Two stronger cases-in-point:
- I actually am a fan of the scene involving Jabba in the SE-ANH. But the CG does not look convincing. It doesn't now, and it was less so in 1997. I like the scene. I like the notion of going back and putting in this deleted scene. However, to this day, I feel as though Lucas should have dusted off the old latex model of Jabba from ROTJ and retrofitted him for motion, then filmed the puppet against a blue screen to match the motion of the existing scene. ILM did this in 1994 making us believe that Tom Hanks really was shaking hands with President Kennedy, Mooning President Johnson, and getting whispered to by President Nixon. Why they didn't use the same technique for Jabba escapes me.[/li]
- Digital Yoda vs Puppet Yoda: ESB still convinces me more than ROTS. Why bother updating Episode 1 with a CG representation when you could just get out the old puppet from the O-OT and use him again. They (mistakenly) tried to make a "younger-looking" puppet for Episode I, which is why Yoda looked so bad. When the reaction was so negative, Lucas' solution wasn't to start using the old puppet again, but make a complete digital recreation of the old puppet. This way he'd be more nuanced and more expressive. And less believable, most of us agree.
It's been said before in this thread and I'll agree with it ... real objects that are filmed simply are more believable than digital creations. To my original point, non-organic objects behave with the physical world with much-less subtlety. We know how light will reflect off of a hard surface based on its elemental makeup and its angle. Clone Trooper armor works great this way too just as ships and rocks do.
Organic forms have way much more going on. A computer cannot handle it because there is more nuance than the programmer has the time to program in. Fluidity of motion, number of bones, placement of muscles, translucence of the skin ... these are about all that has been accounted for thus far by programmers, and it doesn't come close to all the detail. Add to this the sheer randomness of all things organic, and you just can't account for it.
Think of the difference between an analog sound wave and a digital representation. Analog is a true wave. Digital takes slices of that wave, leaving gaps in between. CD's sound so good because they take so many samples (44,100 per second) that we can't comprehend the gaps. But anybody who's listened to a sound sample even at 11,000 (only 1/4 CD quality) knows exactly how bad a representation of the sound wave it is.
I'm using this as an analogy and not a direct comparison to CG. When there is so much nuance to what we see organically, and so much of that nuance is unaccounted for when the same image is recreated digitally, you get the same effect: an unbelievable result. I would say that CG programmers currently can account for maybe the equivalent of a sound wave sampled around 500hz. Maybe. And with all the time and energy spent trying to get to just that level, doesn't it make more sense just to use latex in the first place? Save the CG for the ships and alien landscapes. Leave the characters in the real world. They'll be much more believable as a result.