Will 3D Characters Ever Replace Live Models?

Greymom

kyoto kid said:

...many years ago I toyed with the idea of a political thriller influenced by Robert Serling's novel The President's Plane is Missing, (which in 1973 was adapted for a film of the same name) but updated a bit, where after the president mysteriously disappears, very lifelike 3D representation of him is substituted as a replacement for televised appearances using cutting edge technology (and a lot of coercion) to make it seem that nothing was amiss (this set in a society not too different than what we have today where people are so totally hooked on electronic media, that what they watch is the only "reality" they know).

Anyone remember the film "Looker" with Albert Finney and Susan Dey?  Almost forgotton, but a film way ahead of its time.

Sempie

Petercat said:

The answer is "yes, eventually".
We are fast approaching the point where, on an emissive screen, 3D characters will replace live models.

I hardly watch any current movies or TV shows anyway. Have especially grown tired of all of those empty GC-roller coaster rides and action flics.

That'll be the way I'll stop watching the new stuff all together.

I have no interest in watching a bunch of virtual pixels pretendiug to be human beings.

CG has already mostly destroyed one of my favorite genres; classical western style animation (don't like anime at all), and now you're out on eliminating real actors as well. Well, thank you very much.

I'm fine with fantasy creratures, aliens, dangerous stunt workl, and things normal actors could not normally do. Other than that, I'm not interested in computer generated virtual stuff. I'll watch my old classics instead.

Sempie

ProFotograf said:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh9msqaoJZw

Enjoy,
Antonio

The Asian lady was Okay-ish. The rest is, to my taste, still uncanny valley creepy as hell, especially digital Andy Serkis and the last bunch of four.... (But maybe they would all make good zombies....)

WendyLuvsCatz

Sempie said:

Petercat said:

The answer is "yes, eventually".
We are fast approaching the point where, on an emissive screen, 3D characters will replace live models.

I hardly watch any current movies or TV shows anyway. Have especially grown tired of all of those empty GC-roller coaster rides and action flics.

That'll be the way I'll stop watching the new stuff all together.

I have no interest in watching a bunch of virtual pixels pretendiug to be human beings.

CG has already mostly destroyed one of my favorite genres; classical western style animation (don't like anime at all), and now you're out on eliminating real actors as well. Well, thank you very much.

I'm fine with fantasy creratures, aliens, dangerous stunt workl, and things normal actors could not normally do. Other than that, I'm not interested in computer generated virtual stuff. I'll watch my old classics instead.

Mine has some Lorenzos and a Lorreta lowrez on it so not empty

 

outrider42

I believe a lot of people are projecting themselves a bit here. Consider this, there are legal adults in this world who were born after the year 2000. By the the time these people were starting to get into media, video games were way past the Atari stick figure phase. YouTube and social media would launch before they became a teenager. And CG was already very common by the point of their birth.

These people have grown up in a vastly different world than most of us here. They have grown up with CG all around them, so naturally they would be more accepting of it. Secondly with all of the other media around them, they are not as likely to idolize actors as much as other people.

These are important factors going forward, just as important as the technology itself. All of these factors will combine to make CG actors more of a norm within OUR lifetimes.

One can make an argument about using CG actors of the original Star Wars cast will come too late and nobody would care. I don't think so. Star Wars is different. The original actors are not just in the old movies. They are in comics and video games as well. The most popular characters in the recent Star Wars Battlefront 2 game are the original cast, even though this game was created over 40 years after the movie. I think you can be quite sure the majority of players of this game were not alive when the first trilogy released. Dude, that includes me, LOL. I was not alive when Star Wars first released. But more over, there has only been one actor to play Luke Skywalker all these years, only one face whether on book covers of the extended universe or in video games. That goes for many of the characters. And when they cast a new kid to play Young Han Solo, that movie did not meet Disney's expectations. It did poorly enough that Disney shelved a number of other planned spin offs. I think the fact that he was not much like Harrison Ford played a big part of that.

If anything, I think Star Wars will be the first test of the new CG actor, after all, it already is.

And like I said before, if we can replace every aspect of a film with CG, what is to stop us from replacing actors as well?

I find it very bizarre that pretty much all of us here use Daz Studio to render pictures of 3D people, that any of us would be against virtual people in film. Many of you have no idea just how much CG is actually used for shockingly mundane effects. Like the saying goes, people do not notice CG until it is bad CG. Few people ever notice CG when it is actually good.

I actually do prefer practical effects in many cases, which can add charm. But I'm not going to react negatively to CG, unless of course it just plain bad.

CG in toon animation can be stunning when done well. A computer can render a lot of frames, improving the overall smoothness of the animation. Computers in animation are becoming more common also because they can be cheaper than having numerous artists draw every frame by hand. This has become a big issue, and the rising cost of traditional animation is what basically killed it in America. Animation in America was simply too niche to be profitable this way. This is a bit different in Japan where animation is widely accepted in their society, and Japanese animations are for adults as much as children. But even while Japan does a lot of drawing still, they use computers for a lot of things. It is getting rare to find a 100% hand drawn animation even in Japan. Most anime today use a combination of both.

I really don't care how the pixels on my screen were created. I care about the story those pixels are telling. I come for the character, not the actor.

wolf359

I have no interest in watching a bunch of virtual pixels pretendiug to be human beings.

Virtual pixels dont "pretend to be human beings" 
Real life , often talented human beings use this modern day meduim to tell stories and are no less legimate than someone drawing frames with pencil an paper,
GOOD storytelling is  the key not the medium used to tell the stories

I'm not interested in computer generated virtual stuff. 

 

 

Everything Sold on the Daz store and most of the subjects discussed in the Daz forums is about computer generated imagery.
 
I dont understand why  anyone,in general ,who finds this modern medium so offensive & repugnant would remain a member
for 16 years and make  3,123 visits to this site.

CG has already mostly destroyed one of my favorite genres; classical western style animation:

Sorry but CG cannot "destroy" anyone's favorite genre.
as long as there are people willing to produce content for that genre.

Anyone is free to create old style hand drawn animation if they are so inclined.
Go and search them out or create some yourself perhaps??

However the pace of technology  and new and visually interesting ways for us MODERN creatives to express our narratives will not be stopped by people re-posting the same,boring, tiresome screeds against every visual medium invented after the year 1959.

Gordig

outrider42 said:

I actually do prefer practical effects in many cases, which can add charm. But I'm not going to react negatively to CG, unless of course it just plain bad.

I'm generally in favor of practical effects too, but one thing a lot of people lose sight of is that neither practical effects nor CG are inherently good or bad, nor is one better than the other. It's all in how they're used. Even movies like Fury Road and the Force Awakens that were very vocal about using practical effects still had plenty of CG.

I just watched the first episode of the new Dark Crystal series last night, and the whole time, I couldn't help but think "seriously, you couldn't make their mouths move better than this?". I loved the movie, and the puppets were probably pretty impressive for their time, but it's not as if they were pushing the limits of what's technically possible with puppetry. My wife said she found them charming, but I did not. 

kyoto kid

Subtropic Pixel said:

cclesue said:

You mean those folks in Hollywood are REAL??

No.  No they are not.  They are fake.  Hollywood is fake.  Drama on television is fake, even if it's called "reality-something-something".  Not all "fake" is bad, as I said in a prior post.  But the 3D is more interesting to me than the so-called "reality".  Hollywood probably could just switch to 3D characters for everything.  It's more interesting to me, that's for sure.  Or they can stick with the current crop of real people and instead spend their time and money inventing 3D audiences to watch their award shows.  'cause I won't do it!

Do you want to know what's real?  Montana is real.  Wyoming is real.  Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and New Mexico are real.  There are others, but I think you get my gist.  Your family is real.  Your friends are real.  Your co-workers are real.  Helping your Girl Scout with her cookie sale is real.  Helping your boy's soccer or baseball team's car wash raise money so that they can go to the big invitational this year is real.  Going out for your once-a-month Church Friday fish-fry or Sunday spaghetti dinner; those things are real.  Getting your kid or neighbor's kid interested in pursuing STEM courses in school, or maybe just getting them into a music class; that is real.

..OK, so the likes of Humphrey Bogart ,Ingrid Bergman, Sir Alec Guinness, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Kate Hepburn  Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis, Sean Connery, Patrick Stewart,  Vivien Leigh, James Stewart,Olivia de Havilland, Peter Sellers, Toshiro Mifune, George C. Scott, Cary Grant, marlon Brando, and Sir Laurence Olivier are fakes? I would think they'd take issue with that.

wiz

bluejaunte said:

 If there was a regular human looking CG character with a real actor behind it doing the voice acting and motion capture, why not just use the real actor?

Four reasons. First, did you ever hear of a show called "Knight Rider"? Gene Larson's basic premise was that it's hard to find an action hero type actor who can deliver really good dialogue (Sylvester Stalone, any other Stalone, Rutger Hauer, etc). So they got David Hasselhoff to voice a super-car and crack wise, while William Daniels mostly posed a lot, drove the car, and hit people.

Second reason, if the director doesn't like a scene, they have the option to say "let's fix that one in CGI"  instead of reshooting for the 14th time, and we're losing the light, and two stars need makeup, and we're running into overtime... When the CGI gets cheap enough, they can really cut the number of takes down and shoot movies in half the time. Actors who are paid by the movie rake up more money (money is good) but there's less expenses for

Three, it also makes later changes easier: say an actor has made a gesture that in one particular country is considered obscene. Instead of cutting the scene, they just make the CGI character do something a little different.

Four, and I believe they're doing this already, by mapping CGI onto characters, they can have everything perfectly lipsynced in a jillion languages, without having to have the weird, stilted dialogue you get when employing a Stalon trying to get a voice actor to lip sync to dialogue in a different language. Here's where they were last year. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180817125402.htm

 

Sempie

wolf359 said:

Real life , often talented human beings use this modern day meduim to tell stories and are no less legimate than someone drawing frames with pencil an paper,
GOOD storytelling is  the key not the medium used to tell the stories

I have to violently disagree here. The medium is part of the art. You could have never done a Tom & Jerry with a realistic CG cat and mouse. The medium creates a unique platform for storytelling, and defines how the story is told. It's not just about telling a story; its about how you tell that story.. (And storytelling seems to have become a lost art by itself, actually) And I do not believe drawing has become obsolete, just because we have computers now.

The original Jurassic Park had a good story. It was mostly about the characters reconsidering their roles in life, and the dinosaurs were just metaphores for larger themes. Most other creature movies made since were just sorry excuses for doing a lot of CGI shots. Look at Peter Jackson and his Hobbit Trilogy. So much in love with his bag of tricks that he forgot to make good movies.

But yeah, would love to see some good stories again. Really been missing those for a while.

 

wolf359 said:

I'm not interested in computer generated virtual stuff. 

Everything Sold on the Daz store and most of the subjects discussed in the Daz forums is about computer generated imagery.
 
I dont understand why  anyone,in general ,who finds this modern medium so offensive & repugnant would remain a member
for 16 years and make  3,123 visits to this site.

You'd be hard pressed to find any gallery entries made by me. Poser and Studio are toys to me, a hobby that I use to relax with. I'm not using it to create 'art'. (Not stopping anyone to use it that way though, before we get into that sort of discussion.)

wolf359 said:

CG has already mostly destroyed one of my favorite genres; classical western style animation:

Sorry but CG cannot "destroy" anyone's favorite genre.
as long as there are people willing to produce content for that genre.

Anyone is free to create old style hand drawn animation if they are so inclined.
Go and search them out or create some yourself perhaps??

I'm just a small fish. But I deeply regret that Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, Nic Ranieri, James Baxter, etc, lost their main platform for crerating their magic. I miss the movies they'll never make. It's sort of like giving Leonardo da Vinci a digicam and telling him he's obsolete. For me, it is a loss for the world of art. You hated that stuff anyway and won't miss it at all. Couldn't care less if other people miss it. If you don't like it, it has no reason to exist. Good for you.

Mind you; I'm not opposed to adding a few tools to the toolbox, Far from that; I've done some 3D CG character animation myself. But replacing, that's an entirely different thing.

jestmart

Max Headroom was an actor, Matt Frewer, with lots of make-up and video editing tricks, not CGI.

bluejaunte

Sempie said:

I'm just a small fish. But I deeply regret that Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, Nic Ranieri, James Baxter, etc, lost their main platform for crerating their magic. I miss the movies they'll never make. It's sort of like giving Leonardo da Vinci a digicam and telling him he's obsolete. For me, it is a loss for the world of art. You hated that stuff anyway and won't miss it at all. Couldn't care less if other people miss it. If you don't like it, it has no reason to exist. Good for you.

Mind you; I'm not opposed to adding a few tools to the toolbox, Far from that; I've done some 3D CG character animation myself. But replacing, that's an entirely different thing.

It's not like that at all. CG still needs art and artists and art direction. These hand drawn gems have been replaced by movies that can absolutely invoke the same emotional response. Shrek, Toy Story, Wall-E, Coco? These all do nothing for you? They are at least on par with the old classics.

Hand-drawn is still a thing in Japan. Studio Ghibli would be the obvious name to mention.

The Blurst of Times

Star Wars already HAS had excellent digital actors. Jar Jar Binks! :-D

More recently, L3, the droid.

Tarkin? Leia? Far less believable.
A whole MOVIE full of Tarkin and Leia-type characters? That would be okay with me, but the CGI Tarkin and Leia did not fit in with the human actors. They were neither human enough nor inhuman enough in relation to the live human actors. It was like hearing a real orchestra versus a digital string section.

Subtropic Pixel

outrider42 said:

I find it very bizarre that pretty much all of us here use Daz Studio to render pictures of 3D people, that any of us would be against virtual people in film. Many of you have no idea just how much CG is actually used for shockingly mundane effects. Like the saying goes, people do not notice CG until it is bad CG. Few people ever notice CG when it is actually good.

Yes indeed!

outrider42 said:

I actually do prefer practical effects in many cases, which can add charm. But I'm not going to react negatively to CG, unless of course it just plain bad.

 

CG in toon animation can be stunning when done well. A computer can render a lot of frames, improving the overall smoothness of the animation. Computers in animation are becoming more common also because they can be cheaper than having numerous artists draw every frame by hand. This has become a big issue, and the rising cost of traditional animation is what basically killed it in America. Animation in America was simply too niche to be profitable this way. This is a bit different in Japan where animation is widely accepted in their society, and Japanese animations are for adults as much as children. But even while Japan does a lot of drawing still, they use computers for a lot of things. It is getting rare to find a 100% hand drawn animation even in Japan. Most anime today use a combination of both.

But I don't understand why some creators go and mess it up with BADLY drawn characters' bodies.

wolf359 said:

I have no interest in watching a bunch of virtual pixels pretendiug to be human beings.

Virtual pixels dont "pretend to be human beings" 
Real life , often talented human beings use this modern day meduim to tell stories and are no less legimate than someone drawing frames with pencil an paper,
GOOD storytelling is  the key not the medium used to tell the stories

I'm not interested in computer generated virtual stuff. 

 

 

Everything Sold on the Daz store and most of the subjects discussed in the Daz forums is about computer generated imagery.
 
I dont understand why  anyone,in general ,who finds this modern medium so offensive & repugnant would remain a member
for 16 years and make  3,123 visits to this site.

Things that make you go "hmmmm". 

wolf359 said:

CG has already mostly destroyed one of my favorite genres; classical western style animation:

Sorry but CG cannot "destroy" anyone's favorite genre.
as long as there are people willing to produce content for that genre.

Anyone is free to create old style hand drawn animation if they are so inclined.
Go and search them out or create some yourself perhaps??

However the pace of technology  and new and visually interesting ways for us MODERN creatives to express our narratives will not be stopped by people re-posting the same,boring, tiresome screeds against every visual medium invented after the year 1959.

I only watch Partridge Family and Six Million Dollar Man reruns, old Warner Bros. and Charley Brown cartoons, and the Shazam/Isis hour.  No no, The Waltons and Little House were my sister's jams. 

Gordig said:

outrider42 said:

I actually do prefer practical effects in many cases, which can add charm. But I'm not going to react negatively to CG, unless of course it just plain bad.

I'm generally in favor of practical effects too, but one thing a lot of people lose sight of is that neither practical effects nor CG are inherently good or bad, nor is one better than the other. It's all in how they're used. Even movies like Fury Road and the Force Awakens that were very vocal about using practical effects still had plenty of CG.

I just watched the first episode of the new Dark Crystal series last night, and the whole time, I couldn't help but think "seriously, you couldn't make their mouths move better than this?". I loved the movie, and the puppets were probably pretty impressive for their time, but it's not as if they were pushing the limits of what's technically possible with puppetry. My wife said she found them charming, but I did not. 

I am interested in the new Dark Crystal series, but I refuse to buy any new subscriptions.  Man, how did I become like my dad?  Anyhow, I'm pretty sure that this won't stunt my delecate development as a human being. 

wiz said:

bluejaunte said:

 If there was a regular human looking CG character with a real actor behind it doing the voice acting and motion capture, why not just use the real actor?

Four reasons. First, did you ever hear of a show called "Knight Rider"? Gene Larson's basic premise was that it's hard to find an action hero type actor who can deliver really good dialogue (Sylvester Stalone, any other Stalone, Rutger Hauer, etc). So they got David Hasselhoff to voice a super-car and crack wise, while William Daniels mostly posed a lot, drove the car, and hit people.

I think you got those reversed.

wiz said:

Second reason, if the director doesn't like a scene, they have the option to say "let's fix that one in CGI"  instead of reshooting for the 14th time, and we're losing the light, and two stars need makeup, and we're running into overtime... When the CGI gets cheap enough, they can really cut the number of takes down and shoot movies in half the time. Actors who are paid by the movie rake up more money (money is good) but there's less expenses for

Three, it also makes later changes easier: say an actor has made a gesture that in one particular country is considered obscene. Instead of cutting the scene, they just make the CGI character do something a little different.

Four, and I believe they're doing this already, by mapping CGI onto characters, they can have everything perfectly lipsynced in a jillion languages, without having to have the weird, stilted dialogue you get when employing a Stalon trying to get a voice actor to lip sync to dialogue in a different language. Here's where they were last year. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180817125402.htm

 

OMG, this is actually an awesome use of technology.  The old Speed Racer TV shows were dubbed from Japanese into English.  And the original stories in Japanese had to be completely rewritten, including plot points!  Back then they had no capability to change the characters' movements on the screen and so the English-speaking voiceover actors had to do some really interesting verbal stuntwork to make the words fit.  Hence the run-on sentences and weird word choices in every scene.

The "M" on the car was originally for "Mifune Motors", not "Mach 5".  The "G" on Speed's shirt was for "Go" as in "the Go Team".  Although in a short-lived comic book series, his name was revealed to be "Greg" and he lived in Farmington Hills, Michigan.  I loved that.

Sempie said:

wolf359 said:

Real life , often talented human beings use this modern day meduim to tell stories and are no less legimate than someone drawing frames with pencil an paper,
GOOD storytelling is  the key not the medium used to tell the stories

I have to violently disagree here. The medium is part of the art. You could have never done a Tom & Jerry with a realistic CG cat and mouse. The medium creates a unique platform for storytelling, and defines how the story is told. It's not just about telling a story; its about how you tell that story.. (And storytelling seems to have become a lost art by itself, actually) And I do not believe drawing has become obsolete, just because we have computers now.

No need to "violently" disagree, hehe.  But you are right; the medium CAN BE part of the art, and it often is in past works.  But that doesn't mean that the medium has to always remain unchanging and static for all time.  Sometimes a change is successful, sometimes it isn't.

Sempie said:

The original Jurassic Park had a good story. It was mostly about the characters reconsidering their roles in life, and the dinosaurs were just metaphores for larger themes. Most other creature movies made since were just sorry excuses for doing a lot of CGI shots. Look at Peter Jackson and his Hobbit Trilogy. So much in love with his bag of tricks that he forgot to make good movies.

But yeah, would love to see some good stories again. Really been missing those for a while.

I would like to see some good stories told by people who focus on improving their CRAFT.

Sempie said:

 

wolf359 said:

I'm not interested in computer generated virtual stuff. 

Everything Sold on the Daz store and most of the subjects discussed in the Daz forums is about computer generated imagery.
 
I dont understand why  anyone,in general ,who finds this modern medium so offensive & repugnant would remain a member
for 16 years and make  3,123 visits to this site.

You'd be hard pressed to find any gallery entries made by me. Poser and Studio are toys to me, a hobby that I use to relax with. I'm not using it to create 'art'. (Not stopping anyone to use it that way though, before we get into that sort of discussion.)

Okay, that's fine, but you should know that your view may be a bit of an outlier here.  Although you make some good points, it's not likely you'll find a lot of people (professional content creators or hobbyist like me) here to go against their own interests by coming out against 3D and CGI.

Sempie said:

wolf359 said:

CG has already mostly destroyed one of my favorite genres; classical western style animation:

Sorry but CG cannot "destroy" anyone's favorite genre.
as long as there are people willing to produce content for that genre.

Anyone is free to create old style hand drawn animation if they are so inclined.
Go and search them out or create some yourself perhaps??

I'm just a small fish. But I deeply regret that Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, Nic Ranieri, James Baxter, etc, lost their main platform for crerating their magic. I miss the movies they'll never make. It's sort of like giving Leonardo da Vinci a digicam and telling him he's obsolete. For me, it is a loss for the world of art. You hated that stuff anyway and won't miss it at all. Couldn't care less if other people miss it. If you don't like it, it has no reason to exist. Good for you.

I don't know any of those people, and so I don't know what any of that means, except to say that I think you're underestimating da Vinci and maybe all the others too.  da Vinci was ahead of his time.  Who's to say he would not have been ahead of our time too? 

Genius is genius no matter "when" it happens.  Are you really so certain that he would have rejected modern technology if he had lived in our era instead of his; that he couldn't have succeeded as a groundbreaking leader in science and technology today?  We'll never know for sure, but I think it's a mistake to just assume he would have ended up as a nobody in any time period.

outrider42 said:

I believe a lot of people are projecting themselves a bit here. Consider this, there are legal adults in this world who were born after the year 2000. By the the time these people were starting to get into media, video games were way past the Atari stick figure phase. YouTube and social media would launch before they became a teenager. And CG was already very common by the point of their birth.

This is amazing to think, but you're right.  Your own perspective differs from mine due to the dynamics of your entire existence.  That's amazing and a bit frightening at the same time.  But mostly amazing. 

outrider42 said:

These people have grown up in a vastly different world than most of us here. They have grown up with CG all around them, so naturally they would be more accepting of it. Secondly with all of the other media around them, they are not as likely to idolize actors as much as other people.

And this is actually where I take comfort.  "Hollywood ruins everything", that's my saying.  It's a bubble and an echo-chamber, and to avoid getting caught up in it, you have to get out of it once in awhile.  I recommend Montana. 

Sempie

bluejaunte said:

It's not like that at all. CG still needs art and artists and art direction. These hand drawn gems have been replaced by movies that can absolutely invoke the same emotional response. Shrek, Toy Story, Wall-E, Coco? These all do nothing for you? They are at least on par with the old classics.

Hand-drawn is still a thing in Japan. Studio Ghibli would be the obvious name to mention.

I do not believe 3D has, of this date, done a real equivalent to Bambi or Fantasia. Those are in a different league altogether.

As I already mentioned, I am not into Anime. I like the Miyazaki-films, but not for their charakter animation. The Disney type movies have weaker stories, but excellent character acting, and the stories are better told, more emotional, for my taste. I admire Akira from a technical point of view, but I really didn't care who lived or died in that film. Same with Ghost in the Shell. Can't get into a story when I dislike all of the characters. Loved the way the devious and hypocrytical Scar was animated in Lion King though; the way he played nice to young Simba; that for me is a villain full of personality, that is acting to me..I miss that in Anime.

But good, that's personal taste.

 

I'm not against these 3D CGI films. I absolutely loved Tangled, Ratatoulle, Zootopia, The Incredibles, Despicable Me. Good stories, good acting, good character design, funny ideas..

Nevertheless, I think something got lost.

The individual style of the animator.

The beauty of a painting, a flat drawing.

Distinct graphic styles, like the Mary Blair look in Alice in Wonderland of Eyvind Earle's angular style in Sleeping Beauty, or Gerald Scarfe's style in Hercules.

 

The entire reason for doing handdrawn animation was the magic making of flat drawings come to life. The entire purpose was not being realistic. UPA even went as far away from realism as they possibly could, and skipped perspective alltogether. I love a beautiful drawing. The draftmanship behind it. The fact that no two people in the world draw alike, that drawings reflect the soul of the people that drew them, the individuality, the personality. That you could recognize the animator by the scene, if you got a bit deeper into the craft of animation.

The same with actors. I love them for their personality. (Or like others less because of their personality) Some movies I'll watch just because I like the actors so much. Because they respond to me on an emotional level.

 

For me the GC-question is not a matter of either/or. There should be place for everybody.

I really don't understand why people hate drawings or live actors so much that they think they should be replaced and disappear from the face of the earth...???. Yet that seems to be happening right now, even Disney seems to want to erase their classics.....

 

nicstt

The Blurst of Times said:

Star Wars already HAS had excellent digital actors. Jar Jar Binks! :-D

The only way that excellent and that abomination should be coupled together is when there is a 'not' also in the sentence, and yes I realise you are being sarcastic; but I want to emphasise you point!

WendyLuvsCatz

I am sure Classical musicians feel the same way about Trap Music,

there are people who cannot stand handdrawn cell cartoons either, or puppets

as said people only notice bad CGI if it's done well enough it's taken for granted it was filmed with actors and we are getting closer every day to that, I remember once being told people from tribes who hadn't seen films were terrified by close ups as they saw a huge growing bodiless head, so we have been conditioned in how we view media.

Sempie

nicstt said:

The Blurst of Times said:

Star Wars already HAS had excellent digital actors. Jar Jar Binks! :-D

The only way that excellent and that abomination should be coupled together is when there is a 'not' also in the sentence, and yes I realise you are being sarcastic; but I want to emphasise you point!

And even then, Tarkin and Leia bothered me more in Rogue One than Binks ever did; the problem with Jar Jar was more story-wise than animation wise. Even digital Yoda was OK until he went bouncing ball mode against Dooku.

The Blurst of Times

Sempie said:

nicstt said:

The Blurst of Times said:

Star Wars already HAS had excellent digital actors. Jar Jar Binks! :-D

The only way that excellent and that abomination should be coupled together is when there is a 'not' also in the sentence, and yes I realise you are being sarcastic; but I want to emphasise you point!

And even then, Tarkin and Leia bothered me more in Rogue One than Binks ever did; the problem with Jar Jar was more story-wise than animation wise. Even digital Yoda was OK until he went bouncing ball mode against Dooku.

Ha!

Yeah, Jar Jar was both a superb achievement and a total failure.
Jar Jar was a terrible addition to the Star Wars universe as a character. The acting? The animation? Those were very good.
The idea was well executed. It was just a terrible idea.

I didn't mind digital Yoda so much except that we had an amazing puppet Yoda in the original movies, and I couldn't help but think that every digital Yoda would have been 100x better with a puppet.

A non-human main character can work just fine.
CGI humans have been failures when combined with live human actors, IMO. CGI non-human main cast characters are fine, and should work with no problem.

EDIT: Okay, I guess Phantom Menace had a puppet, and it was terrible. It's not a movie I watch with any frequency, anyway.

Ostadan

The 'real or fake' discussion reminds me of why the high frame rate in The Hobbit failed for me.  Yes, it made everything clearer, almost like you had a clear window to what is on camera.  The problem for me was that what was on camera was a studio with actors in obvious fake beards and makeup, and unrealistic lighting.  In other words, by making things more 'real', it became more obvious that it was 'fake'.  Better tech means that the art of fakery has to become correspondingly better.

Or, just maybe, we have become too concerned with cinematic 'realism', to the detriment of our imaginations.  400+ years ago, an audience was told,

And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history…

The Blurst of Times

Ostadan said:

The 'real or fake' discussion reminds me of why the high frame rate in The Hobbit failed for me.  Yes, it made everything clearer, almost like you had a clear window to what is on camera.  The problem for me was that what was on camera was a studio with actors in obvious fake beards and makeup, and unrealistic lighting.  In other words, by making things more 'real', it became more obvious that it was 'fake'.  Better tech means that the art of fakery has to become correspondingly better.

 

As a side note, this is why I think 2-D work out of Daz feels better with layers that take the hard digital edge off of what we do.
Some layering technique to add the kind of imperfections that exist in traditional hand-painted artwork.

The more successful images in the gallery combine good rendering with excellent 2-D work in PhotoShop or GIMP, I think.

Sempie

Subtropic Pixel said:

Sempie said:

 

You'd be hard pressed to find any gallery entries made by me. Poser and Studio are toys to me, a hobby that I use to relax with. I'm not using it to create 'art'. (Not stopping anyone to use it that way though, before we get into that sort of discussion.)

Okay, that's fine, but you should know that your view may be a bit of an outlier here.  Although you make some good points, it's not likely you'll find a lot of people (professional content creators or hobbyist like me) here to go against their own interests by coming out against 3D and CGI.

Hmm. I have Poser/Studio as a hobby. Did some professional 3D character animation in Maya. Just how anti-3D does that make me?

I'm not against 3D. I'm against 3D artists who believe that draftsmen and live actors should be put out of work and starve. And that 2D animation and live action films should cease to exist. The main theme of this thread is whether live actors should be completely replaced by digital counterparts.

My question is: what have live actors ever done to you that you hate them so much?

Subtropic Pixel said:

Sempie said:

I'm just a small fish. But I deeply regret that Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, Nic Ranieri, James Baxter, etc, lost their main platform for crerating their magic. I miss the movies they'll never make. It's sort of like giving Leonardo da Vinci a digicam and telling him he's obsolete. For me, it is a loss for the world of art. You hated that stuff anyway and won't miss it at all. Couldn't care less if other people miss it. If you don't like it, it has no reason to exist. Good for you.

I don't know any of those people, and so I don't know what any of that means, except to say that I think you're underestimating da Vinci and maybe all the others too.  da Vinci was ahead of his time.  Who's to say he would not have been ahead of our time too? 

Here's a link to a YouTube clip of a making of fo the original Lion King movie. It shows some of these artists I mentioned along with unfinished pencil tests of the animation, and a bit of insight in how handdrawn animation is made.. I usually find these early tests more beutiful than the finished colored scenes; they really show the soul of the artist.. 

 

Subtropic Pixel said:

Genius is genius no matter "when" it happens.  Are you really so certain that he would have rejected modern technology if he had lived in our era instead of his; that he couldn't have succeeded as a groundbreaking leader in science and technology today?  We'll never know for sure, but I think it's a mistake to just assume he would have ended up as a nobody in any time period.

I don't think genius is about technologiy, or should be defined by technology. Have Wacom Tablets made pencils obsolete? I don't think so.

Take away the pencils of the people from my clip, and you take away what makes their craft.

outrider42

Sempie said:

Subtropic Pixel said:

Sempie said:

 

You'd be hard pressed to find any gallery entries made by me. Poser and Studio are toys to me, a hobby that I use to relax with. I'm not using it to create 'art'. (Not stopping anyone to use it that way though, before we get into that sort of discussion.)

Okay, that's fine, but you should know that your view may be a bit of an outlier here.  Although you make some good points, it's not likely you'll find a lot of people (professional content creators or hobbyist like me) here to go against their own interests by coming out against 3D and CGI.

Hmm. I have Poser/Studio as a hobby. Did some professional 3D character animation in Maya. Just how anti-3D does that make me?

I'm not against 3D. I'm against 3D artists who believe that draftsmen and live actors should be put out of work and starve. And that 2D animation and live action films should cease to exist. The main theme of this thread is whether live actors should be completely replaced by digital counterparts.

My question is: what have live actors ever done to you that you hate them so much?

Subtropic Pixel said:

Sempie said:

I'm just a small fish. But I deeply regret that Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, Nic Ranieri, James Baxter, etc, lost their main platform for crerating their magic. I miss the movies they'll never make. It's sort of like giving Leonardo da Vinci a digicam and telling him he's obsolete. For me, it is a loss for the world of art. You hated that stuff anyway and won't miss it at all. Couldn't care less if other people miss it. If you don't like it, it has no reason to exist. Good for you.

I don't know any of those people, and so I don't know what any of that means, except to say that I think you're underestimating da Vinci and maybe all the others too.  da Vinci was ahead of his time.  Who's to say he would not have been ahead of our time too? 

Here's a link to a YouTube clip of a making of fo the original Lion King movie. It shows some of these artists I mentioned along with unfinished pencil tests of the animation, and a bit of insight in how handdrawn animation is made.. I usually find these early tests more beutiful than the finished colored scenes; they really show the soul of the artist.. 

 

Subtropic Pixel said:

Genius is genius no matter "when" it happens.  Are you really so certain that he would have rejected modern technology if he had lived in our era instead of his; that he couldn't have succeeded as a groundbreaking leader in science and technology today?  We'll never know for sure, but I think it's a mistake to just assume he would have ended up as a nobody in any time period.

I don't think genius is about technologiy, or should be defined by technology. Have Wacom Tablets made pencils obsolete? I don't think so.

Take away the pencils of the people from my clip, and you take away what makes their craft.

So what you are saying is that 3D artist have no souls because you can't look at the draft work the same way? That 3D has no passion? I have a feeling that will not go over well here. There are human beings behind the camera, and all over a production, often giving their all. If Miyazaki films don't even impress you, yikes, your standards are absurdly high. So it makes sense that basically nothing impresses you, aside from specific golden age relics that you view with rose tinted glasses. That you find no joy in any Pixar movie is a clear sign to me that you are unable to get past your prejudice against CG and enjoy what is in front you.

I don't think actors are going to starve. That's getting extreme and dramatic over the simple suggestion that 3D models might replace some actors. I don't think anyone here, including me, is saying that human actors are going to go away forever. Just that 3D actors will become more common. They already are.

Sempie

outrider42 said:

So what you are saying is that 3D artist have no souls because you can't look at the draft work the same way? That 3D has no passion? I have a feeling that will not go over well here. There are human beings behind the camera, and all over a production, often giving their all. If Miyazaki films don't even impress you, yikes, your standards are absurdly high. So it makes sense that basically nothing impresses you, aside from specific golden age relics that you view with rose tinted glasses. That you find no joy in any Pixar movie is a clear sign to me that you are unable to get past your prejudice against CG and enjoy what is in front you.

 

I don't think actors are going to starve. That's getting extreme and dramatic over the simple suggestion that 3D models might replace some actors. I don't think anyone here, including me, is saying that human actors are going to go away forever. Just that 3D actors will become more common. They already are.

I'm saying that a pencil stroke has more personality than a motion graph editor. A hand written love letter has a different impact than the same letter as a regular email using a plain Ariel font.

I could tell Disney animators apart by the way their scenes were drawn. Cannot do that with 3D animations. And yes, I think that is a loss of personality..

I have professionally animated with both pencil and paper and in Maya. And I find the pencil a more personal way of expression. Graph editors are cold and sterile and mathmatical. and not intuitive at all. That's my personal opinion.

I have never claimed that 3D has no soul, or that I do not like Miyazaki or Pixar movies. You're making that up.

I am not telling that there should be no more 3D movies.

The haters are you guys. You're the ones explaining that it is a good thing 2D animation is dead. And that they should fire those arrogant overpriced live action actors.

Tell me; is it required from DAZ Studio users to hate and destroy everything not CGI????

bluejaunte

Let's maybe look at a Coco making of? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCAuK_gBStE

You will find people are actually drawing. Beside all the other heart and soul that goes into it.

 

WendyLuvsCatz

This went downhill pretty fast ...

nicstt

Sempie said:

outrider42 said:

So what you are saying is that 3D artist have no souls because you can't look at the draft work the same way? That 3D has no passion? I have a feeling that will not go over well here. There are human beings behind the camera, and all over a production, often giving their all. If Miyazaki films don't even impress you, yikes, your standards are absurdly high. So it makes sense that basically nothing impresses you, aside from specific golden age relics that you view with rose tinted glasses. That you find no joy in any Pixar movie is a clear sign to me that you are unable to get past your prejudice against CG and enjoy what is in front you.

 

I don't think actors are going to starve. That's getting extreme and dramatic over the simple suggestion that 3D models might replace some actors. I don't think anyone here, including me, is saying that human actors are going to go away forever. Just that 3D actors will become more common. They already are.

I'm saying that a pencil stroke has more personality than a motion graph editor. A hand written love letter has a different impact than the same letter as a regular email using a plain Ariel font.

I could tell Disney animators apart by the way their scenes were drawn. Cannot do that with 3D animations. And yes, I think that is a loss of personality..

I have professionally animated with both pencil and paper and in Maya. And I find the pencil a more personal way of expression. Graph editors are cold and sterile and mathmatical. and not intuitive at all. That's my personal opinion.

I have never claimed that 3D has no soul, or that I do not like Miyazaki or Pixar movies. You're making that up.

I am not telling that there should be no more 3D movies.

The haters are you guys. You're the ones explaining that it is a good thing 2D animation is dead. And that they should fire those arrogant overpriced live action actors.

Tell me; is it required from DAZ Studio users to hate and destroy everything not CGI????

The words are all that is important; it doesn't matter what medium they arrive by. To give greater impact to one versus the other, is to do a disservice to words, the meaning, and the intent of their author.

The words, and how they are constructed are what's important; the rest is just a set of tools.

kyoto kid

The Blurst of Times said:

Sempie said:

nicstt said:

The Blurst of Times said:

Star Wars already HAS had excellent digital actors. Jar Jar Binks! :-D

The only way that excellent and that abomination should be coupled together is when there is a 'not' also in the sentence, and yes I realise you are being sarcastic; but I want to emphasise you point!

And even then, Tarkin and Leia bothered me more in Rogue One than Binks ever did; the problem with Jar Jar was more story-wise than animation wise. Even digital Yoda was OK until he went bouncing ball mode against Dooku.

Ha!

Yeah, Jar Jar was both a superb achievement and a total failure.
Jar Jar was a terrible addition to the Star Wars universe as a character. The acting? The animation? Those were very good.
The idea was well executed. It was just a terrible idea.

I didn't mind digital Yoda so much except that we had an amazing puppet Yoda in the original movies, and I couldn't help but think that every digital Yoda would have been 100x better with a puppet.

A non-human main character can work just fine.
CGI humans have been failures when combined with live human actors, IMO. CGI non-human main cast characters are fine, and should work with no problem.

EDIT: Okay, I guess Phantom Menace had a puppet, and it was terrible. It's not a movie I watch with any frequency, anyway.

...Jar Jar was a Sith Lord..

Richard Haseltine

Just a reminder to keep the discussion civil, please.

kyoto kid

...OK a side by side comparison, first the original sketch I did of Leela some 18 years ago and one of the more recent 3D versions in roughly the same pose and attire.

They both have their own "style" but I feel the old sketch has more character.,