April 07, 2016 at 11:10PM

Today I Learned: Today's TIL brought to you by a special talk by representatives from Industrial Light and Magic. 1) You know that really cool remote-control BB-8 robot that J. J. Abrams took onstage with himself a while back? That model was, sadly, built after the movie was finished. What you see on screen is mostly a puppeteered model, mixed in with a wheelable "trike" model, a stationary wobbleable model, and CGI. 2) One of the novel features of Star Wars: The Force Awakens' CGI was their shader palette. Usually shader palattes, which determine the color and spectral response of materials on a CGI model, are designed by an artist. ILM made theirs by actually measuring spectral responses of reference materials in the field. So if you ever caught yourself thinking "huh, the Millennium Falcon's hull has awfully realistic specular reflection", now you know why. 3) Speaking of the Millennium Falcon, the CGI model of the Millennium Falcon is technically a character. In fact, all (most?) of the CGI ships in The Force Awakens were designed using the same software and animation model as their CGI aliens and characters. Bonus fact: Tentales are apparently notoriously difficult to animate. In particular, the longer the tentacles, the more difficult they are to animate realistically (and the more likely they are to accidentally clip through each other).