Why Realism Doesn't Work in Animation (or Machinima)

Salon.com has a great interview with character designer Shannon Tindle. The article mostly discusses character design and why so many animated characters (like the ones in the recent "Gnomeo and Juliet") look terrible, but also touches on the subject of motion capture animation vs. animator-driven key frame animation.

Shannon is very diplomatic throughout the interview, but makes his feelings known about movies that skew towards realism in terms of both their design and their use of motion capture. Here's what he had to say about "motion capture" animated movies like The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol:

"All I know is that the studio that Disney formed to produce those films, Image Movers, doesn't exist anymore. "Christmas Carol" is one of my favorite stories of all time. But with those films, it doesn't look exactly like a real person and so it becomes something in between. In any animated film -- stop-motion, CGI and 2-D, and I've worked in all of those mediums -- you need to make a clear statement. Any time you waffle, if you're somewhere in between reality and stylization, a straight line and a curve, people feel it and they tend to have a bad reaction to it."

To me this is also one of the biggest barriers preventing real-time animation from reaching a more mainstream audience. Machinima might be getting more and more popular, but it's appeal is still very niche compared to mainstream animation. The movement in most real-time animation is driven by "realistic" mocap and/or skeletal tracking. At the same time, it's difficult to find an example of a real-time animated character that exhibits as much personality as Mickey Mouse did in the early Disney cartoons of the 1930s. I think there's a direct connection there; in order to be successful in the mainstream, audiences have to be able to connect emotionalally with the characters they're watching. As Shannon points out, it's much harder to do that using realistic motion or design.

Many Machinima creators are really innovative and do an excellent job of working with and around the limitations in the software they use to make their movies, but what they really need is a platform that allows them to create better, more emotive and relate-able characters so that their imaginations can be set free.

Salon.com article via Cartoon Brew.

An Animator Praises Sid the Science Kid

Keith Lango thinks the use of digital puppetry on Sid the Science Kid makes sense and I have to agree (but then you knew that, didn't you?). More and more I can see how puppets and pixels really are coming together. Check out the comments for the above-linked post to read some interesting discussion on puppetry, mo-cap and animation.

BTW, new episodes of Sid The Science Kid start the week of May 4th on PBS.

One Puppeteer's Journey From Puppets to Pixels

The fence that divides puppetry and animation is a pretty low one and lots of artists like Phil Vischer, Karen Prell, Mike Quinn, and Nate Pacheco (to name just a few) find themselves jumping from one side to the other mid-career and Craig Crane is another of those puppeteer/animator hybrids.

Craig started his career in the 1990s doing a lot of ground-breaking work in real-time animation and performance capture as well as conventional puppeteering on various projects in England, France and Isreal, but these days he's an animator for Double Negative, a British effects shop. Craig discussed his transition from puppetry to animation in a two part interview with 3D World Magazine last fall (click to read part one and part two).

Craig seems to be pretty happy in the animation world these days, but I really hope he keeps a hand (no pun intended) in the puppetry world. He really is a brilliant puppeteer; you can check out is Real-Time animation demo reel above and his preschool puppet reel is a lot of fun too.

Cross-posted from The PuppetVision Blog.

Further Blurring The Line Between Animation and Puppetry

One of the interesting things I've discovered while discussing some of the concepts I am working on with Panda Puppet is that the idea of digital puppetry or utilizing puppetry techniques in animation seems to get a much warmer reception from most animators than motion capture, which has been the subject of fierce discussion and debate lately. Personally, I think the fuss over motion capture has been much ado about nothing and there are lots of ways that all these different techniques can co-exist and be used in tandem with another.

As an example, animator Michael Duffy read about Panda Puppet over at Keith Lango's blog on the weekend and pointed me to Timothy Albee's Facial Animation, a plug-in for Lightwave that allows animators to do lip sync in real-time and includes a somewhat limited 'puppeteering' mode. I don't know how useful it would be for real-time performances, but it's interesting to see another example of someone blurring the lines between puppetry and animation. You can read more about the software here. A free demo can be found at the link above along with some videos showing it in action.

What you could do in Machinima

Brian Stokes, whose blog I always enjoy reading, linked to the fantastic French student animation film Burning Safari a little while ago alluded to the fact that it's difficult to do something like it in Machinima. While I agree completely that it would be nearly impossible to make Burning Safari with most existing Machinima and digital puppetry tools, after spending sometime looking at the films in terms of what I am working on with Panda Puppet I think this type of animated film could definitely be done using real-time techniques.

As a theoretical exercise I broke down the main sections of the film and I'll describe here how would approach them using digital puppetry techniques:


The Spaceship Landing - Easy enough to do, lots of video games already have vehicles like this in them. `Nuff said.



The Little Robots - These guys sure are cute. There are two possibilities for performing them that I can imagine; the simplest way would be to create walk cycles for them and then having a puppeteer simply control their X-Y movement within a scene. Another possibility would be to use a data glove on a flat surface like a table with each leg controlled by a different finger. This would allow more spontaneous and specific control, but running around might be difficult if you didn't have a large enough space to perform in.



"Robo-Vision" - To be perfectly honest, I would cheat this shot in After Effects.



The Monkey - Boy, I love monkeys. There's just something funny about them. In fact, he bares a striking resemblance to "Suzanne" the Blender monkey-head primitive. Controlling a character like this will be relatively straight forward with a control system like Panda Puppet.



See Monkey Get Mad - The only thing funnier than a monkey is an angry monkey. This type of moment in a scene seemed like a real challenge at first, but I have been playing with an idea I call "Emotion State Control" which would influence the movements and poses of a character according to the character's emotion state. If the emotion state "happy" is assigned to a joystick's trigger as long as the trigger is pressed all of the "happy" versions of different movements and poses would be used.



See Monkey Run - Once again, running is done using simple walk cycles. Leaping, jumping, etc. is fairly easily using a combination of walk-cycles and physics. Even the squash and stretch is fairly easy to achieve.


See Monkey On Fire - Ragdoll physics would work nicely in this situation. I would do the energy squares or whatever the robots are chucking at the monkey and the fire on the monkey's face in post using After Effects or something similar.

The other big problem that needs to be addressed is image quality. The graphics in real-time rendering are tied to a computer's ability to draw polygons onscreen. The more polygons a computer can draw and the faster it can draw them, the better the graphics. So having high resolution real-time graphics is really just a matter of having enough computational power. With enough of it, theoretically, you can render graphics of this quality in real-time. In fact I've seen real-time 3D demonstrations that exceed the quality of Burning Safari. Another work around is to simply do performances in real-time at low resolution and then render out higher quality resolution frame by frame afterwards.

There you have it, easy-peasy. Well, almost.

I don't mean to suggest that something being technically doable means it's easy artistically. Making great films is hard no matter how you do it. And even when I get Panda Puppet or someone else gets another digital puppetry system to the point where it can do all this all it will be is just a great tool. Having great tools is awfully nice, but what ultimately makes great art is a great artist.

What you can't do in Machinima (for now)

This animation test above is a fantastic example of pose-to-pose animation (even if it is a "test") from Pixar. As I've mentioned many times here before, one of the inherent limitations of Machinima as it exists today is that the available authoring tools are really unintuitive and don't allow for much expression. Even the best examples of Machinima puppeteering like the ILL Clan's Trash Talk With ILL Will - which won a Mackie for best virtual performance at 2006 Machinima Awards - are ridiculously crude compared to what most puppeteers and animators can do.


I also like this fantastic clip from Aardman. It's done with Claymation of course, but it's so simple there is no reason something very similar couldn't be done in real-time. There is absolutely no reason high-quality animation work can't be done in real-time. The only problems is that a) you need fast enough hardware to render enough polygons on screen and b) there aren't simplified tools that allow you to create great performances.

All it takes is a little money to solve the first problem and, well, I'm working on the second.

Disruptive Animation Technology

The Oscar nominations were announced today and the fact that two of the three nominees for Best Animated Film relied heavily on motion capture has not escaped the attention of many blogs on the internet. Some animators think this is the end of an era.

This isn't really anything new. Anytime a new technique or technology comes along and disrupts an existing art form the old guard get bent out of shape about it for a decade or two until things settle down and a new equilibrium is esthablished. In the 1990s puppeteers griped about the popularity of the then-new computer graphics in special effects work. Traditional animators griped about rise in popularity of 3D animation. Now computer animators are complaining about the rise of motion capture.

This seems silly to me. Photography wasn't the end of painting, electronic devices won't replace books anytime soon and despite the popularity of computer animation, old fashioned stop-motion animation is undergoing something of a renaissance. The tools and process of animation may change, but it will never go away any more than puppetry will.

I have no doubt that when (and I believe it's a matter of when, not if) real-time animation/digital puppetry/Machinima/whatever you want to call it really takes off there will be a whole new round of moaning and groaning about how it will be the end of this artform or that technique, which of course is rubbish. There is always opportunity for smart and skilled artists in these types of transitions. For example, any decent real-time animation system is virtually impossible to put together without good traditional animation skills. Ditto for motion capture, which looks awful in it's raw form.

BTW, work on Panda Puppet this week is coming a long very nicely and much quicker than I expected. I hope to have some demos or screen shots up sometime next week.