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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."
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.
Now everyone on slashdot can have a girlfriend!
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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
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.
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
You are right. Here is the second image which looks fake.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Here's the vid..yay coral cache. http://media01.cgchannel.com.nyud.net:8090/images/ news/2003_10_liamkemp/TWL360x208.mov
fap fap fap fap fap fap...
Hey! shut the door damnit!
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.
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!
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.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
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
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 ;-)
That's mostly like the sort of tech used in today's 3D games. It would be real easy to make such a 'movie' interactive. Walk around in a scene, or choose a character to follow in the story, and tag along with another character when you view the movie next time.
The first time I ran it, I was very impressed with the intro of the game Half-Life. You sit in a rail vehicle, can't get out, so the story is very linear, but you can move, look around, all sorts of things happening around you. If you know the game, you'll know what I mean.
If you see that some skilled coders can cram incredible demo's, or even a FPS in a 100 KB., it's clear that the amount of data to process is do-able. It's really just computing power that's needed. Today's home PC's aren't yet powerful enough to pull this off, but we're getting there real quick.
Yup, those are definitely fake.
-ShadeOfBlue
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?
I have a torrent of both this and the animated short pfffirate up at http://147.126.53.117:6969/ Enjoy :)
michael greene
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.
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
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.
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.