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Galactic News
Thursday August 23, 2001
Is it still difficult to create realistic CG water
or hair, or other similarly complex objects?
This report comes from the Official Star Wars Site!
Answered by: ILM Visual Effects
Sure: Water and hair are great examples of real-world objects that have both very complex motion and very complex appearance. (Other examples are clouds, fire, and smoke.) They also look really different at different sizes: You can instantly tell the difference between an ocean, a lake, and a puddle, or between kitten fur and yak fur. So even though we knew how to do things like the pseudopod from The Abyss or the tidal wave from Deep Impact, doing The Perfect Storm was almost like starting from scratch!
But, we do learn a lot every time we do certain things. For example, we've been doing hair for long enough now that we have some pretty standardized ways of handling the types of hair and fur that we need to create most often. When I was working on 101 Dalmatians I spent several months working out the look of puppy fur, but nowadays we are turning around some creatures with fur in a matter of weeks. Likewise, Perfect Storm was a watershed (get it? ;-) in our ability to create water effects: We had to try so many different things that we ended up with a pretty big toolbox. That same toolbox is serving us well for more recent projects with CGI water, such as A.I.