A Japanese married couple – both talented CGI Animators – have been hard at work on an almost terrifyingly lifelike Japanese schoolgirl.
Teruyuki and Yuka Ishikawa have spent the last several years working on Saya – the CGI Japanese schoolgirl who somehow looks more real than I do.
The progress of Saya has been followed with great interest by a number of animators and industry watchers, all of whom have been super excited about her for a while now.
Obviously, it’s easy to see why – this represents a massive leap forward in CGI work, and everyone and their mum wants to know how the Tokyo-based husband and wife team pulled it off.
They recently shared the first ever video of Saya in motion at the CEATEC trade show in Japan, which you can see below. It truly is incredible stuff.
It should be noted that Saya is still a work in progress, so if you aren’t entirely sold on certain aspects of the video (such as the way her clothes moves), I can almost guarantee this will be addressed in future renderings.
Her creators have revealed in past interviews that all of their characters’ textures are hand-painted and don’t replicate photographs, which is just insane – check out one of the latest pics of Saya below.
Basically, Saya has me questioning my own existence as a creature of flesh and blood, and now I need to go lie down. Thanks, technology.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.