Madagascar Movie Pushes Tech Limits

[James Fee]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://news.com.com/Madagascar+pushes+tech+limits/2100-1026_3-5713854.html?part=rss&tag=5713854&subj=news' target='_blank'>http://news.com.com/Madagascar+pushes+tech+limits/2100-1026_3-5713854.html?part=rss&tag=5713854&subj=news</a><br /><br /></div><i>"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."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/madagascar.jpg" /><br /><br />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)

[klinux]

Like gigahertz and other spec-whoring computer ads, soon movie will tout x number of hairs per frame! This movie's rendering time is y days at a cost of z teraflops! ;)

[Felix Torres]

Like gigahertz and other spec-whoring computer ads, soon movie will tout x number of hairs per frame! This movie's rendering time is y days at a cost of z teraflops! ;)

Part of the promotional hype for THE LAST STARFIGHTER was the fact that the movie's special effects had required a year of CRAY cpu time,
This being back in the day when CRAY CPU cycles were special, of course...

[James Fee]

Part of the promotional hype for THE LAST STARFIGHTER was the fact that the movie's special effects had required a year of CRAY cpu time, This being back in the day when CRAY CPU cycles were special, of course...I think that is the first "The Last Starfighter" reference on DMT... ;)

[surur]

For all their touting of the complexity of their effects, that particular screen shot looks very cartoonish. Isn't the point of all this rendering to make things photo-realistic?

Surur

[Felix Torres]

For all their touting of the complexity of their effects, that particular screen shot looks very cartoonish. Isn't the point of all this rendering to make things photo-realistic?

Surur

Realistic?
That would be in the eye of the beholder.
Many would term Kabuki unrealistic. ;-)

The kind of realism that CGI provides to stories like SKY CAPTAIN is of a different order than that it provides to an animated movie where the characters are stylized metaphors for human follies and foibles. :twisted:

(Ouch, almost swallowed my tongue there...) :wink:

[Fitch]

Wait until you see Chronicles of Narnia-- LOTR-size war scenes, but instead of armor, the fighters will all be chimeras/animals with fur. Oy! 700 dual-processor AMD Opterons isn't even gonna cut it.

[Felix Torres]

Wait until you see Chronicles of Narnia-- LOTR-size war scenes, but instead of armor, the fighters will all be chimeras/animals with fur. Oy! 700 dual-processor AMD Opterons isn't even gonna cut it.

I saw the trailer for Narnia last week and I was impressed.
Not so much by the quality of the CGI, since by now that is a given, but by the design sense and the visual style they're adopting.
I'm looking forward to watching it almost as much as SERENITY (*that* trailer was more witty and fun than most entire movies playing right now.)

[jeffd]

they make this sound like something new. Weve been doing cg animations with indavidual "hairs" for years now.. hell.. my geforce 3 can do hairs in real time. yet at the same time the characters in this movie do not consist of a whole lot of "hair".. a very smooth cartoonish look. Character animation will probably be good.. but from a realistic asspect (which is by far the toughest to replicate in 3d) this movie isnt even a contender. Eye of the beholder smolder... the only way you can NOT judge if a 3d image is realistic enough is if you don't know what a real animal looks like. ^^

[Fitch]

they make this sound like something new.... Eye of the beholder smolder... the only way you can NOT judge if a 3d image is realistic enough is if you don't know what a real animal looks like. ^^Hair on your computer's video card is nothing like the realistic hair that takes hours to render to look remotely realistic. That's just simply wrong. The hair on these CG features casts shadows on itself, have different thicknesses and properties, and even take time to PRE-render a realistic movement simulation. This isn't about eye-of-the-beholder, these characters are artistic, but look real. No, the lion doesn't look like a real lion, but the characters look like they exist in real life. As if somone made a living, breathing, animated, piece of art, and filmed it. The characters have hair on them, some just have short hair, but the hair that gets rendered gives an amazing overall accurate look of a fuzzy animal.

I recommend you find a digital theater and watch Madagascar.