This is such a wealth and a great relief. Thank you. I agree with you that realism and “realism” are secondary to all the other parts that make good film/animat

This is such a wealth and a great relief. Thank you. I agree with you that realism and “realism” are secondary to all the other parts that make good film/animation, this particular pain point for me is more about when I’ve been ripped out of immersion during an otherwise great movie. From the outside it has definitely seemed like either the majority of the industry was unaware of the correlation between muscle and skin, or they just didn’t think that doing it accurately was a priority and that has been frustrating to reason through from the outside. It’s too bad that the tech is prohibitive right now, but the system Weta is using removes all my concerns and I can see now that it’s just a matter of time. Possibly even more now, I still think that the future is the kind of “AI assisted kinematic translation” that I talked about above. If we were to fully “capture” the ~600 muscles in the body of a performer, along with fascial layers (to understanding the performer’s bodily restrictions), then feed it through a pipeline that can human to human or human to non-human, then do simulations on that character so that it has it’s own restrictions and “preferences” (like steadying with gusts of air from wings instead of from waving arms), I think we’d have less workload on he 3D teams, more flexibility in character design, AND a better looking result.