This is nice, but a few historical details aren't quite right. I was part of the crew that made this - and I'm in that group photo you showed. John did not go to England to measure the set and record where the lights were. Someone else got that info for us. Motion blur was invented in the Computer Division, and we were never part of ILM. We rendered the highlights as a separate element so that ILM Optical could tweak them, and if you look carefully all of the floating bits of glass are slightly convex, which allowed a more pleasing reflection of the environment. (When Barry Levinson asked in dailies for it to look "more religious" we all panicked, but Dennis Muren just had Optical add 2 more clicks of diffusion to the glow pass.) A detail you might like is that the candles and stands in the foreground of that tracking shot are all CGI. That rack focus shot was so expensive to compute that I spent 2 weeks at CCI headquarters in Orange County rendering just the last 2/3 of that shot on borrowed computers overnight. Meanwhile, Bill Reeves (the bearded guy in the photo with John) rendered the first third. I had to fly down with two giant disk packs which each could hold about 300 Mb. You should definitely read Alvy Ray Smith's book, "A Biography of the Pixel" to get this, and the rest of the history of computer graphics. It's terrific.
i'd love to see a video where every member of the crew recreates their first ever vfx shot with the knowledge and skills they've gained over the years!
And that's why you just play Fashion Souls, or Elden Bling, in this case. Just take whatever looks good and rock that. As long as it doesn't mean that you get one shot by everyone, fashion is more inportant. lol
"Filmed it all on my phone" is such a breezed over line considering the original took god knows how many people, machines and the 9 od months of time It's insane how far the tech has come
The concept of a 4K phone itself is insane, let alone the fact that you could shoot a broadcast quality film on one, and that almost anyone can afford one boggles the mind, and makes you wonder why we aren't seeing more original, creative stuff coming out almost daily from random people.
Well there's a balance. That's a good idea a lot of the time, but a lot of what you're doing may not necessarily feel right until you've seen your existing process the full way through with the current project. Most art is a constant see-saw between "screw what's correct, go with what feels right" and "it may not feel right just at the moment, but trust the process"
There are many examples where mathematically correct doesn't look right at all. A grey gradient doesn't look balanced if you go 0-100% opaqueness linearly. The perceived neutral greypoint is like 40% or so? Don't remember the exact number
Genuinely appreciated the reverence Wren and Jordan had for the "old guard" while making this video. Always important to pay credit to the guys that paved the way before us. Well done remake too! Seriously impressive for a few days' work.
It's good to pay tribute but it's commonly believed that much of the technological advancements of this era were influenced by OPE's (other planet entities), as the leaps in knowledge from what came before is just too vast and still unexplained.
If the crew ever get Catmull or Lasseter on the couch, they should ask them about the illegal wage fixing that financially hobbled generations of their peers, or the rampant sexual harrassment and discrimination that excluded who-knows-how-many VFX artists and animators from the industry entirely. Nobody's perfect, but to go out of one's way to impede the lives of others should not be forgiven by virtue of their VFX chops.
As a proffesional stainedglass maker. Glass of course is see-through. But when it's painted, which this knight would be, the layers block a lot of the seethrough ness while still let enough light come through to get the colour. The original knight would be from a cathedral window so this guy would have several layers of contourlines and shading. Sir Jordan as how Griffin designed him had several pieces of glass with defined contour lines and should have different layers of shading to get the nuances. So he wouldn't have been completely seethrough as stained glass proper. All that said, I am just nitpicking and it looks great.
Has the Corridor Crew covered ReBoot yet? It's credited with being the first fully 3d animated television series. In 1994 it was quite revolutionary. It would be really meta if ReBoot got a Reboot.
It did and it was not all that good, imo. It's pretty much what if we mixed VR Troopers and Code Lyoko and then threw it into the ReBoot universe but we'll barely use the characters from said series. It was poorly received and only got 20 episodes before being canned. Oh and the main bad guy is a human who wants to return the world to a state before computers.
One of the weird things about getting older is when you realize that "Young Sherlock Holmes," which you totally remember seeing when it came out, is now considered historically significant.
This BLOWS MY MIND how good the original looks for a mid-80s effect, and even looks ten+ years ahead of it's time. Something about the blurry, blooming nature of it, coupled with the rack-focusing and tracking shots really sells the effect more than - I dare say - many effects that came in the following decade even into the 2000's. Stunning.
The secret is that they understood the limitations and stayed within it and had enough time and resources to do what they did. We don’t have real life moving stained glass knights to compare it to and it is deliberately simplified in form and movement.
This knight was our second attempt. The first version looked like shards of shower door glass, as if he were a mosaic. The director didn't like it, so this painted look was where we went.
17:55 Adding the emissive channel kind of makes sense, if you think about it. IRL the glass wouldn't just be transparent. It would also be refracting and scattering light, so adding that bit of emitted light to the surface just helps to fill in that part of the illusion.
Nine months for one sequence is nuts! I've single-handedly made about ten animations in that time. Hats off to the pioneers of CGI, it must have been a real slog.
Inspiration for a future video? There's another comment briefly explaining how actual cathedral stained glass has multiple layers of coloring and contouring that could be an interesting dive. I'm personally inspired to try making a stained glass figurine with proper metal joinery or brazing or whatever the proper term is now. So instead of a magically suspended knight, like would be if an actual stained glass artisan crafted the knight.
It didn't seem like a slog, but it was a lot of work. Well, the rendering of that rack focus shot did feel like a slog, now that you mention it. But that was only 2 weeks.
I mean considering that the way you built the character is this shattered man, I think adding in the Emission filter is quite intuitive. The glass would refract light in ways that would be hard to simulate so having it just glow a little bit is a good way to emulate that I think.
I think perhaps it's more that the time we look at stained glass is when there's light shining through it, as that's when you can really see it and it looks good, so it would look off / unsatisfying if it's not 'backlit'.
Also refractive material often end up darker just because there is not enough samples to represent real total amount of light that go trough. It usually work fine with an absurd amount of samples but it also take an absurd amount of time to render. So emission is a good way to fix this without increasing render time.
@@callum_boss That's a good guess, but even more than that it's because it's usually looked at in a church setting, so there are certain mystical and religious forces that would influence our perception of the glass
I like how these videos aren’t just solely about the project your making but are educational and reflective on the history of how this is possible but also the story of why. So those of us who are also learning or trying to get into animations or visual effects have a deeper and better understanding of the process and it’s origins.
Just reading this sentence back makes my brain tie itself into a knot of confusion. "what 2015 actually looked like"...I mean it's true but it also makes me go "wtf, when did we end up in the future". Jesus XD
Wren first mentioning Stormlight Archive is what got me to start reading it. I’m now half way through the 4th book. I would love to see Corridor’s take on a shardblade in a short film.
An idea I had, you often try to recreate old things using new technology, how about trying to recreate something new using old school VFX tech? Alternatively, maybe you could see how accurately you can reproduce a scene from a modern movie using ONLY free software and assets found online/made yourself (With free software, also, of course)?
The trouble with recreating something new with old tech is the time frame. They have tight schedules to produce video content. Older tech tends to be more labor intensive and time consuming.
Aside from the science and scale of everything, this is one of my favorite series, looking at old movies, figuring out how they made them, and then trying to remake them using a modern take. There are a lot of things we do and learn but we take them for granted until you really take a deep dive and see how special they were and still are to this day.
Its funny how this is the first CGI character ever created and yet we have never seen any hommage to him. I certainly didn't know about him or this movie before this video. Screw the jumping lamp, pixar should have this dude as their mascot
Whenever you think of stained glass, you always think of light beaming in through a huge church window. Light is always washing through stained glass. I think it makes perfect sense for the 3d character to have an emissive property, since the glass was magically taken from the bright window.
4:50 which is called 'forward kinematics' in robotics land. Inverse kinematics is where you have a constraint, like the tooltip or gripper needing to be in a certain position and orientation, or following a certain path, and then need to work out the set of joint angles that can fulfill those constraints.
Jim Henson's Labyrinth has a lot of practical effects, but also some advanced (for its time) visual effects: - The red fox dancers against the black background - The CGI owl during the opening credits
@@whosaidthat84 such an uncomfortable movie to watch with a nearly 40 yr old man prancing about with his dick on show, while trying to entice a young girl to him by stealing her baby brother... Especially after Bowie had multiple allegations of such things (as did many 70s rock stars. Which may or may not be true in Bowie's case but for some reason he's celebrated for it anyways, like 'comedian' David Baddiel claims "Why on earth wouldn't you want to lose your virginity to Bowie?" when expressing surprise his friend turned Bowie down when she was 16 and he was 40+. Um.... ). Used to think that movie was alright but after what happened between a family member and a former friend of our parents, it's far too creepy.
This gave me some serious PaRappa the Rapper Vibes! I love how you dive into the history, geek out, and pay homage to it. The passion for your craft and related crafts is palpable.
@@3DJapan I think you may be confusing it with Flight of the Navigator? (Haven't seen Last Starfighter in its entirety, don't know if it also has a scene that fits that description) Search for "last starfighter death blossom", that clip is extremely obviously CG
@@3DJapan "The Last Starfighter's" spaceship scenes were all CGi. Of course, there were live action mock-ups for the actors to interact with. Rendering technology was no where what it is today. There was mentioned, by another, "Flight of the Navigator" and the only part of that that looked stop motion, I can recall, was the morphing of the entrance to the ship from smooth hull to chromed steps.
Love your videos. You guys have taught me so much when it comes to animation, special effects, stuntmen/women and much more. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
I too have learned so much, except I make signs, not special effects/animation.. but it sure is nice to have a better understanding on how things work or are made 🤘
Really enjoyable homage to a fab sequence, thanks! I still have very strong memories of seeing this at the cinema, aged 15 and being blown away by the effect, like nothing I'd seen on film before. Young Sherlock Holmes is a much underrated movie. When it came out on VHS, I'd play that scene again and again, like they did at the start of this video, marvelling at the details. I loved not only how the glass was transparent and reflective, but that each piece was also convex, bowing outwards a little, just like very old stained glass does in real-life. PS - when looking back at pioneering CGI, don't forget the Genesis sequence from Star Trek II, again something that really stood out in the cinema for me back in 1982 - I still replay that part where the camera zips between two rising mountain peaks in my head! Funny how certain VFX scenes just stay with you as strong memories.
Isn't that the sequence where they invented particle systems? Idk the name of the shot, just that it was a doomsday portrayal of burning away a planet's atmosphere or something like that, and that it was a Star Trek movie.
@@alecbeirne8135 ah, yes. sunraiser's the other candidate. completely slipped my mind there. shocking really, given a few days ago I started rereading the series so far.
@@emceemikey it's still a little niche, but I'm so glad it's getting there. Can't wait for sanderson to confirm a stormlight animated series or something
Scratches bounce light in real life. They are imperfections or changes in a surface which have their own shadows and highligts. What you did with the emitter is what miniature painters often do to paint scratches in armor. Such a cool video!
So fun! I love this channel. I'm sure that all of this takes wayyyy more work than you make it seem, but I still get the vibe that you all have so much fun most of the time, and it really comes through. What an ideal gig
A note about using the emissive channel, remember that while glass is see through it does reflect the surrounding light while also filtering the color, so having it "emit" light is not unrealistic
I'm currently in a great 3D school, first year, and it's amazing how, after having followed you for about two or three years now, I'm starting to completely understand everything you're talking about without you having to explain it. Sometimes, I can even think "oh hey... given enough time and a bit of practice, I guess i could do that !"
What is incredible is that the original graphic looked just as good, if not better than in some cases, as Wren's render. It definitely shows the level of detail they went into to create this shot back in 1985. But Both shots looked great.
i love these types of historical videos! Suggestion: maybe a video looking back at the technological advances Corridor has had. I remember watching you guys go from GoPro's and self-stick's to using RED's and Ronin's now being combined with the apps making production easier. i think you could have a great series talking about your own journey through media production/evolution, let alone talking about famous movies that shaped effects, but how your use of effects, assets, and apps has changed and adapted over time on RUclips and through your own content like the Son of a Dungeon series or these shorts
I'd love to see a deep dive on the demonstration of the "Genesis Device" from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. You guys never touch Star Trek stuff despite those 80s movies having some real CGI firsts in them.
I'd love to see them look at some new Trek as well. Say what you will about the JJ movies, but they look stunning - I'd love them to look at the Yorktown from Beyond, and the Enterprise getting destroyed by the swarm ships.
Definitely, I remember watching STII aged 12 and loving that Genesis sequence. I think there's scope for a look back at all the warp drive interpretations, some are amazing. I always thought STTMP was a bit OTT at first, but I think it may now be my favourite.
Funny, I'm brand new to 3D modelling, I have been working on a ps1 esque retro game and I ran into exactly the same issue as wren, without adding some emission, often the lighting would not look right on some materials. Even when it doesn't make sense for the object to be emitting light, tweaking emission just helped nail the overall look.
I saw YSH in the theater as a teen and that scene was truly something new! Watched it with my kid recently and thought it held up better than I would have expected considering the level of tech available back then
Somebody please forward this video to the folks at *Skydance Animation* - that's where most of the former-Pixar creators (including John Lasseter and Edwin Catmull) and animators are now.
Proof that a Corridor video doesn't have to pull out all the VFX stops to be _exceptional_ - the fantastic breakdown of the original shot's composition already made this a special episode. But then, the deep dive into the ILM/Pixar history of developing the technology in the first place - who would have known rigging started here? - and learning about the abilities of DeepMotion (can't thank you enough; this might even have solved a potential creative barrier at work) - I mean, what more can you ask for? History and exceptional new tech all in one. Definitely one of my ALL TIME favorite Crew videos. Bravo!
Could y’all PLEASE do the chronicles of riddick? Specifically the interior of necromonger ships and the lava/ash planet. I Love that movie and feel like it’s underrated !
I wonder how much less "State Farm" had to pay to just get "a portion of this video was sponsored by State Farm". I also wonder what impact that has on the impressions from the viewers
I remember seeing Young Sherlock Holmes when it came out. That scene was awesome back then. I’ve probably seen the movie a handful of times since and always have appreciated that knights animation.
The first time I noticed a "rack focus" shot that included a CG character--meaning that the CG element was OUT OF FOCUS--was in Jurassic Park's Jeep chase when Goldblum says, "Must go faster!" I could not believe my eyes! How could anyone possibly render a CG image to make it look out of focus, and then make the focus adjustment of both the character and the live background look so perfect? I had no idea that it was done this much earlier!
Yup. It was so expensive to compute that not only was it the first rack focus CG shot, but for years was the only one. Jurassic Park used a descendent of this same rendering software. By then it was called RenderMan.
Arcane is animated & rendered to recreate the feeling of pulling focus onto the subject so well, I often forgot I wasn't watching something that was recorded using handheld cameras. I haven't seen anything do it better than Arcane.
Literally made a fun fact Presentation of CGI History 2 weeks ago to my coworkers! Seeing this now validates all the sleepless work put into it. You guys were the influence for me to do that front of a bunch of people I barely know.
@@alainchristian you missed the point. it’s not just a phone. Only the motion tracking part is. And that’s a bonus. Given all the technological innovations today, you can spend much more time on the actual art. In the original one, the tech was so bad they had to move vertices of every polygon manually for animating a frame. Most of those months went into developing tools and manual labour that substituted for todays computational power. Today’s iphone is more powerful than the computer used in the apollo mission to moon. The fact that despite such improvements in computing and softwares, the original one still takes more than weeks to match in today’s time is insanely revering.
@@alainchristian doesn’t mean it’s not worth mentioning again. Lol. Seems like you are the one who needs to be more attentive in reading so you accidentally don’t misinterpret an appreciation comment as a fight.
The Red Shoes - the dancing towards the mid/central part with the various shoes dancing on their own and the woman dancing with the shoes "magically" snapping on from the reflection and such
Colored glass will scatter some of the light because of it thickness, and that is not happening with a flat texture on a mesh. That is why you needed some emissivity to make up for this. I expect that glass depth simulation will be the last thing that gets raytraced in realtime due to the extreme bounces and scattering and basically no assets have attempted to store depth for transparency.
Man.. how can the movie effect look better than the 38 years old effect? 'O' I know that the corridor guys didn't spend 9 months in the making, but... this is 38 years after '-' OMG, computer graphics are SOOO difficult to make! even a "simple" effect today.
The point is, many of the problems regarding how the audience or the viewer sees it and feels about it remains the same. They wanted to see if they could make it better, and we all knew they could make it equally good and quicker, but it’s also how it’s perceived and what defines it’s “better”ness
It's amazing how the Stained Glass Man holds up so well even today. You guys did a great job of emulating the look, too! I would love to see more of these "history of VFX" videos, it really is useful to see the foundations of how this stuff developed and what techniques and technologies have still persisted to today.
There’s an 80s movie called Dragonslayer that I happened to see the other day. It has this great scene with a wizard battling a dragon but the green screen makes it look ridiculously dated. It made me wonder what the Corridor Crew could do with it.
This is nice, but a few historical details aren't quite right. I was part of the crew that made this - and I'm in that group photo you showed.
John did not go to England to measure the set and record where the lights were. Someone else got that info for us. Motion blur was invented in the Computer Division, and we were never part of ILM.
We rendered the highlights as a separate element so that ILM Optical could tweak them, and if you look carefully all of the floating bits of glass are slightly convex, which allowed a more pleasing reflection of the environment. (When Barry Levinson asked in dailies for it to look "more religious" we all panicked, but Dennis Muren just had Optical add 2 more clicks of diffusion to the glow pass.)
A detail you might like is that the candles and stands in the foreground of that tracking shot are all CGI.
That rack focus shot was so expensive to compute that I spent 2 weeks at CCI headquarters in Orange County rendering just the last 2/3 of that shot on borrowed computers overnight. Meanwhile, Bill Reeves (the bearded guy in the photo with John) rendered the first third. I had to fly down with two giant disk packs which each could hold about 300 Mb.
You should definitely read Alvy Ray Smith's book, "A Biography of the Pixel" to get this, and the rest of the history of computer graphics. It's terrific.
Wow! It's always fascinating to read input from the people originally involved with these projects! Thank you for your clarifications and addendums!
Thanks so much for your pioneering work! I owe you so much!
Corridor Crew has to read this!!!
Thank you for the information!
How the hell do you get dailies for vfx back then when shots took so long to render?
i'd love to see a video where every member of the crew recreates their first ever vfx shot with the knowledge and skills they've gained over the years!
That would be an excellent idea. Just replying to boost the comment.
Yes!
commenting
so
this
This armor is literally when you have the best stats but none of the armor is in a matching set
Lmao
Playing far cry 6 🤣 right now
Like my Elden Ring char.
And that's why you just play Fashion Souls, or Elden Bling, in this case.
Just take whatever looks good and rock that. As long as it doesn't mean that you get one shot by everyone, fashion is more inportant. lol
Dude looks like the veteran who has the most legendary gears and the most ridiculous look.
"Filmed it all on my phone" is such a breezed over line considering the original took god knows how many people, machines and the 9 od months of time
It's insane how far the tech has come
The concept of a 4K phone itself is insane, let alone the fact that you could shoot a broadcast quality film on one, and that almost anyone can afford one boggles the mind, and makes you wonder why we aren't seeing more original, creative stuff coming out almost daily from random people.
@@NelsonStJames it feels like yesterday that a phone being able to have 480p was already insane levels of quality for a phone.
The glass "emitting" light actually makes sense because the glass would refract some of the light around it back out.
Maybe an easy way to simulate little of subsurface scattering too ?
_" When correct doesn't feel right, go with your feelings"_ is such an important bit of advice for creative work
doesn't usually hold up in court though
Well there's a balance. That's a good idea a lot of the time, but a lot of what you're doing may not necessarily feel right until you've seen your existing process the full way through with the current project.
Most art is a constant see-saw between "screw what's correct, go with what feels right" and "it may not feel right just at the moment, but trust the process"
Me when I'm taking a multiple choice test
There are many examples where mathematically correct doesn't look right at all. A grey gradient doesn't look balanced if you go 0-100% opaqueness linearly. The perceived neutral greypoint is like 40% or so? Don't remember the exact number
What’s more important to the audience, technically correct or feels correct? Motion pictures have always been a trick ;)
Genuinely appreciated the reverence Wren and Jordan had for the "old guard" while making this video. Always important to pay credit to the guys that paved the way before us. Well done remake too! Seriously impressive for a few days' work.
I have mixed feelings about being "the old guard".
It's good to pay tribute but it's commonly believed that much of the technological advancements of this era were influenced by OPE's (other planet entities), as the leaps in knowledge from what came before is just too vast and still unexplained.
If the crew ever get Catmull or Lasseter on the couch, they should ask them about the illegal wage fixing that financially hobbled generations of their peers, or the rampant sexual harrassment and discrimination that excluded who-knows-how-many VFX artists and animators from the industry entirely. Nobody's perfect, but to go out of one's way to impede the lives of others should not be forgiven by virtue of their VFX chops.
@@CraigGood Much respect to you sir.
@@buffnipz Your ignorance of the explanation doesn't mean it hasn't been explained. Let alone that fuckin' _aliens_ had anything to do with it lmao
As a proffesional stainedglass maker.
Glass of course is see-through. But when it's painted, which this knight would be, the layers block a lot of the seethrough ness while still let enough light come through to get the colour.
The original knight would be from a cathedral window so this guy would have several layers of contourlines and shading.
Sir Jordan as how Griffin designed him had several pieces of glass with defined contour lines and should have different layers of shading to get the nuances. So he wouldn't have been completely seethrough as stained glass proper.
All that said, I am just nitpicking and it looks great.
The artwork misses the medieval style totally.
@@marieascot It's about the tech and just having fun with it, so we can probably let it slide
Has the Corridor Crew covered ReBoot yet? It's credited with being the first fully 3d animated television series. In 1994 it was quite revolutionary.
It would be really meta if ReBoot got a Reboot.
Im pretty sure it did.
It did and it was not all that good, imo. It's pretty much what if we mixed VR Troopers and Code Lyoko and then threw it into the ReBoot universe but we'll barely use the characters from said series. It was poorly received and only got 20 episodes before being canned. Oh and the main bad guy is a human who wants to return the world to a state before computers.
Nobody remembers Adventures of Johnny Quest or Shadow Raiders
0:26 "Th-"
My uncle was the “glass man coordinator” for that movie!!
You gotta email corridor with this info. Is your uncle still with us? Would be cool to see his thoughts on this
@@CBWBS He's still very much alive! I'll try my hand at getting in touch with Corridor, but I feel like I won't have much luck. I'll try though.
@@gregjoblove672 They do read the comments a lot, so a good shot should not be waisted.
Potential VFX artist guest?
@@gregjoblove672 definitely try. That would be really cool!
My wife made some of the costumes for that film. She was very upset when you said it was nearly forty years ago!
Wren: "And this was like... 40 years ago."
Me, who is as old as this footage: _"Don't..."_
Same
"38 is pretty much 40, woooah"
me: awkward-seal.jpg
Me, who was a teenager when the film came out...
F
big oooff! I want to be very clear here: it was 37 years ago.... ;)
One of the weird things about getting older is when you realize that "Young Sherlock Holmes," which you totally remember seeing when it came out, is now considered historically significant.
Well obviously not, this entire video was dedicated to it.
That Young Sherlock Holmes sequence is insane. It still looks incredible to this day.
yep it holds
4:40
Wild how they were like.
"It's like, stiff bits inside a human which have like joints so it can move."
Like. a Skeleton?
"Like. a tree bro."
dude
@@tehkill3r sweet!
It makes sense when you consider that these were technical artists and computer scientists. A tree is a type of data graph.
This BLOWS MY MIND how good the original looks for a mid-80s effect, and even looks ten+ years ahead of it's time. Something about the blurry, blooming nature of it, coupled with the rack-focusing and tracking shots really sells the effect more than - I dare say - many effects that came in the following decade even into the 2000's. Stunning.
Made by a team of George Lucas look-alikes.
The secret is that they understood the limitations and stayed within it and had enough time and resources to do what they did. We don’t have real life moving stained glass knights to compare it to and it is deliberately simplified in form and movement.
This knight was our second attempt. The first version looked like shards of shower door glass, as if he were a mosaic. The director didn't like it, so this painted look was where we went.
@@CraigGood bruh, you guys are legends.
Wren: The fact that two of us were able to make this in a week is incredible to me!
Griffin: .......
Isnt that who he was talking about?
The third person is just the actor in this case.
@@WayStedYou Jordan helped with the animation
@@WayStedYou actors do work too lol
@@mattschumacher4581 not anymore they won't, Disney'll make sure of that.
@@linguini8331 what
17:55 Adding the emissive channel kind of makes sense, if you think about it. IRL the glass wouldn't just be transparent. It would also be refracting and scattering light, so adding that bit of emitted light to the surface just helps to fill in that part of the illusion.
Nine months for one sequence is nuts! I've single-handedly made about ten animations in that time. Hats off to the pioneers of CGI, it must have been a real slog.
Inspiration for a future video? There's another comment briefly explaining how actual cathedral stained glass has multiple layers of coloring and contouring that could be an interesting dive.
I'm personally inspired to try making a stained glass figurine with proper metal joinery or brazing or whatever the proper term is now. So instead of a magically suspended knight, like would be if an actual stained glass artisan crafted the knight.
It didn't seem like a slog, but it was a lot of work.
Well, the rendering of that rack focus shot did feel like a slog, now that you mention it. But that was only 2 weeks.
its not that nuts when you add inventing new technology to the process. Imagine your job but you have to invent the tools to do it.
Not quite pioneers. Vertigo 1958 was the very first CGI ever used although this was far more advanced.
@@vikinglife6316 That's hilarious. There is no CGI in "Vertigo". Computer graphics really didn't even exist yet.
Love to see you guys add motion blur to some of history's most iconic stop motion characters and see how it changes the movie
This is a really neat idea!
It's amazing how well the original shot holds up.
I mean considering that the way you built the character is this shattered man, I think adding in the Emission filter is quite intuitive. The glass would refract light in ways that would be hard to simulate so having it just glow a little bit is a good way to emulate that I think.
good point, its not only translucent but refractive
I think perhaps it's more that the time we look at stained glass is when there's light shining through it, as that's when you can really see it and it looks good, so it would look off / unsatisfying if it's not 'backlit'.
Also refractive material often end up darker just because there is not enough samples to represent real total amount of light that go trough. It usually work fine with an absurd amount of samples but it also take an absurd amount of time to render. So emission is a good way to fix this without increasing render time.
@@callum_boss That's a good guess, but even more than that it's because it's usually looked at in a church setting, so there are certain mystical and religious forces that would influence our perception of the glass
Like adding an ambient light value to the glass
I like how these videos aren’t just solely about the project your making but are educational and reflective on the history of how this is possible but also the story of why. So those of us who are also learning or trying to get into animations or visual effects have a deeper and better understanding of the process and it’s origins.
0:25 Literally the shortest ad read of all time, a record that may never be broken.
I'd love to see you guys "remaster" the back to the future 2015 scenes to make it more realistic to what 2015 actually looked like
This would be so cool!
Just reading this sentence back makes my brain tie itself into a knot of confusion. "what 2015 actually looked like"...I mean it's true but it also makes me go "wtf, when did we end up in the future". Jesus XD
That could actually be hilarious!
There is one, look up back to the future 2015 on youtube
@@chompchompnomnom4256 Yeah, but I'm saying with like the original actors and such 🤷♂️
Wren first mentioning Stormlight Archive is what got me to start reading it. I’m now half way through the 4th book. I would love to see Corridor’s take on a shardblade in a short film.
It really does hold up in many ways, can't wait to see the full recreation shot
An idea I had, you often try to recreate old things using new technology, how about trying to recreate something new using old school VFX tech?
Alternatively, maybe you could see how accurately you can reproduce a scene from a modern movie using ONLY free software and assets found online/made yourself (With free software, also, of course)?
Yeessss
Lemme know if you possibly hear anything or find anything similir to this
The trouble with recreating something new with old tech is the time frame. They have tight schedules to produce video content. Older tech tends to be more labor intensive and time consuming.
Aside from the science and scale of everything, this is one of my favorite series, looking at old movies, figuring out how they made them, and then trying to remake them using a modern take. There are a lot of things we do and learn but we take them for granted until you really take a deep dive and see how special they were and still are to this day.
Its funny how this is the first CGI character ever created and yet we have never seen any hommage to him. I certainly didn't know about him or this movie before this video. Screw the jumping lamp, pixar should have this dude as their mascot
Reminds me of a castlevania enemy that does the same thing but im not sure if its a reference to this or that both reference some monster of folklore.
Yep the glass knight from castlevania is a direct reference to this one, first appeared in Haunted Castle for arcades.
That would have been amazing haha
It’s a pretty good movie.
I see Wren talking about Stormlight so much. I would love to see an animated shardbearer duel! Or even the Dalinar vs Chasmfiend fight!
I would love to see a sharable vs lightsaber duel. As a sanderson and star wars fan it would explode my tiny nerd mind
Whenever you think of stained glass, you always think of light beaming in through a huge church window. Light is always washing through stained glass. I think it makes perfect sense for the 3d character to have an emissive property, since the glass was magically taken from the bright window.
4:50 which is called 'forward kinematics' in robotics land.
Inverse kinematics is where you have a constraint, like the tooltip or gripper needing to be in a certain position and orientation, or following a certain path, and then need to work out the set of joint angles that can fulfill those constraints.
Now that State Farm sponsored them I want to see Jake from State Farm and Jake from Corridor to do a sponsor segment together
Jim Henson's Labyrinth has a lot of practical effects, but also some advanced (for its time) visual effects:
- The red fox dancers against the black background
- The CGI owl during the opening credits
And David Bowie's package was 100% CGI 🙃🙃It was too glorious to be real 😏😜
@@whosaidthat84 such an uncomfortable movie to watch with a nearly 40 yr old man prancing about with his dick on show, while trying to entice a young girl to him by stealing her baby brother... Especially after Bowie had multiple allegations of such things (as did many 70s rock stars. Which may or may not be true in Bowie's case but for some reason he's celebrated for it anyways, like 'comedian' David Baddiel claims "Why on earth wouldn't you want to lose your virginity to Bowie?" when expressing surprise his friend turned Bowie down when she was 16 and he was 40+. Um.... ). Used to think that movie was alright but after what happened between a family member and a former friend of our parents, it's far too creepy.
I just love these wren side projects. His enthusiasm in his approach to everything just makes me grin wideee.
Keep up the good work..
The actual scene with Jordan at the end is one of my favorite things I've ever seen. He is great.
This gave me some serious PaRappa the Rapper Vibes!
I love how you dive into the history, geek out, and pay homage to it. The passion for your craft and related crafts is palpable.
Oh my god it's not just me thank fuck XD
What an awesome video! I'd love to see you create the morph scene from Willow.
The Last Starfighter was one of the earliest films to use CGI to make "realistic" space ships in 1984. I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Was it CG? I know the stairs coming down from the ship were stop motion even though they look like CG.
@@3DJapan I think you may be confusing it with Flight of the Navigator? (Haven't seen Last Starfighter in its entirety, don't know if it also has a scene that fits that description)
Search for "last starfighter death blossom", that clip is extremely obviously CG
@@3DJapan
"The Last Starfighter's" spaceship scenes were all CGi. Of course, there were live action mock-ups for the actors to interact with. Rendering technology was no where what it is today.
There was mentioned, by another, "Flight of the Navigator" and the only part of that that looked stop motion, I can recall, was the morphing of the entrance to the ship from smooth hull to chromed steps.
I bought some larger quotation marks for your realistic. Here you go.
@@3DJapan You're thinking flight of the navigator?
Love your videos. You guys have taught me so much when it comes to animation, special effects, stuntmen/women and much more. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
I too have learned so much, except I make signs, not special effects/animation.. but it sure is nice to have a better understanding on how things work or are made 🤘
Really enjoyable homage to a fab sequence, thanks! I still have very strong memories of seeing this at the cinema, aged 15 and being blown away by the effect, like nothing I'd seen on film before. Young Sherlock Holmes is a much underrated movie. When it came out on VHS, I'd play that scene again and again, like they did at the start of this video, marvelling at the details. I loved not only how the glass was transparent and reflective, but that each piece was also convex, bowing outwards a little, just like very old stained glass does in real-life. PS - when looking back at pioneering CGI, don't forget the Genesis sequence from Star Trek II, again something that really stood out in the cinema for me back in 1982 - I still replay that part where the camera zips between two rising mountain peaks in my head! Funny how certain VFX scenes just stay with you as strong memories.
Isn't that the sequence where they invented particle systems? Idk the name of the shot, just that it was a doomsday portrayal of burning away a planet's atmosphere or something like that, and that it was a Star Trek movie.
It's always nice to hear a Stormlight reference where you least expect them.
To think, without this moment of CGI history, special effects wouldn’t be were it is today.
For real. And people can say if they didn't do it someone else would have, but THEY DID IT!!!
It is incredible!
There IS a shardblade described as straight, long with a waved blade and cross guard. So It pretty much is a shardblade
Kalanor's? that's the only one that comes to mind
@@professormutant3252 Elhokars, i think. Its called Sunraiser.
@@alecbeirne8135 ah, yes. sunraiser's the other candidate. completely slipped my mind there. shocking really, given a few days ago I started rereading the series so far.
I'm so happy we live in a world where shardblades are becoming as household as lightsabers
@@emceemikey it's still a little niche, but I'm so glad it's getting there. Can't wait for sanderson to confirm a stormlight animated series or something
Scratches bounce light in real life. They are imperfections or changes in a surface which have their own shadows and highligts. What you did with the emitter is what miniature painters often do to paint scratches in armor. Such a cool video!
So fun! I love this channel. I'm sure that all of this takes wayyyy more work than you make it seem, but I still get the vibe that you all have so much fun most of the time, and it really comes through. What an ideal gig
So good. Every time I watch one of your "history of VFX" videos, I wind up with something else on my watch list. Thanks for the post!
A note about using the emissive channel, remember that while glass is see through it does reflect the surrounding light while also filtering the color, so having it "emit" light is not unrealistic
That image of young Steve Jobs really does look like Ashton Kutcher looking back now that was really good casting for that movie.
Idea: Make a 20-second fake 'remake' of your favorite 90s video games using whatever 2D, 2.5D, 3D rendering you want. It's going to be hilarious.
It’s awesome seeing you guys give so much love and respect to the pioneers of your craft.
I’d love to see a recreation of the barn owl from the opening titles of Labyrinth. Pretty sure it was the first photorealistic animal in a film.
I'm currently in a great 3D school, first year, and it's amazing how, after having followed you for about two or three years now, I'm starting to completely understand everything you're talking about without you having to explain it. Sometimes, I can even think "oh hey... given enough time and a bit of practice, I guess i could do that !"
I have edited myself into movies and TV shows using some of your advice, tips and tricks so thanks!!!
Post vid and link!
@@Yoyoyoitsdatboi just click his profile it’s all there
As the first cgi in a film, its not too bad for the technology when it was made surely
It looks fab made
It's not the first CGI in fim - it's the first CGI character in film
First cgi character, not cgi in a film, cgi can be traced back to the 70s
@@JohnnyWednesday you know what I mean though
Not too bad for the technology? It's a ridiculously amazing feat for the technology
What is incredible is that the original graphic looked just as good, if not better than in some cases, as Wren's render. It definitely shows the level of detail they went into to create this shot back in 1985. But Both shots looked great.
No joke, the comedic timing of "Thank you milord!" @ 12:32 is absolute gold.
i love these types of historical videos!
Suggestion: maybe a video looking back at the technological advances Corridor has had. I remember watching you guys go from GoPro's and self-stick's to using RED's and Ronin's now being combined with the apps making production easier. i think you could have a great series talking about your own journey through media production/evolution, let alone talking about famous movies that shaped effects, but how your use of effects, assets, and apps has changed and adapted over time on RUclips and through your own content like the Son of a Dungeon series or these shorts
I'd love to see a deep dive on the demonstration of the "Genesis Device" from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. You guys never touch Star Trek stuff despite those 80s movies having some real CGI firsts in them.
I had one of those but I mostly used it to play Sonic 3
I'd love to see them look at some new Trek as well. Say what you will about the JJ movies, but they look stunning - I'd love them to look at the Yorktown from Beyond, and the Enterprise getting destroyed by the swarm ships.
Definitely, I remember watching STII aged 12 and loving that Genesis sequence. I think there's scope for a look back at all the warp drive interpretations, some are amazing. I always thought STTMP was a bit OTT at first, but I think it may now be my favourite.
Now recreate the bullet time effect. One of you do it like they did back in 19999,the other could try a modern approach and see what turns out best
That's a fun idea, and I'm curious what would change in their strategy to accomplish it.
It'd be fun seeing Peter try to make that shot in blender v522.7 in 19999. So many cool features to play with!
13:41 Jordan dancing is my new favorite thing.
15:15 I love Wren's energy 😆 it always makes these videos so much better
I knew EXACTLY what this was when I read my notification. Epic times. Just watched it with my wife. Scared the shit out of her.
Young Sherlock Holmes is such an underrated movie.
Funny, I'm brand new to 3D modelling, I have been working on a ps1 esque retro game and I ran into exactly the same issue as wren, without adding some emission, often the lighting would not look right on some materials. Even when it doesn't make sense for the object to be emitting light, tweaking emission just helped nail the overall look.
I saw YSH in the theater as a teen and that scene was truly something new! Watched it with my kid recently and thought it held up better than I would have expected considering the level of tech available back then
massive love for you guys being 100% transparent with your sponsors, everyone's gotta eat, great vid, cheers :D keep up the great work
Stained glass man still looks HELLA good in my opinion
0:25 wow, what a great 1 second add for statefarm. funny thing is though that it made me look at it so you could say it was effective.
I had to rewind that micro ad to make sure I didn't what I saw was real.
Somebody please forward this video to the folks at *Skydance Animation* - that's where most of the former-Pixar creators (including John Lasseter and Edwin Catmull) and animators are now.
They only need to take care of Lasseter not been alone with any woman there and that is not a joke
I loved the render, but I was expecting the sound of breaking glass when he tossed the sword aside
Proof that a Corridor video doesn't have to pull out all the VFX stops to be _exceptional_ - the fantastic breakdown of the original shot's composition already made this a special episode. But then, the deep dive into the ILM/Pixar history of developing the technology in the first place - who would have known rigging started here? - and learning about the abilities of DeepMotion (can't thank you enough; this might even have solved a potential creative barrier at work) - I mean, what more can you ask for? History and exceptional new tech all in one. Definitely one of my ALL TIME favorite Crew videos. Bravo!
It's nice to hear the reverence that the corridor crew have for the pioneers of their profession
Could y’all PLEASE do the chronicles of riddick? Specifically the interior of necromonger ships and the lava/ash planet. I Love that movie and feel like it’s underrated !
I wonder how much less "State Farm" had to pay to just get "a portion of this video was sponsored by State Farm". I also wonder what impact that has on the impressions from the viewers
Would Jake be a good Jake from Statefarm? I think yes
You notice the vessi shoes in the dancing montage?
I remember seeing Young Sherlock Holmes when it came out. That scene was awesome back then. I’ve probably seen the movie a handful of times since and always have appreciated that knights animation.
I just love how Wren always shows excitement and enthusiasm about every project he works on, it's really inspiring.
I love when two or three people from the Crew work on a project together like this, it succeeds in telling a pretty enjoyable narrative
I really want to see a Corridor Crew take on Cosmere magic.
More movies to deep dive into: Last Starfighter, Star Trek 2 and 4, WIllow. Also the "Money for Nothing" music video from back in the day.
Star Trek 2 had to invent the particle system iirc
The first time I noticed a "rack focus" shot that included a CG character--meaning that the CG element was OUT OF FOCUS--was in Jurassic Park's Jeep chase when Goldblum says, "Must go faster!" I could not believe my eyes! How could anyone possibly render a CG image to make it look out of focus, and then make the focus adjustment of both the character and the live background look so perfect? I had no idea that it was done this much earlier!
Yup. It was so expensive to compute that not only was it the first rack focus CG shot, but for years was the only one. Jurassic Park used a descendent of this same rendering software. By then it was called RenderMan.
Arcane is animated & rendered to recreate the feeling of pulling focus onto the subject so well, I often forgot I wasn't watching something that was recorded using handheld cameras.
I haven't seen anything do it better than Arcane.
@@PowerScissor Are there any examples of Arcane's work that you could point me towards?
Jordan is so smart and passionate man love his energy and knowledge every video.
Literally made a fun fact Presentation of CGI History 2 weeks ago to my coworkers! Seeing this now validates all the sleepless work put into it. You guys were the influence for me to do that front of a bunch of people I barely know.
I've made stained glass before, and the og cgi knight was pretty accurate
it's crazy that the original one still looks so much better. To think how far they went into doing the best they could is so revering.
@@alainchristian you missed the point.
it’s not just a phone. Only the motion tracking part is. And that’s a bonus. Given all the technological innovations today, you can spend much more time on the actual art. In the original one, the tech was so bad they had to move vertices of every polygon manually for animating a frame. Most of those months went into developing tools and manual labour that substituted for todays computational power. Today’s iphone is more powerful than the computer used in the apollo mission to moon.
The fact that despite such improvements in computing and softwares, the original one still takes more than weeks to match in today’s time is insanely revering.
@@alainchristian doesn’t mean it’s not worth mentioning again. Lol. Seems like you are the one who needs to be more attentive in reading so you accidentally don’t misinterpret an appreciation comment as a fight.
@@alainchristian you should have moved on the first time only. Well better late than never. Lol.
oh man byplay looks like a game changer
My grandfather has been a State Farm agent for over 50 years. Thanks for taking them on as a sponsor lol. He'd appreciate it.
The Red Shoes - the dancing towards the mid/central part with the various shoes dancing on their own and the woman dancing with the shoes "magically" snapping on from the reflection and such
Jordan looking like when you choose your equipment in an rpg by how good it is, not how it looks!
Colored glass will scatter some of the light because of it thickness, and that is not happening with a flat texture on a mesh. That is why you needed some emissivity to make up for this. I expect that glass depth simulation will be the last thing that gets raytraced in realtime due to the extreme bounces and scattering and basically no assets have attempted to store depth for transparency.
Right and why bother with calculating all that for an emission anyway?
You could probably fake it with some sort of subsurface scattering using voxels for the color information
Man.. how can the movie effect look better than the 38 years old effect? 'O'
I know that the corridor guys didn't spend 9 months in the making, but... this is 38 years after '-'
OMG, computer graphics are SOOO difficult to make! even a "simple" effect today.
The point is, many of the problems regarding how the audience or the viewer sees it and feels about it remains the same. They wanted to see if they could make it better, and we all knew they could make it equally good and quicker, but it’s also how it’s perceived and what defines it’s “better”ness
Corridor Crew is excellent in hiring people. Jordan1, Jordan2, Dean, Griffin and Matt are all awesome humans.
It's amazing how the Stained Glass Man holds up so well even today. You guys did a great job of emulating the look, too!
I would love to see more of these "history of VFX" videos, it really is useful to see the foundations of how this stuff developed and what techniques and technologies have still persisted to today.
0:28 imagine being sponsored by state farm, that's epic, say hi to Jake for me, not Jake from corridor crew, you know which Jake I'm talking about
"Honey, who's on the phone?" "Oh its jake...from state farm," "you expect me to believe youre up at 3 am talking to jake? From state farm!?"
@@mediaconglomerate4897 lol
0:27 huh cut sponsorship
There’s an 80s movie called Dragonslayer that I happened to see the other day. It has this great scene with a wizard battling a dragon but the green screen makes it look ridiculously dated. It made me wonder what the Corridor Crew could do with it.
I would love to see a restoration of that film where they cleaned up those ugly mattes.
Vermithrax Perjorative!
The progress from when the first scene was shot and now is insane but the original still holds up to this day
0:29 Gonna tell my kids this was "Jake from State Farm"