Mahiro Ando felt his whole body numb.

The production of "Sword Makes the Witch" has made the entire production team fall into numbness.

How so......

This work can be regarded as a work of Musashino animation pulling eggs.

Because Musashino Animation uses a lot of technology in this work.

Take motion capture, for example.

Well, yes, in "The Knife Makes the Witch", motion capture technology is used.

The concept of so-called "motion capture" is actually very broad, and it is not 3D motion capture that is done with a large number of equipment. In fact, as long as it is a record of the movement of an object, it can be called motion capture.

It's just that this technology is called differently in different fields.

For example, motion tracking, motion tracking, and even somatosensory games, in a sense, belong to motion capture technology - just like the Kinect that Giant Hard will develop on another world line.

Oh, and in addition, in the more distant future, many mobile phones have a depth camera, what TOF is envisioned, and then let the phone have air gesture recognition, which also belongs to the category of motion capture.

In that case, Musashino will naturally need to use this technology as well.

Moreover, "Sword Makes the Witch" used two sets of motion capture at the beginning.

The first set of techniques is roscoping.

Because it is an experimental animation, it was determined that a lot of new technologies would be used at the beginning of "Sword Messenger Shrine Maiden".

Rotoscoping is a technique that has been rejected since it was created, but it is undeniable that rotoscoping can produce very smooth drawings.

But unfortunately, the action that is directly rotoxed ...... Not at all.

If it's dancing or something, it's still okay.

But when it is used to express kendo and swordsmanship, it is a little worse.

One of the characteristics of "Sword Messenger Witch" is that it is close to real fighting, but after using the rotoscoping technique, they were shocked to find that the performance of these actions was ...... It's subtle.

One of the characteristics of rotoscoping technology is that the picture is smooth, even too smooth.

Although high frame rates and high drawing will make the picture smooth, sometimes for animation, drawing too high will make the picture lose its momentum, so in some places, it is necessary to extract frames.

However, the rotoscoping of the fight itself is too smooth, making the battle less powerful, and if the frame is drawn, it makes the picture look weird.

Of course, it's not just about movement.

In "Sword Messenger Witch", many of the shots are rotated, wide-angled, or moved.

This kind of lens has high requirements for the coordination of the scene and the character, but the simple rotoscoping often makes the character and the background feel separated, which is impossible.

In general animation, the so-called fights are also divided into several categories.

The cheapest of these is to give only one character and have that character wave their weapon in front of the camera.

This kind of shot is very common in animation works, and many fights in animation works, once you see this kind of shot, you can basically determine one thing: animation is lazy here.

This kind of painting with a character wielding a weapon is the simplest, so simple that it is so simple that it doesn't even need a background.

And the conscience is that the camera shows the two characters fighting each other.

In this scene, there are two characters on the screen, and the whole confrontation action is much more conscientious than the previous solo slashing shot, but again, the difficulty of painting is also much higher.

But with this kind of shot, the background is also fixed, so the difficulty is not very high.

After that, there is the continuous fight of "Sword Makes the Witch".

This kind of fighting, because the camera is constantly moving, the scene of the picture needs to move with it, and the actions of the characters in the picture also need to be deformed all the time, which can be said to be the most dazzling.

At the end of "Sword Messenger Shrine Maiden" in another world line, the battle between Kanami Eto and her mother belongs to this type, but this kind of battle is too money-burning, so it's basically only a short paragraph, and it's gone-the five groups (production companies) have no money and can't afford to burn it!

Even a great god like Shinhiro Ando, after watching it for a long time at first, I felt that this was not good.

To be precise, it's the technology on Musashino's side, which hasn't been thoroughly understood, and although rotoscoping is a technology that appeared in the twenties of the last century, it really needs to be polished.

Although Musashino is a benchmark in the industry, when it comes to the application of new technologies, they are not completely able to do it so casually.

But if it's purely hand-drawn, this part of the plot is not particularly easy to express - theoretically, pure hand-drawn can achieve any kind of special effects, but animators don't necessarily have that skill.

What's even more terrifying is that if it's purely hand-drawn, the entire animation cycle may have to be postponed to next year, and it may belong to the kind where you have to have a "0.5 words" to make up for two or three episodes.

Moreover, this must also be a super money-burning animation, five groups of paintings can't afford to burn, and the dragon's son can't afford to burn the painting - the animation "Crow" made by the dragon's son in another world line directly burned the company.

"Sword Makes the Witch" is right to burn money, but money is not burned like this, if Musashino really dares to burn, then Kenji Horikawa and one or two people will probably be out of class, and other production companies will most likely not dare to let them burn money and burn to play.

Well...... Except for the technique of letting the artist paint with ink next door, if you convert that painting, it will definitely burn money than all the animations of the mud bombardment, not to mention, a few original paintings by the master, there is a high probability that you can directly be able to do all the belongings of one or two animation production companies here.

So, Mori Xia said that he wanted to do concept animation, which is a good reason, but this action is really not so easy to do.

However, at this moment, another person suddenly slapped the door on the head: let's ask the 3D department for help!

The 3D department was later merged with Company A, and specialized in motion capture and special effects research.

It's okay to find them.

And the motion capture here is naturally the most common motion capture for people.

That is, wearing black clothes, and then the whole body is covered with small white dots.

This technique is an optical capture method that allows the computer to acquire a complete set of motion data after motion capture through the camera.

The accuracy of this data depends on the specific technology.

The general principle is that these small white dots correspond to the joint points of the bound bones of the 3D character, and when people move, the 3D model can also make corresponding actions, and the human actions are burned to the 3D, and through these data, the 3D model can restore the actions.

Not to mention, after capturing the character's movements on the 3D screen, and then adjusting and extracting frames from the model's movements, the resulting picture is really bold, and compared to the most primitive rotoscoping, it is so high that I don't know where it goes.

Then, the production team of "Sword Messenger Witch" suddenly had a brainstorm: let's make the protagonist 3D!

Very good.

Everyone gave it a try.

And then...... And then there was no then.

Because of the rendering of the 3D model, the characters produced have an obvious feeling of "3D", and such characters are very different from ordinary 2D at a glance.

But this animation is not a so-called 3D animation, and the mix and match of 3D and 2D in the story will also make the action of the whole work weird.

This......

There was no way, and Mahiro Ando came up with the idea of using these movements as a reference for hand-drawing.

This technique is called 3D_Guide, or it can be called 3D_Layout.

Not to mention, this technology, Musashino really has.

In the long shot at the beginning of "Magical Girl Naye", the whole scene uses this technique to paint and show off skills.

The effect is called a good one.

But when used in the Sword Witch, this technique is actually quite torturous, but without this technology, there is a high probability that "The Knife Witch" will really skip until next year.

To put it simply, this is a technique that has been demonstrated to improve the efficiency of painting.

In the animation process, the person who draws the background and the person who draws the character cannot be the same person. The former is the background and art, and the latter is the original painting in the usual sense.

Since it is not the same person, there will definitely be deviations in thinking.

For example, when the camera is looking down, the person and the background must be drawn from the same angle to look down.

Many of the so-called painting collapses are actually caused by the fact that the original painting and the background cannot be unified due to the rush of the construction period, resulting in the character's camera angle and scene not being harmonious.

In "Naiye", a 3D model reference was built through this technology, so as to solve this problem.

Of course, there is something more powerful, that is, the super one-person original painting is in charge, one person covers the background and characters, and the whole production is a set of smooth fights.

The reason why Ando's good friend Yutaka Nakamura is called a "national treasure" is because people can do it alone.

Mahiro Ando can also do it, but he has to consider efficiency, and as an annual show-off work, "Sword Makes the Witch" also needs to consider efficiency.

After modeling, 3D capture, adjusting the camera, drawing frames, etc., the picture was transcribed to the 2D painting plane again, and the animation painting of "Sword Messenger Witch" was finally presented.

This kind of operation belongs to the production of a big circle, but in this era, there is no way to do it.

And more importantly, this kind of production is a very big test for supervision, and many times the camera handling needs to be taken into account.

To put it simply, there are some shots that need to be made with the tension of the picture in mind.

For example, in one of the shots, the 3D modeling tripled the size of Kanami Eto's sword.

This picture is only useful in this shot, and its purpose is to make the knife in this shot reflect the sense of courage of the picture.

- Yes, in many 3D animations, a character that looks the same is actually modeled in two ways.

In more extreme cases, a character even needs to build a mold for each shot in order to reflect different actions, otherwise the picture will fall apart - because the model will become ugly from different angles, so this needs to be taken into account.

And after making these 3Ds, these contents have to be redrawn in 2D, which is really troublesome.

But if you don't, it's even more troublesome.

It's 2002 now, and "The Sword Makes the Witch" has been in production since 2001, and the production resources of this era can't be compared with more than ten years later, and many times you can only use this kind of local method......

"Ando, the first eight episodes of "Sword Art Online" have come out, do you want to take a look?"

While Ando was thinking about the camera when Kanami Edo was shifting, he suddenly heard a voice.

It's Kenji Horikawa.

"Ah, that's so fast over there. Mahiro Ando was surprised when he heard it.

Because the production of "Sword Messenger Shrine Maiden" is obviously much slower than "Sword Art Online" on the other side. The former can be said to be slow, but the speed of the latter is indeed abnormally fast.

"yes, Monte's kid is so good, and there are a lot of literary dramas over there, so it's quite fast. ”

Hearing the name "Monte", Mahiro Ando also sighed: "This person is really a genius." ”

"yes...... Hey, I mean, he's good at that kind of surreal fighting, don't even think about pulling people over!"

Since Mahiro Ando joined, he has instigated Kenji Horikawa to pull a lot of technical masters over, which has made other production teams have opinions.

So hearing what Mahiro Ando said, Kenji Horikawa over there hurriedly spoke.

"It can't be said to be surreal, I think his own actions are quite realistic. Many of the actions themselves, I don't think there is any sense of disobedience when applied to real works. However, his style is indeed different from our extremely realistic "Sword Witch". ”

Kenji Horikawa was still a little nervous when he heard the first half of Ando's words, but when he heard the second half of the sentence, he finally breathed a sigh of relief.

"Montena kid is on Black Rock Shooter right now, and there are so many people who rob him, if we want to, we really can't grab it. Mahiro Ando said, "But I think Makoto Shinkai in the background of Sword Art Online is quite good." ”

"Ah, I like his own short films. ”

The background of "Sword Art Online" was made by Makoto Shinkai. And Ando Masahiro understands each other because Makoto Shinkai made a short animation "She and Her Cat" before, this literary work, which makes Ando Masahiro feel that this young man is very good. In fact, Makoto Shinkai did also executive produce for the background of "Sword Messenger Shrine Maiden" - he didn't appear in person because he was now working on an animated film.

"Let's go check out Sword Art Online first. ”

Shinhiro Ando has some brain pain.

Now that I'm half tired to death, it's really uncomfortable to keep going like this.

Why don't you go and see the animation over there first?

Maybe there's something new to inspire. Even if you are not inspired, to appreciate the movements designed by Montoum, the pleasing combat itself, is a kind of relaxation......

……

Yutaka Nakamura is really powerful, because people have hard power, but now the Internet is a little brainless, and it's just a high-level black ......

Two-in-one meow meow ~