Beowulf

[Nexten]

So who is going to see Angelina's digital boobies?

[Berae]

The internet is filled with digital boobies, why pay money to see them?

[Talas]

I'll definitely check it out. I think the scenes with low levels of light look pretty convincing, but scenes in high levels of illumination look pretty flat...

I didn't like Zemeckis' Polar Express or Monster House, but I think he's doing quite a bit to attempt to advance computer graphics, so I'll buy a ticket. I'm also interested to see how the motion capture looks. Some of the animation looks great, some of it doesn't.

[Berae]

In my opinion, the CG didn't even look impressive on the commercials. I assumed it was an ad for a video game a few times watching it.

[Talas]

Well, I sort-of agree. The original commercial that aired at the beginning of last summer looked good. This was the one that was just inside the cave and showed who I assumed to be Beowulf and Grendel's mother (Angelina). I think that scene was pretty intensive. The animation seemed pretty fluid and natural.

The more current animation that aired (I believe) with the MLB playoffs looks much worse in comparison. This is probably due to the lighting differences (and camera position) in the scene. I believe Zemeckis used PRMan as the renderer instead of Sony's newer Arnold renderer. PRMan is not nearly as physically based as Arnold, so it shouldn't look at realistic.

I also think the animation in the newer scenes didn't look as fluid as the cave shot. Motion capture gives you a huge head start, but it's only a starting point and definitely needs to be fine-tuned. Zemeckis' studio was hiring heavily in August for R&D candidates with specializations in motion capture. I hope they advance that. I was surprised to see that they were not really interested in shader writers and TDs, since the lighting will clearly affect the perceived realism of the movie. Maybe they were fully saturated in that department though - I don't know anyone affililated with that studio to question, unfortunately..

[Lonskils]

I look at it this way, the more of these that come out the better they will become. I remember a ton of piss poor blob movies coming out when comp animation first shot out of its starting gate and they have come a long long way.

To criticize this is fine, but to be able to see the advances they have made just from when this movie was first conceived 'til now is amazing. I for one have a lot of respect for anyone that puts forward the effort this one director alone does to advance a process and genre.

Cheers!