Meet Saya. According to her co-creator, Yuka Ishikiawa, bringing her to life was not easy.
The hurdle, Ishikawa explained via Twitter, is “quite high.” The CG schoolgirl model needs to contain a certain softness as well as the purity of her age. In short, it needs to look like a real person.
[Photo: Telyuka]
Mission accomplished, no?
Ishikawa works as a freelance CG artist with her husband Teruyuki. Their portfolio (here) is filled with impressive faces and battle gear.
If you’ve spent anytime online, you’ve probably seen stills of highly realistic CG art. Ishikawa, however, is making an independent CG clip with Saya. So, of course, this character is slated to move. We’ll have to wait to see if that’s as natural as the way Saya looks.
[Photo: Telyuka]
Ishikawa is also making armour and other types of equipment for the Saya project.
“Since we’ve been working on this between jobs, it’s been somewhat hard,” Ishikawa says. “We’re going to give it our best when making it.”
No doubt, the thousands of people who retweeted these photos on Twitter wish her luck.
[Photo: Telyuka]
Comments
7 responses to “Making CG Japanese Schoolgirls Is Difficult”
Hmm… first impression is that it’s very good, but the last picture doesn’t look quite right. The earlobe joins a bit too smoothly to the head, and the internal ridge in the ear is a bit too prominent (and a bit too high up). The skin is also flawless, which may work in beauty commercials but isn’t so great if you’re trying to simulate a real person.
It’s firmly out of uncanny valley territory, but still not quite right.
Yeah, the first couple are extremely good work but the thirdI think the biggest thing is the skin is just a little bit too shiny and it makes the lighting a bit unnatural.
First two if I wasn’t primed to look really closely I’d assume was a real person. Third one immediately looked like CG, albeit very good. Amazing how good our brains can be at picking it out though.
I bet it’d be a nightmare to animate without dropping down the valley into creepytown as well.
yeah, the model is great, but skin texture seems impossibly aside. If they get the lighting right (as with the first show) youd overlook that.
I wish they had posted the article as if it was a real person, and see if anyone picked it as fake, and then revealed it.
When I was working at Animal, we released some images of our ‘model’ and people critiqued parts of it as looking too ‘CG’, but the press release was in two parts, the initial release (which everyone commented on and were quite critical of) was photos of the actual Human Model herself, it was then meant to be followed with the CG versions so people could compare the two.
They didn’t read the first release properly and critiqued the hell out of the real person…
Damn, those renders look nice. I’m in the process of making my own and it is difficult! Good texturing and rendering are probably the hardest parts.
I think an airbrushed photo of a real person could be indistinguishable from the CG creation above.
Yes, or even an actual photo with certain kinds of makeup applied. Although the ear still looks wonky IMO.