Topic awaiting preservation: What kind of Software did Matrix & Matrix Reloaded Use 2 create Slow motion & other

can any one tell me ????

In the first Matrix movie they rigged up a green screen with several hundred small video cameras placed around the scene and filmed the live actor?s then composited (sp?) that footage into a 3D environment.

In the second movie I'm guessing it was a highly custom version of Maya. Most mega budget silver screen productions are done with some variant of Maya because it's so flexible in that you can program extremely complex extensions for it.

Seriously though, the software used to make the scenes counts for shit all. It's the temporal concepts of cinematography that really make them shine IMHO.


[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 05-30-2003).]

In large film companies, its mostly in-house software. They have teams of programers just making little programs they need. Softimage

minor correction to Dracusis' comment - the cameras were 35mm still cameras with motor dirves and large film magazines.

Video wouldn't have matched the quality of the rest of the conventional film-based cinematography.

Though complex, this was a highly adaptable setup. The genius behind this was that, instead of one mobile camera moving in space over a duration of time, you get a multitude of stationary cameras firing at the same moment. Take a few frames from each and you get a pan without the subject moving. Brilliant

While that's how they did it in The Matrix, I read an article that said that in The Matrix Reloaded, specifically the "burly brawl" scene with tons of agent smiths, they used almost 100% computer graphics, including for the actors. I'm not sure how much that was exaggerated or how much I misunderstood.

nope slime, you are pretty much correct: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/matrix2_pr.html

chris


KAIROSinteractive

Dan, it's not exactly right. Have you seen the Dune miniseries that were recently broadcasted in the USA ? There were a lot of fantastic special effects into it. Almost everything was made with Lightwave. And have you seend Star Wars II the attack of the Clones ? Actually, a lot of special effects in it were made with Lightwave too, but the studios did not really tell it, they didn't want to say they used 'cheap' softwares

Lightwave is very used for movies, but the studios doesn't really tell it.

I don't know if you guys watch the credits but they were Hundreds of professionly trainned artists in that movie so think they used a single software package is pretty naive I'm sure each artist had his or her own choice in what package as long as they got there job done and was able to be exported into a compatable format. Usually they use commercal software just for modeling and maybe animation but they use big SGI workstations and costom software in production.
as far as getting slow motion effects goes any software package I've seen that supports IK (Inverse Kinmatics) and key framing can be used for the slow motion effects. as for as projecting the actor in its just a common sceenin process.
With the fighting and the tons agents smiths (which would make a good screen saver) Massive amounts of animation and modeling artists were used to compose the shot.
If you've seen the animatrix they use many of the same effects used in the movie with a less then photorealistic effect (since they don't have any visual actors just voice actors).