“The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
People who look at this forum a lot can remember quite a few images that fall into the Uncanny Valley. I wont name names - the artists who create them are very skilled to even have got to the Uncanny Valley. Infact - one of the best uses of the uncanny valley is Gollum.
That was a good video. I kind of had the idea of what it meant but never understood the “valley” part. Definitely some stuff to think of when creating my own characters.
That youtube link is the best presentation of this I have ever seen. That one image of the oriental ladies face (I think it is an actual robot?) really illustrates it. As far as Blenderart goes, I think that the Elephants Dream characters are an example where overall, they should fit in the stylized safe zone, but as Tony Mullen puts it in his discussion of those characters, they are delibrately made to be off putting. They are fairly human in a lot of respects but they are kind of angular. Emo really bothered me because of his neck and especially his shrill voice. Until I read Tony’s explanation of it I just knew that I didn’t like the movie in spite of it’s excellent demonstration of what blender can do etc. I haven’t heard anyone place those characters in the uncanny valley before, what do others think? As far as animation/game character art, this is a large part of the bigger discusion of character style and design. Probably the most fascinating part of art there is.
JF
perharps you should the read counter arguments of people who basically say the uncanny valley is just B.S. pseudo scientific nonsense. I am in that camp. I just feel people are too overconfident at there ability to spot cgi in movies sure most blockbuster movies use cgi in big overblown ways that over done and easy to spot. But the are lots of movies with invisbile effects so am sure hollywood has slipped a few cgi characters that most have been non the wiser too. All too often I think the uncanny valley excuse is just up to deflect the true reason why some cgi movies fail crapy storys and animation.
p.s gollum can’t fall in the uncanny valley period because he is not human and is not intended to look as one unless you see corrupted and mutated hobbits daily you wouldn’t have a clue as to how one looks.
