Earthblog

Movies like Final Fantasy: Spirits Within and Beowulf demonstrate how well graphic artists can recreate the human face.

But even these skilled artists have yet to successfully cross the “uncanny valley.” The uncanny valley is centered on the eyes. It is the point where a CG person looks like a real a person and his gestures are almost indistinguishable, but something in the eyes looks soulless and “creepy”.

Making real looking people, instead of the ‘soulless’ avatars is one of the biggest problems confronting computer graphics (CG) designers. Ken Bitz, creative director for Solid Green Inc., a Calgary based graphic and visual effects company, relates the uncanny valley effect to “talking dead people”.

Ken Bitz, designer with Solid Green, expects it will take 20 years to create realistic computer generated humans, but movies like Beowolf are a start.

Phote: Aaron Chatha

He does, however, believe that one day computer generated avatars will replace on-screen actors.

“If they get good at it, if they can replace a salary they will,” said Bitz, explaining the advantages of working with a computer generated avatar over a real person. CG avatars would not flub lines or require more takes, instead decisions would be made to change actions, to raise eye brows or modify a facial expression.

But the computing technology required to make a CG actor indistinguishable from the real thing is at least 20 years away, according to Bitz.

“(Right now) the technology is too weak to be replacing real people. Until people look good, until you can’t tell, it’s of no threat to today’s actor.”

Currently the strongest advances in CG persons are in background characters and monsters.

“Standing, filling out a stadium, CG people are common as specks on the screen,” Bitz noted they are usually so small that very little attention is paid to them. It is when CG people are brought into the forefront that they will noticed as being fake, unlike creatures and fantasy characters.

“You can’t say that orc doesn’t look like an orc, but you know how a human works. You can easily pick out when it’s not being done right. With non-human characters, there’s nothing to compare that to,” said Bitz.

Solid Green has produced visual effects commercials and graphics for companies like Toyota, Infinity and ATCO. Since they do commercial products, they haven’t worked with CG people in their works as the technology is not strong enough.

But Bitz noted that video game designers excel in the realm of CG avatars..

Image Metrics, based in the U.K. and U.S. has an impressive resume creating faces for games. Some are of their own design or an artist drawing, such as in Assassins Creed II. Others are based off on living examples, such as basketball players in NBA 2K10.

Avatars in media are best represented through video games, where the human player has direct control over his or her own avatar within that game. While it is still not indistinguishable from real people, humans in video game can convey a large variety of emotions to create a bond with the player.

Image Metrics is leading the technological advances in the field, touting the fact that they use no markers, make up or special equipment to map a characters face, according to their official press releases and project examples.

Instead, Image Metrics captures a real actor’s performance on film, capturing the correct emotions and expressions that clients are looking for. They then tweak the faces based on developer input, and work with game companies to get the look they are looking for.

Companies like Image Metrics are steadily using less and less complicated devices, such as marking an actor’s face to detect facial expressions, instead using their artists and their know-how to teach computers how to read natural expressions and convert them into CG. As the technology gets better, the effects will slowly overcome the uncanny valley effect to become truly lifelike.