Crap CGI

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F117Landers

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Why is it CGI is so obvious and fake on many "straight to TV" movies ? I know the obvious answer would be lack of money, but surely CGI is CGI, so if you have a computer and make CGI, then why should a lot more money make it look more realistic ?

They keep advertising Catagory 6 or something on E4, and instantly you can tell it is a TV movie, it looks like Roger Rabit, half animation and half real life. I have seen at least 10 other low budgets where CGI is awful. I mean, if Abyss could do it 15+ years ago with excellence, then why not now ? Take Back to the Future 2 in 1989, that was great effects. Haven't things got a lot cheaper in 17 years ?

Perhaps I am being ignorant, but it just annoys me when CGI is so obvious and fake. I would prefer stop motion or a bloke in a monster suit sometimes.
 
Not just the small movie, look at the 2002 Bond movie, Die Another Day. Massive budget but can anyone forget the crap surfing scene in it? It would have been better cut than in the movie at all. :(
 
CGI is used too much now even in hollywood blockbusters and looks shite!! I remember watching the original Star Wars and fairplay the special effects were good, the puppeteering with the characters for example Jabba the Hutt was impressive and gave a realistic feel, but when they brought out the re-mastered versions they looked pathetic, they had a scene that they put in where Jabba meets Solo in a hanger and it look absolutly fake and crap. The remakes of old films look crap for example I saw the trailer of Posiedon the other day, I took one look at the effects and immediatly thought crap not gonna bother watching, they need to tone down the CGI and go back to basics.
 
I think part of the problem is that your brain knows you can't really be seeing a dinosaur or sixty foot tall gorilla, so that doubt is always there.
Look at the titles for almost any Western and there will probably be a credit for a matte painter, but you would be hard pushed to notice where these paintings are. Because they are used to hide or create buildings, or create scenes that are not there and do not involve spaceships they are invisible if you see what I mean.
I also think that model work is now being neglected in the cinema. A computer can produce very detailed spaceships buildings, cityscapes etc, but there is something missing, the physicality of an object in front of a camera even if it is reduced in scale.
 
Its generally a matter of artistry. CGI can be used to create phtorealistic images. The problem is rendering those images. It takes a LONG time for a skilled 3D-modeller to assemble an object out of, possibly, millions of triangles, to create something that looks realistic. Take a look at any complex object in the word and see how many edges it has. not the just obvious one, all the tiny little details that without them, the object would look fake if rendered on a computer.

Then a skilled 2D artist neeRAB to create texture to cover the wireframe model. Just tihnk of the detail needed to go into creating the fine texture of wood and consider that to make it look totally convincing, you cannot simply replicate a small pattern all over the object. Such an effect would be very noticable.

Once this is done, an animator has to plan motion paths for the object and then it has to be outputted to a renderer which has to then draw each frame (approx 30 every second) individually and turn it into a filmstrip.

After all that is done, it now has to be quality checked and inserted into the movie, possibly interacting with live, studio or location shot footage.

This isn't an expensive process because it requires lots of raw materials, but because it takes a lot of manhours. Rendering alone is usually acomplished by a farm of dozens of computers which will render out a few seconRAB of footage, overnight. A big budget movie with 18 months or post production time will be able to produce great CGI work simply becaus ethey have the time to do it. A made for TV movie with only a month or two will not only have less time to turn out the results, but will have a smaller staff of less experienced artists and a much less powerful render farm, which in itself will greatly increase the rendering time of each shot.

Simply put, TV movies look like the shit because it is massively quicker to render out a simple model with basic textures. They just don't have the time to do anytihng better.
 
I saw the The Chronicles of Narnia recently and I although I enjoyed it enough... The lion, most of the time (especially close-up) looked really bad.

The CG dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park still look amazing and far more realistic then any CGI used in Narnia and that was made in 1993! :confused:

"Although it's probably more convincing because no human being has actually ever laid eyes on a real dinosaur".

That's why if you do it wrong when using a very common animal known to the human eye, like the lion, you will just fail miserably at convincing anybody over, say thirteen that what appears to be real, actually isn't at all.

I even saw a film a few days ago with a very young Jodie Foster in it called Napoleon and Samantha on the Disney channel, and she just happens to spend a great deal of that film walking around with an actual real life lion. Oh, how times have changed!... :D
 
It's time and money, and different effects houses do different work. ILM is one of the best around but even they turned in shoddy work on 'The Mummy Returns'.

SONY have one of the worst effects houses, with the first 'Spider-Man' looking pretty bad in places. The second film was a big improvement, mainly because Sam Raimi had them working on sequences very very early into the films production, thus giving them more time to fix what doesn't work. He's also done the same thing on Spider-Man 3. He had them working on sequences a few months ago.
 
Yeah I would have to say the worstt CGI I have seen in recent years was on The Mummy Returns as that looked like they had rushed it just so that the film could meet its release date. It ruined that film for me!
 
Narnia is the most recent offender
When they are working on films they are usually working on large monitors which is why sometimes the end result looks bad when blown up but ok at TV level but Narnia just looked BAD on both scales.

Walt Disney used to say you have to fool the viewer by mixing your mediums when creating effects and this is where I feel todays films lack.
Jurassic park used huge puppets and animatronics mixing this with cgi to confuse the mind yet spiderman etc rely too heavily on CGI thinking this will solve all problems.

As others have said the low budget end is all about time money and resources.... and a lack of quality control.
 
Another really bad CGI effort is Air Force One, especially when the plane crashes at the end. Definietely on Mummy Returns that was bad!
 
I hate it when CGI is used when it probably would have been easier to use models or actors and would have looked better. I'm thinking of things like 3 CGI Stormtroopers in one scene of Revenge of the Sith, they look fake but how hard would it have been to put suits on 3 guys and make the scene look decent?
 
I felt like asking for my money back after watching 'A Sound of Thunder'. Made more than a decade after the first 'Jurrasic Park' film, the CGI created dinosaur and other creatures was the most dire effort I have seen ever. If you have'nt seen it then it is worth seeing just to be amazed at how bad it is for a film made in 2005.
 
To sort of back this up, what a few special FX houses do is have offices all over the world (particulary in Soho, London and Hollywood or LA). I know that Kodak Cinesite did this, and their system was desiged so that when each office closed for the night, the offices still open (because of time differences) could use it's computers to render.
 
The main problem with CGI is making objects look like they have true weight relative to their supposed size, and then moving them within the real world convincingly...inertia!

The worst offender for false inertia would be the Walking With Dinosaurs series - ten ton dinosaurs walking as though they weigh as much as a seagull. Not convincing.

The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park work so well because they have the correct weight for their size, and the film cleverly emphasizes their weight with sound cues and the cup of water.

The best recent example of CGI I can think of is the tank battle sequence in the Hulk movie. The CGI tanks are clearly heavy objects so our brain is fooled and accepts them as real.

It's working out true inertia for CGI objects that takes time these days. TV movies just don't have the budget to do it which is why a lot of cheap CGI looks pretty but also weightless and therefore unconvincing.
 
Bad CGI that stanRAB out for me is in The Hulk.

The Hulk looked so fake and his movements were attrocious and unnatural. Maybe the bad physics in his movement just aggravated the bad cgi. However the shots of the face just emphaised the bad cgi too. It really felt like a computer game. When he was jumping around, it was like Mario in a platform game.
 
It's not just badly done CGI, but pointless CGI, too.

The new Omen remake is made somewhere like Prague, but rather than change the storyline to say that, they've CGI'd in backgrounRAB with Big Ben and the London Eye. What's the point, it looks awful.
 
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