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Comment by Turing_Machine | Hacker News Reader

Definitely an impressive demo, but the Uncanny Valley is still there at least for me.

The teeth are still subtly wrong. No one has gotten teeth right yet (that I've seen).

Several posters in the linked previous discussion also make this point.

For me it's the skin. Although it has gotten much better with the subsurface scattering, it's still looking a bit plastic-y.

Skin's one of those things that is WAY more complicated than you think at first glance. It's translucent, soft, anisotropic, specular, layered, with tons of structured fine detail. It doesn't move right unless the fat, muscle, ligaments, tendons, and bones underneath are modeled right and controlled right. And it's one of the things that we innately spend huge amounts of mental processing power on analyzing. It's no wonder it's hard to render convincingly.

You’re forgetting weathering on skin. Some parts get more sun, wind, rain, scars or other marks, we build it up during a lifetime. Good painters knew how to convey these effects, they often lack in shaders.

Yeah, people wearing too much concealer put them right into uncanny valley too. Like a "bad shader cosplay" kind of thing.

And it's one of those things I don't get (or, I do get it, but I disagree with) - I think imperfections and character are things to be celebrated, not hidden and removed.

Agree. The first examples looked great with the given lighting, but once you scroll down you see video game characters again.

I think the problem is that there are no fluids or oils on the skin. The lighting and texture is configured to mimic these excretions but they aren't the excretions themselves and we notice the lack of presence.

This and the eyes yeah. There are some of the models in the demo that actually look photorealistic if viewed in still frame, but are obviously models the minute they move. No one seems to get natural movement right either yet.

I've noticed another thing with these demos is they never do themselves favours by having the lighting absolutely perfect, like in a photography studio. I think it would help to put them in a more naturalistic light setting so that even though the end product "looks worse" it would sell it off as looking more real.

The lighting definitely helps. I've been playing around with Daz3D Studio recently and there are a few tricks I've found to make renders look more realistic.

I'm sure this is all basic knowledge for people who are more experienced, but HDRI lighting, adjusting depth of field to approximate how it would look through a "real" camera, and some of the tone mapping/curves adjustments you'd use in traditional photography or video color grading go a long way.

Yeah teeth generally look terrible, even in fully pre-rendered big budget CG films.

It’s like the ambient occlusion between the teeth is always way too high. So instead of their being subtle divisions between each tooth, they look dirty. Like actual dirt and grime.

I noticed the teeth issue also, and it seems all teeth are the same across characters, which draws attention. More variation in teeth settings would probably help this to not stand out (which contributes to the "uncanny valley" reaction, I think).

Yes. Maybe Unreal will deliver a glorious gallery of British gnashers.

Here’s a video including the actress and the model side by side.

https://youtu.be/NW6mYurjYZ0

Really underscores how wooden and dead the model is.

Skin, hair and eyes are all to clean to be real. The head movement is as if someone is moving a plastic head with hands out of view.

I think the movement of skin and head lacks physics. When head moves, or other parts on the face, inertia moves the skin in other places which we don't see here at all.

It's hard to pinpoint but I think what takes me out of it most is there's no deformation of the lips while he (MeetMike) is talking.

To me it's always the dead eyes. And the crazy thing is I don't really know why.

Remember you may consciously focus on the eyes, but the brain is taking in the whole image and importantly context - so the surrounding skin plays a role

It's all the more impressive when you look at some of the great master painters of the 17th century, how alive their models look.

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