Modern visual effects are easy to spot when they’re creating something you know doesn’t actually exist in real life. Velociraptors and T-rexes are obviously the work of talented visual effects artists, but in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, even the island under the imaginary theme park was a digital creation, brought…
The idea that the Empire, or the First Order, can keep churning out Death Star after Death Star gets a little harder to swallow when you watch this CG timelapse by Benjamin and Isaac Botkin, which shows just how incredibly complex it is to build a moon, or planet-sized space station.
After getting to go behind the scenes on season two of The Expanse for his Tested series, Adam Savage was lucky enough to get a cameo on the show. But as Montreal studio Oblique FX reveals in this VFX breakdown reel, the former Mythbusters host didn’t actually die in the hostile environment of an alien planet... but…
Looking for a creepy and unsettling way to start your morning? No? Well, too bad, you probably shouldn’t have clicked on this story because the hyper-realistic CG experiments in Simon Christoph Krenn’s short film, Parasitic Endeavours, are going to leave you feeling a little disturbed.
To make the bond between Mija (An Seo Hyun) and the giant super pig she befriends in the forest as believable as possible, the VFX team behind Netflix’s Okja came up with several different ways for the young actress to interact with a physical representation of the CG beast on set, including this hilariously bad…
Unless we find a way to travel infinitely faster than the speed of light, there’s no way you’ll ever see the farthest reaches of the galaxy in person. But that harsh reality is made somewhat easier to digest thanks to this short film by Teun van der Zalm, featuring fly-bys of computer-generated nebulae that even our…
Unless you’ve done the right thing and moved yourself into a secluded cave for the next four years, after spending each day enduring a constant stream of depressing news on social media, you can probably relate to the animated characters in Ari Weinkle’s short film, Moodles, who collapse into giant piles of limp,…
Forget the uncanny valley and not-quite-perfect CG humans freaking you out, this title sequence for London’s recent OFFF digital arts festival will make you so uncomfortable you’ll want to burn your laptop. But at the same time the animation is so beautiful you might find yourself watching it two or three times…
As fascinating as behind the scenes looks at Hollywood blockbusters can be, there are some secrets you probably don’t want to know. For example, to make living creatures move as realistically as possible, visual effects artists will create full skeletal and muscle systems under a character’s simulated skin, as is…
It’s easier to mindlessly blast away a room full of video game baddies when they look at you with dead eyes and zombie-like facial expressions. It’s a completely different challenge when they appear to be expressing actual emotions and pain, made all the more believable with this new advanced facial animation tool for…
Jurassic Park had just six minutes of computer-generated dinosaurs in it, compared to modern blockbusters which can have thousands of shots requiring complex visual effects. It’s no surprise that animators are eager to embrace any shortcut they can—which is why realistic-looking CG mud could be a game changer.
Hollywood has a history of animating kids in ways that are supposed to be adorable, but end up giving us night terrors. The Boss Baby, out March 31, will be the latest offender; it’s about an infant voiced by Alec Baldwin who’s somehow secretly a corporate executive. Insane plot aside, that beligerent, giant -headed…
So far 2016 has been a wild ride, but there’s one less thing to keep you awake at night, terrified about the future, now that Disney Research has finally found a way to render convincing computer-generated sugar that looks and moves just like the real thing. Phew!
As we work towards crossing the uncanny valley so that computer-generated humans don’t look like horrific plastic mannequins, every last facial feature needs to be recreated perfectly. That even includes teeth, which can now be digitized using nothing but a video of someone smiling.
You may not realize it, but many of the gadget photos you see in ads and on websites are actually faked using computer graphics. It’s the easiest way to ensure the lighting, angle, shadows, and details are all absolutely perfect. And now Adobe has created a new tool, code-named Project Felix, that makes it easy for…
In his latest short film called The Real Deal, Patrick Bovin uses some flawless CG to bring a five-year-old’s imagination and a set of Transformers toys to life. It’s as close as you can get to looking inside a kid’s brain while they play.
The movements in kung fu are so graceful that even when you replace the human with random digital objects, the art of it still shines through. Tobias Gremmler captured the motion of kung fu and then recreated it with different digital variations: as a fabric weaved over time, expanding into emptiness, reconstructing…
Instead of rebuilding cities like New York, Boston, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. like a CG dinosaur, Alexey Zakharov used a technique where he sliced up antique photos and then carefully animated the various elements, like people, cars, and buildings, to give the appearance of actual moving footage.
The Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques might not have the most exciting name, but every year Siggraph draws the most talented programmers, engineers, and artists to its conference to show off their brilliant CG creations and developments.
