The use of rotoscoping to deliver realistic 3D animation has been used extensively by Neill Blomkamp for his films: CG characters such as Christopher Johnson (insectoid alien) and Chappie (robot) were animated by rotoscoping an actor's on-set (or on-location) performance rather than suiting the actor up in one of those ping-pong-ball suits and having them gesticulate in an imaginary set in front of a green screen.
further down your tangent: one big disapointing suspensions of belief i had with... was it District 9? was where it shows one of the police robots flinching when the cement wall it's behind gets hit by small arms fire.
to me at the time it informed me that there was mocap going on, or a dumb cg artist/director deciding that the robot had to react in a more humanlike fashion.
of course now that i think about it, a military robot with auto-flinch-reflexes could actually help it avoid hits (similar to why our flinch reflex evolved i suppose) so that puts me in my place!
Basically, whenever some sort of "dumb" design decision in a movie annoy you, try to come up with a decent explanation for why it's actually an intelligent design decision. It's a lot of fun!
> The most interesting lessons from sci-fi come when you assume, for the sake of argument, that everything is in sci-fi is there for a reason–even things that look like mistakes. There’s a word for this, apologetics, which usually refers to the act of attempting to close logical loopholes in theology.
> Take Star Wars, for instance, in the scene when Luke and Han Solo are in the Millennium Falcon blowing up TIE fighters.
> If they’re fighting in the cold vacuum of space, why do we hear the ships exploding? Sound doesn’t exist without air.
> George Lucas probably figured that a silent gun fight would probably have been way less dramatic. He wanted to make the scene feel real to the audience, even if it was less true to reality. And if we move from the point of view that what works for the audience will work for the user, we can ask ourselves–could this make sense? Is there an explanation that can warrant hearing ships exploding in space?
> Well, what if the sound is the interface? Audio is a much more efficient gauge of surroundings, since it spans 360 degrees, whereas vision only covers 120 degrees. It might be that there are sensors on the outside of the Millennium Falcon that provide 3D sound inside the gunner seat. So when we hear ships blow up, we’re actually hearing an augmented reality interface that Luke and Han hear. Maybe?
> With design thinking, there are logical excuses for every interface discrepancy. And it makes sci-fi that much more fun to watch.
The space battle/trading game Terminus takes this approach to providing a "familiar" set of controls while still letting you exerience something closer to realism.
You get to see nebulae and moving starfields, explosions gives of sounds, and you can steer as if you're driving a plane, pretty much. But everything that isn't "real" is described in the manual as assistance provided by the in-ship computer to assist human navigation, and can be turned off if you prefer the more austere and genuine look and feel.
Even the way the ship handles - if you look at one of the outside views, while the ship is handling like a plane, you'll see directional boosters fire accordingly; turn it off, and you have full control and can e.g. rotate the ship and fire backwards at ships pursuing you, while continuing to coast away from them.
Explosions do transmit sound in space. If you detonated a stick of TNT 100 feet from ISS they really would hear a boom. The medium is the debris which impacts ships, the ship, and then the air inside the ship. What's missing is space combat should be at very long ranges, and of course all explosions in movies are far to slow.
So, I agree that augmented reality is probably the most realistic idea. But, even without that space battles could be very loud.
Much like Karateka, Mechner's first game, Prince of Persia used rotoscoping for its fluid and realistic animation. For this process, Mechner used as reference for the characters' movements videos of his brother doing acrobatic stunts in white clothes and swashbuckler films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood
Making of Prince of Persia is one of the best books I've read, even if it's just a book version of his journals. It's really captivating as it records his journey as he perfects his game (along with some distractions) and finally gets it published by a major studio.
I now see it as more crucial that this author succeeded in designing a workflow, than that the result is the best one possible.
In media, you're always challenged - implicitly - to discover a good workflow for doing something, to craft a structured approach so that the bulk of it is a matter of "coloring in the lines" or "filling in the blanks." Being considered a "professional" is mostly indicative of having some flexibility, and not staying stuck in a one-note style. For visuals like this, sometimes that means a very technology-driven approach like rotoscoping, mo-cap, 3D and procedural rendering, other times it means relying on basic conceptual drawing and animating skills.
And it's turtles all the way down. Before you can draw a character you have to design a character. And you need a process for designing the character so that they make sense in the context of the world or story. And then the world needs a design, and so on, and so forth, until you're looking at basic principles and philosophies driving the intent of the work. At least, that's how it would work if you built all of culture from scratch. In practice, creators start borrowing elements on whims or as they fall out of their comfort zone, hence why most of culture is remixed.
What you buy when you hire an artist is a "package of familiarity." Some artists are really great illustrators but are uncomfortable with designing original characters; some are good at comic book scenes with dynamic poses, others at portraits and fashion drawing. A Bob Ross landscape is defined by a process that is so straightforward that anyone could pick it up just by watching. And what defines "programmer art" is mostly that it has no particular workflow or structure in mind, it is entirely whimsy guided by pragmatic efficiency. Other media like music, storytelling, game design, and, of course, programming share these same qualities.
Here the author downplays technical drawing and drafting abilities, but those are as valid a form of presentation as any, and they help push the focus back towards the interesting part of the material, which is the realistic motion. A character cluttered with detail detracts from movement - this is true even if you look at the different versions of the first Prince of Persia and how they translate the same motions to higher fidelity platforms. Same frames, but they become more wobbly with colors, outlines and higher resolution. [0]
> Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, (...). Originally, recorded live-action movie images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is referred to as a rotoscope.
Much like a flip-book animation, frames were drawn on the outside of a cylinder. The cylinder was rotated to get the apparent effect of motion, hence rotoscope. Ideally the rotation was linked to a shutter. I saw it on youtube or wikipedia.
Is the link for the GenLock tag wrong? It takes me to parkourpedia, which I'm assuming is incorrect unless he's using the pictures in the wiki as a demonstration? It's not clear to me, am I missing something obvious?
The greatest takeaway here is that, by using live action as reference for both character posing and timing, you're able to shortcut visual appeal.
Read The Illusion of Life, Animators Survival Kit and the Preston Blair book if you're serious about including animation in a project -- or befriend an animator. Animators don't let other animators rotoscope.
To make animation appealing you need to anticipate, exaggerate, and squash/stretch motion.
These do not appear on rotoscoped footage because they do not occur in real life. If you rely on rotoscoping the result is bland movements which lack a "spark of life".
In other words, rotoscoping creates an "uncanny valley" for motion.
Disney has used live action as a tool from early on, you can see this plain as day in Snow White's dancing scenes from 1937 because the movement feel awkward. And this is from animators with classical training who knew where the line needed to land on every frame.
Rotoscoping, tracing back each frame, is more what you will find in A-Ha's Take On Me music video, or Ralph Bakshi's film Fire and Ice. It is limited with poor line quality, and used primarily because the labor is cheap.
The realism of the animation was a big deal in pretty much all the reviews of it when it was released, as far as I can remember (I didn't pay much attention to the Apple II, as it was virtually unseen in Europe, but I remember reviews of the C64 and Amiga versions).
I never actually played the game, but saw the animations, and they certainly stood out.
Seeing this, I imagine something like Pokémon Go, but for parkour; aka get the Lat/Lon for a location, record a parkour set, upload the video, create the animation, generate score, allow other users to see location and animated clips.
Taking shortcuts on your hobby, and being afraid of parts of your hobby, defeats the point of having a hobby. Why not learn to draw and animate from imagination? That way you'll be limited only by imagination.
Not to belittle the technical achievement, of course.
I spent several years learning to draw and paint, it was a great hobby. BUT, I didn't get to the point of being able to draw character-type art. That level of drawing is hard, due to the uncanny valley.
Also, I think it's also cool that he decided to try a different technique than hand-drawing, and went on to (A) get good results and (B) document it clearly. Doesn't feel to me like a "afraid of part of your hobby", more like "how do I get around my own limitations?" thing.
Plenty of professional animators use rotoscoping. Modern CG animators often reference video recordings of themselves acting. It's just another tool, not some form of cheating.
The point is to achieve realism. It's incredibly rare to see animations made without copious reference to film that actually looks nearly as realistic as something that's rotoscoped (or captured using other motion capture methods). If you want realism, it's pretty much a waste of time to manually animate it if you can rotoscope - you can always opt to add your own details to it afterwards.
Very humble conclusion, I think its a great result and I'd be more than proud it that were my first work of any kind.