Friday, June 02, 2006

The problems I have with .... ***UPDATED***

....CG hands for example. They are one of the greatest turn-offs in contemporary movies for me. They remind me of puffed up rubber gloves .







Look at the sheer artistry of a designed, stylised and dynamic handdrawn hand for comparison, it shows an elegance, I completly and painfully miss in CG.







I pulled this sheet from the web a year ago or so, and have completly forgotten , where I found it. My apologies and appreciation to whoever put this together, great job, and it perfectly illustrates my point : there isnt a single finger, wrist or arm, left hand -right hand, that's not corresponding with any of the other elements. A style of drawing you can only achieve, through cheating by drawing.Please understand me correctly : its a shortcoming of the medium, not the animator !


ULI MEYER has sent over some examples of his work on CG hands, but I am too incompetend to open them. Instead I am posting this vintage pic of the master himself, bewitching his drawingboard with voodoochants in the morning.



Andrei ( link on the right ) has sent over some sketches of his newborn son's hands. Marvelous work ! Enjoy...





17 comments:

Benjamin De Schrijver said...

I completely agree. I'm always put off by CG hands. Even recently with the leaked French Ratatouille trailer. There's a whole shot of probably about 15-20 seconds of just hands. And the animation is beautiful. But still it looked so unappealing! It didn't even seem to have knuckles. It was al so fleshy and round and soft, and also flat, while when I look at my own hand, I can see hard bone, fleshy parts, wrinkles. Drawing has so many great ways to caricature all that, and I believe in CG it must be possible as well, but they're clearly not "there" yet.

HaraldSiepermann said...

It's because you feel it, when you draw it and it shows in the drawing, you know, that whole lazy line-thing. But the computer just generates data, and that shows as well, or at least thats what I think .....

Boris Hiestand said...

haha! sorry Harald about my previous comment! Translate 'idiot' as whacky guy posting wacky stuff please! I was in a jolly mood and meant no offence!

We're in London at MPC cursing, screaming and shouting at our computers, trying to figure out how to make the computer do the things we want to.
Like you say here with these Kahl hands- there's a lot of cheating going on,- a different trick in each drawing, making these hands look like they all belong to someone else- even though they are all Merlin I think. And when you have a 'real' hand in 3d space, you can't really do that, although new developments in rigs like scaling(squash-stretch) tools make it a little better.

You just can't get that 'straights against curves' and breaking of fingers to get sharp angles type of appeal in an ugly solid shape! grrrr.

Uli Meyer said...

Cg hands do not allow cheating. Nevertheless an animator can, if the hand is designed and rigged properly, still find nice shapes and silhouettes. I always critisize the hand posing and make sure they work. Next to facial expressions, hands are so important to a character's performance. I'm e-mailing you some humble samples of what we've tried. Feel free to share them. Nevertheless, you can't beat great pencil draftsmanship.

TOONSTEAK said...

Hallo Harald,
ist das Uli am Tisch?

mike . . . said...

great posts and great thoughts.
nothing compares to a drawing and it's emotion.
:)
it's not cheating, . . . it's very much like applying the theory in the original Bambi backgrounds . . . they painted the "feeling of a forest" not the literal "every single leaf rendered forest." and because of that, it felt more like you were there than anything else.
simply put . . .its drawing more of what you feel . . . and less of what you see. the computer shows everything and doesn't allow for that "feeling" to come across.
anyway, that's my 5 cents worth of babbling.
:) all that to say, thanks for encouraging the drawing to continue.

all the best,
m . . .

Uli Meyer said...

When and where was that? Frightening!

HaraldSiepermann said...

Could it have been at Passion in late 1987 ? Kingly Street ? I do have pictures of Chuck from the same place, same day, since I never carry a camera they were probably shot by Hans ....Not so sure myself...

Uli Meyer said...

Yep, you're right, it was at Passion's first digs. I remember, I was working on a 'Chocula' commercial. Hence the spindly finger hand action. My hair looks dark and curly for some reason. Probably because I hadn't washed it for weeks while camping out under my desk. We were drawing straight onto frosted cels in those days, went to the pub at 6pm, returned at 11pm and continued burning the midnight oil. Brrrrr, gotta go and have a shower right now!

TOONSTEAK said...

Uli,
where is your bear on that image! Thank's Harald for shearing this great picture, I think that Uli was heard by those voodo masters, gotta work hard and pray!!

Great post!!

Boris Hiestand said...

Uli looks like a skiny version of Albert Price in that pic

Elliot Cowan said...

CG characters also seem to have problems with shoulder and wrist joints, do you not think?

Haki said...

These hand-drawings from the baby are awesome! Full of life!

Blake Himsl Hunter said...

Thanks for the post. I think every artist finds hands to be difficult to draw. I think it's one of the reasons why I love nicely drawn hands (either realistic or cartoony) and why sloppy hands cause me pain.

Unknown said...

Verne's fingers wouldn't be useable if they followed the character sketches. In CG animation we are unfortunately bound by the physicalities of 3 dimensional space.

I really like Verne's hands in the final film, and were a good compromise between the vision of the designer and the dictates of the animation medium used.

K

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