A little play on words here! >) I was trying my hardest to uncanny valley the heck out of these drawings.
Ok, a little quick review; Uncanny Valley is the psychological concept that as the more realistic (human body/face) becomes in either art or animatronic, the more familiar the brain recognizes that figure in an “almost” linear fashion. This means, you have little connection to a toaster, but as it becomes more humanlike, you connect with it more as being “real” or having a human characteristic. So a toaster is 0,0 on the scale and a healthy human is 100,100. Makes sense? HOWEVER, it’s “almost” linear… meaning that somewhere towards the end, like around the 80% mark, the whole system crashes down. This is called the “uncanny valley”, or the area of which something looks very close to being human, but the emotional response towards that figure is pure disgust, horror, or just unease. It’s a feeling that’s hard to explain other than it being “weird”. Also, it’s a similar feeling to seeing a dead human body, especially if it is animated some how (like you make a body pop up out of a casket) or a zombie. They claim that it’s the mind’s way of picking out sickly people since the brain can make judgements on what the human form is supposed to look like and if it’s off, then it says “hey, something’s messed up here, lets pack up and get the fudge out!”.
So, there you have it, uncanny valley in a nutshell. You mostly see this with CREEPY robots that are human form but with some sort of skin pulled over top. Very unsettling! Or a lot with CG movies or games where the people just don’t look right. I think it’s mostly noticeable in the mouth/teeth and eyes.
And here’s the cool thing; this is not at all restricted to just CG and robots! I have found that a great deal of art (especially in the early days) fall greatly into this category because of the slight lack of realism. You can see it all over, even it works by the pros like Michelangelo (good lord he had some weird proportions) and DaVinci (there’s a reason why people just don’t get why the Mona Lisa seems so… off). It happens with the young artists and ones just starting out and as you improve, you have to pass a threshold where it’s getting better but it just has a weird feel. Uncanny valley is a real drag to work with and I don’t think it’s taught at all in art schools as something to be aware of. Sure, you know it’s off when you see it, but you can’t really understand why. Faces tend to be the worst since there is a lot that can go wrong and proportions have to be just right or you risk falling into the valley. Doing stuff that’s more cartoony or just waaaaay off is an easy cover to bypass the valley completely. Probably the best trick I can give to spot check your work is to make a digital version and flip it horizontally; if it looks wrong, then you’ve got something a bit off.
So there you have it! Heard it here first! World exclusive content! Uncanny valley in art! Think I’ll need to write a paper on this sometime all official like, but yeah… Shawn’s Patented Pending Theory of U.V. in the arts!
>)
i never notice it, but i get the very off feeling when i see it.
And how does not noticing it when you notice it work? Are you multiple people at once, or what?
i mean i feel weird looking at it, but i never understand why. But that did give me an idea for a new username…
yeah, up until a robotics expert over in Japan had made the correlation, nobody even knew about this other than there was just some weird inexplicable feeling about the cg/robot person.
Uncanny Valley is easier to show when you’re working with 3D models. It just looks like these characters are really fugly.
you’re right about that one. I don’t even think UV was even a thing until cg stuff had been out for a while and nobody could figure out why things were bombing at the movies or games. I think there are a lot of issues when making 3d models because the skin isn’t (wasn’t) elastic and wouldn’t stretch in a natural way, which of course, makes it even worse. faces are hard. people are hard. and if one little thing is out of place, you risk falling into that valley.
I think a great example of this is the early pixar stuff. you look at the toys or monsters or other creatures/objects and they look darn real and fun… but as soon as you see a human given the same graphical treatment, it just doesn’t click. even before they came out with the UV deal, I always wondered why they could make those racing games look so spot on and they couldn’t make a decent looking person… and now we know! >)
For what it is worth, when I saw the comic before reading down I thought “Wow Shawn is really just phoning it in today”. I guess you got it down right! It is probably the best Wolverine and Jubilee that doesn’t look like Wolverine and Jubilee that still looks like Wolverine and Jubilee and I am not even a classic comic reader but you nailed it even for me! Chalk it up to video games I guess.
I think we are on the brink of bridging the uncanny valley and soon people won’t know the difference between CGI and real actors. It might take a few decades, but damn that is crazy!
Also I just re-watched parts of Blade Runner on SyFy in between doing other things, so that seems relevant. Fun stuff!
hahahaha!!! yeah, without the article you’d think I totally lost my mind, huh? XD
it actually ended up being a harder task than I thought… not in the drawing, but trying to figure out how to get this effect. that and it was hard drawing my favorite x-person badly. (jubilee’s my fav!)
it’ll be real cool when we can do it! the issue is that the closer we get, the deeper into the valley we fall. so it’s a matter of getting over that hump and we’ll be in the clear. the tech for all this has improved so drastically and quickly over the years, I’d be surprised if we still face this problem, like you said, a decade from now. well, if we live that long…
hmm, if we replace all the real actors with cg it’d be great! no more stupid drama with which actor/actress decided to go on a narcissistic drug binge this week. I say replace them all!
ha! saw the first matrix a week ago or so and was thinking how dumb we all were for thinking that movie had such great graphics. XD granted, they were top end at the time, but now it seems a wee bit dated.
I totally hear you, and agree for the most part. Maybe I am just too old, and I must admit that not all films age well, but I still look back at the original Star Wars and go “Wow, those space battles look way awesome!” (even on the old unchanged VHS tapes deep in my closet). A lot of more recent stuff doesn’t hold a candle to it, while others are really great when it comes to special effects.
It is weird to think what happened between then and now that changed things from “this is cool” to “wait what the hell this looks creepy?” and still have things from back then that look better then some things they come out with these days.
Perhaps the tech is progressing faster then most good classic artists can adapt and keep up with? It probably will just take a flood of Shawn-type-guys that know both ends of the spectrum to finally bridge the uncanny valley. Tech artists if you will. Get your ass to Hollywood!