I was essentially raised on Miyazaki. Some kids grew up with Toy Story and Finding Nemo, I grew up with Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle, and The Cat Returns. I mean, I watched other films to (a lot of other films), but Miyazaki had a huge influence me: without him, I would have likely never gotten into anime. To this day, his films are still some of my favorites.
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.
> 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].
> I know he's not dead, but his next film will be his last.
First his next film won't be released for something like 4 or 5 years he's only just started working on it, so it's a terrible time to give him a sendoff.
Second The Wind Rises was already supposed to be his last film and see how that turned out.
Miyazaki is the kind of people you send off at their funeral and no sooner.
And before that Spirited Away, and before that Princess Mononoke, and before that...
Miyazaki retiring has become kind of a meme in anime communities over the past decade or so.
Nice integration of Joe Hisaishi's music in the tribute. The Spirited Away score gives you a feeling of peace right from the beginning but also the sense that something great is on the way. It seems to me people sometimes focus on the animation and underestimate how important the film scores have been to Miyazaki's work.
My only exposure to anime is his films (friend suggested them, first I ignored the recommendation because they were "for kids" and some time later I watched "Spirited away" by luck and you know the rest of the story) and want to explore more, I thought maybe you could have some suggestions from your other favorites?
The other peerless Miyazaki's are Princess Mononoke (the only other work with as much depth as Spirited Away) and My Neighbour Totoro (avowedly a children's film). Nearly all the others are also very very good.
And if that's your only exposure to anime then you should at the very least checkout Satoshi Kon's masterpiece Paprika.
I wouldn't introduce someone to Satoshi Kon with Paprika. In my opinion it is much better to watch Kon's movies in their chronological release order. Perfect Blue is much more accessible and less surrealist than Paprika which may confuse someone and cause them to dismiss Kon's whole cinematography as a whole.
Porco Rosso, Howl's Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke are good. In fact, they're arguably some of his best.
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.
Thank you for recommending Kaze Ni Naru, which I had not heard (of) before.
Also, if your Hacker News activity is any representative proxy, you seem like a pretty cool person [0] in general [1]; I would hope to talk with you some thread, should a suitable post of common interest be submitted.
[0] That is, possessing similar affinities to me.
[1] I hope you will not begrudge such a public declaration, but I do not know of any of your more direct means of contact.
Although, if you think I'm cool, you should probably know that I'm a highschooler, not somebody actually working in the industry.
I don't know if you care, or if that changes your opinion, but it felt like a relevant disclaimer to put beneath anybody saying really nice things about me based on my online presence.
Then I am glad to see Scheme still circulates amongst the younglings. Carry bravely forward the spirit of (the chip [0] of) '79 - we shall have our year of the Lisp-1 desktop yet!
Or SEL. Or NGE. Although those have more stupid tropes.
Also, if anybody says that Kids' Anime is never good (and they've seen kids' anime that's semi-decent (Naruto, etc, and not just Pokémon)), Digimon Tamers.
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.
This is beautiful. Despite what critics say about Blender3D, I am constantly amazed at what can be done with this piece of open source software. The learning curve can be more difficult at the beginning but it is one of those systems where once I get used to the commands, I can express myself efficiently in the rich UI environment it offers.
The learning curve is difficult in any 3D application and Blender is no exception. It's challenging to learn, but a very capable application in the right hands.
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 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.
I've used Vi and Emacs 25 years ago - I used to give courses in Vi and I used to write LISP macros for Emacs as a developer support job for some time. Why anyone still uses them is beyond me, I don't see how they make you more efficient than modern IDE's like Visual Studio or Jetbrains et al, but to each their own.
Well, I can tell you how - because they're superior at text editing. Modern IDEs are superior at staticly typed lanaguages such as Java or C#, where you also deal with so much boilerplate it's literally faster to tell the editor to write / modify code for you. With those languages, it is also possible to make things like autocomplete/intellisense you can trust is giving you 100% information, so this is a huge win too.[0] I use Java at my $dayjob, and I stick to IDE there too, because of those features. But there is a noticeable (and very low) efficiency ceiling in things like text editing, or doing project lifecycle tasks (like version control).
Switch from Java and C# to more flexible and dynamic space, and suddenly, IDEs give you nothing over Vim and Emacs[1]. There you can finally feel the efficiency of a properly internally integrated text editor. I could elaborate much more on this, but in the interest of brevity I'll just mention magit[2] in Emacs as an example. This is probably the single best integration of Git with a development tool. You get to use 90% of git (!) with simple shortcuts and no modal popups to stop your flow (+100 efficiency). I can prepare, review and commit my code in it in the same time it takes IntelliJ to load the version control popup. And I get to use all of the superadvanced text editing and navigation features throughout the entire tool.
It's little things like this - extremely powerful editing and navigation, tight internal integration of everything, that makes Vim and Emacs so powerful and worth going over the learning curve.
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[0] - As for why this isn't backintegrated into Vim and Emacs so well, my understanding is that intellisense and semantic refactoring engines are huge piles of complicated code that don't fit the architectures of Vim / Emacs code well and need to be done as external application. Languages that benefit from those features are few and - while popular on the job market - not exactly liked or respected among the hacker crowd. So there's little incentive in making projects like ENSIME actually 100% feature-complete or even easy to set up.
[1] - But they still lag and consume insane amount of RAM and CPU power.
Absolutely this. As somebody who primarily writes Scheme, I can't imagine using anything other than Emacs: paredit, geiser, and flycheck are better than any IDE for that.
That allergy is called limited time. You might bump into it, once you venture outside of university/ rich daddys attic.
Every time somebody reinvents the wheel, to save a click- and breaks my workflow, that might seem very reasonable for those who either have lots of money/time - and or already did that investment.
Well, i dont, i have things to create, places to be. If you re-invent a scissor, that only trained experts can use, because its basically two razor-blades taped to the thumb and forefinger- you accomplished all you have dreamed off.
You reduced weight, you allowed for more precise use - and the likes of me will still call you out for missing the obvious.
PS: The Miyazaki tribute is absolutely gorgeous. Im not trying to claim, that blender cant be a excellent tool once you have sunken the cost. Its just that retraining for absolutely no reason..
> That allergy is called limited time. You might bump into it, once you venture outside of university/ rich daddys attic.
That may be one of the causes, but the allergy I talk about is internalized myopia. Time is limited, yes, but it's worth to sacrifice some of it for learning in order to significantly improve your efficiency at using the rest of the time.
> If you re-invent a scissor, that only trained experts can use, because its basically two razor-blades taped to the thumb and forefinger- you accomplished all you have dreamed off. You reduced weight, you allowed for more precise use - and the likes of me will still call you out for missing the obvious.
And I'll still be calling you misguided, if such scissors after few days of training will allow those "trained experts" to outperform regular scissor-wielders by factor of 2. Or even factor of 1.2 - it'll pay for itself pretty quickly.
This approach that every tool should be made for the lowest common denominator, so that people can master them in 5 seconds of use, is IMO stupid. I understand that software designed by that may sell better, but for the tools professionals choose themselves - do people really think they've learned everything humans can learn the moment they leave high school?
That is why professional software usually has two stages- First the UI, designed to be used by everyone with little training and not demanding from everyone to become a Renaissance level expert at everything.
Second stage are short-keys and creating your own tool additions.
And that is where blender falls short- the first stage is the second stage.
I used Solidworks a bit and I would definitely says it has this first stage UI. After maybe 1h of tutorials you are already designing your first parts that you can 3D print.
Yeah, well that steep learning curve everyone is complaining about for blender is about an hour. After that, you'll probably be doing rigged animation.
In my opinion, people associate cost with value. Something that's free MUST be worse than something that costs thousands of dollars.
As Microsoft demonstrated - if something is equal in power and free- the cost drops dramatically. Cant see that happen with Adobe CS or Autodesk 3dsMax.
And its not a hour, even if you know other solutions. I guess in this sort of discussion, that is considered a defeat of the "opponent" - winning by him/her admitting in anecdata that he/she is stupid enough to take this or that longer to learn. Unfortunately feeling smart , doesn't help the cause of open source one iota.
I always wondered, why some people get full zealot for open source? Does explaining the problems away, instead of building a user-friendly OS/ 3D editing Software, supplies some sort of elitist "invites only Treehouse" kick?
I consider Blender much more user-friendly than Max, Softimage, Modo and ZBrush (to list the ones I've used). With Blender I found that I got frustrated a lot less because the work flows for the most tasks I did were streamlined and efficient.
Consider what you're learning. If you've never ever done 3D modelling, it will take much more time to learn just because you need to first learn the principles of doing 3D modelling. My SO is doing exactly that in 3DS now, and I can clearly see it takes her much more time to figure out what to do than how to do it in the program itself.
That said, a lesson often forgotten (or perhaps never acquired in the first place) is that learning requires some minimum structure, discipline and focus. To give you an example - I've been shying away from learning Paredit for about two or three years of my Lisp coding experience. Then one day I decided, "fuck it", I'm taking time to focus on learning it. It only took two pomodoros - literally less than an hour, and yes, I timed it - of reviewing the documentation and practicing (I took a big function, stripped the structure out with M-x replace-str to remove all parens, and then restored the structure using only Paredit operations) to become pretty proficient in the mode, and now I'm that much faster in working on Lisp code.
I've repeated this experience several times in various places - it's surprising just how much you can learn in an hour if you actually focus on it. Sometimes you have to invent your own exercises, but then again, maybe you have to learn how to learn first :). And yes, I do explicitly schedule time for "learning how to learn" in areas I'm not very familiar with, in order to make the actual learning more efficient :).
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As for getting full zealot for open source - I do agree it's an existing phenomenon. But at least in my arguments for Blender and Emacs, be sure it's not open source zealotry. I'll argue just as strong for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and against OpenOffice. The latter just sucks, in a death-from-thousand-papercuts way. So does Linux as a desktop for non-tech people. Open Source seems to be a negative predictor for quality for tools that are a) above some level of complexity, and b) not for developers.
Still, my primary argument is - a powerful tool will necessarily have a learning curve; the longer and steeper the more powerful a tool is. You can try and make this curve easier to traverse, but ultimately you can't flatten it in any other way than by making the tool less powerful and less useful.
You should give it a shot. I was rounding up, actually. There are YouTube tutorials that go from zero to animation in under 20 mins. That includes rigging.
Like it or not, i fight for the users! Better to bitch about things that could change- then instead of bitching about ignorant users not adapting to once comandline User Interface for Ecell . Because you wont train everyone into a coder.
Your failures don't make other people zealots, though. People who like Blender, who learned it quickly are not trying to harm you. They're just thrilled something so wonderful exists.
You know whats hard? Introspection. Hearing that your tool suck, and admitting they are right. The game i dev on sucks at the moment. And, if you said that, with specific advice on how to improve- you would get a thank you.
I contribute to open source- and thus i claim the right to criticize something that is botched. Deal with it. Trying all the angles, are we? If you are a beginner, you do not have enough experience to criticize the subject. If you are a expert, you are too dumb.
If you are a coder and are fluent with the likes of emacs and vim - and dislike the gui, you are a evil cooperate guy.
If you persist after that, you are bitching, as in arguing to argue.
Such a thing as critical love, wanting to see something flourish - is not possible.
The blindness of the likes of you - allows a whole industry of UX-Designers to exist. There i said it.
People must get paid to work with the UX that get crafted by some programers into those "professional" tools.
Solidworks frustrates me because, as you describe, it is very easy to jump into and get moving, but once you start needing more advanced modelling or more intense surfacing, solidworks becomes an unwieldy beast of secret features and unintuitive workflows. There are many pros who scoff at this and just power through (like all things, solidworks is just a skill after all), but as a lower end user sometimes I just through my hands up and use a more intuitive modeller like rhino at the expense of solidworks powerful features such as the feature tree.
The 20 grand per seat price tag doesn't help much either
Wow, that is so laughably wrong. If anything the UI is often as complicated and difficult as possible so that the company can generate more money by selling training packages or licensing other companies to do training.
Autodesk makes a mountain of money off of this stuff.
If you don't want to be a "Renaissance level expert at everything" then either give up on 3D or stay narrowly focused on one aspect of the pipeline and learn that well.
Blender doesn't fall short in either department. It's just different. Get over it.
This is just as bad as Max people whinging about Maya being stupid, broken, and useless.
Limited time? If you can't commit to learning tools you need to use as a professional you're just going to get passed over and eventually dismissed as out-of-date.
Where are all those Softimage professionals now? Crying in a bar, presumably, if they didn't commit to learning other tools.
Your arrogant attitude implies your tools are better, that they will always be better, that there's never a reason to waste time learning other tools. Maybe that works for you, but for many other people they have to swing from one package to another simply to keep a job.
This isn't rich kids with too much time on their hands, rather the opposite: People who's employment isn't guaranteed and they need to be prepared in case opportunity comes along.
Did you just imply that all vim or emacs users live in "rich daddys attic"? Do you have any idea how many things have been created by people in a flavor of vi or emacs?
Who is missing the obvious here?
Yes, but these tools are created from programmers for programmers. And i know those tools, i use them to hack my commit messages in. All nice, for me, but me and you are not the audience.
Having different demands on tools for non-programmers, seems eh, reasonable?
You can type in Vim all you want, but the day you will try to introduce it company wide - you will meet some people you never knew and you are going to have the same discussion you did have here, and as reason does not seem compelling enough, i guess they will use hierarchy to cling "for no apparent reason, but plain stupidity and unwillingness to learn" to Microsoft products.
Here we are again, on the cultural san andreas fault- preventing open source from ever becoming successful. Sad Panda.
> Having different demands on tools for non-programmers, seems eh, reasonable?
Depends. I'm not expecting 3D artists to write a lot of Python (though it wouldn't hurt them at all). But what makes Emacs and Vim so powerful actually does translate pretty well to other domains (like 3D - hence, Blender). We're talking about efficient workflow. Something that makes the learning curve steeper in exchange of giving you a set of operations you can execute as quickly as humanly possible, and mix and mash together just the way you like. The end result is, after going through the learning (which is exactly the point at which people give up and go complaining), you end up thinking in the tool and focusing your mind on what you want to create instead of fighting the UI.
Unwillingness to learn is the real problem here, and it's mostly a psychological one. It's not about Open Source. I'd never recommend Emacs to Java developers because there are better tools for this niche, but I've seen the overwhelming resistance about e.g. switching to IntelliJ because "Eclipse is good enough", that's only overcome when a socially popular cow-orker does the switch and shows all the cool stuff he's now doing. It's silly to watch how the same people who so strongly complained about unnecessary learning suddenly find the time and will to do that learning, just to do the same thing the popular friend did.
So I guess the way to make powerful tools more popular is to make learning sexy (and expected!) again. Which is something the current web and mobile industry is definitely not helping with. :/.
I haven't really seen the hate for Blender--just indifference. I can see dissuading someone from investing time in learning Blender if they want to work in the commercial VFX/Animation industry because it's just not used.
"For the next year at least, Blender is going to have 10 additional full-time paid developers. Some of those developers will be paid by the Blender Foundation or Blender Institute, sponsored with contributions from AMD, Aleph Objects, and the Nimble Collective.
More importantly, developers are being hired by production studios that use Blender, such as Tangent Animation and MAD Entertainment. These developers work on Blender for in-house productions, but their changes get submitted as patches for the version of Blender that we all get to use. This is a far more sustainable development model than sponsored grants and has been incredibly successful in other open source communities. It's only now starting to catch on in the realm of open source creative tools."
If Photoshop was Maya, Blender would be much better than GIMP.
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.
Maya has always been the gold standard for animation.
Modeling, not so much.
Softimage has been discontinued by Autodesk.
After all we've seen from Autodesk (buying out and discontinuing the competition and forcing the customers to migrate to subscription licenses) I think it's unwise to ignore Blender if you are serious about 3D.
Who else used to get a hard-on from seeing the footage of jurassic park animations in Softimage? I remember building up a machine with a Glint card back in the late 90s just to be able to fire up Softimage..
Wow, what a beautiful tribute. I only discovered Miyazaki's stories last year but how I wish I had grown up with them! As an adult, I even enjoy his children's movies. This project captures the essence of some of his classics: a touch of heartwarming character in each vignette. And bringing them together is really a special presentation.
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?
Wow. This is such an excellent work. Thank you so much for it.
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.
It feels to me sometimes that the "new Miyazaki" is much like being the "new Dylan" used to be in the music industry.
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
Every Frame A Painting is the channel that made me feel passionate about movies, direction and editing. The guy has some real talent in analyzing stuff and keeping it short.
Another young director that also deserves attention is Yasuhiro Yoshiura. For the HN audience I'd recommend his short Pale Cocoon about an archivist in charge of restoring humanity's collective digital history and his spin full of humor on Asimov's Laws of Robotics in Time of Eve.
I wonder if any of this has made it into vfx production? The few companies I've worked at they've invested on better tools to manually rotoscope because automated tools never lived up to the hype in production.
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.
I couldn't comment on that particular showreel, but it's clearly possible for Blender to use other rendering engines. For example, the linked Miyazaki tribute used Octane.
Ah, Miyazaki. Whenever I feel down and the winter is darkest, going back to this world fills my heart with joy. I'd say already the music of Hisaishi has some medicinal qualities.
> The rendering time for one frame was from 4 minutes to 15 minutes
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?
> 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.
Wait so 29hrs GIVEN the server farm or 29hrs of computing time, thus requiring a server farm? Can't be the former... right? Wouldn't that mean decades of computing to render it?
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?
You have a live OpenGL preview.
Furthermore, you can render the scenes in lower resolution for editing the movie, and then switch the low-res clips with hi-res ones.
However, rendering reflections and refractions, particle effects, fog, motion blur, etc. in HD resolution still requires a lot of processing power/time
Miyazaki can't die yet: He has to finish drawing (or gettung other people to draw) all the frames for the universe for the rest of time, so it can run without him.
On December 4 & 5, select theaters will be screening Spirited Away. The 4th is the original Japanese audio + English subs, the 5th is the dubbed English audio version.
I saw it in theater when it came out (twice), and then later again a few years back.
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!
Learn how to draw or sculpt or both? The main hurdle to starting Blender is it's odd interface, but it's possible to get comfortable in it in anything from a week to a month depending on how quick of a learner you are. The rest is up to your artistic ability.
+1 on the learn to draw/sculpt for non-obvious. A (skilled) 2d artist with no 3d experience will run rings around any beginning/intermediate 3d artist.
The most significant difference between blender and other modelling tools in its heavy use of shortcut keys. Just learn all of the important keys and it should be fine.
The more recent ghibli movies use cgi, albeit while trying to stay true to their general esthetic. The next one is supposedly entirely in cg[0]. So hopefully he wouldn't hold anyone to a higher standard than himself? :)
I remember him saying somewhere that he didn't use CGI because he wouldn't have the time to master it any longer. He explicitly didn't say to oppose it for artistic reasons. But, yes, sorry, no reference.
Taken from the most recent documentary (by NHK?), Miyazaki does not use CG himself. He might attempt a comeback, i.e. doing feature-length anime. For the time being, Miyazaki is putting a finishing touch on a short anime (crawling caterpillar).
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.