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I feel like motion and facial expressions will be a much bigger hurdle than raw graphics. The answer to when graphics is not good enough is to get closer and mo
by infogulch 9y ago
I feel like motion and facial expressions will be a much bigger hurdle than raw graphics. The answer to when graphics is not good enough is to get closer and model the physical material more accurately and with more detail. Not necessarily easy but relatively straightforward. Then it's just optimizations like this article describes (bump mapping doesn't add something that 100x sampling couldn't get, but it does it 100x faster).
But body motion and facial expressions are entirely different. It's not like an optimization problem where you could just throw more computation at it and it could go away, it's just not possible to do perfectly at all. The best we've been able to do is track the motion of real humans and map that to a digital model; we can't generate it from scratch. We don't even have a general and convincing model of how motion should work. With graphics we've been through half a dozen models, and now here we are with PBR+extensions and the result is fantastic.
Believable body and facial expressions are going to be a much bigger hurdle than we've seen with graphics.
- PeterisP 9y agoWe do have a general and convincing model of how motion should work - we have video examples of "proper" motion, so we can optimize models with the explicit goal of creating motion that's indistinguishable from real motion with e.g. generative adversarial neural network models. Things like https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/AudioToObama/ https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/AudioToObama/ are just the start, we can generate facial expressions from scratch with some quality today, and we can work to make those generated expressions better and more realistic in future.
- infogulch 9y agoA sample is not a model. Taking a picture of a surface, however detailed, doesn't get you any closer to rendering it. Neural networks are exciting here though. But even if it gets off the ground, it will still be at the "Phong shading" level model for some time.
- PeterisP 9y agoA single sample is not sufficient for a model, but if you have enough samples to infer the whole distribution, then that is sufficient. A thousand pictures of a particular surface may easily carry sufficient information to enable rendering a million different pictures that are not distinguishable from the real ones; a thousand motion capture sets of different people walking carry sufficient information to allow generating new motion sets that are different from the original samples, but not distinguishable from real people walking.
- hypertexthero 9y agoI used to think this, too, but recent games like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain have changed my mind. Astounding graphics and facial expressions. Curious what Kojima will do with Death Stranding: https://gamerant.com/death-stranding-still-shooting-scenes-mads-mikkelsen/ https://gamerant.com/death-stranding-still-shooting-scenes-m... https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/kojima-death-stranding-aims-to-be-a-new-sort-of-game-of-war-w499148 https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/kojima-death-st...
- infogulch 9y agoThese are great, but it's still not generating facial expressions, just mapping real faces onto digital ones.