"The Uncanny Valley"

[MechDeus]

Outside of lip-synching, the characters in Silent Hill 3 look damned good, probably the best in-game models I've seen (which are definately helped by the filters and what not). Some more time and work spent on the hands (hands and face are the biggest problem areas for every kind of artist) and they would be nothing short of incredible.

this is why motion capturing sucks. you can have the most realistic model and graphics but if the animation and motion sucks it makes it totally unbelieveable. i may not understand the process entirely but is there a reason they still mo-cap using those little balls other than speed? because it usually produces a horrible effect. its like "look wes spent all this time modeling this character. lookit this render. sooooo realistic. now lets watch it jump. ACK! oh yeah. we didnt spend the budget on animation. soory bout that."

The main problem with motion capture is that time is rarely spent smoothing the transition animations from one mocap motion to the next, so it all comes off as way too stilted. *coughEntertheMatrixcough* Then there's also the inherent rigidness to it even in terms of regular motion, because it doesn't normally adapt to where the person is standing. The animators have to fool around with that and it usually doesn't get done (or done right). If those were ironed out mocap would probably look pretty good, although I'd imagine 100% hand-animation would still best it.

[Master]

http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284...w=wn_tophead_2

Found this on Kotaku:

Citing the haunting depiction of screen siren Naomi Watts in King Kong, author Clive Thompson muses on the botched photorealism that games (and this latest gen specifically) show when it comes to the human condition. The effect, Thompson points out, is called “Uncanny Valley” and concerns the realism of human depiction escalating as the complexity with which they are created is reduced. Meaning simple sketches are more realistic to us, because when things get too real, we’re distracted by their minor flaws.

Kind of cool. We all probably had this thought, I just didn't know it had a name...

PS: Yes, I know he gushes about Kameo. No, I'm not a viral marketer.

[Opaque]

There was a thread about "Uncanny Valley" a long time ago.

Here it is.

[frostwolf ex]

yeah astroblue had a thread called "uncanny valley" last year, interesting stuff really, particularly for me with my psychology interests, if you think about it, the ability to make fine distinctions between things that look like you and not works into the ability to foil some preditors and distinguish mates of the same species.


EDIT: oh and fuck opaque for beating me to it.

[Mman]

Yeah, Ive thought about this with a number of titles. Most recently the matrix game. Developers want to make the characters in their game look as closely to the stars as possible because they think the stars sell games. Personally, I think it would be better to design a whole new look to these characters based on their counterparts that fits in more personally with the game. Just take the core characteristics and make something that works, not something that is a facsimile to the real thing. We are just reminded that it is not the real thing when that is attempted.

[donuts]

I work in the feature CG industry and this is something we know too well. There is a point in CG humans which is really hard to cross, where your models become disturbing to the audience, they look sort of 'zombie' like. Video games are entering this realm with the new-gen systems, and sometimes it is preferable to switch to a design obviously not-real so players do not get disturbed by what they see and feel. A good example are games like Silent Hill 2, their FMVs are sometimes disturbing because some of the human characters look real, but the way they move, or look at the player are kind of weird. Your brain buys their realism at the first place and this is why non-real elements make them disturbing. Getting to the other side of the Uncanny Valley is a hard task, believe me.

[Master]

Oops. Merging the threads.

[rezo]

Looks like the artists need to work on conveying human expressions!

[AaronChance]

I spoke to the developer of the new Tomb Raider about this issue, where they had originally brought Lara's design to the highest level of possible realism... but no one liked it at all, so they had to scale back and use a more stylized approach.

[George]

Half-Life 2 is the only game I've ever seen cross over this "Uncanny Valley" by even a considerable amount. There were only a few humanoids that weren't in masks or anything like that, but the facial expressions were utterly amazing on Alyx and Barney especially.