Holy Uncanny Valley

[netmonkey]

A quick idea for you. On that head, she needs a mustache. Just a thought.

Be careful with what you wish for:

[n0wak]

Too bad the head smiley contest is over. Creepy renderwoman would have won it hands down.

[miffy495]

Be careful with what you wish for:

It's PERFECT!

[Marek]

This one is for you, buddy:

Hahaha oh man.

[Roderick]

yeah

[Oath]

This thread turned out a lot better than I was expecting.

[brkl]

Hahaha oh man.

This is what I think of that avatar:

[Marek]

I give you 100 points for that.

[DanJW]

Well, that was fun

Back on topic:

I was thinking about how this kind of thing compares to big CG animated movies like Shrek, seeing as that is what the games industry is now approacing in terms of sophistication. But games animators are still building people on the surface only - the Shrek animators built bones and muscles before applying the skin, and it's this that makes them believable. Obviously to cut down on processing power for games the innards will have to be removed once the animations are complete, but I still think it's a stage that has to be done to get really good CG people.

Also; the animators in Shrek actually made the Princess Fjona character too realistic at first. Then went back and remodelled her to fit better with the cartoon aesthetic of the movie. I doubt we will get that kind of maturity of direction in games for a while, with most people straining at the leash to more photoreal.

[Oath]

As with all new toys, you tire after a while. Granted, we'll have to put up with some uncanny stuff for a few years, but I'm guessing that as the charm wears off we'll see less of it.

I guess it'd be great if we got movie-level animation, but that costs money. Tons of it. Today, building something to a photorealistic level and then scaling it back a notch is just too expensive for most developers. Just getting to that high level of detail in the first place costs lots of money, but then subtracting from that is another big investment, and something that's probably just a waste of cash in the eyes of an accountant.

[SpiderMonkey]

I doubt we will get that kind of maturity of direction in games for a while, with most people straining at the leash to more photoreal.

I think you'll see it sooner than you expect. If we're in uncanny valley zone now, the easiest way out of it is to do exactly what you describe.

At the moment, it is cheaper not to invest in a proper art style. In the near future, it will probably be too expensive for most to pursue pure photorealism.

[netmonkey]

You have to use uncanny valley to your advantage, though. How about an exorcist game? It would be soo creepy!

[Tanukitsune]

Darn, I got here too late, the link is down...

[Jayel]

Realism often comes at the cost of believability.

Especially in animations.

Extra especially in crappy cgi movies like Polar Express.

[loonyboi]

The problem with photorealism is that the small things can completely ruin the illusion. You can have the most realistic model in the world,but if the eyes are off, it looks like a zombie.

That's why Half-Life 2 is so good. Rather than get perfectly realistic skin and bones, they concentrated on the illusion of life coming from the way the eyes move.

Personally, I think photorealism is grossly overrated. Give me stylized over realistic any day.

I think people will be pleasantly surprised by the look of the characters in the Darkness. They're "real" in that they look like actual people, but they're not superrealistic looking zombies, they're crafted to resemble the characters the actors were portraying when they were vo-capped.

[MrHoatzin]

This is terrifying. Photorealism is a misguided goal. Photo-realism as a term applied here is really wrong. This is photorealism:

What we have going on in games nowadays is some sort of shit that eludes description. It seems to try to achieve some sort of axiomatic ideal and it does it without rhyme or reason. What makes Half-Life 2 stand out as a prime example of the you-and-your-"photorealism"-can-go-to-hell school of game design is the careful attention that the artists paid to the temperature of color or way light bounces and the eyes move on people, rather than letting random technocrats stuff the game world full of shaders.

[Oath]

Sorry, I wasn't listening.

[MrHoatzin]

Sorry, I wasn't listening.

Oh, god, the horror! The horror!

:scary: :scary:

[netmonkey]

Remember that one episode of Futurama where Fry eats that sandwich at the gas station and becomes so intelligent that he can play a holophone? But then after he kills the worms that make him intelligent, he tries to play it again and a tortured frankenstein is all that he can create? but then he tries to make a more unrealistic version of leela and it looks fine.

That is an episode about uncanny valley, but also that tortured frankenstein reminds me of

No... NO... NOOOOOOO!

Edit: WOW. There's this new Volvo commercial in the USA featuring a woman with the uncanny valley look. And she was a real person I wish they put comercials online...

[Moosferatu]

Darn, I got here too late, the link is down...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT0W1PLTmN0&search=quantic%20dreams

I thought that the actual character motion was excellent. There was a lot more expression than there usually is. This was something that was really lacking in Dreamfall. The facial expressions and eyes, however, have quite a ways to go still.

[Thrik]

I dunno. If it was motion captured then it's really not impressive at all; all that motion captured animations can really be used for is cutscene-like sequences, and games have been doing that for years. It probably costs quite a lot to set it all up, but it's not innovative.

There'll always be nuances with animation that require either motion capture or a very attentive animator; even then, the former usually requires the latter to work well. What would impress me would be a way to generate animation on the fly that looks totally authentic without any input from the designers.

I guess Spore is kind of going that way with its procedural animation, but the animation in there really isn't the most breathtaking around. To do it really convicingly I suppose you'd need to emulate an entire muscular structure and everything.

[DanJW]

The new Indiana Jones game apparently uses procedural character animation during gameplay (the so called "biomechanical AI" ). But everyone has been slamming that for looking a bit rubbish.

[baconian]

Have you seen the movie Immortel?

It has CG characters in it, that are meant to be real humans that have had surgery to look like they're computer generated.

These characters and real actors exist in the same world. Quite interesting, and the jarring feeling you get when you realise that the CG characters are supposed to be real seems to be cancelled out by the thematic exploration of human falsity... right Ill shut up

[brkl]

I've seen it. It has some neat stuff in it (the gods look great in 3D), but it's not a very successful movie IMO.

[loonyboi]

...all that motion captured animations can really be used for is cutscene-like sequences, and games have been doing that for years.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. MoCap is like any other technology -- when used properly, it's great. When misused it's not.

Lots of games (i'd even go so far as to say most, these days) use mocap for lots more than just cut-scenes.

But it all depends on the animators. I don't think anyone who saw Bioshock at E3 is going to complain about the quality of the mocapped animations. That's assuming they even knew those animations *were* mocapped, for that matter.