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An interesting debate is underway in the world of movie-making. As reported over at Dark Horizons, in one corner is Gore Verbinski, the director behind the three original Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, and currently doing promotion for his Sam Rockwell-led comedy sc-fi Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
As the report points out, the use of CG for the character of Davey Jones was unbelievably 20 years ago, and still stands up today. So why has VFX seemingly gone backwards?
Verbinski has a view that may be enlightening. He gave an interview to But Why Tho? which was then picked up by PC Gamer. In it, he placed the blame squarely at the feet of Unreal Engine, a video game production platform that has edged out the 3D modelling and animation software Maya:
“I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape. So it used to be a divide, with Unreal Engine being very good at video games, but then people started thinking maybe movies can also use Unreal for finished visual effects. So you have this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema.
I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards. It works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you’re in a heightened, unrealistic reality. I think it doesn’t work from a strictly photo-real standpoint.
I just don’t think it takes light the same way; I don’t think it fundamentally reacts to subsurface, scattering, and how light hits skin and reflects in the same way. So that’s how you get this uncanny valley when you come to creature animation, a lot of in-betweening is done for speed instead of being done by hand.
And then just what’s become acceptable from an executive standpoint, where they think no one will care that the ships in the ocean look like they’re not on the water. In the first Pirates movie, we were actually going out to sea and getting on a boat.”
The VFX community has chimed in to give a response. Among them is Epic Games VFX supervisor, and four time VFX Oscar nominee Pat Tubach. Tubach effectively says it ain’t the tools, it’s the users:
“It’s inaccurate for anyone in the industry to claim that one tool is to blame for some erroneously perceived issues with the state of VFX and CGI. It’s true that there are a lot more people making computer graphics than ever before, and with that scale comes a range of successes and failures – but aesthetic and craft comes from artists, not software.
Unreal Engine is primarily used for pre-visualization, virtual production, and in some cases final pixels. I can guarantee that the artists working on big blockbuster VFX films like Pirates of the Caribbean 10-15 years ago could only dream about having a tool as powerful as Unreal Engine on their desks to help them get the job done. And I should know – I was one of them.”
Both could be true, but it is also true that one of the most common criticisms we hear about VFX-heavy movies around these parts is the statement “It looks like a video game cut scene!” so this could be a plausible explanation why.
What do you think, Outposters?
The post Is Unreal Engine To Blame For Bad VFX? appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
