

Lucasfilm will use video game engines in movie post-production process - Impossible
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2295956/lucasfilm-will-combine-video-games-and-movies-to-axe-post-production-process

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hayesdaniel
I'm a vfx guy and used to work at ILM (lucasfilm). This title is incredible
misleading. Tech to "previsualize" objects "in camera" has been around a long
time and is in pretty wide use. Avatar used it very heavily, for example.

It's important to realize that what happens in post is a whole lot more than
making a 3d object and placing it in the scene. We do a lot of integration
work in 2D by hand to match things like color, edges, etc. There's massive
amount of simulation work on water, fire, etc. Sometimes people straight-up
paint on film frames in things like photoshop.

The big win with real-time visualization is the creative control for the
direction and director of photography, who are generally far removed from the
final product and this can cause expensive second-guessing all around.

Lastly, it's a bit condescending to artists working on games to suggest that
the painstaking work that goes into making/optimizing/QCing interactive
content is something that can just happen on the fly. Sure, game engines and
hardware are pretty great, but games themselves are more and more realistic
because very specialized people are working very hard to make them that way.

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ajg1977
I'm one of the engineers working on this, I even make a semi-appearance in the
video. I'm not really going to say much about it because it's a little
annoying that it leaked out, and by such a crappy recording too, but -

a) I think the title here is pretty good, better than the hyperbolic one the
Inquirer used.

b) Your middle two paragraphs are spot on

c) Given the video, it's understandable people are focused on the "actor as a
virtual character" previsualization part ('but Avatar did this two years
ago!', 'our game engine does that!', yadda yadda). That's only a small part of
it, and honestly one of the less interesting ones.

I don't see what you think is condescending though. There's not a lot of
difference today in the skill-set of a CG artist and a games artist. Generally
they're just working to different budgets. (I say that as someone who spent 15
years working on console games).

The painstaking days of game artists building models that use less than 100
verts and hand-painting 256x256 textures are gone. Now, both your CG and game-
artist build super-high resolution models, probably starting with something
like ZBrush, then decimate down to whatever they need with the highres asset
used to generate normal or displacement maps.

Optimius Prime in the original Transformers movie used ~20x more polygons than
a PS4/Xbone game would today for a similar character. That's pretty amazing
when you think that the GPUs in those machines are already handily outmatched
by PCs, and the performance gains Nividia/AMD bring with every hardware cycle.

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thenomad
Interesting!

So what would you say - as one of the people involved, rather than a
journalist commenting - are the most interesting/important parts of the
project?

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ajg1977
I would say that when you reach the point of being able to accurately
represent final CG in realtime, a huge number of possibilities open up :)

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thenomad
Including an accurate lighting model? Or do you think that there's a
significant inflection point before that when we're still attempting to
replicate a final render using rasterizers?

(My current bee-in-bonnet, besides integrating HMDs and mocap, is realtime-ish
path tracing - but that's a while away yet, still.)

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thenomad
Heh, they're a bit late to the party on this one...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima)

My production company already uses realtime motion capture and realtime
rendering - we've been doing so since we moved away from pure Machinima
techniques 5 years ago.

And we're currently incorporating GPU-based semi-realtime path tracing and
Oculus Rift powered VR into the mix...

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Pxtl
Dangit, don't tease me with the words "Lucasfilm" and "game" in the same
headline - it makes me miss LucasArts.

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ctdonath
_Lucasfilm has been able to transfer its techniques to film-making, shifting
video game assets into movie production._

Yes, does seem a strange innovation, having dumped the department responsible
for the assets they're now touting new uses for.

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btown
While this is very ambitious, I'm sure that they will eventually settle on a
similar pipeline to Avatar: render in lower graphics quality in real-time,
then increase the "graphics settings" and re-render in post-production. People
are used to seeing things like realistic water and hair simulations, and those
things do just take time.

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chaostheory
What they demo'd may not work for movies, but I can see it working well for
television shows for kids.

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vidarh
Check out "Gormiti Nature Unleashed". It's a CGI rendered childrens cartoon,
and the rendering is so low budget that when the scene complexity gets high,
it stutters, as if they're recording from realtime rendering. Don't know if
that's what they're doing, though the entire look of it makes that plausible,
or if it's just that they've got a fixed time budget for rendering each frame
and simply skips frames for the most complex stuff.

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kreek
I have a better technology for stormtrooper rendering, it's called guy in
stormtrooper suit, hyper-realism since 1977.

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ctdonath
At what point will the actors use HMDs so they too can see the virtual world
they're supposedly interacting with? ...and will lag & resolution affect that
behavior in a way causing an "uncanny valley", with actors responding to
situations discernible milliseconds later than the audience expects them to?

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sp332
I think a head-mounted display would get in the way of recording their facial
expressions for the characters.

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mseepgood
Will they use the SCUMM engine?

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codereflection
It's a damn shame that 1313 will not be made, but exciting to see that the
technology they developed for it will live on.

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Tloewald
I wonder if there's a big project to fix script writing...

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mprovost
There is (if you call it fixing):

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html)

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TheZenPsycho
WARNING: The linked page has (edit: sometimes, at random) an autoplaying video
advertisement on it.

