A New Way Of Making Movies

People are now using the 3-D engines from some video games to make movies.

The fledgling art of using 3-D computer games to make animated movies is coming of age.

Around the world, increasing numbers of would-be movie moguls are utilizing the 3-D graphics engines of games like Quake or Unreal to produce animated movies -- at a fraction of the money spent by studios like Pixar.

Known as machinima ("machine cinema"), the relatively new, no-budget genre has yet to produce a blockbuster of Finding Nemo proportions.

However, machinima is maturing so rapidly, some predict it will soon be a major force in animation, especially with the imminent arrival of a new generation of hardware and software promising an era of photo-realistic "cinematic computing."

I recently built a new game PC with a GeForce FX 5600-based video card. The software that came with the card included several demos, including one called Dawn, which features an animated pixie that is rendered in real time (in particular, the skin shader is impressive). Here's an image from the demo (there's a video available at the above link as well):
Given this level of capability with today's video cards I'm not surprised that people are using them to create real-time movies. I would expect that in a few years we'll be able to generate Pixar-quality real-time images with equipment that you can buy at Fry's.

Link via Slashdot.

Update: Nvidia has release a new chipset, the 5900, with some new demos. In particular, the Last Chance Gas demo has a pretty good lighting model.

Posted by Aubrey at July 10, 2003 10:29 AM | TrackBack