Image Metrics May Revolutionize Facial Animation 99
iStorm writes, "I've been interested in computer animation for a long time and have recently started cracking down on my studies in an effort to eventually move myself from hobbyist to professional... then I find this article about Image Metrics, which can map an actor's emoting onto a generated face or onto the image of another actor, living or dead. How does a seasoned animator view this sort of push ahead in technology? If so much of the creative process is made so easy, where's the need for traditional animators spending exponentially larger amounts of time to create work of equal or lesser quality? How did animators view motion capture when it first appeared? Will there still be room for creativity if this tech comes to fruition?" The article doesn't say what kind of time or processing power Image Metrics's "high-fidelity, performance-driven facial animation" requires.
In my day.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In my day... 100,000 years ago (Score:1)
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So you used Corel's predecessor Coral? Sounds like luxury to me.
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Feh. Younguns. In my day all we had were grunts and wild body movements, and you had to convey them to your audience in real time. Later we found we could make marks on cave walls, and the graffiti started to really distract from the conversation.
Mo-Cap (Score:4, Informative)
I think it'll be a while before the industry starts putting out photo realistic digital animations of people.
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Maybe state of the art, but not really, really good.
The way the bodies deform in that scene is very unnatural, and it's very easy for someone who didn't see a behind the scenes video, to spot the digital characters.
On full-body shots, the motion and the way the body and sp. the clothing deforms is great, but not realistic enough, physics are just too clean.
On close ups, well, it's too hard to simulate skin, and they did a great job. But you don't mistake them as real. At least not in
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What we expect to see is not always what is realistic, sometimes a more exaggerated movement seem more natural to a viewer than a correct and precise reproduction of what would really happen. Even actors learn how to make some movements in a more dramatic way they act. Maybe this technology could give a "good enough" result, if the actor has some training with it before hand, but I bet the best results in computer generated characters will still come from the hands and
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Obviously, please, read the whole thread:
>>>> I think it'll be a while before the industry starts putting out photo
realistic digital animations of people.
>>> Uh, The Matrix II. The fight scene with neo vs. a bajillion agent smiths? All of that was CG. from the moment the fighting started. No wirework at all. Go watch it. Not perfect maybe, but really, really, good.
>> Not really, really good.
Maybe state of the art, but not really, really good.
W
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About unrealistic animation being better than the realistic kind, that's right. Some stories are better served by non realistic scenes.
Some asian movies, like "Hero" have stunts that are hardly credible, even visually, but allowing themselves to show more than what is easily believable gives them more expression.
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Here's how it works. You employ animators to animate humans, or you use mocap. Suppose mocap produces better results. How likely are the animators to admit it?
The truth is that good results often require a blend of human animation and mocap, But dealing with mocap is more technical than just hand animating. So for most artists mocap is hard to do well, and less interesting. So artists bi
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There's room for all kinds of things. But sometimes the wrong decisions seem to get made. For example the Spiderman movies have some really amazing mocap that looks indistinguishable from an actor in a suit, but the exaggerations can look terrible, especially the rubbery Spiderman swinging through the streets in a really unnatural looking way. On the other hand, mocap would probably look just wrong in a Pixar production. What we rwally need are
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No doubt. Animating people is a tricky subject, especially when trying to do it automatically. Humans are incredibly good at recognising biological motion and particularly facial expressions. Not surprising from an evolutionary perspective, I guess: watching out for dangerous animals, looking for game and reading body language (for communication with strangers, knowing when someone is ill etc.) h
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this is like any advance in any industry - mocap provides a POTENTIAL time-saving alterna
kdawson didn't use PWNED in the title this time!! (Score:1, Funny)
There is always art in animation (Score:5, Insightful)
Animation from an animator gives it style, and feeling just as much as an actor does. Just watch any old Disney cartoon if you want to see the flow of such animation.
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Did the internet kill reading?
Are you new here?
Seriously, though, I would have responded the the point you were making, but I just got caught up on that one sentence.
Re:video killed painting? (Score:2)
Film at 11.
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No just, grammar and speling.
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Did CDs make Vinyl manufacturing go out of business?
Most of them to make a difference, but some are around...
But if you haven't noticed... When was the last hand drawn animation released in the theaters? I can't remember, but we've had like 5 CGI movies in the paste year or two.
Much like the old vinyl manufactures, hand drawn animation
Resolution increase != animation quality (Score:1)
Quality animation REQUIRES a skilled animator's touch - the more these companies try to create animation without the artist, the further they get from quality art. Look at how Pixar can make nearly abstract objects and characters emote, without any mo-ca
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Another issue is that much animation we see is not very realistic to begin with, it does not obey the laws of physics. Most animation is exagerated to look good and for visual, visceral and emotional impact, in fact most animation is not real. If you look at the real world many real world animated things are in fact... boring. Some of the
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http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/15/02332
New kinds of animations could leave current animators without a job, and employ others.
Of course, these animators could learn the skills to do mocap finishing, but propbably they don't like their jobs.
Not a new question... (Score:2, Insightful)
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That doesn't preclude the use of facial animation software. Just animate Keanu Reaves face and - voila! complete lack of believability!
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Around the renaissance, before the impressionist movement, realism was a highly prized aspect of painting. Most of the "commercial art" was oil paintings done on commission, and it was either "my niece, my soldier, or my serving dishes." Many painters roughed out the composition in a cost-effective way with camera obscura techniques or simple lentography, with the subject in a lit room and the canvas in a darkened room, and a pinhole or lens in a curtain between them.
Those who had a job to do embraced
Photography was a great thing for painters (Score:2)
Once people really embraced photography, it was a great thing for the art world, because painters were no longer burdened with the expectectation of reproducing reality. This freedom paved the way for abstract expressionism and dada.
Not Yet... (Score:2, Informative)
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give it 5 more years and we will have it if we want it
"serious" movies? (Score:1)
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it will change but you wont loose your job. (Score:2)
I don't see the face mapping tech being much more different then mo-cap just on a smaller level. If anything proceduaral synthesis will bring the biggest changes to animation, but you'll still need people to code even that.
Not to worry (Score:3, Insightful)
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Harry Potter (Score:1)
Short answer... (Score:1)
Short answer: Polar Express. Just compare this movie to any Pixar feature and you know the answer.
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"Image Metrics assisted in the making of Polar Express and are currently working on a number of major projects soon to be publicly announced."
Polar Express: this facial mo-cap technology. (albiet an earlier version)
Pixar: animators building each scene.
So I think Salzbrot's point was that we need to spend time and money on better animation if we want animated films that aren't full of creepy wax dolls, because their flagship use of this technolo
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I don't think it's so much a matter of subleties but consistency. Pixar's movies aren't photorealistic. They are 3D cartoons. Your brains happily fill in missing detail to cartoon characters, as long as the hints are there. But confuse the brain about whether
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Rendering Time (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't care how much processing power it takes, unless we are talking simulation on the level of some of the whole-world-weather simulations any additional processing will be a drop in the bucket compared to the current amount of time and processing power already devoted to any production quality animation.
Re: Rendering Time (Score:4, Informative)
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Porn (Score:1)
The evolution (Score:4, Insightful)
Technology usually advances so that it is not only more advanced, but also more efficient. It's fairly obvious that Hollywood studios (just an example) would want cheap CGI, and since there's a need for this to happen, there's also someone working on making that happen.
A skilled animator shouldn't be worried, however. Creativity is hard to replace with software and someone will always have to create whatever's portraited. How it's done and how fast is a different question.
how long is it before (Score:2)
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Technology usually advances so that it is not only more advanced, but also more efficient. It's fairly obvious that Hollywood studios (just an example) would want cheap CGI, and since there's a need for this to happen, there's also someone working on making that happen.
I wonder how much cheaper it would really be. Yes, your animators will probably save time, but won't you have to have "face actors" standing by to give the animator various "happy faces" to work with, or something? And then the animator w
This seasoned animator's view (Score:5, Insightful)
What it's not good at, however, is animating the face. People have been trained since birth to observe human faces and we're experts. It makes us very aware of anything that's unnatural. Only a human who innately understands the subtleties of human emotions can truly finesse facial animation so it looks pleasing to the human eye. An animator is just that type of person. We study facial expression, musculature and all sorts of things, then combine it with acting skills and artistic knowledge to make a result that's looks pleasing to the eye (or not.. depending on budgets and deadlines - and I suspect this technology will filter down to the low end productions that don't care as much about the final results)
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That's why we will continue, for a long time, to see animation like The Incredibles, who don't look even the slightest real, but have very convincing expressions and poses.
People will keep trying, and eventually succeed to duplicate photorealistic animated human expression, but I give it 10 y
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Apparently recognising facial expressions is not learned, but innate [mindhacks.com], and males and females have evolved different strategies to recognise emotional faces [futurepundit.com].
Otherwise, I completely agree. Animating faces is a Turing-complete (as in Turing's test, not Turing Machine) problem, that will only be achieved by machines when/if they achieve full humanlike intelligence.
A few thoughts. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a quote, usually attributed to the WWI German flying ace, Baron Von Richthofen:
"It's not the crate...it's the man inside the crate."
I'm gonna ask you to ponder this and extrapolate to the imagined quandary you propose. Also, I'm going to leave you with a bit of personal history:
I started in the graphic design business back in the early 70's, when a well-stocked "micro-studio" would set you back about around $50,000 (in 1974 dollars) for equipment, which included: a digital typesetter, process camera, film/paper photo processor, drafting table, waxer, light table...plus a few other lesser (though expensive) goodies. A decade later, inexpensive (relatively) personal computers with laser printers and scanners could be had for less than $10,000, essentially replacing my studio gear. Meaning every small business on the planet could suddenly be competing with me in the graphic design biz on some level. Predictably, a whole bunch of them tried. Did it put all the typographers/designers/pre-press craftsmen out of business? Well, it separated the wheat from the chaff, certainly, casting adrift the bottom 20% (subjective talent evaluation on my part) of the professional industry. It also produced an explosion of amazingly awful graphic design/typography, produced by folks whose accountants convinced them to attempt to save money by doing it themselves. However, those of us who actually had some skills/talent/Mojo actually thrived, selling our work by pitching the client on a comparison of our stuff to the examples of sub-par work that resulted from trying to replace talent with technology. Yes, I pitched a lot of FUD back then, showing a potential client the absolute worst examples of things produced by People Who Really Shouldn't Be Allowed to Touch Photoshop. Only...maybe it really wasn't really FUD. 'Cause when you objectively look at it, the good Baron's quote still rings true:
"It's not the crate...it's the man inside the crate."
All the computer programs in the world, along with all the hardware in the world, don't help if you don't got that Mojo to begin with. The tools are subservient to the talent, not the other way around. At least until someone develops a keyboard with a button that says "creativity."
* * * * *
Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.
--Josh Billings
Watch the embedded video (Score:2)
This, however, impressed the hell out of me, especially the African Warrior. WOW!
Is it the end-all-and-be-all of digital animation? No, but it is generations ahead of things like Polar Express.
Just watch the video before making any judgements.
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I'm also guessing that tweaks long after the actor finished the session are still possible.
In a top movie, How many animator hours does it take to produce 1 second of facial animation?
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feel the muscle pull behind your ear?
THATS what computers miss. and it'll be standard feature in two years, betcha.
packrat2
Interesting (Score:2)
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Another tool. (Score:3, Interesting)
There will be some things it is suitable for, and some things it's useless for. I can't see this having much use in the production of a show based around drawings, for instance!
Back during the production of "Snow White", Disney shot a lot of reference film. Some of the animators leaned heavily on this, essentially just rotoscoping the model and stylizing her a little into Snow White. Master animator Grim Natwick would refer to the first and last frames of his reference film, to make sure it hooked up properly with the adjoining scenes, and essentially ignored the rest.
Guess whose scenes had the most life in them?
For some purposes, the raw data out of this will be fine. For other, it's a starting point for an animator to go over, and possibly completely abandon.
Options are good. (Score:2)
Making Beowulf (Score:1)
Technology always moves the curve... (Score:3, Insightful)
>spending exponentially larger amounts of time to create work of equal or lesser quality? How did animators
>view motion capture when it first appeared? Will there still be room for creativity if this tech comes to fruition?"
This sort of thing has always come along. For example, WYSIWYG applications like Front Page let people like me create web pages without knowing hardly any HTML. Suddenly
Computer Aided Drafting did the same thing to mechanical drafters who worked on drawing boards with pencil and paper.
That's kind of the point of technology - to make what were once difficult or tedious expenditures of effort become effortless. Talented people who specialized in those old efforts will have to move on to tackle new things that are still difficult. There's always a new cutting edge.
Steve
Exaggeration (Score:1, Insightful)
p0rn (Score:2, Funny)
Thousands of p0rn "actresses" just lost their jobs.
I can't believe I'm the first person in this thread to realize this!
Living, Dead, or Mouse? (Score:2)
How does a bunch of mops become an unstoppable force?
How do you make a lion comforting?
What makes a toy ballon menacing?
CG sucks no matter what (Score:2)
OTOH, I would rather see a nice CG recreation of Richard Harris as Albus Dumbledore than the guy they have now. The difference is so striking as to be disconcerting-- for a Potter fan, that is. Harris was the bomb.
Eventually Computers Will Take Over (Score:1)
Depends on who you want to animate (Score:2, Funny)
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New Star Trek:TOS? (Score:2)
actor's faces and copyright (Score:1)
Make a New John Wayne Movie (Score:1)
Nothing new under the sun.... (Score:1)
The point of animation (Score:1)
Still looks retarded (Score:2)
Bleh... (Score:1)
Interface (Score:1)