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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."
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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(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
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!
this is what is called the "zombie" effect. that is, when a cg character goes for total realism, you very often get a case where it does something small and usually not obvious, that makes in not quite human, and gives it a very creepy feeling. you won't get that feeling from an obviously non-human model. i definitely can't put my finger on it, but there is something in her face (when you see the motion, at least), that just seems wrong.
Um, given that I had to really screw around with the contrast and brightness to see what you're talking about, you've either got a seriously messed up monitor (I guess you never complained about DOOM3 being too dark?) or a really twisted need to look for those types of things.
:) And besides, I thought you were really talking about this one.
Of course, given that I felt compelled to verify doesn't say a lot about me either
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.
It's creepy because although the rendering and small scale motions are well done, there are enough motion (or lack thereof) clues to tell you it's not real -- the motion is reminiscent the characters in the Final Fantasy movie or of Princess Fiona in Shrek (in human form -- the ogre form and the other characters are sufficiently inhuman we don't expect real motion, so don't find it's lack "creepy"). (In the stills you can look at detail long enough to pick out that it's rendered, not real.)
Take a look at Sample 1, where she raises her head. Well done: the blink, the hair movement, the way the eyes track. The giveaway: she manages to raise her head without moving her shoulders or (apparently) using any neck muscles. That's an unnatural motion.
In Sample 2, the hair is a bit odd -- it sways a little with head movement and ambient breeze, but should swing through nearly 90 degrees as she bends over (styling gel, maybe?). More significantly, the skin on the hands is far too smooth (no wrinkles on the knuckles), and the motion of the hand to the mouth (as in surprise) seems to have the wrong speed profile -- it's too slow and smooth, it should be faster and just a little jerky.
That latter tends to be the giveaway -- live creature motion is either fast and relatively smooth (a "preprogrammed" muscle sequence, as with eg. a gymnast or other athlete), or slow(er) with many minor "course corrections" through the feedback loop. It takes a lot of practise, coordination and concentration to move both slowly and smoothly -- people don't normally move like that, but androids and animations do.
-- Alastair
That's right, he creates a virtual one. This guy REALLY needs to get laid.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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