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The Spirits Within
- World Creation - Tera-Forming The final vistas seen in the movie are distance cousins of the landscapes given to the Animation Section. Steven Preeg, a Technical Director of Sets and Props, described some of the challenges they faced in modeling, "Animation uses a lower resolution version of the model. When you're trying to make terrain that people walk on, you must have enough detail so that their foot has a spot to land on. The final models weren't ready yet; so we built a rough model and delivered that to animation, then they go thte motion capture data in. When they applied the motion capture data, all of a sudden we had to build the terrain around each step that each person took to make sure they're stepping on something." Of course, the final models seen in the movie are composed of millions of polygons meshed together to created plains, ridges, craters, and other landscapes. Features such a rolls, bumps and holes add thousands of extra polygons to a landscape. With big sets such as Tucson and the Caspian that stretch for miles, it would have taken several minutes for artists' computers to open the files. By simplifying the models by taking away polygons, and replacing data-heavy textures with simple shading, Sets and Props converted huge files down to something more manageable. While the Animation Section used rough-but-accurate models to bring scenes to life, Sets and Props fleshed out the models, adding textures and more in depth details to make the movies scenery. During this process, different artist took on amazing new areas of theory. "Threw were certain people in Sets and Props who began to consider themselves experts in dirt," remembers Preeg. "They made dirt for months and month. Between the Crater, Battlefield Wasteland, and some of the other shots, they were dong rocks and dirt for a year." The Animation Section also used displacement mapping to cut down on some of the sets. When Aki goes searching for life in Old New York, the ruined city was a flat scene made to look more three-dimensional through displacement mapping. "In AAB (Aki's Adventure Part B, see FFAP), when she's running through destroyed New York, a lot of the buildings were a single flat polygon with displacement mapping such as 3D window sills or columns to give it depth." All of this combined lends
to some of the most impressive rendered landscapes in film history. |
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