I just got the 3.0+1.11 BD and I watched through the "Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0+1.0" making-of featurette and I still have no idea how they even made something so goddamn scary and jarring as EVA Imaginary, specifically the giant floating Rei head version of it. Lookin like an edgy late 2000s Xbox 360 reboot of Angela Anaconda.
In some of the shots without the dozens of layers of CG over it [all of which are somehow even more terrifying than in the final cut of the film], the face looks like it's a 3D model or a digitized doll's face, but in other, it's clearly real footage of a human face complete with film artifacts.

I did a comparison between a few of the less-touched-up shots from the Rebuild making of, and so far I've ruled out the Japanese voice actresses of most of the EVA pilots and Moyoco Anno [Hideaki Anno's wife]. Megumi Ogata [Shinji VA] is a maybe, but the nose doesn't quite match up. Between all of them it's really hard to tell because Imaginary has her eyes WAY open, so it makes it harder just comparing with casual photos of these people. The strangest part is both the doll shots and the fact that the face looks very young, like 8-15 years old

So do we know who's face was used for EVA Imaginary? Or is it ALL CG??

If you need it, here's a tweet compiling all the shots of Imaginary from Rebuild 3.0+1.0: https://twitter.com/GhostlyOcam/status/ ... 5367000069

Looking at the incomplete shots, I think it would've worked way better without the final digital touch-up. Making her look more like live action would be so right up Evangelion's alley, and reminiscent of the live action shots in EoE. It just looks so much cheaper with the CGI make-up.

Maybe AI?

No, that was definitely handmodeled CGI. Especially back then, there's no GAN capable of making that level or organic detail actually look good

AdamMalkovitch wrote:Lookin like an edgy late 2000s Xbox 360 reboot of Angela Anaconda.

More like a mid 2000s PS2 game tbh...

Blockio wrote:Especially back then

That movie is two years old and we're already saying things like this... Damn, things are moving fast

BernardoCairo wrote:That movie is two years old and we're already saying things like this... Damn, things are moving fast

For better or worse, two years makes a lot of difference in the training of LLMs/GANs at current