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Forum - View topicAnswerman - Where Have All The Mechanical Designers Gone?
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 943 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Honestly, as much as I do love how hand-drawn stuff looks, I think it is for the best that basically all vehicle (including big robot) animation these days is CGI. Back in the day, hand-drawn mecha could look really awesome when it was done well, but when it wasn't it was average at best and horribly jarring at worst.
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5504 |
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From the way hand-drawn cars move in most Anime, I assumed it was dirt cheap to do.The 3 common shots I often see are; the car moving from one side of the screen to another, with the only animation being a blur on the wheels to make them look like they are moving, a car in the distance moving up and down hills, with it just being a still image and a perspective shot of a car with some light effects going across the car and a repeated loop of a road underneath.
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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Another factor is that a lot of shows you need mechanical designers for are all about the toys/figures/gunpla, such that CG actually makes the design process easier, allowing a designer to just design the figure and then hand it over for digitization without needing to worry to much about how it will translate to animation.
For CG's effect on the final product, I wish they'd take the time to let the traditional animators modify the generated product, as the big weakness of most CGA is the environmental effects. Letting the animators paint on the CG models like, well, models would help get past many of the challenges computers have getting light and shadow in complex environments right and rendering wear and damage and letting them paint over scenes would integrate the models into their environment better and help with some of the more complex interactions. Of course, that would mean drawing frame by frame (or the digipaint equivalent), which is what the CG was meant to help animators avoid. |
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Anime World Order
 Posts: 390 Location: Florida |
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I remember around 2009 or 2010 I made the observation that there are still a TON of incredibly talented mechanical designers putting out a ton of high-quality work, with the key difference being that they're not primarily working in anime. They're working in video games instead.
Think about it. Think of all the mechanical enemies and vehicles there are in modern video games, and how incredible so many of those designs are. It's easy to overlook because the advertising tends to be built around non-mechanical aspects, and there is no equivalent of the ANN Encyclopedia or IMDB when it comes to comprehensively documenting videogame staff. How many people are blown away by the visuals of say, Final Fantasy XV or Nier: Automata (to use Square-Enix as an example)? But for all the lavish mechanical designs on display, who came up with them? It's difficult to quickly look up. Sure, they're credited, but only in a credits roll that you generally have to beat a rather lengthy game to see. And which designer made one thing versus another? Not easy to find out. The crazy talented mecha designers and animators are still out there. There are new up and coming talents beyond just the legends from the 1970s and 1980s. It's just that anime doesn't pay as well or have as much demand for them as videogames do. On that note, we're weeks away from Super Robot Wars X! |
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ICO44
 Posts: 105 |
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I personally love hand drawn cars and mechs and kind of sad see most them use CG but really glad to Lupin Part V that has hand drawn cars.
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1461 |
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In my opinion, if there's a show that gets blending 2D characters and 3D vehicles just right, it's Yowamushi Pedal. There are many scenes where the characters are hand-drawn from the waist up and CG from the waist down (along with their respective bikes), and it's barely noticeable.
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Beltane70
 Posts: 3970 |
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My favorite mechanical designer, Shoji Kawamori is still quite productive. He even has a new show airing this season. One of my favorite things about him is his use of Lego to work out the transformation sequences of his transformable mecha, particularly the variable fighters of the various Macross series.
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Actar
 Posts: 1074 Location: Singapore |
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Sorry, but I'm not a fan of CG in anime (unless it's used EXTREMELY well to achieve a certain effect). The CG dance sequences in Love Live! were distracting, the CG people in Re:Zero, disconcerting and the CG mecha in Aquarion/Macross Frontier/Every-Other-Modern-Mecha-Show, disappointing.
I really don't know what it is about CG that makes it seem so lifeless... I suppose you can talk about the uncanny valley, how it doesn't blend well with traditional simulated cel animation and how it doesn't feel like there's any weight, fluidity of motion or proper shading. Maybe it's because when they're traditionally animated, the mecha don't need to adhere to the models so accurately and can move, bend and flex more "naturally" like how a human would and therefore appear more dynamic. Regardless, at this point in time, a majority of the CG is distracting and unimpressive... No CG mecha fight sequence has even scratched the awesomeness of the Goldion Hammer, Guld's sacrifice or Gunbuster's gattai. Seriously, the Lancelot X Guren fight would not have been the same if it had been in CG. The fact that the usage of CG is often said to be a budget-saving crutch doesn't help things either. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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It appears that Bobby's in Deep has dwindled into obscurity. Not to worry though: its name alone is amply amusing to suffice as its legacy.
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Hobbie
 Posts: 30 |
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I think that's because CG are too 'perfect'. Imperfections are what makes animated drawings 'alive'. They're moving, stretching, distording and carries the identity of the man behind them. A computer can't recreate that. I have no issue with full 3D CG shows, 'cause it can be an artistic choice and there's at least a consistency in the visuals. But 2D with 3D in animation will never blend well no matter how far technology evolve. Last edited by Hobbie on Thu Apr 05, 2018 2:09 am; edited 2 times in total |
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MarshalBanana
Posts: 5504 |
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The odd thing is that some of the best animation I've seen recently was not from a Mech show. https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/b4a6cb6befa8296e1fae8f0d3383c2b6.mp4
With Gundam we at least have Build delivering hand-drawn mechs https://sakugabooru.com/data/aaf2c47809a36772d852925b67d7df30.mp4
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11588 |
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Hand-drawn is nice, but with budgets and outsourcing the way it is now, you can end up with stuff like this:
When they can't even draw a smooth circle by hand anymore, CG is kinda necessary. |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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There's some old car footage that makes me cringe, and there's the cheesy looking 3D cars in Wangan Midnight common for that era that sorely sticks out, but I modern 3D mechanical integration have come a long, long way. Most successful of handdrawn mechanicals tends to inject some kind of organic animation into it--like treating mecha more like human characters--or giving the objects a cartoony design. It takes a lot more work to do mechanically detailed and realistic animation by hand.
Bakuon, despite being a slice of life girls-and-motorcycles show features fantastic integration between 3D motorcycles. It's detailed and accurate depiction of commercial bikes (the 4 domestic brands, 1 tuner brand, and Ducati) with realistic animation and yet rendered and integrated very nicely with the rest of the show. I cannot imagine how handdrawn would've made the bike animations better and more than likely worse. |
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Alternative Ice
 Posts: 96 |
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Maybe it's because I have no idea how animation or drawing works, but a car seems like it would be a lot easier to animate than a person.
When a person walks they have four limbs that you have to make move, where with a car the only moving part is the wheels and they just spin. Plus you'd think an object made of mostly straight lines would be simpler to draw than one made of curves. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3019 |
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My biggest problem with badly done CG mechanical stuff is how often it makes people drop otherwise great shows. I remember several people dropping Alice & Zoroku because the show's first action sequence had a truly awful looking CG car chase... if they had stuck around, they would have found out that the rest of the series was pretty uniformly well-animated, and at many points visually stunning, but those cars were such a real turn-off, and the show suffered for it.
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