I don't use 3D technology very often in my work, so I don't have any really interesting samples of my own. But here are a few scenes including the same model, as employed by various 3D artists.
To my taste, even the best of these is still a bit too cold and sterile to be fully satisfying. But time will change that: When this technology first became available to the public, several years ago, the figures were so crude that they lacked articulated fingers and instead had hands that looked like ping pong paddles! The improvement since then has been staggering.
Anyway, I need to post some images to wash away the memory of my own 3D abomination, so here they are:
Pretty images, but they do bring to mind the depressing thought that soon the image of ideal female physical beauty won't be limited by mere human physiology, and will thus be even less attainable than it is now.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
No computer program makes art, only an artist makes art.
Wise words from a wise man.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
Prim, perfection does not equal beauty. These images are flawed, in fact, by their lack of flaws.
Oscar Wilde once pointed to a piece of his blue and white china and observed that the essence of its beauty lay in a tiny hairline crack. The crack added the essential element of irregularity that is necessary for a thing to be truly beautiful. The explanation? A thing is beautiful if it occupies our interest. A perfect thing pleases us for a moment and then reveals nothing for us to contemplate. We lose interest, and with that loss of interest the notion of beauty fades.
All true, but I have my doubts about how universal that perception is. These airbrushed-looking beauties strongly resemble the current standard of female attractiveness in advertisements. And this is a world in which women line up to pay high prices to have their facial muscles paralyzed with botulism toxin so they're incapable of any expression that might make a visible wrinkle.
But this is not an issue for this thread, and I apologize. I may start a thread about this elsewhere (or not).
It is interesting, though, that an artist using these tools might find himself devoting considerable time to introducing imperfections for the sake of realism and a more human kind of beauty.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
No, Prim...it is most certainly an issue for this thread.
The primary objection that most old-school artists have against this sort of thing is that is introduces a notion of artistic beauty (and by extension human beauty) that is alien to all we have come to accept, alien to everything the great artists taught and believed.
It's quite valid to consider how this new esthetic plays out in daily life. Why discuss art at all, if you don't discuss how it changes us as people and as a society?
It all started when Hugh Hefner began airbrushing his Playboy bunnies, planting in the minds of oversexed adolescents a notion of feminine beauty that none of their girlfriends or wives could ever match. This is the next stage of that, the elimination of the human entirely.
The implications have actually given me an idea for a science fiction story. I think.
What's worst to me is the effect this new esthetic has on women, who may resort to surgery or eating disorders to try to match it. This is very much in my mind as the mother of a beautiful (but not, thank goodness, perfectly beautiful) adolescent daughter. So far we have dodged the whole concept, because she's an athlete, but she had a friend who was hospitalized for anorexia at the age of ten.
When the esthetic isn't real, but is also widely accepted, art suffers and people suffer. The women who come close to matching those models suffer to get there, for the most part. The women who can't, some of them, suffer because they can't.
Is it art if it says bad things to people?
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
It's an almost untouched topic, ideal for science fiction. How about a world in which physical sex is of no interest to people because they can fulfill their fantasies better with "perfect" digital mates who have no physical reality?
Do you know, Whistler, this was foreseen by C. S. Lewis 60 or 70 years ago in the Perelandra trilogy? It's how the evil creatures of Malacandra related to each other—all separate, with idealized dolls of each other to interact and have sex with. He didn't of course foresee the digital era, but the concept is there. No reality, just a sanitized and prettier artificiality, with aloneness at the root of it.
And there are the new online interactive spaces such as Second Life, where people adopt avatars to represent themselves, and, as narya pointed out, there aren't avatars for the way most real people really look.
I can see this coming, for at least a significant portion of the population, and there are many stories that could be told about it. Some of them very frightening.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
This discussion reminds of an interesting experiment run in Germany, in which social scientists demonstrated that people much prefer computer-generated "beauties" to real-life people.
The German researchers wrote:To sum up, our study shows clearly that the most attractive faces do not exist in reality, they are morphs, i.e. computer-created compound images you would never find in everyday live. These virtual faces showed characteristics that are unreachable for average human beings.
Despite this fact, people living in modern post-industrial societies are exposed to these kinds of artificially created and manipulated, 'perfect' faces every day, e.g. via TV advertising or fashion magazines. The result may be that we all may become victims of our self-created, completely unrealistic ideal of beauty.
As Prim says, the potential for self-hatred is just about unlimited, alas. Do click on that link; it's rather amazing.
It occurred to me that, while CG can certainly take it to new levels, it's not as if art ever desired to portray the average women. Painters have always idealized the female (and male) form, usually presenting it as an object of exquisite beauty. I'm sure the average Renaissance woman didn't look like Venus.
That also reminds me of a art history book I was reading recently. The author (who editorialized way too much for a supposed history book) made some comment about one painter, saying something along the lines of, gee, he was such a talented painter but unfortunately he often chose to paint thicker or heavier women - as if the weight of the women was relevant to judging the value of his work.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
I think.
