ILM Force Awakens CG ship renders. ULTRA high res.

Because there are no actual physical models being used for the ships in The Force Awakens, very high quality CG model assets were made for the film by Industrial Light and Magic. To help with reference, here are some ULTRA high res renders of ILM's assets. If you wish to download them to your computer, which I recommend, do the following.


Go to the following link...


http://imgur.com/a/lWptA


Hover over the upper right corner of each image, and you will see a gear icon appear.


Click the icon, and you will have two options. View Full Resolution or Download Full Resolution.


I recommend downloading them, and use them for reference when building your own models. Have fun!

DanielB said:

Because there are no actual physical models being used for the ships in The Force Awakens,

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BOOOOOOOO!!!! :angry

I like that even though they're digital models, the designs looks like they were built out of styrene and covered with model kit parts.

Hey, I don't see any Sealab parts on that X-Wing! Lol!

I like the TIE the most. The antenna array or whatever it is looks pretty cool. I just hope they aren't unmanned. On side note, I hope they do away with the clones. Anyway....

The SD looks cool. I like the additional design elements at the nose.

Ironically, I'm not liking the X-Wing. The original bulky intakes and engines looked tougher. It seems too sleek. It obviously looks much more functional but seems like it's missing something.

The sandwiched wings of the transport are a nice retro touch.

Overall, the new vehicles still look cool. I'm still stoked!

Joe

Yeah, I have to admit I'm pretty disappointed there were no physical models made for the movie and am a bit surprised, considering all the other efforts to go "back to basics". I'm sad we'll never get to see these models displayed and be able to admire them in person. I remember a year or two ago someone here supposedly "in the know" implying ILM was gathering up model makers for the new movie. Guess not...

As for the designs themselves, I like them fairly well but I do have a few little quibbles with them. I'm not sure how I feel about the squat bridge area of the new SD though the ship looks cool overall. Honestly, to my eye, it looks like it should be older than the OT ISDs though. Something about it looks more primitive to me. The command shuttle looks okay, with obvious inspiration from the Lambda shuttle but I do wish it were sleeker like the Lambda, with a more apparent cockpit area. I'm not really loving the inverted color palette of the TIEs, with the black hull and gray solar panels. Wouldn't it stand to reason the panel color wouldn't arbitrarily change, even if the FO decided to paint the hull black and red? I guess that was done for the "coolness" factor? I wouldn't imagine the panels themselves are painted?

Oftentimes, when it's decided to take something existing (stormtroopers, Imperial guards, Imperial TIE fighters, Rebel X-wings, etc.) and make it black (shadowtroopers, shadow guards, First Order TIEs, Resistance Black Squadron X-wings, etc), I feel it's done for the "ooh-ahh, cool factor" but I always found it a bit cheesy.

The new first order troop carrier looks like it could be a new favourite ship to scratch build here on the rpf, simple shapes and the options to build it deploying troops or make it large enough to hold bandai 1:12 troops .

In spite of Abram's desire to do more "practical effects" it still comes down to money. Flying spaceships are much cheaper to do CG than practical. The cost to build a CG model vs. a real model is about the same but the cost to shoot real models is a lot more expensive than that to render the CG model. You can also render the CG elements for a multitude of shots at the same time whereas with a real model it's one at a time making for a longer production schedule.

We may end up seeing models shots in TFA, but they are more likely to be larger environmental models or high speed exploding models, which can be cheaper and better practical than CG.

As far as creature effects go, the opposite is usually true, it's cheaper to build a practical creature and shoot it on set than to add a CG one later. And of course it gives the actors something to play off.

the balance between CGI and Practical is like asking the length of a string.
I think its related to the value we place on physical objects and how we perceive them to be real.
The recent film Chappie is a good case in point, there was many scenes where a physical robot chassis were seen and the actors interacting with them, made the transition to the fully digital scenes easier because the physical Chappie had added gravitas to the digital scenes, and the lighting and rendering was exceptional.

Recently enough i upgraded my TV to 1K and I have to say watching the Star Wars special edition versions back was like seeing everything come out of the washing machine after someone left a red sock in the wash.
The scenes done with practical models looked real, the lighting looked real,.....the digital pieces really stood out as brutal, in no way realistic and also very jarring when transitioning from digital to physical assets, again these were made some time ago and the technology had moved on A LOT.
While the Prequels are easier to look at (they built more models for PM than the whole original saga) overall they were probably too clean

So I will wait , and pray that the lessons from all the movies made to date, will make the force awakens what we hope it will be. And when the titles role it will just be like 1977 again .
I don't want to worry too much beforehand , as it happened a long time ago in a galaxy far far away

Vacformedhero said:

Recently enough i upgraded my TV to 1K

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Is your TV 720 or 1080?.....if it's 1080 that is Full HD = (1920x1080) which is just under 2K

4K native is 4096x2160, Ultra HD is 3840x2160 (which is being promoted as 4k)

You probably already know that,.....just throwing this wee fact out there & possibly throwing you another 1K

J

2K resolution is actually slightly higher in resolution than 35mm film grain. So movies shot on film, as Star Wars was won't look any better when they are eventually re-released at 4k Ultra HD resolution for playback on 4K television. Everybody's talking like 4k will be so much better when it finally comes, but it's kind of like the Spinal Tap amp that went to "11". For something to look the best played back at 4k it will have had to have been shot on a digital 4k camera.

I'm really not that worried about the ships being CG,...bad models can be bad models,....bad CG the same,.....look at the CG in the original Jurassic Park,...compared to the horrendous CG in the SWSE,....the 97 Jabba??


.....the updated Jabba in 2004:



but compare him to what he looked like in 99's PM:


So really its all about time constraints,.....the SE's had to have been something squeezed in between projects

The main things that ruin shots is human interaction with CG,....thats why they are making a big deal with the going back to basics,....practical sets, practical troopers, animatronic masks,......motion capture instead of winging it on the computer

Making models for the spacecraft requires all the building, filming....the green/blue-screen....compositing.....which would take up so much more time

...as long as they get those Dykstra style sweeping shots I'll be happy

The effects in recent movies like Avengers etc are pretty much flawless,.....creature & craft,...I can't imagine there being anything to worry about in the new SW

J

DaveG said:

2K resolution is actually slightly higher in resolution than 35mm film grain. So movies shot on film, as Star Wars was won't look any better when they are eventually re-released at 4k Ultra HD resolution for playback on 4K television. Everybody's talking like 4k will be so much better when it finally comes, but it's kind of like the Spinal Tap amp that went to "11". For something to look the best played back at 4k it will have had to have been shot on a digital 4k camera.

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I don't know where you got that info,...but 35mm is considered to be equivalent to 6K,....theres more info in each frame than you'd think,...35mm is still higher quality than 4k,...JJ is using film for the new movie

They used to scan films at 2k,.....for DVD's,...maybe thats where the confusion lies

J

Jaitea said:

I don't know where you got that info,...but 35mm is considered to be equivalent to 6K,....theres more info in each frame than you'd think,...35mm is still higher quality than 4k,...JJ is using film for the new movie

They used to scan films at 2k,.....for DVD's,...maybe thats where the confusion lies

J

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Indeed. I work in visual effects/video production. Film scans until recently were scanned in at 2k, but now mostly scanned in at 4k. Maybe some film stocks could squeeze out 6k of resolution, but probably not all. IMAX 70mm is 8k usually.

I've been in the visual effects business for more than 30 years. Yes, you can get some better image artifacts with film scanned at 4k but it mainly improves color and contrast rendition it doesn't make it sharper. Scanning at 4k also give editors (and visual effects compositors) the ability to "blow up" the image frame and reposition it if they wish with less negative impact on the final image. If you're talking about scanning a full frame 35mm negative, what we use to call VistaVision, then absolutely 4k will give you a superior resolution but for the average motion picture shot in what's referred to as Academy format (less than half the area of a full 35mm frame) a 4k scan will mainly just make the film grain sharper. It can't add more resolution than the inherent size of the grain. It's even worse for "scope" movies which have a built in optical 2:1 horizontal compression created by the camera lens.

More recent films shot with better film stocks could look better at 4k since newer film stocks have finer grain but Star Wars, shot in 1976, won't. When it does get the Ultra HD treatment, and you know it will so they can get everyone to buy it again, it will probably get a digital "facelift" to look better in 4k but then we start getting into the same sort of issues as "colorizing" of old black and white movies.

Besides, the trend it to watch movies on iPhones and iPads these days anyway...

As great as practical sets are, cgi is WAY better than matte paintings

Depends on how they're used but I'll take McQuarrie's (and those that worked under him) matte paintings over CGI any day. Most you can't tell are even paintings.

The hangar of home one disagrees. Those are some of the worst shots in the seriea

Nah, the painting is fine. Just poorly composited. Sloppy blue screen work and perhaps zoomed too tight. That one example is hardly enough to generally discredit matte paintings and there are many CGI shots that looked just as bad, if not worse. I think you would be surprised just how many matte paintings were utilized that you never knew were.

The real problem is that these day a lot of people that call themselves "matte painters" are really just Photoshop cut and paste artists. Back in the "good old days" you couldn't fake it. Your either knew how to paint or you didn't!

Vista Vision (8 perf horizontal) as roughly equivalent to 4K with Eastman 5247, which was a common filmstock used in that era. Release prints, which is what you saw in theatres, would be slightly better than 2K,IF there were a low amount of optical composites in the film (and the titles would count, typically). Terminator 2 VFX shots at ILM were at 1920 by 1080, and up-rezzed to 2K, as that extra amount saved in render time was necessary (quicker to up-res than to render).

At ILM, shots would originate on 8 perf, and go through the optical printer, ultimately getting reduced to 4 perf, a significantly lower res format (in terms of pixels). Many shots were multi-layer composites, which would degrade the quality of each generation (comp layer) even more. And that work was done on what many considered state of the art optical printers in that time.

For contrast, some shots in Special Edition took the original Vista Vision elements, scanned and recomped them digitally, such as several shots in the death star trench with the TIE fighters and X Wings. They were not all CG redoes. I do not know what metric was used to determine re-comps vs, CG redoes, though I consider the shot of the X Wings opening the S foils in the SE to be far superior to what was done for the original film (which appeared to be the same element repeated and reduced several times.) Other than that, they should have left it alone...

So, to simplify, motion control (aka "Dykstraflex") VFX before CG went like this: original photography of elements (first generation, highest quality). Combination of elements together (optical or bipack).Optical degraded the image down to second generation for one comp pass. Additional passes would drop generations even more. If bipack comped, also known as in-camera, exposed elements would be backwound, holdout mattes would be made (if possible), and additional elements would be exposed into unexposed portions of the film negative, thus reducing quality-loss. More expensive budgets would allow for composites on "interpositive stock," which was a fine-grained, low contrast stock. This would help to minimize contrast and grain build up from comping.

Oh, and if the lab screwed up your dailies overnight, you had to reshoot, as there would be no way to save anything.

Yeah, it basically sucked back then...