This might be old but i hadn't seen it before... CG Society have released jpgs of 20 3d renders they made. some are pretty obviously renders n remind me of current game engine renders... others are quite good & are getting near photo-realism imo.

CGTalk is the forum from CGSociety. This is a great place where great CG artists like to show their work. This article rounds up 20 breathtaking realistic CG portraits by CGSociety.

the fat american chick pic is pretty funny :D
full story.

A few of them are so good, you can hardly tell they're CG.

Pretty good! Now we are finally getting somewhere.

Impressive!

Looks pretty good. Is it just me or does CG just have problems with fat chicks heads? They always look ... odd in some way. Can't really put my finger on why it looks odd.

just you mate, you haven't observed as many fat heads as I have.

a few of the pics like the one withe the dude snarling through gritted teeth immediately look wrong to me.. i can't exactly say what looks wrong but it just looks rendered. there was a bbc doco on the human face a while back, where they reckon that a huge chunk of your brain's processing goes into facial recognition that makes CG renders of the face so difficult to achieve realism that fools the mighty brain! ;p

Another good one: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=399499

the naked girl on the chair borders on NSFW eh.

prolly best not look at these @ work

Makes me want to boot up 3dsmax again!

sup fatty lying in rubbish, how you doin?!

Fat people have more skin, it's difficult to get skin to look uniformed and yet not the same colour

The nude chick on the chair looks like she has dwarfism.

dwarf chick is hot dude, I need to see her rotate a bit

dwarf chick is hot dude, I need to see her rotate a bit

But that bit has more skin and as per Kat it would be hard to render correctly :D

Well Kat didn't say that, and if she did, she'd be wrong. Try drawing an anatomically correct 80s Arnie, vs Grimace the thickshake monster from McDonalds. Grimace is easier, he just looks f***ing wierd.

Twas a joke.

Best for me was Samuel L Jackson one or the young girl in the purple turtleneck near the bottom - I think with her the facial asymmetry really nails the realism. Very unusual to have a perfectly symmetric face, which they captured really well, particularly in the nostrils and eyes.

The snarling guy doesn't look realistic. The problem is with his mouth, I am certain. Too square lips - too many teeth showing, I don't think is possible to snarl so openly like that.

Best for me was Samuel L Jackson one

You mean Morgan Freeman?

cg looking fake in animation = uncanny valley, no animator can possible recreate the micro expressions that human faces can have which is what makes it so obvious that they aren't real (in a film).

i.e. eye / lip / muscle twitches, s*** which you don't even really notice but it still registers in your brain.

Raider, Final Fantasy, The Spirt within was made in 2001. They did a remarkable job of capturing those subtle points so very well. Not perfect, but for 2001, it was very advanced.

Nice find Demon, love this kind of stuff.

The chic from cold case is the best imo.

Except that Morgan Freeman doesn't have badly aligned eyes ><

no animator can possible recreate the micro expressions that human faces can have which is what makes it so obvious that they aren't real

Yes they can. It's not the abilities of the animator that limit this, it's the tools/technology they have to work with. I've seen some impressive technology tests that show unbelievebaly realistic hand-animated human faces.

Raider, Final Fantasy, The Spirt within was made in 2001. They did a remarkable job of capturing those subtle points so very well. Not perfect, but for 2001, it was very advanced.

Are u kidding me? Sure the effects were cool but it was painful to watch the characters faces.. for me atleast (2 of my tutors said they turned it off cause they couldn't stand the facial animations it detracted too much)... but then again we're animation grads so stuff like that prob stands out more to us then you :)

Even Beowulf has the same s***, the queen / anthony hopkins chars were really meh animation wise

Best for me was Samuel L Jackson one

You mean Morgan Freeman?

Yes. Yes I do.

Tsk tsk Pinky. Sam J is too bad ass to look like MF.

black people look all the same to pinky

black people look all the same to pinky

Pink people look all the same to blacky too.

Raider, what are they teaching you at animation school to bag out those movies?

Raider, what are they teaching you at animation school to bag out those movies?

Do i walk around bagging out animation movies which i found dodgy? no.. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and i just thought those movies were weak in animation. They try to make the realism the selling point and forget about everything else... like the story.

Pixar ftw.

BillyHardball, they teach them too hate everything they didnt work on, even then too hate that as well, except for pixar productions :)

I sat with a bunch of animators during xmen 3 and f*** me was that annoying to listen too.

and Raider, i understand where you are coming from, but have a look at the last pirates movie, while davey jones didnt have a human face and it was all CG, the facial expressions were f***ing good.

and honestly at the end of the day, being a grad I take it you havnt worked on a film yet.... while you sit here an critise and you are allowed, wait until you work on one of these projects and you will realise the reason it isnt as polished as it could be is normally there just isnt enough time and money.

yer while i totally agree with raider that the facial expressions n stuff from final fantasy : the spirit within was easily detectable as cg ... as ET said, it was the best at the time, whether you liked it or not! i think billy's point was that if raider wasn't impressed by those examples perhaps he has seen stuff in his course that was more advanced. what is the BEST cg animation like now?

and Raider, i understand where you are coming from, but have a look at the last pirates movie, while davey jones didnt have a human face and it was all CG, the facial expressions were f***ing good.

Yer the last pirates movie did have good 3d, but it also wasn't a full 3d movie so the scenes tend to blend better with the movie and since Davey aint in every seen they had way more time to tweak the animations for him (it's still outstanding).. then say Beowulf / Polar Express etc. The more animation you got.. the less quality it will be unless you're like 3D realms and got 12 years to work on a film.

and honestly at the end of the day, being a grad I take it you havnt worked on a film yet.... while you sit here an critise and you are allowed, wait until you work on one of these projects and you will realise the reason it isnt as polished as it could be is normally there just isnt enough time and money.

I've worked on my own personal animation and it's nowhere near as polished as i aimed for at the beginning simply because of time, so i know all to well.

I'm just saying if you want to make a 100% animated photorealistic film then you mose well shoot in real life and then do the scenes which would be impossible to recreate in real life... like Star Trek did so well...

Having watched FF recently (a few months ago), I was surprised at how much I did notice the rendering quality compared to when it first came out.

The more animation you got.. the less quality it will be unless you're like 3D realms and got 12 years to work on a film.

A lot of cg houses, like Photon VFX at Oxenford, have a day shift and night shift. Two seperate teams working around the clock. Additionally a single production will often uses SEVERAL companies to do it's 3D graphics because there is just too much work to go around. Often in different parts of the world too!

Take Stargate for example, the first episode of that show features at least 3 distinct 'wormhole' effects on the stargate, each made by a different company. Some shots throughout season 1 continue to look more 'rubbery' whereas others look more 'watery'.

Eventually they figured out they should divide the work a bit more sensibly, and Rainmaker Studios became in charge of the wormhole effect.

Some of the kids working on the effects for that show in it's final year would have been wearing nappies when the first episode aired.



last edited by thermite at 16:44:06 16/Jun/09

This guy is pretty good.

This is by the same guy.

This page has some real time interactive stuff built into the page. Its not a bad efefct except for the crappy smile she puts on.

http://cubo.cc/

From the viewpoint of someone who can draw the human figure accurately and can do so without use of a model, I grew up with classic cartoons (before political correctness) and tend to think of CGI as just a better cartoon (in my head) so I enjoy and admire it for what it is.

Yes, the flaws are obvious as in all sorts of media if you study it.
Definately watch where they got it wrong and got it right and then figure out how you can improve on that and do it.

If you can't, step away from the thought process and put the keyboard down.

From the viewpoint of someone who can draw the human figure accurately and can do so without use of a model, I grew up with classic cartoons (before political correctness) and tend to think of CGI as just a better cartoon (in my head) so I enjoy and admire it for what it is.

Having a hard time understanding wtf you are trying to say here.

Post your accurate human drawings please, I need a laffo.

i think he's saying he can see past the flaws and appreciate it for what it is.

I think the biggest problem with animating humans realistically is that often there's a lot of motion and jerks that are a little too smooth. For example, when I look to the left and right, my head isn't moving smoothly, its almost following the darting 'random' jerking action of my eyes locking on random objects that the brain targets as it inspects its surroundings.

Motion capture obviously reduces the problem greatly but there a lot of very granular motions (i.e. micro-expressions) that either cannot be recreated due to complexity and time, or are not actually accounted for.

Well said Hermi

Don't some animators recreate the human face (bone + muscle + skin) to create the most realistic looking person?