#SOFTIMAGE 3D JEDI ACADEMY MOVIE#
#SOFTIMAGE 3D JEDI ACADEMY SOFTWARE#

All of these things had to be figured out.'Įight years ago, Leven recalls, there was virtually no interaction between the CG characters and the live action plates. You had to be able to blow holes in all the bugs and have blood come out. Plasma bugs had slimy, transparent sacks that can shoot glowing plasma out of their butt. 'Hopper bugs have this iridescent quality. 'The warrior bug had a sort of dusty high gloss sheen,' describes Leven.

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The software guys, he says, wrote shaders from scratch to get specific looks for the different classes of bugs. They also had to build tools to convert Softimage files into a format that RenderMan could understand.Ī blend of hardware is in place at Tippett Studio, including SGI, Linux, Mac and PC gear. 'This was stuff that nobody had ever done before,' Leven says proudly. Leven's crew taught themselves Alias Dynamation, a particle systems application to do the bug swarming behavior. Had to set up a whole new pipeline and a batch rendering system to handle a crew of 110 people.'Īt that time, Tippett Studio used Softimage 3D to build the models and Pixar RenderMan for rendering. 'Everything was a challenge,' he recalls.

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'When we worked on the first Starship Troopers movie it had a big effects budget to produce 220 effects shots over 14 months with a crew of 100.' Troopers 2 visual effects supervisor Eric Leven says that this movie offers the classic challenge of producing champagne effects on a beer budget. Originally created in Softimage 3D, they were updated for the sequel using Alias Maya. The Tippett team was able to recycle bug characters from the 1997 Starship Troopers film. 'Basically, Starship Troopers was the first thing anyone let me direct and that came down to the fact that we'd make the movie for the budget.' Tippett says the reason it has taken him so long to direct a feature is because the kind of things he likes to do are a little off the Hollywood radar.

Twenty-seven years, 36 feature films, two Oscars (for Jedi and Jurassic Park) and thousands of effects shots later, Tippett finds himself celebrating his studio's 20th anniversary by making his directorial debut on the feature film Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. He had gone from a 25-year-old stop-motion animator on George Lucas' Star Wars IV: A New Hope to Industrial Light & Magic's creature shop supervisor when he decided it was time to run his own boutique visual effects enterprise. BERKLEY, CA - In 1983, Phil Tippett finished his last shot on Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and then ventured east to his Berkley garage to start his own visual effects company called Tippett Studio.

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