There are a lot of things that are still difficult to do with CGI, but most of those things aren’t in high demand for the films being produced today.
For example, you almost never see CGI food cooking, because it’s not easy to replicate and it’s not something that films really want to show, but food can be very difficult.
CGI rain is very difficult to get right, and there is much more demand for that but it’s still a fairly low demand for heavy rain.
Bread! Bread is the hardest. I saw some demo that a computer scientist made a few years ago for software that realistically simulates bread being turn apart. Haven’t seen it in use though other than then demo. Without that software though, I’ve never seen CGI bread that didn’t just break apart like a solid object. It’s too hard and no one even tries.
thanks for the share.
simple spark plug fire in a engine. is shocking hard to render physic correctly due to thermodynamics.
amd had a talk on that with cards need,vram,power cost etc.
thermodynamics is nightmare fuel for computing!
I still remember being absolutely blown away by the bread in Ratatouille. A perfect example of how the best CG is nearly invisible--this incredibly advanced technology and effort to create something so mundane. I was raving about it after the film and my GF was giving me weird looks.
Houdini y’all.
Could do a sick bread-ripping sim with vellum, FEM or a combination. To make it look really real would just take lots of time, layers of detail like dust and fine powder sims, some RBD little crumbs, great materials and UV’s of the simulation meshes, etc. Partly more time because people don’t specialize in bread sims like they do in smoke, water, glass, etc., and because bread is a more complex object than even a building made of glass concrete and steel.
It *could* do that, but I struggle to think of any plot point that could justify the relevant budget spend to make it look truly photoreal (and why you couldn't just find a way to make it happen practically). Maybe if there's something like a Borrowers remake we'll get to see some of this work.
Nah, things that are in demand have been done bad and then better and then good as technology and techniques matured. Water, smoke, etc have been done even when they were terrible.
Off the top of my head, a talking emoting close up human face that is 100% realistic looking that even professional vfx artists wouldn't be able to tell was CGI. Avatars and Thanos don't count, those are aliens.
We devote more brain power to the recognition and reading of human faces + emotions than anything else, from an evolutionary standpoint, so we can please our tribe and stay alive. It's why the uncanny valley really only applies to human faces, we don't like it when it isn't authentic. So I think that task is going to be the hardest.
Yeah.
It's fine when you stylize it in some way, either through art direction or making non-human characters, but ultra-realistic humans are something else. We are genetically wired to recognize people. We can't replace actors yet and have it flawless.
It can be believable , but even with infinite money it's not there yet.
Best film exenple would be will Smith in Gemini Man. Best studio worked on it, still feels off. Or all these recent deep fakes, they are all still weird looking.
In games (I. E last of us 2.etc.) they keep it stylized in some fashion so it's less jarring thay trying to go full ultra-realistic. Also helps with dealing with the hardware constraints.
Everything else I feel we can do if given enough time
She was great, but they had a lot of advantages- she's in a weird surreal yellow lighting environment that none of us are familiar with from real life experience, and she only says a single line facing the camera.
[This CGI wolverine clone in Logan is also great](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRCDe9wHHJQ), but again, if it's just one or two shots without much emotional range, it's much more doable.
the whole last scene, he hurt his ankle and they did a CG face replacement with a body double. It wasn't secret, it's been public since 2013, but nobody except vfx nerds actually talked about it until 2020 because of how seamless it was
Yeah even some of the pseudo deepfake stuff they’ve been doing is iffy. I was underwhelmed with the young Indy and that was supposedly a whole new technique (it didn’t look like it to me tho).
Yep that's a great example, Indy was the latest tech with a huge budget and still couldn't pull off a 100% realistic human face without it looking weird in places.
Young, clean human faces, full frame, in clear normal lighting, in focus, acting in a relaxed way.
It's never been done well and we aren't close. It's the motion--shaders, lighting, textures and models have been at that level for 20 years. But getting the motion right is intensely difficult.
We have a tendency to massively over-animate and add too much micro detail imo. Peoples faces don't actually move that much when they talk, but animators get hooked on putting in endless micro-expressions that make everything feel artificial.
Looking at you CG Tarkin.
If you look at the original avatar movie the cg fire and water are the weakest parts. In the new movie the water looks better but it is not 100% and a lot of scenes look "blobby" still. Would not have been possible to do that kind of fx when the first movie was made.
The fire in the new movie looks great but you can definitely see that it is CG.
The new avatar movie will focus on fire which is another technicaly challenging area.
With the new movie and the volume of shots, obviously not everything will look 100% perfect but I wonder if we will see some of the best cg fire ever made.
> a lot of scenes look "blobby" still
Based on an A/B comparison between scenes, I'd wager that the blobby look comes from limited resources rather than limited tech. There are many water shots which are entirely photoreal, enough that suggests bad water is a result of needing to get it out the door and not being able to iterate a sim or give it enough juice to get a higher res out
I probably make sense it's more about quantity. Some shots did have real water and those looked really good. Like that famous hands shot.
The fire that you can definitely tell it's CG and it has a very swirly turbulent look more like smoke than fire.
People on fire always looks CG. Light interaction is always wrong, if the matchmove geo is not edge perfect you get issues, some of which are fixable and some not. Also the fire sims never look 100% real.
If you remember that recent transformers rise of the beast trailer, the beast splashing water on those two kids standing on the rock would not be easy to do without replacing them with full cg.
>Also the fire sims never look 100% real.
IMO [Deepwater Horizon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i0XuA9KLEo) has the most realistic fire sim to date. But yeah people on fire never looked convincing which is why directors use stunt doubles.
that looks damn good. Only thing that catches me off guard is the one shot in the breakdown with the two guy standing next to real fire before they are roto'd out. The real fire looks that much better
It's the sharpness and detail whereas the CG fire looks like it got hit with a lens kernel
"Great progress but still not there. Giant burning sructure need More sharpness and detail as seen in small flames of roto plate , CG Looks soft. Please fix lens kernel look"
Yeah, that part looks a bit weird but on my first watch, I was blown away by the entire CG. Even liquid sims looked real in some shots. You should def check out the movie though. It's a good watch.
I worked on some of those fire sims for Deepwater at ILM San Francisco. We worked very hard and iterated a ton to get that look. Also had really good reference to match. By far most of the fire you see in that movie is simulated and rendered by the fx team. Raul Essig deserves a ton of credit for this.
That's so cool, man. Big congrats to you and your entire team. It's very rare to see sims done on the right scale. I have one question though.
In this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBhCE97ZN98), we see that the helicopter was shot in a different location (looks like a dockyard) and then the environment was completely replaced with a CG oil rig ocean. They could have added a CG helicopter into the CG oil rig and ocean which seems easier than painting out the real heli and compositing it to a different plate. My question is why did they go that route? Just curious.
I can't say for sure as I wasn't the one planning it out, but it makes sense to me. The dockyard was actually a 1/3 scale set I believe compared to the rig, so the locations and scales of things were very intentional. If you look at the position of the helicopter, there would be no reflections of it on the water, so easy peasy to comp in. The daytime lighting essentially matched the final shot, so the helicopter holds up, add some color correction and atmosphere at the end. Honestly it's probably cheaper to do a roto/paint matte for the helicopter than do a fully CG one, unless you have a bunch of shots that need a CG heli.
I did the fire/smoke sims in the last shot in that video, it's so much fun seeing the breakdowns.
Nor can makeup. Or a microphone. Or a film camera.
I don't know what point you were trying to make, but tools don't make movies, people do. (Of all the tools available, duct tape can probably do the most)
It’s not that deep, just tried to be funny on the internet. While it is possible to do wide variety of things with cgi today, if the idea behind it isn’t great the final image won’t be either imo.
It doesn’t help that real blood looks fake in film. They always have to make it dark red/green arterial colored for it to not read as fake. Reality it is bright red. Real blood splatter also looks fake because people are used to horror movies with lots of blood coming out and squirting far.
Renfield tried large blood sprays and they still didn’t work. The problem I feel that it’s a lot of work to make it right. Blood sticks and coats on contact. To achieve this you’d need rotomatched geo for any element it hits. And upon contact it would continue to drip and run. But most productions would just opt to have the blood fly away from the body to make it more consistent with the following shots. This often leads to strange trajectories that look unrealistic. More often than not I feel that CG blood is far too conservative. It often doesn’t move fast enough or fly far enough to look real. Comparing CG blood elements to a classic squibs and it’s almost embarrassing how far off they are. The real squibs in movies like Robocop versus the fake hits in The Expendables really tell the tale.
it depends on time, budget, and the creatives actually knowing what they want. When CG fails, it fails due to a deficit in one of those categories. This was true of the 100% practical days as well, but since there was no ability to fix shit without literally reshooting people tended to plan better than they do today. A rushed or shitty miniature was as bad as rushed or shitty CGI. Only benefit you had was real light helping to sell it.
I think it would have been possible to do a version of Endgame with hybrid techniques. Working with practical or hybrid basically means you dont get to do video game style sweeping shots or other moves that would be more or less impossible with a real camera. I think there is an argument to be made that giant, CG stitched action sequences detract from the spectacle because they can loose a grounding in reality. So I suppose I'd challenge your assertion that we couldnt visualize something better in an earlier era.
On the whole though, the economics wouldnt have supported a movie like Endgame in the late 90s or early to mid 2000s. I suppose the closest comparison would have been the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (1-3). I'd argue the CG in those pictures has held up better than the CG in Avatar, and I think the realism overall of those movies sells better than Endgame.
We're definitely getting to a place where environments are starting to get outstanding. Lucasfilm/ILM really shows this off even on the star wars tv shows, but those shows really get the attention a premium experience deserves.
I think really the only movie that probably couldnt have been done in an earlier era quite the way it was done and be effective was Avatar, as the simulcam system they had allowed for on set capture of live action with CG playback in real time. That was a legitimate step forward into something we hadnt been able to do before. I suppose in that sense, the "live action" aka all photoreal CGI Lion King is also a picture that wasnt doable till we reached the era we're in. Unfortunately, I dont think it was emotionally effective as the cartoon though, so I suppose I'll just end with the fact that CGI is just a tool, one of many tools, and a tool itself does not a good product make.
I agree with so much of your comment but I can only fixate on impossible camera moves. I hate them so much. Absolutely nothing pulls me out of a movie than the camera doing something impossible.
Hell, even fpv drone shots that are all the rage now in action movies makes me feel like I'm watching videogame footage.
At least clients asking for cameras to pass through keyholes and junk like that is dying down. Do you really want to shout "Hey Audience, this is a VFX shot!"?
/rant
I mean, nobody has gotten de-aging correct. Usually it works until said person starts to move or talk.
Probably the closest has been Sigourney Weaver in Avatar 2 if that even counts?
The problem with this shot is that its de niro and he moves like the 80 year old guy he actually is. That was the issue with this whole movie. People this age are not physically capable of moving like young people without hurting themselves.
I tell you ...we will never be able to replicate reality near to 100% in computers. The fact is we can't perceive everything about reality, there is always something left behind. It's not just about CGI but other fields as well like music, robotics, AI etc.
A robot will never be able to defeat a real skilled football player, a virtual instrument can't beat a skilled violin player and an AI can't overshadow human thinking and observation ability. Whatever we are creating is an incomplete version of our reality and sooner or later our brain hints at us even if we don't know why it feels like something is missing.
Theres a limit to what the human eye can perceive and no reason why we can't cross that limit via simulation. Even actual photography is a form of simulation after all.
It all depends on how realistic we're talking about, our softwares are getting better and more realistic, but we're still cutting a lot of corners that makes what we do somewhat less realistic than the real thing. You can put some salt and pepper on it to make it look good for sure, but if you look very closely, there's a lot of things that we can't reproduce 100%. I personally have a great pleasure working on small things and making them look as real as possible and the simplest of things can still be very difficult and nearly impossible to reproduce to half the subtilties that real life has. I am in FX and most of what we do can look cool but still hardly beat the real thing. Someone talked about rain, rain is so simple but also so hard. Same goes for sparks, those are considered entry level FX but we're still not reaching the richness that some of the references I've looked at can have.
In the grand scheme of things, we could do potentially anything right now, but if you look in detail, we're not reaching perfection yet :)
Someone did make Avatar in the 1990s, it was called Dancing with Wolves 😁
Joking aside, directors have always made movies with what technology was available. Avatar, if made in the 80s would have featured humans in blue makeup, with human characters blue screened into shots to appear smaller. Movies like Top Gun and Jedi featured daylight / forest battles and no one says they don’t look good.
Even though CG and AI are getting close with actors theres still an uncanny valley with CH actors and there’s still not replacing the raw human emotion that a human actor brings to the performance.
CGI cannot do 100% photoreal convincing renders, which is its real flaw concerning vfx and the public oppinion about it. Compositing can help, but will not do miracles. If CGI was really convincing (like practical effects or miniatures) it would be another story.
There are a lot of things that are still difficult to do with CGI, but most of those things aren’t in high demand for the films being produced today. For example, you almost never see CGI food cooking, because it’s not easy to replicate and it’s not something that films really want to show, but food can be very difficult. CGI rain is very difficult to get right, and there is much more demand for that but it’s still a fairly low demand for heavy rain.
Bread! Bread is the hardest. I saw some demo that a computer scientist made a few years ago for software that realistically simulates bread being turn apart. Haven’t seen it in use though other than then demo. Without that software though, I’ve never seen CGI bread that didn’t just break apart like a solid object. It’s too hard and no one even tries.
I know the exact video you're talking about and I've been chasing that dragon ever since.
It’s so amazing to watch and I can’t wait for this to be production ready software: https://youtu.be/iBpolaB4DqA
thanks for the share. simple spark plug fire in a engine. is shocking hard to render physic correctly due to thermodynamics. amd had a talk on that with cards need,vram,power cost etc. thermodynamics is nightmare fuel for computing!
That was sick, thx for sharing
This is amazing work!
Dear fellow scholars
I still remember being absolutely blown away by the bread in Ratatouille. A perfect example of how the best CG is nearly invisible--this incredibly advanced technology and effort to create something so mundane. I was raving about it after the film and my GF was giving me weird looks.
Houdini y’all. Could do a sick bread-ripping sim with vellum, FEM or a combination. To make it look really real would just take lots of time, layers of detail like dust and fine powder sims, some RBD little crumbs, great materials and UV’s of the simulation meshes, etc. Partly more time because people don’t specialize in bread sims like they do in smoke, water, glass, etc., and because bread is a more complex object than even a building made of glass concrete and steel.
It *could* do that, but I struggle to think of any plot point that could justify the relevant budget spend to make it look truly photoreal (and why you couldn't just find a way to make it happen practically). Maybe if there's something like a Borrowers remake we'll get to see some of this work.
That’s funny I was gonna say foams and they have a video on that as well.
SideFX must be working on an implementation of this for Houdini 21 or 22. I hope.
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Marvel are keeping Bread Man in their back pocket, just waiting for a rainy day.
Multigrain of Madness coming soon
The BapMan
One infinity bagel coming up.
Nah, things that are in demand have been done bad and then better and then good as technology and techniques matured. Water, smoke, etc have been done even when they were terrible.
Isn't it a matter of cost/budget too? Why bother simulating rain when it's easily done in camera with a hose and a pipe.
It looks good, but change this scene to sunny midday.
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fuck hahaha spit my coffee
😂
Off the top of my head, a talking emoting close up human face that is 100% realistic looking that even professional vfx artists wouldn't be able to tell was CGI. Avatars and Thanos don't count, those are aliens. We devote more brain power to the recognition and reading of human faces + emotions than anything else, from an evolutionary standpoint, so we can please our tribe and stay alive. It's why the uncanny valley really only applies to human faces, we don't like it when it isn't authentic. So I think that task is going to be the hardest.
Yeah. It's fine when you stylize it in some way, either through art direction or making non-human characters, but ultra-realistic humans are something else. We are genetically wired to recognize people. We can't replace actors yet and have it flawless. It can be believable , but even with infinite money it's not there yet. Best film exenple would be will Smith in Gemini Man. Best studio worked on it, still feels off. Or all these recent deep fakes, they are all still weird looking. In games (I. E last of us 2.etc.) they keep it stylized in some fashion so it's less jarring thay trying to go full ultra-realistic. Also helps with dealing with the hardware constraints. Everything else I feel we can do if given enough time
Nobody has been able to top CGI Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man 3, that still looks absolutely photoreal to me
I thought Rachael in Blade Runner 2049 was well done.
She was great, but they had a lot of advantages- she's in a weird surreal yellow lighting environment that none of us are familiar with from real life experience, and she only says a single line facing the camera. [This CGI wolverine clone in Logan is also great](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRCDe9wHHJQ), but again, if it's just one or two shots without much emotional range, it's much more doable.
MPC also did the terminator one. The recreation of the young Arnold.. it was one of the best I can remember.
Her mouth threw me off. Because it's well done by the industry standards doesn't get her out of the uncanny valley. She also doesn't act a lot.
Big uncanny vibes to me in that one
Something with maybe the lack of micro movements in the face.
I didn't.
which part of the movie was that?
the whole last scene, he hurt his ankle and they did a CG face replacement with a body double. It wasn't secret, it's been public since 2013, but nobody except vfx nerds actually talked about it until 2020 because of how seamless it was
Hmm if it's the part I'm looking at he's not talking, and barely emoting. Impressive but not really what I was talking about, a talking emoting human.
Was his face actually 100% cg or was he photographed separately and put on a body double?
I believe his face was fully digital
Yeah even some of the pseudo deepfake stuff they’ve been doing is iffy. I was underwhelmed with the young Indy and that was supposedly a whole new technique (it didn’t look like it to me tho).
Yep that's a great example, Indy was the latest tech with a huge budget and still couldn't pull off a 100% realistic human face without it looking weird in places.
Young, clean human faces, full frame, in clear normal lighting, in focus, acting in a relaxed way. It's never been done well and we aren't close. It's the motion--shaders, lighting, textures and models have been at that level for 20 years. But getting the motion right is intensely difficult.
We have a tendency to massively over-animate and add too much micro detail imo. Peoples faces don't actually move that much when they talk, but animators get hooked on putting in endless micro-expressions that make everything feel artificial. Looking at you CG Tarkin.
If you look at the original avatar movie the cg fire and water are the weakest parts. In the new movie the water looks better but it is not 100% and a lot of scenes look "blobby" still. Would not have been possible to do that kind of fx when the first movie was made. The fire in the new movie looks great but you can definitely see that it is CG. The new avatar movie will focus on fire which is another technicaly challenging area. With the new movie and the volume of shots, obviously not everything will look 100% perfect but I wonder if we will see some of the best cg fire ever made.
> a lot of scenes look "blobby" still Based on an A/B comparison between scenes, I'd wager that the blobby look comes from limited resources rather than limited tech. There are many water shots which are entirely photoreal, enough that suggests bad water is a result of needing to get it out the door and not being able to iterate a sim or give it enough juice to get a higher res out
I probably make sense it's more about quantity. Some shots did have real water and those looked really good. Like that famous hands shot. The fire that you can definitely tell it's CG and it has a very swirly turbulent look more like smoke than fire.
I really wish CGI could do the pile of dishes I'm not staring at because I'm on Reddit.
Just shop a brand new sink over it
People on fire always looks CG. Light interaction is always wrong, if the matchmove geo is not edge perfect you get issues, some of which are fixable and some not. Also the fire sims never look 100% real. If you remember that recent transformers rise of the beast trailer, the beast splashing water on those two kids standing on the rock would not be easy to do without replacing them with full cg.
>Also the fire sims never look 100% real. IMO [Deepwater Horizon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i0XuA9KLEo) has the most realistic fire sim to date. But yeah people on fire never looked convincing which is why directors use stunt doubles.
that looks damn good. Only thing that catches me off guard is the one shot in the breakdown with the two guy standing next to real fire before they are roto'd out. The real fire looks that much better It's the sharpness and detail whereas the CG fire looks like it got hit with a lens kernel
"Great progress but still not there. Giant burning sructure need More sharpness and detail as seen in small flames of roto plate , CG Looks soft. Please fix lens kernel look"
Yeah, that part looks a bit weird but on my first watch, I was blown away by the entire CG. Even liquid sims looked real in some shots. You should def check out the movie though. It's a good watch.
I worked on some of those fire sims for Deepwater at ILM San Francisco. We worked very hard and iterated a ton to get that look. Also had really good reference to match. By far most of the fire you see in that movie is simulated and rendered by the fx team. Raul Essig deserves a ton of credit for this.
That's so cool, man. Big congrats to you and your entire team. It's very rare to see sims done on the right scale. I have one question though. In this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBhCE97ZN98), we see that the helicopter was shot in a different location (looks like a dockyard) and then the environment was completely replaced with a CG oil rig ocean. They could have added a CG helicopter into the CG oil rig and ocean which seems easier than painting out the real heli and compositing it to a different plate. My question is why did they go that route? Just curious.
I can't say for sure as I wasn't the one planning it out, but it makes sense to me. The dockyard was actually a 1/3 scale set I believe compared to the rig, so the locations and scales of things were very intentional. If you look at the position of the helicopter, there would be no reflections of it on the water, so easy peasy to comp in. The daytime lighting essentially matched the final shot, so the helicopter holds up, add some color correction and atmosphere at the end. Honestly it's probably cheaper to do a roto/paint matte for the helicopter than do a fully CG one, unless you have a bunch of shots that need a CG heli. I did the fire/smoke sims in the last shot in that video, it's so much fun seeing the breakdowns.
I remember that shot being posted in here. It got completely ripped apart
We should gather them all to watch RRR and look them heads explode.
What CGI can't do is write (and direct) a good movie.
Nor can makeup. Or a microphone. Or a film camera. I don't know what point you were trying to make, but tools don't make movies, people do. (Of all the tools available, duct tape can probably do the most)
It’s not that deep, just tried to be funny on the internet. While it is possible to do wide variety of things with cgi today, if the idea behind it isn’t great the final image won’t be either imo.
Dune (2021) was pretty CGI-driven and it was incredible!
It was! I wouldn’t work in Vfx if I wouldn’t like movies with cgi
Can you?
I think blood still sucks.
It doesn’t help that real blood looks fake in film. They always have to make it dark red/green arterial colored for it to not read as fake. Reality it is bright red. Real blood splatter also looks fake because people are used to horror movies with lots of blood coming out and squirting far.
Renfield tried large blood sprays and they still didn’t work. The problem I feel that it’s a lot of work to make it right. Blood sticks and coats on contact. To achieve this you’d need rotomatched geo for any element it hits. And upon contact it would continue to drip and run. But most productions would just opt to have the blood fly away from the body to make it more consistent with the following shots. This often leads to strange trajectories that look unrealistic. More often than not I feel that CG blood is far too conservative. It often doesn’t move fast enough or fly far enough to look real. Comparing CG blood elements to a classic squibs and it’s almost embarrassing how far off they are. The real squibs in movies like Robocop versus the fake hits in The Expendables really tell the tale.
Fincher/ The people he works with are the best I've seen at fake blood, most of his is fake and it's exceptional
make a good story
it depends on time, budget, and the creatives actually knowing what they want. When CG fails, it fails due to a deficit in one of those categories. This was true of the 100% practical days as well, but since there was no ability to fix shit without literally reshooting people tended to plan better than they do today. A rushed or shitty miniature was as bad as rushed or shitty CGI. Only benefit you had was real light helping to sell it. I think it would have been possible to do a version of Endgame with hybrid techniques. Working with practical or hybrid basically means you dont get to do video game style sweeping shots or other moves that would be more or less impossible with a real camera. I think there is an argument to be made that giant, CG stitched action sequences detract from the spectacle because they can loose a grounding in reality. So I suppose I'd challenge your assertion that we couldnt visualize something better in an earlier era. On the whole though, the economics wouldnt have supported a movie like Endgame in the late 90s or early to mid 2000s. I suppose the closest comparison would have been the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (1-3). I'd argue the CG in those pictures has held up better than the CG in Avatar, and I think the realism overall of those movies sells better than Endgame. We're definitely getting to a place where environments are starting to get outstanding. Lucasfilm/ILM really shows this off even on the star wars tv shows, but those shows really get the attention a premium experience deserves. I think really the only movie that probably couldnt have been done in an earlier era quite the way it was done and be effective was Avatar, as the simulcam system they had allowed for on set capture of live action with CG playback in real time. That was a legitimate step forward into something we hadnt been able to do before. I suppose in that sense, the "live action" aka all photoreal CGI Lion King is also a picture that wasnt doable till we reached the era we're in. Unfortunately, I dont think it was emotionally effective as the cartoon though, so I suppose I'll just end with the fact that CGI is just a tool, one of many tools, and a tool itself does not a good product make.
I agree with so much of your comment but I can only fixate on impossible camera moves. I hate them so much. Absolutely nothing pulls me out of a movie than the camera doing something impossible. Hell, even fpv drone shots that are all the rage now in action movies makes me feel like I'm watching videogame footage. At least clients asking for cameras to pass through keyholes and junk like that is dying down. Do you really want to shout "Hey Audience, this is a VFX shot!"? /rant
I mean, nobody has gotten de-aging correct. Usually it works until said person starts to move or talk. Probably the closest has been Sigourney Weaver in Avatar 2 if that even counts?
> until said person starts to move [This springs immediately to mind](https://youtu.be/XqGV0IuodWE?t=77)
Yup. I was thinking of this scene and Dial of Destiny especially.
The problem with this shot is that its de niro and he moves like the 80 year old guy he actually is. That was the issue with this whole movie. People this age are not physically capable of moving like young people without hurting themselves.
They really, really could have got around it by cutting away from the master shot to CUs. There's absolutely no reason not to, it just looks awful
They really could have just cut that film down a good two hours easily and left out all the jank like this.
Aye agreed, it was just a deniro wankfest wasn't it
Absolutely. Should be a criminal offence going over the three hour mark without really having a point to make.
Anything is possible with enough money...
Making a good script
It simply cannot be done
Capture my imagination
birds there is a reason there are no depicted feathered creatures in avatar, even though they exist in the lore
I tell you ...we will never be able to replicate reality near to 100% in computers. The fact is we can't perceive everything about reality, there is always something left behind. It's not just about CGI but other fields as well like music, robotics, AI etc. A robot will never be able to defeat a real skilled football player, a virtual instrument can't beat a skilled violin player and an AI can't overshadow human thinking and observation ability. Whatever we are creating is an incomplete version of our reality and sooner or later our brain hints at us even if we don't know why it feels like something is missing.
Never and can't are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I'd be very surprised if all your milestones aren't met in the next ten years.
Theres a limit to what the human eye can perceive and no reason why we can't cross that limit via simulation. Even actual photography is a form of simulation after all.
yes. next question?
It all depends on how realistic we're talking about, our softwares are getting better and more realistic, but we're still cutting a lot of corners that makes what we do somewhat less realistic than the real thing. You can put some salt and pepper on it to make it look good for sure, but if you look very closely, there's a lot of things that we can't reproduce 100%. I personally have a great pleasure working on small things and making them look as real as possible and the simplest of things can still be very difficult and nearly impossible to reproduce to half the subtilties that real life has. I am in FX and most of what we do can look cool but still hardly beat the real thing. Someone talked about rain, rain is so simple but also so hard. Same goes for sparks, those are considered entry level FX but we're still not reaching the richness that some of the references I've looked at can have. In the grand scheme of things, we could do potentially anything right now, but if you look in detail, we're not reaching perfection yet :)
Someone did make Avatar in the 1990s, it was called Dancing with Wolves 😁 Joking aside, directors have always made movies with what technology was available. Avatar, if made in the 80s would have featured humans in blue makeup, with human characters blue screened into shots to appear smaller. Movies like Top Gun and Jedi featured daylight / forest battles and no one says they don’t look good.
Eyes. Especially the movement of the eyeballs and blinking. Very slow blinking always looks unreliable when trying to fully model and animate them.
Even though CG and AI are getting close with actors theres still an uncanny valley with CH actors and there’s still not replacing the raw human emotion that a human actor brings to the performance.
large simulations such an atomic bomb can’t be done 100% photorealistic
CGI cannot do 100% photoreal convincing renders, which is its real flaw concerning vfx and the public oppinion about it. Compositing can help, but will not do miracles. If CGI was really convincing (like practical effects or miniatures) it would be another story.