Adrienne writes with a question about the state of digital people (she found me via this entry). I didn’t know the answer to her interesting question, so I thought I’d pass it along:
How far are we from not being able to tell the difference between an image that has been totally created digitally and one that has used a photo of a real person? The digital girl is obviously a good indication that we are well on our way, but still seems like we have far to go. Have you come across any articles discussing where the technology is at? Can you recommend any journals or websites that would be good sources on this kind of information?
Any recommendations?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
We definitly can. But I think the artists who have the ability are taking on the cartoon look like The Incredibles.
Compare Polar Express and the former and you’ll know why.
It’s one thing to make a still render of a character, it’s another to have them animated. The degree of difficulty jumps up a few levels.
Here some links of the best life like “digital” work I’ve seen.
Max Kor
Vampirella – Partial nudity.
grandma
The above was created in order with maya, 3ds max and Softimage|xsi.
XSI is created in Montreal, and I use it at work also.
Hope that helps.
nick
I think one reason that animation studios like Pixar are using “Cartoony” models is because of the Uncanny Vally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley).
Basically, if something doesn’t try to look too human, we can still become attached to the character. If something is very close to looking human, but not quite, our brains focus on the minute differences and there is difficulty believing the character is “real”. It’s a fundamental concept of computer animation and robotics.
Ah the digital girl … I recall reading about the animation for Shrek and the animators needed to “dumb-down” the technology used for Cameron Diaz because she looked too human compared to the other characters.
I can’t find the exact article, but here’s one that touches on the animation of humans in the film. animationartist.com.
One of the most poignant quotes is “There are so many things that go into creating believable humans. The audience is not terribly forgiving of human characters because everyone consciously or not is studying human behavior everyday.”
What’s interesting to me is the apparently random questions you recieve via email on what appear to be quite unassociated topics!
Maybe you need to start a “Dear Darren,” blog 😉