I had rented a movie yesterday (Ultra Violet, it rocked) and there was a trailer on it for the movie, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. I was so blown away by the life-like graphics in the trailer that I had to ask if anyone knows how long this takes to make? I've never seen graphics look so much like real life before.
Did anyone else see the trailer or watch this movie? If so, what did you think of the graphics?
This was similar to but not quite the same as the trailer on my rental:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eglsn78Nlq8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6G90YoJw3U 
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How to create this? Don't know, they're probably working on MACS when creating such animations. Final Cut Pro for OSX is a great Video Editing tool. They'll probably use this for the special effects. The design though, I don't know, maybe something like Xara 3D...
Hope this helps
- xPureNLx
Thanks xPure, how did you learn Japanese? So you speak how many languages? Japanese, Dutch, English...Wow
I've just never seen such life-like graphics as was on this movie. It won't be long until you will not be able to tell the difference between digital graphics and real life.
When that happens, will they save money in making movies because they won't have to pay high priced actors or will they have to pay the designers so much that it will still cost them just as much?
Languages I speak: Dutch, English, German and a little Japanese.
Dutch: main language
English: TV, websites, school
German: I live near the German border and the city I live in is 20% German =P
Japanese: movies, anime
- xPureNLx
All I can say to that is, I'm ashamed of us lazy Americans that only learn English (Well I know conversational Spanish, but most Americans only know English)
Don't feel bad ^^
- xPureNLx
Shh! Don't let France hear you say that or they'll be so pissed! LOL.
Can you believe that a country as big as France could be so in denial to not even realize that their language is no longer 1st or even 2nd in the world? And yet they force their citizens to use French on their websites. France is like an ostrich with it's head in the sand. (No offense to any of you from France, love the people, but I dislike the government's policy's).
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ModGirl Design
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LOL! I'm sorry Moddy
I'd say that, if you can afford it, temporarily move to a country that speaks the language and force yourself to get out and engage the locals in conversation. When you have to speak a language to survive, you would be amazed how fast you can learn
I lived in Mexico for a month with a family that spoke no English. I learned far more Spanish in that one month than 4 years of high school Spanish.
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ModGirl Design
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I'm no languages expert as I only speak English, very little French (I had to take it in high school), two or three words of Japanese and other bits from other languages...
Most of my language skills are in computer languages such as PHP, Ruby and Pascal.
Most of the time, animations like those seen in the 3D Final Fantasy movies (there's Advent Children and the older Spirits Within as well as some Anime spin-off's) are done with 3DS Max, Maya or another high end 3D modelling and animation toolkit (not Xara 3D, Xara is a leader in vector graphics, but not 3D) and rendering is done through a render farm (a large cluster of computers that spread the workload to get the rendering done much faster).
Render farms benefit from needing no real front end systems as they can be controled using a terminal or from within an application running on another box and their output is returned for viewing or saved.
These systems also benefit from Unix style OS's which are rather efficient in terms of what resources they use for each task.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy made use of Linux based tools for this.
I've avoided Advent Children because I played the origional game on the Playstation years ago and although Advent Children looks the part, it's not that great in terms of the actual plot or acting from what I've heard.
Square-Enix (formerly Squaresoft, the developers of the Final Fantasy series) have been milking the success of Final Fantast VII recently due to poor results from more recent games in the series (especially Final Fantasy X and X-2) and the complete and utter failing of Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, which lost the company a lot of money.
Usually, Final Fantasy games aren't sequels or prequels as they usually have their own plots, characters and worlds, but FFX and X-2 were directly connected and since then, a lot of Final Fantasy VII content has been released, though not much of it has been well recieved.
The only things which are normally carried over in the games are magic names (though not the way they are earned), summon creatures (the most notable being Ifrit, Shiva and Bahamut), a few creatures (Moogles and Chocobo), some generic enemies and the name Cid or Sid for an important character.
Final Fantasy VII's opening is also one of the earliest things to be used as a tech demo for the PS3, but Square-Enix has not confirmed any kind or remake of the origional for the newer system and they have their thirteenth game already in the works for it (as well as keeping Final Fantasy XI's servers running for what few people were silly enough to go buy the port from the PS2 to the xbox 360, which is a waste of that graphics chip when compared with the likes of Oblivion).
Current project: CMS Object.
Most recent change: Theme support is up and running... So long as I use my theme resource loaders instead of that in the Rails plug-in.
Release date: NEVER!!!
- xPureNLx
Yup we got that out the other day and it's a fantastic film. I loved the cartoon quality to it.
Don't you mean Americanised-English Bryant
There are a whole host of films that have come out or are in the pipeline that take actual footage of live actors and are then "painted" over the top of to make an animated feel to the film. I'm sure bits of UltraViolet are done like that to give it the cartoonesque feel. Another fine example of this is a film that Moddy and I watched the other night called Sin City (Which was annoyingly on Sky Movies that very same night:mad: ) That film took live footage and painted all kinds of textures and colours over the top, they removed bits of colour so say anything coloured red was all that was left showing, the blood was white, all in all it was a very cooool film!
The lines between "real" and "unreal" are becoming finer by the day and soon graphics will have progressed sooo much that you won't be able to tell the difference. Also with the improvement of stunt work in "real" films soon you won't even be able to tell it's not fake by the way the actors leap about or fall over etc!
Now I kinda agree with what Bryant said about not paying actors huge amounts of money to be in films but do you think that once animated movies get so good you can't tell them apart will the stars in there get the same kind of fan bases that stars nowadays get? Also will the animated stars of tomorrow have such demand that they appear over and over which begs the question will they need agents or rather original copyright holders making the decisions about which film they would like their star to star in?:banghead:
www.computerforumz.com
I havent seen advent children yet, the fact its in japanese is putting me off a bit.
Design Deviants
Moda 2
:baby:
- xPureNLx
www.computerforumz.com
Drawing over live action footage is a technique called rotoscoping.
It has more recently been used in A Scanner Darkly, which features Keanu Reeves.
Sin City has no rotoscoping, it makes heavy use of green screen techniques (filming against a green background which is later edited out in favour of something else such as pre-recorded footage or often 3D computer generated graphics, which Sin City makes heavy use of) and colourization, which is what gives it the hints of colour such as blood and some people's eyes.
Sin City's backgrounds use a lot of 3D images and some of the foreground elements such as police cars are added in as well.
Sin City was filmed in colour using high definition camera's before being converted to black and white.
The coloured elements were then coloured over using colours taken from both the original film and from the artists imaginations.
If it was the older one, Spirits Within (more likely unless you saw this quite recently), then yes, it would be a let down (which is why Square lost out on it).
Advent Children has nothing to do with that movie outside of the Final Fantasy brand name though or to be more correct, Spirits Within is nothing to do with Final Fantasy, it just uses the brand name to get fans of the games to actually pay to see it.
Advent Children is based around the events of Final Fantasy VII (7) and what happened after the game ended.
The basic gist of it is that some goons try bringing back the main enemy from FFVII and the main hero, Cloud (yeah, so Square really do suck at naming characters) has to go kick him back into the inner most circle of hell with the aid of his old team mates including Bouncy bouncy (Tifa), Generic stereotypical black man with a gun for a hand (Barret), The big emo (Vincent) and a stuffed toy cat (Kait Sith).
In the immortal words of Tidus himself, HA HA HA HA HA!
X is quite possibly the second worst RPG I have ever played and probably in my top 10 most horrible games of all time (FFX, Big Mutha Truckers, Monster Hunter, Tekken & so on) and I dare not be seen purchasing FFX-2.
Then again, I've been more of a Phantasy Star guy in the past.
Also, Advent Children isn't only in Japanese now... There's an English version as well, not that I plan on getting it :]
Current project: CMS Object.
Most recent change: Theme support is up and running... So long as I use my theme resource loaders instead of that in the Rails plug-in.
Release date: NEVER!!!
Nice one thanks Nuvo
Aye well we all have our own game favourites. As the saying goes, one mans gin is another mans poison (or summat like that lol). As for FF the Spirits within, I actually loved that film. Shame that it made square a loss though.
Design Deviants
Moda 2
:baby:
Agree with caz on this one, the FF movie, spirits within, wasn't bad at all + it looked quite good for that time...
- xPureNLx
omoi: thought; mind; heart; feelings; emotion; sentiment; love; affection; desire; wish; hope; expectation; imagination; experience...
chou omoi
butterflyspirit
I'm glad you posted again Aisaack
You're an enigma to me, very mysterious. What do your posts mean: "You have reason great friend"? Who is your great friend?
Even stranger is your other post, "Well this is" from this thread: http://www.webmasterpost.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12
Maybe English is your 2nd language?
I am searching a publisher of bent videos you can help me in it