Here's a rant about stop motion or something

Hey gang, happy twenties.

Little bit of a general cg/animation thingy I’m about to bring up, dumping it on offtopic as it’s kinda random. I was trying to wrap my head around gpu skinning when I said screw this, I’ll just have nodes swap meshes every other frame and call it a day.

Obviously I’m a man of class so it’s got to be cheap to the maximum: six or five poses at ten frames per second, no interpolation, that’s enough for walking, running, idling, as well as most other loops. A bit choppy sure, but there’s magic in playing a bunch of images in succession, like a flip book or whatever those thingies whose pages you flip through are called.

Maybe I’m crazy, I mean I totally am, but I couldn’t stop thinking that being able to tell it’s a trick makes me appreciate the illusion of motion a lot more. Not going to declare war on fluid animation and generating in-betweens or what have you, but maan. With everything modern hardware is capable of I find myself looking through the pain-in-the-arse techniques of yore. It’s not even nostalgia, it’s legit charm.

Think about it – swapping one image for another, that’s what happens under the hood right? That’s how I was taught anyway; clear the screen, make a bunch of draw calls, swap buffers, rinse and repeat. It’s like the primordial mechanic of animation or something, I dunno I’ve been drinking a lot and there’s a couple slices shy of three pizzas in me right now.

What I’m trying to get at here is even though I came to this solution as a product of my own laziness and zero shame in admitting to that by the way, I wound up liking this style way more than a more modern skeletal animation system with an eff-a-thon of joints and transform matrices and calculating deformation in-between poses on a per vertex basis and dear God why is math so sexy.

Also there’s no message or punchline I just felt like writting.
Have a nice year, you beautiful basterds.

There is a school of thought trying to bring 3D as close as possible to the unique style of anime. Many have attempted it and could not get good results, the most notable attempt made by that company behind the “Guilty Gear” games where they put lots of research to come up with new techniques.

If you have not watched all the videos of the technique I would recommend it. There are quite a few videos but the most recent I watched was this.

There are rumours that each character model is composed by 500 bones or such (if they say it is true) and this is because all of these bones would control each and every tiny detail in the model.

As for example, with these epic rigs, there were also even more complex animations effects that could not reproduce 100% of everything. Such as for example all of the smokes, flashes and lightnings, bending weapons (the high speed effect used in comics) are all model swapping. Also most notable character is that “paperbag dude” where he takes lots of weird shapes, and they simply used model swapping as hell also.

Sidenote: I don’t know why they even went so complex here with 500 bone rigs, if not for the rig, but even so for the epic animations as well, where each individual hair strand or cloth piece would have to be manually animated according to sketches. So instead the most superior and fast technique, is indeed model replacement.

Personally, I am very interested and fascinated with this technique. I have started experimenting with it a couple of weeks now and still figuring it out some things. As for example with classic animation things are settled and prefixed. However here you are forced to think as a 2D animator with only a pencil and paper, so you have to be very picky and precise on how you want to go with the animation.

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Animation, if chosen as a medium to communicate, needs to be consistent. I’m waiting for the sculpt-object-per-frame in blender that is in development. Using bones is constraining in a way as it dictates where your mesh is going to be at. I just want to move parts around and make every frame a bit personal. Like stop-motion. 8 frames a second. If you make 8 frames of animation a day you get over 5 minutes of animation in a year. I bet if you put your mind to it you can make an hour animation a year.

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I am trying to find also the balance between what is classic rigging and what is model swapping. From what I notice so far is that classic rigging is good up to some level of “minecraft-quality” since with the most basic and elementary model rig, you get some benefits in terms of efficiency.

However any other extra detail added ontop of the model is better suited for model swapping.

Such as muscle bending and skin ripples, clothes also as well, long hair, etc. All of these are very risky and unpredictable if left to be calculated automatically, at least even if they are done right, they would result into plain good old boring physical simulations.

The secret is to animate with intent.

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