Main problems with CGI >It's very planed out. You get less improvised moments >Gives non CGI actors little to work with, affecting their performance (Doing on-set motion capture can improve this) >Can easily look unnatural and distract the viewer >It's done post-production. Usually the director is less in charge. A lot of creative decisions are then left to people who only know how to make CGI >Doing CGI of fake things is hard! Or, things that have little references. A CGI car or normal building, is easy. We have so many real life references for that when making the CGI. When it comes to fantasy creatures, the amount of relevant real life references are few. Making it harder to sell the CGI as something real. >Adding CGI into a real environment / set, is easier than having a CGI character in a digital generated environment. (Easier to sell as real)
I think the biggest problem is the lighting. CGI is often intentionally excessively well-lit so the artists can show off all the little details, but it has the side effect of not looking unnatural.
The Balrog here is about as shitty as you'd expect 2001 CGI to be, but the VFX artists showed a lot of restraint and mostly covered him in smoke so you never got a good look at him, so the end result looks great.
Cameron Taylor
Compare that to Smaug here. On a technical level he's one of the most impressive CGI creatures ever, but look at how grey and washed out everything looks. They're supposed to be in an underground cavern, why is everything lit so uniformly? Just because the artists wanted to show off their work.
Hudson Stewart
I agree with all of those points. Also should add that the children industry is incredibly competitive so margins are thin and quality is compromised as a result.
Jack Allen
The gold is the worst
Landon Jones
Yeah, good point.
Those stone pillars also look like plastic, not stone.
Owen Ward
>(Doing on-set motion capture can improve this) Animator here. mo-cap is complete bullshit. You get an actor running around like an idiot and overly emoting their lines like it does anything. Once you feed it into the computer and put the model over it all you get is uncanny valley. Think any video game that does it.
Also
>you're supposed to animate over the motion capture to make it smoother
Fuck off, you're better off just animating from scratch or just using reference videos. Literally just tracing over something for animation makes it look like crap. They figured it out fucking ages ago with the first animated film where they just tried to trace over footage and it looked shit. Why do you think old disney animations have exaggerated movements?
Literally the only reason studios bother with mo cap is just because it's cheaper to get a guy to run around in a suit than hiring a real animator. It does NOTHING For the animation overall.
>Serkins provides good reference video for the real animator
Isn't that essentially what motion cap also does? Provide references for the animators? Even if you have to adjust the motion cap. data to make it look better.
Samuel Morgan
>n-n-no u >can't even list one credit lol back to Sup Forums with you nerd stop lying on an anonymous imageboard
Easton Jenkins
Companies are trying to use mo cap to complexity remove animators because they have no idea how it actually works. Mo cap traces all the movements and CGs a model over it. Reference videos just gives you a general idea to work off. You don't need every single little detail like now where they stick little balls all over a tight green suit with a camera in the mo cap actor's face. It does nothing.
This was how it was used to be done, you don't literally trace over it later, all it is supposed to do is give artists a reference on how the scene is supposed to be constructed. Then explain what your version of uncanny valley means genius.
Aaron Edwards
>cloth under the armor which is realistic for a prestigious general >they made the armor look wore >they even splashed a little fake blood into the orcs armor Insane how much detail this shit had when the budget of the entire trilogy was less than the budget for a single JUSTice league movie.
Nathan Collins
>keep trying to bait me into giving you a definition easily googleable so you can make some retarded point that I have no interest in
You used the term incorrectly but it's ok. Maybe you were taught wrong, as a joke.
Aiden Thompson
This is a common, present most blockbusters. Very little contrast and vibrancy.
Hudson Green
lol you can't even back up your accusations. Did you google up the word and figure out I was right and now backtracking like a little bitch?
Jaxon Wilson
but skyrim is for the nords.
Juan Gutierrez
Problem here is largely depth of field. Focus would be racking a lot irl to get Smaug popping in and out. Also "camera" move is far too smooth and fake, irl a 30 ton dragon would influence the camera. Also lack of interactive shadows on live action - Jackson is notorious for this, see his crappy King Kong.
>thinks the artist gets to decide and not some screeching, sleep deprived director who doesn't know what he's seeing anymore. Over a certain budget bad CG is always the fault of the director/ production.
Jacob Parker
I'm just not interested in a long exchange in which you try to make the definition fit through a long winded explanation and revising your original statement
Thanks for the butthurt
Joseph Phillips
>Literally just tracing over something for animation makes it look like crap >What is rotoscope Fuck off working from reference/ tracing over known movements is a classic technique and works to great effect, it only looks like shit if you're an unaccomplished artist. Also snow whites movements were all based off movements a real actress did which were rotoscoped
Hudson Martin
>Mo cap traces all the movements and CGs a model over it
But you're missing a step. If you watch behind the scenes of LotR, they take mocap data and change the parts that don't work. Gollum is a mix of mocap, looking at reference footage and standard "frame by frame" animation.
Gollum in the hobbit looks great, and they use mocap, record on a real set, use reference footage and normal animation. All the tools, used where they are the most needed, to get the best result.
The more references you have, the better CGI. Mocap is just another tool the get the references you need. I don't believe that studios are wasting millions on this yearly, because some company told them so.
