Am I crazy...?

[Keefe the Thief]

Especially Kim Cattrall.

I got that joke. I feel old now.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Well you better not watch this video of a Japanese Dentist trainer robot then. Seriously, that video's nightmare material. I'm only linking it because some lady called me right after I finished watching it and said I had 7 days to send it along.

Oh... my god.... the EYES! AAARGH!

 

[Wepwawet]

Basically, human psychology conditions us to accept as "attractive" or "normal" both highly-stylized representations of human beings (such as or cartoon characters) and 100% accurate representations of human beings (like photos or, well, real people). There's a point between those extremes, most commonly reached with modern CGI, where a representation of a human being is extremely close to being real, but just "off" enough that instead of triggering a positive reaction, it causes us to be creeped out. That "dip" in the graph of realism compared to positive reaction is called the Uncanny Valley, and it's the reason a lot of people find movies like The Polar Express or Beowulf to be creepy. Same goes for those super-realistic-looking Japanese robots you see video of on the net sometimes.

Ufffff that is so true! Didn't know that feeling I felt had a scientific name
The same with Beowulf goes with those plastic-looking fashion models and heavy botoxed people

 

[TerraDave]

The Kennedy Center had this multiweek long "Japan! Culture + Hyperculture", so of course they had robots.

Including an "actroid" that almost looked human, had facial expressions, and answered questions (seemed to be about 100 canned answers).

It creeped some people out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3tcSlWLS_g

 

[MarauderX]

Honestly, all of those leave me cold, because near-photo-realism fails due to the Uncanny Valley effect. These dwarves are infinitely superior to the DDI/DDO ones, IMNSHO.

I'm of the exact opposite opinion; DDO leans much more toward the artwork that WotC is putting out. DDI does leave much to be desired, but if I wanted to play characters looking like slightly more realistic WoW characters I would have joined Blizzard.

 

[HeinorNY]

Those japaneses must be stopped!!!

 

[Meloncov]

Also, a quick browse of deviant art shows much, much better digital art than we are seeing from the character generator demos. (side note: Seriously, go browse some of that crap. It's awesome. I had no idea.)

Even using someone elses models with a few modifications, as most people on DeviantArt do, those require a whole lot more work than most D&D players are willing to do. Creating a model from scratch, as the best digital artists all do, isn't even worth considering for the general public; it requires hundreds of hours of learning to become even mediocre at it.

The DDI character visualizer is the equivalent of a computer games character editor, not a real tool for digital art.

 

[AverageCitizen]

Even using someone elses models with a few modifications, as most people on DeviantArt do, those require a whole lot more work than most D&D players are willing to do. Creating a model from scratch, as the best digital artists all do, isn't even worth considering for the general public; it requires hundreds of hours of learning to become even mediocre at it.

The DDI character visualizer is the equivalent of a computer games character editor, not a real tool for digital art.

I know that I can't do that, I was just saying that not all digital art sucks.