Thinking about uncanny valley: the eyes.

In PS1 and N64 era, 3D chips could not process many polygons, so faces were textures slapped to low poly models. No problem.
Now, we have chips that can process enough polygons to make individual hairs. No problem.

But there was a point when animators found that they had enough polygons to have faces that they could animate: lips, smiles... and the yes. OMG, they put spheres that tried to look like natural eyes and failed miserably. Some of them were funny, resembling cookie monster's eyes, but most of them were plainly disturbing.

I remember having that feeling with NOLF2, but I've seen a video on youtube and actually that eyes were well done.

What about if you just polygon a lump then try and paste a texture over it, excellent results....

Poor PS1 Hagrid 🤣

Zup wrote on 2021-07-23, 13:39:

Thinking about uncanny valley: the eyes.

I was never a big fan of sphere eyes either (See: Jedi Outcast, Timesplitters 2, Giants). The better aged eyes from around that time tend to be more of the "calculate UV like an environment map but reflecting from the eye origin to where they're looking at" technique, something Source popularized but definitely predates source (IIRC some certain Rare N64 games, Jak and/or Daxter, Blinx). They're better because you don't have to model a head skull around absolute spheres to avoid socket poly gaps, and you don't get the normal shading swimming when they look around, plus you could do a blend layer over them to have them appear more natural. There's also overdraw saving and less "creepy spheres appear when the character gets too close/fades away" problems.