Back on TV: Max Headroom

infofreako writes: " Everyone's favorite 80's construct, Max Headroom, has returned thanks to the people at TechTV. According to their website, they will be rebroadcasting all 14 episodes starting this Friday! This series was doing ethics themes based on designer babies, corporate controlled media, brain scanning and more before some of us were capable of hitting record on the old VCR. "

Comments

Re:Pirate TV

[checkitout]

Thanks! here you go: Pirate TV signal on WTTW

Re:Ananova

[Accipiter]

I mean, if the entire Titanic can realistically be rendered, why not be able to render a person in real time with realistic voice synth and physics?

Are you serious? If you are, you obviously have absolutely no grasp of how 3D modeling works.

Rendering something like the Titanic is easy. (Not easy in the sense that anyone with a copy of 3D Studio MAX can do it, but easy in the sense that it's just a ship.)

When you create something in 3D like the Titanic, it's based on specifications that do not change. Lighting is constant, shapes stay the same, and moving parts are minimum.

Compare that to attempting to duplicate a person, detailed, in 3D. People are tremendously harder to do than objects, because people automatically scrutinize other people. That's why when you look at a movie like Final Fantasy, you can say "Wow, they sure are realistic, but there's just *something* not right."

With a person, you have to deal with mouth movement (a very difficult thing to model in 3D), eye movement, muscle expansion and contraction based on movement, bending limbs and joints, breating, and a whole host of other factors. Then when you get into voice synthesis (which is still not perfect, but AT&T is making leaps and bounds.), and physics modelling on things such as cloth and water... It's all very hard.

So between rendering something like a ship moving through the water, or creating a realistic person in 3D, the ship is a lot easier to do. It may be painstaking in detail to create, but it's still just basic shapes.)