Goodbye Uncanny Valley [video]
vimeo.com
vimeo.com
If the scene is composited digitally out of differently rendered layers, the light won't scatter and occlude correctly through the mist. There's a reason why e.g. the original Blade Runner still looks so timelessly atmospheric compared to your run-of-the-mill dystopian cyberpunk city of today.
In that sense, we've been in the age of post-real CGI for much longer than the quest for photorealism suggests. We're not actually seeking photorealism, we're seeking the hyperstimulus version of it that obeys cartoon physics more than real physics. Simulating fire, smoke and fluids is one thing, but simulating realistic combustion, fogging and drainage is quite another.
Then again, you could make exactly the same observation about cars that explode upon flipping over, or the jumping bus scene in Speed. In real life it made a tiny hop and then smashed its front wheels. Magicians don't need CGI either.
Sources: I remember this from Cinefex, which is not online; Wikipedia repeats the description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_(1994_film)#Filming
So much so I thought it looked very fake in the movie, but the special effects people kinda shrugged and emperor new clothes it.
On a much higher level, this is what art has done since the dawn of time.
Presenting a version of reality that's subtly altered to make a point and convey a message.
Now we can finally do it easily at the low purely graphic level for motion pictures.
The uncanny valley isn't about making things realistic, it is about making things feel natural. Things flying by make sounds, so it's natural to assume lasers in space zipping by to make sounds. Same with all sorts of visuals rendering situations we are highly unfamiliar with.
This nugget in the video struck me most. I remember when I began trusting images less once I understood the capabilities modern photo software provided. We've now achieved this with most physical forms in motion picture, short of humans. Which is not to say we won't soon. Once that threshold is crossed, then what's next? Eventually virtual reality, augmented reality, and finally reality reality. We'll trust everything we see (and eventually hear/taste/smell/feel) far less than we do now.
Another good example is https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bp-and-the-gulf-oil-spill-misad... ...which I remember being a wake-up call to those who didn't know it had already been going on for a couple decades.
I truly wonder how much of what is presented in the MSM these days is actually not real and manages to slip by...
Quite a lot presumably. Ever since the idea of a media started, there have been people trying to hoax it for whatever reason or not:
http://hoaxes.org/weblog/categories/category/Journalism
If a story is mainstream enough (or remotely political), hoaxes will probably get identified at some point or another. If it's in a specialist subject area? Forget it. Who knows how much questionable stuff slips through when neither the journalist nor their audience know what's plausible and what isn't?
Perhaps the effect of spam and phishing on the general population provides some insight into this. Have they increased the degree of healthy scepticism and delayed judgement in the population overall? I don't think there's any knee-jerk obvious answer to that, but perhaps there has been some research into that.
As a result, i'm sure we will soon have CAs for more than just https.
I fear that when we try to use thinks like Checksums, Pub/Private Keys, Blockchain, they're not going to be applied in a reasonable measure, nor will they be explained to audiences in an honest way, but instead simply be tacked on as a badge of legitimacy for the content, not as simply a validation of the source/transaction history.
[case in point this Youtube Video that's been making the rounds.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFNbCcyFkk)
/jk
As other commenters pointed out here, the opening nature valley scene was unconvincing. I think this is partly due to the author not having modeled the limitations that affect physically filming a similar scene.
- a helicopter or airplane could not plausibly move along the track shown in the opening shot
- camera rigs have imperfect tracking control, sometimes biased along certain axes
- high res 4k sensors have physical limits and defects. the scene is rendered as if captured by a totally perfect sensor
Simulating the motion of a helicopter that doesn't even appear in the shot seems well beyond the effort that most digital artists are willing to go to, but I think these sort of things are key to producing something truly convincing.
> Spherical Aberration: this is the aberration affecting rays from a point on the optical axis; because rays from this point going out in different directions pass through different parts of the lens, then, if the lens is spherical, or otherwise not the exact shape needed to bring them all to a focus, then these rays will not all be focused at the same point on the other side of the lens. Essentially, lenses are spherical, they need to be parabolic but that is very expensive.
> Coma: this aberration affects rays from points off the optical axis. If spherical aberration is eliminated, different parts of the lens bring rays from the axis to the same focus. But the place where the image of an off-axis point is formed may still change when different parts of the lens are considered. Essentially, your lens may not be flat compared to the film.
> Astigmatism: this is another aberration affecting rays from a point off the optical axis. These rays, as they head through the lens to the point in the image where they will be focused, pass through a lens that is, from their perspective, tilted. Even if neither spherical aberration nor coma prevents them from coming to a sharp focus, if we consider the rays of light that are in the plane of the tilt, and the rays of light that are in the plane perpendicular to that, these rays pass through a part of the lens with a different profile. So they may not be focused at the same distance from the lens, even if they do come to a focus in each case. Essentially, lenses aren't perfectly spherical and may have a more cylindrical portion.
> Curvature of Field: even when light from every point in the object is brought to a sharp focus, the points at which they are brought into focus might lie on a curved surface instead of a flat plane. Essentially, lenses are round, and film is flat.
> Chromatic aberration: Essentially, red light focuses at a different distance than blue. This is the reason for rainbows.
It feels like a similar problem to realistic speech synthesis, and there have been some really impressive TTS demos recently.
Athough on that note, how come Google can produce these amazing speech synthesis demos, but Google Maps still sounds robotic when giving directions? Is there some big problem around generalizing or productionizing the technology? Is there some hidden trickery behind the demos?
http://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/an1-2740...
Wonder how much of the uncanny valley stuff left is in our heads?
CGI is superb at creating indistinguishable still images, but animation is still riddled with problems.
No, Sean Young (the original Rachael) was brought in to consult, but the CGI face was superimposed on a stand-in, Loren Peta [1].
I saw the movie on Monday and wasn't impressed with the quality there; worse than Rogue One Tarkin and on a par with Rogue One Leia. As many others have opined in this thread, the technology's fine for stills but really, really not there for animation.
YMMV, obviously. I have a friend who made it about a third of the way through Zemeckis' 2007 Beowulf before asking "hey, why did it all just go CGI?", and that movie wasn't remotely aiming for photorealism.
Also, if it is a glacier, snow and running water reflect light very differently.
Just three points in the first 10 seconds which puts "the battle for photo-real CGI has been won" on awful shaky ground.
It seems, to me, like photorealism is currently possible for static images, but the moment you add motion, it all goes to hell.
Admiral Tarken? Princess Leia? Faked Obama? All examples of "beyond", and all really, well, uncanny to watch.
I can't even honestly agree that the commercialized software has started to plateau. The software to create CGI - especially the software being used by the big studios - is evolving constantly. Even Blender changes on a monthly (or more frequent) basis.
For example, in How to Train Your Dragon, one person's time was solely devoted to improving the water splash dynamics. In Frozen, they devoted decades of processing time to rendering one 15 second scene with the ice castle. In Mad Max, the CGI was praised because it wasn't the primary method of creating the effects, because it didn't get in the way of the practical effects.
Can we eventually get there? Yeah, I think so. But we're not there yet. The software isn't finished; the hardware isn't fast enough. Perhaps it will come about in tandem with general AI.
We're also unable to create emergent materials right now, because we don't right now (and may never) have the horsepower to do molecular-level simulation to find out how light interacts with the surface. For similar reasons, breaking something open like an egg, a log, or slicing open flesh is never going to yield truly emergent results. To some degree, they'll always have to be artistically approximated on a case-by-case basis. Those approximations may have increasingly sophisticated interactions as time goes on, but I am reasonably confident they'll never truly simulate things at the molecular level.
I kind of think that it was supposed to be an "uncanny valley" opening scene. The rest of the video is quite good; it's hard to imagine that they'd flub the opening so badly, unless it was on purpose.
However, they are animals and arguably I don't spend nearly as much time looking at apes as I do at human beings. Still renders of humans may look very close but anything in motion still looks completely fake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation#Soap_oper...
But yes motion interpolation is awful.
Sometimes in art, less really is more. Many modern Sci-Fi flicks fail to achieve that feeling of wonder precisely because they are shooting for too much realism in their special effects, I think. The problem is not CGI itself, but the technology does seem to make it too tempting for the filmmakers to fill in blanks that are perhaps better left up to the viewers' imagination.
We're not even close to passing the uncanny valley in movies or games
We might ve passed it in pictures, but that's kinda old news at this point.
Basically we consider CGI bad because we only see bad CGI. If it's used properly and the director/creator understands its limitations we either don't notice it or use our suspension of disbelief and don't care.
So, maybe the title is something like:
Warm Hugs For the Uncanny Valley And Other CGI OdditiesNope, turns out they seem to think the splash video is realistic. The whole video has tons of obvious flaws and overall feels wrong.
I don't know if I have superman vision or what here...
There were some convincing ones in the video though, such as Avengers and the truck demo.
It's quite impressive how close they are getting to photo realistic rendering. Keep in mind, this is done in real time.
I find this quite impressive:
What are you talking about, and did you watch the whole thing? It seemed to mostly be about the potential future of CGI as art and its place in contemporary/future culture.
Jurassic Park 1993 had only 18 minutes of dinosaur screen footage of - 95% of them were miniatures, costumes and hydraulic mechanical robots. Only a very short T-Rex running sequence was rendered with CGI with the predecessor of OpenGL rendered on Silicon Graphics hardware. The good thing is, even today the movie (shot in analog) can be viewed in 2k or even 4k. They will have to re-render "2012" and the Transformer movies for 4k and 8k in near future.
Also the real time rendering is behind, video games still can't render 2005 era movie quality in real time, let alone 2017 era quality.
So a bit pre-mature to call it "goodbye". The progress is great, but there is a road ahead for sure.