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by shimfish 1597 days ago
I think a large chunk of the problem is that we've been concentrating on improving the rendering, which is clearly now phenomenal, and seemingly totally ignoring the animation, which is still abysmal.

CGI characters still move too smoothly. It's all spline curves and jelly physics. CGI is instantly recognisably unreal due to the overly fluid motions and it seems remarkable to me how little progress has been made on this.

Animated characters still look animated, except they dive straight into the uncanny valley because of the incredible rendering. I guess mo-cap only gets you so far before you have to smooth out the noise of the motion signal.

Anyone with actual knowledge of CGI got anything to say about this? It seems weird that everything else moved on while this got neglected.
1 comments
sleepybrett 1597 days ago
It's only that when they can't use cgi because it's impossible. But let's be clear wirework has the exact same problems.
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shimfish 1597 days ago
That's not it.

We buy puppet Yoda as being real (or at least suspend disbelief) in a way we simply can't do with CGI Yoda.

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conradludgate 1597 days ago
Do we? Or is that just nostalgia. I'm in the younger generation but as a kid watching Star Wars, it didn't care. Now watching it I see janky models on sticks and wires and a puppet for yoda barely moving his arms.

I think it's the suspension of disbelief. Star Wars at its time was phenomenal for its VFX and SFX, but CGI in movies nowadays is saturated, so it feels less impactful to us

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shimfish 1597 days ago
Anecdata:

https://twitter.com/simonpegg/status/276131329140215808

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conradludgate 1597 days ago
The CGI for the prequels wasn't exactly great so that's understandable. Yoda in the prequels does look like plastic
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shimfish 1597 days ago
The CGI got better for each movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib2v8atzt5c

I don't think there's anything wrong with how he looks but the subtle over-fluidity of his movement. It's especially bad in the first shot when he's just swaying around most unnaturally. He's completely out of focus so there's nothing the rendering is doing wrong but the motion immediately alerts the brain that this isn't real.

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