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Image Metrics May Revolutionize Facial Animation
iStorm writes, "I've been interested in computer animation for a long time and have recently started cracking down on my studies in an effort to eventually move myself from hobbyist to professional... then I find this article about Image Metrics, which can map an actor's emoting onto a generated face or onto the image of another actor, living or dead. How does a seasoned animator view this sort of push ahead in technology? If so much of the creative process is made so easy, where's the need for traditional animators spending exponentially larger amounts of time to create work of equal or lesser quality? How did animators view motion capture when it first appeared? Will there still be room for creativity if this tech comes to fruition?" The article doesn't say what kind of time or processing power Image Metrics's "high-fidelity, performance-driven facial animation" requires.
We did all our art in MacPaint. We only had the basics mind, a line tool, a square tool, but we didn't complain.
My roommate is a digital animator and if his comments are worth anything then Mo-Cap is not all it's cracked up to be. This new great thing may end up there, where it can map facial expression but does it in a way that isn't quite right looking to the human eye, thus requiring hours and hours of cleanup afterwards.
I think it'll be a while before the industry starts putting out photo realistic digital animations of people.
A blog about stuff.
I doubt that this technique will knock animators or traditional animation out of business. Animation is art. Did the video camera kill painting? Did the internet kill reading?
Animation from an animator gives it style, and feeling just as much as an actor does. Just watch any old Disney cartoon if you want to see the flow of such animation.
Crappy acting will still be crappy acting. Just like the foley artist is still happily employed enhancing the audio soundtrack (either digitally or old fashined foot stomping). The animator will remain gainfully employed improving and enhancing the final product.
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How does a seasoned animator view this sort of push ahead in technology? If so much of the creative process is made so easy, where's the need for traditional animators spending exponentially larger amounts of time to create work of equal or lesser quality?
Technology usually advances so that it is not only more advanced, but also more efficient. It's fairly obvious that Hollywood studios (just an example) would want cheap CGI, and since there's a need for this to happen, there's also someone working on making that happen.
A skilled animator shouldn't be worried, however. Creativity is hard to replace with software and someone will always have to create whatever's portraited. How it's done and how fast is a different question.
Full Tilt
I've been doing 3D character animation for well over a decade, and I've also been exposed to automated facial animation systems including mocap (in many of it's various forms) over the years. I actually think mocap is not bad for certain applications, particularly whole body stuff like athletics. If you really want that golf swing to look like Tiger Woods in his video game, then mocapping him is a very valid option.
What it's not good at, however, is animating the face. People have been trained since birth to observe human faces and we're experts. It makes us very aware of anything that's unnatural. Only a human who innately understands the subtleties of human emotions can truly finesse facial animation so it looks pleasing to the human eye. An animator is just that type of person. We study facial expression, musculature and all sorts of things, then combine it with acting skills and artistic knowledge to make a result that's looks pleasing to the eye (or not.. depending on budgets and deadlines - and I suspect this technology will filter down to the low end productions that don't care as much about the final results)
Here's a quote, usually attributed to the WWI German flying ace, Baron Von Richthofen:
"It's not the crate...it's the man inside the crate."
I'm gonna ask you to ponder this and extrapolate to the imagined quandary you propose. Also, I'm going to leave you with a bit of personal history:
I started in the graphic design business back in the early 70's, when a well-stocked "micro-studio" would set you back about around $50,000 (in 1974 dollars) for equipment, which included: a digital typesetter, process camera, film/paper photo processor, drafting table, waxer, light table...plus a few other lesser (though expensive) goodies. A decade later, inexpensive (relatively) personal computers with laser printers and scanners could be had for less than $10,000, essentially replacing my studio gear. Meaning every small business on the planet could suddenly be competing with me in the graphic design biz on some level. Predictably, a whole bunch of them tried. Did it put all the typographers/designers/pre-press craftsmen out of business? Well, it separated the wheat from the chaff, certainly, casting adrift the bottom 20% (subjective talent evaluation on my part) of the professional industry. It also produced an explosion of amazingly awful graphic design/typography, produced by folks whose accountants convinced them to attempt to save money by doing it themselves. However, those of us who actually had some skills/talent/Mojo actually thrived, selling our work by pitching the client on a comparison of our stuff to the examples of sub-par work that resulted from trying to replace talent with technology. Yes, I pitched a lot of FUD back then, showing a potential client the absolute worst examples of things produced by People Who Really Shouldn't Be Allowed to Touch Photoshop. Only...maybe it really wasn't really FUD. 'Cause when you objectively look at it, the good Baron's quote still rings true:
"It's not the crate...it's the man inside the crate."
All the computer programs in the world, along with all the hardware in the world, don't help if you don't got that Mojo to begin with. The tools are subservient to the talent, not the other way around. At least until someone develops a keyboard with a button that says "creativity."
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An earlier version of the software "needs slightly less than 5 ms per iteration and parameter (>50 ms for all 12 parameters) on a PC with a 500 MHz Pentium III processor." I'm not sure if that's 50ms per frame or what. That site also has a nice mpeg of the software mapping to a face.
wow?? I've been doing character animation professionally (read: features) for 10yrs on the computer and I didnt see anything new there...and certainly nothing that made me say wow. I sure didnt think that African Warrior was very far beyond Polar Express. Every couple of years this same old hype gets dragged up and people get all excited and then the studios hit the bandwagon and make another Final Fantasy or Polar express. It sucks, the eyes are dead, and its creepy. Uncanny Valley revisited. The imporvements each time are incremental at best (to my eye.) But the real bottom line of all this is that its kind of gimmicky. Character animation is meant to *EXAGGERATE* reality, not replicate it. What they describe here is really more visual effects than character animation. Studios love this because they hope someday they can stop dealing with all those annoying actors, animators, and artists. If you want to make a movie about James Dean dating Marilyn Monroe, go right ahead. But if you want to make a movie about a fish thats in love with a bug, mocap (facial or gestural) isn't going to be the most appealing solution. The only photoreal CG Character that ever made me say wow was Gollum and there were many, many animators (whom i know personally) who both animated and cleaned up facial motion capture for thousands of hours to make Gollum. No slight to Andy Serkis who is a very talented performer, but it just ain't that simple. Animators will be around as long as there are children (and adults) who want to see thier imaginations taken somewhere its never been before. (i.e. forever)