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wolf10
Joined: 23 Jan 2016
Posts: 907
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Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2022 5:28 pm
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A lot of the weirdness in CGI anime comes from how fast and loose the classic "anime" visual style plays with perspective at different angles. In a 2D piece, it's generally up to the tweeners and the art director to keep faces looking consistent as they move between angles, requiring several distinct hand-drawn frames, but in 3D you're often stuck with a single mesh that will be rendered from different angles, and there are pretty much always going to be a few angles where it stops resembling the artwork it's based on.
You'd think the rise of anime-styled video games would be pushing the tech along at breakneck speeds, but most of them settle for the traditional approach of using a single model that ends up having a few really bad angles, in spite of this being such an old and well-known problem. Mega Man Legends 2 solved it way back when by using different animated facial textures for a few static angles. The only video game series I can think of to openly use the approach in this article is Ace Attorney, but they actively swap the models in real-time (you can sometimes spot the cut) rather than performing the deforms in real-time.
Another interesting approach I've seen precisely once was Nihon Falcom's Zwei II, which had a layer for facial parts inside the head mesh and used clever z-ordering to make it seem like it was layered on top, allowing for the distorted perspective present in super-deformed visuals to look correct even in rotating shots. That's another trick I haven't seen anywhere else, despite being so clever and (seemingly) cheap to implement.
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RoninX
Joined: 03 Aug 2016
Posts: 40
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Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2022 6:21 pm
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wolf10 wrote: | A lot of the weirdness in CGI anime comes from how fast and loose the classic "anime" visual style plays with perspective at different angles. In a 2D piece, it's generally up to the tweeners and the art director to keep faces looking consistent as they move between angles, requiring several distinct hand-drawn frames, but in 3D you're often stuck with a single mesh that will be rendered from different angles, and there are pretty much always going to be a few angles where it stops resembling the artwork it's based on.
You'd think the rise of anime-styled video games would be pushing the tech along at breakneck speeds, but most of them settle for the traditional approach of using a single model that ends up having a few really bad angles, in spite of this being such an old and well-known problem. Mega Man Legends 2 solved it way back when by using different animated facial textures for a few static angles. The only video game series I can think of to openly use the approach in this article is Ace Attorney, but they actively swap the models in real-time (you can sometimes spot the cut) rather than performing the deforms in real-time.
Another interesting approach I've seen precisely once was Nihon Falcom's Zwei II, which had a layer for facial parts inside the head mesh and used clever z-ordering to make it seem like it was layered on top, allowing for the distorted perspective present in super-deformed visuals to look correct even in rotating shots. That's another trick I haven't seen anywhere else, despite being so clever and (seemingly) cheap to implement. |
I believe Arc Systems (whoever models the guilt gear games) have also remodeled and adjusted for each frame of animation.
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Fluwm
Joined: 28 Jul 2009
Posts: 899
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Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2022 6:35 pm
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wolf10 wrote: | Another interesting approach I've seen precisely once was Nihon Falcom's Zwei II, which had a layer for facial parts inside the head mesh and used clever z-ordering to make it seem like it was layered on top, allowing for the distorted perspective present in super-deformed visuals to look correct even in rotating shots. That's another trick I haven't seen anywhere else, despite being so clever and (seemingly) cheap to implement. |
Always lovely to see Zwei II get some recognition!
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Covnam
Joined: 31 May 2005
Posts: 3703
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Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2022 6:44 pm
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Huh, I would have thought that if you have a model you could just move it or the camera around it. Didn't know you had to adjust the model depending on the angle. Interesting stuff
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omegafinal
Joined: 13 Jul 2005
Posts: 125
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Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2022 8:12 pm
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wolf10 wrote: | (There are some stuff I wanted to quote, cannot decide what to pick without it being a wall of text. But good examples and concerns was made there.) |
RoninX wrote: | I believe Arc Systems (whoever models the guilt gear games) have also remodeled and adjusted for each frame of animation. |
To kinda add on, Team Red (GGXrd's development team in ArcSys) did a lot of work that helped convince us that it is a 2D sprite game. Models do NOT run at a full 60FPS, every model has its own lighting setup, a lighting/shadow map (meaning if they want that part always in shadow, they can do that), etc. And this is an easy to miss detail, the models themselves are "flattened", like when you have May throw down her anchor on someone, the anchor will appear in "front" of your opponent, but once it goes 3D spinning that camera around for that final shot, the anchor would appear to go "through" your opponent.
And yes, they did mention model swapping in it, such as Milla's hair requiring it for a few moves. Would imagine May's special where she just wails on her opponent with her fists needed that too.
Above all, there is a difference between making an anime in 3D, and making a 3D animation with anime aesthetics. Choose one and stick with it.
I'll also recommend New Frame Plus's video on Guilty Gear Xrd and Dragonball FighterZ.
https://youtu.be/kZsboyfs-L4
And the video also recommends the GDC Talk by Guilty Gear Xrd's Art Director. Definitely recommended if you have the time to listen to it.
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DRosencraft
Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 666
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Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2022 11:02 pm
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Covnam wrote: | Huh, I would have thought that if you have a model you could just move it or the camera around it. Didn't know you had to adjust the model depending on the angle. Interesting stuff |
It's very counterintuitive. You would expect that, like looking at a person standing still in front of you, moving to look at them at a different angle wouldn't distort your vision of them to the point of being unrecognizable. But there's a lot going on. From the way that these programs calculate the renderings, to basic matters of viewer expectation of what a shot should look like as opposed to what it actually will look like in a life-like scenario, it's all together a more complex thing than many imagine. I remember the first time I spent an afternoon with my brother as he explained the way reflections work in cg, and why simply "mirroring" an image isn't near enough to cut it. As you said, it's interesting.
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MFrontier
Joined: 13 Apr 2014
Posts: 11795
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Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2022 3:21 pm
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Pretty neat!
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Dayraven
Joined: 21 Jul 2021
Posts: 176
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Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2022 5:35 am
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Quote: | A lot of the weirdness in CGI anime comes from how fast and loose the classic "anime" visual style plays with perspective at different angles. |
To take two very obvious examples, Astro Boy always having his hair-spikes at the side of his head no matter what angle he’s looking at, and Son Goku always having the same hair-silhouette ditto.
A western (but big in Japan) example — in the Peanuts strip, the characters have their eyes and nose drawn above their ears when facing forwards, but in a line when facing sideways.
And as the article shows, there are far more subtle things than those going on.
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whiskeyii
Joined: 29 May 2013
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Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2022 8:52 am
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Dayraven wrote: |
A western (but big in Japan) example — in the Peanuts strip, the characters have their eyes and nose drawn above their ears when facing forwards, but in a line when facing sideways.
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Funnily enough, in the Twitter replies, an animator who worked on the 3D Peanuts movie mentions they used the quick and dirty approach (i.e., not the automated scripted approach Beastars used but a headswapping technique instead) for their movie.
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omegafinal
Joined: 13 Jul 2005
Posts: 125
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Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2022 5:24 pm
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Here is a very interesting videogame example done in real time. One of the earliest I recall is in Epic Mickey on the Wii. You will always see Mickey's iconic ears silhouette, even if you are spinning the camera around him, you will see his ears as two circles on the left and right. Something I don't think Kingdom Hearts has done. (most likely due to art direction, it would've looked weird there.)
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enurtsol
Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 14796
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Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2022 11:01 pm
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Because many anime "animation tricks" don't work just by taking a 3D model and looking at it at a different angle
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