Whoever made this tribute, you have my salute: The 3D CG, while quite obvious, blends very well with the rotoscoped animation, something that doesn't always happen (just look at some of Cowboy Bebop). It also captures the feel of Ghibli's animation amazingly well.
I salute the animator, and I also, of course, salute Hayao Miyazaki: Farewell, and may your legacy live on.
Er… he's not dead, and was only semi-retired. Semi-retired because he's been working on a Ghibli short of an old idea of his (Kemushi no Boro)[0] and "was" because last Sunday in an NHK special he announced he'd started working on a new feature film[1].
[0] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-07-10/hayao-miyaza...
[1] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-11-13/hayao-miyaza...
And if that's your only exposure to anime then you should at the very least checkout Satoshi Kon's masterpiece Paprika.
But my favorites will always be Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, and Whisper of the Heart. They may not be Miyzaki at his best, but they were the films that I loved the most.
The Wind Rises may also join the latter category. Either way, it's a really good film.
Finally, it should be noted that Kaze Ni Naru from The Cat Returns is possibly one of my favorite songs from any anime, ever. And I watch a lot of anime.
Suffice to say it's up on the list with A Cruel Angel's Thesis, and Tank. For you anime fans who know what that means, yes, it's that good, IMHO. YMMV.
I was under the impression that the accusations of rotoscoping in Cowboy Bebop were just rumor and that a number of industry professionals had come out and said that "no, this is just how Hiroyuki Okiura draws".
That said, I can't find evidence either way at the moment, so I could certainly be wrong.
Or as well as the CG integrated in SeaQuest (anyone else remember SeaQuest?)
I don't get the hate for Blender. It can use RenderMan, it supports Python scripting. It's just different from what people are used to.
It's probably just this. You have the same with Vim and Emacs, and tiling window managers - they're different from what people are commonly used to, therefore hated. Even though the paradigms employed in those applications make you many times more efficient in using them.
It seems that a lot of people - even many professionals - have allergy for learning. They feel they've learned enough when they first discovered how to operate computer (yes, every single one of us had to learn that at some point), and they hate being forced to learn further, regardless of how much benefits it brings.
IMO Blender is still worse than Maya (but not by that much), although Maya is also substantially worse than Photoshop -- to make a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
I was excited to see that Miyazaki is making one more movie: http://www.dailydot.com/parsec/hayao-miyazaki-one-last-movie...
Miyazaki is of the few really original thinkers in movies. A Pixar employee once mentioned that when they get totally stuck and need an idea, they screen a Miyazaki movie for inspiration.
I've played around with Blender, and this seems like it would take months of effort. But for a professional with a decent workflow and total knowledge of the tool, how long did it actually take?
This is unrelated. I recently went and watched Markoto Shinkai's latest film : Kimi no Na wa. (Your Name.). Like his previous works, it's extraordinary. I encourage everyone to give it a try.
While Markoto Shinkai won't be Miyazaki, his work are pretty good and he's still very young so I really hope to see him making great ones like Miyazaki.
Though we lost him too young, Kon Satoshi was able to reach the level of extraordinary several times. "Every Frame a Painting" covered his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz49vQwSoTE
Also, minor nitpick, it's Makoto, not Markoto.
I feel like there is a cool machine learning project in here.
The most important thing in these masks are clean edges (and the "auto stuff" usually isn't). A rough mask (called a garbage matte) is good enough in some cases, but most often it's the first step and a clean matte is created by hand using multiple techniques; playing with contrast, playing with color/chroma (bluescreen), and hand animating curves or painting (rotoscoping).
If that is indeed a representation of the quality of results, it's clearly got a very long way to go before it's actually useful for rotoscoping. I suppose it could be useful for automating garbage mattes, but those are pretty easy to do anyway.
(Strictly speaking it's a Cycles showreel but presumably everything there will have been created in Blender as Cycles is Blender's rendering engine).
And what a nice rendering!
I have zero experience in this space but this bit caught my attention. If I'm understanding this correctly, he is saying that the production render of a single frame would take anywhere from 4 to 15 minutes PER FRAME?
If that's the case, the fact that the video is around 200 seconds long would imply that the lower-bound estimate of the time it would have taken to produce the final render of this is around 320hrs assuming 24fps. That's two weeks. I can't imagine the artist actually had to wait two weeks to render his product -- what am I missing?
You're not missing anything :) I worked briefly in the special effects industry[0] and it takes a long time to render stuff. Monsters University took 29 hours to render a frame[1] and they had a whole server farm.
[0] There's an old joke that everyone in LA works in the 'biz' at least once.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/the-making-of-pixars-lates...
And that was part of my question too: Given the rendering time faced by dono, would someone like he have access to technology to distribute this over a few machines/in the cloud or is that something that just big studios have the capacity to do?
I am glad to see he is still with us. And nice work.
More details here: http://www.fathomevents.com/event/spirited-away/more-info/th...
Except in the latter case they clearly played it from DVD, interlaced even! At first I was like "I can't watch this!" but after 3 minutes I was so captivated I didn't even notice anymore!
What would be the best, non-obvious, perhaps non-googlable, path?
That should at least get you through the basics. From there... I don't know.
[0]: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/hayao-miyazaki-latest-film-cg...
