Maes
I like big butts!
Posts: 8662
Registered: 07-06 |
If you put enough work into it, even hand-drawn cartoon characters can appear life-like, as many older Disney and Don Bluth animations can prove.
Similarly, if some poor soul worked his ass off on a super-detailed model of a human being with enough polygons to simulate even birth marks, skin pores and stubble, it would be possible to have a non-uncanny virtual human. It might not be displayable in real time in any of the actual hardware of course, but that's simply a matter of incremental power increase (aka throw enough hardware at it, throw 256 GPUs in parallel if you have to, and it will work).
I had once read in an old VR magazine (in 1994) that a scene needs to have 100 million visible polygons per frame to give a passable illusion of reality, regardless of whether you use texture mapping or not. For comparison, the PS3 can do 275M per second, so even if it's a far cry, if you could combine the powers of 50 PS3s it should be possible to have 60 fps 100M polygon scenes, so this is simply an incremental goal which will eventually be reached.
IMHO the real limit lies exactly in the ability to produce such hi-quality artwork in a reasonable amount of time, even if you have the hardware to display it. It's no good to be able to display a perfect CAD ray-traced model of a human if an artist has to work two years to put every hair in place: tools to generate all that crap are required.
Similarly, imagine how stiff animation would be or how long/expensive it would be to animate characters if there was not motion capture technology and skeleton-based animation, even with perfectly looking models.
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12-22-11 01:59 
