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Movie models made available to the public?

Has anyone ever seen a model used in a major movie made available to the public?

I would like to see the Buzz lightyear and Woody models from Toy Story or the Incredibles models.

Nope, never seen any models like that available to the general public and I doubt you will, as they will be under all sorts of copyrights etc etc, not to mention that there probably worth quite a bit.

You might manage to get a glimpse of the wire frames somewhere (way in white papers or "making of's")

I was afraid of that.. :(

I wonder how they keep things like that safe? Digital props and masters and stuff.. You know, to protect them from getting damaged or lost etc.

There probably backed up and stored (like with backing up a system in a business)

Also if it gets leaked etc then someones probably gonna loose their job.

Yeah this just wouldnt happen.

But saying that, the best model Ive seen from a movie and it was identical literally nut and bolt, was a Jedi Starfighter from EP3 over at SpinQuads website, it was just phenomenal, and it took near five minutes to load as an obj, such was the detail. I may have it on archive somewhere, I'll have a look but check out spinquad anyway...

PS: Steve...stuff is in th post mate, you should get it tomorrow or wednesday

cheers
Jay

We need some freedom fighter to leak them! ;)

You could make it yourself. It's not like you couldn't get frontal and sideshots of Buzz. It could be a fun project for you.

That's true.. I was mainly curious to see how the masters do it.

How they had the wireframes worked out for optimum efficiency, I guess.

I look at it kind of like reverse engineering a UFO. haha

And they should be like an advanced civilization considering all the money they probably throw at that kind of stuff.

Just for the record, Buzz and woody were scanned maquettes, then just tidied up. I think Buzz had over 200 texture maps as well!!

I think you'd be surpised how alot of the meshes are. Take Shrek for instance or Puss in Boots all pretty standard meshes, with loops un the right areas not too heavy, the only differences really are whats going on underneath the surface, these characters are driven by proprietory software though modelled in off the shelf stuff. Also theyve got a muscle rig under there so deformation is going to be pretty accurate. I believe Puss was made from nurbs patches if I remember rightly, though by Shrek 3 I think everything was a subd. If anyone has the original Shrek DVD check out the 'making of' doc on it.

For Yoda in Star Wars, the final model was pretty dense, there are a few pics around on the web of him, its quite staggering!

cheers
Jay

Interesting stuff, Jay. I did a search for maquette and Toystory and found this article..

http://www.uemedia.net/CPC/vfxpro/printer_10806.shtml

Seeing the 2 different methods kind of confuses me.. I am a sculptor first.. this makes me wonder if it would be better for me to sculpt my models out in the real world then scan them. what's the cheapest you can get a scanner?

Quote:

The Character Team After the storyboards and reels are completed, the animation process begins, though not before a few preparatory steps are accomplished. The characters to be animated must first be created in the digital world. This process, which entails character sculpting, rigging and shading, is handled by a character team comprised of technical directors and artists. Basic character design is first worked out via physically sculpting a maquette figure of each character based on illustrations from the art department. While for past feature projects, such as "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo," Pixar artists would have scanned the maquette into the computer using a touch digitizer (accomplished by drawing a grid onto the figure and identifying each grid point in 3D space using a pen-like digitizing instrument), a different process was applied for "The Incredibles." "This time we did it entirely without digitizing," says Sayre. "We had a small team -- two people -- of digital sculptors. They literally just looked at the maquettes, talked to the head animators, the director and character designers, and sculpted directly into the machine." They used Maya software. "We've always had the opinion that 3D scanning is valuable if you're trying to match something directly, like tracing. But there are plenty of artists who don't need that step. A really good artist can just draw." The characters were then rigged using Pixar's proprietary rigging software. Rigging a character entails putting in the bones, joints and controls that enable a character to be choreographed. Rigging defines the ways in which a character moves when animated and encompasses everything from simple limb motion to facial expression. "This film was a big departure for us because it's all about humans, as opposed to animals or toys," said Sayre. "We had to almost completely overhaul the character rigging process to come up with a system that was more anatomically based, with bones, muscles and skin. You want the audience to feel like the characters are, say, being put in jeopardy, and the subtleties of how skin and bones move relative to each other help accomplish that." Not to say there's no hint of cartooniness. "Nobody's going to mistake them for real humans. They don't look like anybody you've ever seen." Once the characters are modeled and rigged, they were shaded. Shading defines the way the surface of an object or character responds to light, both in terms of color and texture. "A good analogy is the difference between human skin and plastic," Sayre explained. "They have might the same color, but the human skin is going to have light scattering around inside it, whereas plastic will have light bouncing directly off of it."

Scanners cost quite a bit, like thousands.

Well that sucks! haha

Is it possible to take your model somewhere and get it scanned I wonder?

Are there different types? I have seen the point scanner types.. then there is a scanner that kind of bathes the entire sculpt rgiht? Like for making action figures from humans?

Again its going to cost you loads. Plus the point cleanup on the model after will most likely be a pain in the arse.

the process is slow overall and adds another step or two before output. They tried on characters for the show I worked on back in October last year, its too much to do and was quicker to hire dudes like myself to build them.

_Jay

Did you use the bathing scanner type, like this?

Or the point scanner?

http://progressive.playstream.com/im...ga_gf0407.html

If you use the bathing type how do you map out the mesh?