05-23-2005, 08:00 PM
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Mystic
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,819
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Madagascar Movie Pushes Tech Limits
"With a cast of zoo animals and hundreds of furry lemurs on the film's namesake island, the animators had to push the limits of technology to render an eye-catching yet believable effect. Every hair on every animal represented a line of computer code, for a countless number of algorithms that had to be compressed and rendered overnight to create the images in just one scene. Madagascar Alex the Lion, for example, the motion picture's animated star played by Ben Stiller, had 1.7 million hairs on his head and each one represented a series of 1s and 0s. Just a few years ago, depicting only five furry beasts in one scene would have been nearly impossible--the computer hourglass icon would likely turn for months--but "Madagascar" shows almost 1,000 at once in one primate dance scene. "There's more data than ever before--we had to render it, light it, shade it," said Philippe Gluckman, visual FX supervisor for "Madagascar," which took four years to make. "Years ago if there were only five or six lemurs we'd have run out of memory."
It is so easy to forget how complex these computer animated movies are. I think we have gotten to the point where we have gotten used to seeing them that we focus on the stories and not the server farms that are required to render them. 8)
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