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Turn Real Life Into A Cartoon

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the video-toasting dept.

Saige writes "Ever wanted to see yourself in a cartoon? Before now, there were means to turn a single image into something cartoon-like, but some folks at Microsoft Research have come up with a method to turn a video into an animated cartoon. It's not up to doing it fully automated, as you have to hand-mark various parts of the video every 10 to 15 frames, but the video of the results is quite impressive."

10 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. sounds cool, but... by blisspix · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'd prefer to attempt rotoscope. The results are amazing. Best example is probably Waking Life

    I tinker occasionally with animation and despite all the technology we have today, if you are a 2D/cel animator it's still an extremly slow process. But fun.

  2. Re:Freudian Slip by Saeed+al-Sahaf · · Score: 4, Informative
    Cue up the BSOD...

    Still running Windows ME, I take it... For as much as a bloated whale Win2k and XP are, BSOD is history.

    --
    "Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
  3. Oh.. by FractalPenguin · · Score: 5, Informative

    this? http://students.washington.edu/juew/

    1. Re:Oh.. by stubear · · Score: 4, Informative

      Did you happen to read the article or did you automatically go into anti-Microsoft asshole mode? If you RTFA you'd see the name Michael Cohen mentioned. What's that you say? You don't recognize that name? Perhaps if you had read the link you provided you'd see these two bits of information:

      "I am also working with Michael Cohen at Microsoft Research on some graphics topics."

      and further down the page there's this:

      "Video Tooning

      Summary: We build a system for transforming an input video into a highly abstracted, spatio-temporally coherent cartoon with a range of styles. We also go a little bit further to do a free-form deformation on Tooning results for exaggeration.

      Jue Wang, Yingqing Xu, Heung-Yeung Shum and Michael Cohen. Video Tooning. ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGAPH2004). (pdf) (demo video, low resolution version at 10M)

      Jue Wang, Yingqing Xu and Michael Cohen. Free-form Video Tooning Deformation. Poster on SCA2004. (pdf)"

      Yes, this guy was working on the project. However, it was part of a team effort of which Microsoft Research (or at least Michael Cohen on behalf of Microsoft Research) was a part. You might also notice that Jue Wang has worked on other projects of which Microsoft Research was a part. Perhaps he's collaborating with Microsoft Research?

  4. Re:Similar to Waking Life... by AndroidCat · · Score: 5, Informative

    And he's currently doing P.K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly the same way.

    --
    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  5. Cohen, remember the guy? by hsa · · Score: 5, Informative

    Anybody remember this guy?

    This is one of the pioneers in computer graphics for a long time. You should remember him for his radiosity papers:

    Cohen, M. F. and Greenberg, D. P., "The Hemi-Cube: A Radiosity Solution for Complex Environments", Computer Graphics, vol. 19, no. 3, pp 31-40, 1985.

    Cohen, M. F., Chen, S. E., Wallace, J. R., and Greenberg, D. P., "A Progressive Refinement Approach to Fast Radiosity Image Generation", Computer Graphics, vol. 22, no. 4, pp 75-84, 1988.

    And his book.

    He even received SIGGRAPH award for his work

  6. Re:Freudian Slip by martinX · · Score: 5, Informative

    To counter your anecdote with mine, my work-inflicted PC running XP is very stable and I run all sorts of non-standard stuff on it. Occasional programs crap out (how the hell can a 'Save as...' dialogue box be 'Not Responding', when it's owner app has been quit???), but even iMovie4 has quit under OS X 10.3.

    To summarise:
    hated '95 - buggy and unstable.
    Tolerate XP - stable.
    Always love my Mac. Just because.

    --
    When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
  7. Re:Freudian Slip by wviperw · · Score: 5, Informative

    As another poster mentioned, spontaneous rebooting is due to a 'feature' in Windows XP whereby the computer reboots rather than showing the proper BSOD.

    To turn this 'feature' off, do the following:

    1. Go to System Properties.
    2. Go to the Advanced tab and click on the Settings button in the Startup and Recovery section.
    3. Uncheck Automatically Restart.

    --
    Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
  8. Re:Wow. Wow. Just wow. by zsau · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... Microsoft researchers do some decent research. Not all Slashdotters are anti-Microsoft just because they can be; a lot of us don't actually like their business practices or their released software or similar.

    --
    Look out!
  9. Re:Waking Life? by Evangelion · · Score: 4, Informative


    That's called Rotoscoping, and it's been around since before the original Lord of the Rings movie by Ralph Bakashi (1978).

    That's not what the article was about, really, if you read it. Rotoscoping is modifying each frame individually, in a manner similar to how you do a cartoon.

    If you RTFA (fat chance, I know), the article addresses this: "In addition, current techniques to turn videos into cartoons are very labor intensive; the artist has to render each frame by hand. And it still doesn't solve the 'jumping' problem.".