ELI5- why can movies make CGI human faces and movements that look 100% real and normal but video games always look fake even with large budgets?
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Movies have teams of artists that stress over every single frame of a film, and can spend days or weeks working on a single shot using farms of high-end rendering equipment. It’s an intensive process that takes much longer to produce than it takes to play out on-screen. A video game’s footage is ultimately created by a single consumer-grade computer that only costs a few hundred bucks and has to render a human face in real time, at one second per second, with no direct artistic intervention.
Movie don’t use your GPU or processor to process the CGI.. you just play it with your media player.. while video game depends on your budget which GPU and CPU did you buy..
Its like you buying a bread at shop and just eat it compare to you buy the ingredients and make it..
Because the movie can spend hours or days making a couple frames, whereas your computer needs to crank out 60-120 frames per second.
TLDR – Video games don’t have the clean up operation at the end by someone paid to fix the fakeness of movements
Even if the movie starts with a character that walks across the surface procedurally like the video game there’s still going to be an animator who watches the results and fixes any jank. Walking along, steps on a rock, and just sorta warps upwards? Well let’s fix that and bend the knee a bit more right here
Video games don’t have someone watching it and they’re a lot more freeform. If the character model just doesn’t conform properly to lumpy ground then it just won’t conform to lumpy ground. There are too many possible animation/terrain/movement combinations possible in video games to test and fix 100% of them especially once you start allowing people to customize their character
Video games are rendered in real time, so the degree of realism is limited to the gaming hardware being used. Movies are rendered once, and can take as much time per frame as necessary to achieve the desired look. The shortcuts often used in games to get good frame rates (at the expense of visual quality) are not necessary when rendering a movie.
Some quick research suggests that movie rendering takes around 24 hours _per frame_, so almost a month of compute time per second of film (24 fps). Many, many cloud instances are used in parallel to render a digital film.
Also, from the perspective of fine-tuning specific motions, a movie is a single set of motions that is painstakingly refined to achieve the desired look. A video game, by definition, varies with user input. It’s not always possible to refine every game scenario and every transition between movements.
Lastly, think about budgets in terms of dollars per minute of content. Most movies run around 100 minutes, while games can be upward of 1000 minutes or more. More budget per unit time allows for higher quality everything.
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Movies have teams of artists that stress over every single frame of a film, and can spend days or weeks working on a single shot using farms of high-end rendering equipment. It’s an intensive process that takes much longer to produce than it takes to play out on-screen. A video game’s footage is ultimately created by a single consumer-grade computer that only costs a few hundred bucks and has to render a human face in real time, at one second per second, with no direct artistic intervention.
Movie don’t use your GPU or processor to process the CGI.. you just play it with your media player.. while video game depends on your budget which GPU and CPU did you buy..
Its like you buying a bread at shop and just eat it compare to you buy the ingredients and make it..
Because the movie can spend hours or days making a couple frames, whereas your computer needs to crank out 60-120 frames per second.
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