While i agree with you about disney being bland and commercialized, their 3D animation is quite impressive on a technical level. We wouldn’t have goodies like PTex or OpenSubdiv if no research was getting into it… They did try going back to their traditional boring “2D musical princess” ways with that frog prince movie but apparently it wasn’t as profitable as any of the 3D features that came out the same year.
Nice straw man. The desire to keep BI around has always been about things that Cycles cannot do well or cannot do fast enough or cannot do at all. There has never been any other reason.
Let me then fans the flames a bit by ranting against “sketchy” NPR: It’s trying to emulate something that is valued because of its personality. There’s no personality in emulating brush strokes with 3D models. It looks artificial and bland, but even if it wouldn’t, it would still be fake. It’s like a Christmas tree made out of plastic. No traditional animator worth his salt would be caught dead using it for any reason except staying on budget.
Bottom line: If Cycles can’t do it, then it’s likely not worth doing anyway. Look who’s moving the goal posts now.
The galleries of all 3D communities are almost completely devoid of such NPR stuff - and rightly so. So, if you want to make an argument as to what Blender should have, you better pull out some good art in favor of it. I certainly don’t see it.
This is utter bunk. The galleries are full of NPR stuff emulating all kinds of styles. But then of course, if all you have is a hammer, you’ll see nothing but nails.
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What’s artistically good than because those guys have had a pretty good run for a bench of people devoid of artistry.
p.s. sorry to go off-topic
This whole damn thread is off topic. I asked a moderator to remove it but I guess he’s enjoying watching you guys squabble over my stupidity.
Back to the topic:
The example I posted was rendered entirely in BI. The pencil strokes are geometry (which is why they appear in the mirror), the skin paint is procedural.
As soon as Cycles can render stuff like that with reasonable effort and reasonably fast, I will say goodbye to BI. I’m not emotionally or ideologically attached to either the old or the new code.
A lot of people simply don’t understand what Cycles can and can’t do, as evidenced by you claiming that it is a “non-starter” for animation, or that it can’t do this and that image example (when in fact, it mostly can).
Bottom line: If Cycles can’t do it, then it’s likely not worth doing anyway. Look who’s moving the goal posts now.
I didn’t say that, I just felt I had to dismiss this CEL-shaded look (which I despise) a bit. It’s more like this: We’re not at a big loss, if we lost this capability.
This is utter bunk. The galleries are full of NPR stuff emulating all kinds of styles. But then of course, if all you have is a hammer, you’ll see nothing but nails.
I’ve went through the first ten pages of this forum and I counted exactly zero instances of anyone using either CEL-shading or “fake sketchy outlines”, which is the kind of NPR I am talking about.
I’ve outlined the reasons why it isn’t held in high regard and why it’s not a must-have for Blender.
The example I posted was rendered entirely in BI. The pencil strokes are geometry (which is why they appear in the mirror), the skin paint is procedural.
In that case, I don’t see how Cycles couldn’t render it, either.
As soon as Cycles can render stuff like that with reasonable effort and reasonably fast, I will say goodbye to BI. I’m not emotionally or ideologically attached to either the old or the new code.
I guess that depends on your definition of “reasonable”.
EDIT:
I didn’t call them “devoid of artistry”, those are your words. I’m sure there are great artists at Disney, then and now. Their only problem is that they work at Disney, where they have to sell you essentially the same storyline with the same characters and the same bland animation, since many decades. A good run, indeed. And now their scientists have found a way to engineer all those lost expressions back into their budget! Oh, the marvel!
Popcorn for sale…
Okay, so Zalamander hates Disney, check.
You do realise your argument is kinda wishy washy if you don’t start defining what exactly you find artistically bad about disney? Because your ‘technically good’ can also mean artistically good.
If you mean that they are narratively bad… That doesn’t have much to do with this thread. If you mean they are narratively limited… that also has nothing to do with this thread.
If you mean that they are animation-wise bad, I’d have to disagree with you, nineties rennaisance disney has excellent animation. But then, we’d have to start define standards, for example, you have stuff like Ren and Stimpy which insisted on no two frames being similar, or the Ghibli stuff, which cuts up backgrounds into so many different parts it might as well have been 3d.
(But then, I’ll be honest with you, while Ghibli is very pretty, I always feel they saturate on show-don’t-tell in a way of never doing exposition which results in characters never asking questions and generally giving a sense of characters having had lobotomies before the start of the movie, personal opinion)
Similarly, as far as I understand you, you feel that outlines on characters and toonshaded look is a degradation of the capabilities of the technology. But that is a little confusing if compared to early twentieth century consumer art, such as the Art nouveau and Art Deco movements, where perfectly capable painters such as Mucha and Toorop used outlines and limited shadows to strengthen the design of their creations. Sure, cel-shaded style has been developed to limit the amount of manhours required to create it, but just because it is designed for budget, doesn’t mean it’s void of aesthetics. I imagine it was actually that people designing this style paid such careful attention to aesthetics that the style and variations became so popular.
Similarly, I find the rendering of line very interesting. Line art is interesting in general because it’s probably closer to how humans ‘perceive’ things as opossed to the photo realism. Early Greek painters are known to have expressed seeing their line-drawings as photo realistic, and there have been discussions on whether or not colour was necessary to make a drawing more photo realistic. A little silly to see now, a few millenia later, but on an art historical level very interesting.
And that makes me want to experiment, what is it exactly that we see when we see linework? Or brushstrokes, or texture? What are we rendering, and why do we understand it?
And in that, even rasteriser renderers which have an absurd handeling of light can be very useful.
If I’m flying completely past your point it’s probably that you are expressing it a little vaguely, so please do elaborate.
You want me to “define exactly” something artistical? Let me answer with a picture.
If you mean that they are animation-wise bad, I’d have to disagree with you, nineties rennaisance disney has excellent animation.
It’s clean. That’s all it has for it.
But then, we’d have to start define standards, for example, you have stuff like Ren and Stimpy which insisted on no two frames being similar, or the Ghibli stuff, which cuts up backgrounds into so many different parts it might as well have been 3d.
Speaking of Ren and Stimpy, its creator has an entire blog on how everything is terrible these days. You’ll find a lot of examples of good animation on there.
Similarly, as far as I understand you, you feel that outlines on characters and toonshaded look is a degradation of the capabilities of the technology.
No, not at all. I don’t see how you’d get that idea.
Sure, cel-shaded style has been developed to limit the amount of manhours required to create it, but just because it is designed for budget, doesn’t mean it’s void of aesthetics. I imagine it was actually that people designing this style paid such careful attention to aesthetics that the style and variations became so popular.
Is it really that popular? I’m fairly sure many people share my dislike of it. If it was acceptable, all Anime (not just Appleseed) would use it everywhere. In reality, it’s used very sparingly.
Disney animation bland? Are you serious? Look at how smooth and realistic Snow White animation is when she is dancing (starts at 0:40). That was done in 1937.
Now if you’re saying their later princess stuff is conceptually bland, I’d agree. But I’m not a little girl, so maybe I just don’t like that stuff.
Is it really that popular? I’m fairly sure many people share my dislike of it. If it was acceptable, all Anime (not just Appleseed) would use it everywhere. In reality, it’s used very sparingly.
It’s used in a lot of cases, but it doesn’t look like classic cel-shaded 3D anymore. Watch the Evangelion re:build movies, they used a ton of 3D and it’s not noticeable.
I think it makes sense to keep BI around for NPR, isn’t that what the BEER project is about?
That said, you guys aren’t giving Cycles the credit that it deserves 
Exactly. When was the last time you’ve seen anything like that come out of a Disney studio? Maybe I should’ve explicitly exempted some pre-WW2 stuff from my judgement.
She was obviously rotoscoped from footage of a real dancer. That technique is even older than the Disney Company. Artistically it is comparable to painting by numbers.
She was obviously rotoscoped from footage of a real dancer. That technique is even older than the Disney Company. Artistically it is comparable to painting by numbers.
Is it so?
So it is about the famous VerMeer’s paintings.
He was using a real camera. As many other artists.
That said, about snowwhite figure. What about the rest of the characters?
Am I trolling now?
On topic
Cycles has a long roadmap to go. (I’m a little disappointed, after two years)
I doubt if blender could stay alive without BI, for the next few years.
I doubt if there will be developers to re write a new BI, from scratch.
If we get what we need, then we will get a fully mature Cycles with all the baking and goodies we need as a standalone solution, and we will get a modified Internal for NPR and better painting interaction.
I’ve said this before, but this kind of also goes with my idea of BI having a comprehensive legacy-based feature set like Renderman (before Pixar started pushing it into the field of pathtracing). I know it might still make it seem ancient ancient compared to the physical shading of Cycles, but there’s still a lot of people here who have an interest in using traditional old-school techniques for 3D and this combined with comprehensive NPR will allow enough differentiation from Cycles that it serves its own market.
Now if Brecht and others actually do find a way to make the exact same gamut of NPR effects (including those that go beyond the terminator) in the pathtracing environment that Cycles is, then maybe it would be time to drop BI. Until then though, BI is the most ideal option.
Maybe there was a reason for this? 
I really don’t care if a few Blender users here would rather write legacy shading features for an old engine not only because it seems evident that there’s some demand for it, but also because those who are wanting to do the work will not take away any development resources from Cycles. It will be a different engine for a different segment of the userbase, which means that Blender will end up having the ideal tools for an even larger number of people. Irie Shinsuke for example has already apparently signed on to be a BI developer (who is not really interested much in developing Cycles at the moment so it’s kind of like seeing a new developer ecosystem forming).
But the only way that BI is really going to shine in the short term is for any development to not lead to it trying too hard to be a raytracer when it would only mean unbearably slow speeds and the risk of a full implosion of its shading system (not to mention that Brecht gave up on the idea of implementing a pathtracer into its code).
I, for one, think that we can safely put-to-rest the rumors of any existing Blender rendering-technology “going away.” There are many thousands of very-important Blender projects out there which predominantly or exclusively use BI … and this will forever be the case. Yes, it’s very exciting indeed to watch Cycles as it continues to grow and develop, but it’s fairly nonsensical to think of Blender “losing” a huge piece of what it is capable of doing today. There are no good reasons to do that, and plenty of reasons not to.
I fully expect that the retinue of integrated rendering-options will continue to expand, not decrease. Yes, you can “have it all.”
But any new integrated options will not be done by the BF, they will be in the form of plugins like we already see with Indigo, Thea, Luxrender, and Yafaray. Why would someone develop a third or fourth in-house engine when the current two can potentially handle the integration of all current render technology in existence.
It really doesn’t take a whole lot of term highlighting and quoting as if the people on this forum are third graders to realize that, you really need to know that the majority reading your messages are adults and can understand context on their own 
FOCUS: BLENDER IS FOR ARTISTS
The official Blender Foundation goal is worded like this:
Provide individual artists and small teams with a complete, free and open source 3D creation pipeline.
In this simple sentence a couple of crucial focus points come together.
- Artists and teams:
We work for people who consider themselves artist – and who work on creating 3D individually or in small teams together. The definition for “artist” can be taken quite wide – to include engineers, product designers, architects or scientists. But each of them can be considered to have a serious interest in working with 3D software to create something related to that interest.
“Blender is for artists” also means that’s it not a programming API or scripting environment, these are secondary to this goal. - Complete 3D creation:
Blender should work for making finished products, without requirement to purchase or run other programs. Its output should satisfy the users sufficiently to share their work in public or market it as part of a living. - Pipeline:
We are aware of how CG production works (for animation, film, vfx, games) and we want Blender to work sufficiently in each and every aspect of such creation pipelines. This to to make complex creations possible and to enable people working together. - Free and open source:
And not only should Blender be a complete production system, we even want this to be free and open source!
“Artist” and “create something” are the key words here
On topic: BI isn’t going anywhere soon.
Off topic: see above, and below
It’s positively MADDENING listening to people who don’t even have ONE finished project on here, or even some tests or works in progress. Isn’t this Blender ARTISTS?