Slashdot Mirror
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."
That's it, good night folks, I've seen it all.
"However, even the 300 frame video of the girl swinging on the money bars only needs a keyframe every 10 or 15 frames."
I just hope they don't make it part of Wordart or something.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
cheers,
erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Time to buy stock in Animotion...d'oh!
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Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
Does this give new meaning to the animatrix?
Sony has something similar with the EyeToy. It's doens't really make cartoons, but will put you live in the action of a video game. It probably woudn't be too hard for them to add some filters to "cartoonize" the video.
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Constant deal updates. Every 10 minutes!
I always knew Microsoft was a Mickey Mouse corporation.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
Bill's kid comes home crying. Seems his little schoolchum's dad Steve has a hip movie studio that makes way cool animated features. Why can't you do that, Dad? I want an animation studio! I want it right now! So Daddy Bill picks up the phone and commands that Megacorp also begin work on animation. Unfortunately, Megacorp's work ends up looking a lot like old Clutch Cargo episodes. Bill's kid cries himself to sleep.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
My life is already quite cartoonishly silly. The only way software could make it more so would be to automatically drop an anvil on me as I fell off a cliff like Wylie Coyote.
My real life is like a cartoon already. A badly drawn cartoon.. but a cartoon none the less.
No todo lo que es oro brilla
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.
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.
I'll be most impressed when they have a Cartoon Physics Engine.
Didn't we already this back in 1994?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I used to work at a place where some sort of technique was applied to turn the work environment into a Dilbert episode.
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
1: Artistic ability
2: Camera ability
That said, I'd be interested in giving this a shot for various projects.
I'm just drawn that way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My first thought-- oh, great. Put me out of work.
But then I came to my senses. Of course this kind of thing would never replace traditional animation. After all, you'd still have to have actors enact the scenes to be animated, the backgrounds would have to be set up or altered, etc. Setting up a shoot of a scene to be animated could end up being more of a PITA than just animating it to begin with. Though the end result could be a cool rotoscope/Waking Life effect, it's not a "cheat" to get an animated feature without the tedious work of animating.
Wait, I dont get it...
SP2 and its funky TCP/IP stack BAD
MS Research Cartoon Videos GOOD
Am I on the right slashdot? I just read an article about how SCO is good and everyone loves them. Whats next, slashdotters start Reading TFAs? I'm so confused, all this talk about lana swinging on the monkey bars, wheres the cowboyneal option when I need it.
I'll just pretend that MS bought this from another company and is going to integrate it into longhorn in order to keep the competition out, yeah thats it, back to writing it M$ for me.
Breathe in... Breathe out...
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
What better way to /. Microsoft than linking to page with a video.
.wmv
The only problem with this is that most people don't go to the linked pages, and the video is a
this? http://students.washington.edu/juew/
Real Life is already a comic?
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!
Well, they're making it look like a child's drawing. Anime looks much cooler. And from how long it takes Piro to update MegaTokyo sometimes, I bet there are TONS of scenes in your typical romance/comedy which are much easier to film. Of course, they'd look different, and it'd probably be harder to go from CGI to that than from cell to CGI.
Basically, anything without supernatural elements, especially something blog-ish (like a lot of MegaTokyo) would be within reach of 3-5 hours with 2-3 people, instead of 3-5 weeks with 10-20 people. But IANAA either.
Still, I want it to look like anime, not crayon.
I bet the Open-Source clone will do anime before Microsoft does!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
So do we like Mircosoft now or what?
Sometimes flowers grow in a pile of sh*t. That's no reason to go swim in a cesspool, but the wise man will still acknowledge the flower.
-- I could tell right away that she was impressed with my HUGE Slashdot Karma.
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
I thought Greg Dean was getting his own TV series.
Technoli
Real Life is already a cartoon!
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
This sig space intentionally left blank.
So now it's just very cool. But if Microsoft applies for patent on it then it will be Evil Microsoft.
An accomplishment is an accomplishment.
Taking away some of your freedom is taking away some of your freedom.
There is no inconsistency in lauding one and condemning the other.
This is not a difficult concept.
-- I could tell right away that she was impressed with my HUGE Slashdot Karma.
BSOD is history.
Didn't you mean "BSD is history?"
*rimshot*
Does this mean I can replace the paperclip that keeps giving me sass with an animation (derived from a video) of a man dressed up as a paperclip... Who has more free time on their hands... Me or MS???
All the torrents you could want.
If I'm a mouse and use this software is Disney going to sue me?
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
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.
Cool. Now I can do my own version on the Ah-ha clip...
One day one of my teachers kept some people after school to watch an experimental method of creating cartoons. It was Lord of The Rings, but the animated figures were toon-ized by using cell-shading and color manipulation based on edge algorithms.
It looks pretty cool, but you can tell that it's completely fake, not from the visuals, but because the motion is too human-like.
pebkac.
"....and then the one-eyed snake, Captain Wiggly, enters the cave. He is so happy to be in the cave that he pukes with pleasure....."
Table-ized A.I.
He spent millions painting on top of film when he did the animated Lord of the Rings in the early 80's (remember kids?), which was half-rotoscoped, half bizzare drug trip. But it was better than Cool World.
Anyhow, this is exactly what Ralph needs -- a way to film actors, and then make it sorta' look like a cartoon. I see it now, "American Pop 2"... oy.
Still, I spent a summer tracing from Super-8 onto paper and my results were less than spectacular, although my test film did get me some work back in the days of Liquid Television...
Maybe someone can come up with a really good creative application for this technology and I wish them good luck!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But also realizing that by taking away patents, you're taking away my freedom to earn money from my product as I see fit.
It's great until to realize it means clippy appearing in every frame.
Just do something "newsworthy" and watch what M$NBC does to it. Coyote was a genius.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm genuinely interested.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Microsoft used to have "Comic Chat" which turned IRC into comic strips. It's been put to good use by our friends at Jerkcity
Best Buy can have you arrested
Like any large company, there are many different departments handling many different things.
Research is but one of those departments. And why deny them the ability to do further research? In the end, with what they've learned doing research it can only help their products that are already out in the market.
Now i have to put up with DIGITAL cosplayers, "hey look, i edited myself to look like some anime character" i'm going to LOVE this....
How is this "insightful", it's a clear troll.
This *IS* Microsoft software. They are coding new technology, how is this...argh..I give up...it's not even worth it..
I can't wait to see how many people abuse this whenever (if ever) it's integrated into Microsoft's lame Movie Maker program. Prepare knock-offs of Ah-Ha's "Take on Me" video in 3, 2, 1 . . .
And you know some obnoxious dad who films every moment of his kid's life will just love this. Prepare to be bored whenever your friend of family member sends you his oh-not-so interesting home movies saturated with this, and other effects (sometimes better is less, okay?)
That said, it looks kind of cool, though I suspect it has been done before.
If you guys dig this, you may also get in to NPRQuake which takes quake 1, and turns it in to sketch art. It works on the shareware Q1 client, and doesn't require the amount of user intervention that this MS project does.
Still, it is an interesting concept.. and as I understand, the playstation2 is a huge seller. I had no idea there was such a market for this stuff.
Here's the associated paper (PDF).
I was hoping for near cel-shading quality.
But it'd be nice to have the Waking Life http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243017/ footages re-done using this, and then we can compare. I bet it'd become boring before it reaches a thousand frames.
How long before a crappy kids show comes along which derives it's sappy content EXCLUSIVELY from this one effect... like gen-locking in Blues Clues.
At least they can pay an extra scale to be whichever Tele-Tubbie doesn't show up that day.
Yeeesh.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
No, you're still free to earn money from your product just as you see fit. Unless your "product" is a patent.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
...because they made the computer reboot before it could show up. And if you're clever or lucky enough to avoid that, you'll see that they changed the colour to black! (at least that is what I observed)
Shoulda changed it to another colour though because the BSOD acronym still fits...oh well.
The new and improved B(lack)SOD includes brand new, even more vague and useless error messages too! Yay! At least they are MUCH less common than in Win9x/Me or NT.
Anyways, I saw the sample animation...looks way cool but it looks like it is far from automatic. It does really make the rotoscoping process much faster and doesn't seem to impede too much on the "creativity" aspect--looks like it allows a lot of latitude to apply your own artistic style.
Don't think it'll ever replace "pure" animation (manually done frame by frame). It just has this "stiff" characteristic. It's hard to explain, but it is kinda like how you can almost always tell when a drawing is traced from a photograph. "Real" animation seems to add warmth and character--for all the computer rendering in Shrek for example, the actual character animation was manually done by artists with mice and digitiser pads at workstations (ie the position of the characters were manually set every few frames--computers did the rendering, camera movements, lighting, in-betweens etc).
Worst...Introduction...Ever!
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
ASE's safe mode really needs this software. It'd be making fun of stupid people, but in video.
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/08/12/1749235.shtm l?tid=88&tid=1
Wow. And it's still on the front page. I smell salmon.
So basically MS is taking credit for work largely done by three Asian graduate students? Kind of like three Ph.D. students at Harvard finding a cure for AIDS, and then Harvard claiming it's their discovery.
Cohen's colleagues get zero name recognition in the MS article. Kind of awkward don't you think? It comes off as if the other workers' contributions are insignificant.
The parent is still very informative. We wouldn't have even known about the other contributors if it weren't for him.
And anyone who has worked under a big-name advisor on a project knows they have a tendency to take credit for more than they actually did, especially when foreign students are involved.
Life is cartoons!!! http://www.arecee.com/Audio/LifeIsCartoons.mp3/
DRM DCMA Blue Screen of Death Security holes M$ Windoze Unstable Patch Is there anything I left out ?
Why do the "Colorising" trick that a pain to keep correct and looks like junk any way. Most animation uses limited set of colors. So why noy use "Color Vectorising". Adobe and others have this function. Then back to a picture. Make it easer and no adjustment to keep it in line so to speak. Would look better than this.
Does it remind anyone else of the Dire Straits "Money For Nothing" video? Especially the picture of the girl with stripes on her trousers?
This probably also uses technology Microsoft got when they bought Creature House. They had two products: "Expression", a natural-media vector package (Expression : Illustrator :: Painter : Photoshop), and, more importantly, "Living Cels", an animation program that applied the same natural-media techniques involved in Expression to animation.
I miss Expression.
egypt urnash minimal art.
>> Shrek for example, the actual character animation was manually done by artists with mice and digitiser pads at workstations (ie the position of the characters were manually set every few frames--computers did the rendering, camera movements, lighting, in-betweens etc).
That must be why I find it so difficult to watch Shrek. It gives me a headache, because the visual style is so crisp and detailed, but the character motion is so sloppy and irregular.
I have misplaced my pants.
The article was written by some tech writer as a PR piece. Cohen was the biggest name on list of people who wrote the paper. Of the other three, two appear to work for Microsoft Research in Asia and the other is a grad student who also works with Microsoft Research in Asia. Oh my God, you mean a lowly tech writer didn't give full credit but the paper did? That's absurd. Oh and if you can't find the paper yourself by going to Cohen's webpage linked in the article its Video Tooning
And by checking the authors we have Yingqing Xu and Heung-Yeung Shum as well as Cohen and Jue Wang from above. So we have 3 PhDs working for Microsoft and a doctoral student working at Microsoft doing research, and its Microsoft stealing credit?
Troll. And you have a fairly low UID compared to most I see in these threads
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
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.
Woohoo! Now I can finally put myself into some animated pr0n!
You must think in Russian.
Not again, thanks! I already found it here.
Regards, Martin
at bath university a similar thing is being done: http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~vision/cartoon/
So why don't you download the latest version from Microsoft
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
I just can't wait to transform these videos into cartoons.
- "They misunderestimated me."
Here's the full paper that was presented at SIGGRAPH 2004.
... so when can I pirate it?
From the article audio.. 'a symantic relationship?' What does that have to do with video?
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Real Life Comic? You mean this?
That's pretty damn stupid.
This isn't that impressive in 2004. If anyone has seen Richard Linklater's Waking Life, they did this kind of thing in 2001.
Big deal. Doctor Appleby and Larry, Moe and Curly did this back in 1962.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I was expecting this to be something along the lines of the LOTR original 70's "cartoon movie" but it's more like edge detection and then crayon in the shape. Although clever, hardly groundbreaking, especially as it's not even automatic.
When they can feed in a film and get out something like the LOTR animation out of it without having to fiddle every single second of footage, maybe then it'll have a use.
Homemade Hentai anime.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
There are effective uses of rotoscoping (the humans in An American Tale, for instance), but the technique has to be used sparingly.
It's just a shame that Microsoft doesn't let their people compete using their full talents and insists on using bully tactics.
I've met lots of bright people that work at Microsoft and I've no doubt that MS could make loads of money letting them do their thing. Instead any project that threatens the MS Office/Windows cash cow is put on the back burner indefinately.
This is one of the reasons that monopolies are so bad for the economy and even the people who work for them. Even the stockholders of Microsoft would be better off, IMHO, if the company was split into several different units, say Operating Systems, Applications, Games, Hardware, and Languages. The areas in which these seperate units would compete would just result in more innovation and better products.
Look at how much the Internet has slowed down since IE "won". The progress we all expected in multimedia and innovative interfaces has been slowed to a crawl.
I can only hope that some brave soul in the Justice department of the next administration will take his job seriously and work to break up monopolies instead of seeking some kind of accomodation with them. We'll all be better off for it.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Wow, that's great news. I liked the book, it was a very cutting portrayal of the idiocy of the "drug war", AND the idiocy of being a total stoner. PKD was one of the best, no doubt about it.
The dedication (to all his friends who'd died, been permanently injured, or gone to jail because of their drug habits) was one of the saddest things I've ever read.
Freedom: "I won't!"
For their next research project, they are looking at turning Windows into an operating system!
Is a way for amateurs to make Anime movies or episodes without spending trillion dollars on software, or trillions of hours on 3D modelling. ^_^ My 2 cents.
Isn't this called ACID?
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
Oddly enough, the author of A:M relates that Microsoft actually owned the source code to Animation:Master some years back. Apparently, he got pissed off, quit, and filed a lawsuit to get the code back. Microsoft strange story #298.
I did - but making it available like this gives me the suspicion that there won't be an Expression 4. And whatever it appears as in the future, I bet there won't be a Mac version...
egypt urnash minimal art.
Hey, my life is already like a cartoon. What with the Acme products strewn around, safes falling on me, and some of the weird characters I work with that have speech impediments. This is the last thing I need.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
But also realizing that by taking away patents, you're taking away my freedom to earn money from my product as I see fit.
It is a misconception to assume that you have any moral right to forbid someone to do something that does not harm you directly.
Example:Stealing from your restaurant would be harming you directly.
Opening a restaurant across the street is mere competition.
Patents are like saying "You can't open a restaurant across the street from me because the government granted me the privilege of being the only business allowed to wrap hamburgers in paper and put them in sacks, which nobody would have thought of if it wasn't for my heroic innovation!"
-- I could tell right away that she was impressed with my HUGE Slashdot Karma.
I could well be wrong about that; I haven't seen Cool World myself, I fear. You're absolutely right that rotoscoping is good sued sparingly; I recall it being striking in Wizards, with its rotoscoped World War II footage.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
Hey, moderators, you blew it. This was humor, not MS bashing!
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/