The use of rotoscoping to deliver realistic 3D animation has been used extensively by Neill Blomkamp for his films: CG characters such as Christopher Johnson (insectoid alien) and Chappie (robot) were animated by rotoscoping an actor's on-set (or on-location) performance rather than suiting the actor up in one of those ping-pong-ball suits and having them gesticulate in an imaginary set in front of a green screen.
further down your tangent: one big disapointing suspensions of belief i had with... was it District 9? was where it shows one of the police robots flinching when the cement wall it's behind gets hit by small arms fire.
to me at the time it informed me that there was mocap going on, or a dumb cg artist/director deciding that the robot had to react in a more humanlike fashion.
of course now that i think about it, a military robot with auto-flinch-reflexes could actually help it avoid hits (similar to why our flinch reflex evolved i suppose) so that puts me in my place!
Basically, whenever some sort of "dumb" design decision in a movie annoy you, try to come up with a decent explanation for why it's actually an intelligent design decision. It's a lot of fun!
> The most interesting lessons from sci-fi come when you assume, for the sake of argument, that everything is in sci-fi is there for a reason–even things that look like mistakes. There’s a word for this, apologetics, which usually refers to the act of attempting to close logical loopholes in theology.
> Take Star Wars, for instance, in the scene when Luke and Han Solo are in the Millennium Falcon blowing up TIE fighters.
> If they’re fighting in the cold vacuum of space, why do we hear the ships exploding? Sound doesn’t exist without air.
> George Lucas probably figured that a silent gun fight would probably have been way less dramatic. He wanted to make the scene feel real to the audience, even if it was less true to reality. And if we move from the point of view that what works for the audience will work for the user, we can ask ourselves–could this make sense? Is there an explanation that can warrant hearing ships exploding in space?
> Well, what if the sound is the interface? Audio is a much more efficient gauge of surroundings, since it spans 360 degrees, whereas vision only covers 120 degrees. It might be that there are sensors on the outside of the Millennium Falcon that provide 3D sound inside the gunner seat. So when we hear ships blow up, we’re actually hearing an augmented reality interface that Luke and Han hear. Maybe?
> With design thinking, there are logical excuses for every interface discrepancy. And it makes sci-fi that much more fun to watch.
The space battle/trading game Terminus takes this approach to providing a "familiar" set of controls while still letting you exerience something closer to realism.
You get to see nebulae and moving starfields, explosions gives of sounds, and you can steer as if you're driving a plane, pretty much. But everything that isn't "real" is described in the manual as assistance provided by the in-ship computer to assist human navigation, and can be turned off if you prefer the more austere and genuine look and feel.
Even the way the ship handles - if you look at one of the outside views, while the ship is handling like a plane, you'll see directional boosters fire accordingly; turn it off, and you have full control and can e.g. rotate the ship and fire backwards at ships pursuing you, while continuing to coast away from them.
Explosions do transmit sound in space. If you detonated a stick of TNT 100 feet from ISS they really would hear a boom. The medium is the debris which impacts ships, the ship, and then the air inside the ship. What's missing is space combat should be at very long ranges, and of course all explosions in movies are far to slow.
So, I agree that augmented reality is probably the most realistic idea. But, even without that space battles could be very loud.
