SubJeff on 22/8/2008 at 21:07
Quote Posted by Thirith
If you didn't know that she was CGI, would you have noticed anything wrong?
Yes. Mouth was all wrong. They always get the mouth wrong. Problem with this stuff is its close enough to be freaky because a bit of it is wrong.
Paper Carnival on 22/8/2008 at 21:19
I didn't know she's CGI and didn't realize she's fake. Sure, she did look a bit weird and creepy-like, but I've seen weirder people in real life. Then I saw it two more times and noticed some stuff that didn't look very natural. I think most (but not all) people who are like "meh she's too fake", are only smartasses who wouldn't notice if they didn't know enough to look for it.
Briareos H on 22/8/2008 at 21:20
Quote Posted by kodan50
That was CG?
Only her face was CG, and it was fitted frame by frame to the original video. And then transcoded into a tiny, youtube quality video.
The filmed head, arms and body expressions are important markers (as important as the face itself) that give us a sense of reality, thus misleading us into blending the CG to the actual actress. Make her head full CG, zoom on it so that no part of the body shows and do the same video in hi res... it won't be that exciting anymore. Just a bit better than Alyx Vance.
Nice ad, though.
Paper Carnival on 22/8/2008 at 21:29
Yeah it looks less realistic this way, but I was fooled in the beginning because I didn't know she's fake.
It's still impressive nonetheless.
demagogue on 22/8/2008 at 22:04
Quote Posted by Briareos H
Only her face was CG, and it was fitted frame by frame to the original video.
I got the impression that you could make your point even stronger than that. Not that the CG was fitted frame-by-frame into the video, but the other way around, frame-by-frame of the video was fitted into CG. So then it's really not surprising that it was so realistic. They convert a real-life video to look just like ... a real-life video.
The real question is what applications this will be good for beyond normal run-of-the-mill video editing or motion-capture. I want to see what it can do beyond a video regurgitating itself. I could imagine getting more realistic animations into games (although I'm not sure how efficient/robust the models are; it might need a lot of work that destroys what makes it special in the first place) or a quicker way to put complex CG sfx in videos, but that's the sort of things we need to see. It clearly has a lot of potential in those sorts of directions, though.
JACKofTrades on 22/8/2008 at 22:11
For me, the thing that was just slightly off was her eyes. Her pupils weren't right. Reminded me of a person who is blind in one eye. Which eye is looking at me?!?
Paper Carnival on 22/8/2008 at 22:22
Quote Posted by demagogue
The real question is what applications this will be good for beyond normal run-of-the-mill video editing or motion-capture. I want to see what it can do beyond a video regurgitating itself. I could imagine getting more realistic animations into games (although I'm not sure how efficient/robust the models are; it might need a lot of work that destroys what makes it special in the first place) or a quicker way to put complex CG sfx in videos, but that's the sort of things we need to see. It clearly has a lot of potential in those sorts of directions, though.
Well, it could be used to build some kind of a realistic expression database, so that it's possible to achieve the same realism without the need of human models acting the desired performance.
Kolya on 23/8/2008 at 01:55
No it couldn't and that's the whole problem with it. Expressions are individual as they could be. You can't build up some database and then start generating realistic human emotions. That's not how it works.
In the end, all these people are doing is copying a human actor's expressions in a very complicated way. I don't get it, humans are so cheap, why try and re-create them? Fuck someone and you can create more realistic characters.
Peanuckle on 23/8/2008 at 02:14
Wait the girl was the animation?!
:eek: :wot: :eek:
Fafhrd on 23/8/2008 at 03:21
Quote Posted by Kolya
I don't get it, humans are so cheap, why try and re-create them?
It's a more efficient, natural, and accurate way of doing facial motion capture. Did you see that recent all CG Beowulf movie? Had they used this method instead of the traditional painting lines on the face and putting dots on the intersections method, they would have gotten much more realistic facial expressions on the characters, and they would have had them throughout the film, instead of just in the close-ups.
And before you reiterate the 'why not just film real actors?' question: Because this way they can do scenes all in one take without having to worry about reverses and multiple camera and lighting set-ups, and all the stuff that makes a ten minute scene take 8 hours to film. Camera work gets done in the computer, more potential for interesting camera work, or finding unplanned for framing that works better than that which was planned is had.
