Meet Saya, Ultra Realistic, Japanese Schoolgirl

Say hello to Saya: she is an incredibly realistic CGI Japanese schoolgirl, created by a husband and wife team of computer graphics creators.

Has the uncanny valley just been pole-vaulted by an imaginary Japanese schoolgirl? Well, maybe – could most of us honestly tell some of these images apart from photographs?

The CGI lady in question is named Saya, and her “parents” are husband and wife, Teruyuki and Yuki Ishikawa. The Ishikawas work together creating out-of-this-world realistic, computer generated portraits, and they have big plans for their photogenic daughter – she’s going to be a movie star.

The couple are at this moment producing a film featuring Saya and a yet to be revealed co-star. She is the creation of Teruyuki and Yuki Ishikawa are a husband-and-wife team of freelance 3D computer graphics artists from Tokyo.They posted the images online, and have since seen them reposted thousands of times as people trying to answer the question of whether they are photographs of a real person or not.

The pair, who are known within the computer graphics industry for their lifelike work, created Japanese School Girl in their spare time.

Ishikawa is also making armour and other types of equipment for the Saya project.

‘Since we’ve been working on this between jobs, it’s been somewhat hard,’ Ishikawa told gaming site Kotaku.

‘We’re going to give it our best when making it.’

The hardest part, they said, was achieving the moist, soft and translucent skin.

In fact, Yuki says they are still improving the Japanese School Girl model, and hope to improve both the skin and hair.Some of the duo’s tweets: “The hardest part was achieving the moist, soft and translucent skin of girls this age. The Japanese School Girl hair, they add, are not up to their expectations.”

She was created using a series of 3D modelling tools including Matya, often used for film effect. They also hope to bring her to life in a self produced film. ‘This character ‘Saya’ is a being created as a CG character for the self-produced movie,’ they revealed in a tweet. They also said that for the film, she will receive an upgrade – and armour.