On Wed, 29 Nov 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hey all, I haven't heard this mentioned on the list yet, so I thought
> I would ring in. After seing mention of Shrek (www.shrek.com) I
> thought a few of the people might be interested in an even more
> impressive computer animation movie coming out next year. Final
> Fantasy: The Spirits Within (www.finalfantasy.com) is coming out next
> summer. If you have broadband or are willing to sit through the
> download, then I highly recommend downloading the theatrical trailer
> (the higher the quality, the better... well worth the download). The
> quality of the computer animation is incredible, and I think this
> demonstrates just what computer animation can do.
They had a setup at Siggraph where they showed a trailer over and over;
that was really cool. I haven't downloaded the trailer mentioned above to
see if it's the same one, but based on what I saw at Siggraph, it is
going to be really cool from a computer animation standpoint.
According to my husband, who keeps up with this stuff (and sees every
computer-animated feature-length movie in the theater on the grounds that
it's related to his field of work, however remotely removed), the most
difficult thing in getting humans to look "real" now is the modeling of
hair. What we saw at Siggraph had people with black hair, which just
avoids some of the problems of hair modeling (don't have to worry about
what the other hairs are doing in terms of casting shadow on a given hair,
since everything is black to begin with); if everyone in the movie has
black hair, that trick will work nicely.
I'm looking forward to the movie. (Just wondering if things will work out
for me to actually see it in the theater.... If not, there's always DVD
later.)
Julia
