Comments on: Backfilling the Uncanny Valley

Backfilling the Uncanny Valley

Dave Faris — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:18:17 -0800

Facial CG Animation is getting better. 1, 2 <<warning : noisy!!, 3, 4, 5, 6.

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By: blacklite

blacklite — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:29:07 -0800

Hm. It doesn't creep me out, but there are still lots of things to fix. I bet it's still firmly in the valley for some people though – I have the luxury(?) of having grown up with weird deformed faces desynchronized from their voices.

By: blacklite

blacklite — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:31:08 -0800

The things I'm noticing now (it doesn't matter how good you make these things, it seems, you always notice something else) seem to be lip and tongue movements. Your mouth should be in a certain position to go "ss" and "sh", etc, and the last one especially seems to get that wrong.

By: chococat

chococat — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:32:15 -0800

I was set to snark on the creepy fakeness CGI still has, but #2, 3 and 4 are pretty amazing. They still can't seem to get the talking thing down.

By: flatluigi

flatluigi — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:35:00 -0800

It may be just me, but I'm impressed that most of these don't put me off too much. It's a nice step (climb?) out of the uncanny valley. The two that put me off were the eyeless "masks" in the second to last video and the quick facial movements in the last video.

By: joelf

joelf — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:51:06 -0800

i didn't cringe either. It still seems like talking plastic dead people though. I think if the brightened up the eyes it might help. Brighten as in make them more lively.

By: aqhong

aqhong — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:56:14 -0800

And then there's this.

By: sonic meat machine

sonic meat machine — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:56:31 -0800

The last one puts the lie to the technically impressive first few. Even though it appears that the animation is capturing expressions, it's not, really--it's visually mimicking them. Even with a sophisticated model and animation the last one looks completely false and soulless.

By: Dave Faris

Dave Faris — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:06:10 -0800

The last one is the oldest of the lot, made in 2006/early 2007. The others are more recent innovations.

By: spiderskull

spiderskull — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:13:09 -0800

Awesome post. I'm amazed at some of the stuff they can do -- but what's really impressive is that there are deterministic math formulae behind it all. There's a science to mimicking facial expression, and that's what's so cool about it. If this catches your interest, and you're in the SoCal area, you definitely should check out SIGGRAPH -- it's where academics and industry people show off the latest and greatest.

By: pmbuko

pmbuko — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:26:06 -0800

#3: Michael Stipe shaved?

By: nightchrome

nightchrome — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:31:35 -0800

It really seems like the number one hurdle they still have to get past is the fact that CG skin always looks solid and plastic. It was especially obvious in that first link, when the actress made a face which required slack skin or furrows/wrinkles in the skin the model ceased looking anything like the intended expression. You just can't get around the fact that facial expressions are not made by the skin itself, but by the muscles underneath which the skin is loosely resting on.

By: Leon-arto

Leon-arto — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:54:29 -0800

Sounds like a former president -- building a bridge to the future, over the uncanny valley and into the Promised Land. That said, I'm going to be incredibly creeped out when I see one of these on a giant bus station video screen, watching me get on the bus. That's just too far.

By: agress

agress — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:02:51 -0800

For me, it's the smiles that are the most obvious giveaways. For some reason, they've managed to make pretty much every other expression look good, but the smiles always look pretty bad to me. Something about the mouth and surrounding area just doesn't look right. Speaking specifically about the first link, which was good in every other regard, I thought. Also, I was hoping there'd be some facial animation in #3, just cause the texturing job on that one looked really good and it'd have been interesting to see how that would affect the realism of the facial expressions. And they really should have put eyes or grey placeholders or...hell, anything other than just black nothingness on the "masks" in #5, cause that was kinda weird and a tiny bit creepy looking.

By: Effigy2000

Effigy2000 — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:10:34 -0800

Neato. Though after watching #2, I kinda couldn't help thinking if only they had used that kind of CGI for I Am Legend, the film wouldn't have sucked quite so bad.

By: Leon-arto

Leon-arto — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:26:55 -0800

I was just thinking what some of this reminds me of -- the portraits at Disney World/Land in the Haunted Mansion that follow you around with their eyes. There, it's just a trick lens system. Here, it could be done realtime. Why is Disney not on it?

By: elgilito

elgilito — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:52:54 -0800

I guess that the reason why #6 is different from the others is that it's actually a man-created animation, i.e. the animator (Steven Stahlberg) defines the moves after observing them in real life. The others are motion-captured, i.e. the data points are taken directly from real-life performances, so it's more like digital rotoscoping.

By: seanmpuckett

seanmpuckett — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 05:23:56 -0800

Still too smooth. I suppose part of the capture process has to run the captured data through some estimation/smoothing algorithms that, for me, turn them all into zombies.

By: rlk

rlk — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 05:47:42 -0800

Seems like tongues will continue to be a particular problem. In #6 the lips seem okay but the tongue is saying "la la la". Can't stick retro-reflective markers (like #5) on your tongue, I guess... not until the actress can get a "Jody". Camera-based tracking (#2) isn't a total solution either. ("Jody"? Anyone?)

By: Benny Andajetz

Benny Andajetz — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:11:52 -0800

The progress that has been made in the last ten years is amazing. Even the "plastic" skin has become quite believable in a lot of cases. I agree with agress: the mouth (especially the smile) is the giveaway. There's still not enough subtlety.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:33:00 -0800

Your last example was posted to YouTube in 2006, so it's a little out of date. I found a lot of this stuff pretty good, and while it was obviously CG I don't find it "Uncanny" at all, so I think they are "climbing back out" of that valley. Or maybe I've just become desensitized to it.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:04:47 -0800

Yeah it's like there's a sort of low-pass filter applied to everything - any small, fast, really subtle motions get left out. But the mo-caps where pretty cool.

By: ddaavviidd

ddaavviidd — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:14:28 -0800

It's just great that these faces look exactly like those I see in magazine ads and tv commercial. I mean, they look so real. D'oh!

By: iamck

iamck — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:09:03 -0800

The combination of CGI and pornography will birth some of the most interesting fetishes.

By: Dave Faris

Dave Faris — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:36:42 -0800

Will? Has. NSFW!

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:06:35 -0800

Oh god no... I wish I could unsee that.

By: edgeways

edgeways — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:25:37 -0800

One more step to the complete digitization of movies I think. what.. another 5 - 10 years and we'll have our first movies that are completely animated but not marketed as being animated, and will be hard to tell.

By: bauermaster

bauermaster — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:05:25 -0800

That truly looked amazing. But then, I thought Beowulf looked great too...

By: Brandon Blatcher

Brandon Blatcher — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:15:35 -0800

Serious question: what's the point of doing this?

By: Dave Faris

Dave Faris — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 08:27:03 -0800

Well, the most common use these days is to pull actors into videogames. In the 90's, they used live action cutscenes because the graphics weren't up to par. (Although, apparently Electronic Arts is still partying like it's 1995.) Another reason is to make live-action movie special effects look more realistic. As with #2, it'd be tricky to make a man morph into a green Hulk using make-up and film effects. Not that it hasn't been tried (1912), and tried (1941). and tried (1981), with varying degrees of success. But even less dramatically, if you use this method, and you decide sometime down in post production that you want the scene to be look another way -- everything from the costuming, to the actors, to the camera angles, to the setting -- it wouldn't involve a total reshoot, which would be massively expensive. Just juggle a couple of numbers and re-render. I think that's probably the holy grail of this process.

By: juiceCake

juiceCake — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 08:40:46 -0800

Serious question: what's the point of doing this? What's the point of art at all then? There is an art to this, and craftsmanship, be it digital and programmatic.

By: Brandon Blatcher

Brandon Blatcher — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 08:50:16 -0800

Thanks for the response Dave. Having recently watched bits of King Kong, I was impressed by the awesome effects, even as I found the use of them overdone and overwrought, done mostly because "this'll look so cool" as opposed to enhancing the story. At this point, as CGI continues to race towards being ever more realistic, I'm waiting for that race to be over and the filmmakers fascination with it to mature into realizing that "hey, it's just code and pixels, we can do ANYTHING" and then turn out some really amazing stories, similar to how painters eventually realized "hey it's just paint, and since photography can mimici reality, we can go hog wild!"

By: Brandon Blatcher

Brandon Blatcher — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 09:04:24 -0800

What's the point of art at all then? Individual pieces and movements usually have a reason.

By: Dave Faris

Dave Faris — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:34:10 -0800

Just came across this.