Full Page Replies - Why?

[EVENKEEL]

You guys know who you are.

 

Hey guys, why do some of you think a full page reply is necessary? Are you so wrapped up in yourself that you imagine anyone cares to actually read all of it.

 

Then we have the guy who double spaces each sentence........

[daveAustin]

Some do tend to verbose for the sake of it (The Blether comes to mind). These guys are likely lonely. But sometimes it is needed if a topic requires it, such as visa, medical or electrical. This is a forum, not Twitter, or X or whatever.

[Mike Lister]

It depends on the subject and what the post is trying to say. If somebody writes and asks will my income be taxed in Thailand, that is going to be impossible to answer in a few lines. Regardless, if you don't want to read lengthy posts, I only have two words for you.....don't. 🙂

[SAFETY FIRST]

1 hour ago, EVENKEEL said:

Hey guys, why do some of you think a full page reply is necessary?

Page long replies. 

 

I reckon they are lonely and bored, nothing better to do.

Its a hobby for some.  

 

 

 

[georgegeorgia]

Just now, SAFETY FIRST said:

Page long replies. 

 

I reckon they are lonely and bored, nothing better to do.

Its a hobby for some.  

 

 

 

Omg 😂 yes some continually "comment" on here 

Well ..maybe they don't go to the gym?

[Mike Lister]

Wont it be really neat if somebody gives a full page post reply to the OP's question.  :))

[SAFETY FIRST]

6 minutes ago, georgegeorgia said:

Omg 😂maybe they don't go to the gym?

Maybe they should put the keyboard up for an hour a day and go to the gym. 

 

The daily gym routine is different at first, quite difficult to get use to but once you get in the swing of things it's so rewarding. 

 

 

[bob smith]

I agree.

 

There are some really tedious people here on AN.

 

Thankfully, they are in the minority (I think).

 

bob.

[EVENKEEL]

28 minutes ago, Mike Lister said:

Wont it be really neat if somebody gives a full page post reply to the OP's question.  :))

I know you're up to the challenge.

[EVENKEEL]

22 minutes ago, SAFETY FIRST said:

Maybe they should put the keyboard up for an hour a day and go to the gym. 

 

The daily gym routine is different at first, quite difficult to get use to but once you get in the swing of things it's so rewarding. 

 

 

The gym is good for 2 hrs 5 days/wk

[SAFETY FIRST]

1 minute ago, EVENKEEL said:

The gym is good for 2 hrs 5 days/wk

Yes, I agree, mix it up, time spent at the gym is worthwhile. 

 

[EVENKEEL]

33 minutes ago, georgegeorgia said:

Omg 😂 yes some continually "comment" on here 

Well ..maybe they don't go to the gym?

Number of posts is different from writing a full page about one's life. There was one poster of days gone past who was the one line king.

[Dolf]

2 hours ago, EVENKEEL said:

You guys know who you are.

 

Hey guys, why do some of you think a full page reply is necessary? Are you so wrapped up in yourself that you imagine anyone cares to actually read all of it.

 

Then we have the guy who double spaces each sentence........

50 words is enough. If you can't express yourself in under 50 words then you are just posting crap.

[kwak250]

Hey! It’s been a while since I’ve posted-

Now, I have a consistent problem where I open my mouth intending to add just a sentence to a conversation and a nine-volume encyclopedia pops out instead. Accordingly, my attempt to answer the poster succinctly turned into a post-long response that I decided might as well just be a post, so here it is!

Thanks for your comment! You may be right that Spider-verse isn’t the best example, and certainly I wouldn’t hold it up as an example of the kind of production I intend to create--just as a very good example of stylized CG. I suspect that rendering in a stylized way, and making this style work with their existing methods, was quite expensive for SPI! I recall an artist who worked on Paper Man describing it as twice the work of ordinary CG. That's certainly a danger with stylized approaches--but I think it's an avoidable one.

The problem, it seems to me, is that you really can't approach this sort of production as if it were conventional CG, with a conventional methodology and pipeline, and expect to reap the cost benefits I think are potentially realizable with it. You'd have to treat this kind of production very differently.

For instance, you mention simulation as something that would be difficult with non-continuous motion, and you're quite correct. So simulation itself would be the first thing on the chopping block for the production, outside of the occasional FX shot. It's one of the many steps that gums up the works of CG production and prevents us from getting to that an-artist-can-sit-down-and-just-make-something state. Plus I generally don't like its results on an artistic basis (at least in this stylized context). When traditional animators animate clothed characters, the clothing takes part in the character's silhouette and becomes a part of the performance. They never had any difficulty animating cloth by hand.

Yes, I am actually claiming that hand-animating cloth would be faster then simulating it, and I know how insane that sounds from a conventional CG perspective. But stylization completely changes the game. Consider the monkey test I posted a few months back.

The monkey is unclothed, of course, but there definitely parts of his body that require secondary animation, notably his hair tufts and ears. The hair tufts at least would most likely be simulated if this shot were approached in a conventional manner. The way I approached the shot was not only to animate them by hand, but to animate them from the very beginning--the very first key poses I put down already included the ears and hair tufts as an inherent aspect of those poses, already contributing to silhouettes and arcs. It’s pretty difficult to get an accurate idea of exactly what percentage of my time animating the shot was devoted to them, but I’m going to guess it was only a few percent.

This is only possible because the stylized look allowed me to ignore the “higher frequency” details that would be required for a fully rendered character, and I expect these same details would also be unnecessary for character clothing. I’m much more interested in character silhouettes then I am in wrinkles and clothing detail, so some simple secondary that’s really just part of the character’s pose would actually be more effective.

The idea here is that this isn’t just any form of stylization--it’s a specifically chosen set of stylizations that support each other in the goal of massively reducing the amount of work involved. And that means choosing subjects that work with the grain of those stylistic choices. For instance, you may be wondering how I’d approach a long flowing cape or a long coat. The answer is...I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t generally put characters in long coats or capes. There are about a million stories you could tell that don’t require anyone to wear a cape. Creating low-cost CG in this manner would be about making the design choices that let you get the most bang for your buck production-value wise while maintaining the essentials of character animation, a very different goal then that which I suspect drives companies like SPI and Disney to create stylized CG.

This also applies to the NPR rendering. There are a lot of ways to approach this problem, and some may be very time consuming! The two-tone methods I’m using here aren’t, though. I was able, as an individual with some understanding of the problem but no custom tools, to sit down and do the shading for the Monkey test without much trouble. Partly this is again choosing the most direct path to something that both looks good and is efficient to create. The simple two-tone present in the monkey test carries far less detail then the more painterly frames from Spider-verse, but I think it wouldn’t have any difficulty supporting emotionally engaging characters or exciting action scenes.

That said, the efficiency of this process could be improved a lot, and there’s a lot of room for R&D here--there’s still a required level of manual tweaking that I’d like to get rid of, and the two tone shapes could be improved. I’m hoping to tackle some of those problems this year.

There’s still the question of how that process, however reasonable on a small scale, would scale up to a large production like a feature film. In many ways, it may help to think of the look development for such a production as being less like a conventional film production pipeline, and more like a game. Ideally, except for certain FX shots, such a production would not even have a rendering/compositing stage--what you would see working on the shot would simply be the shot. It might be quite literally “in-engine” if using a game engine as the hub of production turns out to be the right way to approach it (this is something I’m getting more and more interested in). While this doesn’t remove all potential issues with scaling the approach to feature film size, I think it does drastically simplify the problem. Of course, we haven’t actually produced a long-form project using these techniques, and I’m sure there are going to be unforeseen roadblocks, so we shall see!

In any case, thanks again for your comment! I hope this illuminates how I envision this production process being different from the way I imagine that Spider-verse is being done, and why I think that the immense cost gains I’m claiming here are achievable.

[Dcheech]

Twitter .... X

 

It's everywhere you want to be. Make it so OP.  

[Mike Lister]

46 minutes ago, EVENKEEL said:

I know you're up to the challenge.

I don't get out of bed for less than three pages

[Mike Lister]

38 minutes ago, Dolf said:

50 words is enough. If you can't express yourself in under 50 words then you are just posting crap.

I have saved your post for another day. 🙂

[Dolf]

46 minutes ago, SAFETY FIRST said:

Yes, I agree, mix it up, time spent at the gym is worthwhile. 

 

Any exercise is good.

[Dolf]

1 hour ago, SAFETY FIRST said:

Page long replies. 

 

I reckon they are lonely and bored, nothing better to do.

Its a hobby for some.  

 

 

 

It's not a normal conversation. At a table you say 5 to 20 words then the other person speaks. Someone typing up 400 words is just a rant. They are trying to act superior.

[EVENKEEL]

Kinda funny when folks tell a similar experience but their's  happened 30+ yrs ago. Not the same. 

[EVENKEEL]

1 hour ago, kwak250 said:

Hey! It’s been a while since I’ve posted-

Now, I have a consistent problem where I open my mouth intending to add just a sentence to a conversation and a nine-volume encyclopedia pops out instead. Accordingly, my attempt to answer the poster succinctly turned into a post-long response that I decided might as well just be a post, so here it is!

Thanks for your comment! You may be right that Spider-verse isn’t the best example, and certainly I wouldn’t hold it up as an example of the kind of production I intend to create--just as a very good example of stylized CG. I suspect that rendering in a stylized way, and making this style work with their existing methods, was quite expensive for SPI! I recall an artist who worked on Paper Man describing it as twice the work of ordinary CG. That's certainly a danger with stylized approaches--but I think it's an avoidable one.

The problem, it seems to me, is that you really can't approach this sort of production as if it were conventional CG, with a conventional methodology and pipeline, and expect to reap the cost benefits I think are potentially realizable with it. You'd have to treat this kind of production very differently.

For instance, you mention simulation as something that would be difficult with non-continuous motion, and you're quite correct. So simulation itself would be the first thing on the chopping block for the production, outside of the occasional FX shot. It's one of the many steps that gums up the works of CG production and prevents us from getting to that an-artist-can-sit-down-and-just-make-something state. Plus I generally don't like its results on an artistic basis (at least in this stylized context). When traditional animators animate clothed characters, the clothing takes part in the character's silhouette and becomes a part of the performance. They never had any difficulty animating cloth by hand.

Yes, I am actually claiming that hand-animating cloth would be faster then simulating it, and I know how insane that sounds from a conventional CG perspective. But stylization completely changes the game. Consider the monkey test I posted a few months back.

The monkey is unclothed, of course, but there definitely parts of his body that require secondary animation, notably his hair tufts and ears. The hair tufts at least would most likely be simulated if this shot were approached in a conventional manner. The way I approached the shot was not only to animate them by hand, but to animate them from the very beginning--the very first key poses I put down already included the ears and hair tufts as an inherent aspect of those poses, already contributing to silhouettes and arcs. It’s pretty difficult to get an accurate idea of exactly what percentage of my time animating the shot was devoted to them, but I’m going to guess it was only a few percent.

This is only possible because the stylized look allowed me to ignore the “higher frequency” details that would be required for a fully rendered character, and I expect these same details would also be unnecessary for character clothing. I’m much more interested in character silhouettes then I am in wrinkles and clothing detail, so some simple secondary that’s really just part of the character’s pose would actually be more effective.

The idea here is that this isn’t just any form of stylization--it’s a specifically chosen set of stylizations that support each other in the goal of massively reducing the amount of work involved. And that means choosing subjects that work with the grain of those stylistic choices. For instance, you may be wondering how I’d approach a long flowing cape or a long coat. The answer is...I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t generally put characters in long coats or capes. There are about a million stories you could tell that don’t require anyone to wear a cape. Creating low-cost CG in this manner would be about making the design choices that let you get the most bang for your buck production-value wise while maintaining the essentials of character animation, a very different goal then that which I suspect drives companies like SPI and Disney to create stylized CG.

This also applies to the NPR rendering. There are a lot of ways to approach this problem, and some may be very time consuming! The two-tone methods I’m using here aren’t, though. I was able, as an individual with some understanding of the problem but no custom tools, to sit down and do the shading for the Monkey test without much trouble. Partly this is again choosing the most direct path to something that both looks good and is efficient to create. The simple two-tone present in the monkey test carries far less detail then the more painterly frames from Spider-verse, but I think it wouldn’t have any difficulty supporting emotionally engaging characters or exciting action scenes.

That said, the efficiency of this process could be improved a lot, and there’s a lot of room for R&D here--there’s still a required level of manual tweaking that I’d like to get rid of, and the two tone shapes could be improved. I’m hoping to tackle some of those problems this year.

There’s still the question of how that process, however reasonable on a small scale, would scale up to a large production like a feature film. In many ways, it may help to think of the look development for such a production as being less like a conventional film production pipeline, and more like a game. Ideally, except for certain FX shots, such a production would not even have a rendering/compositing stage--what you would see working on the shot would simply be the shot. It might be quite literally “in-engine” if using a game engine as the hub of production turns out to be the right way to approach it (this is something I’m getting more and more interested in). While this doesn’t remove all potential issues with scaling the approach to feature film size, I think it does drastically simplify the problem. Of course, we haven’t actually produced a long-form project using these techniques, and I’m sure there are going to be unforeseen roadblocks, so we shall see!

In any case, thanks again for your comment! I hope this illuminates how I envision this production process being different from the way I imagine that Spider-verse is being done, and why I think that the immense cost gains I’m claiming here are achievable.

Your hard work and dedication has not gone unnoticed. Give yourself a pat on the back.

[transam]

2 hours ago, Mike Lister said:

Wont it be really neat if somebody gives a full page post reply to the OP's question.  :))

Nooooooooooooo..........😱

[richard_smith237]

Some of us (myself included) type extremely quickly, thus longer replies may be normal as we are thinking and typing at the same time and filling half a page takes a matter of seconds. 

 

Conversely, there are others, perhaps many, who have a two second attention span and won't read posts longer than three lines - it usually these posters who end up with multiple posts which have to explain what was 'meant' in their previous two liner because they couldn't be bothered to make their comments clear.

 

 

[richard_smith237]

2 hours ago, Dolf said:

50 words is enough. If you can't express yourself in under 50 words then you are just posting crap.

 

Or you are someone with the attention span of a gnat and the post was not intended for you but for those displaying better socio-phonetics. 

 

 

[Fat is a type of crazy]

One example is that sometimes , say, a supporter of strange right wing things, or conspiracy things, or god things, will make 6 dubious or illogical claims in a post. One can take a few paragraphs to respond, attempting to not be totally dismissive, but showing one has addressed the issues raised. I don't meet people with these opinions in real life. 

I work in a job where I have to argue things logically so, in the past, a 10 minute break from that, to reply to such a post that might have ended up a bit long,  is something to do.

At one time I thought maybe you can change that mind, or a different reader's mind,  but soon you see them make the same type of conclusions the next day and you realise there is no point and short replies will suffice. Better still don't bother and have a walk in the sun. 

[EVENKEEL]

6 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

 

Or you are someone with the attention span of a gnat and the post was not intended for you but for those displaying better socio-phonetics. 

 

 

You just had your say in under 30 words. Job well done. 

[Dolf]

35 minutes ago, Fat is a type of crazy said:

One example is that sometimes , say, a supporter of strange right wing things, or conspiracy things, or god things, will make 6 dubious or illogical claims in a post. One can take a few paragraphs to respond, attempting to not be totally dismissive, but showing one has addressed the issues raised. I don't meet people with these opinions in real life. 

I work in a job where I have to argue things logically so, in the past, a 10 minute break from that, to reply to such a post that might have ended up a bit long,  is something to do.

At one time I thought maybe you can change that mind, or a different reader's mind,  but soon you see them make the same type of conclusions the next day and you realise there is no point and short replies will suffice. Better still don't bother and have a walk in the sun. 

I gave up after 2 lines.

[Dolf]

41 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

 

Or you are someone with the attention span of a gnat and the post was not intended for you but for those displaying better socio-phonetics. 

 

 

On the rare occasion 30 lines might be worth reading but that's very rare. No world class authors on here.

[richard_smith237]

1 minute ago, Dolf said:

I gave up after 2 lines.

 

.... Nuff said.....  

 

42 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

Or you are someone with the attention span of a gnat and the post was not intended for you but for those displaying better socio-phonetics. 

 

[gargamon]

3 hours ago, kwak250 said:

Hey! It’s been a while since I’ve posted-

Now, I have a consistent problem where I open my mouth intending to add just a sentence to a conversation and a nine-volume encyclopedia pops out instead. Accordingly, my attempt to answer the poster succinctly turned into a post-long response that I decided might as well just be a post, so here it is!

Thanks for your comment! You may be right that Spider-verse isn’t the best example, and certainly I wouldn’t hold it up as an example of the kind of production I intend to create--just as a very good example of stylized CG. I suspect that rendering in a stylized way, and making this style work with their existing methods, was quite expensive for SPI! I recall an artist who worked on Paper Man describing it as twice the work of ordinary CG. That's certainly a danger with stylized approaches--but I think it's an avoidable one.

The problem, it seems to me, is that you really can't approach this sort of production as if it were conventional CG, with a conventional methodology and pipeline, and expect to reap the cost benefits I think are potentially realizable with it. You'd have to treat this kind of production very differently.

For instance, you mention simulation as something that would be difficult with non-continuous motion, and you're quite correct. So simulation itself would be the first thing on the chopping block for the production, outside of the occasional FX shot. It's one of the many steps that gums up the works of CG production and prevents us from getting to that an-artist-can-sit-down-and-just-make-something state. Plus I generally don't like its results on an artistic basis (at least in this stylized context). When traditional animators animate clothed characters, the clothing takes part in the character's silhouette and becomes a part of the performance. They never had any difficulty animating cloth by hand.

Yes, I am actually claiming that hand-animating cloth would be faster then simulating it, and I know how insane that sounds from a conventional CG perspective. But stylization completely changes the game. Consider the monkey test I posted a few months back.

The monkey is unclothed, of course, but there definitely parts of his body that require secondary animation, notably his hair tufts and ears. The hair tufts at least would most likely be simulated if this shot were approached in a conventional manner. The way I approached the shot was not only to animate them by hand, but to animate them from the very beginning--the very first key poses I put down already included the ears and hair tufts as an inherent aspect of those poses, already contributing to silhouettes and arcs. It’s pretty difficult to get an accurate idea of exactly what percentage of my time animating the shot was devoted to them, but I’m going to guess it was only a few percent.

This is only possible because the stylized look allowed me to ignore the “higher frequency” details that would be required for a fully rendered character, and I expect these same details would also be unnecessary for character clothing. I’m much more interested in character silhouettes then I am in wrinkles and clothing detail, so some simple secondary that’s really just part of the character’s pose would actually be more effective.

The idea here is that this isn’t just any form of stylization--it’s a specifically chosen set of stylizations that support each other in the goal of massively reducing the amount of work involved. And that means choosing subjects that work with the grain of those stylistic choices. For instance, you may be wondering how I’d approach a long flowing cape or a long coat. The answer is...I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t generally put characters in long coats or capes. There are about a million stories you could tell that don’t require anyone to wear a cape. Creating low-cost CG in this manner would be about making the design choices that let you get the most bang for your buck production-value wise while maintaining the essentials of character animation, a very different goal then that which I suspect drives companies like SPI and Disney to create stylized CG.

This also applies to the NPR rendering. There are a lot of ways to approach this problem, and some may be very time consuming! The two-tone methods I’m using here aren’t, though. I was able, as an individual with some understanding of the problem but no custom tools, to sit down and do the shading for the Monkey test without much trouble. Partly this is again choosing the most direct path to something that both looks good and is efficient to create. The simple two-tone present in the monkey test carries far less detail then the more painterly frames from Spider-verse, but I think it wouldn’t have any difficulty supporting emotionally engaging characters or exciting action scenes.

That said, the efficiency of this process could be improved a lot, and there’s a lot of room for R&D here--there’s still a required level of manual tweaking that I’d like to get rid of, and the two tone shapes could be improved. I’m hoping to tackle some of those problems this year.

There’s still the question of how that process, however reasonable on a small scale, would scale up to a large production like a feature film. In many ways, it may help to think of the look development for such a production as being less like a conventional film production pipeline, and more like a game. Ideally, except for certain FX shots, such a production would not even have a rendering/compositing stage--what you would see working on the shot would simply be the shot. It might be quite literally “in-engine” if using a game engine as the hub of production turns out to be the right way to approach it (this is something I’m getting more and more interested in). While this doesn’t remove all potential issues with scaling the approach to feature film size, I think it does drastically simplify the problem. Of course, we haven’t actually produced a long-form project using these techniques, and I’m sure there are going to be unforeseen roadblocks, so we shall see!

In any case, thanks again for your comment! I hope this illuminates how I envision this production process being different from the way I imagine that Spider-verse is being done, and why I think that the immense cost gains I’m claiming here are achievable.

I'm a bit unclear on what you're trying to say. Maybe you could expand it a bit so I could understand.