March 18, 2007 at 00:32Cel shading technology in games and movies
First you need to talk about the technology of "cel shading". What it is? This is some kind of image conversion method. It consists in the fact that due to getting rid of halftones and identifying the boundaries of objects, we get a picture resembling a picture. Those who have worked with vector editors know a very similar thing called trace.
For the first time I was able to see the use of “cel shading” in the computer game “XIII”. The game was created by Ubisoft in 2003. Here, ordinary and already quite familiar to us three-dimensional graphics is turned into a lively comic book. Actually, the game became famous for this innovation. No other advantages were noted for her.
Meanwhile, director Richard Linklater used similar technology in the movie Awakening. Cinema was not in demand by the general public, but not because of its unusual appearance, but because of the complex philosophical conclusions on which the entire film is built.
Linklater's next work had a more impressive eight millionth budget. About 50 animators worked on the film. Despite the participation of such stars as Robert Downey, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Keanu Reeves in the project, the film failed at the box office. Perhaps only lovers of the literature of Philip K. Dick will be able to evaluate “Turbidity”, according to the book of which the film was made. Personally, I believe that Linklater movie succeeded. But Dick’s ideas themselves frighten away many and the closer the movie is made to the original, the more schizophrenic and paranoid it appears to the average person.
A special Rotoshop frame program was written for the film. A minute of a film made in this way takes 500 hours of computer processing of the material. Therefore, to speed up the process, Rotoshop interpolates frames. Those. in fact, only every 10th frame can be entered into the machine, the program can draw all the gaps on its own.
The artists managed to achieve the most impressive effect when creating an undercover cop costume. This is a kind of mosaic shell, consisting of images of more than a thousand (!) People. 18 animators worked on the creation of this image.
The next film, which I want to talk about, was released later on in “Turbidity”, but work on it began back in 1999. The Renaissance looks very impressive. This is a completely black and white film. The fantastic story told by French filmmakers was also not commercially successful. At a cost of $ 18 million, the film did not collect less than two million at the box office.
In this case, a slightly different technology was used. For the shooting, as I understand it, they involved not just processing a contrasting image, which on the screen turns into a striking animation, but a lot of sensors that informed the computer not only the position of the characters in space, but even their emotions. For example, special glasses were put on the actors, which recorded the movement of the eyes, the size of the pupils or the twitching of eyelashes.
Work on the film took a total of 6 years. The complexity of the task set by the creators of the picture frightened all the producers. IBM was the savior. The blue giant provided not only computer hardware, but software.
I must say right away that I do not intentionally mention Robert Rodriguez's film Sin City, which is very similar in its visuals to Renaissance. I think that to all readers of Habra this movie is well known even without my modest note.
In conclusion, several links:
The site of the game "XII"
The site of the film "Haze"
The site of the film "Renaissance"
For the first time I was able to see the use of “cel shading” in the computer game “XIII”. The game was created by Ubisoft in 2003. Here, ordinary and already quite familiar to us three-dimensional graphics is turned into a lively comic book. Actually, the game became famous for this innovation. No other advantages were noted for her.
Meanwhile, director Richard Linklater used similar technology in the movie Awakening. Cinema was not in demand by the general public, but not because of its unusual appearance, but because of the complex philosophical conclusions on which the entire film is built.
Linklater's next work had a more impressive eight millionth budget. About 50 animators worked on the film. Despite the participation of such stars as Robert Downey, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Keanu Reeves in the project, the film failed at the box office. Perhaps only lovers of the literature of Philip K. Dick will be able to evaluate “Turbidity”, according to the book of which the film was made. Personally, I believe that Linklater movie succeeded. But Dick’s ideas themselves frighten away many and the closer the movie is made to the original, the more schizophrenic and paranoid it appears to the average person.
A special Rotoshop frame program was written for the film. A minute of a film made in this way takes 500 hours of computer processing of the material. Therefore, to speed up the process, Rotoshop interpolates frames. Those. in fact, only every 10th frame can be entered into the machine, the program can draw all the gaps on its own.
The artists managed to achieve the most impressive effect when creating an undercover cop costume. This is a kind of mosaic shell, consisting of images of more than a thousand (!) People. 18 animators worked on the creation of this image.
The next film, which I want to talk about, was released later on in “Turbidity”, but work on it began back in 1999. The Renaissance looks very impressive. This is a completely black and white film. The fantastic story told by French filmmakers was also not commercially successful. At a cost of $ 18 million, the film did not collect less than two million at the box office.
In this case, a slightly different technology was used. For the shooting, as I understand it, they involved not just processing a contrasting image, which on the screen turns into a striking animation, but a lot of sensors that informed the computer not only the position of the characters in space, but even their emotions. For example, special glasses were put on the actors, which recorded the movement of the eyes, the size of the pupils or the twitching of eyelashes.
Work on the film took a total of 6 years. The complexity of the task set by the creators of the picture frightened all the producers. IBM was the savior. The blue giant provided not only computer hardware, but software.
I must say right away that I do not intentionally mention Robert Rodriguez's film Sin City, which is very similar in its visuals to Renaissance. I think that to all readers of Habra this movie is well known even without my modest note.
In conclusion, several links:
The site of the game "XII"
The site of the film "Haze"
The site of the film "Renaissance"
