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Turn Real Life Into A Cartoon
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."
Similar to Waking Life, one of my all-time favorite movies. On the dvd, there's a 20 minute segment explaining the technology behind it...very labor intensive, as every curve ultimately still had to be hand-done.
And now for something completely different...a man with three buttocks.
no, but it would have made Waking Life and Bakshi's Lord of the Rings a lot easier.
If you're running at a good clip per second, that's several frames per second that you're giving it animation information. As the microsoft researcher says, it's interpolating between keyframes, smoothing for trajectory. It's probably also taking averages of color inbetween the frames, and running it through a natural media highlight algorithim. Think those oldfangled "morph" programs mixed with a photoshop filter.
It should be doing some edge detection for the inbetween frames, but it probably isn't. I hate to say this, but this is a simple application of known and existing technologies. Nifty for the guys that made it, but not exactly groundbreaking.
The ______ Agenda
This is basically a way of partially automating the process of rotoscoping, which goes back to the 1930s. It's not generally used because the resulting animation looks choppier and less cartoon-like; it's the reason why Ralph Bakshi's later films (Lord of the Rings, Cool World, American Pop) generally are considered not to look as good as his previous films: they were almost entirely rotoscoped.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
Isn't it interesting how throughout the last several years we've been researching and coding like hell to take cartoon(ish) characters and make them look as realistic as possible? Look at the work that went into transforming an artist's sketches of Dr. Aki Ross et al into the very real looking characters of Final Fantasy.
Now we're researching and coding like hell to go back the other way.
I'm sure there's a Microsoft joke in there somewhere :)
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
Just a thought. I've played with Photoshop/Paintshop Pro and various standard filters can turn individual photos into an artistic rendering eg. Brushstrokes or Charcoal drawing. What's to stop someone from writing software that will extract each image from a video, apply the filter and then re-encode to video? Has this already been done elsewhere?
As an aside I love the effect on pets using the charcoal filters drawing filters. The fur translates surprisingly well.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I just saw about 15 of them trying to install a D-link USB wireless card (USB) on a W2K box. If not the BSOD, then it was spontaneous reboots. Finally pulled a different one out of my pocket, and it's associated driver. (got tired of uninstall, clean cached drivers, reload software, detect hardware, BLUE-SCREEN on boot)
Then there's my home machine that runs 2K.
It's fine unless I plug a USB camera, Web-Cam, Scanner, or basically anything USB except a card reader into it. Heaven forbid I swap memory sticks too frequently, of it may just BS as well...
Then there's always the customer that tries to roll back his XP after loading a Service Pack, or some daily sevurity patch, and discovers it won't boot anymore...
Yeah, BSOD is on it's way out. (hello KDE, and Open Office) I got a Debian box on it's way to my Grandmother tomorrow morning. (for real. giggle)
Only use WHQL certified drivers and you won't see STOP crashes.
While there is some truth to this, if you do this you will end up running very old (and sometimes quite buggy) video drivers. I haven't seen any recent video drivers that are WHQL certified. At least, not nVidia drivers. I suspect this is the same case with ATI as well. Probably not as much so for run-of-the-mill 2D cards.
While I've always loved to joke about how Windows blue screens at the drop of the hat, I have to say that XP has been relatively stable, both at work and at home.
The only time I've had my XP box regularly bluescreen was when I was using a quad-head configuration (two dual-head nVidia cards, one AGP, the other PCI) and booting into Linux. If I did a warm reboot from Linux into Windows, it would bluescreen every time. Power off the system, and it would boot up fine. I suspect someone was making some incorrect assumptions the state of video RAM when initializing the drivers.
-Twilight1
Some time ago, Microsoft purchased a company called SoftImage. Turned out to be a good investment in 3D development and film compositing with a product called the DS.
Meanwhile, in Tewksbury, the Avid Media Composer which ran only on the Apple Macintosh platform was ported to Windows when Microsoft made some investments in Avid. About that time Apple (unwisely) discontinued their six PCI-Slot Macintosh..
When Avid noted that their product was dead-ended because its code basis assumed a raster that was limited to NTSC and PAL television format, they purchased SoftImage's DS in order to be able to easily produce software that will do film and high definition video.
Microsoft doesn't make investments for nothing. I believe I can do something very close to what Microsoft is doing for Mini-DV video on any format of video or film with the Avid DS -- though for a lot more money (something like $120K USD). I would not be surprised if they got the technology from that very old investment.
As a creative person though, I have to say I don't like the fact that the DS-Nitris will probably never run on a Macintosh. We have problems with ours that are related mostly to two issues: Operator screw-ups (expected) and Microsoft Windows XP Professional limitations, many of which do not exist in Apple's current versions of Unix.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Tolerate XP - stable.
It looks like you may need to try Windows 2000 - I've never had a problem with it. Supposedly, it's not for widespread desktop use, but it has the stability of NT, the compatibility of 9x (not ME), and none of the bells and whistles of XP... perfect.
Oh yeah, heil Linux.
Although the MS Research work is interesting and pretty good, it was only one of several papers this year that described techniques that could produce similar effects. Good quality work in this area has been going on since the 1997 paper by Litwinowicz, and the techniques have been used in industry.
I hate Microsoft products as much as the next guy, but MS research does do a lot of good work. However, it's usually in collaboration with research universities, as in this year's papers by Agarwala et. al. and Wang et. al. So it's not as if these papers just magically emerged from the bowels of MS.
Also, the two biggest names in CG, Blinn and Kajiya, have published jack by comparison since they went to MS. Blinn isn't even followed by an entorage of groupies any more.
As an aside, Win2K on my box has been running stable for over 3 months, and I run all kinds of weird shit on it.
This isn't that impressive in 2004. If anyone has seen Richard Linklater's Waking Life, they did this kind of thing in 2001.
While I agree that Win2k and XP are usually very stable, Microsoft's choice to disable the BSOD is, quite frankly, disingenuous, and causes people like the poster above to say things like the "BSOD is history". Sure, it's history because most people don't see it anymore -- their computer just spontaneously reboots. I know that was one of the first things I changed back when I upgraded to 2k (though to be fair to MS, I don't think it ever did BSOD, except when I had some bad memory, and that's hardly Windows' fault). If Windows dies, I want to know that. If the computer just reboots, I start thinking there's some sort of weird hardware problem. I don't know if that was Microsoft's intention, or if it was to just reduce the number of appearences of BSOD's to the general public.
:)
In any case, it doesn't really matter to me, since I only run Linux at home now
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown