Without a doubt this movie sits at the top of my all time disappointment list. I was sitting in the theater with my friends thinking where's the fantasy? what is this ghost shit? Visuals were top notch and the the acting wasn't bad but what a blah movie.
20% of production time and something like $10 million of its $137 million budget went towards technological development and rendering of the main character's hair (I recall reports quoting something like 1/4-1/3 of the special effects budget was spent on the hair alone). Of course, a dozen years later, with the development of Hairworks & TressX, we became capable of rendering nearly as realistic hair with our home PCs in real-time. So the new and improved Lara Croft owes her looks in some part to Aki.
http://www.boxofficeprophets.com/column/index.cfm?columnID=13399
was really a snooze fest, and I was super excited also because it was hyped especially for rpg fans, I remember they even had an article in time or newsweek were they spoke about the graphics farm they made in an underground facility with so many servers just to make the graphics needed, and how realistic the eyes, hair etc were for the characters. Then the film dropped zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..
Kind of crazy how much Aki and reboot Lara look alike, isn't it?PureHair
PureHair is Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix's hair rendering technology, which like our own HairWorks technique adds tens of thousands of hair strands to a character model. These hairs move realistically, can be affected by wind and water, and are lit and shaded in real-time by the scene.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the 'Normal' setting is recommended for just about everyone, as 'Low' strips back the number of hairs for min-spec users who need to disable and turn down as many settings as possible.
In the normal gameplay position, with Lara away from the camera, the difference between detail levels is far less noticeable, though as Lara walks, runs and jumps, the degree of hair movement and its realism are still affected.
In cinematic, story-driven cutscenes, however, the differences between detail levels are immediately apparent, as Lara almost-always takes key billing, with lots of close-ups and action moves highlighting the immersion-damaging loss of hairs.
Performance: As with other hair rendering technologies, dynamic level of detail scaling adjusts the visual quality and performance of hair on the fly. During gameplay, in the default zoomed-out view, expect a minimal performance cost of just 2-3 frames per second, versus Low, though that number raises to 5 or 6 frames per second when you zoom in for precision sniping or shooting.
In cutscenes, the performance cost can be up to 10 frames per second, but as performance is often higher during these moments the extra hit is offset and shouldn't be a problem for most systems.
Yeah, that's been covered, and it was one of the reasons even I left the theater annoyed (though I wasn't a Final Fantasy gamer in my youth, I was familiar with their stories from my friends growing up...I didn't play those things until the Android ports starting about 8 years ago, and only have three completed under my belt). Still, part of Final Fantasy is the fact each is really its own fantasy. I forgave the movie for the lack of anything resembling RPGs and gaming when I went back and watched it again a decade later. Suddenly I found myself siding with Ebert:
There is NOTHING in this movie that reminds of you Final Fantasy... Where are the Chocobos and Moogles? The over the top action? The magic, the weapons, the summons of guardians or spirits to attack/defend the summoner? Things that carry from one Fantasy Fantasy game to the next one? None of this made it into the film.
Let any Final Fantasy gamer watch this movie without knowing its title or history and they would have never guessed in a bazillion years that this movie was adapted from Final Fantasy.
It is the worst adaptation of a video game ever....
I think this remains the best movie adapted from a videogame ever made. I hated it the first time I watched it, but it grew on me when I went back and gave it another chance. It isn't great, but it was definitely underrated.
Of course, nothing beats the first half hour of the original Resident Evil. If that film could have maintained that quality throughout it would have become an all-time classic of the horror genre. But instead it instantly went potato, and never went back.
No, I don't think Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, or Silent Hill belong in this discussion. As if it matters. An interactive viewing of a straightforward playthrough of the The Last of Us compared to any of these is like comparing The Godfather to Corky Romano.
20% of production time and something like $10 million of its $137 million budget went towards technological development and rendering of the main character's hair (I recall reports quoting something like 1/4-1/3 of the special effects budget was spent on the hair alone). Of course, a dozen years later, with the development of Hairworks & TressX, we became capable of rendering nearly as realistic hair with our home PCs in real-time. So the new and improved Lara Croft owes her looks in some part to Aki.
https://cmsw.mit.edu/mit2/Abstracts/JanePark.pdf
http://www.boxofficeprophets.com/column/index.cfm?columnID=13399
History of computer animation (CGI)
I remember it being cutting-edge at the time. People would have been a lot kinder towards it if the plot and dialogue were up to par with the visuals.
