Enter the era of "Eye-Def" Computing and digital filmmaking at SIGGRAPH 2009 when director Peter Berg ("The Kingdom", "Hancock", and the upcoming remake of "Dune"), software creator and OTOY CEO Jules Urbach, and AMD's top computer and graphics processors executive Rick Bergman discuss some of the ground-breaking advances in hardware and software that enables sophisticated real-time rendering techniques and new delivery models, and forthcoming client and server hardware that has the potential to put the equivalent of a Hollywood render farm in a home set-top box.
"As new technologies approach unperceivable differences between CG characters and real actors, breakthroughs in processing power and software are creating a powerful new medium: Eye-Definition Computing," says Carlye Archibeque, SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival Executive Producer "As this medium moves into real-time rendering capabilities, new possibilities are born in digital filmmaking, video game development, and interactive animation."
Join the panelists as they contemplate the impact and implications of:
Films with entirely CG created characters
Real-time rendering for pre-visualization
Game characters as detailed as CG film characters
Digital immortality for actors through advanced new image and data capture techniques
New possibilities in blending interactivity with the home movie viewing experience
17 Comments
Tim, you've been recently drifting far away from Blender, reporting Google OS and other far-fetched stuff.
This is BlenderNation, not 3DNation.
Shiretoko,
The Blender Foundation and BlenderNation are supporters of SIGGRAPH which advances the science of much of what Blender is built upon. Also Ton has a large Blender booth at this years SIGGRAPH as well as the Blender BOF Conferences. At last years SIGGRAPH BOF there were so many people that it was standing room only and a number of people had to watch through the doors in the hallway. In additiona, I have met many wonderful members from the Blender community at SIGGRAPH.
Unfortunately I will not be covering it this year in New Orleans
Shiretoko, I think it applies to all 3D CGI and therefore to Blender. Tim, thanks for the heads up. I'd better start saving for a faster computer.
>>Films with entirely CG created characters
>>>Real-time rendering for pre-visualization
>>>>Game characters as detailed as CG film characters
These are things I would love to see implemented in Blender.
Hope Durian will help the dev achieve these goals... :D
+1 @ ByronK.
I think the more the better!
if one thinks it is not interesting/nothing to do with blender, one does not read it.
every bit of CG/blender news is interesting, keep up doing the good work!
Yessss ALL CG news are important and related with the intrests of the mayority of the people who uses blender. If you don't like it, don't read it!
Thumbs up from my side of the world!
Articles like this are a-ok by me here +1 @ tim :)
I personally think that CG characters will never look totally real. Every year or so, everyone is blown away by better quality, but I think AMD, or people in this industry are getting a bit full of themselves. And real-time rendering? What entirely is meant by that? If you could render one of blender's short films with the same quality in real time, you would need an insanely fast render farm. I think this should be more about technical aspects than this plot that people see in their minds with an unreal cross. That would mean that CG would end up looking MORE real than real life!
"Digital immortality for actors through advanced new image and data capture techniques" like Arnould swartzenager in the new terminator movie
"Digital immortality for actors through advanced new image and data capture techniques" thats a horror senario so we will never be freed from bad actors like that topgun guy and travolta. O well if they implement it well you can adjust how the main actor looks , probably more like yourself lol.
@Thomas, It reminds me of the motto of the Nexus Corp. in the movie "BLADE RUNNER"
in which Tyrell states, "More real, Than real' that's our motto."
@Shiretoko:
Dude, BlenderNation reports on SIGGRAPH every year. Whatever issue you have with Tim's discretion, you couldn't have picked a worse page to call him out for it on than this one... not even if he were reporting the next big announcement about Blender 2.50!
What about Ben Franklin, Muhammad Ali and Amelia Earhart? Don't they deserve some kind of immortality?
@back on topic (the article):
Let me begin by saying that we need animators and CG professionals who will continue to create CG art no matter how realistic the medium may become. As long as we have folks refusing to submit to the "realer is better" mindset, 3D art will remain art. And we need it to be art, and it should be a different, separate art form than photography, painting, or anything else. Using computers to simulate reality isn't art, and it never will be. Period.
Now let me appear to completely reverse direction...
I can't wait for the day when CG becomes consistently, completely indistinguishable from live-action. It's so painful for me to watch a movie, and have the male lead dodge a bullet and suddenly start moving like a video game character. I hate it when the movie I'm watching is spoiled by that shattering of the fourth wall that occurs with every uncanny valley. Guys with super-human powers, giant robots, floating swords, doesn't matter. If I can tell it's fake, it ruins the scene for me. And so far, I can usually still tell, even when the folks sitting next to me can't.
Even more than that, though, I want to play a live-action video game. I will continue to play and love every Zelda, Mirror's Edge, Muramasa and Bioshock that comes down the pipe. These highly artistic games give the game industry an invaluable, irreplaceable asset that is a joy to look at, to play, and to look at again. But for each of these, there's a Mass Effect, Halo, Assassin's Creed or Alan Wake that needs to look convincingly live-action. It's that fourth-wall thing again. It never feels totally real when it doesn't look real.
I'm a little concerned about what might happen to CG art when CG realism becomes commonplace, but not so concerned that I don't want to see it happen. I'm confident that there will always be BlenderArtists folks, CGsociety folks, DeviantArt folks, and countless others, both inside the industry and hobbyists outside, who will continue to create amazing works of art using the most powerful medium we've created yet. After all, we still have great artists using every other medium out there...
If you're one of the two people who read this entire comment, thank you very much. As a closing statement, I just want to say: As part of the 18-24 male demographic... it hasn't happened yet, but I want to believe that a man can fly... at least while I'm watching it happen on the screen.
Considering the technological and artistic advancements I've seen (much more than I've had the creative pleasure to access), I believe that the level of realism is quite probable. For me, as an artist, I look forward to eventually seeing and (most of all) taking advantage of such advancements.
Thank-you, Tim, for sharing this news with us. I'm confident, some developers for Blender are keeping up with information, like this and look forward to learning "how it's done" so that they can incorporate the techniques for those of us that cannot afford to buy every newly advanced 3D modeling and rendering program that hits the market....Like many users of Blender, Make Human, and LuxRender.
Not because of silicon-based technology, but because of the facial recognition networks in the human brain. The closer to real, the more upset our limbic (emotional) systems become if there is the slightest error. That's why no-talent critics can look at a portrait and spot the errors in a painting, or the optical distortions in a photograph. It isn't just the technology, it's the inherent strengths and weaknesses in human perception. Perception is a bag of tricks, after all: perspective doesn't really exist; it's just the way our binocular vision calculates distances. That's why Blender has an orthographic (true-shape) view in the first place.
Yes, you can't have perfect realism. Because reality is never perfect! Ha, before we go the philosophical deep end, let me just say that the perception of reality very much depends upon the individual. A child for example might have a lower standard for reality or what counts as realistic. I remember watching some crappy Godzilla movie as a child and coming out of the theater awed by its realism.
So, yes, for some people CG realism has already been attained!
The article said 'blending'.... :)
@Shiretoko 14 years old anime fanatic much? :D