Forum - View topicAnswerman - Where Have All The Mechanical Designers Gone?
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Kikaioh
 Posts: 1205 Location: Antarctica |
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My biggest issue with CG animation is that it's usually very noticeable, and by virtue of being able to notice it, the immersion gets ruined for me. Maintaining a consistent look and feel for all of the moving parts in a show really helps to draw you in.
There's also something to be said of the pure wonder you get from seeing the fantastic craftsmanship and technical skill needed to believably render a mechanical design using only hand-drawn imagery. The incredible knowledge of motion, physics, perspective and weight on display in a complex animated piece can be a real delight to behold. There's just not as much magic with CG animation when you know that a computer is handling a lot of the heavy lifting. Speaking of great hand-drawn mechanical scenes: https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/8312 https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/6808 https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/36826 https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/11182 https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/13631 https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/13457 https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/4427 https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/9205 And of course https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/8931
My friends and I sort of suspected the same thing as well --- talented artists have less of a reason to go into animation when videogames are a more financially viable occupation. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6043 |
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That sounds like it's less to blame on the CG and more on people being rather.....petty, I mean I've dropped shows due to lack of interest or something else but never because of one particular scene in one episode. |
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Philmister978
Posts: 313 |
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A large part of how that and Yowamushi managed to make it work is that the CGI and composites were overseen by the same studio -Asahi Pro- thus giving them more control as to how to meld them together than if they farmed the CGI elsewhere from the composite studio. That said, I miss seeing 2D mechanical animation, but let's be honest here- most series these days probably don't have the time to hire the animators that can do good mech/vehicle animation. So it's either do it in CG or just don't do it at all unless they really have to. |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5405 |
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Kikaioh
Posts: 1205 Location: Antarctica |
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To be doubly fair, OVA series were a big part of the scene back in the day too, which I think gave more opportunities in non-franchise works for ambitious mechanical animation relative to the overall runtime (I think they were generally more open to it back then too, since the animation itself might be the draw for buying an OVA in the first place). And it probably helped the craft that CG was non-existent or too expensive back in those days, since it would have given hand-drawn animators a broader and more frequent range of experience across an array of different vehicles. I often find that modern animation feels more like the work of illustrators than animators, and even in the better instances, often conveniently emphasizes "floaty" impact in lieu of more technically challenging mechanics or realistic physics. |
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MarshalBanana
Posts: 5405 |
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There's a great video on YouTube that partly covers floaty animation in Anime vs realistic animation(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvx7p6-lABw) The reason why they are mostly floaty, outside of I assume them wanting them to be that way, seems to be because Anime is all about key-frames, with in-betweens being there too smooth them out. I suppose it must of started out that way, when I watched the original Osomatsu, there wasn't even any in-between animation, characters just clicked from one key-frame to another. And as a result there are only a handful of animators; Toshiyuki Inoue(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH2JRtpOqaM), Hiroyuki Okiura(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv4grHvq7E8) and Mitsuo Iso(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iounOj1VRUU) |
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5539 |
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Have ya'll seen the latest Full Metal Panic IV stuff? Very jarring/off-putting CGI. Not awful, but in contrast to the rest of the show, it doesn't look like it's from the same show at all. It's pretty bad in that regard. Basically killed all my hype for a show I've wanted for over a decade.
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Kougeru
Posts: 5539 |
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BodaciousSpacePirate was either being nice, or just forgot, but it actually occurred for multiple episodes, in many scenes. It wasn't an isolated incident for that show. Still a shame since Alice & Zouroku was overall a good show. |
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1117 Location: Puget Sound |
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(Disclaimer: I did in fact watch Alicezou to completion.) I disagree. Strongly. If an episode shows me something that makes my eyes bleed in the first ep (bad CGI, excessive fanservice, whatever) - how am I to know there's not more of that coming in future episodes? And in Alicezou's case, that bad CGI (not just the cars, but the chains and other manifestations of the Alice's powers) went on for several minutes IIRC. And if bad CGI turns people off, they were right to drop after the first ep, because it was a on again off again problem throughout the series. The first ep sets the tone... And if things are wrong in the first ep, betting that they aren't going to get any better is just betting the odds because they usually don't. |
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Deacon Blues
Posts: 391 Location: Albuquerque, NM |
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I find it amusing he cites designer Makoto Kobayashi as being hyper detailed when a lot of his older stuff that appeared in B-CLUB and what not was "realistic" to the point of having almost no detail. A lot of his designs almost looked like they were drawn with a single line, leaving off various facets of Mecha he was doodling.
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I_Drive_DSM
 Posts: 217 |
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If you want a - what I believe to be - good example of changes in mechanical designs the anime series Future GPX Cyber Formula is a good example. It's an older series that first started in the early 90s made by Sunrise (a lot of the VAs from like Gundam Seed and such got their start there) that had one TV series and four OVA series'. It saw a good deal of success in Asia but not in North America (we did get one of the Super Famicom games in the US, that was re-titled 'CyberSpin' on the SNES).
The first season, a 37 episode TV series, played itself as a modern Speed Racer type show and it's budget for TV really shows. There is a lot of jaggedness in the cars, quirky animation between cels, and liberties taken to show variances like cars disappearing in the distance and the like. As the TV series did not carry itself with the same seriousness as the later OVAs it's animation issues are really apparent in some of the vehicular hi-jinks that are played. For the second & third seasons - the first & second OVA series - the series switched to be more focused on the racing aspects. It received a higher degree of animation quality, and as it was more racing focused there were still some tricks played at points such as re-using cels for particular scenes in later episodes. For the fourth & fifth seasons the animation style changed again and the budget for the series increased. In these two series the mechanical designs are slightly better than before in that the animators did not have to utilizing moving the background against the animation cels as much to create the sense of speed. There is also more of a sense of movement between two sets of cels (cars) against one another, rather than having them move at the same speed or reliant on the background. A more key issue with the series in regards to mechanical designs is the cars' change themselves aerodynamically throughout the race(s), so not only did movement of the cars have to be animated but also often dynamic changes in the cars. In a way it's akin to watching mecha in space but instead it's cars on a track. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4622 |
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I think this question is particularly timely with the Legend of the Galactic Heroes reboot. All other respective merits aside, and as much as I knew it was coming, seeing the promo videos of those fleet battles rendered in CG almost made me weep. I know full well the skill involved in 3D modeling: I'm part of a gaming community with a robust modding scene, and I know a lot of people who can craft incredible spaceship models. But when I think of the sheer ridiculous effort that went into drawing entire fleets of ships by hand, having the camera pan over and around them while keeping them (mostly) on-model, it boggles my mind. Compare that to a shot where you can literally copy and paste the same ship model as needed, and direct the camera movement with a single click of the mouse. And there are literally hundreds of other series that have featured dazzling mechanical animation, from Macross Plus's dizzying aerial dogfights to Evangelion's meticulous launch sequences to Gurren Lagann's rapid-fire freeform mecha action. I know time marches on, but there's something very real and valuable that's largely been lost.
And all of that isn't to say that I don't appreciate good CG work. Even more than a decade ago, GITS: Stand-Alone Complex did a fantastic job of integrating 3D Tachikomas and cars with the rest of the traditional animation. Right now I'm working my way through Land of the Lustrous, a staggeringly beautiful fully-CG series that really exemplifies what anime creators can do with the format. And then there's the flipside, largely personified by good ol' Gonzo. Anyone remember Trinity Blood? *shudder* |
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SayuriUliana
Posts: 34 |
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I somehow feel like the article mixed up "Mechanical Designers" and "Animators". They're two different things AFAIK, with the Mecha Designers being the one who draws up the designs and aesthetics of mechanical objects in the show, while the Animators are the ones who actually make said designs move. Mecha designers can actually be even more involved in 3-D animation because they're the ones who make sure that the machines being animated not only look good, but are also mechanically consistent. To my knowledge, most mecha designers never really get to be in charge of animation for most shows, they just draw up the designs and it's up to the animators to do the rest of the work. There are mecha designers that are also animators or animation directors like Masami Obari, but usually they're either one or the other, but never both designing and animating at the same time (as an example, while Obari was involved in Gundam Build Fighters as an animator, he did not contribute to mecha design there).
Mecha Designers don't even have to work on shows involving large humanoid mecha to work: mecha design is essential for creating the design of vehicles, weapons, devices and various other machinery you can find in a story. For an example, this season's Legend of Galactic Heroes remake doesn't have giant robots.... but they do have spaceships modeled in 3D CGI, and guess who are the ones who drew up said designs? Mecha designers of course. Hell, this site alone lists three of them for said show under the Mechanical Design section: Atsushi Takeuchi, Shinji Usui, and Shinobu Tsuneki. As long as there are visually-told stories that require well-designed mechanical objects in them, mecha designers will always be important, whether in hand-drawn 2D or 3D CGI animation. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Regarding bicycle spokes, that reminds me of how the bicycles in The Triplets of Belleville were cel-shaded CG because Sylvain Chomet had so many problems getting them to look right with regular hand-drawn animation. I guess this is a common problem, and I wonder if it's the reason bicycles are so rarely seen in 2-D animation.
Oh, they definitely can. It just requires a lot more work. CG animators most definitely know the Seven Basic Principles of Animation, of which "Squash and Stretch" is one of them. You mainly see these in theatrical films and in video games though, as those are the media with the time and budget needed to make it look right. Nevertheless, Squash and Stretch was present in CG at least as early as Luxo Jr. (And this goes for Japanese output too, though with video games, it could only be mimicked, not replicated, due to the huge amount of CPU strain needed for it.)
Not quite--it's because mechanical objects are made of rigid metal, plastic, wood, and so forth, which don't bend and compress like softer, organic objects do. As a result, viewers are much more sensitive when they're drawn even slightly off-model. It has to be done just right for it viewers to accept it. You see something similar with signs when moving or carried about: These are also notoriously tough to animate in 2-D because the positioning of the letters and images on the signs must be perfect, or they'll appear to move around the sign as the sign is moving.
Though I don't know the exact production process for all of these shows (or any of them, for that matter), after some certain point in time, it became feasible to create quick and simple CG models of things and then draw frames over them--that is, they were essentially rotoscoping CG or using them as manikins. Think something like Max Headroom-quality graphics in which an animator traces over each frame. I wouldn't doubt there were some anime that did this, and Evangelion and Gurren Lagann would've been in the same time period in which this was fairly common in western animation. (Heck, they might've even done this for Outlaw Star and Cowboy Bebop.) |
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Wrangler
 Posts: 1346 |
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It's dying and changing art form. Hopefully some hand-art work continue, but can believe in Japan that the budgets they have and with overseas costs properly lower that they don't have enough people to do the detail work. Sad money dictates where this goes. They need keep costs down, they were underpaying it's artist as is now.
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