I have talked a lot about CG animation, but up until this point I have not talked about live-action films with CGI included in the final project. One example written about by Peter Weishar in his book The Art of Computer Animation is Alien Resurrection. This CGI work was done by Blue Sky Studios using the program Inferno. This program can perform real-time effects on images that still have to be compressed. This is different from most cheaper systems because those other programs use compressed images and that lowers the quality of the finished image. While this program is way more expensive then Renderman, costing in the upper multiple thousand dollar range. Your best bet as a buyer would be to get a used system. Most of these CG images are added in post production after all of the live-action filming has taken place. Actors are forced to act as if the image is present, and set designers are prepared to make sets appropriate in size. According to Weishar, "If live-action film is part of the mix, the goal is the creation of a seamless, photorealistic image incorporating animated digital models." This is acheived more and more each day in studios around they world, and there is no doubt that this technology will allow the CGI to continue to blend in even more with live-action footage. George Lucas was the first person to really take advantage of combining CGI with live-action film in Star Wars. Unfortunately I have not researched their techniques, so that film will be reserved for another blog. I am sure that the tecnology avaliable to George Lucas had a great deal to do with the invention of Inferno, and it would be very interesting to compare the capabilities of the two.