Weeks ago, the people from MirrorShowManagement asked me to rig and create some face expressions of my old M&M’s characters. They needed to create larger than life sculptures for a Mars stand. I finally made the rigging and the morph targets for the face and this is how the M&M’s characters turned out. They used the models to come up with the poses for the characters which they then sent to a sculptor.
Over the last few years, a brand new technology has emerged for creating CGI effects that has already made a big impact on feature film production. It is called point-based rendering, and this powerful technique makes creating global illumination effects for feature film far more practical and efficient than before. In fact, this year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the creators of this innovation, Per Christensen, Michael Bunnell and Christophe Hery, with a Scientific and Engineering Academy award.
In the next article, we will look into the development of this important new technology, how point-based rendering works, and what this all means to the future of feature film production as we know it.
Read the whole article here: Point-based rendering in Pixar’s Renderman