MSN:Why realistic graphics make humans look creepy.

[Renzsu]

That's EXACTLY the problem I had when I watched that Polar Express trailer... the characters freaked me out..

[Cyberdigitus]

Yeah, this really struck me in the latest video's of hl2, with the modeling and rendering become more realistic, the a,imation sometimes feels pretty mechanic, it seems the ai sometimes doubts what clip to play. Not to say valve has bad animators or programmers, it's just a natural effect as described in your post.

[pogonip]

Totally agree with everything in this article....Humans just can't be simulated even if you gave the best artists 10 years to model/rig/animate 1 human it would still be wrong and flawed . People are going to keep trying though :hmm:

[mmkelly011881]

perhaps they will scale it back to more "impressionistic" character design for hl3

[mastermesh]

lies not in the amount of polys... but in the level of realism... If you study any art, but especially painting and sculpture, both of which are extemely similar to 3d modelling, you come to realize that there are levels of realism, and that if one part of a work is only at a certain level and others parts of the work are at a higher level of realism, the observer will catch on to this and either take it as an accident that the lesser real portion of the work was not done enough, or depending on artist's intention, come to some realization about the work's meaning... for instance if you have a painting of a female and all parts of body but breasts are in black and white outline, but breasts are in full color, near photo-realistic, there's a rationale behind what is going on in the work.... the same thing applies to movies, etc... hence the reason that we know that Roger Rabbit is a toon, and that's part of the story... but if we see through the fx in a movie like Star Wars, etc. we think that we are seeing a mistake...

[gabe28]

As an animator, I've never thought my goal should be realism. Obviously in sci-fi movies and such there is a need for photoreal effects but I think they should be kept mostly to things that we have no real world example to compare too... you know, dinosaurs and such.

When it comes to game design or animated stories I'd rather see something stylised than real anyway. The art and animation of Final Fantasy left me cold but I really enjoyed Ice Age, Shrek and everything from Pixar.

Bottomline, most cg doesn't need to be photoreal anyway.

[falclor]

In Final Fantasy I felt the same way. The main chick was cool looking but on the hair it would only move a certain way. Some of the other characters looked kind of off. When you deal with motion capture at least at that time frame, the pivot on the necks were off. I agree. Throw some style on your characters so we can all not pick it apart, and just accept it for the style it was intended for.

[agreenster]

Stylization in animation is key. Interpretation is the root of artistic beauty.

You want real? Grab a film camera!

This sentence is dead on: "The once-cute robot now looks like an animated corpse."

[Alan Daniels]

It's a pity that he didn't have links to some sample "death masks" of Jennifer Garner; that would have been interesting. Not that I don't get his point, since I've seen firsthand what he's talking about (it really IS creepy!), but some reference videos would have been helpful.

[eliseu gouveia]

The strangest thing is that although I´ve noticed this phenomenon before in many CG filns, videoclips and videogame FMVs, the only time it really really struck me was when I was watching Disney´s animated Robin Hood (the one with animals) and at one moment I caught a glimpse of Maid Maiden dancing.

Although 2D and done with animal characters, her dancing moves were so natural and lifelike that it freaked me for a second.

[willbrown]

Digital humans will appear natural given enough time and artistry. It's already very close to being done. We will question them less because they'll be used in more and more films. Only the sheer impossibillity of the action (like Legolas's ride on the elephant beast in LOTR) will be the giveaway. We KNOW no human could do that. Eventually we won't concern ourselves with the REALWORLD plausibility of what we see, but with how cool it is.

The real point of all this is convincing story telling. We suspended disbelief with King Kong, when that was the best that Hollywood could produce. Digital CG is becoming more and more seemless and imperceptible, when it's done well.

Eventually the uncanny valley will get crossed.

[SheepFactory]

I agree with the article %110

[Pentagramma]

Fascinating read, Roberto. Thanks! :beer:

And for those interested in a deeper look into Dr. Mori theory regarding the "uncanny valley", check this article :


http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html

[Boone]

Yawn.:rolleyes:

Mankind is trying to turn Robots into something they are not. Why force a creature to immitate something that really doesn't need to be immitated? Not to mention inpracticle!

The most successful robots are "spider-like" or pretty much wheel-based.

Also, for animation in films - leave the CG for stunt-doubles, NOT to replace the human actors.

Saying that - "Never underestimate the power of the No-No!":cool:

[FloydBishop]

Game character:

http://www.aliasthegame.com/profiles/images/sydney.jpg

Real thing:

http://image.pathfinder.com/people/images/features/reviews/011022/alias.jpg

[AWAKE]

I saw this movie once, and although the CG character was stylized, as it lay there dreaming a tormented nightmare, I really really believed.


I agree with willbrown

It's not so much of an impossibility, just a matter of artistry. With all the advances we've seen, to say we'll never get there is foolish. There will be a time where we see a convincing human.

and I will laugh. "HA."

[Novakog]

Originally posted by willbrown
Digital humans will appear natural given enough time and artistry. It's already very close to being done. We will question them less because they'll be used in more and more films. Only the sheer impossibillity of the action (like Legolas's ride on the elephant beast in LOTR) will be the giveaway. We KNOW no human could do that. Eventually we won't concern ourselves with the REALWORLD plausibility of what we see, but with how cool it is.

The real point of all this is convincing story telling. We suspended disbelief with King Kong, when that was the best that Hollywood could produce. Digital CG is becoming more and more seemless and imperceptible, when it's done well.

Eventually the uncanny valley will get crossed.

Yeah, I agree. I've heard about this "uncanny valley" think before, and it is absolutely true. But I do believe we will cross it, probably in the next ten years or so. Some people are already scaling the opposite side.

http://www.blackmountain.de/projects/images/robbi_big.jpg

http://www.highend3d.com/artists/si.3d?au=3dcharacters&im=Holgi&iid=133 (the background, obviously, is not CG)

[erilaz]

The silent hill characters always did that to me. In that case it works though.:D

[P_T]

Originally posted by Novakog
Yeah, I agree. I've heard about this "uncanny valley" think before, and it is absolutely true. But I do believe we will cross it, probably in the next ten years or so. Some people are already scaling the opposite side.

http://www.blackmountain.de/projects/images/robbi_big.jpg

http://www.highend3d.com/artists/si.3d?au=3dcharacters&im=Holgi&iid=133 (the background, obviously, is not CG)

they sure look realistic as still render but how would they look in an animation with full range of emotion?

and even if they do manage to do make a truly realistic human, wat's the point? movie stars don't get famous on their looks alone, otherwise people wouldn't give a crap about those news about a certain movie star. people are also interested in their lives, how they get to where they are, wat skeleton hiding in their closet, they want to be able to say "hey i met this star and i talked to him/her and got the signature" etc.. u can't do that with synthespian.

go watch S1m0ne, very interesting story.

[Novakog]

Originally posted by P_T
they sure look realistic as still render but how would they look in an animation with full range of emotion?

and even if they do manage to do make a truly realistic human, wat's the point? movie stars don't get famous on their looks alone, otherwise people wouldn't give a crap about those news about a certain movie star. people are also interested in their lives, how they get to where they are, wat skeleton hiding in their closet, they want to be able to say "hey i met this star and i talked to him/her and got the signature" etc.. u can't do that with synthespian.

go watch S1m0ne, very interesting story.

Yeah, that's why I said they were "scaling the other side", not that they've crossed the valley yet. And also, I don't think that EVER will CG actors replace real ones, I just think that we'll be able to make them be indistinguishable in 10 years. I think most of that will go towards continuing production after a main actor/actress died, stunt doubles, etc. And I have seen Simone.

[P_T]

i think when it comes to indistinguishable digital human, we're there already as ur examples shown. it's just that at the moment the cost is prohibitive. i remember seeing a sample clip of digital Neo and Smith in one of the threads here. they look practically indistinguishable from the real ones, and the digital double in Blade 2 was excellent as well.

[kiaran]

I'm glad I now know what to call this creepy side-effect.

The 'uncanny valley' is VERY noticable in the game Far Cry. During one cutscene the very well endowed female character takes a shower under a waterfall. It would have been a very nice image had she not looked like a corpse being pulled around by strings.

This is my theory:

- 80-99% real will always be creepy.

- 100% real will happen soon, if it hasn't happened already with the digital doubles in such films as LOTR, Blade II, Star Wars II etc... 100% real is not creepy.


This is a great argument for using stylized characters.

[Nemoid]

As tools and technology will progress we will surely see 100% realistic characters moving realistically too, but since copying 100% what a real person is and looks can be useful only in movie production for SFX and maybe for some games all the rest have to use creativity.

copying is boring, creating is art.

Non realistic characters are better than realistic chars, because they are more expressive, more significant and iconic and u can make them do the impossible. :buttrock:

99% realistic chars are scaring, because it just happens the same of when u see a sick person, a down syndrome one, or a freak. he/she looks just someway wrong to your eyes but unfortunately it's all real.
That's why some people doesn't reach to accept this.

The same happens with androids and therefore you're scared a lot.

[t-toe]

I think the artist Norman Rockwell found the solution to this problem way back almost a century ago, when he did his Saturday Evening Post paintings. while incredibly detailed, and every painting basically follows the physical laws of our actual world (light; i.e. radiosity, reflections), all of his paintings are very stylized too. noses are exaggerated, hair is impossibly poofy, etc.

basically, he believed if you wanted realism, you look to real life. if you want art, make it art.

[samartin]

Originally posted by t-toe
basically, he believed if you wanted realism, you look to real life. if you want art, make it art.

Like that, although it's an achievement to create something that looks realistic but imagine if games had realistic graphics, game chars were virtually indistinguishable from humans. So say we were playing an FPS game and you could see all the gorey details would we become even more immune by such acts, and kids can get away blaming video games these days never mind the future ?!?!?!

Not that I'm trying to argue this but is it acceptable to blow the living daylights out of realistic game chars when this day comes around ???

Sorry a bit OT...

[slaughters]

Originally posted by Boone
...Mankind is trying to turn Robots into something they are not...I can think of a great number of reasons for human like robots, so I don't really understand your comment

[nimajneb]

Just an aside. The folks who did Flight of the Osiris were the same as those who did Final Fantasy, and the work was much improved (though still in no way perfect). I don't think the problem is that photoreal characters can't be done well. I think, as others have already pointed out, if you are going to make something real, making it "look" real isn't enough. You need a good animator to breathe life into the performance, and a flexible puppet that doesn't tie his/her hands behind his/her back.

[coboman]

This article is filled with so much truth that it should be required reading for all animators.
And all storytellers for that matter, because that human behaviour not only applies to modeling and animating but to personality as well.

We loved the first Star Wars sidekicks: R2D2 and Chewbacca, because of their human traits in a non human body. Their lines were touching and filled with emotion (who can forget the frightful whislte of R2D2 as he goes alone in the desert, or Chewbaca's growl when his pal Han Solo is attacked).

But we all hated Jar Jar Binks (most of us), because he was too close to be human. He actually spoke. He was annoying.

Deffinitely modeling, animation and character design live better in an impressionistic world, than in a realistic one.

[rotaryman]

one of the major problems I see with digital characters when being animated is the complete lack of a sufficient rig to nail the expressions of the face. For the most part a lot of work goes into the mouth region and the brow's frontalis and furrow shapes. But not much attention goes into the eyes and surrounding areas. First off, just to get it out of the way, one of the problems with games at least is the "the thousand mile stare" where the character's eyes are not focusing on anything in particular and you can kind of see it on the comparison made on this thread of Jennifer Garner and her digital double. Technology in games are probably not to a point to alieveate that problem, but give that time. However more importantly, when we look at someone, we tend to focus mostly on the eyes and the surrounding cavity, infact that is where we read most of an expression. Anyone who has taken a class in traditional hand drawn animation will know that the shape relationship between both eyelids and the eyeball play a crucial role in nailing down that expression your striving for. If you look at Pixar's films, granted they are far from photoreal, but do illustrate my point, they really work hard to make the eyes come alive. Pixar also does something that no one else seems to get right, except maybe PDI, and this is "PUSH" those expressions, just because its photoreal doesn't mean you have to make all the characters look like Bells Palsey for heaven's sake. I don't know where the idea that if it looks photo real then don't push it farther than what a real human can do. DING! sorry that doesn't work, ya should have noticed that from Final Fantasy.
Oh well just my two cents

G

[gr8spangle]

I don't think there's any problem modeling realistic human bodies. However there's actually a biological reason why we're so picky when it comes to faces. From a very early age babies' brains start becoming hardwired to recognize faces, and there's a significant portion of the visual cortex that gets devoted to this.

Fast forward 20 years, and your average human adult movie-goer has had exposure to literally hundreds of thousands of faces and learned how to discern among them all. This explains why no 2 people look exactly alike (with the exception of identical twins). Even though they may be very similar, our brains are trained to fixate in on subtle aspects of a face, proportions and scale, and the brain is VERY efficient at this, it happens within a split second.

However if you've ever done this experiment as a sketch artist, you'll find that a face is much harder to recognize when it's upside down. A common exercise for artists is to sketch from a reference photo turned upside down, because it avoids the brain's recognition pathways, so you avoid any bias you've developed as far as "how a nose should look" for example.

So that's what we're up against, thousands of years of evolution.
:cry:

[BiTMAP]

perhaps we need a way to model upsidedown...

[Novakog]

Originally posted by BiTMAP
perhaps we need a way to model upsidedown...

Simple. Just take your reference images, flip them, model the character, and then flip it. If you don't have reference background images, then... you're screwed.

[jeremybirn]

Originally posted by rotaryman
I don't know where the idea that if it looks photo real then don't push it farther than what a real human can do.

But, there are some connections there! Once a character is given rich, detailed texture maps covering the whole head, those maps tend to stretch out or bunch up in distracting ways if posed into the kind of exaggerated expressions that an animator could get away with on an NPR character. A similar thing happens when you have realistic facial hair or razor stubble on a character, you have to make sure it doesn't dance or jitter or do anything weird, and that usually means not jumping the mouth rapidly into different physically impossible shapes.

Another problem with pushing realistic heads into exagerated expressions is the risk of the "morphing" look - that is, making extreme animation on a realistically shaded face can sometimes come out looking more like a photo-morphing animation done to a person's picture than a real person's face in motion. This problem would apply more to the kind of realistic heads you see posted on CGtalk than to the kind of realistic heads a studio would make, but still could be a concern. (By "the kind on cgtalk" I mean heads optimized for stills, that have a lot of the shading painted into the texture maps or derived from photographs of skin.)

-jeremy

[samartin]

The most realistic heads I've seen rendered were used in the matrix, I was trying to find the animations as they were posted a while ago but here's an article :-

http://www.deathfall.com/article.php?sid=2726

[Pentagramma]

one of the major problems I see with digital characters when being animated is the complete lack of a sufficient rig to nail the expressions of the face. For the most part a lot of work goes into the mouth region and the brow's frontalis and furrow shapes. But not much attention goes into the eyes and surrounding areas. First off, just to get it out of the way, one of the problems with games at least is the "the thousand mile stare" where the character's eyes are not focusing on anything in particular and you can kind of see it on the comparison made on this thread of Jennifer Garner and her digital double. Technology in games are probably not to a point to alieveate that problem, but give that time. However more importantly, when we look at someone, we tend to focus mostly on the eyes and the surrounding cavity, infact that is where we read most of an expression. Anyone who has taken a class in traditional hand drawn animation will know that the shape relationship between both eyelids and the eyeball play a crucial role in nailing down that expression your striving for. If you look at Pixar's films, granted they are far from photoreal, but do illustrate my point, they really work hard to make the eyes come alive. Pixar also does something that no one else seems to get right, except maybe PDI, and this is "PUSH" those expressions, just because its photoreal doesn't mean you have to make all the characters look like Bells Palsey for heaven's sake. I don't know where the idea that if it looks photo real then don't push it farther than what a real human can do. DING! sorry that doesn't work, ya should have noticed that from Final Fantasy.


Excellent comment, Greg. :thumbsup:
I believe the secret - or the main secret, if you will - is on the eyes, and in its correct behavior.

Pixar has developed those beautifully alive "Pixar eyes"... maybe that´s what we mortal 3d artists should try and do, too. ;)

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