What is the attraction with Anime type characters. I thought we were striving for better resolution ,more realistic looking Characters. This Anime has the look of when computer graphics was just in its prime. I personaly want more realistic looking characters. Not go back to the Poser one look or Saturday cartoon look. Ya I know who cares what I prefer !!!!.

Probably because anime is wildly popular in many places outside of the US. In Japan, anime movies can gross as much revenue as Hollywood blockbusters, and anime artists there are highly respected and revered. People here in the United States just don't "get it", but in other parts of the world, the stuff is mad popular.

I enjoy working both realistic and cartoonish styles, and it's certainly not because cartoon/anime is easier -- if anything, it's far tougher because it's more difficult to get the expressions you want out of characters with far more limitations. But ultimately, it depends on which style is right for the project in mind.

Anime Is King Mainly because of what maxxxmodelz said. Now that being said, there is a difference between "Anime" and "Toon" type characters to be found in the Poser/3D universe. AnimeToon

Anime

Toon

Anime

The "strive for better resolution, more realistic looking characters" is an attempt for some. There's also a strong strive for "better resolution, more fantasy looking characters" as well. The field of animation is not for everyone, some just don't like to see it. And that's ok. Personally, I prefer animation because I can see the real stuff all around me 24/7. Plus I have always had a deep admiration for those that can create, which is why I'm here in the first place. Creating something that looks real is an accomplishment.
Creating something that looks cool in animation is an achievement.
Creating something that looks really cool in Anime-style is godly.

And besides, the origins of Anime style has nothing to do with 3D or Poser. Correct me if I'm wrong but it is a style of Japanese 2D cartoons dating back to the old Speed Racer and Starblazers cartoons. So these new Anime type characters coming out for 3D are just trying to emulate that style, which by the way is still going very strong with a whole bunch of current movies and tv shows. So think of it as not a step backwards, but just another type of character for 3D, like fairies, hulks, monsters,etc.

Before that, even... but yes. Anime is generally classified as Asian-oriented animations, most commonly from Japan.

wtsmith, why do you prefer what you do?

I personally like what I like for reasons I can't exactly put into words.
I don't really get into cell shaded anime and though I respect the work put into photoreal, that's not me either.
My interests lie somewhere in the middle.
I've worked with V3 and jumbo textures, working with models with less detail is refreshing, especially in animations.
Besides, the question asked here might as well be...
Why faeries?
Why cutesy?
Why militant?
Why big breasts?
Why not?
The answer will always be personal preference.

I a getting more and more into japanese animation these days, Ghost in the Shell and Spirited Away converted me. Anime appeals to me because of it's very different graphic style, I like the fact that they don't look realistic that's their appeal to me. I find them quite expressive even with the often crude facial features. Even the toons now hold more appeal to me than V3 and company,but I think that is because I am tired of the vacant stare with the puckered lips pin ups, I want expressive characters and very few people are good at coaxing expressions out of them.

Attached Link: http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=155791

If you scroll down the images on that thread, you'll see the mesh involved there. By far more complex than Vicki. Obviously, there's more than a small interest in the stuff. ;-)

Message edited on: 08/07/2004 10:44

Holy Hell!! That must take a lifetime to render out. WOW!!!

" Holy Hell!! That must take a lifetime to render out. WOW!!!" NO doubt. I'm sure he used a renderfarm for the final run. The entire project took 1 month. Done in 3dsMax 5 and Vray, for use on a game cover I think he said. Amazing stuff.

i can't speak for everyone but i prefer toon style characters,if i wanted realism i would get my camera out,i do let vicky out occasionally,but not really for realism,just for a change of scenery :D

Hey, i cant find the reason of such a mater. Poser is for every one and what i liek from it is the posibility to create whatever you like from a beauty realistic person to a cute little mouse. So poser is not intented just for one kind of people but for every one. When you say realistic, it comes to my mind that the texture, lights, ambience looks as real as it coulbe in real world, even if it is a toon or anime. We choose our own way to use poser, i dont think poser content is going back, what i see is that more people is opening new doors that were closed before. By the way, if you want to see good anime things; look for "Final Fantasy X" its a game but man, what a game. -Vlad

I thought we were striving for better resolution ,more realistic looking Characters. Got a mouse in your pocket, do ya? Seriously, I do what I enjoy. Realism, surrealism, toon, fae, fantasy, everyday life... I suppose the real question is, WHY NOT?

I'm still trying to figure out why they call it 'anime', when apparently the idea is to have as little movement on screen as possible..;)

pakled: Not sure I understand your point.

It's all down to personal taste my friend, personally I like a bit of both. Someone could just as easily post a topic 'More Realism: Why??????'. I like anime because it's a little different from what I would call western style toons and it isn't all aimed at ankle-bitters. On the subject of the image at http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=155791 posted by maxxxmodelz, in the name of all that is good in the world - that guy is a genius!!!!!!!!!!! If I won the lottery I would throw money at him until he gave me that mesh :D

That Luna model on CGtalk is beautiful! I'm floored by all the swirly-Q stuff - there is no way I could ever model that! I have actually just started getting into anime/manga. It's different and I like the way they express emotion (even the exagerrated chibi style). I prefer the toony stuff to the realistic stuff. If I want to see perfectly airbrushed people, I can open any fashion magazine. If one wants to capture more "realism", pick up a camera and go downtown - all the realism you could ever want to see.

I think it is pretty silly to claim that the advancement of CG art has a single goal. Higher resolution and more realism is one worthy and impressive goal, but it's not the end-all and be-all. Some people want CG to advance in service of their stylized, cartoon, or fantasy ideas, and the community benefits from progress made on all fronts. Even as a traditional artist (I have a Bachelor's in drawing), while the ability to do faithful life-drawing is an indispensible skill to have in your repertoire, I've always chafed at the popular notion that realistic=good. If I could point to one goal that all artists, CG or otherwise, could be thought of as pursuing, it would be mastering their medium so that they can realize their visions more completely and faithfully. Within that, goals vary, and what artists learn along all their disparate paths advances the art as a whole. Okay, that was way flowerier than was called for... For what it's worth, I'm a toon person, myself. ^_^;

I guess the ultimate goal for myself is to get the closest-to-anime-quality-pictures-possible-using-only-Poser thing happening. I think I've hit a ceiling, and am awaiting e-frontier's newer offering.

I like most types anime cartoon realistic etc.

I love it all. I'm a huge fan of Aardman Animations. I love Angry Kid. I would lover to see some poser characters with a claymation feel to them. Why limit the choices to more realistic looking character, when we can have it all?

For me, it's simple: I can't draw. I love comic books, manga (Japanese comic books) and anime, though. CG allows me to render the stories that I can't draw. I also enjoy doing "realistic images" as well. On the other hand, how different is it to use CG to make manga that deal with realistic situations vs. making a photo-realistic render of a knight fighting a dragon?

anime (I think) is short for animation..now I'm hardly the expert (my kids watch it..and my grandkids), but all I see are lots of (still) shots of surprised characters with strange eyes, and only the mouth goes up and down..;) They pan the picture..now in my defence, I've seen some actually good anime (not sure of the name, but Princess Nomomoke..or something like that), but even there, it seems a Zen-like attachment to inaction rather than anime was present..;)

Now sure what your kids and grandkids are watching, but most anime that I've seen has constant movement in it. Yes, there are alot of surprised characters (GAINAX titles), but you'd be hard-pressed to see little to no movement in anime or any animation for that matter. They kinda HAVE to move... otherwise they turn into still pictures. ^_^

Some anime is very cheaply made, that is why there is not much animation. I saw an anime film once that had no actual animation for about five minutes. It was background screens being panned across and down. Even some of the better anime has animation "shortcuts" too.

I know what pakled is talking about, though I'll admit my anime watching has been limited. Hold frames are very popular in all forms of animation, because they allow a company to save money. One of the most expensive scenes to film in traditonal animation like Disney is underwater scenes where the hair has to constantly move for all 24 frames. Anime seems to go a step further and uses those hold frames for quite a bit longer to the point where it's very noticeable. People just don't stay perfectly still like that. But it takes a large budget to be able to create the illusion of life per frame, and so they tend to cut costs by using still frames. Even so, the medium is still animation as there is motion.

The older marvel comics animations did a lot of the bad animation stuff like only animating the lips and having still frames, well before the japanese anime afaik.

I thought we were striving for better resolution ,more realistic looking Characters. Yeah, and it's giving 3D rendering a bad name! I think we should all petition Pixar and Dreamworks to stop with the toony crap and do some REAL rendering. ;-) On a serious note, surely the world is big enough for all kinds of models and images, from the most accurate photoreality to the tooniest? Just a thought. bonni

I agree w/elizabyte. 3D rendering opens up endless possibilities from the zany to the most realistic. It gives the artist the opportunity to create what is or isn't in the real world. And there is nothing wrong with that. I like both sides of the spectrum myself from the cartoony to the realistic. Heck, I even take photos of cartoony things. There is enough of both to keep everyone happy for a long time methinks. ShadowWind

Sure, Disney movies have more motion in them than Saturday morning anime. That's like pointing out that the latest Star Wars film has more special effects in it than Stargate SG-1 or Start Trek: Enterprise. Movies have a much higher budget, both in money and time, than TV episodes. If you compare Disney Sat. morning cartoons to anime, there's a much smaller gap in quality. (I haven't seen an animated Disney TV episode in a long while so I can't remember what they look like. I do remember that their straight-to-video stuff is nowhere near as good as the theater releases.) Cheers!

oh great.. yet another "anti anime" crusader :)

"We were looking for realism" ? who are included in teh We ? certainly not us here :)

don't even want to bother speakin with you.

di i shun your work and taste ? do i pretend being part of a global WE who would be supposed to hold the truth and the only good way of doing something ?

anyway anime is CHEAPER !

V3 unimesh + v3 addons (vital addons i would say..;) + correct texture + bunch of other accessories + hours of postwork in Ps to correct some inherent poser renderign engin bugs !

vs

animedoll + a few freebies + some postwork...

i value my time and purse more than you because i intend to use both of them more and to full extent :) but i lack of both (time and purse)...

see you ! please: give us a break... get a life !

Message edited on: 08/10/2004 19:49

ps to maxxxxmodelz: aargh i ma stunned, scandalously beautiful !

realism versus fantasy... that's a neverending duel, same as "beauty against uglyness"... it's all subjective...

I'm on the "I get realism every frugging day in the street, why woul I want more in my 3d artwork?" team... I really don't care about realism in Poser, other than if I want to portray "this character is a human with long hair", then I want it to look like so and not like a piece of brick.... 

but then, I love Fantasy... I'm not about to defend it  before the realism advocates, it's just my personal taste...

it's a challenge to devise some form of machine automation to do the cel-shading according to anime stylistic conventions. so far, I haven't seen anything that comes even close using poser, excepting toons that required a great deal of postwork, which is not feasible for an animation project. nor are photoshop actions IMVHO, although some are very good. if one wants a photorealistic image, one can use a camera and an actual human, which can bend, express emotion, wear clothing and reflect light in ways a poser model cannot.

it is possible to use postwork via Photoshop for an anim!! as the overlays are just replacing the cell-sheets from "old-skool" anim, so special effects like lens flairing sword blades or alternating the sparkle off some gemstones, is easy to do as a postworked overlay.

having seen some of the lastest Japanese anime i think they are still hand-drawing most of it, and can see the possibility there that they could of used Photoshop for overlaying special effects, like magic trails an stuff, i could actually believe that the whole thing can be done in photoshop really, i'd guess though that the hand drawn stuff is still taking about five years to complete.

Posted Tue, Aug 10, 2004 7:46 pm

Somebody's bored...

or maybe they is just a very slow typer, and it has taken this long (three years) for them to finish writing what they started to write back then.

Could be!

nah, just did a search for anime/manga related poser topics... not much on the subject, specially in recent years (oh, yesteryears...)

there's also something wrong with the forum software. in the list of threads it shows 7 or 8 replies, only one page. but there are actually 30 or 40 replies and 2 pages.

I thought we were striving for better resolution ,more realistic looking Characters.
We are? What's with the we? There are lot's of Poser users having no interest in striving for better resolution ,more realistic looking Characters. For me it's the more unrealisting looking the better, the more toony the more it's useable for me.

*I personaly want more realistic looking characters.

Not go back to the Poser one look or Saturday cartoon look.*

There's more then enough of that stuff around.... we could really do with some more toon stuff.

Quote - there's also something wrong with the forum software. in the list of threads it shows 7 or 8 replies, only one page. but there are actually 30 or 40 replies and 2 pages.

The first page and a half are dated 2004. It's likely that those messages haven't been converted to count towards the page/message count.
The programmers probably thought that those old threads weren't likely to be resurrected...

haha, they should have thought better then... we should call ourselves the Resurrectors or something (har!)

yeah, a few more of these zombie threads revived from the dead, and we can call ourselves "thread re-animators". "why anime? - the thread that wouldn't die" :lol: maybe I can revive one of those threads from 99, when jack and willow were still here