Miyazaki Tribute(blender.org) |
Miyazaki Tribute(blender.org) |
Whoever made this tribute, you have my salute: The 3D CG, while quite obvious, blends very well with the rotoscoped animation, something that doesn't always happen (just look at some of Cowboy Bebop). It also captures the feel of Ghibli's animation amazingly well.
I salute the animator, and I also, of course, salute Hayao Miyazaki: Farewell, and may your legacy live on.
Er… he's not dead, and was only semi-retired. Semi-retired because he's been working on a Ghibli short of an old idea of his (Kemushi no Boro)[0] and "was" because last Sunday in an NHK special he announced he'd started working on a new feature film[1].
[0] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-07-10/hayao-miyaza...
[1] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-11-13/hayao-miyaza...
And if that's your only exposure to anime then you should at the very least checkout Satoshi Kon's masterpiece Paprika.
But my favorites will always be Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, and Whisper of the Heart. They may not be Miyzaki at his best, but they were the films that I loved the most.
The Wind Rises may also join the latter category. Either way, it's a really good film.
Finally, it should be noted that Kaze Ni Naru from The Cat Returns is possibly one of my favorite songs from any anime, ever. And I watch a lot of anime.
Suffice to say it's up on the list with A Cruel Angel's Thesis, and Tank. For you anime fans who know what that means, yes, it's that good, IMHO. YMMV.
I was under the impression that the accusations of rotoscoping in Cowboy Bebop were just rumor and that a number of industry professionals had come out and said that "no, this is just how Hiroyuki Okiura draws".
That said, I can't find evidence either way at the moment, so I could certainly be wrong.
Or as well as the CG integrated in SeaQuest (anyone else remember SeaQuest?)
I don't get the hate for Blender. It can use RenderMan, it supports Python scripting. It's just different from what people are used to.
It's probably just this. You have the same with Vim and Emacs, and tiling window managers - they're different from what people are commonly used to, therefore hated. Even though the paradigms employed in those applications make you many times more efficient in using them.
It seems that a lot of people - even many professionals - have allergy for learning. They feel they've learned enough when they first discovered how to operate computer (yes, every single one of us had to learn that at some point), and they hate being forced to learn further, regardless of how much benefits it brings.
IMO Blender is still worse than Maya (but not by that much), although Maya is also substantially worse than Photoshop -- to make a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
I was excited to see that Miyazaki is making one more movie: http://www.dailydot.com/parsec/hayao-miyazaki-one-last-movie...
Miyazaki is of the few really original thinkers in movies. A Pixar employee once mentioned that when they get totally stuck and need an idea, they screen a Miyazaki movie for inspiration.
I've played around with Blender, and this seems like it would take months of effort. But for a professional with a decent workflow and total knowledge of the tool, how long did it actually take?
This is unrelated. I recently went and watched Markoto Shinkai's latest film : Kimi no Na wa. (Your Name.). Like his previous works, it's extraordinary. I encourage everyone to give it a try.
While Markoto Shinkai won't be Miyazaki, his work are pretty good and he's still very young so I really hope to see him making great ones like Miyazaki.
Though we lost him too young, Kon Satoshi was able to reach the level of extraordinary several times. "Every Frame a Painting" covered his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz49vQwSoTE
Also, minor nitpick, it's Makoto, not Markoto.
I feel like there is a cool machine learning project in here.
The most important thing in these masks are clean edges (and the "auto stuff" usually isn't). A rough mask (called a garbage matte) is good enough in some cases, but most often it's the first step and a clean matte is created by hand using multiple techniques; playing with contrast, playing with color/chroma (bluescreen), and hand animating curves or painting (rotoscoping).
If that is indeed a representation of the quality of results, it's clearly got a very long way to go before it's actually useful for rotoscoping. I suppose it could be useful for automating garbage mattes, but those are pretty easy to do anyway.
(Strictly speaking it's a Cycles showreel but presumably everything there will have been created in Blender as Cycles is Blender's rendering engine).
And what a nice rendering!
I have zero experience in this space but this bit caught my attention. If I'm understanding this correctly, he is saying that the production render of a single frame would take anywhere from 4 to 15 minutes PER FRAME?
If that's the case, the fact that the video is around 200 seconds long would imply that the lower-bound estimate of the time it would have taken to produce the final render of this is around 320hrs assuming 24fps. That's two weeks. I can't imagine the artist actually had to wait two weeks to render his product -- what am I missing?
You're not missing anything :) I worked briefly in the special effects industry[0] and it takes a long time to render stuff. Monsters University took 29 hours to render a frame[1] and they had a whole server farm.
[0] There's an old joke that everyone in LA works in the 'biz' at least once.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/the-making-of-pixars-lates...
And that was part of my question too: Given the rendering time faced by dono, would someone like he have access to technology to distribute this over a few machines/in the cloud or is that something that just big studios have the capacity to do?
I am glad to see he is still with us. And nice work.
More details here: http://www.fathomevents.com/event/spirited-away/more-info/th...
Except in the latter case they clearly played it from DVD, interlaced even! At first I was like "I can't watch this!" but after 3 minutes I was so captivated I didn't even notice anymore!
What would be the best, non-obvious, perhaps non-googlable, path?
That should at least get you through the basics. From there... I don't know.
[0]: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/hayao-miyazaki-latest-film-cg...
See: https://web.archive.org/web/20080215205807/http://www.pixar....
Slide #13
"For the next year at least, Blender is going to have 10 additional full-time paid developers. Some of those developers will be paid by the Blender Foundation or Blender Institute, sponsored with contributions from AMD, Aleph Objects, and the Nimble Collective.
More importantly, developers are being hired by production studios that use Blender, such as Tangent Animation and MAD Entertainment. These developers work on Blender for in-house productions, but their changes get submitted as patches for the version of Blender that we all get to use. This is a far more sustainable development model than sponsored grants and has been incredibly successful in other open source communities. It's only now starting to catch on in the realm of open source creative tools."
Also, if anybody says that Kids' Anime is never good (and they've seen kids' anime that's semi-decent (Naruto, etc, and not just Pokémon)), Digimon Tamers.
First his next film won't be released for something like 4 or 5 years he's only just started working on it, so it's a terrible time to give him a sendoff.
Second The Wind Rises was already supposed to be his last film and see how that turned out.
Miyazaki is the kind of people you send off at their funeral and no sooner.
Is it no longer the case?
After all we've seen from Autodesk (buying out and discontinuing the competition and forcing the customers to migrate to subscription licenses) I think it's unwise to ignore Blender if you are serious about 3D.
http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/53bca41869bedd8b0d0...
Who else used to get a hard-on from seeing the footage of jurassic park animations in Softimage? I remember building up a machine with a Glint card back in the late 90s just to be able to fire up Softimage..
Also, if your Hacker News activity is any representative proxy, you seem like a pretty cool person [0] in general [1]; I would hope to talk with you some thread, should a suitable post of common interest be submitted.
[0] That is, possessing similar affinities to me.
[1] I hope you will not begrudge such a public declaration, but I do not know of any of your more direct means of contact.
Although, if you think I'm cool, you should probably know that I'm a highschooler, not somebody actually working in the industry.
I don't know if you care, or if that changes your opinion, but it felt like a relevant disclaimer to put beneath anybody saying really nice things about me based on my online presence.
Also, mentioned in GP, Cat's return is not a Miyazaki either.
And I call myself a Miyazaki fan.
Jeez.
Switch from Java and C# to more flexible and dynamic space, and suddenly, IDEs give you nothing over Vim and Emacs[1]. There you can finally feel the efficiency of a properly internally integrated text editor. I could elaborate much more on this, but in the interest of brevity I'll just mention magit[2] in Emacs as an example. This is probably the single best integration of Git with a development tool. You get to use 90% of git (!) with simple shortcuts and no modal popups to stop your flow (+100 efficiency). I can prepare, review and commit my code in it in the same time it takes IntelliJ to load the version control popup. And I get to use all of the superadvanced text editing and navigation features throughout the entire tool.
It's little things like this - extremely powerful editing and navigation, tight internal integration of everything, that makes Vim and Emacs so powerful and worth going over the learning curve.
--
[0] - As for why this isn't backintegrated into Vim and Emacs so well, my understanding is that intellisense and semantic refactoring engines are huge piles of complicated code that don't fit the architectures of Vim / Emacs code well and need to be done as external application. Languages that benefit from those features are few and - while popular on the job market - not exactly liked or respected among the hacker crowd. So there's little incentive in making projects like ENSIME actually 100% feature-complete or even easy to set up.
[1] - But they still lag and consume insane amount of RAM and CPU power.
[2] - https://github.com/magit/magit best to look for screenshots to really see just how much tooling it packs inside.
Every time somebody reinvents the wheel, to save a click- and breaks my workflow, that might seem very reasonable for those who either have lots of money/time - and or already did that investment.
Well, i dont, i have things to create, places to be. If you re-invent a scissor, that only trained experts can use, because its basically two razor-blades taped to the thumb and forefinger- you accomplished all you have dreamed off. You reduced weight, you allowed for more precise use - and the likes of me will still call you out for missing the obvious.
PS: The Miyazaki tribute is absolutely gorgeous. Im not trying to claim, that blender cant be a excellent tool once you have sunken the cost. Its just that retraining for absolutely no reason..
That may be one of the causes, but the allergy I talk about is internalized myopia. Time is limited, yes, but it's worth to sacrifice some of it for learning in order to significantly improve your efficiency at using the rest of the time.
> If you re-invent a scissor, that only trained experts can use, because its basically two razor-blades taped to the thumb and forefinger- you accomplished all you have dreamed off. You reduced weight, you allowed for more precise use - and the likes of me will still call you out for missing the obvious.
And I'll still be calling you misguided, if such scissors after few days of training will allow those "trained experts" to outperform regular scissor-wielders by factor of 2. Or even factor of 1.2 - it'll pay for itself pretty quickly.
This approach that every tool should be made for the lowest common denominator, so that people can master them in 5 seconds of use, is IMO stupid. I understand that software designed by that may sell better, but for the tools professionals choose themselves - do people really think they've learned everything humans can learn the moment they leave high school?
Where are all those Softimage professionals now? Crying in a bar, presumably, if they didn't commit to learning other tools.
Your arrogant attitude implies your tools are better, that they will always be better, that there's never a reason to waste time learning other tools. Maybe that works for you, but for many other people they have to swing from one package to another simply to keep a job.
This isn't rich kids with too much time on their hands, rather the opposite: People who's employment isn't guaranteed and they need to be prepared in case opportunity comes along.
Having different demands on tools for non-programmers, seems eh, reasonable?
You can type in Vim all you want, but the day you will try to introduce it company wide - you will meet some people you never knew and you are going to have the same discussion you did have here, and as reason does not seem compelling enough, i guess they will use hierarchy to cling "for no apparent reason, but plain stupidity and unwillingness to learn" to Microsoft products.
Here we are again, on the cultural san andreas fault- preventing open source from ever becoming successful. Sad Panda.
Depends. I'm not expecting 3D artists to write a lot of Python (though it wouldn't hurt them at all). But what makes Emacs and Vim so powerful actually does translate pretty well to other domains (like 3D - hence, Blender). We're talking about efficient workflow. Something that makes the learning curve steeper in exchange of giving you a set of operations you can execute as quickly as humanly possible, and mix and mash together just the way you like. The end result is, after going through the learning (which is exactly the point at which people give up and go complaining), you end up thinking in the tool and focusing your mind on what you want to create instead of fighting the UI.
Unwillingness to learn is the real problem here, and it's mostly a psychological one. It's not about Open Source. I'd never recommend Emacs to Java developers because there are better tools for this niche, but I've seen the overwhelming resistance about e.g. switching to IntelliJ because "Eclipse is good enough", that's only overcome when a socially popular cow-orker does the switch and shows all the cool stuff he's now doing. It's silly to watch how the same people who so strongly complained about unnecessary learning suddenly find the time and will to do that learning, just to do the same thing the popular friend did.
So I guess the way to make powerful tools more popular is to make learning sexy (and expected!) again. Which is something the current web and mobile industry is definitely not helping with. :/.
I have never seen actual professional software that included this first stage.
In my opinion, people associate cost with value. Something that's free MUST be worse than something that costs thousands of dollars.
The 20 grand per seat price tag doesn't help much either
Autodesk makes a mountain of money off of this stuff.
If you don't want to be a "Renaissance level expert at everything" then either give up on 3D or stay narrowly focused on one aspect of the pipeline and learn that well.
Blender doesn't fall short in either department. It's just different. Get over it.
This is just as bad as Max people whinging about Maya being stupid, broken, and useless.
And its not a hour, even if you know other solutions. I guess in this sort of discussion, that is considered a defeat of the "opponent" - winning by him/her admitting in anecdata that he/she is stupid enough to take this or that longer to learn. Unfortunately feeling smart , doesn't help the cause of open source one iota.
I always wondered, why some people get full zealot for open source? Does explaining the problems away, instead of building a user-friendly OS/ 3D editing Software, supplies some sort of elitist "invites only Treehouse" kick?
The down-side is that most people don't appreciate this, instead they just bitch about right click to select and give up.
That said, a lesson often forgotten (or perhaps never acquired in the first place) is that learning requires some minimum structure, discipline and focus. To give you an example - I've been shying away from learning Paredit for about two or three years of my Lisp coding experience. Then one day I decided, "fuck it", I'm taking time to focus on learning it. It only took two pomodoros - literally less than an hour, and yes, I timed it - of reviewing the documentation and practicing (I took a big function, stripped the structure out with M-x replace-str to remove all parens, and then restored the structure using only Paredit operations) to become pretty proficient in the mode, and now I'm that much faster in working on Lisp code.
I've repeated this experience several times in various places - it's surprising just how much you can learn in an hour if you actually focus on it. Sometimes you have to invent your own exercises, but then again, maybe you have to learn how to learn first :). And yes, I do explicitly schedule time for "learning how to learn" in areas I'm not very familiar with, in order to make the actual learning more efficient :).
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As for getting full zealot for open source - I do agree it's an existing phenomenon. But at least in my arguments for Blender and Emacs, be sure it's not open source zealotry. I'll argue just as strong for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and against OpenOffice. The latter just sucks, in a death-from-thousand-papercuts way. So does Linux as a desktop for non-tech people. Open Source seems to be a negative predictor for quality for tools that are a) above some level of complexity, and b) not for developers.
Still, my primary argument is - a powerful tool will necessarily have a learning curve; the longer and steeper the more powerful a tool is. You can try and make this curve easier to traverse, but ultimately you can't flatten it in any other way than by making the tool less powerful and less useful.
Or don't and just bitch about elitism. Up to you!
Like it or not, i fight for the users! Better to bitch about things that could change- then instead of bitching about ignorant users not adapting to once comandline User Interface for Ecell . Because you wont train everyone into a coder.
Do you still crawl around on all fours or did you ever take the time to learn to walk?
3D is hard. It's like learning to fly an aircraft in terms of complexity and no amount of UI tinkering will ever change that.
https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=9...
Really?
https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=9...
I got into 3ds Max after one day.
https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?id=9695
And now i just do things.
https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=9...
You know whats hard? Introspection. Hearing that your tool suck, and admitting they are right. The game i dev on sucks at the moment. And, if you said that, with specific advice on how to improve- you would get a thank you.
https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=8...
Autodesk is horrific expensive. Do you think working a month a year for them, is fun?
https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=8...
I contribute to open source- and thus i claim the right to criticize something that is botched. Deal with it. Trying all the angles, are we? If you are a beginner, you do not have enough experience to criticize the subject. If you are a expert, you are too dumb. If you are a coder and are fluent with the likes of emacs and vim - and dislike the gui, you are a evil cooperate guy. If you persist after that, you are bitching, as in arguing to argue.
Such a thing as critical love, wanting to see something flourish - is not possible.
The blindness of the likes of you - allows a whole industry of UX-Designers to exist. There i said it. People must get paid to work with the UX that get crafted by some programers into those "professional" tools.
