Just felt like sharing this with everybody.
It’s a tribute to 3 artist that completely changed my life, and had inspire me forever to be a better artist.
There names are Francisco Cortina, Andrea Maiolo e Steve Giesler.
Recently on a mailing list I was able to get some extra information about one special project.
The year was 2001 and with the release of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within on the big screen, changed the minds of a lot a people.
First the Uncanny Valley theory was in everybody's mouth and second for the first time a CG Character enter a list of the most beautiful women voted by reader of the US Maxim magazine.
For better or worse, Square Pictures nailed to hit a critical point in the art of CG, the photo-realist barrier.
Like breaking the sound barrier, it echoed in all directions and was so hard to do it, that this part of nowadays Square Enix was disassembled after the movie revenues came in.
To the marketing department it as complete failure , to me a wormhole for my soul.
The information was shared by Cheryl Rye from RGH Entertainment that I really have to thanks for sharing it.
Dr. Aki Ross in Maxim’s Hot 100
From a Andrea Maiolo email :
“Francisco Cortina, Steve Giesler and I did the work for that image.
Francisco had to spend some time to sculpt a complete body as in all her previous appearances Aky showed very little skin.
Steven did the work of collecting volunteers for photo reference and paints the textures. Not sure who ended up modeling the bikini. I believe Francisco and Steve went back and forth. We got photo references from Maxim so we knew exactly what she was going to wear. ….
The shaders were those used for FFTSW and the renderer was Renderman 3.7. We generated the ribs using MTOR out of Maya 2.0.
Francisco also had to do a new groom as the hair style didn’t really match what she had in the movie. The hair was rendered separately and composited in the final image.
We used the plugin that Jonathan Rise wrote (and was never used in production) to generate global illumination. That plugin calculated one bounce indirect diffuse that was stored on the mesh vertices and then passed to Renderman. I wrote the shader that used that information to generate a pass and then we merged that with the beauty pass of the body and the hair. Once the we had all the elements Steven spend some time in Photoshop adding blooms and balancing colors to make the image more “glamorous”. We did 3 test prints with one of the fancy printers used by the art department and then we send the file off to Maxim. One of that test print signed by Steven and Francisco is still hanging framed on the wall of my studio
One of the elements we got from the magazine was the background Aki was supposed to be “photographed” in front of. We took the background and add it as first layer in the Photoshop image. At delivery we suggested to the magazine to get our Photoshop file. The declined but then apparently they decided to replace the wooden background with a constant blue. That forced them to roto Aki and re-balance the image with all the filters applied to with the effect of having the final published image to look much more computer generated that it was delivered.
Ciao,
A.“
I really needed to share this with the world.
Please do check the work of this artists.
Somesite are really old specially Andrea’s that it’s still storaged in angelfire.com !
Links and references:
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Square Enix
Andrea Maiolo
Francisco Cortina
Steve Giesler
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