Take that "Uncanny Valley" (slap)

I wonder what will happen to graphics in the near future…

First of all, you might say wow cool video and impressive video, then you can close Youtube.

Actually I downloaded the Unity3D example and run it on my Windows PC, no lie to say that I was completely shocked with the quality of the demo. I thought that there was an actual person in front of me, I think a dude there almost tried to animate his arms (though they are static models). Now that my blood pressure falls a bit, I recommend download the Unity version to anyone enthusiastic about computer graphics because video is “sort of fake experience” in comparison to a game.

One year ago I was very pessimistic about computer graphics because the “Next Gen” did not blew the audience as usual. If you are like me, you might saw a bit of dullness and dust in the new gen consoles. It’s true that the hardware has reached it’s Apex and now the road is shortening to provide rich experience to the users.

Now the good news is that out of nowhere 3DScanning has finally proven worthy to provide life-likeness to the viewers in a snap! Also keep in mind for the benefits of using forward path tracing to provide amazing lighting in your scene and you will have a mind blowing realism right in front of you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evfXAUm8D6k This is a classical example of human innovation outperforming hardware specifications, because with these two new technologies the blank will be filled and we can enjoy new graphics with the same hardware.

Some things that bother me though:

I am a hardcore gamer for more than 10 years and I have never had a problem with violence in video games, Duke Nukem, Serious Sam, Carmageddon, Quake… These were games you know, silly graphics, fantasy, fun gameplay. Not one in a million I could blame video games for youth violence. Now I reconsider, I think that playing a game so realistic will be scary as hell and then I don’t know what impact will have on the society.

Either way or another, Blender developers are geniuses and years ahead from the rest of us. I understand why there is ongoing plan to glue the game engine with Blender, no more no less, if interactive rendering seems to be gaining interest, with it also comes interactive code execution (games - simulations - movies). If you imagine how long Cycles goes on to render an image similar to the “Brigade Engine” you can see it’s very good to trade a bit of accuracy for speed. So interactive movie making, might be the key for the new era of movie making and Valve has many things to teach us. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG02JftoiLU

Who knows what will happen in the future… Stay tuned!!! :slight_smile:

“Accuracy” isn’t just some dial you can arbitrarily change for an equivalent gain in performance. Brigade doesn’t trade accuracy for speed, it trades flexibility for speed. Their engine is pretty optimized and has only a very limited set of materials (as far as I can tell, they haven’t even implemented glossy materials yet), but it’s essentially the same rendering method.

Well, realistic real time rendering is one thing. Uncanny valley will come back right after animation begins playing :stuck_out_tongue:

So far, the only movie that (offline rendering) appeared to be very realistic, was Avatar. I am not sure it would look as real as it was if characters were actual humans and not blue monkeys-cats.

Im pretty sure they have some sort of glossy happening in this shot – http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SqIWufF8DlM/UCx0x1sKZvI/AAAAAAAACt8/PwThJLkvxHg/s1600/soa7.png (taken from raytraceys blog)… maybe it doesnt do roughness on the glossy?

I’d call that specular, whereas glossy would imply roughness.

Beautiful imagery, but uncanny valley is in no danger of being slapped. These are static models. Let’s talk about uncanny valley when they start moving and looking at you and smiling. :slight_smile:

Not only that, but I read a new scientist article once where a scientist who specialised in researching the uncanny valley effect stated that the effect is often already triggered by people knowing that the source is manufactured.

So something akin to a placebo effect than. You think a pill can cure your ills, so your ills are cured even when you take a sugared pill and not the real drug.

With this you, you have expectations that digital doubles will freak you out so you freak out when you have know its a digital double but this might not be related to the quality of the work. Interesting.

I think the thing to do than is to pull a Simone, create a digital double keep quiet about it and measure the reactions.

More than in graphics, i really see that something like sword art online in reality would be much better than ultragraphics

Looking at scanned imagery creates somewhat of a false impression though. I’ve seen some incredible things done with scanned models and they look really really good. A photograph looks really good too, but I’m not going to compare it to a painting. There is such a big divide between 3d scanned imagery and digitally created imagery, both in process and accessiblity. I think it is entirely possible to take a real person, scan every aspect of their geometry and reflectance properties and generate a highly convincing image. I think we are at the point where we can do that without people knowing. But if you want to create a human character from scratch, you aren’t going to get that same level of fidelity yet.

It’s really easy to take the Lee Perry Smith model and drop an sss shader on it and have it be believable, but it is orders of magnitude more complicated to create it from the ground up.

Games and movies have been using scanned data and measured reflectance properties for a long time, Matrix reloaded and Crysis comes to mind here. And still there is a gap so I don’t think its as easy as you make out to be.

I have seen so many Lee Perry scanned head model tests and frankly 99% of them are pure garbage. Starting from scanned data or from a ground up model is irrelevant because the biggest obstacle is shading. Developing SSS models that are accurate and render quickly.