Amazing CGI work. Uncanny Valley grows smaller

[Samurai8472]

http://cubo.cc/

For those who don't know, the "Uncanny Valley" is a term used by 3D artists when it comes to creating human and human like creatures. You can make a human face and animate it to the best of your ability, but there will always be something there that screams out it's CGI and thus not life-like.

Still an issue, but it's nice to see we are getting closer to breaking it. The more we do, the better movies such as The Hulk.

The eyes have a bit of a bloodshot look to them.

 

[Meredith]

She looks kinda like FRAN (Friendly Replicator ANdroid)

 

[Garrovick]

Cool...

Have you been drinking tonight?

Please follow the cursor with your eyes!


Any one try that?

 

[Gertch]

That's really something. Still something about the mouth when she smiles. Almost like she has a mouth full of cotton. Definitely much better than we've seen.

 

[Lindley]

Pretty clear they haven't figured out how to do per-strand hair yet, but it's a decent approximation.

 

[Gepard]

Meh. That was it? It seems pretty clear they're just warping a photograph around using a simple 3D mesh. Gertch mentioned the problem with the mouth, but her eyes are all screwy too. Essentially, she looks fine until she moves.

 

[Samurai8472]

it would be great to have something like this on your computer. A personal assistant.

 

[David cgc]

Meh. That was it? It seems pretty clear they're just warping a photograph around using a simple 3D mesh. Gertch mentioned the problem with the mouth, but her eyes are all screwy too. Essentially, she looks fine until she moves.

That's more or less the same trick they used in Myst V, where the real-time characters had video of the actor's faces acting their lines as texture maps to give the facial animation a little extra oomph, as well as what they did for Superman Returns to get all those angles of Marlon Brando as Jor-El out of the old footage.

 

[FordSVT]

Meh. That was it? It seems pretty clear they're just warping a photograph around using a simple 3D mesh. Gertch mentioned the problem with the mouth, but her eyes are all screwy too. Essentially, she looks fine until she moves.

Yeah, this is still several orders of magnitude below what was done in Beowulf, for instance. Neat tricks, but not very sophisticated to be honest. It's like the difference between painting a really great portrait or a person and then taking a photograph and then marvelling at how much more the photograph looks like a real person. No shit!

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Some of this is remarkably good, and better than anything that's been used in movies yet - the skin, the hair. The motion is not completely convincing, the teeth are...just strange and of course the eyes aren't quite there yet.

 

[Arrqh]

Pretty clear they haven't figured out how to do per-strand hair yet, but it's a decent approximation.

Sure we can do per-strand hair. Just not fast enough for real time running in a web browser

Anyway, it's pretty clear that this is just photos slapped on top of some geometry. The hair is really obviously just a photo. I've seen much better stuff in both stills and video... and some that don't look quite as good but are much more flexible.

 

[Twilight]

Not to be a poo-poo - and certainly not that I could do any better - but this seems to me just a very high resolution texture mapped to a 3D mesh with some simple animation.

I mean - it certainly looks excellent (though the animation isn't particularly convincing) - but I don't think it's at all revolutionary - it's just good textures on a well-made mesh.

If the hair had been totally dynamic instead of just a few high res textures I'd be a lot more impressed. Though I wouldn't expect that to run real time in a web browser, you'd need to do it locally on a machine.

Again, not to be a bad sport - it does look great and is one of the best faces I've seen - but it's not all that surprising given today's standards.

 

[FordSVT]

Some of this is remarkably good, and better than anything that's been used in movies yet - the skin, the hair. The motion is not completely convincing, the teeth are...just strange and of course the eyes aren't quite there yet.

No, it's not. Do you think THIS is a nice piece of CG work?

It's no different, there's a relatively simple wire frame mesh under her skin to make it look like she's moving. YOU CAN SEE THE TRIANGLES! CG models used in movies have individual hairs, hundreds of thousands of polygons, many layers of texture mapping and transparency to simulate light refraction and veins and pores, etc. This thing is a relatively primitive trick by comparison and certainly does not hold up to close scrutiny.

This doesn't move, but it's the first picture I ran across on Google that's representative of really good CG facial work. Remember, this is an entirely human created face, not rendered bitmaps or some such thing. Makes the OP link look silly to be honest.

 

[The Squire of Gothos]

This doesn't move, but it's the first picture I ran across on Google that's representative of really good CG facial work. Remember, this is an entirely human created face, not rendered bitmaps or some such thing. Makes the OP link look silly to be honest.

I would have been thrown had I not been told, but the light reflecting off her eyes seems a bit suspect.

 

[FordSVT]

This doesn't move, but it's the first picture I ran across on Google that's representative of really good CG facial work. Remember, this is an entirely human created face, not rendered bitmaps or some such thing. Makes the OP link look silly to be honest.

I would have been thrown had I not been told, but the light reflecting off her eyes seems a bit suspect.

They eyes are the single hardest thing to get correct. I think it's because we as people spend so much time looking into people's eyes when we communicate with them. "Windows to the soul" and all that.

Having said so, the page I got this from says that the reflection in her eyes is an actual reflected rendering of a person standing in front of a sunlit window "taking her picture". You can make out the silhouette if you look closely.

THAT is attention to detail and good CG work.

 

[Arrqh]

They eyes are the single hardest thing to get correct. I think it's because we as people spend so much time looking into people's eyes when we communicate with them. "Windows to the soul" and all that.

They're also physically complex... a thin layer of water over a soft, multilayered surface. It of course doesn't help that we have a chunk of our brains dedicated to recognizing faces so we're very good at telling if it's off. Skin is also really hard, it's physically very complex and while we do have subsurface scattering shaders doing a render that takes the entire structure into account would take a huge amount of time to set up (you'd have to physically model everything down to the blood vessels and bones with physically accurate shading models for each) and then render the whole thing which is going to be significantly expensive from a computational standpoint.

But there's a lot of really good near-photoreal work out there. Most of it actually isn't in films... in film, your goal is to produce something "good enough" on time and in budget. Some of the best work I've seen is usually done by people who work professionally, but do some of their best work on their own time when they don't have to worry about time constraints!

Some stuff from CGTalk:

Song Hye Kyo

The Artist himself

Weird Science

The Final Battle

And, for fun, Gangsta Chimp

 

[The Squire of Gothos]

Song Hye Kyo

That one looks fantastic!

 

[Bill Morris]

Song Hye Kyo

Good work, but compare:

Publicity photo of Song Hye Kyo

 

[Samurai8472]

They eyes are the single hardest thing to get correct. I think it's because we as people spend so much time looking into people's eyes when we communicate with them. "Windows to the soul" and all that.

The one glaringly bad cgi eyes i've seen are from "superman returns". Although some claim the only CGI in the scene is the background.

 

[Arrqh]

Good work, but compare:

The point isn't how good of a likeness it is, the point is how photoreal the image is on its own.

But if you want to compare the likeness, you'll need more images: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=3661085#post3661085