"Look at our demo of a hyper-realistic human character!"
eighteen million things happen around the character to distract the viewer's attention from the human character throughout most of the video
Not the most confident tech demo. Looks like a reasonable degree of evolution, but as they start to get up toward turn-of-the-century movie CGI in games, now you run into the same issues that you see in mocap for movies--including that a lot of details of an actor's expressions and movements actually aren't captured, so you have to have animators go back and laboriously add all those lost details back in to have something that looks convincing.
(Mind, I say turn-of-the-century, but man, the fundamental techniques for rendering skin convincingly have come a long way, even in current game engines.)
Someone who knows better can correct me, but I assume they put the character in a complex environment to show that they are rendering a highly realistic character while still rendering a complex environment. I remember very impressive character rending tech demos from 10-20 years ago, but it was a single character in a static environment.
Also they have a character making weird facial expressions in a weird situation - I legitimately cannot tell whether the occasional uncanny valley effect I felt was due to intentional direction or just the limitation of the tech. I suspect this is intentional.
It isn't perfect yet, and there are subtle queues that this isn't a real person. The character and dialog do seem to be deliberately leaning into this so these flaws don't detract. To me, the character started moving her hands in a very unreal way at the start. And then I realized the movement I was seeing was almost certainly motion captured and likely exactly as the actor performed it!
eighteen million things happen around the character to distract the viewer's attention from the human character throughout most of the video
Yes. Why did they do all those crappy CG effects while showcasing photorealistic characters? Two people seated across a chessboard in a realistic room would have been more effective.
It's getting to the point that everybody is doing this. Unreal Engine has Metahuman Creator.[1] Even Second Life has reasonably good heads now.[2] And has facial tracking on their roadmap.
I didn't think I would care about face tracking, but Star Citizen uses a Face over IP system and man it really enrichens the online experience. You can communicate a lot more subtlety with it.
It also has the benefit of necessarily head tracking as well, so you can also do TrackIR style head tracking which again adds a lot to the experience to be able to move your view around independant of the mouse and in ways a mouse can't move.
I guess the simple reason is because then you wouldn't believe it was computer generated but it could just be a movie of two people playing chess. It needs to add a touch of the bizarre or fantastic to remind the viewer they are watching something that isn't real. Though, frankly, the talking portion was reminder enough of that.
They're showing off a lot of things at once here. The real time raytraced lighting on their vfx is impressive. To do that in tandem with their human while maintaining 30fps is pretty something.
Every thing draws from the same well so to speak, a human that looked a little better but had to exist alone in a white room would have far less utility for real things.
eighteen million things happen around the character to distract the viewer's attention from the human character throughout most of the video
Not the most confident tech demo. Looks like a reasonable degree of evolution, but as they start to get up toward turn-of-the-century movie CGI in games, now you run into the same issues that you see in mocap for movies--including that a lot of details of an actor's expressions and movements actually aren't captured, so you have to have animators go back and laboriously add all those lost details back in to have something that looks convincing.
(Mind, I say turn-of-the-century, but man, the fundamental techniques for rendering skin convincingly have come a long way, even in current game engines.)