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Visual Virtual FX (VFX) are becoming more and more realistic. In the latest Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Industrial Light and Magic have created some award winning VFX. They launched “The Show” a couple of days ago, allowing visitors to explore some of their work. You can turn on and off the visual fx, and see what the footage looked like before being transformed to the finished product. Personally I am fascinated by their “before” footage, where you can see the tracking markers, as well as the facial expressions and acting of the real actors. Later you can look at the finished product, and how they managed to keep the original acting and expressions which makes the “monsters” appear more realistic.

ILM has used a great deal of 3D, which yet inspires me to learn more and improve my understanding of creating art in the third dimension. I was playing with Google’s SketchUp the other day. A brilliant application that really has an easy and straight forward User Interface, although there is no rendering, SketchUp makes basic 3d modeling a breeze. And it’s free! But at the same time the free version means limitations.

Since SketchUp does not handle rendering, I was looking forward to be able to use Cheetah3D to render what I’d sketched. I went to file and export, but wait, there was no option to save as anything else than a Google Earth object or a 2D image. After a quick Help keystroke, I realized that you need the SketchUpPro version to be able to export your 3D creations. The PRO version is definitely “pro” costing almost $500, not my first investment to just play around and try out a feature. So although I really enjoy the easy interface of SketchUp, I’m sadly going to have to just recommend it for those of you who don’t want or need the models rendered. (There are apparently some cheap workarounds for being able to render directly in SketchUp, however I’ll look into that another day.)