Pendulum Facial Animation

wow indeed, wow

Originally posted by Tyler Lowe First, I want to say "wow" from a technical aspect, but to me, these things look more fake the more "real" they get. I know that may sound wierd, but everytime animations improve, I find myself keyed in increasingly on small flaws. Maybe I'm just not right in the head.

That's really, really creepy... It reminds me of dolls, and I've always had a phobia of dolls turning and looking at me when I'm trying to sleep.

Well they're not on my bed.... That would be really, really bad.

Edited by Clinton - 27 Sep 2008 at 6:00pm

Definitely progress, but they still aren't simulating all of the muscles which activate during human facial movement, particularly expressive speech. The lip movement and teeth positioning will never look quite right until they can model all of the facial muscles, down to the tiniest. Also, the faces are too symmetrical to be real. Perfect symmetry in a real human face doesn't exist. We all pick up on that. If they tweaked the underlying skeletal structure to have lumps, slight twists, and slight differences in size from left to right and in top to bottom placement, the entire face would start to look more human.
The next thing they need to work on after they master that is hands. Hands always look wrong. Walk animations, too. People don't walk fully upright, but for some reason animators always do it that way. (Sorry, I programmed PC games for almost a decade early on and I'm now an artist, so I tend to pick graphics and computer imagery apart...)
All of that aside, they have really improved the quality over the years.