[winwintoo]

Has anyone seen Shrek 2?

I saw it the other night with a couple of the grandkids and thoroughly enjoyed it but then I'm easily amused.

I was telling someone about the awesome rendering job on the cat and he asked me "how'd they do that" and I couldn't answer.

I expect that they start with some sort of wire frame to plot the movements and then add the hair (fur) on after, but how do they get each hair shaft shaded so realistically? Maybe I need to clean my glasses and look again and it might not be *THAT* realistic, but it was impressive.

Anybody here had any animation experience, care to shed any light on how it's done. Sharing insider secrets with me would only make more impressed.

Take care, Margaret

[Doug Nelson]

I have no animation experience, but I do watch all the "making of" documentaries on the DVDs I rent, and have been following the progress of CGI animation. Several films have been landmarks in CGI animation techniques. These are usually software developments. Monsters, Inc. was the landmark for programming hair. There's some funny stuff on the DVD about testing the software, showing Tully (the big blue hairy creature) rendered with various hair variables in place.

Other landmarks were Phantom Menace (software for natural cloth and clothing), Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within (software for skin/pores), LOTR (the 2nd one) and the 2nd Star Wars prequel (software for handling autonomous soldiers in huge battle scenes).

As much as art and skill goes into animating these movies, a lot of the "wow" factor comes from proprietary software rather than human drawing skill. Much of this software is made possible by advances in shared rendering rather than any breakthrough in animation programming. In other words, it was technically conceivable to program the hair, etc., 10 years ago, but the rendering demands made it impractical.

Another example is Finding Nemo. They'd design one fish and tell the software to replicate it thousands of times, each with its own random characteristics. There's a funny scene on the DVD where the software actually generates too many fish and they have to go in and manually erase some to make it less chaotic.

There's also a funny commercial out there with the donkey from Shrek complaining about his hair and a human animator explains about advances in hair animation software making more realistic hair possible.

[winwintoo]

I think I will rent some of those movies you mentioned and lose myself in them this weekend.

I've been setting up my Mom's new iMac and moving computers around all week and I'm exhausted - so much to remember for this old brain. And I haven't even had time to turn my own new computer on to see if it works

Have a good weekend, Margaret

[Doug Nelson]

I finally got around to seeing this, and I must say that I was impressed by the CG rendering. The skin textures especially were marvelous.

Oh yes, it was also a very funny movie