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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Which turns out to be not anywhere close to what audience were expecting. I still remember When Toy Story was shown in 1995 created on Silicon Graphics, they said everything was so crazy good, that at the rate of Moore's law, in 10 years time realism in animation is finally achievable. 2005 and The Spirit Within came and we are still no where close. Fast forward another 10 years in 2015 we are definitely better, but realism and Digital Actor is still pretty much a fantasy. At least the case the audience knew it was not real actor. That is 20 years with Moore's law, now Moore's law is gone and we are slowing down, what other kind of innovation will lead us to realism?

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But realism was achievable and was achieved not that long later; Lord of the Rings is still a very good movie, you can start to see the CGI is a bit dated but for a long time, e.g. Gollum's character was the benchmark - worse, the Hobbit movies couldn't even top it, despite being made over ten years later.

Gollum was definitely a benchmark, maybe even still. Then there's Avatar and Cesar from the Apes movies. But we've yet to get close with actual humans. What started with Final Fantasy we still have that "uncanny valley" in things like Tron and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Side note: I can't find an article but I believe Gollum was one of the first times deaf movie-goers could actually read a digital actor's lips.

I find it weird how producers still insist on shoe-horning CGI humans into movies even when the technology clearly isn't there yet.

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Snoke is entirely CGI for no discernible purpose, and it's uncanny valley hell every second he's on screen. It's all in the animation, of course; the rendering itself is great, but there's something really off about his movements and facial expressions. What's odd is that they could easily have produced this character using a real actor in prosthetics, with some subtle CGI augmentations.

Tarkin in Star Wars: The Force Awakens is even worse, like something out of a video-game cutscene. I don't understand why they couldn't just have used an actor.

Gollum, while very good, was never good enough to be said to be photorealistic or something. Your eye would not be fooled that easily.

The problem with "digital actor" is that, while we've got the "digital" part pretty well covered, that leaves the "actor" part which falls squarely under Moravec's paradox and probably (IMO) even requires consciousness to achieve.

They don't need consciousness, they need to quit ignoring the laws of physics when making things move.

They keep breaking the viewer's suspension of disbelief because they want to show their characters being so bad-ass that they defy the laws of physics. Instead of seeing people with super-human traits, they see really expensive cartoon characters.

If you look at movies along the decades everything is amplified. People have shifted their references. I get mental fatigue watching movies these days because everything is fast, quick, chopped, extreme. It's like a manga, without the childish part. High power doesn't mean high dynamic. For instance in Se7en, there's one single gun shot, the whole movie is tame but when that shot occurs the shift is so strong you feel it. It's a musical thing, what makes it is as much the notes than the silence between them. Balance.

Hah, I have the equal and opposite problem: I try to watch highly regarded old movies and find they're just incredibly slow and boring. (Certain kinds of movies work with a slow pace, but even supposed action movies seem to take forever to get to the point).

Some of them are too full. I must admit. But the other day I watched 3days of the condor and it was just right. All the presidents men too.

I still wonder if this is only youth neurons being drugged on all formats.

I’m pretty sure there are multiple gunshots in Se7en. E.g. when they chase the guy through the apartment building.

Proof: http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/se7en-john-doe-ha...

So I take this is at least the second shot ? damn fuzzy memory

> Moore's law is gone

For CPUs, yes. For GPUs, not as far as I am aware. And rendering is the traditional GPU task.

no he is right. Moore's Law in its original meaning is gone, and with GPU we are just shifting goal posts to pretend it still applies.

Moore's law in its original 1965 meaning was an observation that transistor counts doubled every year and a projection that this would continue for the next decade. Moore revised the projection downward in 1975 to every two years, which remarkably has held into the 2010s. But it is transistor count, not necessarily performance. A coworker calculated that performance was doubling in 18 months. https://www.kth.se/social/upload/507d1d3af276540519000002/Mo...

Transistor counts continue an exponential growth curve, particularly in GPUs. It may be time for another downward revision on the rate (2.5 years? 3 years?), but we aren't getting as much single-threaded performance out of the increased transistor count. This provides increasing performance difference between the highly parallel GPU architecture and the more limited parallelism of traditional CPUs.

Wasn't the Moore law about transistor count PER surface unit? If that's the case, then even GPU are way below the predictions now, because chips have certainly more transistors, but their surface is also increasing.

Components per integrated circuit. The link above quotes Moore's 1965 statement.

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