Infinitap Games

In this developer diary, I talk about how we have to carefully consider our art style in order to avoid ending up in the Uncanny Valley.

Apparently there is a part of your brain that is very attuned to reading the most microscopic little things in human faces, and when they don't add up, you feel unsettled because your brain is yelling "DANGER" at you subconsciously.

Haha, The Polar Express is the first movie that came to mind for me when I thought of Uncanny Valley! I feel sorry for all the kids growing up now who were traumatized by that thing. Here are a couple of screengrabs:


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LA Noire is the video game that epitomized the Uncanny Valley for me. It seems like we're still in a weird place technologically where photo-realism is starting to become possible, but still not good enough to create human faces that don't make you feel uneasy when you look at them.

I didn't like Bioshock Infinite all that much, but obviously the best thing about it is the art direction and visual design, and I think they were really smart to give it that candy-coated kind-of-cartoonish sort of look. The character models aren't creepy, and I think it will age pretty gracefully.

The character animation in Alien-Isolation worked well with the Working Joes, since they intentionally invoked the Uncanny Valley to make them creepy as hell. So they did a fantastic job with that. However, they really, really, pitifully, inexcusably dropped the ball with the humans. They look just fine, but they're startlingly badly animated. They all stand straight up in the same slightly-hunched over pose, standing completely still except to occasionally pivot to face you. When they talk, their mouths and tongues flap up and down seemingly at random. The AI is absolutely terrible, being the worst combination of stupid and omniscient as they can be, and when you have a human encounter, they almost always enter the room at the same time, walking in a big clump together perfectly in sync with the same walking animation until they arbitrarily start splitting up to get to their pre-programmed starting points like robots. In fact, there's one part where you call a tram and when it comes, two NPCs are on board and walk off (and usually get killed by the alien). That's all well and good, except the two NPCs are the same exact character model with slightly different clothing, and when the doors open, they're standing in the same exact pose and then depart at the same time, walking perfectly in sync with one another with the same walking animation. The first time I saw it, I just assumed that they randomly generated NPCs from a pool of common character models and clothing and whatnot, and I was just unlucky enough for them to generate the same character model twice. Except on a subsequent playthrough and a let's play I watched, the same thing happened each time. Which means that they're actually scripted to be the same character model. So what is supposed to be a completely normal part with two guys nonchalantly walking off of a tram becomes an unintentional exercise in Shining-esque horror. I'm a little in awe of how bad the humans are in general; it's almost like they were an afterthought, or it was at the bottom of the priority list for some reason and once they reached the alpha, it got put in the "if there's time" list (and there was not enough time, obviously).

Still a good game though. And despite how bad the facial animations are during gameplay, the most appalingly awful facial animations in any game I've played in recent memory has got to be in Alan Wake, to the point where it was detrimental to my enjoyment of the game. Their facial expressions seem like they're under and over-animated at the same time, staying frozen and lifeless while at the same time stretching and contorting to crudely mimic facial expressions. Everyone has these giant, chomping horse teeth that they viciously bare when they talk, and it seems like everyone occasionally forgets to mouth out words in the middle of sentences sometimes. And they all have this terrible, distant look in their eyes. How could anyone look at this and think it was alright!?

http://youtu.be/Rc08KPP2IYk?t=3m13s
(apparently I can't embed videos with a specific time stamp)
(no real spoilers, by the way, it's like the first very cutscene-heavy 10 minutes of the game. Nothing super important happens.)

The Polar Express is a totally great horror movie! hahaha

LA Noire is interesting because they pioneered some fancypants facial motion capture, but it ended up looking kind of uncanny.

While I wasn't nuts about Bioshock Infinite, I totally agree about their art direction. Joe was actually just looking at video of it for inspiration with the animation. I think they did slightly exaggerated/stylized the animation as well, which helps convey the emotions.

I barely saw the people in Alien: Isolation because I was always hiding. hahah The Working Joes were definitely creepy. I thought the skin shader was pretty off on the humans though. The sweat was a nice touch, but it was sooooooooo shiny that it looked ridiculous.

The one thing you have to always remember when AI programming is to play animations at a slightly different random speeds, so they don't line up. It is a little detail, but it prevents the twin situations. It seems like a pretty big oversight to use the same character model right next to each other.

I *love* Alan Wake, so while the facial animation was not great, I was able to look past it. heheh

matt wrote:The one thing you have to always remember when AI programming is to play animations at a slightly different random speeds, so they don't line up. It is a little detail, but it prevents the twin situations. It seems like a pretty big oversight to use the same character model right next to each other.

http://youtu.be/dR-8BUAulXg?t=10m3s

Mark's reaction was pretty much the same as mine.

Hahaha that is awesome! I suspect that was a C- priority bug, and in order to ship on time, they had to mark the bug "No Plans to Fix". Pretty much every game ships with bugs (Neverending Nightmares included) that are too minor. We never fixed all the shadow issues that neuros666 found for fear of introducing new bugs. Maybe someday we'll get them all!

Grabthehoopka wrote:

matt wrote:The one thing you have to always remember when AI programming is to play animations at a slightly different random speeds, so they don't line up. It is a little detail, but it prevents the twin situations. It seems like a pretty big oversight to use the same character model right next to each other.

http://youtu.be/dR-8BUAulXg?t=10m3s

Mark's reaction was pretty much the same as mine.

Oh those guys were so weird. What bothered me most is how neither of them made a SOUND. The first time I saw them I ran over thinking maybe there would be some kind of interaction, but no, they just creepily stared at me for a bit, then wordlessly ran away and crouched in a corner.

There are so many ways to screw up human characters. Maybe that's why so many games just have robots and monsters! haha

When I look at a lot of the stuff you guys are talking about I have a very different take on it. I don't look at the final result of their hard work and just fixate and focus on what they got wrong and how uncanny/bad it looks. I usually look at what they have managed to accomplish and appreciate how HARD it is to get as far as they could.

But I also have always been fascinated and amazed at the growth and history of computer animation and CGI rendering. I was a massive fan of the Mind's Eye series and seeing artists and creators doing wild and amazing things with computers. I followed any shows on Beyond 2000 and the Discovery channel as a kid that discussed CGI, animation or new technology used to enhance it.

So when I see actual video games that are able to replicate human like characters, and realistic facial animation/expression, even if it's not "spot on perfect" I still smile and appreciate how far we've come. Look back at some old Peter Gabriel music video's where it's a conglomerate of styles and a few end up being CGI and compare that to what we have now. Or even the old flick LawnMower Man. lol Or "Nightmares", the anthology from back in the 80's, which features one story about an arcade and 'the bishop of battle". Or tron (the original).

I recognize that there are issues and some fine tuning to games and movies (i've seen all the flicks you guys mention and then some). But to develop new ways to try and close the gap, new tech to quickly and effectively get results on a game or movie to me is amazing, beautiful, and really hard/time consuming. I don't consider the tech that Rockstar created for LA Noire to be 'fancypants motion capture' but a massive leap (and risk) that tried to do something amazing and gained a lot of industry attention for it. The same for Zemeckis's work. He has gotten better over the years with his characters and getting away from the 'stone face' issues, but he was well into digital film making and knew the industry would shift to it well before most traditional filmmakers were ready to accept it.

I guess I just don't get ya'll.

I LOVE computer graphics. I see pretty much every CGI movie and special effects extravaganza I can. That being said, the uncanny valley is a very serious problem that all of us in the computer graphics field have to face.

I love how good CG is getting, and every step closer is important. However, we don't want to be the game that looks creepy.

I don't consider the tech that Rockstar created for LA Noire to be 'fancypants motion capture' but a massive leap (and risk) that tried to do something amazing and gained a lot of industry attention for it.

Honestly, I don't think it got much industry attention other than Team Bondi hyping it up as part of their marketing efforts. Are any other game developers using it? Not to my knowledge. Team Bondi went defunct, so the pioneers of the tech aren't around to use it. :-/ It was an interesting idea, but doesn't really scale well due to the fact that it requires massive amounts of data. I think it was a dead end, but perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe some day with better compression, it could work.

However, I think it's unlikely. The main problem if you play PS4/Xbox One games is the REALLY long load times. It takes ages to load up the 8 GB of memory with textures, meshes, etc. Skeletal animation data is really efficient to load - especially compared to the morph target data that Team Bondi was using, which required the game to be on 3 Xbox 360 discs. The only other multi-disc Xbox 360 games that I can think of were due to lots of pre-rendered cutscenes. Maybe I just like to rain on parades.

Interestingly we essentially use morph targets for our characters, which is way more efficient than cell animation. We could compress it a lot further, but texture and sound is what takes up all of our RAM.