Article: The Uncanny Valley and CGI

# 1 19-09-2013 , 02:43 PM

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The film industry became aware of the uncanny valley, which is a paradox in animation that states that the more life-like a character gets the creepier it becomes to human observers, when Pixar created their short film Tin Toy in 1988. This film got them their first Academy Award and established computer animation as a serious medium.

A few attempts have been made a realistic humans since then, freaking out audiences (me included) around the world.

The Uncanny Valley and CGI - The Challenge of Creating Realistic Humans

Also, out of curiosity, was there anyone else here who struggled with the characters in TinTin? I thought the sets looked beautiful but those characters really scared me. Must be tough to be a kid these days user added image

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# 2 19-09-2013 , 10:13 PM

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I think what made the Tin Tin characters so creepy is that they're a strange mix of realism and a cartoony style but set in a strikingly realistic environment. It is a bit off putting lol.

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# 3 20-09-2013 , 02:09 AM

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Aw, I liked Tintin. I know it's a bit of a strange style, but I liked the effect. I wasn't creeped out much. Speaking of mixing cartoony and realistic, have you noticed how realistic all the shaders and lighting are in the most cartoony movies? Thinking of Despicable Me and Pixar and such. The effect is often gorgeous, but it's a bit strange too, if you think about how cartoons used to be. Although now that I think about things like matte paintings in older Disney movies, they were quite "realistic" too.

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# 4 20-09-2013 , 08:04 AM

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Good point about the lighting and backgrounds. I heard that Pixar had to 'cartoon' the oceans in Finding Nemo as they looked to real, but now they seem quite happy with super realistic backgrounds eg. Up, Brave and Monster's University.

On the subject of the motion capture people - what about Avatar? I haven't seen the movie myself but it was a huge box office hit. I guess maybe the blue people looked so weird anyway that it didn't freak people out.

Cheers, the Yeti.

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# 5 23-09-2013 , 03:16 PM

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Maybe in a few years it will all be super realistic, they must have something in mind when they rename it "PhotoRealistic Renderman". I like this clip from Disney for giving dimension to backgrounds back in the day, it's incredible how much work we put into cameras.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d4-AUwkKAw

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Article: The Uncanny Valley and CGI

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