Laughing from Sunday mornings all the way to the bank
Published: 01 Nov 2004 12:19 GMT
The uncanny valley
Animators and visual effects experts agree that the Holy Grail of computer graphics is bringing realistic human characters to life on the big screen.
"At some point in the future, we will have true human characters -- that's something people are striving for -- but it will take a few years," Owen says. "We need a lot more understanding of how humans move, how humans act, and more understanding of our perception -- to figure out what we do when we take in information. It's important to creating these effects."
Still, computer graphics professionals walk a fine line. Japanese scientist Masahiro Mori has described people's emotional response to humanlike robots as the "uncanny valley", because fondness for the robots often falls off a cliff when they become too real.
The human face has so many subtleties that a slight muscle or eye movement can dramatically change the meaning of an expression. To study facial expression and capture it is one of the hardest things to do, said DreamWorks supervising animator Tim Cheung.
For this reason, DreamWorks' animators try to achieve "stylized realism" in their films, in which they give the characters the complexity of human appearance and emotion but don't try to replicate it too closely.
Making characters too realistic can turn off the audience. In Shrek, for example, many viewers felt the character of the talking donkey was more "real" than the human princess Fiona.
Like other studios, DreamWorks has developed technology to make the process simpler. Its software contains information on the human physical anatomy and its traits, allowing an animator to program, with one control, movement that reverberates throughout the body.
For example, when the enchantress in Shrek breathes, the movement travels from her shoulders to her belly. The animator would use one command to create that effect so the one action carries the function throughout the structure of the body.
"We're looking to push the envelope on each film, and that requires us to invent new tools," Cheung says. "We write all our own software."
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