WOW, I think they are cheating...

http://www.finalfantasy.com/production/character/top.htm

Just have a look, I know it is not real time but still. That is truly photorealistic!

Just need to wait a few years until that kind of technolgy and power is in your home pc.

Thats all stuff about how they are making the Final Fantasy movie. And if I recall correctly, the movie is being rendered not on SGI machines, but on a custom built array of (essentially) PS2’s (of course, not in real time).

Hey there…
I always smile hearing “photorealistic”… That word shouldn’t exist…
But seriously… These photos look natural! I can’t wait to watch the film. I have to watch it twice, since the first time I’ll focus on the effects of course…

According to Computer Gaming World, the FF movie was done on Square Pictures’ 1,160-CPU rendering farm, including 960 933 Mhz Pentium III systems with 768 MB ram each, plus 150 SGI Origin 200 systems with 4 GB RAM each. Each frame is 2x HDTV resolution and the entire movie takes up roughly 1,350 GB of storage space.

[This message has been edited by Chromebender (edited 06-02-2001).]

Thanks for that info. I seem to remember hearing that it was going to be rendered on the PS2 array quite some time ago. That was when word of the Final Fantasy movie had just come out. Maybe I was mistaken, or maybe their initial plan was to use these. I just took a quick look and all I could find was this.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/13253.html

“At present it takes five hours to render one frame,” said Kazuyuki Hashimoto, senior CP and CTO of Square, a film production company that co-operated with Sony in the development of GSCube. Square is producing the computer-generated effects for the upcoming Final Fantasy movie.

So they were working with them somehow. That article also mentions that the GS cube is an array of 64 Emotion Engines (or a chip based on the Emotion Engine, its not exactly clear).

Anyway, I guess you can just file my previous post under the topic of “crossed neurons in my brain”

Sounds like some serious hardware then!
I guess we have to wait for quantum computers then to get a desktop realtime version. Still, someday we will be using that technology, it always happens. Look at graphics and games 10 years ago compared to today.

I think I will start on my quark level raytracer using photon waves. In a hundred years time it might run in real time

I think the “rendering on a PS2 array” idea probably came from the GSCube demo that Sony had going at Siggraph. It was a scene from the FF movie rendered in real time.

I think that the actual geometry data was the same, but the shading and texturing and all that wasn’t quite the same as the movie

j