Star Wars: The Clone Wars CG TV series

[Duke Togo]

If they're going to make it CG, at least make it look decent.

Like I said before, there are games that are over 10 years old with better cutscene quality than this.

Your analogy is poor at best. You are talking about a TV series length production, compared to what adds up to a few minutes of computer animation produced for a video game.

Hey, the Dune film had better special effects than the TV mini-series made 20 years later.

[KingNor]

Considering we are a year away from release, I don't think we've seen the finished product yet.

This is an important concept.

In CG it's not like hand drawn animation. For previews, the studio can show unfinished scene's with choppy blocked in place holder animation.

A good example is the previews for "Cars." Since they were showing previews like 1-2 years in advance there were a LOT of things missing in those previews. Most noteably is the quality of the renders.

It's different than 2d animation. Since its very hard to go back and fix motion in 2d by the time they start animating they know EXACTLY what each character will be doing. Thus even watching rough pencil sketches of 2d work will look fairly similar (in motion, not rendering) to the final product.

Radd I'm with you 100% man. Joe shmoe on the street tends to not see the difference between quality animation and crap. It's the same way people can't differentiate between Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z and something like Spirited Away. To them it's all just anime with weird big eyes and tiny mouths.

It's easy to forget that, as anime/animation fans, we tend to have animation fan friends. And even friends of ours who arn't so into animation will pick up a bit of an eye for the stuff from us, by just being exposed to it. We generate a bubble of animation sensitive people around us, just by us being into the art. Thus we tend to think everyone can see this stuff.

As a Californian it's also very easy to forget that a substantial portion of the U.S. doesn't pay any attention to animation. There is also a thriving culture of people who see something like Spiderman, with it's very obvious CG sections and bad motion and just think, "damn, that's some good CG"

Most film CG people I've talked to say something like this: "I'm doing my job when people have no clue that a scene they just watched is CG"

Oddly enough, a lot of these same artists are constantly being prodded by execs these days to "make the CG obvious, people want to know they're watching CG.

mr march while i don't agree with you exactly that people are perceptive enough to notice a lot of these differences, I think that is squarely because they're generaly not given the opprotunity. or at the very least don't give themselves the opprotunity.

I don't know you but i'm going to go out on a limb and say you're probably not a classical music enthusiast. and even if you are, just consider. Most people these days don't listen to much, if any classical music. Generally people hear violins, bass, trumpets, and other orchestra music and they think "oh classical."

But if you ask them "what kind of classical do you like?" they won't know what the heck you're even talking about. You could play them 3 songs from different composers (granted none of them are famous sets) and i highly doubt you're average joe schmoe could tell you which one was composed tighter, had better melodies, used a more skilled violinist etc. they just don't have the ear for it.

It's exactly the same with animation. People who know it can spot it, people who don't, can't.

whew.

[1/1 LowViz Lurker]

delete me mr moderator (accidental post)

Edited June 7, 2007 by 1/1 LowViz Lurker

[1/1 LowViz Lurker]

delete

Edited June 7, 2007 by 1/1 LowViz Lurker

[1/1 LowViz Lurker]

But if the show isn't out yet, how do we know they won't change it so it won't be so bad? That's why I asked how do we know if it will be bad until its done?

When I look at star wars ep1, I notice the cg detail isn't as good (like the texturing on some things is blurry) as the stuff in ep3. I'm no expert.

And then there is the factor of "taste". Some people have already said they don't want realistic cg because the animation looks wooden and the characters have the effect of being more noticeably-fake the more you TRY to make it real. The human brain picks those things up that they ordinarily wouldn't had the characters been purposely cartoony in the first place. (ie shreks animation being nice and flowing and smooth vs the wooden 'realism' of the FF movies where there is no weight and where people just feel floaty like the guys in the matrix sequels)

And then look at appleseed: some people want the character to be celshaded to go back to the "anime/manga-world" where they are close to being like comic book versions of people (big eyes, anime proportions vs actual real people) Some people might actually like the 'bad' fake stuff so the mind doesn't focus on trying to pick apart how unreal the cg is. (the uncanny valley)

For tv series the animation might start out poo and then get better. It might start good, and then go crap towards the end.

For movies: you don't have to be an expert to know that the early cg gollum in fellowship of the ring is inferior to TT and ROTK gollum. One just sucks because they might not have had the time to make it better, and then by the second movie as it became a priority, it started looking much better. (beating out the yoda cg puppet from star wars in the facial expressions and stuff. End result being that you could forget it was cg and could start to feel like he was a real person)

Edited June 7, 2007 by 1/1 LowViz Lurker

[Warmaker]

Your analogy is poor at best. You are talking about a TV series length production, compared to what adds up to a few minutes of computer animation produced for a video game.

Hey, the Dune film had better special effects than the TV mini-series made 20 years later.

A mini-series, full-fledged TV series, movies, etc... it doesn't matter. Poor quality is poor quality, period!

Not to mention the deep pockets and usually fancy presentation of Star Wars shows, this trailer looks like a serious step back in several different ways (IMO), stuff that I covered before in an earlier reply in addition to the quality of the CG.

Edited June 8, 2007 by Warmaker

[Duke Togo]

A mini-series, full-fledged TV series, movies, etc... it doesn't matter.

Yes, yes it does. You show me a CGI TV series that was of a higher quality than the trailer we saw, and you can start your argument. Until then, you have none.