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NEWS: Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 3DCG Anime's Characters Designed by Birthday Wonderland's Ilya K

CGI isnt always bad.

I use to LOATHE cgi. (type like Ajin)

Then I watched a company who can do CGI correctly (knights of sidonia) and i actually went from "this is weird as F" to 4 episodes in loving the style.

I'm really really really hoping that given the statue of Ghost in the Shell, that Netflix and Production IG are making this a high budget ultra sleek looking CG anime.

Good CG is usually a combination of talent + time + money.

At bare minimum I would like something the quality of Appleseed Ex Machina.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijVo1pxtJZM

24 fps, no low 2D framerate animation on characters. Really nice rendering style.

Appleseed Ex Machina is the best mix of something that is great and could fit well enough for a high end quality TV series budget.

The style of Ex Machina would also go well with Ilya's style of character designs and colour.

I think the Appleseed films also used a combination of mo-cap and animation. Could work well here too.

CGI nowadays depends more on techniques and available tech than it does on talent, we now have plenty of good tools to create incredibly detailed models with little effort, so what we see on CGI anime nowadays is a simple lack of modernisation and sticking to old tech and methodologies. For one, most CGI anime want to use cellshaded and rimlit materials on everything, instead of going, as you said, with the Appleseed EX-Machina art-style, which, to be perfectly honest, is what most, if not all, normal anime use as backgrounds (I, for one, can't remember a single anime that uses 2 or 3 light/shadow cascades for backgrounds, only on characters).
They also don't seem to use raytracing (vray or whatever you want to use) even when they don't apply special shaders, giving the models an incredibly flat appearance, but it doesn't stop there, the models themselves, most of the time, are incredibly barebones in detail, to the point they seem low-poly assets with a couple of turbosmooths applied on them just to give them a more roundish appearance.
And then comes the texturing, in most cases being almost non-existent... they simply use basic material colors and maybe a tiled texture on certain things and call it a day, they feel like zero-effort works.

Still, as the word implies, animation isn't just about coloring, shading, lighting and modelling work, it's about movement. And oh boy, do most CGI anime suck at this, and not just a bit, they look sublimely terrible. It almost feels like the animators believe that lowering the FPS to the FPS anime uses is going to give them the same feeling, alas, that's just pure bs. Anime is a VFR medium, so leaving the model animations at 12 FPS and then recording it all at 24 FPS won't give CGI that apparently smooth movement normal hand-drawn animation has (this includes digitally drawn stuff, pen-tablets still use your hand to draw), it will simply give it a choppy feeling. But there's more, CGI models don't deform in CGI anime, they don't even try, while normal hand-drawn animation typically has incredibly deformed drawings to give that natural feeling of movement, they effectively replicate a sort of motion blur, or rather, image distortion caused by speed and what our eyes see.

Altogether, CGI anime is mostly VERY bad compared to normal anime, even compared with very mediocre shows (well, they won't get bad body proportions on certain shots), and this happens even when CGI production is far cheaper than traditional animation (as long as you have a good working pipeline, that is), and if that weren't enough, correcting something in CGI is far easier, animation and model work are mostly separate things, requiring minimum tweaking... it's quite sad that the animation industry hasn't made the switch yet, with only a couple of shows being good (Houseki no Kuni anyone?).

Technically, the art style is fabulous and cute. I like it, but, it feels way too cute for a serious theme like GITS.

meiam wrote:

Big departure but I don't dislike it... But it's gonna be CG so w/e, not like it matters how good the design look.

Yes it is a huge shame that they've decided to go this way, we will just have to wait until the next entry now. Do not know if we should blame the directors or Netflix.

Just because it’s in CG doesn’t automatically mean that the animation’s gonna turn out bad.

Have they announced a voice cast? I'm curious if they're going to fire everyone again like they did for Arise.

CGI isnt always bad.

I use to LOATHE cgi. (type like Ajin)

Then I watched a company who can do CGI correctly (knights of sidonia) and i actually went from "this is weird as F" to 4 episodes in loving the style.