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Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

Agreed in general but imagine a VR video game that looks so good even 20-percent think it's a movie. That's awesome.

This is a bit of a weird one. Sometimes VR is super obviously rendered in a certain game engine, but sometimes, even on my now aging Vive it just looks absolutely astonishing.

I have a photogrammetry scan of some guys room as my VR home on Steam and it's genuinely eery how I have to do a double take sometimes.

Half Life Alyx did at some moments feel extremely real to me, it was a weird experience.

If only my Index had a much higher resolution. Alyx felt next level to me even though there was barely any shooting. Just being there felt amazing.

Is that just the people with bad eyesight or who are neuro atypical and so can't see the flaws and/or tell from the weird body movements?

What's the closest example in mainstream media of cg human that [almost] passes?

CGI is much more widely used in film than I think you think it is. Half the distance/crowd shots in LotR nearly 20 years ago now were CGI, from what I remember, and e.g. the following scenes of the car sequence in Deadpool use CG humans in far more places than I’d guessed from having watched the film: https://youtu.be/C8D_o8bOeOc

The cinematics in videogames likewise can be pretty convincing, even when the gameplay itself isn’t so much.

Edit:

And then there’s AI-generated faces like these: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Princess Leiah was reanimated in star wars sequels. She made it pretty deep into the uncanny valley, and died there.

No digitally rendered realistic human has ever made it through the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is to be avoided at all costs, but many digital animators refuse to learn.

Gollum from LOTR worked well because it didn't matter that he was in the uncanny valley. He's supposed to creep you out, it suited his character.

Leiah (and Tarking) are not good examples.

Blade Runner comes awfully close. Compare the original movie footage with the replicated 3D version and it's almost impossible to tell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQcxEo5MUc8

I'd say, rendering is basically solved. The problem now is animations. Very hard to replicate all micro expressions and imperfections we have come to accept from humans. Even humans with motion capture rigs seem to be insufficient.

That said, what about the John Connor death in Terminator: Dark Fate? What's uncanny about that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49YHDbdRP0A

Behind the scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Rm9k7kTZQ&t=60s

Leia and Moff Tarkin (sp?) were not convincing to me - they're incredible feats, but it just looked like a couple of video game characters stuck in the movie (I'm being a bit harsh there). One shot of Tarkin was pretty great, until he moved.

I'm not at all saying this isn't all incredible progress, but it seems like it's almost asymptotic to creating a convincing on screen effect?

Thanks all for the links and suggestions for scenes to check out.

Uh, Neuro atypical people are much more likely to spot the fake, and are also much more likely to have been doing the modeling and rendering.

Hmm, I would have expected that to be true in one direction from the norm but not the other - how is it that only people in the middle can't spot unnatural motion?

I'd have expected rendering and modelling to attract quite different sets of people.

Chasing photorealism in games seems misguided to me; you have to spend much more money on artists. And at the end of the day, photorealism won't make a bad game into a good game; so that money is better spent on other aspects of the game. Furthermore, if you're committed to spending that much money making a game, it will probably have a very conservative lowest-common-denominator design to recoup as much money as possible. Who will take risks and experiment when so much money is on the line? You end up with a game that is mediocre to everybody but exceptional to few. The video game equivalent of a big budget marvel movie.

Photorealism may be a worthwhile goal for VR. Even completely cartoonish games like No Man's Sky can, at times, make you forget what you are seeing is not real. This effect is only enhanced in more 'real' games (like Flight Simulator 2020, in VR).

In general though, I agree it's a waste of time. I'd much rather play Super Hot, for instance.

Although I do play Dwarf Fortress occasionally, so I might not be representative of the average demographic...

> Although I do play Dwarf Fortress occasionally, so I might not be representative of the average demographic...

Based on the current state of games and pay-to-win mechanics I really wish you were, might see an improvement :)

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