3 ms·

The most unrealistic things in video games for me are faces. While increasing polygon counts and such will certainly help, I can't help but notice that faces wi

by jxcole 15y ago

The most unrealistic things in video games for me are faces. While increasing polygon counts and such will certainly help, I can't help but notice that faces will never cross the uncanny valley unless they can do something about the lighting. Check out: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html So, unless they can do all this AND ray trace it at the same time, it really won't make my game experience 100,000 times better.

baddox 15y ago
These days, I don't think rendering technology is what's holding us back from having realistic faces. I think the art and animation is just really hard to get right.
prawn 15y ago
I think that's one of the massive challenges in gaming. I played Minecraft a bit (before realising I was tending a lovely in-game garden while there were weeds outside my real-life house) and at no point was my experience impacted negatively by the fact that the animals were dorky boxes with legs. Photo-realistic isn't everything.
starwed 15y ago
Surely a lot of that is due, not to lighting/shadows/rendering, but to the incredible subtlety required of the animation? HL2 has some pretty amazingly convincing faces, and that's obviously not because it has the best rendering engine.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  I wouldn't go as far as "amazingly convincing". I think they look better after you've been staring at the HL2 world for a while, rather than the real world.
  - starwed 15y ago
    Nah, I had that impression from the very first scene the game loads, which is the creepy guy talking to you. (I don't mean convincing in a "mistake-for-real" way, but in a "lets-me-suspend-disbelief" way.)
estel 15y ago
What do you think of the LA Noire faces?
- jxcole 15y ago
  So much better than before...but still not quite where I would like them to be. I feel like a game like that made huge advances by using talented actors and scanning in the faces. They overcame a lot of the uncanny valley that was there before, but the shading still makes the whole scene seem unbelievable. Still though, the artists and actors did a phenomenal job with this game.
mhd 15y ago
Faces do get better, and I'd be pretty content with something like Mass Effect 1 (not exactly state of the art anymore), unless we're going for very emotional scenes in close-ups -- where most real-life actors fail, too. One problem where in my opinion the advances aren't exactly exponential is body language. If I'm looking at the NPC talking to me, it's not just his facial motions, teeth etc. that I'm aware of, it's also the movements of his body - shoulders, arms, etc. This is still pretty bad. Most of the time they're just flailing around in a pretty uncoordinated manner. It gets better for highly "scripted" scenes, but the usual "shrug / fist pump / scratch yourself" animations are bad. They've gotten pretty good at the purely physical parts, i.e. what muscles and body parts have to move if something connected to it moves (skeletal and muscular animation), but there needs to be a better "body language AI".

by jxcole 15y ago

baddox 15y ago

These days, I don't think rendering technology is what's holding us back from having realistic faces. I think the art and animation is just really hard to get right.

prawn 15y ago

I think that's one of the massive challenges in gaming. I played Minecraft a bit (before realising I was tending a lovely in-game garden while there were weeds outside my real-life house) and at no point was my experience impacted negatively by the fact that the animals were dorky boxes with legs. Photo-realistic isn't everything.

starwed 15y ago

Surely a lot of that is due, not to lighting/shadows/rendering, but to the incredible subtlety required of the animation? HL2 has some pretty amazingly convincing faces, and that's obviously not because it has the best rendering engine.

sliverstorm 15y ago
I wouldn't go as far as "amazingly convincing". I think they look better after you've been staring at the HL2 world for a while, rather than the real world.
- starwed 15y ago
  Nah, I had that impression from the very first scene the game loads, which is the creepy guy talking to you. (I don't mean convincing in a "mistake-for-real" way, but in a "lets-me-suspend-disbelief" way.)

estel 15y ago

What do you think of the LA Noire faces?

jxcole 15y ago
So much better than before...but still not quite where I would like them to be. I feel like a game like that made huge advances by using talented actors and scanning in the faces. They overcame a lot of the uncanny valley that was there before, but the shading still makes the whole scene seem unbelievable. Still though, the artists and actors did a phenomenal job with this game.

mhd 15y ago

Faces do get better, and I'd be pretty content with something like Mass Effect 1 (not exactly state of the art anymore), unless we're going for very emotional scenes in close-ups -- where most real-life actors fail, too. One problem where in my opinion the advances aren't exactly exponential is body language. If I'm looking at the NPC talking to me, it's not just his facial motions, teeth etc. that I'm aware of, it's also the movements of his body - shoulders, arms, etc. This is still pretty bad. Most of the time they're just flailing around in a pretty uncoordinated manner. It gets better for highly "scripted" scenes, but the usual "shrug / fist pump / scratch yourself" animations are bad. They've gotten pretty good at the purely physical parts, i.e. what muscles and body parts have to move if something connected to it moves (skeletal and muscular animation), but there needs to be a better "body language AI".