Thread: Graphics - Movie

  1. #1
    Sanity is for the weak! beene's Avatar
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    Graphics - Movie

    Hi
    I know i'm not at the stage yet, but how do people make movies with computer graphics? It looks really hard, but i don't know. Could anyone help me out?

  2. #2
    Kernel hacker
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    There are several different "hard" things about 3D animation:
    1. The actual drawing of the characters and other objects (houses, roads, office furniture or whatever).
    Depending on what your skills are, you may be able to do this "quite easily".

    2. Animating (as in making the objects move), and the related programming to make facial and body movements.
    Software for this type of thing is available to buy, but if it doesn't do it like you need it, you'll need programmers who can do this stuff.

    3. Compute intensive calculations to draw the scene itself.
    For a few minutes worth of "film", you'll need hours worth of computing time, if you want to make it look at least somewhat realistic. And if you want to compare how things have progressed in this area, check out the difference between Toy Story and Shrek 2 (or 3) when it comes to the details in background and complexity in the scenes. The difference is mainly because computers nowadays are so much more powerful, so the film producer is able to do much more detailed stuff without "running out of time". Big clusters of thousands of machines are used to produce a frame at a time, 25 frames per second. So 1 hour of film is 25 * 3600, or 90000 frames.

    If you want a decent software that can do animation, you may want to try out "PovRay", which is a package that can do 3D drawing via a programming language, and you can make the objects move, change colour, etc.

    --
    Mats

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