The most beautiful thing I have ever seen

[Otto.]

I have never seen anything like this.

http://vimeo.com/7809605

As I was watching, I was blown away by how professional this looked and how well the emotion was captured. Truly the best piece of film I have ever seen.



Then I saw the credits...

It said nothing about who was involved in the filming or anything of the like.

That video is almost entirely CGI.

Yes... all the textures, lighting, and reflections... all CGI. It boggles my mind that something like this can be completely computer-generated. On a low budget too!

The man standing behind the camera is one of the only things that was actually filmed... and even then, it was in front of a green screen.

This is a short video of how some of the environments were rendered.

http://vimeo.com/8200251

This guy deserves some kind of award. I've never seen anything that even comes close to this. He's also a great architect. Some of the places featured in the film are awesome. I love his clean, minimalistic approach to the structures. He did the music too. It was based off of two other scores but the music you hear in the video was completely made by Alex Roman.

He has some serious talent. A mind bottling amount.

It's so beautiful... and it becomes even more special when you find out what it really is.

[Razi]

Wow holy smokes.
That is epic!!!!!!!!!!

Really great work.

[s0m3th1ngAZ]

Wow even knowing it was CG I was hard pressed to find any evidence of that. That's incredible.
Makes AVATAR look like Frogger.

[Travisty]

That was amazing. The amount of emotion found in it is extremely impressive, and when I read it was CGI I was speechless!

It definitely makes avatar look like frogger.

[Razi]

I just finished watching it in fullscreen.
Epic video!

[93coupe]

Stunning video. Why was this made?

[Otto.]

Stunning video. Why was this made?

For teh lulz.

I actually don't know. I know the preview he made for it ( http://vimeo.com/5407991 ) was shown at an animated short film festival but other than that, I don't know.

[93coupe]

Ok, I was just curious if it was for some festival or to compete for some sort of prize (which, this man clearly deserves).

[MinisterofDOOM]

Very impressive. Still, there were a couple of shots at the beginning that were obviously CGI. Reflectivity of certain surfaces were too perfect, too uniform, not quite natural looking (specifically the polaroid photos and some angles of the leather body of the camera). That's not so much a criticism of the video as an inherent flaw of CGI: it really can't look perfect to the human eye, because the eye is simply too good at scrutinizing detail, even if we're not always conscious of it.

[Otto.]

Yeah. There was also a point somewhere halfway through where you can see some clipping (I guess that's what you would call it... like a gap between the two textures).

Other than that it looks totally real. Technology is amazing.

[93coupe]

Any idea how many hours a project like this would take to create? Also, what does the program cost to make something like this and what is it called? Not that I am interested in making one.

[Otto.]

I don't know what rendering software he used but I do know that he used Magic Bullet Looks for the grading and color correction which is a $400 program alone.

I don't even want to know how many days of his life he used up working on this.

[s0m3th1ngAZ]

Considering it takes up to 3 years for a feature length animated film from Pixar...and they have entire teams of people working. However this didnt have any animation in it so...hard to say.
When I made maps for CS:Source it took me months of a couple hours a day to texture everything right. SLightly different I know...but same principle. He just has a lot higher res textures, models, surface effects...post processing...ok it's not the same at all...

[sentrastace]

Wow even knowing it was CG I was hard pressed to find any evidence of that. That's incredible.
Makes AVATAR look like Frogger.

+1 that was amazing....

[Jesda]

[numbnuts240]

[Chaotic_Warlord]

I can only imagine the kind of computing power the artists' computer must have. The amount of rendering in that is astonishing, being that I was a multimedia student in college and know how to use 3-D Studio Max and Maya I can tell you that it takes a very long time to not only build the environments but also get the lighting/shadows right. Textures are easy as you can just use JPEG files for your textures so you can just source the materials that you want and embed them into the surfaces, but if there is even the slightest hole (we're talking infinitesimally small) then the colors and textures will leak out and you have to either start fresh or find the hole. I literally took me a week just to make a crappy spinning wheel and another 4 days of constant rendering to get like 2 seconds that I looped.

[Otto.]

I can only imagine the kind of computing power the artists' computer must have. The amount of rendering in that is astonishing, being that I was a multimedia student in college and know how to use 3-D Studio Max and Maya I can tell you that it takes a very long time to not only build the environments but also get the lighting/shadows right. Textures are easy as you can just use JPEG files for your textures so you can just source the materials that you want and embed them into the surfaces, but if there is even the slightest hole (we're talking infinitesimally small) then the colors and textures will leak out and you have to either start fresh or find the hole. I literally took me a week just to make a crappy spinning wheel and another 4 days of constant rendering to get like 2 seconds that I looped.

He posted this in the comments:



His setup is pretty low end compared to professional studios. Pretty amazing.

[MinisterofDOOM]

His setup is pretty low end compared to professional studios. Pretty amazing.

QX6850 is low-budget for HOME computers. Definitely impressive.

I <3 my i7 920.

[Chaotic_Warlord]

With that setup the rendering alone probably took several months. Though since there isn't really any moving components aside from the camera panning and adjusting image blur (booth can be achieved with effects standard to any video editing software), the rendering time probably wasn't as bad as it would have been if there had been moving objects.

[hatedinthemind]

very impressive!!!

[Red coupe]

Wow even knowing it was CG I was hard pressed to find any evidence of that. That's incredible.
Makes AVATAR look like Frogger.

Avatar looked VERY CGI though. Good, but amazingly fake.

This looks amazing though, insanely boring film of things coming in and out of focus.... but very skillfully made.

[Otto.]

This looks amazing though, insanely boring film of things coming in and out of focus.... but very skillfully made.

I wasn't bored with it.

[Warped161]

it is excellent modeling and the textures are really amazing, the realistic affect is created using photometric lighting. it takes forever to render because each beam of lights path is calculated to as many as 5 to 10 bounces from object to object. so a single frame can take 2 to 5 minutes, and there are 29.97 frames per second. i have taken as long as 6 hours just to render 15 seconds of work but that was on a much older computer.

as an example i made this logo for a forum

this is a closeup of the details.