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Interview: revisions Producer Kazuya Ide

but having looked at the audiences here, I'm also confident that this will be accepted by the Western fans as well. I certainly hope so.

Well, that trailer certainly is something

(Movie trailer narrator voice)

"In a world of bad CGI people, everything goes to hell and bad CGI monsters attack!"

Nice of pink haired girl to show up, give her entire overly long title, then shoot.

i wonder what takes more time at this point as i know both are incredibly time consuming aspects of animation: Compositing 3D CG animation with higher framerates, or animating the clean and crisp hand-drawn animation of the more famous studios.

The CG isn't that bad in the trailer, but the lighting (or lack there of) is really jarring.

ufotable with their CG effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3R6cf6njz4
I'm not saying they should do everything like ufotable, but they should probably run through another pass to clean up the distinct discrepancy between their environment and the objects in it.

A good example is 2:45 where it's very noticeable that the background character moving is actually CG but less noticeable with "camera" tricks and multiple layers of compositing.

i wonder what takes more time at this point as i know both are incredibly time consuming aspects of animation: Compositing 3D CG animation with higher framerates, or animating the clean and crisp hand-drawn animation of the more famous studios.

The CG isn't that bad in the trailer, but the lighting (or lack there of) is really jarring.

ufotable with their CG effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3R6cf6njz4
I'm not saying they should do everything like ufotable, but they should probably run through another pass to clean up the distinct discrepancy between their environment and the objects in it.

A good example is 2:45 where it's very noticeable that the background character moving is actually CG but less noticeable with "camera" tricks and multiple layers of compositing.

I think "houseki no kuni" is a much better example as its actually fully CG (well mostly) unlike anything ufotable has done and since thats what Revision will be.... yea.

also one thing people always get wrong, Frame rate for CGI is just a SETTING you change, animated at 2 frames per second and animating at 23.976 frames per second takes the same amount of effort.

For example, the pv that recently aired for "kumo desu ga, nani ka?" is a mixed bag in terms of CGI quality but they rendered it at max framerate (except for 1 shot) because they wanted it to feel more "video gamey" due to what happens in the show... level ups and stuff.

I'm not sure if "acceptance" is the right word as it's more or less a grudging acceptance. For example, I bought Knights of Sidonia 1,2 and Ajin and Blame despite being dissatisfied with the CG and wish it didn't use CG, or at least the way Polygon did. A lot of people still criticize them, but watch them nonetheless. You can't guage acceptance / entrancement of your methods just from viewership numbers.

Zerreth wrote:

i wonder what takes more time at this point as i know both are incredibly time consuming aspects of animation: Compositing 3D CG animation with higher framerates, or animating the clean and crisp hand-drawn animation of the more famous studios. The CG isn't that bad in the trailer, but the lighting (or lack there of) is really jarring.

One common problem this and others have with the lighting / rendering is that the cell shading is programmatically designed to move or dynamically change against a real light source, except cell shaded, rather than gradient shaded. But 2D anime has its shading fixed. It's stylistic not realistic. The cell shaded regions aren't constantly shifting like it is in CG. But because of that constantly shifting cell shading, some CG artists try to compensate by reducing the lighting and light sources, which removes some of the visual flare.

One way to overcome this without sacrifiing lighting is to hand animate the cell shading in the characters and "bake" in the rendered shading. You completely remove the programatic based lighting physics and use your own non-realistic shading. Then any additional light sources and lighting in the environment won't affect your baked in shading, unless you explicitly want it to. This is the technique Arc System Works uses for their games.

Quote:

ufotable with their CG effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3R6cf6njz4 I'm not saying they should do everything like ufotable, but they should probably run through another pass to clean up the distinct discrepancy between their environment and the objects in it. A good example is 2:45 where it's very noticeable that the background character moving is actually CG but less noticeable with "camera" tricks and multiple layers of compositing.

Unfortunately that ufotable footage is missing the use of CG in the modeling the character animation itself, which is shown here: https://vimeo.com/77675596
Basically the motion and cinematography is fully done in CG then the drawn characters composited over follow frame by frame for the tweens of the CG motion. ufotable also isn't afraid to modulate up to the full tweens on 1s either which is evident in all of their titles. They don't stick with "choppy" just because they are stuck on the limited animation paradigm as evident from the Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel movie and most of their titles. Likewise even with pure 2D and shaft, they too are not stuck on making their animation purposely "limited" and for slow motion especially, will go for full tweens on 1s

fantaselion wrote:

I think "houseki no kuni" is a much better example as its actually fully CG (well mostly) unlike anything ufotable has done and since thats what Revision will be.... yea. also one thing people always get wrong, Frame rate for CGI is just a SETTING you change, animated at 2 frames per second and animating at 23.976 frames per second takes the same amount of effort. For example, the pv that recently aired for "kumo desu ga, nani ka?" is a mixed bag in terms of CGI quality but they rendered it at max framerate (except for 1 shot) because they wanted it to feel more "video gamey" due to what happens in the show... level ups and stuff.

It's not just the issue of framerate per se, but frame modulation. That is the key that is missing from animation of the CG in Shirogumi and Polygon and Studio 4C works (Berserk). An object, character or segment of a character moves with consistent, constant spacing, timing or frame rate from point A to point B. That and the lack of some distortion in the tweens also makes the CG movement obvious. What Land of the Lustrious does, and ufotable and Trigger / Sanzigen (sometimes) does is to modulate. Don't use blind interpolation for the in-between motion. See these scenes for example in Kill La Kill:
https://youtu.be/P17l7VlWBE8?t=3m50s
In the Ryuuko vs Satsuki fight scene, which was entirely CG, they first did the full 24f interpolation. Then they applied what they called "frame-skipping", which is actually a "hold" of a particular frame.

Where the others Polygon, et al. differ and is the fatal flaw for trying to emulate limited animation in CG animation / motion, as that they apply "frame-skipping" evenly, constantly spaced, across every single movement. Where as Trigger does it selectively, i.e. using modulation by hand after animating the full interpolated motion, to apply holds on select frames, not evenly.

One way to overcome this without sacrifiing lighting is to hand animate the cell shading in the characters and "bake" in the rendered shading. You completely remove the programatic based lighting physics and use your own non-realistic shading. Then any additional light sources and lighting in the environment won't affect your baked in shading, unless you explicitly want it to. This is the technique Arc System Works uses for their games.

It's not just the issue of framerate per se, but frame modulation. That is the key that is missing from animation of the CG in Shirogumi and Polygon and Studio 4C works (Berserk).

An object, character or segment of a character moves with consistent, constant spacing, timing or frame rate from point A to point B. That and the lack of some distortion in the tweens also makes the CG movement obvious. What Land of the Lustrious does, and ufotable and Trigger / Sanzigen (sometimes) does is to modulate. Don't use blind interpolation for the in-between motion. See these scenes for example in Kill La Kill:
https://youtu.be/P17l7VlWBE8?t=3m50s
In the Ryuuko vs Satsuki fight scene, which was entirely CG, they first did the full 24f interpolation. Then they applied what they called "frame-skipping", which is actually a "hold" of a particular frame.