Lifelike Animation Heralds New Era for Video Games

Status
Not open for further replies.
G

GrnMarvl14

Lying
Joined
Jan 4, 2003
Messages
13,846
Reaction score
4
Source.

Extraordinarily lifelike characters may soon begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology.

"Emily," the woman in this animation, was produced using a new modeling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated.

She's considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as the "uncanny valley," or the perception that animation looks less realistic the more it approaches human likeness.

Researchers at Image Metrics, which is based in both England and California and makes computer-generated imagery for Hollywood movies, started with a video of an employee talking.

They then broke down her facial movements into dozens of smaller movements, each of which was given a "control system."

The team, which produced animation for some of the "Grand Theft Auto" video games, then recreated the gestures, movement by movement, in a computer model.

The aim was to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face -- for instance, that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical.
Click to expand...

First word that comes to mind: Wow.
 
Wow indeed. Just...wow. You kind of knew it had to come at some point, but I wasn't expecting it to be that good.
 
Hot Damn.

I hope that this translates to Sports game. Then... that would be awesome.
 
Save for my corny pun, but is that for real?!

For some reason I'm disturbed by that level of realism. Of course getting this far was inevitable, I'm just shocked that it's here so soon. It's stuff like this that begins to blur our understanding of reality and fiction and thus make it harder for us to rationalize actions for proper judgment. There will be givaways still- autonomous voice patterns have a ways to go before these avatars stop sounding like puppets.

Even so there will be many great applications for use in games, movie effects or even for instructional purposes, whatever, but I feel online is where this technology may thrive the most. Whether an advantage or disadvantage, advancements like this will only further draw people into online social environs as social domains begin to reign supreme on the net. But my only qualm is that people who already invest time in fictional reality may find it harder to leave when this customizable realism is at their fingertips. How much time will we dedicate to hanging out with virtual counterparts before we realize we're spending less time in the 'real' reality? Would virtual realism create new social norms?

And I've probably already crossed an ocean with this, but I'm beginning to get Matrix vibes from this and then you begin to see where I have issues with this advancement.

It's really nice we have this level of realism in the works but is this what we really need?
 
Last edited:
That is extremely impressive, the only thing I think needs to be improved upon is the eyes and hair, but the skin is flawless. Almost like a super-imposed image over a 3D animated head.
 
I think the model moves like a human, but there's something about the face... maybe the shading or color... that looks obviously fake. When I first opened it, I thought it moved just like a human, except for some overly fluid movements, but there is still just something about it that doesn't seem realistic.
 
They say the face is near impossible to get exactly right. I think they nickname it the absolute final frontier because you can never actually make it "real". While the animation is nice it still has the problems that many other animators have had over the year, which is the ability to get the face to seem real to humans.
 
Last edited:
And the games still won't be very fun.

I don't see the big deal about going to these lengths. The closer video games get to reality, the more boring they will become.
 
Just so I'm clear on this, the whole thing was an animation? Obviously the colorized versions were, but before that as well? Her body, too, or just her face?
 
Pitch said:
Just so I'm clear on this, the whole thing was an animation? Obviously the colorized versions were, but before that as well? Her body, too, or just her face?
Click to expand...

Entire thing.
 
This reminds me of some movie, or some dream I had I thought was a movie.

fate said:
And the games still won't be very fun.

I don't see the big deal about going to these lengths. The closer video games get to reality, the more boring they will become.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I don't play videogames because of their awsome graphics. Do I really want to play GTA with people that look that realistic?

For sports games fine, lets just hope they remember the fun.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom