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In my opinion, the failing of Tarkin was one of animation, not so much rendering. If you watch some of the deepfake videos where they swap the original actors f

In my opinion, the failing of Tarkin was one of animation, not so much rendering. If you watch some of the deepfake videos where they swap the original actors face over the CGI version (e.g. [0]), to me, it looks better but the movement is still unnatural. The lips curl, the head bobs, etc. all have a "linear interpolated" look that makes it seem like it was hand animated rather than motion captured by any actor. It looks like in the article either the system they had in place captured facial expressions or an animator tried to recreate them, so I'm unclear why the facial movement looks so awful. Maybe they captured waypoints and then interpolated and we're seeing the aftereffect of the interpolated system? I don't know. I remember Logan coming out at around the same time and being blown away by the younger Hugh Jackman. This was a year later than Rogue One and the younger version didn't really speak, so maybe it's not a fair comparison but I don't think there was a good excuse to have such a bad model. Certainly later, with Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorian or Carrie Fisher in the later Star Wars series, there was no excuse to have had it be so bad. [0] youtube.com/watch?v=_CXMb_MO3aw

kevingadd 2y ago
If it looks interpolated, that suggests to me that the people creating it were in a hurry - and film VFX operations are well known for crunch at this point, so it seems possible that they simply didn't give it enough attention. Mocap without lots of hand touchups would normally look very noisy/jittery from what I know, so if it looks unnatural and "interpolated" it was probably hand animated in a very coarse way, like high level 'gaze here, tilt head at this point, clear throat' sort of stuff without an artist ever going in and fussing over each frame to make it feel really natural. In 2D animation you have stages like this, there's the initial storyboard, then the keyframing, and then the inbetweening. The inbetweening can be surprisingly important since it comes down to making the motion between those "key" frames feel natural instead of just a linear interpolation from A to B. The same applies to 3D animation, you want to put anticipation in the right places, have momentum build up or dissipate, have objects overshoot their destination and then snap back, that sort of stuff.
- abetusk 2y ago
  It's a question of cost, knowledge and time. Avatar was in 2009 and the motion capture there was well beyond what was on display in Rogue One. My take on it is that ILM had their own in house animation process and rather than admit that it was costly, slow and gave abysmal results, they doubled down and tried to push it through. Again, there might be some excuses that can be made for Rogue One, but none for Mandolorian and the later Star Wars movies. The Luke Skywalker scene was deepfaked days after the episode aired [0] and, again, the DeepFake version is much better but still horrible because of the animation. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU
- yowzadave 2y ago
  What I find amazing is stop-motion animation—-I presume it is animated in one go, with no in-betweening possible (because of the difficulty in getting the model back the precise in-between state). Really remarkable that the animators can do it so effectively!

kevingadd 2y ago

If it looks interpolated, that suggests to me that the people creating it were in a hurry - and film VFX operations are well known for crunch at this point, so it seems possible that they simply didn't give it enough attention. Mocap without lots of hand touchups would normally look very noisy/jittery from what I know, so if it looks unnatural and "interpolated" it was probably hand animated in a very coarse way, like high level 'gaze here, tilt head at this point, clear throat' sort of stuff without an artist ever going in and fussing over each frame to make it feel really natural. In 2D animation you have stages like this, there's the initial storyboard, then the keyframing, and then the inbetweening. The inbetweening can be surprisingly important since it comes down to making the motion between those "key" frames feel natural instead of just a linear interpolation from A to B. The same applies to 3D animation, you want to put anticipation in the right places, have momentum build up or dissipate, have objects overshoot their destination and then snap back, that sort of stuff.

abetusk 2y ago
It's a question of cost, knowledge and time. Avatar was in 2009 and the motion capture there was well beyond what was on display in Rogue One. My take on it is that ILM had their own in house animation process and rather than admit that it was costly, slow and gave abysmal results, they doubled down and tried to push it through. Again, there might be some excuses that can be made for Rogue One, but none for Mandolorian and the later Star Wars movies. The Luke Skywalker scene was deepfaked days after the episode aired [0] and, again, the DeepFake version is much better but still horrible because of the animation. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU
yowzadave 2y ago
What I find amazing is stop-motion animation—-I presume it is animated in one go, with no in-betweening possible (because of the difficulty in getting the model back the precise in-between state). Really remarkable that the animators can do it so effectively!