yong!! I don’t know about you but I am sure 2007 lasted
about six months! It was just one of those years that didn’t let up. As we are a busy industry, it was pleasing to see the CGSociety community stepping up to suggest items to the comprehensive list of events, films and product upgrades that made the year of 2007 such a milestone. Of course as always, the criteria for selection was that the event had to mean something to the community of artists.
The event had to be a landmark, and be at least a little bit cool. About a thousand people visited the thread set up to have suggestions put forward. The proposals could have been products, events, movies, games, short films, software updates, even personal stuff. If they pulled enough votes, they got in. So, here now we present the public-voted list of the most requested cool items for 2007.
Just scraping into the top 20 is what I thought was a most ambitious and intricately-modeled search and destroy computer game. Set in the year 2552, Halo 3 involves the fight humanity has taken up against the Covenant, an alien civilization that sees humanity as a bit of a problem for their own existence. There are several sides to this whole conflict and up to the end of Halo 2, things weren’t looking too good for us all. ‘With time running out,’ as the spiel goes, ‘all hopes for the Galaxy now lie in the hands of one soldier, Spartan 117 – the Master Chief.’
This is certainly a storyline worth watching. I wonder when they will begin the movie.
The Assassin’s Creed game itself is staged as the Third Crusade engulfs the Holy lands. The player takes on the role of Altair, an assassin assigned to 'take out' targets on both sides of the conflict, with a mixture of guerilla tactics and acrobatics. While there’s a fair bit of hiding, creeping, climbing and running going on before any action takes place, it gives the player audience a chance to check out the countryside, generated by Raphael Lacoste and his great concept and environment team at Ubisoft for the long project.
The character teams relied on Max and ZBrush, which I notice are both in the Top 20 here in the 2007 Retrospective.
Ah great! A bit of hardware coolness! Since some DirectX 10 games are ready for sale already, NVIDIA has the SLI-ready nForce motherboard and the GeForce graphics cards ready to slot in and get into action. With the ‘only just announced’ SLI system, gamers can crank up their system, (if they have the play money) to experience a 2.8X improvement in speed. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX is exactly the card to heat up the configuration of your PC, and no wonder there have been words out in the games press about it. Plug two more into the SLI system and watch the graphics glow. There’s a lot to explore in the NVIDIA page link below. One thing I can say is that in the past year, NVIDIA has come a long way toward connecting with a tech-savvy audience.
The DirectX 10 support was pipped as a big plus on the board for the Microsoft Vista players. Maybe later into 2008, there will be a bigger list of games known to take advantage of this. I’ll be watching.
In June 2007, an animated mockumentary appeared with real character. Written and produced like a surfing safari film, ‘Surfs Up’ featured the animated cast as seen through the wobbly camera. What appeared also were some astonishing new techniques in water animation, techniques that took up a lot of session time at SIGGRAPH 2007 for its inventiveness. The glistening curls and convincing splashes of the ever-present ocean edge gave the water a life of its own. Oh and the film itself was pretty good too. Nice work from the team at Sony Pictures Animation.
Nothing quite prepares the viewer for the sandman pulling himself out of the silo, and the creepiness of the black Venom taking over the victims. The VFX crews (yes, plural) working on these two characters alone were really pushing boundaries. Again, the big winners were the sessions audiences at SIGGRAPH and the many other conferences staged after Spider-Man 3 swung through the cinemas. Almost every VFX house in the industry had a part in this film.
Before production began on the Sandman character, supervisors and R&D leads spent a year developing simulation toolsets and rendering techniques. Using Imageworks proprietary Sandstorm software and their own lighting program, Katana, the final image was lit and sand particles added to integrate the digital character into a photographic plate.
The three separate instalments of ‘Pirates’ were all made intrinsically at the same time, and despite the well-known drama behind the scenes, which included a real life cyclone trashing the sets, the final, ‘At World’s End,’ stands up very well. The votes poured in for ‘At World’s End,’ and the industry really seemed quite ready to hail the final instalment of this magnificent show. Not forgotten is that ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ held the number one position in the Top 20 in the 2006 Retrospective.
The faultless VFX work on the ocean storm, and the reappearance of Jack Sparrow after his time in the grip of Davy Jones’ locker, brought new strength to the story, and credence to the artists working on the show.
yong!! I don’t know about you but I am sure 2007 lasted 
