Saturday, December 17, 2016

2D Animation Comment My "Illegitimate Email" Kept Me From Posting on Animation Anomaly

Below are my comments on the Animation Anomaly thread The Real Reason 2D Animation Isn't "Viable". This is a response to Aaron Keefe.






I understand your point that 2D animation done on the computer and not just colored on it is technically 2D computer animation. I've made allusions to the pinscreen and how digital animation is technically just a high resolution color pinscreen

I think that it is possible to make 2D computer animation just as stunning as the 3D variety. One way is to harness noise art in a figurative sort of way. Another is to harness artificial evolution of 2D images. One more way, at least a couple of years into the future is thought printing. That would revolutionize visual art in allowing anybody with a vivid imagination to print out artworks with just a couple of mental visualizations. It would be invasive if done publicly if bad thoughts come up, so it would most likely be done in private and only the results would be shared in public. It's not just art that would be revolutionized by this. Communication itself would be revolutionized. As somebody who doesn't want to become a cyborg, I find the future worrisome.

Even for those with more limited visual imaginations, I expect computer drawn animation to be outdated soon. After all, why draw anything when you can have a computer create patterns that imply depth and can be shared in an online database? After all, just about every basic shape has been drawn before by somebody. I suspect that the future will be a combination of drawing and pattern sharing. Through this system, artists will be able to create animations that are more detailed than those that came before them. It will be like the word guess feature on today's smartphones. This is how the particular example of noise art will be harnessed.

Between those three basic tricks I mentioned, 2D artificial evolution, thought printing, and what I'll call 'permuting', hand drawn animation as we know it may soon no longer exist in its current state, except in the hands of die hard fanatics.

It's possible to do many of these things in 3D too, but that's a whole different subject. For one last note, while these technologies may open new possibilities, they won't take away from the dedication that it takes to be the best that one can be. Artificial evolution takes a lot of forethought in deciding what direction to go in, thought printing takes a well used imagination filled with many images honed through practice, and permuting takes a level of shape sorting that may overwhelm people with its over-complexity and sorting of fine details. If you're wondering about anatomy, there are already websites with 3D images available for animal skeletons. Expect more things like that in the future.

Those are my thoughts on the matter. I have more to say on 2D animation, but I'll leave if for another time.