ILM Software

I'm a little experienced in using 3D Studio Max and Discreet Inferno. But I was wondering the exact software they use over at ILM to create the CGI charcters in the PT and the additions to the OT (yoda, jabba, jar jar, etc..). Any help would be very appreciated.

 

Ahhhh the million dollar question.


ILM uses a combination of propietary software and commercial software. They have a ton of propietary software to deal with all sortts of things from composting (CompTime), animation (Cari), tracking (MARS), dynamics, fluids, etc.

A lot of the propietary software are plugins and extensions to commercial software or they are accessed through commerical software like Sabre (built on top Discreet's Inferno).

As far as commercial software Maya is the base animation package (and a lot of propietary stuff is accessed and setup from withing Maya) while Photorealistic RenderMan is the base rendering package. There is also a significant use of mental ray as well. Compositing wise is you conside Sabre as Inferno plus extensions, that's one, but Shake has made inroads as well. They used to use Softimage as well but seems Maya has won the battle at ILM for the most part. Of course Photoshop is important. The matte dept. besides using propietary used stuff like Max, Brazil, and a few other commercial tools. Motion capture is done via a Vicon system.

As far as the characters in the Star Wars prequels that's also a really complex answer because stuff changed a lot between the special editions and Ep. 3. Shortly, the special editions used mostly commercial software, I believe Softimage but dont quote me on that. For the PT, many of the characters were modeled via Isculpt (propietary) or via Alias software. For the first 2 prequels the characters were mainly animated via Softimage + Cari. For Ep. 3 they were animated in Maya and Cari. Maya was also used since Ep. 2 tosetup muscle dynamics and the like. They were textured mostly via Viewpaint (propietary). Rendering via PRMan mainly, there was some mental ray use I believe (dont quote me on these either). Crowd animation is done via propietary code, some of it via Python scripts and tricks using RIB archives and Maya particle animations.