Realism!

This lecture was focused on realism, and the amount of effort we go to in order to achieve it in animation and modelling, often with horrible results. One of my favourite parts of this lecture, was the idea of the uncanny valley.

In animation, you would assume that the more lifelike and human that a character seems, it would be easier to relate to. However, as a character becomes 'almost human' it will also show 'non-human' attributes. Examples of this could include jerky movements, dead eyes, or an incorrectly moving mouth. We then enter the 'uncanny valley'.

It is named after the dip that occurs in the line in this graph:

[IMAGE NOT WORKING WILL ADD LATER :( ]

An example of this can be shown in the following videos.




Tin Toy is a short film by Pixar made in 1988. Although the animation itself was praised, viewers were extremely disturbed by the baby in the animation. I was also quite unsettled when I first saw the baby crawl into the room. I feel the main thing about it is the jerkiness of movement and rubberiness of the skin.

Thankfully Pixar changed the way they modelled/animated humans due to the negative reaction towards to baby, if not, there's a possibility the first Toy Story film would've had similar 'human' characters *shudder*



When I first saw the trailer for Heavy Rain back in 2006, I was confused as to what everyone was talking about when they were praising the animation detail. The mouth moves incorrectly and completely ruins the realism of the scene. There's a similar problem with the eyes, in my opinion, they show no emotion and just stare at you.


Half Life 2 was realised two years before this trailer and yet, personally, it featured much better facial animation, and is still better than some games today. Even with the latest installment, the graphics aren't as great as games such as Mass Effect 2, and Crysis, but the facial animation allows us to connect with the characters much more easily and they seem more realistic.