CGSociety and 3D World present a rundown of the Top 100 3D Movies as selected by the CG community
hat marks out a truly great 3D
movie? The knowledge that it
pioneered techniques that became
standards within the industry, as
Flight of the Navigator did with reflection mapping?
Or that it raised the bar on the volume of effects work possible in a movie, as with Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace? Or simply that it told a memorable story? That was the question we posed in our recent poll to determine the most influential 3D movies of all time, organised in conjunction with 3D World magazine, the industry's leading community portal.
To qualify for inclusion on our shortlist, a movie needed to meet three criteria: to have a running time of 60 minutes or longer; to have received a full cinematic release;
and to include a significant element of 3D animation or VFX work, as opposed to matte painting or compositing.
Films like Blade Runner - although undoubtedly influential - were excluded on the grounds that they featured only traditional effects.
Movies that received an Academy Award nomination were automatically included, as did those whose technology reels were screened in the Electronic Theater at SIGGRAPH.
The remainder were chosen from standard reference books such as Isaac Kerlow's The Art of 3D Computer Animation and Effects, and according to feedback from our own contacts in the industry.
Visitors to CGSociety were then asked to pick the 10 films on the shortlist that they most admired technically; that had the greatest impact on their working lives; or that most made them want to work in 3D in the first place.
During the three weeks it remained online, 5,874 people filled out the poll, casting well over 50,000 individual votes. To the best of our knowledge, this makes it the largest survey of its type ever conducted - and the definitive guide to the films that shaped an industry.
You can find a rundown of the 150 films in the shortlist on a special 3D World website here.
Ron Howard's tense space drama bagged an Oscar nomination for Digital Domain's slick CG artistry and detailed large-scale modelling techniques.
Key effects DD's proprietary tracking technology helped create a series of stunning deep space scenes, plus a Saturn V launch sequence that even NASA astronauts mistook for original televised archive footage.
Many studios helped Sony supply the visual effects to set the man of steel soaring, as Bryan Singer swapped X-Men for Superman.
Key effects Sony Pictures Imageworks' super-realistic digital double of Superman actor Brandon Routh used Paul Debevec's LightStage 2 system, capturing reflectance data of the actor to apply to a spandex-clad computer-generated model.
Marking Tim Burton's first major dalliance with 3D, Mars Attacks! features over 300 shots from Industrial Light & Magic, then at the height of its dominance over the Hollywood effects industry.
Key effects From 1950s trading cards to the big screen, the titular Martians represented a leap forward in CG character work. Putting even 15 on screen at once nearly brought ILM's systems grinding to a halt.
Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi thriller enlisted the help of MetroLight Studios to handle digital effects in this take on a Philip K Dick short.
Key effects Tim McGovern's Oscar-winning X-ray scanner sequence, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger's character is seen in CG skeleton form, was also one of the earliest uses of motion capture in the cinema.
A demonic house is brought to life with 40,000 animation controls in this stylised, fully CG family feature, building on Sony's work on The Polar Express.
Key effectsMonster House marked the next step in performance capture. The actors wore around 80 body markers and between 40 and 80 facial markers, which were captured using 200 infrared cameras.
Audiences watched in awe as CG cattle and tankers were spat from vicious cyclones in Jan de Bont's tornado chaser movie.
Key effects The real star is Mother Nature, as realised by ILM's proprietary particle software. It lost to Independence Day at the Oscars, but ILM's hyper-realistic storm simulations can still thrill today.
With some of the most sophisticated effects created for a sci-fi movie, MPC's recent outing truly shines.
Key effects At nearly 2GB of geometry, the spaceship proved too large to load into Maya. Giggle, MPC's scripting language, was used to manipulate the data.
A teenage boy becomes the unwitting co-pilot of a sleek, sliver, spline-based 3D morphing spaceship in this Disney children's favourite.
Key effects The first use of reflection mapping in a film, to mesh the alien spacecraft into their environments. Graphics researcher C. Robert Hoffman's techniques are still used to good effect today.
Brett Leonard's idiot-turns-cybergod movie became an unexpected pop culture icon, as Xaos Incorporated and Angel Studios' effects all but defined the look of virtual reality for the masses.
BY ROY SPENCER
"The Lawnmower Man was groundbreaking in two ways," says Mark Malmberg, creative director of the now-defunct San Francisco studio Xaos Inc. "Firstly, it presented a story rooted in virtual reality, in which CG imagery carried a significant part of that story. Secondly, it contained a radically greater volume of computer animation than any other feature film to that date, with over 15 minutes of imagery."
This included about five or six minutes of animation by Xaos, a similar amount by Angel Studios, and six or seven minutes of 2D work that Malmberg sub-contracted to Western Images.
Director Brett Leonard came to Xaos very early on. "Brett had very little money for the amount of work he needed," remembers Malmberg. "We were a hungry young company, and I was young and brazen enough to say, 'Sure, we can give you 10 or 15 minutes of CG.' " The longest spot Xaos had handled at that point was a mere 30 seconds.
Leonard's second reason for choosing Xaos was its proprietary facilities. "We were using our own software, right down to image formats, and even drivers for the Targa frame buffers, since we were working on black-and-white Apollo workstations," says Malmberg. "We had developed unique capabilities in particle systems and image processing, as well as the combination of the two. This was at a time when the infamous bevelled chrome logos were still the dominant form of CGI."
The Lawnmower Man presaged the extent to which CG would eventually take over VFX. "It was number one in the box-office for one weekend: more than it deserved as a film, no doubt," says Malmberg. "But it did make an impression, however brief."
Key effects
The character Jobe's 'cyber-treatments' included being bombarded, in virtual reality, with religious symbols, many of them made up by Xaos.
"At one point we noticed that the forms we'd invented added up, for just one frame, to create a perfect image of the symbol for the very worst of the ancient demons we'd researched.
The frame number was 666!" says Malmberg. "The following week the Oakland hills caught fire, and we were pretty sure we had something to do with it. No lie."
Eschewing the kinetic violence of earlier instalments for the sombre confines of a prison planet, Sigourney Weaver's Ripley returned to face her xenomorphic nemesis once again - this time in a form augmented by Boss Film Studios' Oscar-nominated graphics.
Key effects The cracking alien head sequence. The movie also included CG shadows for physical models and flying digital debris.
The second Star Trek movie just beat TRON to the punch to create cinema's first landmark CG visuals, thanks to the terraforming 'Genesis' sequence.
Key effects Industrial Light & Magic's still-impressive work, created with the help of legendary graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith, marked the first use of a fractal landscape in a film.
DreamWorks' first 3D feature told the story of Z, an ant that dares to go it alone, who is voiced unmistakably - and with added neurosis - by Woody Allen.
Key effects Proving that DreamWorks could do a 3D film, Antz also broke new ground in simulation with its epic flood sequence, thanks to Nick Foster and PDI's award-winning fluid program, Flu Tools.
hat marks out a truly great 3D
movie? The knowledge that it
pioneered techniques that became
standards within the industry, as
Flight of the Navigator did with reflection mapping?
Ron Howard's tense space drama bagged an Oscar nomination for Digital Domain's slick CG artistry and detailed large-scale modelling techniques.
Many studios helped Sony supply the visual effects to set the man of steel soaring, as Bryan Singer swapped X-Men for Superman.
Marking Tim Burton's first major dalliance with 3D, Mars Attacks! features over 300 shots from Industrial Light & Magic, then at the height of its dominance over the Hollywood effects industry. 
Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi thriller enlisted the help of MetroLight Studios to handle digital effects in this take on a Philip K Dick short.
A demonic house is brought to life with 40,000 animation controls in this stylised, fully CG family feature, building on Sony's work on The Polar Express.
Audiences watched in awe as CG cattle and tankers were spat from vicious cyclones in Jan de Bont's tornado chaser movie.
With some of the most sophisticated effects created for a sci-fi movie, MPC's recent outing truly shines.
A teenage boy becomes the unwitting co-pilot of a sleek, sliver, spline-based 3D morphing spaceship in this Disney children's favourite.
Eschewing the kinetic violence of earlier instalments for the sombre confines of a prison planet, Sigourney Weaver's Ripley returned to face her xenomorphic nemesis once again - this time in a form augmented by Boss Film Studios' Oscar-nominated graphics.
The second Star Trek movie just beat TRON to the punch to create cinema's first landmark CG visuals, thanks to the terraforming 'Genesis' sequence.
DreamWorks' first 3D feature told the story of Z, an ant that dares to go it alone, who is voiced unmistakably - and with added neurosis - by Woody Allen.
