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I wrote you were not impressed with Myazaki films. After all, you did write this: "I like the Miyazaki-films, but not for their charakter animation." That would seem to imply you were not impressed by the animation, am I correct? What other purpose does that sentence serve?
"Nevertheless, I think something got lost." You continually repeat this over and over, again heavily implying a lack of personality or spirit is lost with CG. What else would this mean?
I am making a prediction. You can hate that prediction, but that prediction will come to pass.
"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."
Not a single person here wrote that...only you did. I even wrote that I like practical effects just fine and even prefer them in many cases.
One thing that might shock some of you guys is that in my dealing with young people, I am finding that they actually prefer a lot of CG elements. In discussions around anime, you always find people who hate that so much anime is CG now. However, there are many in the younger crowd who favor it (when it is done well of course). Ask a young anime fan about shows from the 80s and 90s, and they might say they think they are ugly! And that goes for the old Disney movies. Bambi? UGLY! That is just how they feel.
That is why I keep talking about the younger crowd. They are all for the rise of CG. You guys are going to grow old and die, and your preferences for CG or not will die with you. The industry is going to be taken over by the 20 year olds of today. That is just how it is. Change is inevitable.
This a rather violent (warning warning!) scene from the Wolverine movie Logan but show digital replacement done right: https://youtu.be/-13Y2Pe7kFs
@ Kyoto Kid:
It's mostly in the line of action. Your pose in the 3D version is more stiff.
The animation in Miyazaki movies is technically at a very high level. The designs are complex and not easy to rotate/animate. Probably a lot of the scenes would be more difficult than I could handle. Special Effects animation in anime is incredible. That said, the acting is more bland than in Disney movies. I've never seen anything matching Hades, Scar, Aladdin's Genie, or Beast in Anime. It may have something to do with the fact that the Japanese are a lot more restrained in real life as well.
I do mean that. That is my opinion. There's a lot of bog-ugly 2D crap as well, of course, but the best of 2D as a higher emotional impact on me as the best of 3D. You don't have to agree, but that is how I feel. And I don't think that I'm less entitled to that opinion than 20-year olds claiming Bambi to be ugly.
Here's a quote by you earlier in this thread: "How about a question for you, why didn't Disney use real animals for the Lion King with how realistic they took the art direction? Wouldn't that have been quite an interesting movie? No, they used CG for a reason, and one day that same reason is why they will work to replace real actors. They may not replace everybody, but a good many."
Bambi is dated from a story telling point of view. even if I absolutely love that movie. It was animated decades before I was even born, but I consider the animation superior to many of the contemporary animation of the 1970s, which was my decade. The same way I prefered the already ancient Tom & Jerry shorts to the drab limited animation TV garb in the 1970s. Newer isn't neccesarily better. Beethoven didn't become bad because someone invented techno.
I think, Hollywood is alienating the older audience at the moment. The new Lion King was panned by the critics. There's a lot of us hating the Star Wars and Star Trek reboots. A lot of us that stopped investing money in that stuff. We're not quite dead yet. And there's a lot of us baby-boomers left.
I'm 55; i'm probably one of the older Poser/Studio users. I'm not 20 and I do not share the taste of this generation. I have nothing with computer games. I have probably nothing in common with the millennials. Question is; why should I?
And at the end, I like what I like.
I love a well animated Drogon in Game of Thrones. Think CGI is a good solution for characters like Thanos. Or dangerous stunt work, to get back to the main topic of actor replacements.
But I do not need to have my human actors in CG, even if the technology permits it.I don't see the sense in a next generation Beowulf. And it's not going to get my money.
This whole thread reminds me of the Film vs Digital photography wars when digital was in it's infancy.
Film is still around, but digital won that war.
I retired my medium format cameras and my Fujichrome 50 when Canon provided the EOS 5D series with L series lenses that could match the image quality in a lighter, faster, more versatile, and overall less expensive package.
No, 3D can not replace reality at the moment, but neither could digital replace film at one point.
Note: I am not equating digital photography with 3D art in any way save the similarity of discussion.
Note 2: The first 5D couldn't match or exceed medium format, the latest can.
Whenever I saw a big fight scene in any of the recent Marvel movies, I thought to myself, "They are now going into 3D mode."
The CGI always took me out of the story, without fail. I don't like the loud annoying CGI stuff.
Rocket or Groot being relatable to the other characters? Much more entertaining than fake Captain America throwing a fake shield in a perfectly fake way.
...
There are more emotional Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli movies, but they don't tackle the same subject material as Disney. In that way, Pixar is maybe closer to Ghibli than Disney, although the techniques are more Disney than Ghibli.
It's not like Totoro is trying to take over the known world, like Scar. He's a big, fluffy forest spirit.
The kids watched From Up on Poppy Hill and Ponyo FAR more times than we watched Wall-E, Incredibles, and even Tangled. We are more of a Ghibli household.
...
And Jar Jar. Yes, we all know Darth Jar was the one who was the puppetmaster behind Darth Sidious.
Darth Jar is the one who ended the Senate!
Jar Jar... a well-executed 3D character, but a bad idea nonetheless.
...exactly, and I used a base pose that I modified as best as I could. I used to work with comic art (have all the Hogarth Dynamic Anatomy/Drawing books) and some exaggeration, as in hand drawn animation, is essential to get a feeling of dynamic movement and flow. 3D rigging tends to impose limits, which if exceeded, can cause unwanted and unsightly distortion that isn't an issue in drawing as you aren't dealing with a mesh of polygons that need to be stretched and squashed. To get that more smooth "dynamic" exaggerated curve in the drawing would require additional bones in the abdomen and chest area as well as a more heavily subdivided mesh (distortions in the mesh also often translate to clothing because of the fitting system and texture mapping used). Posing with the arms up (particularly straight up) still has some distortion, particularly in the lats region.
Granted, 3D rigging has improved since the Gen3 days, but there is still a ways to go.
...I still use and old Ricoh 35mm SLR. Still takes great photos.Yeah, film is harder to find. While my number 1 favourite film Kodachrome is gone, Ektacrome my second choice, has come back, not only in 35mm but 120 and larger formats.
Oh, this stinks, I can't keep up with this conversation and I think I got lost somewhere....
But... to Outrider42, who said:
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.
I think we are already at the point they are trying to reboot the franchise and not keep the old around. They KILLED all the original characters and made a new movie with them in it - and gave them zero scenes to work through, terrible arcs for their lives and, to be honest, pretty much trampled on all that "fans still care about the old characters" stuff. You still care, I still care, but Hollywood does not. So instead of a digital Han Solo, they went with a different live actor. That is what they want to replace old actors with, not CGI.
Movies are now filmed in 6 months and spend a year and a half in post- adding all the CGI.
Replaced or in place of...?
If a house chooses to use CGI instead of actors, then that will be replace....
Has that already happened? Who knows.
Would I prefer one over the other?
Really depends on the CGI quality.
What else.
Not only that, they got the wrong guy too.
Haha, yeah apparently=)
Disney; Pixar and co have a few more tools for manipulating the mesh, but most other software has its limitations. The poses that I did in Maya were much more stifff than the ones I did in handdrawn animation. I usually would thumbnail my poses on paper and then find out they were impossible to recreate with the rig. And Poser and Studio are a lot more limited than Maya.
..and those tools are likely proprietary to their companies. As I've mentioned elsewhere, Pixar even built a custom system and wrote their own software to just create and animate Merdia's hair in Brave.
I learned photography with a 120mm double-lens reflex. Still have that and a couple of Konica 35 mm SLRs. Sad that Kodachrome is gone. On my last trip, instead of using my Fuji digital, I used my IPAD 3 for most outdoor shots, because of the higher dynamic range. I was astonished how well the shots turned out.
I ended up incorporating one of the beach shots as a base and backdrop, and as an IBL light, in a render, adding a single character (a girl walking down the beach) with a shadow catcher. Lot of people I showed it to thought it was a photo...They had trouble accepting the fact that she was a 3d image...."but you can see her shadow there on the water!"...
WETA uses propiatory stuff too
there is no question actually that the convincing CGI will be something a home user could whip up in a hurry even with high end Autodesk etc software suites, that is way off
but with neural networks, machine learning, servers of stacks of Nvidia high end cards it is certainly coming to a production house soon
Basically you want to pose a flesh-and-blood felxible human, but what you get to work with is a slightly improved Barbie doll that only bends at the joints.
...yep.
...yeah I've been watching that development. Summit has 4,608 nodes each with 6 Volta Tesla 32 GB GPUs (with 640 tensor cores each) on an NVLink motherboard with dial IBM Power9 22 Core CPUs yielding up to 200 petaflops per second performance.
I went to the last Avengers movie some months ago. Lots of CGI, lots of super hero nonsense, nice movie. People laughed, people cried, people jeered. This 'soulles' CGI was apparently touching people. Not for you? That maybe, but I am very skeptical about 'it used to be better' claims.
Lizards with spikes and plates glued on to them was definitely not better
and you often saw the wires and the foam plastic and paper mache rocks never fell quite right
The CGI was good and bad in Avengers. When it comes down to characters interacting? That was fun. Rocket, Groot, just talking with other people - that was good.
Or the Hulk in the previous Thor movie - it was fun. It was CGI, but it had to be done because there is no such thing as a talking racoon or "I am Groot"..
Big explosion time? When I see a fake Captain America or Black Widow doing obvious CGI flipping around the CGI explosions, then it took me out of the scene. It was CGI for CGI's sake, not for the characters' sake.
I think that's the issue with spinny, flippy ninja Yoda as well. It was caricature more than the "real" Yoda, to the point where the stylized Clone War cartoon Yoda felt less of a CGI monster than the "epic" ninja movie Yoda. It didn't feel consistent. It felt manipulative of the audience IMO. I like CGI stuff, which is why I'm here at the Daz site. I didn't care much for Avengers, although it's mostly a writing thing (like Jar Jar Binks).
they thought the automobile would never replace the horse and buggy too
Ehhhh.... They still had the real Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, etc do the acting, didn't they? Nobody here is opposed to doing the FX and alien creatures in CGI...
(Haven't seen Endgame yet, but many of the other MCU films - some I actually liked - and even worked at a studio that did FX-shots for those movies. The shot where a digital Nick Fury is almost crushed in his car by some machine in Winter Soldier was partly created at the workstations next to mine, and a shot where Iron Man is massaging Pepper's shoulders in Iron Man 3 was animated at the workstation behind me. Lots of tedious tracking, and I was happy to be working on my 2D-show...)
,
Praktina FX w/35, 50 and 75mm lenses for me. That was a great system, in it's day. Then Miranda with it's excellent Soligor lenses, then Canon and Mamiya.
The most important thing I inadvertently learned in high school with my Praktina when the other kids in photography club had Nikons and such was that at the end, it's not the equipment, it's the person using it.
The lasest technology may make things faster or easier, but knowing how to get the most out of it is the key to the final result.
I don't understand this. Couldn't you create morphs or blendshapes or whatever it's called in the software and bend or shape the figure however you want for an animation?
You get what you get. What I got were rigs on the central server, we used references of that. Modelers would keep changing the rig when needed, whenever you reloaded the scene, you would always work with the latest update. We had several animators working on the same character. It was not up to the animators to create new blendshapes. We could ask for changes made to the rig, sometimes we would get them, sometimes not. It's been a while since I animated in Maya, I hope the rigs got a bit better. But especially the torso and shoulder sections would be way too stiff to do strong lines of action. You'd need a freely bendable spline for that. I was already happy to have a rotating hip that left the upper body where it was. (Otherwise doing walks would have been hell on earth)
I think it was also a question of hardware limits. We usually did the broad animation with lores rigs, and switched to the hires versions only when going into detail. Made scrolling through the timeline an ordeal. They tried to keep the rigs as light as possible. Doing a single pose is not that much of a burden for the hardware. Animating with loads of keys; that's another story. Especially in multi character setups.
I saw somebody do a nice elephant rig a few years later, That one had muscles under a loose skin and rigid bones. Must have been a lot of work to animate that. The GOT dragon rigs must have been perfection. The Tarkin and Leia rigs from Rogue One... well, not so much....
Holy Neuromancer, Batman! That's 0.2 Exoflop! At this rate, we will be able to send a detailed screenplay to the cluster, and go have lunch until "Avengers 27: The Return of Mecha Squirrel Girl" is done....
And look how well that plan went, Solo flopped so hard that Disney killed off most of their other projects. The film was not even that bad, but it was generally not what fans wanted. Maybe having some new guy who is nothing like Harrison Ford wasn't such a good idea? They can't do a full movie with a CG lead actor...yet.
And if Disney keeps going down this path, they will manage to utterly ruin one of the most profitable franchises of all time.
Welcome to being 55. This what every generation goes through, it is nothing new. Hollywood has ALWAYS treasured that 18-35 demographic, and you are simply not in that group anymore. People your age do not go to movies that often (see below for data proving this). They are starting to look at the 50+ crowd a little, that is partly why so many reboots of old franchises are happening.
And remember what I said about Hollywood stars not being as big as they used to be? Here is some information and data to look over.
"Another data point that strengthens the case for studios to sink hundreds of millions into just a few films a year is that, increasingly, Americans are only going to a few films a year. In the 1940s, nearly 80 percent of households went to the movies each week. Today, scarcely 5 percent do. Studios have to build a new audience each weekend for their releases with ad campaigns that can cost as much as $100 million. You can't do that more than a handful of times a year."
This chart demonstrates the sharp drop in movie attendance by age.
The quote and these 2 graphs come from here: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/the-6-graphs-you-need-to-see-to-understand-the-economics-of-awful-blockbuster-movies/277691/
So its kind of like when people ask the question of why the Daz store always sells female items and a lot of skimpy outfits. Because that is what sells. And young people are who go out to theaters, so it is only logical that movies are going to cater to them. That is why you see so many kids movies these days.
And the kids love the CG movies.
Another part of that article talks about the international market playing a huge role as well. Movies are often not made just for America, they are made for a global audience. The problem with that though is that foreign markets might not understand everything that goes on. But they do understand explosions. So that can play a role in dumbing down the plot or dialog.
Here is another article that argues that star power in Hollywood is largely a myth. https://www.worth.com/why-hollywoods-star-centric-revenue-model-doesnt-work/ There is a paper that this article is based on, but I do not have an account to access it (link ito the source paper is in the article if you guys wish to try it.) And I agree. What proof do we actually have that star power truly makes or breaks a movie? A movie with a huge star is just as capable of flopping as it would without a big star. Some movies are just plain bad.
And last, have you guys heard of ZAO? This a Chinese Apple app that allows the user to place their face onto any number of footage stock. It is deepfake technology, not CG, but you could use this to cast your face over a video game scene as well, or Daz. I imagine you could cast Victoria 8 over the footage as well. It is currently exclusive to the Chinese market (it even requires a Chinese phone number.) However, the results are crazy, especially when you consider these are being created by a mobile processor, not a super computer, and in only seconds. https://twitter.com/i/status/1168049059413643265
...I used to get great photos with an old box camera. Loved that big format Kodachrome 620. Always wanted to get one of those press cameras with that lovely 4" x 5" negative like the newspaper and magazine photographers used.
Star power may not make a movie (with some exceptions surely, looking at you Dwayne Johnson), but it's one component in the marketing machine that is important like any other. It is harder to market new actors, especially in lead roles. Was the script so bad that all stars turned it down? Is it such a crappy production that they couldn't pay enough money to get a star, aka B or C movie? These are valid reactions, as often times this is actually the case with movies that have unkown people in it. Previously successful actors can also fall from grace and find themselves in this category. Nicholas Cage anyone? Brilliant actor, but if a new movie comes along with him as lead, the sad truth is that it has a way higher chance to be completely BS than a movie with DiCaprio in it.