actions were
entirely plausible in context.

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nkassis
Tron Legacy was incredible visually and musically, I'm sad the story didn't
live up to the rest of the movie. I hope Disney can look pass that and maybe
make a sequel.

I hope this guy does go ahead and create a OpenGL UI toolkit. He should start
a donation site to fund the project.

~~~
alanfalcon
I hated Tron when I saw it, mostly because I had such high hopes and the story
was just so piss poor.

But now I've come to an understanding. It's a gorgeous, technically and
artfully masterful screensaver. You just have to ignore all the idiots who
keep talking over it.

~~~
SwellJoe
I find myself occasionally searching for the videos on YouTube so I can hear
the soundtrack (I somehow haven't thought to buy it yet), particularly _End of
Line_. I'm always annoyed when I end up with one of the trailer versions with
all the talking, in addition to the music.

~~~
jswanson
I bought the soundtrack, and enjoy it. Many tracks are prefect for working to,
if you like listening to backgroundy type music while coding or whatever.

~~~
alexqgb
Same here. For the first time, I used the feature in iTunes that allows you to
set the in/out points, so I could skip over Jeff Bridges VO on 'The Grid'.
With that tweak in place, it's my new favorite working soundtrack. I suspect
the alteration between symphonic pieces and ones with an articulated rhythm is
a bit part of what makes it so good. Also, the amazingly great production.

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rbanffy
I would love to see some of these visuals make their way into xscreensaver...
Unfortunately I have already promised I would take a look into the Apple II
screensaver because it's not completely faithful to its 8-bit namesake.
Besides that, this is completely beyond my modest knowledge on mindblowing
visuals.

I am more than a little embarrassed because I thought I could map the output
of the Apple II screensaver to a curved surface to mimic a CRT screen on
current flat screens. That was humbling.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
That sounds similar to Cathode - the vintage terminal emulator -
<http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/>

~~~
rbanffy
You can try GLTerminal

<http://ldopa.net/2006/01/14/glterminal/>

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keyle
Wow. That's any creative developer's dream job. Amazing stuff. I'd love to
work for a startup that just comes up with stuff like that. It seems like such
a dark and hidden industry.

I do create fun stuff in my free time <http://noben.org/term.io/>

~~~
nitrogen
_I'd love to work for a startup that just comes up with stuff like that._

One of my post-exit fantasies is to start a company that solves eccentric
billionaires' (and casinos, Hollywood, and large corporations) crazy
decoration problems, by designing new types of computer-controlled fountains
and nontraditional displays, algorithmically-generated dynamic landscapes,
etc.

~~~
pkteison
Why wait? Smart lights are DMX controlled, and computers control things
easiest these days with USB, so google up DMX and USB and hit ebay and then
write some code to have your laptop control lighting. Once you have a computer
controller in the loop you can do almost anything. ("Color Kinetics" is one
brand of interesting computer controlled light I have played a bit with. I'm
sure there are many more options out there also.)

~~~
nitrogen
Well, I didn't exactly say I was waiting :)

[http://nitrogen.posterous.com/home-automation-and-
lighting-c...](http://nitrogen.posterous.com/home-automation-and-lighting-
control-with-kin)

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djenryte
The author, Josh Nimoy, gave a great talk at last month's LA Hacker News
meetup. Unfortunately, can't find a video recap.

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niktech
I've never heard of Houdini so I had to look it up (it's a purely procedural
3D animation package): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houdini_(software)>

Here is their demo reel: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leJks6ay4tg>

Apparently Maya, Softimage and 3DS Max are not the only players in this space
anymore.

~~~
oofoe
Sorry, small clarification:

Houdini is actually descended from the PRISMS package developed by Omnibus
Computer Graphics (one of the very first CGI studios (and actually still in
business in Japan!)). SideFX (started by two of the original programmers)
bought the rights to PRISMS when Omnibus (North America) went under. They
opened for business in 1987 and have been going strong since!

They have a number of "firsts" to their credit -- for instance, Houdini was
the first major 3D package on Linux. Debuted in 1999, although I was beta-
testing it before that.

For procedural 2D and 3D graphics, there is absolutely nothing like it.
However, it's hard for most users to understand, so its popularity has never
been great. Anyone doing serious FX work knows all about it, however.

(My old boss used to be CTO of Omnibus, in charge of PRISMS development.)

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jinushaun
Great write up! It's good to see real world uses for Processing and
OpenFrameworks outside the context of trivial tutorials and sample code. I've
always wondered who actually uses them and for what.

~~~
tintin
At first I also thought that he was using Processing but I don't think he used
it for this film.

~~~
jonbro
I am using openframeworks for games and music toys on the iphone. It happens
occasionally.

Processing I mostly use for prototyping before I go to c sometimes. It is a
bit quicker to write out code and the like.

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flexd
I'm amazed to know that openframeworks gets used in movies.

A good movie is a lot about level of detail, at least if you have a good
knowledge of technology similar to whats being used in the movie.

You can nearly spot a good movie just by seeing how much they have paid
attention to detail, based mostly on who they target as their main audience.

This is obviously one of the things the Tron: Legacy creators did right :-)

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sradnidge
I didn't like TRON Legacy at all, but after reading this I'm going to watch it
again. Several times even.

~~~
rbanffy
The story is predictable, but, come on... It's like Star Trek (pre-2009 at
least). You know it will probably not live up to your expectations, but you
just have to see it anyway.

BTW, the original Tron movie has its fair share of problems.

It's a very ambitious goal to visually depict the world our computer programs
see in ways non-trained humans can relate to it and to build an interesting
story out of it.

I would, most certainly, fail in this task.

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jmtame
incidentally, if you look up the "top 100" movies on piratebay right now,
you'll see tron legacy show up as #3. i think this goes to show just how
popular this movie is--the visual effects were incredible.

was there any information on how they created the younger version of kevin
flynn?

~~~
flexd
Lots and lots of plastic surgery. He really looks like that now, they did the
movie in reverse!

~~~
flexd
Since apparently somebody missed the point, the comment above is a joke.

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sjm
Terminal font looks very similar to BitStream Vera Mono Sans if anyone else
was curious.

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rokhayakebe
It is quite interesting to see how much work has been done.

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fractallyte
While the graphics are technically well done, I was offended by this movie.
Prior to seeing it, I'd decided that, for me, the real 'test' of whether I
could consider this a genuine sequel would be in the landscapes...

Tron came out in 1982. Ken Perlin won an Academy award for his work on the
procedurally generated textures (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise>)
used in the movie.

The Mandelbrot set (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set>) got
widespread fame in August 1985, with that famous Scientific American cover.
Tron _just missed_ that graphical opportunity! So, I figured, any true student
of CGI involved in the sequel would relish the notion of putting some sort of
tribute to Mandelbrot into the scenery (here are some examples:
[http://www.fractalforums.com/3d-fractal-
generation/heightfie...](http://www.fractalforums.com/3d-fractal-
generation/heightfields-using-meshes/)).

How mistaken I was... Yes, I'm really bitter about producers and artists who
don't care to know anything about the history of their art. And they had the
presumption to call it 'Tron Legacy'??

~~~
muyuu
You were offended that some people simply had no idea about this?!

