CG movies vs current games

[HexiumVII]

Have we gotten to the point where games look better, more realistic than cg movies? It looks like they have given up with the realism dream and only create cg movies that are cartoony whereas the new games are getting closer to realism and actually look better than full cg movies ala beowulf.

 

[Elcs]

Most CG movies are supposed to be catroony, spanning back from Toy Story 1 days. I have to agree that in quite a few CG-enhanced movies, the CG effects are noticably distinguished from realistic events, parts of The Matrix Trilogy spring to mind.

Some CG is meant to be cartoony, some is not. Some games are meant to be cartoony or unrealistic (sci-fi etc) and some are built for pure realism (CoD) and you occaisonally get a blend of both.

CG Movies Vs. Games in realism terms is too broad a spectrum. If you compared the CG effects in some kind of war movie to the CG in a war game such as CoD then I think you have room for comparison and debate.

To accurately discuss this point, you need to know what the director for the film or game was intending to do and how much appreciation was given to making the CG parts graphicallt fit to the surrounding parts.

 

[shortylickens]

I have not seen a game that looks as good as either of the Final Fantasy movies, so: No.

 

[Capitalizt]

Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...sy_VII_Advent_Children

no frickin way...We'll need a PS5 to touch those graphics.

 

[MarcVenice]

There's prolly 100's of machines comparable to lets say a PS3 running 24/7 for half a year to get those kind of graphics in CG movies though. I don't think it's a fair comparison. Ray tracing might prove interesting in the somewhat near future for game.

 

[EvilComputer92]

Take a look at the Warcraft III cinematics and then you'll see why we aren't even close to that sort of level of quality.

 

[Canai]

Originally posted by: EvilComputer92
Take a look at the Warcraft III cinematics and then you'll see why we aren't even close to that sort of level of quality.

Blizzard cinematics > *

Always.

 

[Modelworks]

It takes about 8 minutes to render a really complex scene in 3d for film work.
Thats running on a render farm of about 50 dual core processor machines.
Thats for one frame, you need 24 frames for each second of animation.
So your looking at a render time of 192 minutes for each second of movie.
11520 minutes for each minute of movie * 90 minutes (average film length) = 17,280 hours of rendering time for the finished movie.

About 720 days of rendering time.
So for really big films you have to double and triple, quad, the render farm computers, to bring it down to 3 to 4 months of render time. No way that is going to be done in games or on home pc's anytime soon.

About the OP comments.
Its all about style. With CG you can have whatever look you want for a film, cartoon, realistic, etc. Thats what makes it so great.

I'm going to be using the UT3 engine to make movies, simply because it can render pretty decent graphics without the render times that conventional software requires.
Game engines are actually getting good enough now with enough features that rendering a fairly good quality cg movie is a reality.

Its not going to be theater quality, but its going to be still very nice.

 

[Elcs]

Originally posted by: Canai

Originally posted by: EvilComputer92
Take a look at the Warcraft III cinematics and then you'll see why we aren't even close to that sort of level of quality.

Blizzard cinematics > *

Always.

Apart from Murmurs terrible voice acting, Flagship Studios came damn close to toppling Diablo2 + LoD's cinematics for me with Hellgate London.

Deckard Cain made those CGI's so awesome.

One thing I could say is Relic.... Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War intro anyone?

We will either run like a pair of traintracks and never meet, always progressing at roughly the same speed... or we will converge into one and have the same tech doing both jobs.

Personally, I think its like consoles, traintrack style all the way.

 

[Fenixgoon]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
It takes about 8 minutes to render a really complex scene in 3d for film work.
Thats running on a render farm of about 50 dual core processor machines.
Thats for one frame, you need 24 frames for each second of animation.
So your looking at a render time of 192 minutes for each second of movie.
11520 minutes for each minute of movie * 90 minutes (average film length) = 17,280 hours of rendering time for the finished movie.

About 720 days of rendering time.
So for really big films you have to double and triple, quad, the render farm computers, to bring it down to 3 to 4 months of render time. No way that is going to be done in games or on home pc's anytime soon.

About the OP comments.
Its all about style. With CG you can have whatever look you want for a film, cartoon, realistic, etc. Thats what makes it so great.

I'm going to be using the UT3 engine to make movies, simply because it can render pretty decent graphics without the render times that conventional software requires.
Game engines are actually getting good enough now with enough features that rendering a fairly good quality cg movie is a reality.

Its not going to be theater quality, but its going to be still very nice.

UT3 definitely has the CG movie look. crysis would also be pretty sweet to use since it leans more towards photorealism.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Fenixgoon

Originally posted by: Modelworks
It takes about 8 minutes to render a really complex scene in 3d for film work.
Thats running on a render farm of about 50 dual core processor machines.
Thats for one frame, you need 24 frames for each second of animation.
So your looking at a render time of 192 minutes for each second of movie.
11520 minutes for each minute of movie * 90 minutes (average film length) = 17,280 hours of rendering time for the finished movie.

About 720 days of rendering time.
So for really big films you have to double and triple, quad, the render farm computers, to bring it down to 3 to 4 months of render time. No way that is going to be done in games or on home pc's anytime soon.

About the OP comments.
Its all about style. With CG you can have whatever look you want for a film, cartoon, realistic, etc. Thats what makes it so great.

I'm going to be using the UT3 engine to make movies, simply because it can render pretty decent graphics without the render times that conventional software requires.
Game engines are actually getting good enough now with enough features that rendering a fairly good quality cg movie is a reality.

Its not going to be theater quality, but its going to be still very nice.

UT3 definitely has the CG movie look. crysis would also be pretty sweet to use since it leans more towards photorealism.

UT3 uses fog to hide low detail textures and low draw distance though.

 

[HexiumVII]

So what are the differences really in CG Film vs games? Is it 10x the polygons and 10x the size in textures? I've been trying to look up more technical details on Pixars films but haven't been able to find many numbers. They seem to use similar raster rendering techniques like in games rather than ray tracing.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: HexiumVII
So what are the differences really in CG Film vs games? Is it 10x the polygons and 10x the size in textures? I've been trying to look up more technical details on Pixars films but haven't been able to find many numbers. They seem to use similar raster rendering techniques like in games rather than ray tracing.

There are a lots of things different.
The polygon counts are way higher.
The texture size is higher.
Physics calculations can be much higher. Calculating 20 million particles to make up the goo in the spiderman3 movie takes a lot of cpu power.
Lighting - radiosity, ray tracing, subsurface scattering, all devour processors.
compositing - blending the animation data with green screen film or backgrounds.
bones - each character has a rig that makes up how the mesh will move. Games like UT3 may have many bones for the character. But movies, for example narnia, had over 700 bones just for the lions face.
Animation keys - each item that is doing anything in the scene has to have a key.At every frame each key has to be calculated. So if you have a scene like the rat in pixars film, you have to have keys for every single bone in the rat, thousands of them, for every background object, for every light, for every sound.

Pixar generally writes a renderer for each work they produce. They don't use off the shelf rendering software most of the time. They have a very talented team of programmers.

about the lion in narnia

Animation Rig controls:
1851 controls, 742 in just the face alone
98 facial shapes
53 body shapes

Fur and Hair:
3 versions of Aslan were built: normal, shorn, and golden
7 hair pelt types
5.2 million strands of hair
R&H technical animators used thousands of guide hairs to simulate the effect of physics on Aslan's mane. The guide hairs drove a high-density pelt rendered as moving fur.

Rendering:
13 hours a frame render
?1.6 million render hours = 200 years of computer rendering time
Lo res 21,884 polys

 

[BladeVenom]

You're talking about the biggest budgets, and most elaborate CGI effects for movies. There are plenty of lesser productions that, at least to me, don't look as good as Crysis.