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Animated Short - This Wonderful Life
dfluke2 writes "It's been around for awhile, but Lian Kemp's This Wonderful Life is a very impressive animated short. Over at rendernode there is an interview with Lian, where additional background information can be found about the flick, including other plans for more animated movies. The author also features a gallery with photo shoot style images of the female actress from the short."
I wish I could produce works like this...
Where's the full length feature though?? Am I the only one that could only find short demos that were about 5 seconds long?
http://www.this-wonderful-life.com.nyud.net:8090/i ndex.htm
p hp?articleId=197
http://www.rendernode.com.nyud.net:8090/
http://www.rendernode.com.nyud.net:8090/articles.
Okay, its fair to say that all CGI animation in this class is advanced but this doesn't really further the technology much beyond what we have seen before.
Certainly, plenty of render-farm time has been devoted to this character's hair just as Aki Ross's hair was in Final Fantasy.
The trouble is, the hair, while obeying *some* of the laws of physics, still doesn't 'feel' right because there are so many more factors involved. (like did she wash it this morning / static attraction etc).
In fact, the whole motion of CGI characters is still too 'soft' to be believable, they sort of wave-around like marionettes whereas real human movement has a certain sharpness about it.
It looks like they've done some good development work with the skin textures but thats about the height of it, nothing really that new or exciting to see.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Wrong Jimmy Stewart movie. It was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And, yes they should, that'd be cool.
Now everyone on slashdot can have a girlfriend!
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
Putting the word "female" into a Slashdot post is like pointing a loaded gun at this poor guy's server and pulling the trigger.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
You'd think with all the time they spend putting little tiny hairs all over her body, they would have found some time to give her some "down there".
Or am I the only one seeing "virtual camel toe"?
http://www.this-wonderful-life.com/various01.htm
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
over 1/2 of you CG artists out there....
Liam makes you look ALL like a bunch of no-talent hacks.
Holy-fricking-crap.
What's in the box?!
Crazy Old Man: "I'll give you twenty bucks to bury this thing. This one, too." *Hands Lisa "It's A Wonderful Life--Killing Spree Ending"*
That's a real human right?
This
Everytime I see one of these CG rendered figures, the lack of accurate physics really stands out. While many advances have been made in the quality of the 3D graphics, the polygon count, and the texture detail; to me they still look like hollow shells (which they essentially are).
In Sample1.avi for example, her eyes move much too mechanically and instantly. While individual hairs on her head move with the wind, it still doesn't look quite natural. I'm not complaining, it's just it will take quite some time before mathematical models are created that can accurately represent real world physics and not crude approximations thereof.
Anyone have a torrent of the whole movie up. Happy to stick a few mbs behind it as well.
damn she's hot
the skin was very well done and he didn't even use the latest skin shaders that give you slight light transmission through "shallow" objects (think the ET finger effect or light shining behind your ears)
:D
things are going to get NUTS in the next year or so... exciting
I want a torrent of the 23 meg file!
Anyone? Anyone? is this thing on?
Computer generated images and animations are improving all the time, however, they are not quite there yet.
Look for example at this image : it is almost natural, like a real photo. No CGI hints there.
However, look at that other image, and although the hair is done OK, the eyes and hands still look fake.
That same eery feeling
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Kuni: Ahhh, a red snapper! Mmmmm, very tasty! Okay, Weaver, you can either hold onto you red snapper... or you can go for what's in the box that Hiro-San is bringing down the aisle right now!
[Hiro-San emerges, carrying a table with a box]
Kuni: What's it going to be, Weaver?
Phyllis Weaver: I'll take the box! The box!
[Applause]
Kuni: You took the box! Let's see what in the box!
[box is opened]
Nothing! Absolutely nothing!! Stupid!! You're so stupid!!!
-jim
Bit torrent anyone? or is it copyrighted?
http://www.this-wonderful-life.com/part4b.htm
a Bittorrent of This Wonderful Life.
Here's the vid..yay coral cache. http://media01.cgchannel.com.nyud.net:8090/images/ news/2003_10_liamkemp/TWL360x208.mov
I hereby report that I have successfully wanked to the CG screenshot mentioned by parent.
Slashdot "Lingerie CG" test --> APPROVED!
Regards,
A.C.
It's because it's still too perfect. Even if he did randomly texture/color it, he didn't randomly change the reflectivity and such.
Several of the poses are also very unnatural, and the expressions just don't seem right.
Special F/X people will tell you that the brain is astoundingly good at picking up when something's wrong. You may not always know what it is- like that the car leaping over the bus didn't have a shadow, or the sun was at the wrong angle for the story- but your brain is on a somewhat subconscious level saying, "What the heck?" and the scene 'bothers' you.
It is a little similar to what I call Stump the Baby. Babies shown a box where two cars go in and two come out will loose interest quick. Show them two going in and only one coming out- or the opposite- and they'll stare at it for much longer...
Please help metamoderate.
One thing that I always notice is clothing. It never seems to hold onto the body like it does in reality. It's always floating right above the surface.
That's right, he creates a virtual one. This guy REALLY needs to get laid.
5) Hair - too perfect.
6) Skin on chest
Dude! I read that as "Hair on chest".
Read slashdot while drowsy, be creeped out.
Seriously, though, tiny see-through hairs are natural, but not thick hair. If you're a seriously underweight girl, you risk getting more body hair growth to compensate for the loss of body heat.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
So, ... how far are we from real time rendering of this sort of quality? (Even with its faults as already pointed out in other posts)
Years, decades? DX10 ?
Seriously. I'm ignorant here, but the thought occurs, what happens when people can render their own...virtual "friends" easily?
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
What made this annoying was the way they showed off their achivement (two models with facial expressions): They artificially constructed a 'storyline' in which the woman got to show as many emotions as possible, and due to the lack of a talented writer they ended up with nonsense and kitsch galore. The animation process doesn't use motion capturing or a physics engine or anything else that would further realism; it's old-school keyframe animation, which looks (in scenes like the one in which she jumps from one stone in the water to another) artificial and very out of place with these partly near-photorealistic images (she looks like a marionette draged along on wires). They're stuck deep in the uncanny valley (if you haven't heard that term before, google it;
This short looks like one painfully long commercial for the product they made; it's just a demo of the 3D models, and not a very impressive one. Also shown were the very humorous New Balls Please and the hilarious Pfffirate, which made the giggling audience gasp for air, but This Wonderful Life definitely got the most laughs -- they just weren't intended.
But don't take my word for it; if you want to see a recent animated short that's very impressive, check out the documentary Ryan: "The audience hears the voices of real people who accompanied Ryan as he made his way through life. In the world of computer-animated film, these people speak through strange, distorted, broken, disembodied beings, humans whose exterior appearance comes across as bizarre, humorous or irritating." The author calls this style psycholrealism.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Can't connect to the original link or the coral cached ones.
Bittorrent anyone?
what ever happened to women with waists that are 2/3 of their chest/hips measurements being considered attractive? Nowadays most of the generally accepted as attractive "women" have bodies like rules. Straight up, straight down. 36-24-36 baby! Not 32-28-32. Yech.
I already have two girlfriends already.
That is supposed to be the ideal female form? Man I feel nauseous just looking at it. What is up with her lips?
With vapid digital sluts like this being postered around as the ideal geek fantasy woman, it is hardly any wonder that real women find it laughably demeaning, and ensures that about all the action you computer nerds are going to be getting is with a bottle of jergen's and your left hand.
The pictures are beautiful... but some of the facial expressions and poses remind me of Silent Hill... ::shudder::
http://63.197.76.221/TWL360x208.mov.torrent
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
"Yep. Just don't tell my wife."
She can have one too.
I've seen this I think a little over done lately where the artists insert what might be considered natural human flaws like freckles and other blemishes into the skin, etc. The problem is that it's seems stretched. Sometimes there are too many freckles, too large, too frequent, or the translucency is just off.
Then there's hair. It's not all the same thickness or texture. Real hair even on a persons scalp has a variety of shades, textures, lengths, colors, etc. The hair put on all the models I've seen so far are generated to the same exacting specification (i.e. equal to the average human hair). When faced with things like arm hair or eyebrow hair it's all the same. To create an eyebrow it seems they just pile more hair into the same amount of space instead of starting out at the edges with really fine hair and then as you go down the brow it becomes more course.
It's the same with skin. Skin comes in a variety of options but for the most part these models always have the same skin from head to toe. Pores are missing, veins, scars, wrinkles are more like smooth ridges than real wrinkles (i.e. there's an indentation there but the indendation is smooth).
I think what I really miss with a lot of the character renders is sublety. Too many things are done to say "HEY LOOK I'M A REAL BOY!" and they look forced. Like some of the character renders in games where the character fidgets a little too much or breaths really really deep as they stand waiting for you to get out of their way. Or when the characters blinking is such a major focus of the action of their face. I like to be romanced a little - give me a pulse and some soft breathing and a little sublety and it will take me a long way.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
slashdot adds a space
ed2k://|file|This.Wonderful.Life.mov|27402443|6A6
ERROR (10:50 PM) - rejected by tracker - torrent is banned
He rendered those... with the clothing rendered over the body later...meaning he has them in his "Personal" collection
sorry folks, they deleted the torrent from the public tracker (theppn.com) for whatever reason and I'm sorry to say my home webserver isn't up for a slashdotting ;-)
Someone slap this friggin thing on suprnova! Really the fact that this has no bittorrent link is a ridiculous oversight!
To all the people complaining that the models don't look 100% real:
THEY'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO.
If he wanted to make a real movie, using real people, he would have managed to do so in much less time, with much less effort by using... (surprise) real people.
The movie is about (artistically) capturing the most important elements of facial expression. RTFI(nterview).
Hopper's paintings look "realistic" without looking quite like photographs; if all you can think of when you look at them is "ah, I can see it's not a photograph, that shadow there should be slightly different", then you're missing the point.
RMN
~~~
The main issue is that the muscles are still essentially lobes wrapped around straight lines. The antebrachial muscles don't wrap around the lower arm correctly.
It might be that the bicipital aponeurosis isn't modeled as a constraint on the movement of those muscles, or it might be ignoring that the brachioradialis normally causes a lump in what is here a smooth curve from the radial styloid process to the lateral epicondyle of the humerus. The deltoids show a similar issue.... they should pull in more as the arm lowers. She, like most poser models, ends up with the shoulders of a linebacker.
Most CGI models remain essentially surface formed... the muscles are given extra bulk that makes up for what the deep fascia and tendonous restraints normally do to the surface.
So THAT'S what's wrong with her teeth. Denture city.
this ain't "real" -- not even close, actually, because it's so overdone. But it IS close enough to make for great special effects if they would make use of it. Why doesn't someone make one of these ala a "sky captain" type feature? Throw in plenty of "analog noise" and it would all look much more convincing.
Keep in mind that good animation is not really much of a technical problem.
Realistic image synthesis is simply a matter of balancing computer power with available time. Images generated today often lack a certain "randomness" that we associate with reality. But don't forget that you aren't random... you're coded in your DNA, which simply happens to be complex enough that the compute time vs. available time equation doesn't work out well.
We'll get there with image synthesis... What's interesting is whether or not the problems with animation will be solved with a human or artificial touch.
Yup, those are definitely fake.
-ShadeOfBlue
I've been dying to see that but could never find anywhere to rent it.
Is it online anywhere?
Another one I've always wanted to see is the boxer.
It's a nice try, but it's really not all there. I love the eyes, and hair, but her lips... I mean, they're like rubber (her skin is rubbery, too, but not as bad. Perhaps if he would've used the light diffusion effect on it..). I'd run if I saw a girl with lips that stretched like that. And is it just me or do her teeth jump around in her mouth?
kinda weirds me out... something wrong about the proportions of her face that give her a creepy cheshire cat quality.
Wasn't this movie is public domain a few years ago, and then became copyrighted? Oh wait, I'm thinking of It's a wonderful life.
I would recommed checking out http://www.rustboy.com/ It's another guy at home using an old Mac and basic software, but creating some beauiful video. I'm curious how they compare in quality.
Hmmm...plastic women. Now we have another reason to invade an oil-rich country.
http://media01.cgchannel.com.nyud.net:8090/images/ news/2003_10_liamkemp/TWL360x208.mov
Here we go laides! A working download link.
Alright, kiddies... you asked for it, so it's been done.v .torrent
http://torrent.youceff.com/torrents/TWL360x208.mo
Ya'll enjoy now, ya hear?
...who're bitching about the flaws in the movie, please provide a link to a short that you think is more impressively realistic. That is, instead of just moaning about the flaws in the piece, do us all a favor and give us a link to something better.
I swear to god, Slashdot is home to more nasty, jealous pricks than any other open forum on the net. Even Spaceship One had a horde of vile little losers trying to cut down Rutan and Melville's achievement seconds after the craft put down in the desert after an historic first.
No doubt y'all think you're cool in some pseudo-intellectual fashion when you rave on as some self-appointed not-so-expert critic, but here's a newsflash: You aren't! Blasting the achievements of others doesn't make you look cool or chicly rebellious, it just shows you up as a pathetic, common, unaccomplished little man green with envy and burning with vitriol.
And in case you haven't figured it out, I thought the stuff was very nicely done. It's certainly better than anything I could ever do, even if I spent my entire life working at it. The artist deserves kudos, and he's getting them, at least from me.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
http://www.demonoid.com/torrents/download/22698/Th e_Wonderful_Life.torrent
:) )
All I can say is simply amazing! Not only is that better quality than FFTM in my opinion but it is also even more amazing at how much this person has accomplished after working with CGI for only 4 years! Not only that but he said he is self-taught! Simply astounding. Good work, good work. (If Lia Kemp is reading this, please don't kill me for putting this on the BT netowrk, it is only free mass advertising for you
I have a torrent of both this and the animated short pfffirate up at http://147.126.53.117:6969/ Enjoy :)
michael greene
We have enough computing power on the desktop now, so I'm sure you can do better. Have at it.
Yeah, I'm being snarky. Everyone's a critic, but they watch it anyway.
Tell that to my kids... or my spit-covered house. Top of the head is NOT where anything ends up.
Here's a tracker with the complete 26 mb movie that actually seems to work:
http://147.126.53.117:6969
Plus the "Pffirate" animated feature is there too.
I liked this better the first time I saw it and it was called "The Sims 3".
My problem with the film, which actually struck me as quite technically accomplished, was its trite sentimentality. It's just unwatchable as a narrative: the syrupy music, all the goo-goo mother-baby stuff, all those lingering gazes and heart-tugging smiles and the itsy-bitsy eyelash-batting. Good bloody lord!!! I had to fast forward, in order not to suffer a whopping violation of Zhe's Rule of Chick Flick Endurance: one minute of wistful gazing at babies is all a man should be required to sit through in a film of any length. I'm glad you were transported to your special place. Me, I needed a shot of whiskey.
And this is a problem that can't be ignored. Art demands to be seen, understood, even judged, first and foremost, as art--not as mere technical accomplishment. If you, for instance, code AI that can autonomously produce Barry Manilow music, that will be a rather serious, er, accomplishment. But as much as you might want it to write the songs that make the whole world sing, don't get bent out of shape if we'd rather not.
Here's an HTTP link to my personal webserver at home. See how long it holds up. If not oh well, I tried. Not like anyone visits my site anyway :P
http://69.242.156.34/misc/TWL360x208.mov
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
The site is holding up better that the NASA site of World Viewer.
This might be a good thing... "Look at how many people are interested in my CGI" or... a bad thing.... "Note from your host: this month bill is: $obscene_amount_of_money"
I am confused as to the plot of "This Wonderful Life".
This woman's obviously lost her husband; hence the crying and the kissing of the ring. Then she sees the baby, which seems to bring a new hope into her life. But she abandons the baby (placing its fragile head far too close to the stone walls of the bridge where a single jerk could damage it-- she seems intelligent enough, and any intelligent woman wouldn't do that) to jump off the bridge when she loses her ring... and then what? She doesn't die immediately, but what happens? While she's down there lying on the rock (wounded?), someone else comes and takes the baby away-- because she was too afraid to 'let go' of her deceased husband and open a new life with the baby?
How about an essay on the plot? A review? A synopsis? Anything? Bueller?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Since most animators need to act out their parts to figure out how to capture the motion best, and any uber-obsessed render geek just ain't gonna get laid enough to make the motions look realistic. And if you're going to do mocap, then, you might as well just film the mocap and skip the rendering, eh?
It is of course copyrighted. Anything you create which is at least vaguely novel or demanded a wee bit of effort, is automatically copyrighted by you. It is up to the copyright owner to decide how that peace of work can be distributed. So what you're really asking is "is redistribution allowed", which I don't know.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
That's right, he creates a virtual one.
Yeah, virtual is lame! You would have a thought he would just hook up Barbie to his computer, and wear a bra on top of his head? Can it really be that difficult to create a real chick? :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
What shot it for me was the blinking of "her" eyes. Women blink more rapidly than that. Hell, I blinked more viewing.
Maybe with his help, Greedo shooting first might actually look real.
did you notice the emotion in the eyes ? top job thats hard shit to do (for 3d, look at shrek and see how they tried), to get the eyes to "communicate" to portray human emotion, the body and the rest of ani was a bit weak but facial expression and eyes was badass,
To quote the website which discusses Doctor Masahiro Mori's famous theory on why we reject the "nearly human" vs. the "obviously inhuman" - The Uncanny Valley, " This chasm -- the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori's thesis -- represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting." - Basically, we tend to "humanize" and accept as human objects which do not appear human at all (Shrek) but outright reject and even feel uncomfortable with objects which try to appear fully human (Final Fantasy Movie and this Wonderful Life animation.) It's actually a facinating read!
The author also features a gallery with photo shoot style images of the female actress from the short.
Somebody mod this phrase -1 Redundant.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
It's creepy when she smiles.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
The slashdot pragraph referres to him as Lian Kemp, but it's actually Liam Kemp.
As someone whose name is Liam, I find this is a frequent error in Norh America.
Liam
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
Thanks! I needed one of those for my sister!
does anyone remember the claymation short of those grey guys who make 'happy goggles' ?
sorry for being offtopic but its for someones b-day present and thought someone might remember the name of it..?
thanks
I had a bet with myself that there would be a majority of self-important smarmy 'this is why the work is inferior' posts. Gosh, I win.
Let's see the stuff you've done that makes this project worthless. Oh, you haven't done any.
I am astounded people. This is what Final Fantasy *wanted* to be, but done by one guy and four computers. Wow.
The character is simply not Anatomacally Correct Proportioned - a drawing class would be able to fix this problem, but unfortunately it seems that the guy making this stuff has way better technical skills than the required portrait skills.
:)
Study more women, bring a pencil and paper, then come back. Do study real women though
Warning: there will be spoilers below.
Okay, I know a lot of people have been complaining about it being "too perfect" or something like that, but I'd like to go into it on a slightly different tack.
When you make a film, there needs to be a point. You have to make a decision about why you're making it and why the audience would want to watch it. Is it as a demo, to show off your technical prowess at modeling and backgrounds and so on? Okay, then the only people who'll watch it are people who want to see pretty pictures.
A much more common goal for a film is to be entertaining to a wide audience, and this almost always involves a story that fulfils a basic human understanding of what a story should be. Look at any sucessful feature or short and it has this.
Part of creating a successful whole is to keep focused. It's a disaster if the audience is distracted by anything. If you're deeply involved in the story and then you see a character with a face that doesn't look quite real, you're going to think about that and stop being involved in the story.
The film progresses as a "look how pretty this all is" demo. Sure, pretty. Very idyllic. Now, why am I watching this again? I want to be fulfilled, not just see pretty pictures.
Now on to some specific things.
There's been some research on this topic - welcome to the uncanny valley!
Not the parent, which is one of the few that actually gets it - I mean the asshole that modded it down.
This thread is full of idiots saying "oh, the hairs of the eyebrow don't look quite like real eyebrow hair", when that's simply not the point. Why waste time creating something that looks 100% like a photograph when photography has been around for over 100 years? CGI is not mean to replace or compete with photography; it's an art form, just like painting or sculpture. What kind of sense does it make to complain that the shadows in the Mona Lisa or the pubic hairs in David are "not quite realistic"? Bunch of morons.
If you like the movie, say so. And if you don't, say so too. But complaining that irrelevant details don't look like something else (that they were never supposed to look like) just shows you can't see the forest for the trees.
The short demos are way better in qaulity and detail than the movie itself.
Oh, and what a horrible fucking story! Jebus, I'm not going to spoil it for you, but it's weak. I can't see anyone acting like this in real life.