How close is Daz to achieving Emily?
areg5
Posts: 617
I thought the 3d modelling in Daz was state of the art, until my daughter showed me this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o#t=27
Forget about the animation, how close is Daz to achieving this level of realism in it's models?
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You need to watch an old Albert Finney movie from 1981 called "Looker". Finney plays a plastic surgeon who works on fashion models, and the girls are bringing him alteration requests down to fractions of a millimeter for that perfect look, and then they all happen to die horribly shortly after the surgery. I don't want to give it away, but it was an interesting concept for the time, altho' anyone today with a basic knowledge of how computer graphics work could poke gaping holes through the plot.
I saw Looker years ago. Yeah, I'm old. Starring Susan Dey, right? Anyway, that doesn't answer the question.
I've seen still images set up in DS and rendered in Reality that looked about that good, and probably a good animator with the right skin, morphs, etc could probably achieve animated results on par with that. I found the slightly blurry face and weird smile on Emily less than convincing.
It's not the software, DAZ is state of the art for hobbyists, it's the users talent and the DAZ hobbyist plug and play mentality that hold users back from advanced realism. Take the time to learn about materials and their settings, learn about composition, learn about other apps and rendering engines and their settings, learn about modeling and the much larger 3D world outside of DS and hopefully then you can come closer to advanced levels or realism.
You could always head over to turbosquid and pick up one of the their advanced models for the advanced (market) price and rig it yourself if you want to try something different/unique/
Well, first off the video you linked was not "pure" CG, it was overlayed on real video footage. But to answer your question, daz would have to trash can 3d delight completely and replace it with some kind of futuristic dot matrix render engine that doesn't use 2d bitmap textures or polygons.
Well I've been a PA here for at least 7 years.. so I'd have to say they achieved Emily quite a white ago. :lol:
The RS who repaired my face after an auto accident in my teens began with a sculpture of what he wanted to achieve in the end. It wasn't an exact match but it was close. His aim wasn't perfection, it was to make things look "normal" so the average person looking at me would never know. He achieved his aim.
I saw Looker years ago. Yeah, I'm old. Starring Susan Dey, right? Anyway, that doesn't answer the question.
I mention "Looker" because the video you linked to brought to mind immediately -- digitally scanning people for life-like clarity in computer animation systems. The largest plot hole in the movie is the need for the subjects to be surgically altered to a "perfect" state prior to being scanned -- the idea that the scanned data could be manipulated at any time to achieve whatever look was desired obviously never occurred to the writer(s).
I mention "Looker" because the video you linked to brought to mind immediately -- digitally scanning people for life-like clarity in computer animation systems. The largest plot hole in the movie is the need for the subjects to be surgically altered to a "perfect" state prior to being scanned -- the idea that the scanned data could be manipulated at any time to achieve whatever look was desired obviously never occurred to the writer(s).
Looker dates back to the dawn of PC's. Compare what little you could do on the first IBM's with what you do routinely on you current system. I'm sure the writers had no concept of how the scanned data could be manipulated. I've been using Poser and other graphic apps for twenty years now and much has changed between then and now.
Is the reality plugin that much better than Delight? Know of any side by side renders so I can compare them?
Wow! Is that woman in the video 100% CG? If so that just looks amazing!
http://youtu.be/GBgURIUQ700
shows you just how much is Emily
it is the rotoscoping of the face on the real person that makes it more convincing than DAZ animations IMO
Is the reality plugin that much better than Delight? Know of any side by side renders so I can compare them?
Luxrender is an unbiased renderer, 3Delight is a biased renderer like firefly in poser. i have seen great results in both, again, up to the artist and settings. Default render settings in both, unbiased by nature will always look more realistic IMO.
DS & Poser Pro can achieve some very believable still images given enough time and resources, but there are still a lot of "tells" that they are CG to those who know what to look for. Animation-wise, however, they're still many, many years from convincing photo-real effects.
Then again, Hollywood features are still a ways from completely cracking the code for a perfectly realistic synthespian, hence the reason that most human effects in films are achieved by starting with footage of live actors and layering images on top of them.
Speaking of cg realism. A while ago I stumbled across this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyj3DA-iI7I
I think the CG faces of the fairies are just AMAZING!
Eyes are another giveaway. Eye make frequent minute movements. You don't really notice them until they aren't there or they become exaggerated. Facial expression as well. Face is too symmetrical. Nothing like the dead stare, frozen smile and mirrored sides of the face to give it away.
Eyes are another giveaway. Eye make frequent minute movements. You don't really notice them until they aren't there or they become exaggerated. Facial expression as well. Face is too symmetrical. Nothing like the dead stare, frozen smile and mirrored sides of the face to give it away.
Yes. They overlaid just a CG face onto real footage - it's clear from the how-it-was-made video that it's not a digital figure in a digital room. And the face has issues. If you weren't told you might take it for a real person, but you would take it for a real person with a very odd screen presence because of the way she moves her face.
Animating a face realistically requires not just tremendous tech, but tremendous craft at recognizing how people move each tiny part of their faces. That's not impossible with DS tech. It's impossible without 10 years of practice with human faces.
Disney is doing some groundbreaking work on eyes, see this io9 article and the attached youtube video.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the DAZ figures aren't designed to be real. They're designed to be a compromise between an idealized version of a human figure and something that's a commercially viable product. Real humans are bags of mostly water attached to skeletons with between 206 and 270 bones, so every single part reacts slightly differently to the effects of gravity, momentum and interaction with other parts of the body and outside elements. Real humans have skin covered with tiny hairs that stick out... even if we've shaved them... as well as patches of drier and oilier skin and secreted moisture, and a multiple thousand skin pores, goosebumps and unique skin patterns. While it's theoretically possible that someone could duplicate all of those with some degree of accuracy, it's far, far quicker and cheaper just to hire a real actor or model if you want something that looks really real.
Disney is doing some groundbreaking work on eyes, see this io9 article and the attached youtube video.
wow.
For high end content creation, 3d scanning is where it's at for making people right now. The work on Maleficent is fantastic, and also shows how scanned shapes and maps can be warped into chariacture with the fairies. But it's expensive to create your own room to do the scanning, or to rent time at someone elses.
That's the thing I noticed within a few seconds. Computer animated mouth movements are precise and repeatable. An actual living person's mouth movements are fuzzy and not always synched with the sounds coming out of their throat. Think of how long it takes to learn to lip-read accurately. It's progress, all right, but definitely not out of Uncanny Valley just yet.
Eyes are another giveaway. Eye make frequent minute movements. You don't really notice them until they aren't there or they become exaggerated. Facial expression as well. Face is too symmetrical. Nothing like the dead stare, frozen smile and mirrored sides of the face to give it away.
Yes. They overlaid just a CG face onto real footage - it's clear from the how-it-was-made video that it's not a digital figure in a digital room. And the face has issues. If you weren't told you might take it for a real person, but you would take it for a real person with a very odd screen presence because of the way she moves her face.
Animating a face realistically requires not just tremendous tech, but tremendous craft at recognizing how people move each tiny part of their faces. That's not impossible with DS tech. It's impossible without 10 years of practice with human faces.
Yeah, that last line is about how I feel about it.
Guess that would be Genesis 10 in the year 2030 :c)
Genesis 3 need to be more, as we see what's coming to the mass next year from IR body scans (see examples in Unity/UDK)
I am a Reality/LuxRender user. (See my dA gallery for examples of what I've achieved with this rendering pipeline. Fair warning, a lot of what I render is topless/skimpy clothed females.) This pipeline was easier for me to grok, since I have experience with photographic lighting in the real world with real cameras. So for me, it's much easier to set up a scene and light it using the DRL workflow than with 3Delight.
That said, 3Delight is an incredibly powerful Renderman-compliant engine in its own right. It's been used for many big-budget films. But the effects firms using it have their own Renderman shader coders creating their own pipeline. Studio only exposes a (small?) subset of what 3Delight can do. You CAN create any shader you want in Studio (using Shader Mixer and/or Shader Builder), but this requires advanced knowledge and most users just look to plug textures/values into the shaders included with Studio. And every so often someone creates a new, more advanced, user friendly shader for Studio, the most recent being the AoA Subsurface shader that a lot of DAZ stuff has switched to now.
In the end, it really boils down to learning the tool, whichever tool you select. I have spent two plus years learning how LuxRender handles materials, and I'd like to think the quality of my renders have improved over that time. Whereas my occasional attempts to render something in 3Delight come out dreadful. Not because 3Dlight is a "bad" or "limited" render engine, but because I simply don't have the knowledge/experience with it to get good results.
I am a Reality/LuxRender user. (See my dA gallery for examples of what I've achieved with this rendering pipeline. Fair warning, a lot of what I render is topless/skimpy clothed females.) This pipeline was easier for me to grok, since I have experience with photographic lighting in the real world with real cameras. So for me, it's much easier to set up a scene and light it using the DRL workflow than with 3Delight.
That said, 3Delight is an incredibly powerful Renderman-compliant engine in its own right. It's been used for many big-budget films. But the effects firms using it have their own Renderman shader coders creating their own pipeline. Studio only exposes a (small?) subset of what 3Delight can do. You CAN create any shader you want in Studio (using Shader Mixer and/or Shader Builder), but this requires advanced knowledge and most users just look to plug textures/values into the shaders included with Studio. And every so often someone creates a new, more advanced, user friendly shader for Studio, the most recent being the AoA Subsurface shader that a lot of DAZ stuff has switched to now.
In the end, it really boils down to learning the tool, whichever tool you select. I have spent two plus years learning how LuxRender handles materials, and I'd like to think the quality of my renders have improved over that time. Whereas my occasional attempts to render something in 3Delight come out dreadful. Not because 3Dlight is a "bad" or "limited" render engine, but because I simply don't have the knowledge/experience with it to get good results.
Nice gallery. I think many of your renders look very realistic, more so than anything I've been able to accomplish. You can check out my gallery at deviantart if you like. Fair warning, most of what I do involves age regression stories but I think you'd get a sense of where I am in this incredibly complex process at this point.