Avatar - A new Era of Cinema begins
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Hehe....reading Ringworld's Children at the moment as a matter of fact.
I read RW back in the 70's and was awe-stricken as a young teen. As a matter of fact, it was probably Niven's works that pushed me to physics and engineering. Niven has an uncanny ability to visualize worlds that are at least somewhat plausible with the given technology.
Speaking of Avatar and Niven. I saw it in an IMAX-3D in Raleigh, NC over the new year weekend and was stunned at the beauty like everyone else.
BUT, it made me think of a Niven book as I was watching it, and that was The Integral Trees. If you love Niven's imagination, you will love the book. Like Avatar, Niven's early books before teaming with Pournelle were never overly ambitious with story telling as he leaned more for how fantastic tech and environments effected people or aliens. The comparison of Integral Trees. . .with the 9 foot 'humans', the insanely large "floating" trees, all in zero g (somewhat like the floating mountains) made me wish SO much Cameron had chosen Niven's book for his project instead.
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Dear All,
I became hooked on science fiction as a teenager, little realising that one day I would end up working on space instrumentation. Notwithstanding the 'off-world laws of physics', I thoroughly enjoyed Avatar and would happily go see it again. Ring World would indeed make a great film, as would some of the works of Peter Hamilton, a British science fiction writer of the first water (http://www.peterfhamilton.co.uk/).
Regards,
Bob -
Just finished re-reading "The Ringworld Throne" the other day, I'm starting to collect all the old Sci-Fi books I read as a kid - from Niven to Asimov. I'll have to look for "Integral Trees".
But, back to Avatar, I just saw this on FailBlog and thought it was funny:
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Stereoscopic stuff (aka "3D") has also been big in the Consumer Electronics Show this week. It seems the PlayStation 3 will have some stereoscopic games in the future, and that stereoscopic Blu-ray movies are coming, too.
So... who's getting a Sony "3D" TV this summer with accompanying glasses?
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Sony had Fromfonts show off their 3d TV at the AIA show a few months ago. They used it on Google Earth. It was cool to see Google Earth in 3d on a big TV. I don't think I'll be spending money on it anytime soon though.
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Ummmmpf.....One of the directors in our firm saw the movie with his daughter and just asked me if we can do stereoscopic views of architectural projects for presentations. The idea is actually quite thrilling
Could we do that with some Sketchup plugin?..... -
@kwistenbiebel said:
Ummmmpf.....One of the directors in our firm saw the movie with his daughter and just asked me if we can do stereoscopic views of architectural projects for presentations. The idea is actually quite thrilling
Could we do that with some Sketchup plugin?.....You could get a plugin that exports 2 images of the camera that would be offset as a person's eyes would, but as for color changes and mixing the images together, I doubt it would be possible.
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You can do it with Vue, there is a tutorial on how it's done at Geekatplay, it renders with two cameras.
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You can do it with Walkabout3D
http://www.walkabout3d.com/
It also works fine with LightUp now.
Simmetry3D (the more serious version) can also do it:
http://www.simmetry3d.com/As for the plugin for those images - if there were one, that would be cool. I saw a nice app (free!) that could convert photos taken like that into these images (I can't remember now but I am sure I could find it). Now if you render a scene nicely and then put these images together, that would be cool...
These are not motion pictures however.
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You can produce stereoscopic images with any renderer; you just need to render two views, one for each eye, and then join them with an anaglyph maker. There's a free one here:
http://www.stereoeye.jp/software/index_e.html
In that site there are also links to online vendors of anaglyph Red/Cyan glasses.Head-ache inducing anaglyph technology won't look nearly as nice as the stereo effect in Avatar, but you can do it with any monitor.
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So what about 3D 360 degree, spherical panoramas?
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At the slight risk of giving someone a headache, anyone seen two image stereograms?
Basically cross your eyes till you get a third 3D image in the middle of the two images on the screen.
Also remember these? They were all the rage back in the 80's and early 90's.
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The bottom one says Sketchup! right?
Thats what i saw at least.
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Though the k looks sort of like an h
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wow, now I've really got a headache
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Nice article on landscape modeling in Avatar from CG Society
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5434
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Here's a sequel/takeoff to Avatar with Cameron selling it.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/121061/saturday-night-live-digital-short-laser-cats-5#s-p1-sr-i2
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The production company that made Avatar could have easily added another half to one hour to the movie and made the beginning start by sending clothing or blankets when the tribe didn't want to relocate. It's a time tested American tradition. Send the spy in afterward and continue with the rest of the movie.
Every 10-20 years seems like it's a new era, does anyone remember 2 movies called TRON and Wargames? About the only couple of things things left are to have a simulator-like seat for motion, holographic projection so you can see slightly around the edges if you move (I'm not talking about StarTrek-Holodeck) and smell. Someone is already working on adapting a seat for theaters and there was work in the past, BC (before computers) to use holograms with a film. I remembered reading that smell was used as a gimmick when they had 3D movies when they used cardboard frames and red-blue cellophane lenses for "glasses".
As far as the Robin Hood parody, I think Springtime for Hitler was funnier.
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Dunno if this has been mentioned yet, but apparently several of the models in Avatar started life as SU models.
http://io9.com/5464694/creating-actual-navi-props-and-silly-corporate-logos
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