At this point the main thing I see missing to achieve more realism are better physics, global illumination and better facial animations. Models/textures are already there.
At some point we're gonna need some type of non-profit, open source company that develops massive asset packs for game engines in order to move the industry forward significantly. Companies are wasting a lot of money re-inventing assets from the ground up for every triple A game.
It exists already. UE5 is integrated with Quixel MegaScans. Quixel is a company Epic acquired that does photogrammetry i.e. scans of real objects to film-quality assets. Like everything UE you can use it for free. You only pay once you have >$1M of revenue.
I think this idiot is saying artists should work for free so game publishers can make more money in the same way that thousands (millions?) of devs donate their time to make VCs richer by working on open source projects. No thanks. Need to eat. If you want to use my assets so you can make money selling your game then you can pay me.
Facial animations seemed fine for me. What got me off was surprisingly the body animations. When Keanu and Carrie-Anne were walking and doing hand gestures, it felt really strange. Too smooth.
A little later in the video where another character is walking, the butt motion is really weird. It's like someone decided that "her butt will wiggle, regardless of realism".
It's the small imperfections that give things away. Before, it was textures that were too perfectly smooth. These days we can make things look a bit more realistically imperfect.
Now, it's animations that are too perfect, as you've pointed out. Even a perfectly trained athlete or ballet dancer still moves in slightly irregular and imperfect ways.
People gliding over the ground is a huge giveaway as well, when you walk past someone else your feet don't slide to the right while you are still walking straight ahead, your movement changes.
In this demo, most still frames could often easily be confused with a still frame from one of the films. Blown away, there. You're so right about the lighting, models and textures being virtually indistinguishable.
However - in motion, the effect is completely broken - only every few seconds - but enough to push it into uncanny valley territory.
I notice Nirobi (? sic, the Jada-Pinkett Smith's character) in the backseat seemed to be the most offensive in terms of unnatural animation.
I'm guessing - I'm hoping - ML models could be of tremendous use in terms of improving animation in video games? The problem is always that it is too unnaturally smooth. People just don't move like that.
Just as we got texture detail to the point of perfection of the unnatural - pores on the face, etc - we need to get animation to the perfection of the unnatural.
Even freaking same with the camera. After getting used to VR, the weirdly static, linear, unnatural camera movements in regular console games have aged like milk. Not sure why we are still treating cameras in 3D like it's 2001.
One thing I find missing with facial animations often is blood flow under the skin. Skin often looks plastic because it doesn't change hue with pressure changes. An example of this would be firmly pressing your lips together - they'll go a shade lighter due to the pressure causing the blood to flow out of the lips. These things are almost imperceptible, but they go a long way to making something look alive.
