And yes, the Oscars are political, but Avatar isn't going to win just because it's James Cameron, and Hollywood does NOT hate Michael Bay. If they did, they wouldn't give him some of the biggest film budgets EVER. Think about it....

 

While the Avatar story sure isn't a new story I do give the writers credit for keeping a focused story. We don't really jump around to a lot of things that don't have anything to do with the story but all the elements all work toward the central story of a man thinks he knows what he wants and when he discovers he wants something different then he's put to the test to save it.

I really wish that Transformers could keep that sort of story focus instead of jumping around so much. Also that feeling that characters were severing some sort of purpose instead of just showing up in the movie because an actor needs work or GM wants to show off a car.

I also give Avatar credit for being one of the few action films this year to actually create some tension. There is that point in Avatar when it really feels like the blue guys have had it and all is lost. Transformers really couldn't manage that because it felt like a forgone conclusion that the Decepticons would be stopped. You knew Wolverine would live because it was a prequel. Star Trek kind of lacked in the tension department but gets props for pulling the unexpected with Vulcan. Terminator, okay I'm not even sure what's on the line anymore since Skynet and the humans are just doing the same thing every movie.

If the Transformers 3 production team are looking to borrow any ideas I hope it's ideas like focused story, tension, and a bit of color is a really nice thing. Well and you don't need a billion parts to look high tech, but I'll settle for focused story and tension.

 

How was Transformers cheated in 2007? Golden Compass had FAR superior effects than TF.

The most "advanced" bits of TF was the swirling of carparts into skeletal robots. Afterwards, in robot mode, there really wasn't anything more advanced than the NFLbot on Sunday Night Football. Golden Compass had all sorts of digital effects, such as a photorealistic digital polarbear, numerous lighting effects, and far more.

Now Dark Knight... THAT movie got cheated.

 

Ah, I meant that TF had a better premise. A more unique one, and a generally novel and engaging one. Avatar a very old, oft-used, and very offensive story trope that I'd prefer to never see again, not that that's likely. Now, TF's script was a fractured mess, and Avatar was better written for sure, and tired, old premises aside, I really thought it was damn good. Personally I just take issue with the fact that on a tertiary level, I found the latter's storyline more ungracious than any minstrely robot twins.

 

Avatar gonna win

No question

 

Unique premise? Group A fighting and killing Group B over a MacGuffin. Lessee... Transformers, Ronin, Pulp Fiction, POTC: Dead Man's Chest, All the Indiana Jones movies, etc

 

As a foreword to this post, I will say that the effects in Avatar are fucking STUNNING. Its effects are flawless (I;m still not crazy about the designs, but from a technical standpoint it's off the fucking hook), it will win, and it definitely deserves to.
But that is not what this post is about; this post is to address some of the more technical-based utter drivel that I have just seen in here.

OK. Now I've stopped laughing, here we go.

And car paint. Which is incredibly fucking difficult to get completely right. And God knows how many other textures, demanding a HELL of a lot of work.

This part is true. But with subsurface scattering and custom shaders it's a LOT easier than it used to be.

You forgot about going to every single real world location (which a movie set on a planet that actually does exist has a lot of) and taking 360 degree HDRI images at ridiculous resolutions to use as reflection maps, and to light the images. Don't think this stuff ends at modelling & texturing, pal.

This can be done with a combination of straight texturing and (again) subsurface scattering. Incidentally; if you don't know what that is, go look it up.

Yes, UV mapping is wonderful, isn't it?

Fluid dynamics. Piss easy with the right person using the right high end software.

The flesh and skin is largely one object with a skeleton inside it. A very complex skeleton, but still a bipedal/quadrapedal skeleton with far less extras needing to be animated than a multi thousand part mechanoid.
And those "moving parts" are thousands of separate interconnected pieces, individually modelled and textured, rigged to move correctly when anything connected to them does. Those models must have taken WEEKS to rig.

And as a CG professional for years, I'll tell YOU first hand that YOU really don't.

Y'know, I LOVE how often I see this from people who don't have the first clue what they are talking about. "Don't take this personally." "No offence". Learn some basic politeness before you go off on someone. Not to mention checking your facts.

Something you yourself are guilty of. If you think that modelling/texturing/lighting/rigging/animating/compositing photorealistic mechanical aliens into the real world is in ANY way easy, as you most certainly seem to, you really do need to go hit the books again (probably for a long time) before making such frankly cretinous statements. Maybe stick at that VFX course you seem to be basing all that rubbish on next time.

This I agree with. We got beaten by shitty looking polar bears and it was an utter travesty.

More than likely, on both counts. Avatar is an absolutely amazing achievment.

Good. Next time, do your research before you open your mouth and plant your foot in it.

 

The texture changes between robot and vehicle modes are pretty funny. They go from immaculately clean and shiny cars to dirty, scratched, oily beaten up robots, then back to immaculately clean again. Apparently part of the transformation includes a subspace car wash.

 

GM didn't want the vehicles to look beaten up or dirty. Does this really need explaining yet again...?

 

No, I just find it funny, especially when it's so obvious on Prime. Which fx house do you work for, if you don't mind me asking? I've been out of the game for a few years now, but used to do a reasonable amount of visual fx work.

 

I don't; I'm freelance. I do private commissions; corporate logo animation mostly, and models for individuals. I'm currently working on a set of models to be rapid prototyped and made into miniatures for a tabletop space strategy game.

 

Oh how I loathed corporate logos. Every time I was asked "Can you make it chrome, and maybe make it spin? And how about putting a lens flare in there?" I'm pretty sure I died a little inside. It paid well though, and it's a good way to pay the bills while working on more interesting personal projects.

One point I wanted to mention was that while flesh is easy enough to render with the right shaders, it's still extremely difficult to animate correctly. A well done organic character is usually made with underlying skeletal, muscular, and fat layers so that the skin will slide and stretch correctly over the top, fat will jiggle and deform as it would expect, and the various densities all move and look correct in motion, especially when you apply gravity and other dynamics. There's a ton of secondary animation involved along with some extremely complicated rigging.

 

Avatar win sure sure!!  

_______________________________________________________________

 

Which I didn't in any way. I never used any technical terms of any kind, because simply put, I don't really know any. And I never said I took any kind of higher-level class. It was high school. But it still had to do with creating visual effects, which I found difficult. Which unless I'm mistaken, is ALL I SAID.
All of my various points about diffuculty (and perhaps I should have been more clear on this) were simply based on my OPINION, based on what I SAW. And if you ask me, that's what this should be based on. I don't care how many terabytes and processors it takes to create effects. In the end, all that matters is how they look. And that's the only point I truly tried to make.
That being said, I'm sure my post might read a bit differently now.

As for the fanboy remarks, I simply left those on the assumption (which on a nerdy, fanboy site like this one here, of which I am HAPPILY a member, is safe to do) that the opinion I was bashing was ever so slightly biased. Hence the "no offense" towards the bottom of my post. So once again, to the original poster, no offense.

Oh, and we're all very proud of you. Really. A CG professional for years? Care to rub anything else in us inferior types' faces? Seriously, my friend, if you're gonna leave a remark telling me not to jump on somebody, you may want to make sure you didn't just get done doing it. And please don't come back with a remark about how I did it, too. All I tried to do was stress how biased I thought his opinion was, and that the various opinions (much like my own) HE stated, didn't seem to me to hold any more water than you think mine do. I succeeded in as much. My point was made, and I also sought to make sure he was not offended, since that's not what I'm about. You, on the other hand, seem to be all about belittling people on a fandom website.... That's very big of you.


And on a final note, if I ever said I thought the effects in EITHER movie were "easy," I apologize. Obvious statement of the century alert: It's not. Hell, they have an Oscar for it. Even my feeble little mind can grasp this means it's probably not easy.

Sorry if all of us out here bore you with our "utter drivel" and "rubbish." Perhaps "cgprofessionalanddontyouforgetit2005.com" would be better suited to your taste.

 

Even as someone who, as Draven likes to remind us, is far inferior to his uber-intelligence, I agree. It's kinda funny, and in my opinion, can make continuity a little difficult sometimes to the more sharp-eyed movie watchers out there.

 

On the upside, it's easy work and it brings in a decent chunk of change. One job I did for Electrolux a few years back paid for that year's trip to Botcon outright. And I always try to steer clients clear of lens flares when possible.  

This is true. Organics are nightmarish from both a modelling and animating standpoint. Hell, they're a nightmare in general. I steer clear of them personally; my thing is definitely mechanical modelling and animation and I stick to what I'm best at and only really dabble in other areas. To my mind, that is why Avatar should win; the organic work was beyond stunning.

 

Avatar wasn't just about creating amazing CG animals, it was also about creating believable characters that not only bridge the uncanny valley, but deliver more compelling performances than many flesh and blood actors in other films. And it's not just the creatures that were CG, but whole environments with vines and leaves and a whole ecosystem that the characters interact with. That was an impressive effect, in that no one hardly mentions it, for the most part it is taken for granted, which shows that it worked.

Avatar vs Transformers isn't just about the difficulty of organic vs robotic. Avatar also has a large array of CG'd heavy machinery, including of course, those robot suits.

On so many levels Avatar deserves to win.

One area in which Transformers is often overlooked is the compositing. The TF movies have some insanely messy and complex composites. There's the CG robot, which people notice, but there's all kinds of environmental interactions going on with destruction, dust, explosions, lighting conditions, human interaction, an endless amount of stuff.

I often find fault with the robots themselves, but what sells it for me is the composites where you can really believe they were right there in the frame.

 

Sorry, but Avatar is going to win. Just kinda obvious.

 

Please take the discussion over here:

Transformers not in finals for VFX Oscar - TFW2005 - The 2005 Boards