How CGI effects work in movies. How computer graphics become indistinguishable from reality

How are special effects for films created? What is digital painting? What do CG and CGI mean? We will answer these questions in this two-part article. And besides, here you will find addresses of websites on the topic and videos about creating special effects for films.

The article turned out to be so long that I had to divide it into two parts to make it easier to read. The first part is devoted to theory and special effects, and the second to digital painting and graphics.

In general, most of the resources on the Internet related to the creation of special effects and digital painting are of foreign origin. This is due to the fact that in Russia this area is still developing. That is why Russian blockbusters with beautiful special effects have appeared quite recently. It is worth mentioning Timur Bekmambetov, who gave impetus to modern Russian blockbusters (for which many thanks to him).

Concept

"CG" translates to "computer graphics". However, as a rule, this concept has a slightly different meaning. After all, the concept of “computer graphics” covers almost any field of activity where graphics are created by or with the help of a computer. However, the word “CG” specifically implies the creation of either special effects for video, or digital painting, or the creation of graphics for various interactive presentations and video games.

True, special effects in movies are usually called "CGI" ( computer- generated imagery , literally "computer-generated images"). Although, in principle, there are no special differences between CG and CGI.

And now the most interesting...

Special effects in cinema

Once upon a time, special effects were very primitive, but also innovative. Usually, the essence of special effects was to skillfully erase safety ropes, etc. from the frame to make everything look exciting and more interesting. All this happened in the days of silent films.

Later, when there was a need for various movie monsters, there was a need for corresponding special effects. Of course, if you need to create a humanoid or Bigfoot, then the actor simply applied makeup or put on a costume. However, creating something more complex caused big problems for directors.

To add bizarrely shaped creatures to movies, filmmakers came up with stop-motion animation. Those. a plasticine model of the creature was made, and then photographed many times, while its body pose was slightly changed. And then, if you quickly scrolled through such photographs (30 frames per second), it looked like the creature was moving. Although it looked ridiculous, the directors managed to make it quite interesting.

It was stop-motion animation that changed everything (even modern special effects are made according to the same principle). However, even in our time, some cartoons are made using frame-by-frame animation, because such cartoons look unique and interesting.

And then came the era of information and computerization...
Then the film industry realized that it was possible to render special effects using a computer. Moreover, characters and various creatures can also be drawn directly on the computer and transferred to film during editing. Then the first films with “embedded” characters appeared.

However, with this came problems. Due to the fact that such characters were superimposed on the tape after filming, the actors had to show all their acting abilities in order to interact with such an “invisible partner”.

When Steve Jobs created Pixar, he wanted to create a cartoon made and drawn entirely using a computer. This is how the Toy Story series was born.

Modern cinema is not far from the basics used by the forefathers of special effects. Only the plasticine creatures were replaced by creatures made entirely in graphic editors. However, there are a couple of techniques and tricks that modern directors actively use...

ChromaKey

Pronounced "chroma kay", although the correct pronunciation should be "chroma kee". The idea is simple: the actor is filmed against the backdrop of a green or blue cloth (rear screen), and after that the canvas is replaced with an image. Those. you can film almost an entire film in one pavilion, where the main character travels around the planet (by the way, this is how the film Resident Evil 4 was created).

To project the desired image well onto the rear screen, you need to use a monotonous soft color, and therefore either green or blue are usually used.

MotionCapture

This means "motion capture". Special sensors (white balls or cubes, etc.) are attached to a real actor, and then all his movements are analyzed on a computer. Those. an actor fully dressed in a suit of sensors makes some movements, and then this animation data is transferred to a computer character. This way the computer character moves just like a human (smoothly and physically correctly).
And sometimes, motion capture is used locally, for example, to add something computer-generated to a real actor (computer makeup, if you like).

3D graphic editors

Without them, you won’t be able to make a single three-dimensional monster or creature, or build an entire city. To add, say, King Kong, you need to first model him. This is done in three-dimensional graphic editors, and the process is more like creating a sculpture. You need not only to be able to handle such programs, but also to know the basics of anatomy, composition, etc. As a rule, such people are also called artists, since the principle of work is almost the same.

Usually, a primitive model of the character is first made in order to understand how he will behave in the frame, how much space he will occupy, and how the actors should interact with him. And then a high-quality model is made for installation.

The skill of modern special effects creators is amazing. Fully simulated actors are already being created - of course, why pay a real actor when you can make your own, who will neither be capricious nor get sick.

In the following image you can see actor Jeff Bridges from the movie Tron: Legacy. On the left is the real Jeff Bridges, and on the right is his artificial young copy (which was created on a computer). Amazing, isn't it...

Filmmakers have many more clever ideas for using computer technology in cinema. Who knows, maybe tomorrow this article will have to be updated - new technologies for producing special effects will appear. Now special effects and artificial computer characters are indistinguishable from reality, but what will happen next...

At the end I want to show you a few short videos about the creation of special effects in some films.

There Are None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See:

According to the ‘ Random House Dictionary of America's Popular Proverbs and Sayings by Titelman, Gregory’ this proverb has been traced back to 1546 ( John Heywood), and resembles the Biblical universe Jeremiah 5:21 - New King James Version(‘Hear this now, O foolish people, Without understanding, Who have eyes and see not, And who have ears and hear not:’).

In 1738 it was used by Jonathan Swift in his ' Polite conversation’ and is first attested in the United States in the 1713 ‘Works of Thomas Chalkley’ (see this unexpected link title: ).

The full saying is:

‘There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know’.

Any data collected from multiple sources and compiled into one frame for discussion will, by definition, be fake. NASA often collects information from multiple satellites, over a wide range of time, or from multiple sensors onboard a single craft; then pieces it all together (concisely - for discussion) into a single image for brevity and clarity of any given topic.

Many a NASA spacecraft, or mobile (or stationary) planetary ground unit, is out there without alone a cameraman tagging along, and is therefore incapable of snapping a photo of itself. One exception is a rover currently driving around in circles on the Martian surface, which has a camera mounted on a selfie-stick of sorts.

NASA trains it "s astronauts in environments on Earth (prior to launch into the great unknown) in an effort to prepare the off-Earthers for otherwise unexpected conditions. Fighter pilots do the same thing, using simulators which are similar to the real cockpit of an actual F-35. Commercial airlines and railroad engineers, ditto. Often these exercises are filmed, photographed, and documented for educational purposes. Their existence does not prove that our resident alien (Neil A.) wasn"t on the moon.

Journalists often exaggerate, or perhaps unintentionally distort the facts; either because they don"t fully understand the material, or have not done the necessary research (due to time restraints or deadlines); in order to sell newspapers. If a headline contains a question mark, you can be reasonably certain the answer is" no." (see Betteridge's Law of Headlines here, at " Calmer Than You Are": is betteridge's law of headlines correct?)

Until an article in Sky and Telescope some years ago, the standard definition of a Blue Moon was quite different than the accepted definition used today, due to a reporter's misunderstanding of the then-accepted rules for naming such an event.

The statement "I"ll marry you, m"lady, when the Moon is blue!" would not have been taken as a betrothal in the 18th century. (see: Blue Moons - Origins and History of the Phrase)

"Yf they say the mone is belewe, We must beleve that it is true."(from a work by William Barlow, the Bishop of Chichester, the Treaty of the Buryall of the Masse, 1528)

The data represented in any given CGI image published by NASA is accurate, or at least useful, in the context of it"s publishing. Personally, I would rather see a glossy animated representation of a Black hole, than a penciled sketch any day of the week .

The main feature of the film remake of the 1967 Disney feature film is not even the voices of Scarlett Johansson, Idris Elba and Christopher Walken (which the Russian viewer will not hear in the dubbing anyway), but the fact that during the 105 minutes of the incredibly realistic film, only one living person appears in the frame - Mowgli , played by debutant Neel Sethi. All other characters were created using computer graphics, for which director Jon Favreau has already received an award from the PETA organization, since during filming not a single animal was harmed or even worked on the set.

What happened before

The first film made entirely with computer animation (CGI) was the short film Hummingbird, released in Belgium in 1967. Back then, no one could imagine what the future would hold for the new technology. Until the early 1990s, computer graphics, like the entire IT field, developed at a very slow pace by today's standards. The breakthrough was Jurassic Park (1993) with its realistic CGI dinosaurs. Two years later, Toy Story was released, the first full-length cartoon made on a computer from start to finish.

2001 was a turning point in the history of CGI, graphics were divided into two directions. “Shrek” was released, the characters of which looked, on the one hand, realistic, but on the other, still stylized. At the same time, the science fiction film “Final Fantasy” was released, which marked the beginning of photorealism in CGI - the desire to create characters indistinguishable from real living beings. The continuators of this trend were “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”, “Beowulf”, “Avatar”, “Life of Pi” and, finally, “The Jungle Book”.

What's new in The Jungle Book

When creating The Jungle Book, Favreau and his team made full use of all the advances in the field of CGI. The director has extensive experience using computer graphics thanks to his work on the same "Iron Man", but in "The Jungle Book" Favreau wanted to go even further: to tell a fairy tale using an entirely photorealistic image. We already saw something similar in “Life of Pi” - then some viewers at first even refused to believe that the tiger in the film was completely computer generated. In The Jungle Book, not only the tiger (by the way, very impressive and quite scary for a children's cartoon) has already been created with the help of CGI, but also the entire jungle. Special effects development was led by Rob Legato, who previously worked on computer graphics for Avatar.

How real footage and graphics are combined

An oversaturated color scheme of computer graphics, which is out of color from the overall picture, destroys all realism, and the rendered characters simply fall out of the scene. Therefore, the most important process when creating computer animation is compositing (from the English compositing - “layout”). At this stage, 3D models are integrated into the surrounding reality.

Compositing involves combining character models with background video and other elements of the frame, including footage of live actors (usually shot against a green background using chroma key). First, various video layers are superimposed on each other, then the brightness of the layers is equalized and color correction occurs.
The creators of The Jungle Book tried to make the border between reality and computer graphics as invisible as possible. For each individual scene involving Mowgli, new sets were built, including a three-meter jungle. Then the material filmed in the pavilions was combined with computer models. So, in one of the scenes, the hero first crawls through very real mud, and then jumps on an animal created using computer graphics, which helps him escape from, again, a computer Shere Khan. It is difficult even for a specialist to understand where reality ends and digital animation begins.

Realistic movements and rigging

All the achievements of brilliant artists, 3D modelers and composers can be erased by unrealistic physics. And motion simulation is one thing, believable movements of living characters are another. The sensational scene from The Lord of the Rings, where Legolas, from the point of view of realism is perceived in much the same way as the Tom and Jerry cartoon. In recent years, more and more technologies have emerged that calculate the movements of living beings. For example, it simulates the deformation of human soft tissues during movement and adds weight to parts of the body.

High-quality rigging (from the English rig - “rigging”) is also very important - the creation and development of a virtual skeleton and joints inside a three-dimensional character model. All the constituent elements of the animated figure (not only the limbs, but also the facial muscles, eyes, lips, etc.) are given characteristics, and a hierarchical relationship is built between them. Fine tuning allows you to make truly realistic models.

Motion capture

Motion capture is used to create a character's facial expressions and movements. The technology became widespread in the 1990s, after it was first used to create character animation for the computer game Virtua Fighter 2 in 1994. Motion capture began to be actively used in cinema in the 2000s (The Lord of the Rings, Beowulf, Avatar, Harry Potter, Life of Pi).

There are marker and markerless motion capture systems. The most popular are the first ones, where special equipment is used: the actor is put on a suit with sensors (to create facial expressions, sensors are placed on the face), the data from which is recorded and transferred to a computer. In markerless, computer vision and pattern recognition technologies are used to record data. Then the computer combines the received information into a single three-dimensional model, and then an appropriate animation is created based on it.

Thus, motion capture serves to transfer the movements and facial expressions of real actors onto computer models, resulting in a portrait resemblance of the characters to the actors who voiced them. Thanks to motion capture in The Lord of the Rings, Gollum retained , and Smaug did so. In The Jungle Book, by the way, not all the characters have a similar face to the actor who plays them. The boa constrictor Kaa, for example, only adopted a velvety voice from Scarlett Johansson - Jon Favreau explained in an interview that “to give a snake a face similar to a person would be completely ridiculous.”

Eyes and facial expressions

Photographic realism of characters is impossible without high-quality rendering of their facial expressions. Work in this area is carried out in two main directions: directly generating the appropriate animation and applying it to the characters. The animation itself is created, as a rule, using the same motion capture technique. A smooth change in a character’s facial expressions is achieved in Autodesk Maya and 3DS Max using the blendshaping (morphing) technique.

Despite the rapid development of computer graphics in recent decades, for a long time there was no way to create realistic human eyes. In 2014, Disney proposed a method to solve this problem: when capturing eye expression, place separate markers on the eyeball, cornea and retina, and then compose the resulting data and overlay it on a 3D computer model of the eye.

Emotions and age

Disney specialists recently shared a test version of the unusual FaceDirector software - a kind of auto-tune for emotions. The program allows you to combine several takes in real time, depicting a whole palette of different emotions, and adjust the acting. The program provides the director with the opportunity in post-production to combine several facial expressions, enhance or remove the emotional intensity at a certain moment in the scene.

Another development is digital cosmetics that can restore youth to actors. The impressive video was presented by VFX specialist Rousselos Aravantinos, who used a Nikon V1 camera and programs NUKE and Mocha Pro. Similar stunts were performed in the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Hair and wool

Creating realistic fur and hair is a difficult technical task, one that animators have been struggling with for a long time. Hair as a 3D model is a whole system that must maintain its integrity and character, while in dynamics each individual hair must behave independently and react to collisions with other hairs. Simulations of believably swaying fur as an animal moves have been learned to be created relatively recently, and modern plugins for CGI editors, such as XGen, have simplified the task for animators. It is known that this particular hair generator was used in the creation of Zootopia and Toy Story 3.

What programs are used to create special effects and who creates them?

Many large studios such as Pixar and Disney use their own software to create computer graphics, but they also resort to programs available to the general public, including Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Luxology Modo, Houdini. Thus, most of the special effects in Avatar were created using Maya; Adobe After Effects was used for compositing.

As a rule, several companies work on computer graphics for large projects. The creators of The Jungle Book resorted to the services of the British MPC and the New Zealand Weta Digital. MPC also worked on Life of Pi, World War Z and all of the Harry Potter films. Developers Weta Digital worked on graphics in Avatar, The Avengers, The Hunger Games and The Lord of the Rings. Most companies specializing in special effects are registered in the USA and Britain, but many of them move part of their production to India and China, creating their own studios there or buying existing ones. Thus, in 2014, the British Double Negative and the Indian Prime Focus merged, which then jointly created the graphics for Interstellar. However, Chinese and Indian special effects studios that are not part of large companies are not yet as popular among filmmakers as Western ones, mainly due to the lack of sufficient experience and resources.

CGI in our everyday life

Complex technologies for creating computer animation are gradually becoming available to the masses. Among the latest achievements in this area, one can note the program released in 2014 or the sensational Belarusian application. They allow you to superimpose animation on the user’s face or people caught in the lens of his camera in real time. A similar function is available in the Snapchat messenger. The applications track the user's movements, analyze them, and superimpose the received data onto three-dimensional models in real time, that is, they use methods similar to those used to convey the facial expressions of characters in films and computer games.

Material from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia

CGI studios

One of the first computer graphics studios was the American company Industrial Light & Magic, founded by George Lucas in 1975. ILM revolutionized the concept of visual effects in films.

see also

Write a review about the article "CGI (graphics)"

Notes

Literature

• Boris Mashkovtsev(Russian) // Film equipment and technologies: magazine. - 2006. - No. 2.

• Kerlow, I.V.. - 2004. - 451 p. - ISBN 0471430366.

An excerpt describing CGI (graphics)

“Ma bonne amie, [My good friend,”] said the little princess on the morning of March 19th after breakfast, and her sponge with mustache rose according to an old habit; but just as in all not only smiles, but the sounds of speeches, even the gaits in this house since the day the terrible news was received, there was sadness, so now the smile of the little princess, who succumbed to the general mood, although she did not know its reason, was such that she reminded me even more of general sadness.
- Ma bonne amie, je crains que le fruschtique (comme dit Foka - the cook) de ce matin ne m "aie pas fait du mal. [My friend, I'm afraid that the current frishtik (as the cook Foka calls it) will make me feel bad. ]
– What’s wrong with you, my soul? You're pale. “Oh, you are very pale,” said Princess Marya in fear, running up to her daughter-in-law with her heavy, soft steps.
- Your Excellency, should I send for Marya Bogdanovna? - said one of the maids who was here. (Marya Bogdanovna was a midwife from a district town who had been living in Bald Mountains for another week.)
“And indeed,” Princess Marya picked up, “perhaps for sure.” I will go. Courage, mon ange! [Don't be afraid, my angel.] She kissed Lisa and wanted to leave the room.
- Oh, no, no! - And besides the pallor, the little princess’s face expressed a childish fear of inevitable physical suffering.
- Non, c"est l"estomac... dites que c"est l"estomac, dites, Marie, dites..., [No, this is the stomach... tell me, Masha, that this is the stomach...] - and the princess began to cry childishly, painfully, capriciously and even somewhat feignedly, wringing his little hands. The princess ran out of the room after Marya Bogdanovna.
- Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! [My God! Oh my God!] Oh! – she heard behind her.

3D graphics

3D graphics operates with objects in three-dimensional space. Usually the results are a flat picture, a projection.

Three-dimensional computer graphics are widely used in cinema and computer games.

In 3D computer graphics, all objects are usually represented as a collection of surfaces or particles. The minimal surface is called a polygon. Triangles are usually chosen as polygons.

3D graphics

All visual transformations in 3D graphics are controlled by matrices.

There are three types of matrices used in computer graphics:

rotation matrix

shift matrix

scaling matrix

3D graphics

Any polygon can be represented as a set of coordinates of its vertices.

The triangle will have 3 vertices. The coordinates of each vertex are a vector (x, y, z).

By multiplying the vector by the corresponding matrix, we get a new vector. Having made such a transformation with all the vertices of the polygon, we get a new polygon, and having transformed all the polygons, we get a new object, rotated/shifted/scaled relative to the original one.

CGI - graphics

CGI (computer-generated imagery) , lit. “computer-generated images”) are special effects in film, television and simulation created using three-dimensional computer graphics.

Computer games typically use real-time computer graphics, but in-game videos that use CGI are occasionally added.

CGI allows you to create effects that cannot be achieved with traditional makeup and animatronics, and can replace sets and the work of stuntmen and extras.

CGI - graphics

The first time computer graphics were used in a feature film was Westworld, released in 1973.

In the second half of the 1970s, films using elements of 3D computer graphics appeared, including Tomorrowworld, Star Wars and Alien.

CGI - graphics

IN Jurassic Park (1993) was the first to use CGI to replace the stuntman; the same film was the first to seamlessly combine CGI (the skin and muscles of the dinosaurs were created using computer graphics) with traditional filming and animatronics.

IN In 1995, the first full-length film completely simulated on a computer was released - Toy Story.

IN the film "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Us" (2001) first featured realistic CGI images of people.

CGI - graphics. Character Creation

http://city.zp.ua/viewvideo/R4woMpsHYSA.html

Computer graphics in special effects

Special effect, special effect (English special effect, abbreviated SPFX or SFX) is a technological technique in cinema, television, shows and computer games, used to visualize scenes that cannot be filmed in the usual way (for example, for visualization of scenes of spaceship battles in the distant future).

Special effects are also often used when filming a natural scene is too expensive compared to a special effect (for example, filming a large explosion).