Is this the future of movie making?

If making movies like this is wrong, then I don’t want to be right! :cool:

Although not usually real-time, the basic techniques are already used quite extensively in film.

I literally spit up my coffee when I saw the “Star Trek: Next Generation” - style controller at 1:20. Someone is really geeking out there…


The Congress (2013) by Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir-2008)

Real-time rendering certainly has come a long way in the last few years alone but I am not so sure that this technology will replace offline rendering any time soon. As we push technology further to make rendering quicker we will compensate by putting more and more details in our movies, that is the way it always has been and it will always be so. Even the day we will be able to render 5 million hair strands with physically accurate shaders and global illumination in real-time we will still try to add more stuff that we can’t really handle.

This video/trailer was rendered using a realtime renderer.

And while the quality is impressive knowing that it is rendered in real-time it is still not good enough for cinema and the man-hours that went into making it is absolutely insane!

I believe that in a few years we can use online renderers for a major role in film-making but we will still use offline render engines for certain effects of passes.

I’m not sure effects play into it much myself, but I think the resources involved to real-time a performance for a production film (at least for the foreseeable future) would be wasted on the practice. All that processing when having to do a dozen takes to get a scene right seems ridiculous to me. Seems less to worry about to just capture the actors motion to a higher degree of accuracy and render later. For simpler live performances, TV cameos and such I can see it being used, but that’s more a novelty to me.

<sarcasm> Well if they weren’t doing something wrong, the studio wouldn’t be dead now, would it? </sarcasm>

RIP LucasArts

Probably the future of filmmaking is this, but actors will have head mounted displays which will show them the realtime CG in first person, so they can be more immersed in the “live” action, along with face/body sensors to catch all the subtle expressions and movements, much like the kinekt-style one seen in the video linked by OP…

Marco

This sort of is the future of film making, though studios expect this kind of capability, they often are the very same ones doing the best job at harming it.

I hope this does happen though since it would put the vfx artist on more equal footing with the actors, who are extremely over paid, over worshipped and are seen as non-expendable where as the actual people who make it happen get treated like crap.

Oh, I do think that this is your future. It might not be fully-developed quite yet, but it would be huge to be able to shoot a film and to see, in the director’s monitor scope right now, what the finished shot will be.

Right now, when a film “blows its budget,” it is very often the CG that does it. There are hundreds and hundreds of animators practicing what is essentially a manual craft, and we just can’t keep paying those bills. (Sometimes, I think, a CG-shop goes bankrupt just to “dump” all those debts that can never be recouped.) There has to be a way to make the computer do more of the work, and to bring it back onto the set, where all the rest of film-making already is.

I’m envisioning a device that “paints” the set from several different precisely-set locations with a web of infrared laser light, with the points modulated by a rapidly changing stream of numbers. High-speed sensors, also precisely located, read that data, and “phenomenal computer power” (conveniently stored in a box about the size of a guitar amplifier …) interprets it to create a real-time 3D understanding of the scene, into which more power (say, another box) in real-time injects animation. Another box-ful of solid state drives records it all. We are, today, already extremely close to that.

What we can very comfortably say about this “craft industry that right now employs thousands of people” is that it will follow in the course of every other such craft industry that preceded it: it will die, as we know it, to be permanently replaced by something else that we don’t know yet. It will be superseded by the very computer power that a few years ago birthed it, and a whole new Pandora’s Box of exciting possibilities will thereby be opened up. We’ll be learning our skills all over again. And, we’ll be watching movies that right now we can’t quite dream of … “movies” or, say, maybe something else besides. (It always comes down to: “We are here now. Entertain us.”)

I am perfectly calm when I say this. History repeats itself in many ways, and this is one. We can’t stop it, and, really, we don’t want to.