Beowulf Imax 3D

[tongodeon]

Last weekend matrushkaka and I saw the new CGI "Beowulf". Short version: not without its flaws, but I thought it was a pretty good movie and I think you should go see it this weekend.

Comments

[mrbalihai]

I could tell the actors were CGI just from the TV commercials.

Just wondering: how do you define "real 3-D"?

[tongodeon]

I could tell the actors were CGI just from the TV commercials.

Oh sure, everyone could tell that some or most of the actors were CGI, but in some of the scenes the rendering of a few of the actors was apparently good enough that it fooled some of the members of my audience.

That we're having this conversation at all is pretty remarkable. Humans are very good at detecting minor defects in other humans, and that we've been able to even momentarily fool anyone at all is a pretty big milestone.

Just wondering: how do you define "real 3-D"?"Real practical 3-D" requires photographing practical 3D objects with two discrete stereoscopic cameras. "Real CGI 3D" requires rendering the original 3D scene from two virtual cameras. Both "Nightmare 3D" and "Chicken Little 3D" were photographed by a single practical camera, then reprojected onto low-res geometry (some of which had been procedurally constructed using computer vision techniques) and rendered the stereo pair from the reprojection/geometry data. That's a nice trick, but it doesn't

[mrbalihai]

"Real CGI 3D" requires rendering the original 3D scene from two virtual cameras.

That's my definition as well. I used to teach stereo concepts/configuration back in the days when the "G" hadn't been forcibly removed from "SGI", so I have enough knowledge in this area to be dangerous.

Is Beowulf being projected at 24fps? In my experience, the frame rate has a huge effect on my ability to watch stereo images without experiencing the urge to re-gurge.

[tongodeon]

Yeah, BEO was a 24FPS show. Well it was 48FPS if you count each camera as a separate frame. There are two projectors, each simultaneously showing a left/right pair with polarized lens filters to separate them, not a single projector showing an interleaved left/right eye with an LCD shutter in the glasses.

[leighton]

Low expectations made me love this movie.

With this tech getting better every year , wondering how long it will be before CGI / 3D will replace "real" live actors / 2D? Or will HoloDecks and virtual sex come first?

[tongodeon]

Ah, see above.

[dbrottman]

I mostly enjoyed this flick for the effects, and my drooling fanboy devotion to Neil Gaiman. Overall I thought it was a so-so movie that was improved by the pretty pretty effects.

Ah, Classics, good ol professor Solomon.

well, actually

[freeasinbeer]

almost all of the stereoscopic work on Beo was reprojection.

Some of the effects work (smoke, for example) had to be rerendered for another eye.
But about 80 percent of the second image was done with reprojection. Rerendering
was done for the parts near edges where reprojection showed too much smearing
or where there just wasn't enough good data in the first render. Also, snow
and dust and smoke where there is tiny or no geometry to reproject onto.

The second eye render was done up to 6 months after the original image.
If the methodology was to rerender, it would be far easier to do it at
the same time, when all the files are still online, the shaders haven't
changed, the original compositor is still around remembering what cheats
he did, and so on.

But it's WAY cheaper and faster to reproject, and selectively rerender.

I checked with a definitive source before posting.

Re: well, actually

[tongodeon]

Ah, runawaysquid's famous "Christmas Rock" technology has finally made it to production. I stand corrected. How big a difference is there between a reprojected opposite-eye image and a rendered-from-scratch image?

There's still a big difference between Beo and Nightmare. With Beo we have the actual geometry and the original shaders for the parts where the projection isn't working. Nightmare wasn't a CG movie to begin with, so ILM had to create the reprojection geometry from scratch and deal with the projection artifacts with paint and guessing. Not their fault - that's just the constraints of their project, and they did it about as well as they could be expected to.