One thing I will never understand, is fans of an adaptative work, mocking elements of the original icongraphy not incorporated and/or changed in said adaptation. You see this in every fandom-- Marvel, DC, Harry Potter, Star Wars, S. King books, F. Herbert books etc, and it's always just been so odd to me.
It's almost like this tribalistic need to justify and/or co-sign a director's adaptive choices as definitive inference of adaptation, as if the aesthetic choices that the director made (Reeves, Nolan, Snyder, Burton etc) were the ONLY way those elements could be translated to screen.
Fact of the matter is, Reeves
chose not to incorporate the white eyes or pointy nose as part of HIS vision of the material... But that doesn't mean those classic elements are stupid, or ridiculous, or impossible to execute on film, as I've seen many fans ridiculously claim.
Thanos was completely CGI'd over, so that doesn't count.
I'm referring to Thor's CG sleeves
My point was never about white eyes. I think CG white eyes would be fine so long as you got an actor who didn't emote so hard with his eyes. CGI rubber neck, however, would just look weird.
While i absolutely believe that the VFX team could easily execute a rubber neck, we're also operating under the framework that the cowl HAS to be rubber.
The cowl could be any material, even fabric, and still retain it's form (with a face shell), and be *more accurate to what the cowl is actually supposed to be in the comics, which is a mask! Something Bruce can pull over his face.
It's that frustrating lack of innovation in how the cowl is engineered & executed on screen, that gets on my nerves. They've been realizing the cowl the same way for almost 35 years, with very little change minus shape
Uncanny valley wouldn't make Batman look scary though. It'd just look weird.
Well, the uncanny valley effect evokes a sense of fear in the subject of something looking "off", human but... Not quite. And fear is a synonym of fright, which is induced by something being "scary".
So it's really just a game of semantics. It means the same thing. And I would love for Batman to fall in that uncanny range of "off".
Also despite the actual armor, they completely covered said armor in CGI for Iron Man. And it honestly looked pretty awful in spots lmao
Well, yeah, it did.
But it was done still, and they ended up using the practical parts for references like lighting, and surface detailing etc
Tracking dots only work with motion. They don't replicate the creases and stretching of materials like rubber.
Tracking dots are used to quite literally track the practical element of an effect, which in this case, would be Batman's neck. The dots would be used to track the movement of his neck, so the VFX team could animated the creases and stretching accordingly-- in sync with the movements.
Material warping in itself has been done in animation for decades now.
Superman I'll also give you, but that shot is 2 seconds long. Your suggestion would be one that'd be seen for several scenes at a time. The longer you see CGI, the more your eyes can tell something's not really right. It's kinda that simple.
But many of these cited examples were a continuous effect, where audiences were not in fact, able to tell it wasn't right, because the effect was simply that good. CG when done well, and seamlessly integrated into a scene or character, can be almost impossible to pinpoint.
And that's what all VFX artists aim to achieve
I wouldn't even really call it a "non-issue", either. Take one listen to the horror story that the VFX crew went under for Shang-Chi because of Disney's over-reliance on CGI. Or even the fact that NWH technically wasn't completed until after the movie was released, because of the copious amounts of CGI that had to be done.
Well, that's how the industry works today. My primary concern in the matter, is the VFX artists who are working tirelessly to provide for these studios. I don't think there's a union for them either yet, but I could be wrong. Things might've changed since I was involved in the film scene
In contrast, as I said, to just...giving the actor an actual cowl they can move in. Which solves literally any possible issue. VFX crew get less work so they can focus more on making their CGI look as amazing as possible, it's also actually cheaper and it's easier for the actors because Batman doesn't have a green screen neck.
But at the same time, with CG enhanced cowl, you don't have to work around the limitations of a practical piece, like giving Batman a collar. It looks great, and I'm sure it was also added for aesthetic purposes, but there was definitely an element of Reeves wanting Pattinson to be able to move his neck, and the collar was in part a solution to that.
A problem that wouldn't exist with digital effects
