Interest

Artist Creates CG Portrait of Hayao Miyazaki

The best-known live-action footage featuring the director Hayao Miyazaki is probably the infamous scene, included in the documentary Never-Ending Man, in which he is shown a CG-animated creature created by artificial intelligence. The director's reaction was angry revulsion: "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself. "

That phrase has already been waggishly tweeted by the British Ghibliotheque podcast in response to a project which turns Miyazaki into a photo-real CG character in a single, meticulously-detailed image. The CG image is on the right; a photo of the real Miyazaki is on the left.

Perhaps Miyazaki would not be so incensed as the CG image is not the work of an AI program. Instead, it's the painstaking work of Yingkang Luo, a character artist at the videogame company Naughty Dog. The creation of the work is detailed on his page, as well as in the YouTube video below.

"His works always bring warmth to our heart," Luo commented, "so I decided to make an image of him."

Luo used the following software: Houdini, Arnold, Maya, NUKE, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer and Texturingxyz.

There is no word on if Miyazaki himself, currently working on the production of his upcoming Studio Ghibli film How Do You Live?, has been told about this simulation of himself.

[Via Cartoon Brew]