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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat off-topic, but I wonder why facial recognition/modeling experts seem to persistently ignore ears and jawline. As someone who works in film and does some picture editing (though it's not my primary skillset), ears are just as individual as other parts of the face, and they're one of the trickiest things for makeup artists to work on. As CG in movies and videogames keeps improving, my suspension of disbelief is often broken by noticing problems with the ears, eg watching a CG anime film and noticing that everyone has the same ear shape.

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I would guess that the high incident angle makes it very difficult to accurately measure. You can see some trouble with the inside and bottom of the noses, and inside the mouth. Parts that are near orthogonal to the viewing plane look much flatter.

In this case it is likely because ears can be obscured by hair. If you notice this technique has some difficulty just with shadows so they limit it to the face.

> As CG in movies and videogames keeps improving, my suspension of disbelief is often broken

I have never really seen CG portrayal of people in live action films that didn't break suspension of disbelief, it always falls right into uncanny valley stiffness. The exception being Avatar, which for whatever reason doesn't seem to have had the problems other films have.

> which for whatever reason doesn't seem to have had the problems other films have.

By not CGI-ing humans. That's enough for you to stop judging what you're seeing by the same criteria as you do real life. They wisely chose to stay well to the left-side of uncanny valley instead of trying to jump over to the right-side.

Look it up. It's also why Wall-E feels so human.

I would wager that this is because most of Avatar is not live-action, but CG, with real people added in. Spend enough money/time and live-action people fit in really well to CG environments.

It took me to about the 3rd viewing before I started noticing some small details. There's an couple scenes where the main characters are touching each other and the arm/hand movement has a weird puppet-like quality that I can unsee now.

That's a silly statement. If it didn't break suspension of disbelief then it's because you didn't even realize it was CG! If you go to movies at all then I can all but guarantee you there are CG shots that you had no idea were CG.

Here's some super impressive CG from the first Captain America movie back in 2011. Crazy insane stuff they're doing it. And that's for a very, very extreme case. You better believe they are doing slick stuff in non-extreme cases! http://www.fxguide.com/featured/case-study-how-to-make-a-cap...

For Iron Man it's not quite the same because it's a suit but it's just as impressive. Since Iron Man 2 there is no full suit worn by an actor. There are no legs and at this point there are barely even arms. There's a chest piece and open mask face piece and that's about it. http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/2198/how-are-the-i...

In The Social Network there are a lot of scenes with the Winklevoss twins. Spoiler: They didn't use twin actors. They used two actors and CG'd the face of one onto the other body. No way in hell did you call this out on first viewing. (number 3) http://www.totalfilm.com/features/50-cgi-scenes-you-didn-t-n...

Wow, those are really good. I wonder why big budget movies have such trouble rendering believable CGI when others do a fantastic job.

Budget priorities.

I think we are talking about CGI faces here and thats just not doable yet and this research won't change a thing about it. The last movie I remember having a CG face was Clu in Tron Legacy which certainly was state of the art CG, unfortunately 'state of the art'[1] in face modeling/animation is just not perfect yet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvaGd4KqlvQ

That link is real time. State of the art server farm rendered is orders of magnitude better.

"The last movie I remember having a CG face was Clu" By strict definition if you remember it having a CG face then it wasn't good. It's not possible for you to remember a good CG face because if it's good you wouldn't know it was CG!

The next big test might by Paul Walker in Fast and Furious 7 or Philip Seymore Hoffman in Hunger Games 3. Both big budget movies where the actor died and CG will be used in at least some places. That's the ultimate. I think we can already get away with CG if the actor isn't known. But for actors who have faces we know and mannerisms we subconsciously recogonize it's another step up in difficulty.

The Captain America stuff was fascinating, thanks for sharing!

> CG anime film

Example?

The Final Fantasy movies (VII: Advent Children, Spirit's Within), possibly? (Can't recall anything with ears though)

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