For Anime to become better they need to Move to 3D

Pullman said:


Almost no 2D TV anime look amazing either. Isn't looking pretty damn good just fine?

Pullman said:


Okay if you have to put words in my mouth and pretend I'm taking random statements personal just because I don't agree with your judgment and tried to make a point, and you don't have anything else to say to back up your point of view, there's no point in even trying to discuss this rationally.

When your first move is literally trying to undermine my credibility for no reason, that's not a promising start. And yes, I'm taking that personally because you basically ignored the topic at hand and just forcefully misrepresented the intention of my reply to make me look petty. Good luck finding fruitful discussions with that attitude in the future. I'll try to remember not to reply to you again so we can avoid this situation in the future.

Crusader_8 said:
Anime industry doesnt have a pixar equivalent but needs one badly. Almost all of anime's 3d looks awful so it's a shame

zieek said:
15poundfish my friend, you are aparantly
an ambitious person. And I respect you for
your bold statement, but 3d is 95% shit CGI is still far from good let alone perfect. And current anime are doing very well without it. Incorporating 3d battles in 2d anime for example is an abizmal sight to behold. "Divine gate and Phantasy star online 2 are a painful reminder of that fact.

Oh and the only 3d or CGI or whatever it is has only ever looked good once in my eyes, that would be in" Tokyo Ravens".

But "Ajin, Berserk, RWBY (not anime), Knights of sidonia and others who I don't care enough to remember, even the Berserk movies look awful beyond comprehension and frankly words fail me in trying to describe them as anything else.

copyrightRingo said:
Right now. 2D is dominating, like light years away.
Almost nobody in the anime industry knows how to utilize 3D well. Either the movement stutters or just too slow. As blending 3D to 2D is also quite a task to do. Think about it. Characters are drawn in 2D, but the camera is constantly moving in a 3D environment. The animator needs to redraw the character almost every frame so that it doesn't look weird. This is why these horrible 12 FPS 3D movements exist.

Complete 3D animations require very accurate facial expressions to look good. There is also hair physics. All of which are very expensive to do.

Does anime need to move on to 3D? Not necessary. Action shows may benefit, but let's say a slice of life or a drama show. These shows need details on facial expressions and there is no need for things to look fluent. Afterall, that's what 3D excels on.

Bourmegar said:

Eh we don't need a pixar now.

We need a Disney equivalent now since Disney can do both 2D and 3D and pixar is part of Disney.

But that requires Resourches like Tech and Animaters that get the time and money to make it good and that requires monehhhh.......

Zerity said:
if only every CGI anime was as good as Land of the Lustrous

bhaktivinoda said:
cgi animation has always been terrible, its crude and a waste of time. Most anime studios wish to sell units so 3D would best be avoided imo.

Pixar are literally the only studio that know how to utilize it

MissMoppet said:
No, 3D always looks outdated in a couple of years. In 5 years even Houseki no Kuni will be barely watchable. 2D stands the test of time much better, look at Walt Disney's work from the 30s and 40s.

-Lofn- said:
Boobs and panties looks better in 2D, so obviously 2D wins.

15poundfish said:


You can do this all in 3D, facial expressions in land of lustrous are sometimes molded using 2D art. For action scenes they actually hire 2D animators to create guide frames for the scene. This nonsense that we are somehow losing something by moving to 3D has to stop. You people and everyone else in this thread are like people arguing over cel-shaded animation with film is superior to computer animation.

15poundfish said:
You are saying that when the first groundbreaking 3D animated motion picture by Pixar, Toy Story is still admired by many. 3D animation can hold just as well as 2D animation as long as it uses a proper aesthetic and avoids photo-realism. New 3D movies will become more animated and have more elaborate set pieces as faster computers and new techniques are developed but it doesn't mean those old movies are obsolete or crap. If we had that same attitude we could apply the same to the entire anime industry whether its movie or tv.
Look at the differences of anime from the 1980s than today. Modern anime has better animation but older anime had more detailed character designs because they were not nearly as animated. The first Macross vs Macross Frontier is an easy example. The animation and art is way superior than the original but uses a more simplistic style for drawing its characters and has better 3D animation. Even Ghibli films show age, Look at Spirited Away in comparison to Castle in the Sky. I rather watch the former again than the latter for its art and animation.

Even with Disney Films, the newer 2D films have better color than the older films and character's stay in frame where you get a jitter effect in older Disney films because they had to align slides through the projector by hand. When they move to computers for 2D there was a vast improvement in art quality and consistent animation. The next progression was 3D and as long as the film was good it would sell like hotcakes. if we are speculating based on the profits, I think people see 2D as obsolete in the West after attempts at 2D animation motion pictures were massive failures like Princess and the Frog for Disney and other companies. The only 2D Disney movie productions we get based on movie's are sequels straight to DVD and never marketed at movie theaters.

Clebardman said:

The first one looks like a plastic toy, eeeek. Anyway, that's not the average 3d quality I see when I skip over the cartoons channels, and I'm having troubles picturing anime studio making models, skeletons and animation of Disney's level for 12 eps LN adaptations.

As a side note, this might be "pretty", but is it interesting as far as animation goes? I'm still watching cartoons because of stuff like The Sword in the Stone's battle between the two mages, or this:

or FLCL. 3d still has stuff to prove before it stops boring me to death animation-wise with its extra dimension and rules. Maybe "ugly" wasn't the right word, sorry. But definitely not as exciting as 2d can be.

15poundfish said:
I think For Anime to take it a next level in quality in terms of artistic and animation quality it needs to take the full transition into 3D instead of making anime largely 2D and blending 3D haphazardly during scenes that require smooth rotation or detailed animated objects like monsters in anime. People complain that Anime are not pushing animation limits when often doing so is a complete waste of money and well beyond what is reasonable for professional 2D animators on a budget. The people in the industry understand the limitations of 2D animation so they haphazardly add 3D animation and try to blend them together that often leads to hilarious results where everything in a particular scene is in 3D except the characters(Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These) or the counterpart where 2D characters and backgrounds with 3D monsters like in Ga-Rei:Zero. Both look horrible because often the art styles clash together with the character designs and stick out like a sore thumb because they are trying to combine two mediums that don't really mesh well together.

The strength of 2D animation is its easier to create character's that can change their structure at a moments notice. This gives more choices in art styles and abstract visuals and the possibility to transition scenes and character animations in few frames possible. The big reasons that 2D animation is used over 3D because it has low upfront cost and cheap as long as their are few frames and complex rotations are avoided. its great for low budget productions but the negatives become apparent when anime studios try to use rotations or basic cinematography. It leads to samey action scenes, the feeling the animation team are perverts by over emphasizing female character's body parts for perspective shots, etc.

This is where 3D Animation comes to save day. 3D animation has a high up front cost but assets are extremely reusable. 2D assets are often just thrown away like trash and often never reused. They spend many hours on something that is thrown away and never used again. 3D animation you can reuse animations for multiple body types and its much easier to create new characters when you can use one as your base model and build on top of it. Anime studio's can basically perfect the ideal body types and slightly modify them based on the anime. All they have to do is re texture and if needed apply different shader's for clothing and art style. Another aspect of reuse is the environment; many anime use the exact same locations so why not reuse them? Why waste time drawing the same real life location when you already modeled it?

Another aspect of 3D animation that surpasses 2D is you can easily handle rotations and perspectives without even trying because the computer handles it better than any 2D animator could hope to try. You can rotate a camera on the x,y,z axis without a problem. The best rotation you can do in 2D are limited to the Z-axis which is the axis you are not really interested in an anime. With 3D anime you can manipulate the camera in a 3D space at any angle allowing the possibly of more intense action scenes because you can rotate the camera anyway the animation director pleases.

The biggest aspect of 3D that will make surpass 2D is the amount of animation that can appear in a single frame. They could animate the hair of characters in all scenes, change the weather in a way that looks believable in scenes and also characters in the background actually doing something even if they are not talking or the main focus of that frame. In almost every 2D anime the only characters that actually move in a scene are the ones having a conversation and all the other ones are just part of a static image that never moves in the entire conversation. 3D animation by virtue of reusing and recycling animations can just apply stock animations on these background characters to make it appear they are actually doing something interesting even when they are not. an Anime that does this to great effect is Houseki no Kuni. Every character whether they are speaking or not is always moving even if they are not part of the conversation. It makes the scenes feel alive where no 2D anime could emulate because of budget restraints.

The final reason 3D is better than 2D is visual effects. Fluid, reflections, explosions and missiles,etc all look awesome in 3D. 2D anime rarely can draw water that looks convincing so they just insert 3D water into the anime and even anime from the 1980s used 3D all over the place for missiles and explosions and nobody noticed. Its sad that people hate 3D for their prejudice formed by watched poorly implemented 3D in 2D centered anime but if more Anime took the almost full plunge like Houseki No Kuni we would see a lot more good anime even in tight budgets.

BirdyTheMighty said:
No. Anime should stay 2d, or it aint anime.

Striker-3649 said:
2D>3D, i think >95% of MAL users will totally disagree with you, including me ofcourse, its just... 3D sucks (Berserk, Ajin etc), couldnt stand it.

Praland said:
Agreed, this is how anime will look in the future.

North514 said:
t that being said there are aspects of CGI that could help out especially if you want to show massive battles

DrGeroCreation said:
I have noticed in modern 2d anime full cgi being used for certain scenes with armies like in Overlord, Arsland Senki, Shoukoku no Altair.