ILM was called in late in the 'Avatar' development process to help finish a series of the movie's shots.
(Credit: Industrial Light & Magic)Update (11:49 a.m.): Weta Digital has been contacted for comment, and this story will be updated when and if the company responds.
SAN FRANCISCO--About a year ago, with James Cameron's science-fiction epic "Avatar" well under way, it became clear that Weta Digital, the visual effects studio doing much of the computer generated imagery, or CGI, on the project, was a bit in over its head.
At that point, the movie, which opened Friday, was about 40 minutes longer than it ended up being, and what was needed to finish the project was another company that could come in and lend a helping hand--and do so at the same, very high level, that Weta was working at.
And that's where Industrial Light & Magic came in, recalled John Knoll, the Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor tasked with parachuting in to help finish what was, more than on most films, the crucial job of crafting the "Avatar" CGI work.
What followed was months of coordination between ILM, Weta, and Cameron's production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, with a primary goal of ensuring that the two visual effects teams, one in San Francisco and the other in New Zealand, avoided any unnecessary duplication of effort, even as both sometimes found themselves working on effects for the same movie sequences.
For ILM, this wasn't the first time it had been called in to help aid another effects house, but it may well have been the first time it did so for one as big and as accomplished as Weta. To be sure, ILM's overall contribution to the finished film was minor compared to Weta's, but nonetheless critical in helping get the film to its final, finished state, Knoll suggested.
For Knoll, the challenge of working alongside Weta was about identifying a body of work that limited the number of assets the ILM team had to develop and which would allow them to be the most helpful. Ultimately, they were handed the keys to creating the visual effects for many of the specialized vehicles in the film, including the Valkyrie, a large shuttle used to move people and equipment, and several different types of helicopters, as well as the landscapes those vehicles lived in.
ILM was mostly given responsibility for doing the visual effects on the film's aircraft, notably its helicopters and the Valkyrie, a large-scale shuttle.
(Credit: Industrial Light & Magic)ILM also did the effects work on the film's final battle scene, taking responsibility for the shots of all the vehicles taking off, as well as the sequence's cockpit interior shots.
Working together on a scene
For the most part, the teams at ILM and Weta worked on different scenes, but Knoll said there were some in which the two companies handles different parts of the same sequence. An example, he said, was a scene in the film where a group of helicopters attack the giant "home tree," where the Navi, the humanoid alien race in the film, live. Knoll said that the effects in the scene were mainly put together by Weta, but ILM handled all the shots in which the camera looks back toward the choppers.
In the scenes where the two effects houses both were charged with creating shots, the challenge was figuring out how to "checkerboard" the shots, Knoll said, especially because in some cases, ILM didn't know what Weta's work looked like.
"You keep cutting back between ILM shots and Weta shots," Knoll said. "They're really intermixed. I was worried, because we had to get going and go pretty far down the line before we had any Weta shots to refer to. We were both doing development in parallel."
This might have been a serious problem on many film projects, but with "Avatar," both ILM and Weta were working from extremely detailed templates given to them by Cameron. Knoll said that the templates gave his team very specific direction on how they should construct their shots, down to rough indications of the lighting in the scenes.
"It did help that the templates were so specific," Knoll said. "They were very detailed and Jim [Cameron] was very insistent: 'I've put a lot of time into making sure these are exactly what I want them to be, so you need to do a good job of matching that.'"
Still, with both houses working in parallel, there was certainly a bit of a race to finish a shot, Knoll said, because the team that was fastest would be able to more or less set the tone for the whole scene. "Whoever gets there first is who drives it," he said.
ILM visual effects supervisor John Knoll hopes that audiences won't be able to tell the difference between shots created by Industrial Light & Magic and those created by the film's original visual effects house, Weta Digital.
(Credit: Weta)"For example, in the home tree sequence, we have to fire a bunch of missiles," Knoll recalled. "[There wasn't] anything established for what the missile trails look like. We did our own version of the what [they] would look like and Jim liked it, so that's what Weta had to match."
Of course, in other cases, Weta would finish first, and ILM would have to match what the New Zealanders came up with. And in some cases, it was a bit of "splitting the difference," Knoll said. Ultimately, he added, he hopes that audience members won't be able to tell that two separate visual effects teams shared the work.
All-CGI explosions
One benefit for the entire film industry of having ILM step in to help out on "Avatar" may be that in working on the project, Knoll and his team came up with a new way to completely computer-generate large-scale, close-up explosions.
Until now, big fiery explosions in CGI-heavy films have been shot with live camera and then had visual effects added to them. But Knoll said that because of some of the limitation of matching Cameron's templates for "Avatar," there was no practical way to meet the movie's explosive needs with live-action.
"We've done CG explosions in the past," Knoll said, "but never with this level of realism, and never this close up."
Fortunately, ILM had pioneered the rendering of the visual movement of fluids in films like "Poseidon" and "Pirates of the Caribbean," and Knoll knew that the shape and movement dynamics of an explosion were similar to that of water.
"The same underlying engine is being used on this," Knoll said. "The motion of the underlying gas is similar to the motion of fluids. The medium is relatively uncompressable. So when there's movement of the medium, it can't change volume real dramatically. So if you push on one side, something has to push on the other side."
That meant that ILM could take the graphics engine it had created for fluid shots in the previous films and apply the same basic technology for the explosions in "Avatar." Though there are clearly some major differences between fluid and big fire--notably that as fuel burns, fire expands, and then retracts when the fuel goes away, the technique was similar enough that the technology could be adapted to the needs of "Avatar."
"I think this is going to be an important technique (for the industry) in the future," Knoll said, "to tailor-make an explosion that looks good close up."
The fifth paragraph in this story was updated on December 22 to better reflect Knoll's statements of how and when ILM came to be involved in "Avatar" and what the company's impact on it was.
Mattel's i-Tag, a new augmented reality-based toy that comes with 'Avatar' action figures that will be released in October. Could this be the future of toys?
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)I have seen the future of toys, and it is augmented reality.
That was my conclusion Monday after seeing Mattel's i-Tags, new technology that will be included with action figures the company will make for "Titanic" director James Cameron's new film, "Avatar."
For those not familiar with augmented reality, it's an overlay of digital information or imagery on top of real-world objects. AR, as it's known, "is a field of computer research that deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time," according to Wikipedia.
Or, as Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst with Needham & Company in New York called it, AR is "jet fuel for the imagination."
In the case of the "Avatar" action figures, AR is being implemented in the form of small plastic cards--the i-Tags--that kids can hold up in front of any Webcam. When they do, a fully 3D digital image is superimposed over the card on the screen. This can be anything from a simple set of information about a character from the film to a full-on, five-on-five shooting battle involving large military helicopters and flying dinosaur-like creatures called Leonopteryx.
The i-Tags, along with the "Avatar" action figures they're based on, will be released in October in advance of the December 18 release of Cameron's film.
There are five levels of i-TAGs, each of which corresponds to a specific level of interactivity with the AR. At level one--which will cost $8.95 per toy--kids who hold the card up to their Webcam will see some information on their computer screen about the character. At higher levels, though, they'll be able to "push" buttons on the card, allowing them to manipulate the digital character or vehicle that pops up (see video below).
While AR is beginning to show up in many arenas, from video games to movie advertising to baseball cards to exploratory toys, Mattel said that the i-Tag is the first-ever retail toy implementation of the technology.
And let's be honest about Mattel's implementation: it's cool, if fairly limited. At its best, two kids with Level 5 i-TAGs could put their "Battle Packs" to the test and watch as five warriors pop up on both sides of the screen and proceed to battle it out in, seemingly right in front of the kids.
And to be sure, for a 6-year-old, or even a 10-year-old, this could be pretty exciting. But I'm willing to bet a 15-year-old is going to get the maximum out of this system pretty quickly.
Augmented reality has already made it to some markets, as in the case of Topps baseball cards. The Topps implementation was also done by Total Immersion, which is behind the technology in the Mattel i-Tags.
(Credit: Topps)But to me, this isn't about today. This is about what's coming down the line, and what i-Tags and augmented reality making it to the retail market now means for the future of toys. And that's because this, as first-generation technology, is just scratching the surface of what's going to be possible in a year or two when growing public awareness of AR meets lower R&D costs and motivates developers the world over to see what's possible with this new medium.
"It's a very important thing, because the evolution of toys has been about solitary action," McGowan said. "We've had Web sites that interact with toys, but we've been missing the feedback with the toy...We've seen interactive toys 1.0, but nothing that goes back to the toy. I think augmented reality is creating a loop that makes two plus two equal five."
Think about it. The possibilities are just about endless, and could mean a whole new life for the kinds of toys that kids at first play with a lot, and then quickly abandon. By embedding special software in imagery that can be placed just about anywhere on a toy, toy makers will now have an incredibly wide range of virtual things to add to their physical toys.
Whether it's battling aliens or dancing dolls or branded pets, the sky's pretty much the limit for what could be done with AR and toys. And it's not about Mattel at all. Or at least not entirely about Mattel. It's really about the entire toy industry and the imaginative ways that toy designers figure out to build AR into their creations.
Indeed, it may be more accurate to say that, assuming the market is proved out quickly, the only limitations to how to deploy AR in or with toys could be what toy makers can think of.
Instructions on the side of an augmented-reality-embedded toy from Mattel's 'Avatar' collection.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)To McGowan, there really is no limit to what can happen with this technology, but he thinks that it's important that a company like Mattel is taking the step of introducing AR to the market. Yet he also applauds the company for being subtle about AR in its marketing. In part, that's because of the state of the economy.
"Mattel is being smart, and downplaying" AR, McGowan said. "They're not trumpeting it as the hottest thing. They're not saying it's going to set the toy industry on fire. Why set it up that way?"
Yet this is extremely new technology and, so far at least, people don't seem to be putting a lot of energy into embedding AR into toys. Which isn't, of course to say that the technology won't be the next big thing.
McGowan believes there isn't any corner of the toy industry that won't benefit from new technologies like this, whether it's dolls or airplanes or anything else.
"With the concept of play, going back to the stone ages, kids emulate what they see in the world, and emulate what they see adults doing," he said. "It's their imagination that makes things real. And that imagination can be augmented...Every kid has always taken a little paper airplane and imagined they've been flying through the sky. Now that can happen a lot more realistically."
Places, a new initiative from the Multiverse Network, will offer users the ability to connect through Manhattan's Times Square. Earlier this year, the company first demonstrated the Times Square environment, at the time to showcase its graphics capabilities and to explain how many users it could fit on a single server.
(Credit: Multiverse Network)The Multiverse Network, a developer of virtual world platform software, announced Wednesday that it was unveiling what it calls Places, two related social elements that tie Multiverse users together.
Essentially connective tissue for users of the Multiverse platform, Places has two separate components.
The first is a social networks application that automatically connects people using Multiverse virtual worlds together with others who are also friends in social networks like Facebook.
The second part of Places is a new virtual world centered around a digital representation of Manhattan's Times Square. Now anyone who installs Multiverse's World Browser--the basic Multiverse virtual world software--will be able to enter the Times Square environment and connect and socialize with friends, play games, view interactive entertainment, and meet and greet in personal, private destinations.
This is notable for two reasons, and seems to be a culmination of much of what Multiverse has been working on the last couple of years.
On the one hand, until now, Multiverse has fashioned itself strictly as a platform provider, offering others the ability to build virtual worlds using its software. On the other, Multiverse last year unveiled a prototype of the Times Square environment as a showcase for its ability to host large numbers of people on a single server.
But from the beginning, Multiverse offered the promise of tying users of all the virtual worlds built on top of its platform together. It was never entirely clear how that would work, and to date, there had been no publicly available, completed worlds made using the software.
Now, however, it is clear Multiverse is using the Places model to showcase its technology and demonstrate that its platform is capable of supporting a 3D social virtual world, somewhat along the lines of Second Life.
Disclosure: My wife works for Second Life publisher Linden Lab.
Another interesting piece of Places is that it is, as Multiverse puts it, "an open-source virtual world." This means, the company said, that developers can "access, modify, and add to its user interface, avatar behaviors, menu system, art assets, avatars and--most importantly--its game play or structured interaction capabilities."
This would seem to indicate that Multiverse will be allowing users to make wholesale changes to the Places virtual world along the lines of the kinds of modifications and content creation that is possible in Second Life.
What's not clear is the scope that developers will have with these tools and whether they will be able to make adult content.
This is interesting because one way that Multiverse has tried to position itself to corporate clients wanting to build a virtual world on its platform is that those clients wouldn't have to worry about their own users encountering objectionable content.
In a separate announcement also made Wednesday, Multiverse said that Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron--a member of the company's board of directors--plans to use the platform to build a virtual world based on his film, Titanic.
Called Places in Time: Titanic, it will be structured as an educational environment in which users can explore much about the voyage and fate of the doomed ship.
The Titanic virtual world will be a "destination" for users of Places and is clearly meant to demonstrate how third-party developers can expand upon the platform.
- prev
- 1
- next
