"Super" Realistic CG Characters (Beyond Uncanny Valley)

Hey I just found this link on the Slex forums:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece?Submitted=true

That's the most realistic I ever saw. I never saw Beowulf, so I dunno what these folks are talkin' about who are makin' the comparison.

Somebody posted on them forums: "imagine the av's we could make"

Somebody else posted: "Very soon you won't be able to tell the difference between the real president and a computer generated one."

Crazy, yeah...and two posters commented on how u could make a "fake" of a President & start a war, which is somethin I been thinkin for a long time myself, while I watch the tech get better every year.

I dunno about avs, how realistic THEY could be, given the bandwidth & traffic considerations, but if they were close to this level in the year 2020...imagine you are brand new, loggin in for the first time...I'm a diagnosed Bipolar Psychotic Schizo here, maybe that's why I thought of this so quick...but ok:

2 (insert griefer group here) boneheads TP into a welcome area. One has a thug or soldier, or whatever av, the other one...a "pregnant" female av.

The male av whips out a big combat knife & slashes the female avs' stomach open (magic of scripts & anims). I think...well...I dunno bout YOU, but that would make some folks log out, cancel, call & cuss out LL, then go call the RL authorities.

The virtual pr0n industry would boom again, but I wonder how much cencorship would have to be in place, & how this would change the amount of freedom in the "metaverse"?

Well anyway...somma the posters on that link I gave ya' said they had seen better. Anybody got any thoughts/links/comments?

Yeah I know I'm off-topic, sue me, band me from the forums, etc.

This was posted here early part of the week man :0 ... come on keep up )

Funny thing is .... as i read this post ..... Logins susspended due to overload on SL ... so Tech needs to iron out the basic stuff befor we can ever see stuff like this here

LL get your finger out ...paying customers cant gain access while the grid is full of non paying BOTS AND F**%&N CAMPERS !

LOL...I looked & didn't see it, I'll look again...was wondering why nobody responded in half a second like usual, lol.

Nice to see your still around though man ...i wondered if that crazy motorbike gang ever did come round to pay you a visit lol

Pretty darned amazing, Beowulf doesn't compare, actually.

LOL NOOOOOOO....I thought everybody 4got about that! ARRGH!

Heh heh...that was funny...thx 4 the advice back then, my "psychiatrist" was messin up pretty good, haha




Yeah, I'm puttin Beowulf in my Netflix cue right now before I 4get, I'm practically senile & I hear it looks wayyyy ahead of other similar CG+RL effects extravaganzas (sp?)

...anybody got a link to the original post on this vid? I'm goin blind or somethin here!

This animation is better than that in Beowulf. Or maybe I should say more realistic. Beowulf is quite convincing on its own terms in its own world, but you would never mistake it for reality.

But the first version of this video I saw doesn't tell you it's an animation and it did fool me.

Science fiction fans knew years ago that someday photographic and video evidence would become unrealiable. I'd say that day is nearly upon us. But that's okay. I'll take Max Headroom over or current crop of world leaders.

I feel ya', yeah Beowulf (from the previews I've seen) looks more like a fancy graphic novel in "3D"...right up my alley!

LOL @ Max Headroom...they should bring "him" back

It's kinda "scary" thinkin' about the fact that technology makes such unpredictable LEAPS nowdays, that it might not take until the year 2020 for CG & RL footage to be indistinguisable huh?

I'd say that's as good a description as any. It was good as a stylized piece, but no one in their right might would call it realistic. The poster who made the comparison is either blind, and idiot, or both.

In any case, "Emily" is certainly impressive. I'm not sure how scalable or practical the described technique is that went into creating her rig, but she's an excellent proof of concept, definitely a breakthrough. As was mentioned in the article, she's not quite perfect, though. If you watch the video a few times, she gets a little more noticeably fake with each repeat. What makes her seem so real the first time through is mostly the fact that she's very different from what most of us have seen before, so we haven't yet had the chance to define something like her as fake in our heads. At first glance, anything "not fake" seems "real". Look back at her in five years, and I'm sure she'll seem VERY fake.

As for the notion of photo and video evidence becoming unreliable, I would submit that they always were. People have been manipulating them for years, since long before the modern digital era. From the civil war photographers who would drag dead soldiers' bodies around for miles to find just the right tree to claim they fell under, to the airbrushing of supermodels' faces and bodies on magazine covers, to simply showing things out of context to change their assumed meaning, the phrase "photographs don't lie" has itself been a lie since it was first coined. I think Cindy Crawford said it best, "Even I don't look like Cindy Crawford."

Heck, half the country thought Bigfoot really had been found last week, even though the pictures were so obviously of a gorilla suit in a freezer. Usually, it's not the imagery itself that creates belief; it's the presentation of it.

One of my favorite books in my retouching collection is "Making People Disappear":

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Making-People-Disappear/Alain-Jaubert/e/9780080374307

It has lots of old retouched propaganda examples in it.

I see the next generation "Alien Autopsy" coming out of this technology (pun intended). Maybe even a digital Jonathan Frakes will narrate it.

That's an interesting clip. Course the time and effort, and hardware, that went into creating it is proportionate. This is not in SL's near future if ever.

Beowulf is a very good example of that "uncanny valley" effect. As a demonstration of very advanced animation techniques, it's top notch. As a "movie" it sucks. You can't quite immerse yourself into the plot. There's constant subtle reminders of "wow this is pretty cool animation" or "damn that was awesome, how'd they do that?". But you can't get that out of your head that it's CGI. You can't relax and enjoy the story. It's a two hour montage of really cool animation. (and it has Jolie )

makes me think of S1MONE, but digitalized actor rather than actor digitalized?

ALL good points...yeah I went back & watched the video about 10 more times (lil' obsessive compulsive) & every time it looked less "real". I noticed the lighting, the first time I saw the clip...it just looked like a bad "director", makeup & lighting job on an otherwise healthy lookin' spokeswoman. After a few times, her eyes looked "dead"...her hair looked fake, and her skin looks hard as a brick, kinda like just a version of the usual "plastic people" we are used to seein' in CG, but with a movie makeup crew.

...with that all said though, STILL a BIG leap as far as the muscle movements' coordination. If it wasn't for that part of the tech...she would have looked fake the first time, easily.

Yep you're right, in 5 years, she's look about as real as Super Mario.



LOL

Yeah, I know just what you mean...bein' a BIG Ghost Rider fan since I was about...5 or 6 y.o., when the movie finally came out...EVERY 5 SECONDS, I couldn't help it..."how'd they do that? What software did they use? Wonder 'bout how many overlays that took? Was that a stuntman, a Cg, or a puppet on the stunt ramp?"

Regardless, I'm real used to that now, so I still love the movies anyway, unless they have the CG & RL footage so sloppy that it kinda seems like the whole movie is in "two different dimensions"...which is tough ta' explain.

I guess I mean like when Xena: Warrior Princess first came out...lotta dragons, demons & other ridiculous CG monsters, up against Lucy Lawless, who wasn't that good at stunts & fight choreography yet....it was about as realistic as Power Rangers...cause the CG contrast, brightness, & saturation was too far off from the background lighting, the textures looked pasted on, etc.

Hopefully I'll just sit back & enjoy the visuals like you said...hey...I just saw Conan: The Barbarian (Schwarzennegger) again for the 1st time since I was a kid...Beowulf shouldn't phase me, LoL

It's an impressive technology demo. It will be a while before the typical desktop computer has enough computing and graphics power to make this kind of rendering feasible in real time (perhaps 10 years), but it will come sooner or later to Second Life or some future virtual world.

Will it really be "better"? Who knows? We don't yet know how people will react to extended interaction in a photorealistic virtual world, because nobody has done it yet.

Yay! Max for Prexy!

Didn't someone in the thread say that only the front of the face was an animation, the rest was real?

"...you know you spend too much time in SL when..."