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Comment by camperman | Hacker News Reader

I was horribly unimpressed with the CGI versions of both Tarkin and Leia. I've seen video games that do better. And then it hit me a few days later: modern CGI is perfectly capable of rendering a very realistic person but the teams are told not to, either because actors have lobbied against it or on orders from high up.

EDIT: Y'all are blind as bats :) I saw it in IMAX 3D and it was like watching a video game character mixed in with real people.

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I cringed every second he was on screen. While it was clearly better than any CGI character I've seen, it was still strikingly obvious, especially as the editing cut between CGI-Tarkin and real-human Krennic.

The textures are superbly detailed, but Tarkin comes across as a botoxed-up; there's something very wrong and jerky about the movement of his eyes and mouth. There's also something horribly wrong about his skin colour. In the film he looks like he's deathly ill — reddish eyes, deep purple eye sockets. Cushing was elderly in the original trilogy, but he wasn't near death.

I don't think it's a coincidence that you (or, rather, I) can't find a single clip of the CGI Tarkin on YouTube. I did find a low-res cam screenshot [1], and you can see the uncanny valley even there. He looks a bit vampiric.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/kAwm23P.png

I thought the vampiric look was the point - that all that evil sucks the life out of you.

Die hard fans cringed. I thought the Leia part at the end really hurt the film. Instead of focusing on the story, I immediately started wondering how they achieved it.

I took me out of the moment, in other words.

For what it's worth, my family members went into the movie not knowing ahead of time that Tarkin was CGI, and they didn't realize he was throughout the movie. I had to tell them after it was over.

I didn't realize it until I read about it earlier today. My wife had no clue either, she was shocked when I told her. So I think they definitely did a good job with Tarkin.

I mean, it has to be pretty good if it took my brain a couple seconds to ask "Wait, isn't Peter Cushing dead? Oh shit, it's CGI". We may still be in the Uncanny Valley, but we've climbed pretty high out of it.

Had no idea either. Ironically, while watching, I was most impressed with his 'acting' performance of all the characters.... Perhaps because the total lack of humanity came through visibly.

I didn't know about this going in, and I don't recall the details of Star Wars well enough to know that this character was in Episode 4.

My though process was something like this: "That character seems weird...is it CG? It can't be, that would be too weird...but something about the character just seems off." I may be more sensitive to this than others. It was pretty impressive, though for me still in the uncanny valley.

I went in not realizing Tarkin was in it, and the moment I saw him my reaction was "AAAAAAAH! CREEPY!" It was most impressive, but still creepy. I think... I feel that the upper half the face wasn't quite right.

I knew going in. Tarkin is a bit wooden and unexpressive but overall it is climbing out of the uncanny valley for me. At least on par with the young Professor X and Magneto.

I have not seen more realistic human characters in video games. Please give an example.

It took me a second to notice Tarkin wasn't real, and I saw it in IMAX.

I'd say it's remarkable that we've reached the point where this can credibly be done at all, and done confidently without hiding the characters in shadows or strobe lights and avoiding close ups.

In terms of video games - the first time I saw it, I spent a good chunk of the opening cut-scene of Halo 4 trying to figure out if Dr Halsey was live-action or CG:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3zcO28JbHxI

I wouldn't go so far as to call that better than the Rogue One CG work, but it's... comparable quality, at least. I don't really care to rank them, they're both downright incredible in my book.

Great CG playing against good cg (not all characters/env are created equal) makes the great CG stand out as realistic. Great CG playing against real life makes the great CG look off and less realistic. I think your example is a matter of contrast more than technology.

I didn't notice Leia being CGI as much, but Tarkin was fully in uncanny valley. His face texture was a little too smooth and you could contrast with the live actors in several shots. The lighting/shading on his render wasn't right in the bridge, either.

It's weird to me that they would choose a goofy CGI when they could have just taken a similar looking actor. I was getting flashbacks to Tron Legacy the whole time

That's funny, I had the opposite reaction - CGI Tarkin didn't bother me too much but Leia was creepy.

It's a challenge, I bet a lot of Lucasfilm fx guys were thrilled at the prospect and did their very best.

Still, I agree that the result is underwhelming and, above all, gratuitous: there was no need to involve Tarkin directly, and Leia could have been handled in better ways (e.g. camera shooting from the back, or showing only her hair -- Leia has such a distinctive hairdo, you'd need very little to know it's her).

> Y'all are blind as bats

i don't remember tarkin from the first film, i didn't know he was CGI'd, and I didn't notice anything while i was watching the show.

i thought he was just another campy actor acting in the spirit of the original film, which was super campy. the x-wing battle at the end of the film convinced me that some of these actors were likely intentionally hamming it up, like a command and conquer cutscene.

some of those pilot contributions were filmed in 77.

Yep, I had the same unnerving feeling of watching a video game cut scene. Really took me out of the film :(

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