Her tiny movements, such as bending over to closely examine a new item for the first time (even one that has no bearing on the game), give her a human feeling without treading into Uncanny Valley (where animation comes so close to actual human behavior that it causes discomfort).

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Onscreen you see a live shot of you holding the book, which now bears a superimposed animation of a walking human skeleton, a flexing dinosaur, and so on.

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Today, says deGraf, the cost to do a total computer animation of Max would be about the same as hiring a human and creating the effects around him.

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Traditional animation methods are labor intensive and time consuming, but Collomosse's technique requires very little human intervention for the transformation to take place.

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This is the beauty of animation: it allows a cerebral joke to expand through, say, exaggerated facial expressions that a human being might not be able to perform, or have a character in a setting not normally available in real life (when was the last time you traveled to a liger breeding facility?).

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