ILM Force Awakens CG ship renders. ULTRA high res.

No, my benchark is not the OT, as much as I love it. There have been many movies since the OT that have used miniatures, some of which I've worked on. I would be willing to bet there's quite a few movies out there that have used miniatures so well you didn't realize they were miniatures. I'm not against cgi, it is a great tool, and I think it has made vfx shots today look fanastic, but I just think the mix of practical miniatures with cgi looks better than either one alone.
 
Personally, I think the falcon looked cgi because it was too agile. I realize that using a cgi model allows them to do shots that they never could have done before, but that always translates to them that they can do anything with the ship.

What happens is that it looks like it has no mass. This was especially noticed in the takeoff from jakku and the "landing" ar starkiller base.

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I think the shot of the chase where it climbed, turned off the engine, fell and then just climbed again before it hit the surface was totally off. Absolutely unbelieveable.
 
I agree the physics were off. But the ship has been doing unbelievable moves since the OT.

Going lightspeed, and doing the (non-lightspeed) dogfighting moves in ESB/ROTJ . . . it has to manipulate gravity/inertia in some way. Once you cross that Rubicon then a lot of bets are off.

Besides, optical/miniature ships are perfectly capable of doing moves with bad physics too.
 
Nobody is arguing for a return to photochemical... there was time for miniature work, even if they would have been 3D printed off of the CG masters. More likely they do not have a large model maker talent pool to draw from anymore. JJ commented about not crossing the reality threshold for camera moves, but after seeing TFA again yesterday, it doesn't seem like that was followed in many shots, sadly. Most of those shots involved the Falcon, and particularly the Jakku/Star Destroyer 360 roll shot (the one featured in the trailers). I have made a good living off of CG over the years, but I thought several key shots fell short, and could easily have been done with miniatures; the Starkiller base landing would have been the best candidate -- a 5ft miniature and baking soda snow shot at high speed would have looked far more realistic than the final shot in the film.
 
jayroth said:
Nobody is arguing for a return to photochemical... there was time for miniature work, even if they would have been 3D printed off of the CG masters. More likely they do not have a large model maker talent pool to draw from anymore. JJ commented about not crossing the reality threshold for camera moves, but after seeing TFA again yesterday, it doesn't seem like that was followed in many shots, sadly. Most of those shots involved the Falcon, and particularly the Jakku/Star Destroyer 360 roll shot (the one featured in the trailers). I have made a good living off of CG over the years, but I thought several key shots fell short, and could easily have been done with miniatures; the Starkiller base landing would have been the best candidate -- a 5ft miniature and baking soda snow shot at high speed would have looked far more realistic than the final shot in the film.
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Like all those models of landscapes in the prequels? They were actually pretty awesome. That star destroyer would have made an awesome model for the scene.

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Yes, the prequel miniatures were a combination of actual models and CG, which is exactly the approach I would have preferred to see in TFA. Oh, well...
 
Speaking of prequel miniatures...
 

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Some of the prequel landscape models are featured in "Sculpting a Galaxy".

Nice to finally see Ep. I mentioned without the usual bashing ;) (It only took Ep. VII to be made :p)
 
I have made a good living off of CG over the years, but I thought several key shots fell short, and could easily have been done with miniatures; the Starkiller base landing would have been the best candidate -- a 5ft miniature and baking soda snow shot at high speed would have looked far more realistic than the final shot in the film.
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You have my vote there. Miniatures still trump CGI when it comes to certain "destructive" things like that.

They could have even just used a MF model painted green with tracking balls. Just doing the snow element practically would have helped.
 
Each of the prequels had more miniature work than the entire original trilogy. That's mostly due to them building environments, which is what miniatures do best these days.

I do think that some of the shots were filmed in a way where you wouldn't be able to film them if they were actually happening--meaning you know it's fake simply because the camera can't move that way. Perhaps if they changed that then they would have had more cases to use miniatures.
 
Look, there are two main reasons miniatures aren't used as much today, and it has nothing to do with money, time, talent, or how they look on screen.
1) Most VFX supervisors work for digital vfx houses, and they are not going to give away work that could keep them busy and bring in more money. 2) A lot of directors like to be able to manipulate every little aspect of a shot, and you can't do that with miniatures. Sometimes you get lucky and get to work with a director like Christopher Nolan, who likes to shoot miniatures, but they're few and far between. (Rant over)
 
swgeek said:
Look, there are two main reasons miniatures aren't used as much today, and it has nothing to do with money, time, talent, or how they look on screen.
1) Most VFX supervisors work for digital vfx houses, and they are not going to give away work that could keep them busy and bring in more money. 2) A lot of directors like to be able to manipulate every little aspect of a shot, and you can't do that with miniatures. Sometimes you get lucky and get to work with a director like Christopher Nolan, who likes to shoot miniatures, but they're few and far between. (Rant over)
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Don't kid yourself, it has everything to do with money! I've yet to have an experience in the film industry that wasn't governed by money issues. If a director (with clout) like Christopher Nolan wants to use miniatures and can either justify it or demand it of the studio, it will happen. If a visual effects shot could be achieved less expensively using models than CGI, studios would go that way in a heartbeat. But due primarily to the shooting costs of model shots it's always going to be cheaper to go CGI. And unfortunately, there are a lot of studio execs that share the "CGI is crushing it" mentality (no disrespect intended to Batguy) and won't even consider other options.

The is an organic quality to miniature shots that is difficult, if not impossible to replicate with CGI. I just watched Interstellar again last night and the model photography looked absolutely brilliant, and completely real. And either due to the directors vision, or due to the reduced flexibility of camera moves with real models as opposed to CGI the framing and action was better too.

Going back to people not realizing that Star Wars Ep. 1 was such a huge miniatures show... if you remember back, Ep. 1 was the first movie to be shot entirely digitally (or at least that was the claim, there was film shot) and the publicity was focused entirely on the "New Age of the Digital Studio". Traditional VFX work, like models, that normally would have gotten a lot of attention got zero. Which lead to the impression that there were no models used.
 
Of course, money is always a factor, a big factor. But studios don't know vfx. A visual fx supervisor who works for company "A" isn't going to tell the studio, hey you know you could save yourself money if you give half of this job to company "C". And stating that it's always going to be cheaper to use cgi over miniatures is not true. I agree with most of what you said though.
 
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DaveG said:
Going back to people not realizing that Star Wars Ep. 1 was such a huge miniatures show... if you remember back, Ep. 1 was the first movie to be shot entirely digitally (or at least that was the claim, there was film shot) and the publicity was focused entirely on the "New Age of the Digital Studio". Traditional VFX work, like models, that normally would have gotten a lot of attention got zero. Which lead to the impression that there were no models used.
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Episode One was shot on film,…..bar one scene,…the shot where Qui-Gon takes Anakin’s blood & tests for……ahem…..Midicloreans……I think they tested on this scene because it was a nighttime shot & they wanted to see how the DV handled low light……not very well,…the shot stands out as lower quality

Why is this thread in the studio scale thread?

It should be in the Entertainment & Movie section

J
 
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I think CGI's options for being altered in post-production is a huge factor now. The industry has changed in the last 20 years. Directors are less comfortable than ever with being at the mercy of how a practical shot turns out.


Remember the Temple of Doom bridge cutting scene? They said if that shot hadn't gone right it would have been ILM's problem to fix it. They could never have re-rigged it for a second take.

Modern producers/directors would crap themselves at the thought of all those variables and one try. All four bridge cables, both sides of the bridge falling away correctly, all the dummies waving their arms & legs realistically, all the zillion different cameras rolling at the same time, etc


CGI helps to tweak & polish model shots. But that can be polishing a turd if the practical footage isn't quite what they want. When it's all CGI they can change ANYTHING all the way up to half an hour before the movie gets released. They can re-direct the whole scene & change the shots around. They can lengthen a shot for that extra 3 seconds that was never originally planned. You can't do that when it's practical footage. If you don't like the camera move, or the shot was cut too early, or the practical prop's coloring wasn't quite ideal, or the explosion goes off in a slightly wrong direction or 1/3rd of a second too late - you're stuck with it.
 
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