operaguy opened this issue on Dec 07, 2005 ยท 36 posts
operaguy posted Wed, 07 December 2005 at 1:16 AM
Attached Link: http://www.jrdonohue.com/glow001i.mov
This little animation represents a quest for a stylized look. Animated and rendered in "realism" mode in Poser6, I took it out to After Effects and applied a few filters, especially "Glow."
I tried the Van Gogh plug-in effect for watercolor, not convincing at all IMO.
I don't know...the quest for hyper-realism and full motion for the small studio...I think it is impractical, even rendering in Max or Carrera on a farm. Yes, you can go "pretty far" given today's shaders and various GI, but to REALLY convince in realism, you have to push each frame so far, and be so meticulous, because every flaw tells, breaks the suspension of disbelief. Even at DVD frame size (don't even think about full film size) the render time is very high.
But more important is the time taken tweaking, experimenting, re-rendering, etc. to make every frame convincing, in full motion.
I am starting to think it is a non-starter. There have been threads on this forum and CGSociety, for instance, that make the point that even with maximum effort and expense, such as in Midnight Express and FF, you "can't get there from here" with animation posturing as live action. [And with a nod to Peter Jackson...verisimilitude with CG is MUCH easier in action scenes than in human character close-ups and conversational interaction.]
To put it another way...."Just go get actors and a SONY prosumer CAM and go shoot the damn thing for real!"
Leaving that aside for a moment, and not being ready to move into what I call many-stops animation, where you essentially have a static background over which a small amount of animated action takes place with many fully-stopped frames, I am beginning to play around, not with toon, but with stylized versions of realistic character action. IMO this clip does not make it; it is not stylized enough. It just looks like attempted h-realism with effects applied. I am going to keep working to find something genuine.
::::: Opera :::::