Thanks to Ward-o-matic for inspiring me to do this!

I was inspired to reply to his review of The Polar Express and further inspired to Blog myself. This is the post from his blog.

This is a different person from above FYI.
I have always had a keen eye for detail and although I am not a professional artist I have always been fascinated by the details of the body. There is a lesson most 2d artists do early on that involves drawing your hand without looking at the paper while drawing. You only look at the hand. You end up with a very stylized version of the hand and it strongly draws your attention to the details you are noticing on the hand. It also gets you in touch with how a “too perfect” hand looks “not quite right”.

I think part of what is lost in much animation and motion capture is that skin has layers and flaws. The reason animation looks like puppets is that only the outer layer is being rendered. So it looks like the characters are solid (like a puppet). The body is a (mostly solid) skeleton with a layer of muscles and tendons moving over it and then the skin moving over that and all filled with varying viscosities of liquid. Not to mention all these are being subjected to gravity. Usually the skin will distort as it moves over the bones and the muscles and tendons. This actually is why people who have had face- lifts and such look like their expressions are “plastic”. The skin has lost some of its ability to respond to the bones and such moving under it.

The color of the skin also changes subtly as it is stretched, as it is not as deep. It is important to remember that skin is translucent (hold a flash light up and cover it with your hand completely in a dark room to see this.) The color of skin is really the color of light moving down through it’s layers and then being reflected back out again (or passing through it, like in the lobe of your ear with a strong back light). You saw this with the eyes and corrected for it nicely with your redraws but it is still a “rendering” of it. Eyes are DEEP! And have varying levels of clarity to the surface. For example the area around the cornea is mostly transparent with the “color” of the eye actually below the reflective surface. Take a moment to look very closely at someone’s eye to see how it is almost like a gem in it’s depth and reflective qualities (and flaws).

Another thing that is lost is the wrinkles at the edge of the eyes, and the pinch between the eyes. I think the “feel of realism” can be linked especially the part between the eyes. You’ll notice that both Gollum and Mr. Incredible have it and that the others pictures do not.

The result of these details missing is one of the most glaring problems with motion capture that I see. You can only ever get the opaque surface of an object and there is more to it than that that your eye sees even though you might not register that you have seen it.

Anyway those are the parts that struck me the most. It would be interesting to see what else would come up with more detailed examination. I have background in theater lighting and you should see how the skin reacts to different colors of filtered light! Even different actors look different under the same light! Part of theater makeup is just trying to get everyone looking the same.

Great article and as a life long Fan of CG (I went nuts when I saw the old CG tin can commercial the first time and have been hooked since) I would love to see the art push forward!

Shadowgolem@yahoo.com