More Realistic Rendered Flesh

The Renderman writes "Check out this ubercool new rendering technique for skin from the guys who invented photon mapping. They also have several animations to demonstrate the technique - all rendered using Linux :) It makes those faces in Final Fantasy look like plastic. This technology should make the actors in Hollywood more nervous than what they saw in FF." The examples prove that human skin needs more blemishes. Without zits, pimples, moles, or scars, the skin still looks fake, it is definitely a cool step forward.

Re:Human actors needn't be worried...yet

There are, of course, tons of examples of existing movies where there's a big difference between the what appears on the screen and the actor behind the character: animation, the same actor playing multiple characters, different actors doing the voice and the body for the same character, etc.

On the other hand, there's still the major problem of creating affect: it's very difficult to draw or paint or model a person displaying a certain emotion without working from a real person, and doing the voice is at least as hard (besides the fact that speech synthesis is not as good as rendering yet).

I suspect that, even for an entirely CG movie, the studio would want human actors for all of the parts, so that the animators could see how each character's face looks when they are doing what the script says.

Furthermore, there's a lot more to each character than what's in the script; the actor (and director) determine what the character is thinking and feeling while doing the predetermined actions. It's essentially the Turing Test: convince an audience that you really are a person in a certain situation. Neither a computer, nor even a group of graphics researchers are going to be able to get into the roles that way any time soon.

This could, of course, mean that an actor's appearence makes very little difference; a skillful actor could play a character with no physical resemblence if the task involved only showing a graphics team what the necessary emotions look like.

Re:Human actors needn't be worried...yet

The *concept* of CG actors may leave people cold on the face of it. But the reality of seeing those digital actors in an actual context... engage the viewer in a compelling story, and he or she will not be paying attention to whether the actor is digital, flesh and bone, or hand drawn.

I bet if you asked these same people about using technology to revive, say, John F. Kennedy from the grave to appear in a movie, they would have also been dubious. But that didn't stop Forrest Gump from being a success, mostly because of that technology. In the context of the film, it made sense and looked fairly natural.

Where digital actors will make an impact first (and have already been making an impact) are background crowd scenes and walk-ons. With some motion capture equipment, a few actors can become a huge crowd that does exactly what the director tells them, every time. The A-list stars may not be threatened, but I suspect people who make some money on the side by being extras will be seeing less work. I also suspect stunt people will be seeing less work as well. Why risk a real human life by having them jump off a building, when you can get a digital actor to jump and come to a splattery end without anyone being hurt?

But I do think eventually that audince's suspension of disbelief will apply when they are presented with a life-like character in a compelling plot... something that is a bit more than a technology demo that the current crop of realistic digital actors are now.

I beg to differ...

If that were the case, then how come animation does so well? Even series/movies from american studios which tend not to have the dramatic range of anime.

I know *I* have been deeply affected by some of the anime I have watched, and I know many other people that have as well.

Secondly - your basic assumption is faulty. Even with animated works (cel or cg) there is a real person behind each character. Because whilst the image may be completely fake, the VOICES are not.

Now, given the current speech synthesis technology, if a series was voiced using it I *would* be put off. Because the voices have just as big an effect on the emotional impact of a show as the visuals. Hell, I think they have more. Many a fantastic anime series/movie has been ruined by a pathetic english dub cast.

And there is another medium for stories that has NO dependence on live people for the telling - BOOKS. By your reasoning books must be the most boring things in the world, because by definition all the characters in them are entirely fictional. And if none of the people you talked to are interested in books, they are hardly a representative sample, are they?

But when will they _move_ well?

My problem with the characters in FF wasn't the texture of their skin. Every one of them (except the cops in mecha suits) moved like a Disney animatronic figure. This is why many cartoon characters can seem very realistic: many cel animators concentrate on the movement and articulation of the bodies, rather than detail of surfaces. When will the CG industry learn that detail is much, much less important than giving your actors believable jaw movement?

offtopic, but sort of related?

http://bbspot.com/News/2001/04/flesh.html [bbspot.com]

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Re:Realtime?

The horsepower needed to do this will not show up in your consumer level video cards ($200-$500 is consumer level... We use $3000.00 - $6000.00 video cards in the video production industry) for a really really long time.

I have one of those $3000 cards from a few years ago, and the new Nvidia GEForce 3, at $250, is better. In fact, right now it's hard to spend $3000 on a graphics board and get something significantly better than the consumer products, because the high-end graphics companies are money starved (or gone) and aren't keeping up.

This photon rendering may be doable like radiosity [autodesk.com] - render the radiosity map once, then view from different angles. This allows real-time walk-throughs of static scenes.

Read the article and don't "Assume"

If you had read the article, Commander, you had found out that this new technology in rendering is based on subsurface scattering.

Instead of assuming that light will scatter to all places on top of the surface it also scatters inside the material.

This is, because not all materials are non-translucent. For example: milk looks as a non-translucent white, but a very tiny drop of milk is actually translucent.

The same goes for skin, Guinness and snow. By assuming that the light will not scatter back at the same place as the light impacts the material, but also makes a little travel inside the material, the overal image looks much more confincing.

Please read before commenting, Taco :]

Zits, pimples, moles, or scars?

What? Zits? Pimples? Moles? Scars? Speak for yourself Commander! My face is smoother than Hillary Rosen's ass, just without the smell. ;)

Didn't BBspot do a joke article about this?

As I recall, in that article, the potential pornographic uses of improved flesh rendering were emphasized. Let's face it, the porn industry will be some of the first people to deploy this technology large-scale. They pioneered BetaMax, VHS, GIF, JPEG, internet multimedia as a whole, and this too will be lead by the noble pornographers. God bless them, every one!


USA Intellectual Property Laws: 5 monkeys, 1 hour.

Re:the obvious applications

There was an article a while back about someone using a game engine as a basis for the production of a motion picture.

Oh, you mean Tomb Raider?