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yeah. I am getting downvoted, but I am totally with you here. The arguments above seem nonsensical, e.g. tradition, resistance to change, not having the resourc
by vonklaus 10y ago
yeah. I am getting downvoted, but I am totally with you here. The arguments above seem nonsensical, e.g. tradition, resistance to change, not having the resources (except large media companies, i.e. the subject of this discussion who have the resources), and liking the aesthetic hand drawing produces (which I suspect could be duplicated in a computer).
> I think the best analogy to use here is probably that of a REPL versus a slow compiled language
I agree. Something like this analogy, except after it is "compiled" and after it would be "rendered by the REPL" it would be a commodity. I mean this in the sense that, typically working close to the metal allows for amazing optimizations but in terms of a video/animation you are rendering a static piece of content. So I agree, you are just spending large amounts of time and resources for what seems like very little leverage.
I bet that some talented kid at RISD or another artschool who is technical and artistic could probably do a better job with adobe creative suite, so I don't understand why an entire industry would do it like this. Also pixar was started >30 years ago at ths point.
I am not trying to condemn the industry or peoples views here. I am just trying to understand the impediments to this. It seems to be unpopular, but also have no logical reason. The only one that seemed reasonable would be difficulty to produce the aesthetics, which would be especially true for a legacy show like the simpsons where the charachters strongly predate the new technology. However, southpars, the simpsons and family guy have noticeably improved their animation and charachter rendering so I don't see this as fully valid.
edit: I should say that tehri (in a dead comment) does make a compelling argument. Reproduced for those who do not have show dead [x] enabled.
> Because it's really, and I mean REALLY hard to teach the computer to create stylised illustrations from a 3d scene. Even harder, to actually animate the scene geometry in a way that corresponds to what a human animator would draw. Think to one of the core principles of animation - squash and stretch. Every character is more or less a soft body that deforms in a volume-preserving way to add emphasis to movement and intent and that's a really important artistic element of animation.
For example, just watch an old Tom&Jerry short and try to imagine how you'd represent these characters as 3d geometry. How would the animator move and deform them? How do you do the effect where Tom is hit with a shovel in the face and turns into a table? With hand-draw animation (either digital or on paper) you are just drawing the final result, but with 3d animation you have to describe the actual physical geometry in the scene.
- egypturnash 10y agoSouth Park is actually fully CG. Done in Maya IIRC. The original short it spawned from was construction paper being moved around on an animation stand, but now it's completely virtual. The entire industry does not do it like this. I worked in the industry around the turn of the century and saw a lot of new shows starting up on full-digital workflows. I am really surprised that it is taking some overseas shops this long to switch from roughing the animation on paper to roughing the animation in the computer. Building it in 3D and making the computer "draw" it is another thing. I mean, we still have people doing beautiful stop-motion work because that's what they like the look of, even though CG movies tend to have a similar look. It's very much an aesthetic choice. It's art, and sometimes art involves weird choices.