This tool cuts time spent drawing in-betweens by half
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- Опубліковано 27 жов 2023
- Check out this tool that can cut down your time spent in-betweening by half!
If you want to inquire about it, because email us at info.sakugaprototype@gmail.com
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Thanks to everyone that signed up to test the tool! We have to manually create your login credentials, so check your email, including your spam folder if you haven't received your login info.
Just sent an email. Incredibly excited to test this out!! It could truly be a life saver tool.
Thanks for allowing other artists to test it!
Best of luck with the development!
I dnt get an email... I suppose I didn't make the cut?
I sent an email and haven't gotten a response yet, I want to try it😊
Just sent an email. I had the opportunity to be a beta tester on the software called Cacani, which also has a similar proposal.
It would be a great pleasure to be able to contribute in some way with my experiences, thank you in advance.
@@GugartsAnimationsHave you become a cacani beta version tester? There has been no news about cacani for over two years, can you show some feature demo videos about it?
Don't stop making these videos,people that want to animate get super inspired by your videos and you are kind of the light in the dark,no one is making videos while they are already in the industry. This is next level credibility,quality,and advice. Keep it up brother,good work.
Could not agree more!
it's always exciting to see this kind of technical improvement in animation, but it always worries me that it just helps studios to make more money and never helps animators to have a better quality of life at work. we animate much faster than before, but the pace has never been so intense.
For real, those fuckers will just find it as an excuse to make more anime and still count our hours outside of working hours as working hours too. We are so underpaid as is, every sheets have different difficulties, it’s unfair to make them all $4 each. From where I’m from, $4 in the local currency isn’t even enough to afford a meal. Their currency (Japan) is much higher than us yet they simply change the $ sign to our local currency. Now they reduced our basic salary too because the local government makes it an obligation for all companies to pay overtimes.
The way I see it, if something like this makes animation easier to make, MORE animations can be made, and any displaced animators will be able to work on those.
The technology thing is a headscratcher though. The only technology I can think of that has screwed over 2D animators is CGI, and that’s because corporations twisted it into a replacement for 2D instead of a way to assist it… But I guess that’s your point, isn’t it? Nobody thought that 3D and 2D would end up colliding, yet here we are. ☹️
I imagine long term it will bite the companies. These things make it more practical for indie companies to rise up.
This! Yesterday's idea of sakuga is tomorrow's idea of bare minimum standard and that isn't always a good thing. I've brought up the point that improving technology can sometimes mean bigger expectations and harder pressure on animators to an ex once and he literally said "so you hate quality then?" I guess he thinks "prettier" animation is worth the suffering of human artists. I guess I do then because I would "settle" for animations of "less quality" if it meant the artists were treated like humans and got to live their lives.
I’m a professional inbetweener at a Japanese studio and I would like to express my opinion on this.
I think this might be a good thing for very simple cuts meant for independent projects, with little to no budget and who can’t hire someone to do all the inbetweens they might need. However it’s definitely not usable for more complicated cuts, specially for big productions. It seems to fill simple spaces between lines but stuff like walking cycles, flowing hair, characters turning around, jumping, and other stuff wouldn’t be doable the way the tool works.
And I don’t think this tool should even replace simple cuts in bigger productions or in the studio scene because those simple cuts are usually given to new inbetweeners to train douga skills, which are incredibly useful when they eventually go onto become genga and LO. It’s a shortcut yes, but I don’t think this should by any means become industry standard. I have already seen what no douga (in betweener) experience does to animators, I’ve handled horrible genga and LO with no regard for how the inbetweening for the scene will be done, badly timed stuff, messed up timesheets, etc etc. This is only attained by working on inbetweening when you first start animating, and it should not disappear or the industry will just keep creating inexperienced LO/genga artists, destroying the basis for a good anime and making the process more difficult for everyone else.
Cacani already tried doing this before and it didn’t work, I believe it has its place but I don’t think it should be promoted as a tool that will actually reduce everyone’s inbetweening time in half when its not applicable for most cuts.
I love this comment. A lot of people don’t seem to realize that in the long run AI is going to prevent future animators from being made.
great comment, i like hearing from those who are experienced. but how do you suggest inbetweening be sped up?
@@zoro-i8u Hire more people, or hire experienced inbetweeners who work faster.
There are also a lot of inbetweening companies in China that can do a whole episode’s worth of inbetweens in one or two days because of the amount of employees they have. Quality isn’t exactly the best but most anime studios use their services to meet deadlines anyway so if one prioritizes speed over quality that’s the way to go.
Besides from that the other answer I have is that there are things that can’t be “sped up” if you want quality animation, it’s all part of a process that takes time and effort, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
@@NoahAllstonHow many employees do those companies have? To do an episode worth (about 4-8k+ drawings) they must have tons of people.
I agree on the rest though.
@@zoro-i8u Not sure how many but from what I heard they usually work 24h a day divided into different shifts. I looked it up and one of the first results shows one of those studios can do up to 5000 in betweens in 24h which would definitely be enough for an average TV anime episode.
Paint Tool SAI had a nice feature I wish more programs had, where you could make an ink layer and it made it so your lines were fully modular. You draw the lines, with line weight from your tablet and everything, and it not only gives you the vector style manipulation points, but also allowed you to mess with the line weight and taper, all while still in rastor, rather than vector. It was a great layer tool for production art or ad poster art, allowing you that small extra bit of control to get things exactly how you want them.
Clip Studio Paint also has the same thing. There's even a vector line eraser that works the same way as the cutter tool in ToonBoom Harmony
paintoolsai is my main drawing program.. I wish it got gradiant maps and a timeline.. it would be hella greatest tool
@@nofuturo SAI has the eraser as well, but yeah I prefer Clip Studio. I'm just saying if SAI had those functions, there's really no excuse that other programs don't.
@@janarose8179 You're better off, baked in gradients never look good. They always end up looking like 2003 Flash animations. It's much better to learn how to color blend and do them yourself.
@@Shadows_Inc Gradient *Maps* are not the same as simple gradients. They're a correction tool that's widely used by professionals to color correct and gamut change as well as colorize grayscale images. If you've never used Gradient Maps, they're like modern magic.
Glad someone is working on this. Not sure why there hasn't been a solution to the in-betweens issue as solving it could easily free the industry up by getting more animators drawing keys. Could easily be the beginning of a new age of hand drawn animation.
I really hope so! Nothing against 3D animation, I just personally like the style and techniques of 2D animation better, so I hope it stays alive as long as possible!
A great example of AI image generation actually being used as a tool instead of mass art theft disguised as a 'tool'! As an indie animator I'd love to make the workload just that bit more doable : )
This tool is very promising. Personally I use Blender's grease pencil interpolation tool for automatic inbetweening of line work. Its the closest available option to my knowledge of another software you might not have heard of: Houdoo by Les films du poisson rouge.
That one is worth looking in to aswell.
It works a bit different. With linking strokes on seperate frames it then inbetweens. Sadly I'm not sure if it is available for personal licenses.
Cacani does stroke order tweening and auto colouring frames. Been around for 10 years; Trigger and David Productions (Jojo) use it
I'm learning animation in Blender grease pencil as well. I haven't used the interpolation tool for inbetweening like others but I would love to see a peg shift & trace option in there at some point if there isn't a way to do that already.
@@derock4art608 Wait, how do you know David Productions uses it on Jojo? Do you know anything else about how they make JJBA? It's a favorite anime of mine, and I can't find anything on their animation process. Thank you!
@@zoro-i8u You will see the credit to Cacani on the anime credits. They list something like "inbetween help with the power of Cacani" in the credits near the end. At least back on the 2012 Jojo credits for the first 2 seasons had this credited properly. That is how I learned of the name of the program but only started using Cacani at the tail end of 2022.
@@zoro-i8u Cacani has a list of credits on their site too. I believe Trigger uses them a ton. I've used Cacani for fight scenes stuff since I hate tweening but I love animating haha
You just gotta be smart about how you break up your drawings and how and where you can cheat some tweens between key drawings with a minor pop.
But yeah, Jojo's credits opened my eyes. Their designs were pretty detailed so it is no wonder they needed the additional help, especially before they knew it would be a successful anime run.
this tool looks awesome, most of the time i just won't give myself time for inbetweens when i animate and just settle for something very choppy - but this could change that!! Really looking forward to see how this progresses :)
this basically turns in-betweening into a much simpler data processing job, but I am curious how it will work for larger motions. I feel like the math must get really difficult as the difference between keys grow.
Yeah I don't think those more dramatic motions should be left to automation anyway
I assume you _can_ key frame it in such a way that you can appeal to the algorithm, but it looks like this is mostly for the boring stuff like a character pulsing up and down
Bro trust me the inbetweening he shows in the above video, can be done a lot faster and easier using just two of the opentoonz vector tools 😂
It may depend on what it is. Inbetweens with a lot of drastic changes are done as smear frames while something like this seems to be on the opposite end of the spectrum in including an inbetween with very little change to smooth the motion. I would imagine there could be a half-and-half where lines are moved at their adjustment point but more drastic elements can be drawn in normally.
@@randomyt5358 Maybe so, but the studio having him work with this program may have particular rules or policies about what softwares they can and can't use for whatever reason. I imagine it's like how Gamefreak likes to (supposedly) develop their own game engine to make their pokemon games so they don't have to give a percentage of royalties to pre-existing engines. Even if another program is better for the job, the studio may have their reasons to make their own for their exact needs--he said it was still in development and there's a possibility there are more features he didn't show off too. I'm just saying we don't know the full details of why he's using this one over something like toonboom.
@@jilliancrawford7577 I'm still curious what it would look like if it tried to do a giant movement.
This is really cool! I think soon every studio may have a computer assisted inbetween software.
I support this so much! glad you are part of the development of this tool! Ill reach out and see if there is anything i could help with as an animator. Even testing and some suggestion may help you in any way
This is a great tool if you are doing animations independently. As for real production work, I wouldn't personally use it because studios usually have specific requirements for douga output, like line thickness AA or non-AA, clip file with vector layers, line withe pressure on, dpi change etc. I hope they collaborate wit CLIP studio because switching software too often is such a pain.
fyi: I'm actually trained and working as douga-man currently
isn't what you saying can be done in rastor files ?
fyi: the op is a professional working on the anime industry in japan, I bet he knows what it can and cant be done
@@DaVinc-hi7hd from what i gather from the video, currently the software messes up with the line by converting it again to vector. trust me when i say it gets messier if there is something like gosei and kumi thrown in the cut
@@sirirond1990 I know he is a "professional working on the anime industry in japan".
I was just stating the obvious, so that I too can get more insight from him, or someone else.
Thanks for your input though.
@@filthyfries6256 I trust you :P . I think I might have to watch the video again to get better understanding. Thanks for the reply.
When the world needed him the most, he returned...
I see tools like this being revolutionary for indie animation but for studio projects it will most likely cause marginal increase in quality and/or more productions.
While this will devalue each individual frame that's not necessarily a bad thing as each individual animator would be able to produce more frames for the same effort so a horizontal change in regards to quality of life.
So overall I'm feeling optimistic about this tool if it can improve animation quality without further negatively effecting animators lives. There's potential for pipeline changes because of it that can screw people over but the boon for indie animation it could provide still has me leaning positively towards it.
It's been around with Cacani for 10 years. Used on 2012's Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. It is a robust tool for auto tweening, cleanup, and colour.
For an early iteration this looks great I look forward to seeing how this progresses as even though I'm still learning and enjoy the drawing, inbetweening is no joke!
I think you said it perfectly with "Always interested in learning new things about the animation process". You can be a professional or could be a beginner just trying to find out better ways to improve and make better choices in an animation production pipeline. Also just to have a general educational idea on how animation work which is fantastic! Please keep up the good work!
I highly recommend exploring the Freestyle render engine for this project. While it's true that this engine is absolutely ancient, not to mention just how hard it is to find good examples of it being used since so many novices use it, the level of customization it offers is unparalleled. I myself have used it for turning vector art into very convincing hand-drawn lines. That being said, to achieve this I had to use Blender as an intermediary tool since the render engine does require 3D geometry to create the strokes. However, a skilled programmer can defiantly circumvent this limitation by directly injecting vector lines as the chaining strokes to completely bypass the 3d side of the engine.
Yeah, it's sad how outdated Freestyle is at this point. Was hoping the Line Art modifier would replace it... Seeing results in real time is nice but it's pretty slow and not nearly as customizable. I've only seen a few good renders using Freestyle such as this one (ua-cam.com/video/1adk42-eviQ/v-deo.html)
I think one important thing to keep in mind is rendering the lines with no antialiasing by setting the samples to 0 and rendering them with an average thickness of 2 pixels at a low resolution such as 1650x928 (Mappa) then compositing and upscaling from there.
Comment might get flagged because of the link.
Looks amazing! I'll look into it at a future date.
This would save so much time and keep the quality of the drawings very convincing. I am very intrigued
Always look forward to your videos! This tool seems pretty great for the right application.
i think everyone should
reach out
nice video bro. I hope you continue to create and discuss this work, and can inspire many people to become animators. I support you bro to be able to continue making videos
I always wanted to animate things with this anime feel and your videos have been helping a lot thanks
Hype for this to be generalized to softwares like Fire Alpaca or Krita, even if it takes a few years or so. Has the potential to leverage AI to greatly enhance the diversity of working in animation (boredom contributes to burn-out, I think), or to help amateurs like me to animate even more at less human cost.
this is so brilliant. tempted to "reach out"
This looks fantastic
This looks awesome!
Can't wait to hear an update for this
Your skill on display here being able to read that spaghetti of lines is the real magic, but this is excellent. ❤ What you really need is to train a diffuser to guess the inbetweens. That's the only way you'll get 3d stuff like a head turning toward the viewer. A finetune of stablecascade should work imo; it has a really solid understanding of form and of lineart.
All the process remember me a bit of Cacani, personaly to me its more effective if the software can create some clean sketck and after that we do the final line. Making all the correction take a lot of time to me, because of that i don't use cacani anymore.
ooohhh this is the kind of tool i had been thinking about for a long time
Reached out. It looks very promising Dong! :)
I love your work ❤️
For beginners I would recommend drawing all in-between it helps to develop your skills and understanding of anothomy
This is amazing!
thank you so much!
I just received this tool today, and it's incredibly helpful. The only drawback I've noticed so far is that it can only handle a maximum of 2000x2000 pixels (correct me if i'm wrong), and it works best with a 2-pixel brush. Initially, it felt overwhelming, but after a few hours of using this tool, I managed to achieve excellent results.
where i download it?
Good job man
reminds me alot of Cacani's auto inbetween function, seems really cool
This is awesome!
Wow, i must try this on my film
Wow:o that’s so useful!
I'm pretty sure that with your skills you can speed up this technique in Moho. It has all these vector features, totally animatable like in AE, with onion skins, FbF layers + incredible bones system and actions
Dude is about to revolutionize the anime industry
Interesting technology here. I wonder if there's currently (or plans for) any direction you can give the software to help it generate the inbetweens. For example flagging an area or shape in drawing one as the same in drawing two to help interpret what becomes what. Cacani does this on a line-by-line basis which is very useful but also time-consuming in its own way. The idea of more generally indicating a transformation that the software may not be able to interpret on its own, then correcting the output, is very appealing.
Bro must me busy still uploads videos here , nice bro 👀✨
ive been dreaming of something like this
Nice!
I would say this tool is basically a twixtor from AE, but with much better execution of lines and a lot easier correction. (besides that twixtor can work with colors and gradients and saves way more time if you do it without masks)
You might want to explore with the line interpolation feature of Grease Pencil in Blender.
I'd be very curious to try this. Have you used Cacani? It does automatic inbetweens with little cleanup needed, though you'll need to draw it all in the program.
Grease pencil has great interpolation, open toonz randomly messes things up with inbetweening.
Hello, thanks a lot for those very high quality videos, I've learned a lot since I started watching your videos. Quick question: What are the advantages of developping and using this software when there are existing tools such as Cacani, already used by huge studios? Thank you!
When this app releases after beta, I'll be willing to spend a good amount of money for it considering the time I could save with it!
Aí sim, valeu por mais esse video 😃
I have recently experimented with some simple Animations for which I used DAIN App to interpolate between two Keyframes (Rasterized, no Vectors) and get up to 8 Inbetweens -- I would typically have to do some Cleanup in a few Spots, as was expected, but it was a great Help. :)
I ve learnt a lot about making anime. Thanks
I'd really like to know what advantages this tool has over similar interpolation tools from different software, like the one in opentoonz for example
in flash and toon boom, they had been use auto-tween tool for long time. im really glad there a opportinity for anime animator to use this tech.
Their versions are broken for traditional animation. Cacani has what Dong shared and even more, but very little support and isn't well known despite David Productions using it for Jojo and Trigger using it as well. Auto colouring on top of auto tweening is amazing!!
japan's consumption tax is a little less scary if you're putting out double the betweens than you did before. Keep up the awesome work.
Do you have paid version videos of post production? Mr. Dong
Cool, thank you for interesting information! By the way, quite a few scientific labs all over the world are working on this problem using ai, I’ve seen some interesting samples. And I think the inbetweening problem will be solved next year, and it will be the game changer in 2d animation industry. So, it’s time to think about personal anime projects and hone genga skills! Soon we’ll need only to draw key animation, all douga will be done by ai.
i think the Klaus movie used that technique for key frames and advanced lighting for things.
It takes a trained eye to make sure everything goes smoothly.
*not that they used Sai, but still
Mostly lighting and shadows
Everything else is manually in-betweened
I would love to test your program!
Definitely a good tool, very promising what it can do with more refining.
Though i think the tool is great, but it seem it might work for only easy - medium difficult animation. I think the tool is a good improvement in the technology of animation. But i feel like the main reason Inbetween work feel like a slugfest, is not all animation scene is just simple movement. Harsh motion, camera angles, hair movement, hands, or even running cycle etc.
If the tool can mimic those difficult animation i will be very impressed. (PS. Im pretty sure i would rather do normal inbetween then use the tool, checking incorrect work is more frustrating then actually doing the work yourself. That is my personal opinion)
woah
Our man Dong slowly dragging the Japanese animation industry into the 21st century 🙏🙏🙏
Japan has always been ahead of the curve in animation. If America is "ahead" with computer assistance like bone rigging and motion tweens, like most of the garbage animation from the west in the last 10 years, then I'll take traditional hand drawn any day.
My man you can't just call 3D or rigged/ tween animation garbage. In fact it's been utilized in a way that's pretty damn incredible if you've actually seen the stuff the western animation industry is actually making
Especially the Indie companies!
Anime is literally the highest level cinema can reach.
@@INTERNECION101 When did I say 3D was garbage? Seems like you might be protecting. It's also not a very controversial statement to say that most western puppet animation is awful. It's not done as a stylistic choice, it's just cheaper and doesn't take as much talent to do, so you're able to hire a smaller team of less qualified individuals, so you're not paying for a large room of specialized talent. I'm also not saying that ALL tweening and such is bad, a background establishing shot that pans from left to right is technically a motion tween. The problem is when it is used as the base crutch for all the animation to cut down on production time and budget, and so they don't have to hire specialist artists to draw foreshortening and dynamic movement and do in-betweens while understanding animation principles like easing. That way, a studio can hire a small team of cheap kids fresh out of college for cheap, and push out a product quickly. Puppet animation is as much proper animation as paper drawings cut out and glued to popsicle sticks and wiggled around.
@@Shadows_Inc You low-key did not need to type all of that. The moment you said I was projecting I knew you were hostile and your credibility is gone. It's the fact you took what I said negatively. If I misunderstood then sorry dude. But calm down. Shit ain't that deep 💀
I notice that being it generates lots of vector points per line so a smoothing tool to reduce them would be helpful. Maybe to solve complex changes you could look at the morphing tool in toon boom harmony premium. Its similar to using shape layers in after effects but you can mark points to track their motion between keyframes. At least in our case when we do cleanups in harmony we also color them ourselves so sadly make use of this tool
I'd like to see a workflow for Toonboom Harmony
Please make a video how to colour frames
I've recently worked on a certain "3rd seasons of an old shoujo anime" With a cut of 36 frame of mostly zoom that i think this tool might be very useful tho i don't know will this tool can properly work with complicated spiky hair character.
THANKYOU VERY MUCH!!
Do you not know how much time consume when I try to draw in between fame hand by hand!!
Waiiiit. Whats the tool?? Is it opentoonz or is there something else?
why so many control points on the lines?
How is this different from cacani?
You show us kumi but please show us how to use it in after effects. The process.
this is how A.I should be from the start.
fill the gaps in between keys, not replace artists.
Inbetweeners are artists too, and it's typically how new animators learn their craft. We need to be careful, even with stuff like this.
@@natsukaze5799 I agree, this is how typically we start with. inbetween artists will always be in demands since they add the human touch with flaws lines
@@natsukaze5799the most important step with generative AI is outlawing training AI on peoples work without permission.
this tool help me a lot, no need longer time to learning it. yet, is still need improvement. already send my opinion in email.
i am interesting for invest using this tool for future project.
for the test, can i upload the result in my social medial ?
I have a question, as you are an animator in the anime industry, how do you feel about animators being overworked and especially in Mappa?
This seems like a slightly better version onf Flash and Animate's shape tween.
May I ask what the name of this software is?
A very promising application that will help us in betweeners’ job! Working as a Japanese animation inbetweener currently, it is indeed a real challenge trying to in between everything in one given cut. With tight deadlines of only a day (supposed 8 hours) I’d say that 10-20 sheets are the limits of what one in-betweener can do. However, every cut has different difficulty. Once I did 14 sheets only and I had to work over 24 hours due to the intricate details, and many times even with average number of sheets that I stated, I worked over 10-15 hours on them. It’s really difficult, I love my job, but I wished applications like this existed earlier. I aim to be a keyframe artist, but being an inbetweener who depends mostly on curve tool for the speed, this junior job is affecting my workmanship with how I also have barely any available time to practice on my drawings. Perhaps one more reason is because Im working in a very exploitative company right now, not sure how other anime companies are like.
Combine this with cadmium for coloring
Hey! Whats this software youre using for this new process?
Is there a tool like this for coloring animations?
seems like it's using basic interpolation to take some manual labour out of the tweening process which might be promising (and a wonder it hasn't been utilized yet), but i don't see this working in about 40% of use-cases. as in the old Richard Williams water drop example, a perfect middle-point between two frames doesn't work in many scenarios.
I wonder if Procreate Dreams could implement something like that
More time doing corrections … I still think traditional is the best given that many details may be overlooked when it comes to the automation of animation 😪
Hi dong, have you used Cacani or know anybody who has? Thank you
Bro can u tell how to make walking animation from all angles
❤
2d animation expecially has been in need for advancement. So excited to see what the future holds. If good training data is constantly supplied and the more the program is being used, it should keep improving more and more. With less touch up needed and being able to help in some even more dynamic animation, making 2d animation a better competitor to other medias. And more importantly, more viable in the future
omg
I wonder if some of the technology disney invented for their Paperman short, can be useful in your software.
look up a video with the title of "Paperman and the Future of 2D Animation"
Woo a Interpolation tool.... it sure reminds me of Live2D Cubism with the way how the rigs work *in a Teq Way... not talking about the Process of making a Rig ,instead talking of the actual Behaviour of the interpolation...
i am curios on how the interlopation works... is it like a 3D Software or is it more advance than that... Hmmm...
I wonder how much per drawings us animators in house get paid for now...
I am used to drawing lines and lineart as regular raster layers. Any time I've tried converting them to vectors to have adjustable points, there are too many to be any more convenient. However, I struggle with trying to make lineart as vectors with adjustable points from the start (as they should be done with this technique) because I feel like the lines aren't drawn as fast or come out as natural or beautiful. It leads me to struggle with either lines thay I like and too many adjustable points or a manageable amount of adjustable points but a line I feel is lacking.
Is it a matter of patience and getting used to it or something else?
Clip Studio Paint has a similar feature as this program where the points allow for movng lines and even adjusting lineweight, brush/tool, and so-on as a vector.
What's the difference between this and CaCaNi?
This is still in development???