For the hair tools they created methods for the animators to control the movement of Aki's 60,000 strands of hair down to the lock that often falls in front of her face. Not a small operation! Using the Maya API, they developed over 100 plug-ins for Maya. The support staff for R&D on these hair, tool and queuing systems was 40 full-time employees. For lip synching, Square created a Phoneme Library from which the different mouth shapes could be pulled. Technical directors and lead animators would create a set of sliders to control each element of the face, such as "Left Lower Eyelid Twitch" or "Purse Lips" in order to animate the performance while following along with video shot of the voice actors' performances. Lastly, the facial animation would be implemented. If the character had flowing clothes, like General Hein in his trench coat, or long hair, like Aki Ross, these objects would receive secondary animation through dynamics and keyframing. Next, an animator would tweak that performance in Maya using an optimized set of data that had been reduced from the original mo-cap data. ![]() First, an actor would be motion-captured for the broad movement and blocking of a scene. The character animation in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was almost always created through a series of refinements. The results are beautiful effects with many levels of detail and an organic nature. One trick they developed for making very lifelike smoke and fireballs was to render the RGB channels separately and then tint them each a different fiery hue before compositing them. But as his team of 20 artists experimented with CGI versions, Sakaguchi eventually was pleased enough with them to greenlight the project as 100% CGI. When it came to some very large explosions, smoke and fireballs, he initially planned on using composites of practical effects. Suffice it to say that the whole was far greater than the sum of its parts.īalcells is proud to note that when he began going through the many VFX shots needed for the film, director Hironobu Sakaguchi was always pushing him to generate everything in CGI. The passes started with color and lighting then added fog, muzzle flashes, shadows, fog noise, glows, fill lights, specularity, more lighting, different fog, and so on. Ross from a forbidden section of Old New York City, in a progression of layers leading to the final shot. This was the job of the sequence supervision department they oversaw the work as it traveled between many departments including Storyboards, Layout, Sets/Props, Animation, Motion-capture, Lighting, FX, Rendering and Compositing.īy going through these departments a shot would be built with anywhere from nine to 498 composite layers! Balcells showed one shot, where the ground troops rescue Dr. All of this data needed to be carefully managed so that the creation process was collaborative and organized. ![]() The roughly 200 people who worked on the film contributed about 120 person-years of work. Square Pictures stored 10 Terabytes of 3D and 5 Terabytes of 2D artwork. There are 141,964 frames, each of which took anywhere from 15 minutes to over 7 hours per frame to render. The film itself is composed of 1,327 shots. Ultimately, The Gray Project was an internal success which allowed Square's R&D department to prove that their production pipeline worked and they could use Maya, Renderman and custom tools to make the movie.Īki's dream world contains the key to unlocking the aliens' domination. Balcells showed the captive audience the never seen outside of Square Pictures animation, and it was quite amazing. While far from a compelling story, the level of drama and realism hit the mark. The scene shows two women inside a futuristic apartment having an argument. The proof-of-concept, titled The Gray Project, was a way to focus on both the artistic feel of the film's design and the technical complexity of generating realistic hair and skin on humans. So they decided to create a proof-of-concept animation that showcased the ambitious level of realism in human characters they would require for the finished product. Eschewing the more stylized rendering of the in-game cinematics for a photo-realistic look, they knew that there would be some major challenges ahead. ![]() When the principals of Square Pictures decided that they wanted to take the themes and title of its massively popular Final Fantasy series of PC and console games to the big screen in an entirely CGI feature-length film, they first had to prove to themselves that it was possible. One soon forgets that the characters in Final Fantasy are merely the product of zeros and ones.
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