After watching the trailer for the Polar Express I was a little creeped out. It reminded me of a slashdot story that I read the other day about as animation, games, and robots get closer to "real", they just look creepy. People just accept things that don't seem to be real as "okay" because they are easily identified as being fake. When it starts to look "real" it gets really strange because it's still not quite right. I think that the article likened it to a death mask. No one wants to see a cool cgi film and have it in the back of their head the whole thing that the people look dead.
I guess that we are in that spot right now that's between believable and obviously fake. We've come so far in the last 10 years in computer graphics, I wonder when we'll get over this problem. The human mind is very hard to fool when it comes to peoples faces.
I think that computer generated images have a long way to go before they look completely real. But I also think it's possible now to do it. The real problem is finding the time and money to do it. Do you really want to spend 10 years on a movie, when you can make 10 movies in 10 years, and make 10 times the money. Looking at the trailer, the people look kind of realistic, but all the scenery looks completely fake, so you know its' fake. In order to make it completely realistic, they'd have to spend as much time on the inanimate objects, as they do on the animate ones.
ReplyDeleteOh, just a thought. In real hollywood, when they need a table, they go out and get a table. In cgi hollywood, they have to have one drawn out, if they want it to be good quality. Maybe they should be pooling their objects into some sort of database, so that in 20 years, they can just have thousands of tables to choose from, and then they can spend more time focusing on making everything more realistic, because they don't have to redraw the same stuff over and over again for each movie.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand kibbee: you said they have a long way to go but they can do it now? Isn't that a contradiction?
ReplyDeleteI think the article and my feeling about the people looking creepy has nothing to do with the scenery. If you just look at the people (well, at least in the theater), they looked almost real, but "not quite right". Something that was just *off* about them...
I would guess that the hard part about animation at that level would be the texturing, not the actual building of objects.
Remember Finding Nemo? The "house" that Nemo lived in was just Sully's hair (from Monsters Inc.) made shorter and fatter. (the first version at any rate). Many shops DO reuse stuff.
I think for pooling the resources, it is an IP problem. Do you charge for the use of someone else's outdated objects? Build your own? Make them open source? I really don't know and that wasn't really the point of the article.
What i'm saying is that the quality that they turn out now is a quite far off from looking real. But that if they really wanted to put the time into it, they could do it. I've seen some very realistic looking stuff. pictures, an few really short videos. But that stuff takes forever to do. Making a feature film of this quality would take 6 years. Nobody's willing to put that much time in.
ReplyDeleteIf you've seen panic room, you can see how realistic they can get, at least with scenery. When the camera is flying around the house, through keyholes and such, that is a complete computer model of the house. I couldn't even tell when I saw this until I watched the special features on the DVD. Granted there are no people, so it's a little easier to fake.
ReplyDeleteIn the CG world, things aren't always done by hand.
ReplyDeleteIt could be a simple geometric shape with an elaborate skin that makes it look smooth. Bump/texture mapping has also come a long way, which makes flat CG object look bumpy. Things like skin, terrain, wood, etc.
Hair and moving clothing are done using shortcut algorithms that approximate/generate then movement which could then hand-tweaked by animators to look just right. Anything else would be too time consuming. An animator would never try to animate every hair on a characters head!