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Guh. All that horsepower on the screen, and the characters have Mass Effect faces, creepy Polar Express mannequin stares, and move like robots. Seems like the more they amp up the MIPS-per-pixel, the less actual character makes it through to game graphics...
 
It seems as if the more CGI in a film, the worse the acting. I suppose the tradeoff is paying a good actor and director to do a good job or to squander the cash on fancy graphics.
 
It seems as if the more CGI in a film, the worse the acting. I suppose the tradeoff is paying a good actor and director to do a good job or to squander the cash on fancy graphics.

I remember when I was a teen and very much into photography, I had a greater interest in (indeed knowledge of) cameras than I did in the actual art. It was quite a few years before I learnt that one could make worthwhile statements with just a brownie. It's a maturity thing. Those that have little to say often feel that technology can make up for that. Witness the overuse of special effects these days. There's nothing wrong with it, but it does dilute the communication.

But yeah. Real actors is where it's at. Having spent some years in the theatre I still prefer a real actor, and you can skip the sets if you like. It's the humanity that counts. :)
 
Despite the flashiness in the graphics, the "uncanny valley" is still there in regards to people's faces. The most realistic the look, the more repulsed we are by the "actors".
 
Despite the flashiness in the graphics, the "uncanny valley" is still there in regards to people's faces. The most realistic the look, the more repulsed we are by the "actors".

Yes, the eyes are still wrong.
When it comes to movement, at first they move slowly, almost carefully.. as if the animators are worried about a "wrong" move. And still the errors are there, inertia and gravity isn't handled correctly. And as soon as the shooting starts it's all back to 198x, all realism goes out the window as far as movement is concerned.

There's a lot of computer-generated stuff out there now. And still, for the computer-generated replacements for cartoon animated films.. what I don't understand is why hand-animated cartoon movies can (when they want to) handle things like gravity, inertia, and walking in a much more natural manner than any computer-animated film I've seen to date.

-Tor
 
There's a lot of computer-generated stuff out there now. And still, for the computer-generated replacements for cartoon animated films.. what I don't understand is why hand-animated cartoon movies can (when they want to) handle things like gravity, inertia, and walking in a much more natural manner than any computer-animated film I've seen to date.

Like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff and doesn't fall until he notices he's run off the edge of a cliff?
 
Yes, the eyes are still wrong.
When it comes to movement, at first they move slowly, almost carefully.. as if the animators are worried about a "wrong" move. And still the errors are there, inertia and gravity isn't handled correctly. And as soon as the shooting starts it's all back to 198x, all realism goes out the window as far as movement is concerned.

There's a lot of computer-generated stuff out there now. And still, for the computer-generated replacements for cartoon animated films.. what I don't understand is why hand-animated cartoon movies can (when they want to) handle things like gravity, inertia, and walking in a much more natural manner than any computer-animated film I've seen to date.
It's laziness, pure and simple, is what it is. If they modelled movement and inertia in an even halfway realistic way, you'd have to be looking to catch the problems with it. Instead they take shortcuts that require less planning and work, and the more power they pump into it the more obvious it becomes.

The biggest offender is linear motion; living things don't move like that, never have, and never will. If they mimicked the slow-fast-slow pace of actual real-world motions (which traditional animators did, however much they exaggerated for effect,) it'd be vastly more convincing, but that would take work. (Not much, but evidently they care just that little.) Instead, everything moves from point A to point B at a constant rate, and applied to an IK skeleton it becomes obviously creepy. (I think the worst offender I've ever seen on this was Madagascar - everything in that movie moves in linear time, and they try to do quick movements by increasing the rate, which makes it even worse - much like the little herky-jerky mini-motions they put in on 1313 to try and make the shortcuts less obvious.)

Eyes, too, are a big problem, not because we can't render a believable eyeball, but because they don't do anything with them. Look at the dude as he stares at the hologram - his eyes aren't moving, he's not examining anything, he's just staring creepily off into space as he speaks with a creepy Tom Cruise grin, because nobody could be assed to make his eyes flick this way and that (or blink, for that matter.)

Little things like that count in a big way for believability, yet game animators keep failing to learn this lesson, or care about it enough to fix it, and the more horsepower they pump into it, the worse it looks. The fact that everybody is lauding the wizardry of the pixel shaders in a world populated by dead-eyed marionettes is a pretty good microcosm of why the industry is in the state it's in.
 
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Like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff and doesn't fall until he notices he's run off the edge of a cliff?

Note the "(when they want to)" that I included.. :) but hey, even Will E. Coyote's special way of handling gravity looks more convincing than how it's done in that game video link (and any computer-generated movie yet produced, including, for example, Clone Wars).

-Tor
 
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