Christian Rouet, Senior Technology Officer, ILM: The Research and Development Engineers from ILM worked about two solid years to prepare for Star Wars. A lot of new CG applications were developed to address new visual needs, such as better modeling tools, clothing, terrain mgeneration, interactive lighting, etc. A lot of effort was spent also in increasing the overall digital production throughput by improving computer server utilization, interactive real-time playback, and extensive use of hardware acceleration for quick-preview rendering.
Christian Rouet leads the research and development effort at ILM. For Episode I The Phantom Menace, his team worked for about two years to create numerous new technologies that were used by visual effects artists on the movie, such as digital clothing, terrain generators for the Podrace sequence, stampede choreography, interactive lighting, and many other advanced computer graphics tools.
