SYDNEY (AAP)

In 1986, a two-and-a-half-minute animation involving desk lamps gave the cinematic world a glimpse of just how close computer-generated (CG) images could come to mimicking real life.Pixar Animation's film, Luxo Jr, was incredibly simple in story concept but took three-dimensional animation to a level of realism previous attempts had failed to approach.The Oscar-nominated short showing two desk lamps kicking a small rubber ball across a workstation broke new ground on several fronts.It gave vivid expression to otherwise mundane office objects and dramatically enhanced the degree of detail through richly textured surfaces and, for the first time in a computer generated (CG) animation, the use of animated lighting and shadows.Twenty-one years later, CG specialists have remarkably broadened the scope of what they can achieve.

Such technology is an almost ubiquitous part of the production process today, even in movies that are not known for CG effects, such as Bridget Jones's Diary.Artists were once restricted to representing man-made objects such as aircraft and cars.But breakthroughs in computing algorithms in the past decade have put images of trickier items like hair, water and fire onto the 3D stage.John Dietz worked with Australian group Rising Sun Pictures on the 2006 adaption of Charlotte's Web.One of the biggest challenges in that film was creating a realistic spider web, given a lack of off-the-shelf programs that even came close to helping the artists achieve their goal."We had to write our own dynamic simulation package," Dietz says."All the different lines interact differently together and it becomes really complex."No matter how close we got, there's still a certain amount where you just had to go in and animate some of it by hand."

It's just something in your backyard but it's super complex and it was basically what the movie was about."Rising Sun Pictures also worked on some of the CG effects in Superman Returns, which is nominated for an Oscar for best visual effects this year.Dietz says another complicated part of the trade is getting real-life human actors and CG objects to interact in a seamless manner.Getting a human actor to battle a CG troll or ride on a digital dragon, for example, provides considerable technical challenges."Any time these things have to interact closely, there's always a super high level of complexity that ends up getting added on top of just doing the character themselves," Dietz says."Getting that live action person to sit on a digital creature is pretty complicated and it's only been pulled off successfully a limited number of times."

The industry has made significant advances since early 3D animation blockbusters such as Toy Story, with the digital artist's toolset expanding considerably.Everything from the way the light of dawn bounces off a lion's mane to the physics of an 70-year-old man's wobbling jowls, has been factored into animation.But the holy grail in the world of digital effects remains seamless human representation.Guy Griffiths, director of research at Animal Logic, which was behind George Miller's Oscar-nominated Happy Feet, says audiences are most critical when it comes to recreating human movement."As humans, we're very adept at picking up the subtleties of other humans," Griffiths says."If you read all the stuff about behaviour, a lot of what we communicate is not through speech but through body language."Being an effective digital artist means not just knowing how to use a computer, but knowing the complexity of what you're trying to recreate.

Most CG movies have shied away from being too ambitious with their human representations with characters often styled in exaggerated cartoon forms, as they were in The Incredibles.Square Pictures' 2001 title Final Fantasy is considered one of the few full-length movies to achieve almost-perfect photorealism through CG technology.However, with the enormous amount of time and money needed to create such visuals yielding no return, the movie's spectacular failure at box office sent Square Pictures bust.Even if computers do end up fashioning the perfect human, Griffiths is dismissive of that persisting question: will CG animations ever make human actors redundant?"When I watch Helen Mirren in The Queen, am I watching Helen Mirren or am I watching a visual representation of her?" Mr Griffiths asks."I think of CG characters as being just another expression of that - it's just another form of make up."
(23/02/2007 01:42:32 PM)