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Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

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31–40 of 69 posts

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it depends on what kind of movie you're making and who the target group is. Say you're making children's videos like Cocomelon or Bluey in 3D, you don't need all these nice things. At the end, movies are about the stories, not just pretty graphics.

> At the end, movies are about the stories, not just pretty graphics. The great people at Pixar and DreamWorks would be a bit offended. Over the past three or so decades they have pushed every aspect of rendering to its very limits: from water, hair, atmospheric effects, reflections, subsurface scattering, and more. Watching a modern Pixar film is a visual feast. Sure, the stories are also good, but the graphics are…

I've always wondered why they have never done a remaster of Toy Story.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#32
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LED screen thing is so absurd that for a long time I assumed they just replace the content in post somehow and its purpose is merely to aid in lighting and for actors to orient better in the scene.

I don’t see why it’s so absurd, with how cheap display tech has become recently. Ambitious, maybe, but it seemed to work pretty well in The Mandolorian.

The Mandalorian was also an interesting case where they almost had to use a solution like on-set LED screens due to the reflectivity of his armor.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#33
post #17

It's important to distinguish between traditional post vfx and in-camera vfx, which has come into fashion in recent years. In-camera vfx means that the final CGI is already present in the scene when it's shot. This is usually accomplished with giant LED screens. Typically the engine that runs these screens is Unreal. One major advantage is that the cinematographer's main job, lighting design, gets easier compared to…

> when your LED screen set has cheesy realtime CGI backgrounds…

Does this happen often? Are there any examples?

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#34

(-_-) You can CHANGE the light reflection algorithm in Unreal Engine from Lambert to Oren Nayar. Google "unreal engine lambert to oren nayar light reflection" you have to modify files, but it's doable.

Who are you talking to? If this is meant for Gore Verbinski, he won’t read it, and even if he did, he wouldn’t understand it.

The requirement to recompile the engine makes this feature non existent for a film crew.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#35
post #8

The greatest slip backwards for movies was too much focus on visual effects.

All of that SFX budget is worthless without deliberate art direction. Most modern blockbusters look bland and busy. The scale of spectacle that computer graphics allow for just doesn't "WOW" any more. It's a shame that this is what the movie industry has come to.

Visual noise from CGI has been a real problem since at least Transformers in 2007. That's my benchmark for it, the one where I really first remember the overwhelm being a distraction. "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" is a lesson that keeps needing to be relearned.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#36
Gore Verbinski directed a film trilogy with absolutely impeccable art direction and possibly the best special effects in the history of film (they're also, subjectively, some of my favourite films of all time).

He knows what he's talking about!

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#37
post #17

It's important to distinguish between traditional post vfx and in-camera vfx, which has come into fashion in recent years. In-camera vfx means that the final CGI is already present in the scene when it's shot. This is usually accomplished with giant LED screens. Typically the engine that runs these screens is Unreal. One major advantage is that the cinematographer's main job, lighting design, gets easier compared to…

The LED screen thing is so absurd that for a long time I assumed they just replace the content in post somehow and its purpose is merely to aid in lighting and for actors to orient better in the scene.

At least on The Mandolarian this is what happened. Everything behind the actors in the camera's frame would be green while the rest of the volume was used to have a lowres lighting reference for the scene. So essentially it would be a moving green screen. The Unreal output was never directly used in the finished show.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#38
post #17

It's important to distinguish between traditional post vfx and in-camera vfx, which has come into fashion in recent years. In-camera vfx means that the final CGI is already present in the scene when it's shot. This is usually accomplished with giant LED screens. Typically the engine that runs these screens is Unreal. One major advantage is that the cinematographer's main job, lighting design, gets easier compared to…

The transition between the real set and the virtual set is usually very obvious. LED volumes really should be completely replaced in post and used mainly for accurate lighting and actor reference.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#39
post #33
post #17

It's important to distinguish between traditional post vfx and in-camera vfx, which has come into fashion in recent years. In-camera vfx means that the final CGI is already present in the scene when it's shot. This is usually accomplished with giant LED screens. Typically the engine that runs these screens is Unreal. One major advantage is that the cinematographer's main job, lighting design, gets easier compared to…

> when your LED screen set has cheesy realtime CGI backgrounds… Does this happen often? Are there any examples?

Oh yes. The Mandalorian is one of the first to use it extensively.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-il...

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LED screen thing is so absurd that for a long time I assumed they just replace the content in post somehow and its purpose is merely to aid in lighting and for actors to orient better in the scene.

At least on The Mandolarian this is what happened. Everything behind the actors in the camera's frame would be green while the rest of the volume was used to have a lowres lighting reference for the scene. So essentially it would be a moving green screen. The Unreal output was never directly used in the finished show.

I'm pretty sure this is false and the wall was visible in many scenes

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk

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