Beowulf

The recent movie Beowulf with Angelina Jolie.
Does anyone know what modeling package was used to create the models in that movie?

3dsMax? Maya? someotherunknownsupercrazyCGmodelingsuite?

Plan on making a Hollywood high budget movie?

Maya and Motionbuilder.

Autodesk Maya and Autodesk MotionBuilder

To my knowledge Imageworks used mostly Maya, ZBrush (which was highly praised in some interviews as a novelty even though it has been around for a while) and MotionBuilder, though the overall pipeline surely includes other additional tools.

Maya -- this is the same package that was used in the movie Final Fantasy - a few years back.

BTW, is this the same package that Disney/Pixar uses to create their CGI movies.

Maya and houdini seem to get used the most in movies with other apps like 3ds max, xsi, lightwave for specific shots where they might have an advantage. But typicaly Maya is standard in the movie industry.

I enjoyed the Beowulf film, not because it was CG though, the CG wasn't that realistic but it was a great film to watch and get your first Imax experience. I hadn't seen imax before because very little that isn' a 3D gimmick comes out.

In my opinion Beowulf was rubbish but i liked the CGs in Ironman, they used Lightwave, Modo and Softimage as far as i know.

There is nothing in that film that can't be done with the top 4 3D applications. Modellers genrally enjoy a little more freedom in thier tools than other disciplines as modelling isn't really a bound function of an application.

For example, golem (from lord of the rings) was modelled in wings and zbrush/mudbox as thats what the guy liked, the rest of the studio used maya.

@boomboom

What are the top 4 3d applications?

BTW, I'm sold on trueSpace for my 3D designs!. And no, I don't thave the budget to make a multi-milllion dollar hollywood movie.

Many of my computer - illiterate 'friends' are asking me questions about how certain effects are done in various media!

heh, I thought Iron Man was rubbish. Was like a long demo reel about some sleazy pimp guy that gets a electronic suit of armour and starts to grow up. Unfortunately most of the film was looking at a crummy metal suit and being bored to tears.

I thought quite the opposite.

I always liked the childrens book the 'The Iron Man' by Ted Hughes, and the Black Sabbat song based on it, so I kind of got grumpy hearing the tune in the trailer for yet another superhero movie way before I watched the film anyway.

I guess I just don't like comics and superheroes. I did like Iron man comics in the mid 70's when I was a kid though.

I liked Crichtons novel "Eaters of the Dead" interpretation of Beowulf and the film 'The 13th warrior' based on the book over the CG animated movie. So I didn't exactly love Beowulf, but enjoyed it quite a bit.

I think Beowulf was really a bad movie, both in terms of the story as well as the visual aspect. Sin City, 300 both were done much better.

I loved to read the Marvel comics when i was a child and so to me it's really great that they released quite some Marvel films. Well, they could have done better, more depth, story blabla but some are still enjoyful. Would be cool to see the Green Lantern next or a real Silver Surfer film. Although Ironman doesn't feature the best CGs in a film it had some scenes were i thought wow i didn't think that those were CGs, nice style, i liked it.

The 4 most used applications are:

Maya
XSI
3DMax
Lightwave

I agree the best CG is often the stuff that doesn't try too hard to be CG or just a special effect and looks real. Iron Man did pull off that aspect quite well. The suit looked very real, I think I was mostly disappointed because after all the critical acclaim it wasn't what I expected.

Yep also all the fire and explosions. Kind of scary as if it's welldone then they've reached a quality were you don't notice it anymore, at least when the movie is running.

You can use pretty much any modeling tool for stuff like that. What is probably most important when it comes to big cg films is the renderer. Beowulf used Pixar RenderMan, and so have most effects heavy or fully animated films. The reason is that RenderMan handles stuff, like subpixel displacement and motion blur, faster and better than almost any other renderer. MentalRay gets used a bit too, and while it does better GI, raytracing etc., it tends to grind to a halt with very complex scenes.

Of course, all big studios use a lot of inhouse tools too.

That said, the tools the big boys use are often not the best tools for you. They have the resources to throw several developers at writing shaders, fur plugins and customizing stuff, something a small shop can't do. That said, if you want to play around with a RenderMan like renderer you should check out http://www.3delight.com/en or http://www.aqsis.org

I saw at Beowulf in Imax, and thought it was a horribly bad film, though technically interesting. I spent the whole time just studying how they had done it, as the story was utter rubbish. The nude scene reminded me of the scene from The Simpsons movie, where Bart scates naked. It just got silly hiding his penis behind stuff all the time.

heh yeah if you were hoping for realistic humans and wanted to see jolie naked, it probably wasn't the best thing to watch. I enjoyed the film much better than any crummy pixar movie though. Typicaly really hate CG animated movies though, bit strange considering I spent most of the last 15 years doing computer graphics.

Pixel Envy? :-)

The cg is beowulf was pretty lifeless until near the end by which time they seemed to have worked out how to add some facial emotion.

I just liked it mostly because it wasn't final fantasy or cutesy little bugs and toys with dumb humour that makes you snigger at best.

Come on you had to like The Incredibles!

But it wasn't as funny as for instance Toy Story I+II. Hmm the Pixar/Disney movies are improving on the image quality but the stories are getting worse. Pixar also uses a little bit of Modo. :O)

I reckon that Wall-E is by far the best movie that Pixar has ever made. The only CG movie that I enjoy nearly as much is Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda.

I don't like many other CG movies - including Beowulf.

I just find them irritating and couldn't sit through a whole one start to finish. They are good to watch in the waiting room at the vets though. You can watch a bit here and a bit there and never really have to get involved in the story enough to care if you get called away.

I really didn't care for either toystory movie at all. I found the Beowulf movie boring beyond belief. (loved the incredibles, Wall-E and Kung-fu Panda though, so computer generated movies aren't all bad)

Wow, what a thead I started.
I didn't expect these kind of comments!
Guess I will post more often?

On a similiar topic, anybody out there plan on working on something with similiar quality?

Don't get too excited, some of the most interesting threads wonderously vanish here, i would blame some galactic abnormity strifing earth from time to time.

Working on a film or a game in this quality? I doubt both because it needs a fast target platform, proper art and quite some talent, nothing which you handle in between. There are some Modo artists which also work into this direction but beside of a few short movies it's mainly about stills.

I liked BeoWulf, & Toy Story , & Wall-E. Maybe I'm easy to please - I even watched BeoWulf twice!

I quite like Van Helsing.

Yeah, we quite liked van helsing as well.

People with taste often like Pixar movies, people with less taste even enjoy Dreamworks productions. ;O)

Can't I "just like it" without being judged?

You know the answer to this one! :O)

I enjoyed Pixar movies until I noticed that they were recycling the exact same concept over and over again for almost all of their works... I find Dreamworks CG movies interesting only from a technical standpoint, and it's going the same route for Pixar too.

Anyway, I find Pixar movies enjoyable and well written even though they usually revolve around a standard story arc, but certainly not thought provoking (my favourites are Monster Inc. and Ratatouille). Writing wise, Dreamworks so far didn't produce anything worth of notice except Shrek (which was in a league of its since it lives on references and parody and already exhausted the franchise with the second movie).

> even though they usually revolve around a standard story arc

Have to agree, with the exception of the Incredibles - excellent change of pace they had with that movie. Now if only Pixar would team up with an Anime group from Japan, Pixar budget mixed with Macross, Yamato, or Gundam would be great.

I've seen most of the movies mentioned here.
I didn't know there were two companies producing them.
I thought they were all produced by Pixar.
I know that Disney owns Pixar.
Who owns Dreamworks?
this osunds like a good contest. Does anyone know which movies were produced by Pixar and which by Dreamworks.

BTW, are there any other studios out there producing CGI movies.

Which studio produced Bewowulf and Final Fantasy?

I apologize upfront to anyone if I offend their taste of good judgement with this next statement. If so, warn me and I will not do it again.

Has anyone heard of Michaal Ninn. He had made a CGI movie too. Do you know what it is? (BTW, yeah I do!)

Despite that they censored the much more tasteful boobs-version, it's still the best they ever did - imho ;O).

-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jI6WOzdzdY&feature=related

Beside of that i liked Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles.

> Who owns Dreamworks?

It's an offshoot of Steven Spielberg's Amblin entertainment, I think...

Beowulf was produced by Dreamworks.

The first Final Fantasy was produced by Columbia Pictures (Sony), and Advent Children was produced directly by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment since it is for the home video.

While we are at it, let's add The Ice Age which was produced by 20th Century Fox, and Monster House which was produced by Zemeckis and Spielberg and came out for Columbia Pictures.


He was one of the three founding members, but three years ago they sold the studio to Viacom.