Attached Link: http://www.finalfantasy.com/

Evenin' ladies and germs :) I did a quick search and it seems like nobody has posted these, so I thought, "what the hell" :) Introducing the one, the only, the shortly to be lusted after, Aki Ross, heroine and chief love interest of the animated movie "Final Fantasy, the spirits within" The first's a test render, the second the bikini shot Maxim requested for a cover shoot :)

Attached Link: http://www.finalfantasy.com/

the bikini shot :)

It's just unbelievable. I loathed the game but even I can't wait ,to see the movie.

holy S**T!?!?!? howd you do that?!!? you didnt use poser?!! this is what i wanna do when i grow up.......lol CD-RW ;)

lol, no, they didn't use Poser. Marque

hmmmmmmmmmmmm.... how much does the software cost? or its only for animators?

That's quite a nose they put on her....

Theres nothing wrong with her nose -- it looks a hell of a lot more realistic than posette's nose.

lol.....uhhuh...but its gorgeous non the less! CD-RW;)

The software is a few grand .. that much I know. Not totally sure but it is out of my price range S

hmmmm...do you know where i could get it? or you cant get it at a store? these are the times you wish you were rich! lol....anyway thanx! CD-RW;)

i dont know why they dont lower the cost...they would sell more...but i guess if everyong had one..lol...they could make there own movies! CD-RW;)

I thought they did it in Maya, which is real expensive. I know I'm not able to just go out and put down the old checkbook...lol Not unless they're taking cobwebs as payment these days. 8^) Marque

I think Maya is correct. About 7 grand to my knowledge at least. I don't even think about it S

It's not the software cost that created her..it's the modelers!

Absolutely amazining! My sister and I have played every one of the games from the NES on. Saw the trailer for this on a DVD we rented recently. This thing is going to beyond belief! Liz Pope Dreamspinner Inc.

As 3D Models, the characters in FF are absolutely amazing...there's no no doubt about that. They've put a lot of time and hard work into the looks the of the characters...

As a movie, I just hope they spent a fraction of the time on a screenplay, or the whole thing is gonna end up pretty lame.

According to a sales rep at one of Alias/Wavefront's Resellers, Maya 4, which will be released in about 60 days, should cost about $7500US. It runs under Unix or WinNT/2000. You'd need workstation level cpu/memory/graphics to get your money's worth, and a separate render engine running on a graphics server class machine to really get this kind of results. Then again, look at some of the work that's been done with Poser, using post in PhotoShop/PSP. I agree that it's the modelers. Give somone with talent a pencil and a piece of notebook paper, they can create art. Give them better tools, they can go even farther. GrayMare..who wants an SGI workstation and Maya for Christmas so he can make higher-tech messes of his renders...

Speaking of which, are her eyes green or brown? And does the head on the bikini render look out of proportion to the body to anyone else? At this level, I'm really nit-picking, but hey. GrayMare

Maya 4 is also being released for Mac OS X. Alias/Wavefront showed demos of it last January at the MacWorld SF conference and will be releasing it by July at MacWorld NY.

wow.....7500?? ouch...... hmmm iheard macs are better with graphics...why is that? CD-RW;)

I'm going to make an educated guess that these models have actual facial underpinnings (muscles, bones, fat pads, etc.) that control the appearance and set limits, instead of just a series of mesh morphs. Until "The Mummy" animators could get away with hollow meshes; "Hollow Man" would have been far less believable without this step. FWIW I sorely doubt every scene was shot using these mega-hires textures and bumpmaps; this is more likely for closeups and publicity. Likewise, the Ananova you see on the cover of "Lightwave[6]" isn't the Ananova you see on the website; that's (believe it or not) the Posette mesh you see talking. My guess is that Digital Animations realized they couldn't render five minute spots of the ultra-hires mesh in enough time to meet deadlines and commissioned a low-res stand-in they could animate more readily. Ananova and DA won't admit this, but there's ample proof out there.

imacs are better at graphics because arty types buy them! Techno-doodlers like me buy PC's in a big ugly white box because they like taking them to pieces to watch the little wheely-fan go round - what do you expect? BTW, which one of them gurls up there is the real one?

I just downloaded the 26 meg hi res trailer and retreived the Qt movie from my browser cache so i now have my own copy of the trailer to watch whenever i want. i cant wait!!! as far as software used this movie used Maya for modeling and animating and was rendered on a farm of over 95 hi end SGI workstation using the highly scripted renderman renderer. even on this powerful hardware setup the actual rendertime was YEARS!! as an example of the rendertimes involved in animation projects of this nature the first "Toy Story" from Pixar was rendered in parts on a farm of over 100 SUN solaris Enterprise II workstations with custom boards that supported 32 GIGS!! of ram!!! yet the total rendertime was still around 2.6 YEARS!! that means on a SINGLE Machine it would have taken 260 YEARS to render. Alias wave fronts Maya come in three versions i think MAYA-$7000 or so MAYA complete-$10,000 or so MAYA Unlimted- $15-$20,000 this is NOT!!! Software designed for the individual artist it is a special effects highend open source 3D interface for which you hire TEAMS!! of programmers usually on a project by project bases to write the complex scripting code to give it its true functionality Its learning curve is HUGE.!! but as you can see the results well are worth it for a team project Mocap

She just doesn't look good without glowing nostrils :( smerc

That's an AMEN, Smerc ;-)

I was just looking again at what stops the first close-up from looking real - I mean, how you can tell it's not a photo. It's a bit in the eyes, but I realised that it's largely the lack of hairs on the surface of the skin which trap the light. She looks too smooth and dead. No number of blackheads is going to make up for that. What's the poly count to hair out that flesh?

The producers of this movie could've easily hired live actors. The models in my opinion are unecessarily real. Why waste all this money, time and human resources just to "animate" live actors? I'm not saying there is anything wrong with realism but come on fellas this is art we are talking about here. Art does not copy nature. It imitates and re-creates. I think we all should grow beyond this popular clamor for "it looks real". Hey, what is real anyway?

Spoken like a true Luddite. Same arguments were made during the infancy of photography as art, with the complaint by traditionalists that it was too real and that true art should come from a brush or a chisel.

Hysterical, in a freaky kinda way, but I just noticed a Maya banner ad on this page that lists Maya Complete for only $4495...this after I spent the LD money to call someone in CA to get a price quote for you guys :-P I guess they're offering a special price on the current version since 4.0 is coming out soon. Funny the VAR didn't mention it...hmmm GrayMare

"There is no spoon!"

4495 bucks? Where? I've wanted Maya for a couple of years now, looks like it's time to take the leap.

Yeah, I thought she had "quite a nose on her" too :) though I loved the "there is no spoon" comment, made me laugh :) From what I know of it, the reason they made it this way, instead of with live actors is partly because they wanted to make something that wasn't constrained by the limits of gaming hardware, and partly so they could share thier results with the game team. The director of the movie is the man behind the series, it's been going 15 years so far. Apparently one of the things that has allready made the trip,is, (and I know you'll all sympathise :) better hair. You'll find a picture attached of Yuna, the herroine/love interest of the next game, this is from in game FMV, but the images of the game I've seen look like an "antialiased" version of a pre-render poser scene, not exactly highly detailed, but very good none the less. later jb

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/~syyd/artvisive/shadows.htm

I personally think that this is how it is going to go for us all. Technology like this is expanding and evolving at such an amazing rate some might wonder where it leaves 'us', the poor old Poser user. Well, in my humble opinion, as a Poser user that started out with Poser V1. It won't be long before we will be able to show off our own work to this standard. Of course there is talent and technique involved here too. You can't just slap any old texture on a model and expect it to look like that. I am of course talking about still images here and not animation. I don't yet know the render specs for this movie, but I do know that up to 800 processors were used in the rendering of 'Shrek'. Textures like the ones above are 'almost' possible now with Poser. Don't forget that it's not Poser that makes the textures. It only renders them. This is a major part of the problem. Maya and other high end animation softwares have far more sophisticated rendering engines. In 'Shrek', different layers were used on the skin textures for transparency, translucency and an epidermis layer and also bump mapping. This just not possible with poser. For instance there is no way to add dirt apart from just painting it on, which is not very realistic. With the Millennium figures and a great texture it is quite possible to obtain results that are somewhat close to the images above. Check ou this image of Syyd's 'Adam'... http://www.renderosity.com/~syyd/artvisive/shadows.htm This texture was created for Daz3D's Michael, using hi resolution digital photographs of all the body parts and face. The eyes are transparency mapped which lends more realism and gets away from that bright white and flat look. There is actually no bump map used on this texture and the only post work is an addition of contrast and levels in Photoshop. There 'is' hope for us poor Poser users who seek more realistic renders. Poser 1, looking back, was just one step above a wooden artists manaquin. Poser 4 is still an amazing set of tools for the price though. I reckon Poser 6 or 7 will contain a lot of the technology that is used today in software such as Maya. Lets hope we have the system resources to run it...:)