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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."
1) She needs to have some pores in the skin. The closeups of the face and nose don't show any pores at all.
2) Tiny jaw. Nobody has a jaw that small.
3) Real tatties sag just a little.
4) A nice touch was the subtle camel toe. Problem with that is the contours of the bathing suit fabric overlying the camel toe. Not enough wrinkles in the right places. I'm an expert.
5) Hair - too perfect.
6) Skin on chest - some effort went into that to make it look like a real chest, but the freckles just had the appearance of being placed on a chest in an effort to look natural.
So it's a very nice attempt, but really too perfect. Lt. Commander Data would be able to pick her out of a crowd as artificial because her blinking pattern was exactly the same as the Fibbonachi sequence.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Anyone have a torrent of the whole movie up. Happy to stick a few mbs behind it as well.
It looks like a mask when in motion. I guess there is some small movement that we don't notice in human faces, but notice that this model lacks it.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
um, They = 1 guy, so perfection isn't garunteed...
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
Looks to me like the skin doesn't reayll have depth... Real skin is slightly translucent and refracts light through it... The skin here is just a surface that reflects light.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
...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?
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.
If you believe watching porn is immoral because it makes you regard women as sex objects then clearly creating virtual models of women and creating virtual porn is even more likely to do so.
How we know is more important than what we know.
1) She needs to have some pores in the skin. The closeups of the face and nose don't show any pores at all.
:) However, it is masterful, considering how often most people botch it.
Pores are usually not necessary for 95% of character animation work and would mean some major memory usage. The textures were damn good, but yeah, could use some work. (The goose bumps on the thighs were a bit overdone in the knee close-up, but that's just me.)
2) Tiny jaw. Nobody has a jaw that small.
Plenty of people do. With 6 billion people on the planet, can you really claim that with any sort of authority? For example, living in Japan, I see women with jaws like that every day.
3) Real tatties sag just a little.
Again, living in Japan, I have been blessed by the company of a woman whose "tatties" don't sag. Asian women tend to have perky breasts, and they're not as tiny as people would have you think.
4) A nice touch was the subtle camel toe. Problem with that is the contours of the bathing suit fabric overlying the camel toe. Not enough wrinkles in the right places. I'm an expert.
Depends on the material the bathing suit is made out of. I agree that the wrinkles aren't correct for your typical bathing suit spandex; this suit would appear to be made out of a thicker, velveteen fabric. A lot of the responsibility for this would be on the cloth-body dynamics software included in the animation package, not necessarily the animator himself. Fabric is hard to do. He did a good job in terms of getting it to flex believably over the model (note the strap over the collar bone.)
5) Hair - too perfect.
Hair is hard to do. Actually, my complaint would be that the hair is not perfect enough.
6) Skin on chest - some effort went into that to make it look like a real chest, but the freckles just had the appearance of being placed on a chest in an effort to look natural.
This comment is so subjective there's not much to say. Damn fine skin-texturing, attention to detail and believable bump-mapping and specularity. Also seems to have used some good environment maps to render the lighting (radiosity, perhaps), and possibly some sub-surface scattering (if not, then some very sophisticated light rigs.)
As the saying goes, come back when you can do better. This is very high-end stuff.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
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.
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.