" It has tons of imperfections that I’ve never seen captured accurately in a CGI rendering." That’s because when the imperfections are captured accurately, you never notice that it’s CG.
Too perfect is correct in this video.
Pick up an object in front of you. My example will be a bottle of ibuprofen I have in front of me.
I just bought it today. It’s brand new, so it should be an example of perfection, as close as you can get to this video.
The label sticker is peeling in one corner. There’s also an irregular crease in the label where it didn’t get stuck to the bottle perfectly. The cap has a slight amount of flash from the moulding seams. The expiration date printed on is is a little askew. If you look at the plastic closely, you can see tiny scratches. There are fingerprints from where I grabbed it.
Even though the finish is supposed to be glossy, there are tiny imperfections in the specular reflections.
And that’s something that is brand new in the real world.
If you want an example of CGI that looks pretty realistic, try Battlestar Galactica. Look at the Galactica herself. The metal’s dull, from being in space for decades. There’s blast marks from her many battles. You can see the seams between the mosaic of armor plates on her hull, and each armor plate has a slightly different color from her neighbor. Where there are gun ports, or engine exhausts, you see blackened marks. The paint on her name, and on the Colonial crest emblem is faded. And as the show goes on, she gets more beat up, you see more craters in her hull, more scorch marks, until the fourth season, when she’s nearly black.
Except that it’s not perfect or realistic. The movement is wrong, the light is wrong, the figure is not weighted properly (her butt sits on the chair like it’s a hard malleable shell), the skin tones are cartoonish. Light produces various tones as it bounces off of objects in space, and as well as it recedes from the light source.
A brown object next to a blue one will see these tones produced in the reflected light. You see none of that here. Perhaps it annoys me I am a classically trained artist… I have a very calibrated eye for first principles in chiaroscuro, animation and the effect of weight on mass compared to the average Joe.
This is a nice video, but it’s not any sort of indicator about the state of CGI. I have seen much much better.
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Hi! I’m the guy who made the video and it’s great to spark off some interest in what CG is and what it does. Some of the issues that have been touched on in this thread are exactly what I was interested in when making the work - sometimes it’s too perfect, sometimes it’s not perfect enough.
I’m really interested in that certain CG feeling that huge teams of CG artists spend huge amounts of time eradicating, all so that the medium can disappear into photographic reality and become invisible. I love all these little traces of the machine in the medium: the cartoonish skin tones, the strange light bounces, lack of friction and perfect geometry are what makes CG not a photograph. Sure, you can eradicate these traces with enough time, enough prodigious talent, enough processor power or enough money and generally people do. The CG industry is focused on the attainment of 1:1 reality and seamlessness. That’s cool and I love hyper-real CG, but the thing I wanted to explore with this film is what CG imagery does when it’s not invisible. Naturally, it starts to fall apart in different ways.
In that sense, I think my film is more a reflection of what CG is than an example of state-of-the-art technique. Are there things that could be improved in the film? Yeah, of course! But if I could go back, I’d probably emphasise those parts rather than hide them!
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