I am wondering for a few years now. CGI and game graphics are getting better and better every year, but it’s still not good enough to make it look completely real! Wiy is that? What is missing for my eye to believe that it’s real life?
Even wirh motion capture and whatnot it’s still easy to spot a computer generated person for example.
In: Technology
There’s no (current) way to recreate all of the microexpressions that human faces have. Those microexpressions are what humans use to determine the intent of others.
There are plenty of still frames of virtual faces that are hard to tell apart from real humans (check out This Person Does Not Exist. Com). But once they are put in motion, you would never be fooled. Technology is catching up quickly though, think about deep fakes.
Games and movies aren’t exactly *trying* to recreate real life perfectly. The recent Lion King remake, while billed as “live action”, had lots of elements of unrealism in it. Lighting was super unrealistic, colors were oversaturated, characters were backlit no matter what lighting conditions were present to make them more visible. A more general example is that military explosives in real life have really no flame, and are only visible as a shock wave and dust, whereas every single explosion in a movie is a big fireball.
Movies and games intentionally deviate from reality to a) make things more impressive than real life, b) make things more visually readable to an audience, and/or c) reproduce things that the audience expects, even if the audience doesn’t know its not realistic.
A lot of it boils down to processing power.
Movies have a luxury that video games don’t in that they can take more than a small fraction of a second to render a frame, but even that has limits. Movie-quality renders take many hours to do one frame. If you take a render farm with about 1200 computers, you’ll likely still get less than one minute of film per day. You’ll spend about four months just rendering. And that’s at the quality levels we have now. Getting more computers would cost a lot, and time is finite, so while they technically could do better, it wouldn’t be financially feasible.
Video games have to render frames **a lot** faster, so they need to sacrifice a lot more quality. The hi-res cutscenes are pre-rendered and simply played back like a movie, but gameplay renders in real-time, so it’s lower quality.
We’ll need computers that are far faster and more powerful to get the realistic graphics.
Game graphics are severely limited in that they have to render the graphics in a sort time frame, like 1/60th of a second.
If it wasnt for that time restriction you get a LOT more realistic.
Here are examples of ultra realistic cgi renderings
Mostly because we do not notice good CGI, only bad ones. There is a YouTube channel called Corridor Digital which has many videos on the subject. They also have many fun videos, I highly recommend them.
Rest is that we do not have enough computer power/time to simulate every bloody thing a body can do including but not limited to how it will react when hit by a single rain drop, how bad the T region will look after our main character sweats, etc…
We can do incredibly realistic videos but it will take way too much time and money, so people will either accept good enough photo realistic humans or very good interpretations of aliens, like Thanos. No one complains he is a CGI; apart from being a purple giant, his movements including lips are ultra realistic.
One side bot; according to an article by The Wired published in 2010, average duration to render single frame for Toy Story 3 is around seven hours, and it can take up to thirty nine hours, and let me remind you, one single second contains at least 24 frames.
The subtle deformations of objects that touch eachother. Most notably when a character is walking, it looks as if they are always walking on hard stone, even when it is textured to look like sand, dirt or grass. The subtle shifting of the earth. The deformation of the sole of a shoe. When grasping an object: the deformation of the skin of the hand. Even with otherwise photorealistic graphics, nothing seems to have any weight or substance.
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