Humor/Comedy Crunchyroll announces original series "Ex-Arms": Anime is over, we can all go home.

[Shipmaster Sane]

You're definitely the one making an embarrassing spectacle of himself, given the petulant circular logic and your ludicrous backup argument of, "If I make a cherry-picked comparison between the worst CGI shows and the best traditional animation, this clearly proves that all CGI is inherently bad!"

Says the guy too cowardly to quote me directly or respond to my points with anything other than nonsensical strawmen.

You done crying?

"SHITTY SHIT SHIT SHITTY SHIT BULLSHIT STOP SAYING THINGS I DONT LIKE"
also you
"Stop throwing a tantrum!"

Until then, well, you can keep crying about your shitty circular logic and having a tantrum about "CGI IS RUINING MUH ANIME!"

You cant actually challenge or refute anything I've said, thats why you snip and resort to strawmen, which is only slightly less broke ass than what your one cheerleader is doing.

It ruins some anime. This one in particular.

It's a negative in most cases.

But then you go on about how it just ruins everything, and then most people just laugh at you.

Baseless strawman, you can keep trying to pretend I've said things I havent, and you can keep being wrong in public, thats fine.

But, you do you. Don't worry, I've got no issues with a grown man crying, even if it's over shitty CGI.

I'm watching a grown man crying over people disliking something that most people find detracts from a visual medium, outright pretending they said things they haven't over a public text exchange where others can actually see the facts.

 

[bullethead]

Honestly, the problem with CG anime come from two things:
1) no money
2) lack of proper tech and experience

So back in like 2008-2010, there was this Canadian anime style show called Storm Hawks, and it was all CGI, and it looked good. I'd put it up against something like Appleseed Ex Machina any day of the week - it probably wouldn't impress in terms of action choreography, but in terms of art style and execution it was top notch.

The entire anime industry in 2020 has yet to match either of those two productions, despite years of technical advancements. One reason is because the anime production pipeline is fucked and doesn't actually get enough money into each production. Some of this is deliberate, to minimize Chinese influence on productions, but the rest of it is related to how shit the production committee system is. It also doesn't help that most of these shows don't have multiple seasons to actually realize the costs savings from asset reuse from using CG.

The other reason is that tech and knowledge related to said tech is very limited. If you listen to Anime World Order podcasts, you'll occassionally hear horror stories of Japanese industry guests doing things like swapping out entire laptops when the battery runs low during a presentation, instead of just plugging it in, and rendering parts of their projects on desktops* instead of on render farms. (*Theoretically, this might not be a problem if it's an HEDT rig, but considering how cheap and tech illiterate the anime industry is, that's unlikely.)

Until about 4-5 years ago, no one in the anime industry was providing a commercially obtainable software package for CG anime. And the company that did provide it was Polygon Pictures, whose anime style stuff is pretty divisive. And I heavily suspect that the companies that do CG anime (in part or in whole), including Sunrise (the guys who do Gundam), still don't have proper render farms or use cloud render farm services, because we're not seeing year over year improvements across the board in CG anime.

And this isn't even getting into the general knowledge base of how to do it well and what kind of cheats you can do to make it look better (like rendering at a resolution, then upscaling the image to make it less sharp and blend better).

 

[CarlManvers2019]

@bullethead
I remember Stormhawks, I don’t think they ever showed what was beyond that gate or something because they never showed another season

 

[Bear Ribs]

Honestly I thought Storm Hawks looked fairly terrible, but the world was unique, the characters were fun, and that more than made up for the deficiencies of the artwork. And yeah, no third season when they went through the portal. Still not a bad place to end the story, it ended on a high note and the adventure went on.

Which comes to the most important lesson, the writing is typically significantly more important to enjoyment than the graphics. Unfortunately you can see the graphics in a trailer but not the writing. I'll reserve judgement until I see an episode and judge it's story, though the artowrk for Ex Arms looks like what I'd expect on a Newgrounds submission.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

Personally, I would prefer no CGI in anime but I don't automatically hate it. If there is CGI, there is CGI. I just hope it looks good.

 

[Laskar]

Crunchyroll’s Upcoming Original Ex-Arm Faces Widespread Ridicule Over Debut Trailer’s Poor Quality

Crunchyroll’s Ex-Arm has been met with near-universal backlash after its debut trailer made apparent the series’ low-production quality.

boundingintocomics.com

What can my foolish words say that'd come anywhere close to doing this incredible masterpiece justice?

>To spare people a search-up of the full trailer if they'd like:

Spoiler

The music choice is...something.

Well. That doesn't look very promising. If anything, the short clips kind of undersell how bad it is. But that doesn't seem too surprising coming from Crunchyroll, kickstarter, or CGI.
That's right. I'm throwing down my old-person guantlet on CGI. It's a cancerous blob of horror that I cannot recall ever producing a good product--perhaps contributing to something else if used partially or sparingly, but so far I'm pretty certain we're batting a 1000 on CGI 'anime' or anime-alike stuff that's just...terrible.

Unless you count like...Starship Troopers stuff? Maybe? I've heard positives about it, at least. But in basically every other instance...

In a way it's understandable-ish, maybe? Crunchyroll 'original' lacks any premade fanbase and that kickstarter-money can only go so far. I'm sure CGI is cost-savings and blahh-looking CGI even more-so. But...At a certain point you hit a corner where you lose most of the visual appeal of using an animated medium to begin with.
This looks like it dropped through that hole and kept falling.

...And they could have at least given the samurai-dude his own figure-hugging unitard.

Well. That looks horrible. I'm not exactly an anime fan, but I can't see anything to recommend this.

Looking at the fight scenes, I wonder if CGI can even do the fluid, hyperstylized fight scenes that anime is known for. Drawn anime always has the ability to go off-model. It can convey unnatural motion in a way that looks completely natural until you hit the pause button on a tween frame.

Meanwhile, the CGI I've seen just looks like action figures bouncing around in front of a greenscreen. The scene in the trailer where the girl vaults up that flight of stairs is especially egregious. That motion doesn't look natural. It doesn't have weight or momentum. It just looks bland.

I've seen good CGI incorporated into anime, like the Tachikomas in GITS:SAC. This ain't it.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

@CarlManvers2019

How about you Carl? What do you think of this and what do you think of CGI?

 

[Hlaalu Agent]

If they are declaring war on anything, it is good taste. Egads, the animation quality is worse than s1 RWBY!

 

[CarlManvers2019]

@CarlManvers2019

How about you Carl? What do you think of this and what do you think of CGI?

What do you think I think?

 

[LifeisTiresome]

What do you think I think?

You could just easily say you don't like it. I too don't like CGI. I ain't a hater and would accept good cgi but a lot of the times, it sucks.

 

[bullethead]

Looking at the fight scenes, I wonder if CGI can even do the fluid, hyperstylized fight scenes that anime is known for. Drawn anime always has the ability to go off-model. It can convey unnatural motion in a way that looks completely natural until you hit the pause button on a tween frame.

The answer is yes, but you need people who know how to do that.

They're all at Arc System Works.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

The answer is yes, but you need people who know how to do that.

They're all at Arc System Works.

It's largely the equivalent of the early era where Industrial Light & Magic were the *only* people in the entire industry capable of doing (then) next-generation visual effects.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Arc's pipeline for doing anime-esque 3D CGI would be terrible for an anime production schedule. IIRC during their GDC presentation, the Arc guy said that they had to assign one guy per character and it took them months to do all of the animations. 2D animation looks 2D because each frame is slightly different, because they are hand drawn, but 3D CGI is immediately noticeable because the computer performs a perfect calculation from frame to frame, so it looks smooth. The Arc does it, there are thousands and thousands of bones on the character's skin, so for each frame they tweak the positions of every bone to give that feel that it isn't perfectly calculated, but imperfect. This can work for a game where you reuse most of your animations and only have a handful of cutscenes, but it'd never work for 12+ season anime with 20+ minute long episodes. It'd take them years to handpose every character's bones for every frame of a 4+ hour long show. The production committee system is wack and absolutely needs to be changed, but that's just straight up not economical.

EDIT: found the video

 

[bullethead]

2D animation looks 2D because each frame is slightly different, because they are hand drawn, but 3D CGI is immediately noticeable because the computer performs a perfect calculation from frame to frame, so it looks smooth. The Arc does it, there are thousands and thousands of bones on the character's skin, so for each frame they tweak the positions of every bone to give that feel that it isn't perfectly calculated, but imperfect.

I feel like they could probably get the software to use a different calculation that produces imperfections frame to frame... it'd just take some time to get it to look good.

This is probably one of those things where machine learning algorithms would be needed to train the software on what tweaks are needed, then produce a usable calculation script that can make decent/good looking CG.