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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

It's strange that the character wasn't more photorealistic in this demo. If you Google Image search you can find more photorealistic characters from previous versions of the Unreal Engine. I wonder if there might be some trade-off being made between photorealistic character and lifelike character movement.

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I suspect it's a way to avoid the uncanny valley, and serves to highlight the photo realistic quality of the environments even more.

I assumed the same. If you also make the character more realistic you run into the risk of making the demo eve more unbelievable. Now there are some hints that underline their claim that it runs on a PS5, like some videogame like animation transitions, character movements and the character model itself.

It was done on purpose, similar to how Pixar movies have obviously cartoony and unrealistic characters in an otherwise photo-realistic environment.

the problem isn't that her design is a bit stylized; it's that her face looks kind of... not-face-like in closeups. (missing some shininess & subsurface scattering imo).

it's different from e.g. Moana, where skin is kind of marzipan-y, but still recognizably skin-like

This is the best way to do graphics IMO. Instead of pushing the tech to its limits and landing in the uncanny valley, it's better to back off a bit from the limits of the tech and perfectly execute a more stylized result.

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