I was thinking about this the other day in regards to animation.

Geep has a great point here. The thing that is missing (in my opinion) in animated humans is the fact that they do not have a soul. How to you REALLY animate that and nail it dead on the money? I think this is why humans will never be replaced by digital actors. We as humans have souls. Polygon cages do not.

Yes but the person animating the character has a soul. That does not mean that he/she can inject that soul into a character.

It's the same as experiancing something amazing and then trying to explain that experiance to someone. There are no words that can REALLY give the person that same felling that you had.

If you watch the characters in Final Fantasy you will notice that something is missing. If you watch the characters in Polar Express you will notice that something is missing. It isn't good animation that is missing, they are both done very well. What is it then?

Side note: I read in 3D World that Tom Hanks did the acting for the motion capture of the main character (the boy) in Polar Express. I thought that that was interesting.

Anyway... I was then watching iRobot. I remember thinking "Man that robot feels real. It feels like it has real emotion". Then I got to thinking "would that robot character feel real if it were a human"?

What I realized was that it is possible to make a CG robot feel like it has REAL emotion but not a CG human. Why? We (at our core) expect a human to have the emotion but not the robot. When the robot acts remotely close to human we are amazed.

Or am I just crazy? :)

CHeers,

Joe

Message edited on: 12/22/2004 14:18