The future of animation

For those interested, there’s a fairly decent article in the most recent issue of Wired magazine, that talks about come of the challenges faced by animators (the large industrial studios) as they push the limits toward achieving an ever-greater sense of realism. It’s a good read.

Yes, I read that. It was funny how FX people described the success of their work in terms of their audience not noticing their work at all. Or how philosophical those research people get about the face and its connection with the soul. I was glad to read about that, the fact that brute computational power is not enough to solve such problems.

is there a web link to this article? I noticed that the text “Wired” was the color of a link, yet was not a link. I do not get the magazine.

Yes. And it also mentions that due to the complexity of the various combinations and permutations of expression, that a a good approximation is all we can hope for. The statement,

Our job isn’t to simulate an actual human face with 100 percent fidelity. Our job is merely to fool the audience. Once you believe it, we’re done.

I also like this one:

Andy Jones, Final Fantasy animation director, makes a similar point, arguing that, while a completely convincing replication of a human being had never been his team’s goal, he, too, had noticed how “it can get eerie. As you push further and further, it begins to get grotesque. You start to feel like you’re puppeteering a corpse.” Similarly, PDI/DreamWorks’ Lucia Modesto noted that her team had to pull back a little on Princess Fiona: She was beginning to look too real, and the effect was getting distinctly unpleasant.

For anyone who is interested, the article is available online at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/face.html

That article was wonderfulk

its true

we can relate to fake looking characters ( like toy story) and almost real (attack of the clones), but as soon as you get within 97 percent, it becomes creepy because it stops being fake, but wierd real. Like a slightly mechanical or gohstly human being. It is just off enough to make it seem bizzarre, like something filmed backweards and played forwards. Until you get to 100%, the remainder isnt wort doing

I’ve had a subscription to Wired for quite some time, but for a while, it was soooooooo overdesigned that it was a chore to read. So I stopped. About the last year or so, I’ve actually looked forward to each issue - it has very informative and interesting articles that aren’t subjugated to some layout editor’s bizarre sense of page design. I’m willing to bet they lost more than a few subscribers over this.