EMMA - Field Research 13

Despite my horrible cold I'll try and evaluate some of the findings I've done today.
First, I came across an article from an University which had developed an automated method in which a 2D image could be transferred into a 3D environment.



This was a so-called Photo Pop-up. It had an annoying command-prompt program which I haven't been able to run 100%. Sigh. Ah well, I'll find that out later on.
Secondly, I found this video about transferring 3D motion information onto a 2D skeleton which used a more image-like approach.



I liked both of the subjects a lot, and hope I am able to dive into them a bit more to use them for my own project.

Thirdly, I wanted to adress some aspects of realism that I have been using very often in my work. The subject concerns Custom Brushes.
Many Photoshoppers use brushes with custom settings to apply in different situations. Often, you can use complete photographs to create textures, buildings or abstract works. I have done a seminar a while ago, about these custom brushes, and we went outside to take our own photographs and use them (instead of internet ones).

It is easy to use the photographed object 'as is'. For example, if you photographed rice and created a brush out of it, you would only use the brush when painting rice.
This was something I wanted to experiment with: often structure is the key to recognizing things, so I gave them a funny assignment.
They had to create a brush from photographed food, and then create a scene with that brush. I myself had done the assignment as well, and eventually created a deep-sea coral reef from a rice brush, flowing hills from wallnut-shells and a sea monster from a jar of beans.




The funny thing was, that the essence of 'realism' lay within the complex sructure of nature, and which you could adapt to your own advantage and purpose. Leaf-brushes are easily created and cost 1% of the time if you had to paint all the leaves by hand. And also, these images are often perceived as more real - the image complexity resembling a realism that 'hand painted' works do not quickly resemble.

I hope to be able to refine this area of 'abstract' designing with 'real-life' elements. I would love to be able to perfect the technique.

EMMA - Field Research 12

The original 'Realism' in painting has become famous because of a few schools that taught Realist methods.

The Realists (1800 - 1899)
This is a group of international artists in Paris which begin to devise new methods of pictorial representation. They are focused on scientific concepts of vision and the study of optical effects of light. The Realists express both a taste for democracy and rejection of the inherent old artistic tradition. The Realists felt that painters should work from the life round them. Indisputable honest, the Realists desecrated rules of artistic propriety with their new realistic portrayals of modern life. Artists: Marie Rosalie Bonheur, John Singleton Copley, Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, Thomas Eakins, Ignace Henri Theodore Fantin-Latour, Wilhelm Leibl, Edouard Manet.

Barbizon School (1840s - 1850s)
Barbizon School was a group of French landscape artists one of first formed outside the Academy. They were named after the Forest of Fonteblau near the village of Barbizon where they got away from the revolutionary Paris to produce their art. They attempted to paint nature directly; Constable who pioneered in making landscape painting a faithful depiction of nature was their model.
The Barbizon painters helped establish landscape and motif of country life as vital subjects for French artists. They also cherished an interest in visible reality, which became increasingly important to the later artistic styles. Artists in the group: Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, Pierre-Etienne-Théodore Rousseau.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848 - late 19th Century)
In 1848 a group of English painters, poets and critics formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to reform art by rejecting practices of contemporary academic British Art. They have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art. They accepted the doctrine of imitation of nature, as central purpose of art. Instead of the Raphaelesque conventions taught at the Royal Academy, their central doctrine was that artists should seek to represent the natural world. They believed that the only great art was before high renaissance, before Raphael. He was representative of the time when painters would scarify the reality of the subject to their own ideals of beauty and morality. The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers condemned this art of idealization, and promoted works based on real landscapes and models, and paid intense attention to accuracy of detail and color. They advocated as well a moral approach to art, in keeping with a long British tradition established by Hogarth. The combination of didacticism and realism characterized the first phase of the movement. The landscape compositions were painted outdoors, what was an innovative approach at the time.
The interest in the Middle Ages inaugurated the second, unofficial phase of Pre-Raphaelitism. Their subject matters were from medieval tales, bible stories, classical mythology, and nature. With technique of bright colors on a white background, they achieved great depth and brilliance. However, we can see now the curve from their immature rebelliousness, through the realistic painting of detail without idealization, to works of art that are finally more surreal than real. Their work cannot be realistic with the mythological matter and medieval tales that they chose - they can only be envisioned in the mind and do not exist outside of there. So they ended up closer to some other art rebellions - Symbolists.

French Realism:


Gustave Courbet


Honoré Daumier


Gustave Doré

Jean-François Millet
Rosa Bonheur
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Charles-Francois Daubigny
Pierre-Etienne-Theodore Rousseau
Ignace Henri Theodore Fantin-Latour
Edouard Manet
Edgar Degas
J. Dalou

British - PRB:


Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema


Dante Gabriel Rossetti


John William Waterhouse

William Holman Hunt
Thomas Woolner
John Everett Millais
William Morris
Edward Burne-Jones
Ford Madox Brown
Arthur Hughes
Henry Wallis
Frank Cowper
Simeon Solomon
Evelyn de Morgan

German Realism:


Georg von Dillis

Wilhelm von Kobell
Friedrich Wasmann
Friedrich von Amerling
Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller
Franz Kruger
Carl Blechen
Adolf Menzel

American Realism:


Thomas Eakins

Winslow Homer
Francis Coates Jones
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Thomas Pollock Anshutz
Augustus St. Gaudens - sculptor

EMMA - Field Research 11

Even though this might not be 100% appropriate, I found it quite convenient to place this article here. It is about visual perception.
I came across this article while reading the blog of James Gurney, creator of many creatures from Star Wars II and III, and author of the book 'Imaginative Realism - How to paint what doesn't exist?'

The article about visual perception stated an experiment in which visitors at a counter were first subjected to person A, and when this person had to bend down to get a paper, person B would emerge and take his place. None of the visitors ever noticed the change.
This reminded me vividly of the video we saw at the lecture: the 'Visual Awareness' video.



Did you notice them? I definately didn't.

Another post from Gurney Journey's blog: Face Detection.
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/12/face-detection.html
In here, he uses a camera with automatic subject detection. So, when he focuses upon a face, the camera can recognize the face and switch to 'portrait' mode. However, the camera comes up with some interesting results, as the most icon face is seen as 'portrait' and a very detailed old man is not.

EMMA - Field Research 10

I found an extensive article concerning the 'realism in animation' subject. Stephen Rowley (I believe) writes out different notions of realism in animation. He even adresses 5 'types' of realism which he can discern from the medium.

- Visual Realism

- Aural Realism

- Realism of Motion

- Narrative & Character Realism

- Social Realism

The article states clearly that methods of 'true' reality are deliberately put aside, even in live-action (real?) cinema itself, to establish their goal. He treats animation as a 'fantasy-inherent' medium because of its construction, and therefore questions its possibility of representing reality.
This is exactly my area of research, both in the way the article is written and what it implies: animation (and thus: fiction) can be seen as reality in different ways.

'Real' reality is often never portrayed, not even in live-action films, where dead-time or unscheduled actions are not used and can undermine the goal of the film itself.

This still leaves me a bit short on the visual realism. Within this article, visual realism is judged by comparing its resemblance to real-life photographs/objects. How does this comply to fictional designs? How can you compare a fantasy castle with its 'real-life' object?



"Hah, this is fake!" I can hear you say. Easy, because blue toadstools definately don't exist. True, I edited the picture and manually coloured the red toadstool blue.
Let's head to the next example.



Is this image fake? Possibly. I edited the colours of the bracelets, but does that make them immediately fake? They still look real, are truly woven, and have bright colours just like the other one. They still resemble their 'real' counterparts.



Which one of these two images is the real one? That's right, you only know this if you know the monastery. And even then; who says there is no other monastery built with an extra floor added?
These examples touch upon man-made examples. It is always possible we could've made some monastery like that. The bracelets could've been made with that colours.
Only, this also applies to nature designs. We do not know ALL about nature, therefore strangely coloured birds, new plants or other features can be seen as real just because they appear to be: the birds have beaks, eyes, beautiful feathers and wings. The plants have branches and roots, have fruits or flowers and respond to the surroundings by growing around obstacles or rustle in the wind.

Then, real 'appearance' leaves us at the basic principles of art, I guess. Lighting, texture, colour and for humans, animals and creatures there is also anatomy. Within architecture there's structure, material and design. And maybe nature uses organic features and laws of nature.

EMMA - Field Research 09

A while ago I sent a mail to someone with some advice about animation. They wondered if they should use realistic (rotoscoping) animation, and even though this can be quite a handy technique, I immediately found myself thinking about exaggeration.
I truly love to search for the animation's leading 'motion-arcs', and exaggerate these. In our Fist of Fame Project, I even got to exaggerate them as far as I could: over-the-top being the selling point of the game. I loved this and truly enjoyed animating these moves 200% more extreme than I normally would've done...

So, when they want to use rotoscoping techniques, their exaggeration is limited to zero. Rigid bodies don't squash, stretch or over-stretch, even though their movements sometimes appear to do so.
Within high-end games, this realism is no problem: we see enough complex details to comprehend i.e. mo-cap animations. When you create smaller, often 2D games, moves tend to become undefined or unclear, and need exaggeration to clarify themselves.





Above, Call of Duty and Swords and Soldiers. Where the realistic CoD would need no exaggeration to express their meaning in atmosphere or actions, Swords and Soldiers needs colour and exaggerated actions to express their meaning.

EMMA - Field Research 08

I came across an article about Realism in Videogames that states quite a few interesting facts. Not only did it mention Scott McCloud (yay, connections!), it also touched our desire for (non)realism.

"The idea of realism in art plays an important role in the media. Scott McCloud's excellent and deeply profound book Understanding Comics outlines this philosophy. In short, our brains automatically interpret what we experience in its own terms. Seeing faces in clouds is a perfect example of this. We put ourselves into the world we experience, we want to see familiar things everywhere. And we can see a man on the moon because there's just enough information there for our brains to fill in the gaps. Three dots is all it needs, and suddenly we have a full-blown human face.

But if there were an actual carved face on the moon there would be little magic or mystery. If clouds had definite shapes, would we turn our eyes to the sky as often? The philosophical implications of this run very deep, but in terms of video games, the idea is simple: a less life-like game allows for more interpretation. More realism means less creativity on our part, less of our own personality filling in the details missing between a cartoon-ish game and reality. It's no mistake Shigeru Miyamoto wants to keep Mario a cartoon; he wants us to be able to identify with him. Who can identify with a real Italian plumber?"

And the last sentence sums it all up. Mario has been and is still played for many hours of fun, and not because he is a plumber.
But even though I can find myself easily within the statement of 'having less creativity' when a game is more real; I then wondered why this doesn't always account for movies? I believe 'watching a movie' is seen as an (inter)active thing for our brain; we live along with the protagonist and try to figure out clues and plots. So when we see a 'realistic' movie, we do not feel ourselves cut off from our creativity. I enjoy them just as much if not more.
I think more processes are at work when watching a movie or playing a game, which might affect the way we look at realism.

Secondly, he states in the article the principle of identification.

"As video games progress in realism, the rules become increasingly like the ones we live with from day to day. Breaking those rules is still expected, but in a much more believable way. This could change as games more convincingly mirror the outside world. And honestly, who wants a game where you pay the rent?"

Even though the last sentence is a bit simple-minded, I come across this principle quite often, and mostly in a negative way. (Maybe it's me personally, but this is how I experience this). When you have to jump upon Goombas in Mario, you don't necessarily feel that you 'kill' them. They're just obstacles that you have to jump upon before you can move on.
When I play a more realistic game, for instance the latest Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2, you have to shoot people. Not only do you focus on them with your gun, you actually see them get shot in the head, get hurt and fall down dead. Gameplaywise, you can still say: 'They're just obstacles that you have to eliminate before you can move on'. True, but on the moment I focus upon that person and pull the trigger, I don't feel right about it.



Above you can see a screenshot from the Call of Duty game. This is, in fact, a very infamous level in which you shoot civilians. (You get a warning beforehand, that you can skip it if you might find it offensive). This is - deliberately of course - more complex than just shooting 'normal' rebels who are firing at you and will kill you if you do not shoot them first. No, this level is about killing civilians - deliberately - even though your character plays a spy who has to 'play along' with the criminal whom he has gotten involved with. You see people scream, running away, or drag themselves wounded out of harm's way.
I know games are seen as fun, and are played 'because it is possible to do things you couldn't do in real life', I still feel the strange chill as to why people would want to shoot others in the first place... Sigh. Maybe I'm just too soft to play games...

EMMA - Field Research 07

During our meeting, the word 'uncanny valley' was also mentioned. This negative area between experiencing something 'human' (real) and something 'almost' real can be experienced as uncanny.
I sought out the article on Wiki again, and this was quite extensive, actually. It had a lot of resources which I would love to investigate further.
The article begins by stating possible scientific explanations as to why we feel repulsive to (especially) almost-human robots. These judgments usually take place on a subconscious level, where expectations play a role.
Though, upon reading further, I came across these design choices that had to be evaluated when you wanted to create a life-like robot. These especially interested me.

1.) Design elements should match in human realism.
For a robot to give a more positive impression, its degree of human realism in appearance should match its degree of human realism in behavior. If an animated character looks more human than its movement, this gives a negative impression. A robot may look uncanny when human and nonhuman elements are mixed.

2.) Appearance and behavior should match ability.
In terms of performance, if a robot looks too appliance-like, people will expect little from it; if it looks too human, people will expect too much from it.

3.) Human facial proportions and photorealistic texture should only be used together.
A photorealistic human texture demands human facial proportions, or the computer generated character can fall into the uncanny valley. Abnormal facial proportions, including those typically used by artists to enhance attractiveness (e.g., larger eyes), can look eerie with a photorealistic human texture. Avoiding a photorealistic texture can permit more leeway.

So, the first statement applied directly to the Guild Wars' Intro. The graphics were expectantly real. So if the movement falls behind, we experience a negative feeling.
To close this interesting topic off, I found this picture on the internet, stating exactly what the 'uncanny valley' is.