I was watching this one and noticed it was a helluva lot crisper on my TV than I remembered other DVD releases of theatrical CGI productions being. If you've got Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, do a framegrab or three and note the graininess. It was mastered from digitized filmstock, not the original MPEGs and the (lack of) quality shows. Both Shrek and FF are produced with Maya. Or, for that matter, go look at the first Shrek movie. Plenty of artifacting around the edges of the characters if you watch it fullscreen on a computer monitor. S2 is smooth as butter comparatively, like the studio decided to re-render the entire thing for DVD resolution, on highest quality compression. Unfortunately the other side effect of that is that the sync isn't always perfect, as if it hadn't been mixed by the original crew.

"Both Shrek and FF are produced with Maya." You sure? I heard both Shrek and Shrek 2 were done with Softimage XSI, not Maya. Could be wrong, but I was pretty sure this was correct.

Nope, Shrek was done in Maya ! :P

"Nope, Shrek was done in Maya ! :P"

Ah... ok then. ;-)

Let's not forget, folks... the software that's used to make movies like these (regardless if it's Maya, Max, XSI, etc.) is almost always modified versions of that particular software, made to work with proprietary coding, etc. It's not the exact same thing you buy "off the shelf" so to speak.

Anyway, interesting about the DVD thing too... I'll have to check that out. Message edited on: 11/06/2004 03:24

I know Shrek's people (like the fairy godmother) were modeled in Maya, but 3D World's magazine said that was the extent of Maya in it. I could be remembering wrong though. One interesting thing is the special in the Extras 'The Tech of Shrek'. They talked like the audience was ignorant 8 year old, even if they did explain some stuff. They showed examples of global illumination used, talked about their translucent skin shaders, hair dynamics...

Full story in short: For Shrek 1, DreamWorks strongarmed Alias into custom porting Maya to Linux, because after seeing how long it took to render FF:TSW, DW wanted render farms with the least OS overhead. No word on which Linux distro. So, unless things changed between 1 and 2, the rendering was done in Maya on Linux boxen. Since the actual modeling is a synthesis between digitizing clay maquettes and "traditional" 3D modeling, my guess is that modeling was done on Macs and/or PCs where 3D digitizing software is currently Win/Mac centered.

I've often wondered why these studios dont look at the relatively huge market of CGI hobbyists and release lo-rez meshes that are compatable with Cinema 4D or Poser or even Studio. Sort of the equivalent of a virtual action figure.

I'll assume you don't mean "release meshes of their characters so we can depict them in bondage scat/snuff pr0n."

LOL -- like that would stop anyone anyway. :)