She's not real?!!?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by BeBro
Well, I don't think CGI is always - per se - too perfect, it just costs a lot of efforts to make it look real. I also would say it is much easier to make technical structures (buildings, vehicles etc.) look real than humans, animals or other "organic" things.

I've never seen it look real. I think there's something fundamentally wrong with their idea.

[Dr Strangelove]

I'd like to see film makers start using CGI to synchronize the movement of lips and faces of actors in dubbed movies. Wouldn't it be awesome if in your favorite foreign film the dubbing was rendered like natural because the mtion of the actors' lips and faces was synchronized with the pronunciation of the words in your native tounge?

I thought that the CGI rendering of the characters in Final Fantasy was almost lifelike. They reduced the plastic-like appearence of their CGI figures by dulling the surface on the skin. Unfortunately the viewer would still get the impression of skin that was still too homogenious. On close -up shots though you could actually see tiny hairs, veins and skin lines.

[Adagio]

But some 3D things looks very real... I've noticed several times when walking near water, that I've said the water looked like computer graphics

[Skanky Burns]

Sims!

[alva]

/me kicks Skanky out of the thread.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Originally posted by Adagio
But some 3D things looks very real... I've noticed several times when walking near water, that I've said the water looked like computer graphics

It seems to me that water is pretty easy to render, at least for raytracers... or perhaps it's just POV-Ray that does a good job of it (I'm not quite sure of how other renderers fare). As evidence, I submit http://www.lyseo.edu.ouka.fi/~lighten/bigcoolwater.jpg . I created this image quite a while ago (that file on the server was last modified in February 2003) with a piece of landscape generating software that's quite dead and rendered it with POV-Ray. Compared to the horrible-looking land and the decent but definitely not good sky, the water actually looks quite cool. Sure, it could use improvement - it should reflect a lot more and refract a lot less, and there should be different-looking areas of the surface (air going in different directions causes waves to go in different directions, I guess) but the only thing that's really important here is what it looks like compared to the rest of the image...

[pchang]

I think the "real" factor has to do with how light reflects off various surfaces. The CGI programs use equations that are very accurate for "inorganic" things like metal and plastic, but are not that accurate for "living" things like human skin.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Not my point. They don't look 2D. Look at a normal movie, look at a CGI movie. The normal movie looks flat - and real. The CGI movie looks 3D - and fake.

Of course it doesn't look 2D. A normal movie don't "look 2D," either.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Ari Rahikkala
It seems to me that water is pretty easy to render, at least for raytracers... or perhaps it's just POV-Ray that does a good job of it (I'm not quite sure of how other renderers fare).

It depends. Doing things like sweat on a person's face or water condensing on certain type of objects is very hard.

Originally posted by Ari Rahikkala
Sure, it could use improvement - it should reflect a lot more and refract a lot less

It has too much reflection already - and the light source seems to be wrong.

[Mr. Harley]

Was going through some threads to save my own and saw this one. Besides the problems already mentioned - too many light sources (and the proportion of light coming from the non-primary ones is all wrong - I'm a serious amateur photographer whose done a few gigs for close friends) and the hair, there's another factor that has only been dealt with the last couple of years.

It has to do with the fact that with skin, and certain other surfaces, the light is not simply reflected from the surface, it also penetrates and reflects back from below the surface. The inner luminous aspect to skin is what makes it so develish to CGI. I cannot remember the programmer who pioneered this approach, but he has been getting some phenomenal results.

[DeathByTheSword]

probably already said but the absorption and dispersion of light on the hair and skin is what makes it unreal

[Ari Rahikkala]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
It has too much reflection already - and the light source seems to be wrong.

When was the last time you saw the bottom of a lake through water from that angle? As far as I know lakes are supposed to be *blue*, not some sort of greenish brownish light cyan (can you tell I had problems figuring out what I should call that colour )?

[Tattila the Hun]

I wonder, would those cgi clips look more realistic, if they were copied couple of times to lowzy VHS-casettes?

Or if they applied the same visual effect they did for Saving Private Ryan, removed some colors, made it a bit bleaker...

[Dis]

Originally posted by Ari Rahikkala


When was the last time you saw the bottom of a lake through water from that angle? As far as I know lakes are supposed to be *blue*, not some sort of greenish brownish light cyan (can you tell I had problems figuring out what I should call that colour )?

our lake looks brown up close. of course we live in a desert. from an airplane it looks blue though.

[The Andy-Man]

Originally posted by monolith94
"I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George (Lucas) would do it."
- Mark Hamill

I thought he already was