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Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 4

Posted by Amber Ahlborn



In my previous post in this series, I talked about the pitfalls associated with animating faces, specifically pointing out how incredibly hard it is to photo realistically animate a human face due to the array of subtle yet complex interactions of muscles and skin. Now we move on to the broader animation of the body. You can divide animation techniques into two broad categories: by hand, which means the animation was achieved manually by an artist; and assisted animation, where most or all of the animation has been created through mechanical means for the purpose of capturing greater realism in movement. The two mechanical techniques I'll be talking about in this post are rotoscoping and motion capture. Naturally, since this series is about the Uncanny Valley, I'll be focusing on how these assisted animation techniques can go horribly wrong...

...horribly, horribly wrong.

Video Clip Found Here

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Most gamers are probably familiar with the term motion capture. There are different styles of motion capture but they all involve the use of computers to record the movements of a live actor and digitally mapping those movements onto a 3-D animated character. Rotoscoping is a much older technique that gives much the same results. Invented by Max Fleischer around 1915, this technique involves taking film footage of a live actor and tracing the animated character over the actor's movement frame by frame.

Motion capture is the technique most often used in today's video games, particularly in sports games to translate the actions of athletes into digital form. However, these mechanically assisted animation techniques have a number of drawbacks. The one of major concern to an artist is noise (excessive motion).

When people move around, they don't exactly do it with efficiency. People wiggle and wobble and gesture meaninglessly. While this is natural in life, it can look very off when applied to animated characters, as Samwise's disturbing flailing in the film clip above demonstrates. Why this is so is a problem of juxtaposition.

Let's say I drew a robot. It's a very blocky robot made of metal cubes and cylinders, but when I go to animate it, I give it incredibly fluid and organic movements. This juxtaposition of clashing elements results in the character looking wrong. Putting together dissimilar elements can have a powerful desirable effect, like drawing a murder scene in black and white but coloring the blood bright red to draw the viewer's attention to the results of the carnage. Or, it can be incredibly jarring, like putting Sonic the Hedgehog into a Final Fantasy game and having him date the female lead. The clashing cartoonie and realistic art styles might make one wonder if this incarnation of Sonic was a battery operated plush toy running amok in the real world.

Stylized characters, whether they are cartoonie or realistic achieve a distillation of reality. The human or animal form is refined to its most essential parts. Anime characters are prime examples of this refinement. The human form is simplified and important features exaggerated to maximize those characteristics that are most critical. The eyes in particular are the focus for expression in Japanese culture so they are enlarged. Some anime styles even do away with such non-essentials as the nose to put more focus on the eyes.

The animation applied to such characters should match their visual style. Where the Uncanny Valley affect comes in is when noisy photo realistic movement is applied to a stylized character. The motion captured animation stands out like a sore thumb. This can be especially egregious in games that use hand done animation during play but switch to mocap during cutscenes.

Motion capture and its elder sibling rotoscoping are powerful tools that can be used to great affect, but they often need an animator to clean up and often tone down the raw animation so that'll fit the character. When misapplied it can be easily spotted as an anomaly in the scene, and when mixed with minimalist hand done animation, it can look creepy enough to fall into the Uncanny Valley.

I began this series with a link to a video that treated the subject of photo realism VS stylization very even handedly. I, however, am a lot more opinionated on the subject. I'll be wrapping up the Uncanny Valley series with a final look at where graphics and realism stand today and a plea for greater artistic expression.



Related Links:

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 1

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 2

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 3


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Comments

Demaar said:

Think I said this on an earlier article, but this is my biggest problem with realistically styled cut scenes. Games from Japan usually feature characters that are clearly not Japanese, but use Japanese mocap actors which Japanese body language/hand gestures/etc. It looks flat out creepy.

November 22, 2008 5:11 AM

About Amber Ahlborn

Artist, writer, gamer and DigiPen survivor, she maintains a day job as a graphic artist. By night Amber moonlights as a professional Metroid Fanatic and keeps a metal suit in the closet just in case. Has lived in the state of Washington and insists that it really doesn't rain as much as everyone says it does.

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Derrick Sanskrit is a self-professed geek in a variety of fields including typography, graphic design, comic books, music and cartoons. As a professional hipster graphic designer, his recent clients have included Hooksexup, Pitchfork and MoCCA, among others.

Amber Ahlborn - artist, writer, gamer and DigiPen survivor, she maintains a day job as a graphic artist. By night Amber moonlights as a professional Metroid Fanatic and keeps a metal suit in the closet just in case. Has lived in the state of Washington and insists that it really doesn't rain as much as everyone says it does.

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