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...)
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.
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.
no, but it would have made Waking Life and Bakshi's Lord of the Rings a lot easier.
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
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
this? http://students.washington.edu/juew/
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.
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
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
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.
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....
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.
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.
Not again, thanks! I already found it here.
Regards, Martin
This isn't that impressive in 2004. If anyone has seen Richard Linklater's Waking Life, they did this kind of thing in 2001.
Homemade Hentai anime.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!