Chapter 93 16.2 The Birth of Synthetic Characters

Mickey Mouse is one of the predecessors of artificial life.Mickey, now in his sixties, will soon enter the digital age.In a permanent "temporary" building on Disney's Glendale studio set, Mickey's trustees are carefully planning how automation will be applied to animated characters and backgrounds.Here, I chat with Bob Lambert, who is responsible for providing new technology for Disney animators. The first thing Bob Lambert made clear to me was that Disney was in no rush to fully automate animation.Animation is a craft and an art.The great wealth of the Walt Disney Company is sealed in this craft, and its crown jewels-Mickey Mouse and his friends-are the models of this art in the eyes of audiences.If computer animation means the dumb cartoon robots kids see on Saturday mornings, Disney would rather not touch its side."We don't want people to say, 'Oh, hell, another craft has gotten into the eyes of computers,'" Lambert said.

Artists are also a problem.Lambert said, "Look, we've had 400 women in white coats draw Mickey for 30 years. We can't change them all at once." The second thing Lambert wants to make clear is that since 1990, Disney has used some automated animation techniques in their famous movies.They are digitizing their world step by step.Their animators have realized that if they don't transfer the artist's intelligence from their own heads into some kind of almost living simulation world, then they will quickly become a different kind of dinosaur. “Honestly,” says Lambert, “in 1992, our animators were clamoring for computers to do their work.”

In the cartoon "Beautiful Detective", the hand-drawn characters once ran a huge clock, which is a computer-generated clock model.In "Australian Adventures", Albatross Orville flies through a fictional New York City, a completely computer-generated environment based on data collected for commercial purposes by a large construction contractor. database.And in "The Little Mermaid", Ariel shuttles through the simulated fish school, the seaweed dances lightly, and the water bubbles spread out like in the real world.However, these computer-generated background images, each frame greeted by the 400 white ladies, were first printed on fine drawing paper, and then hand-colored to integrate with the rest of the film.

In "Beauty and the Beast," Disney used "paperless animation" for the first time in at least one scene.In the prom at the end of the film, the characters were composited and rendered digitally, except for the Beast and Beauty, who were still hand-painted.If you don't look carefully, you won't notice the transition between real and fake cartoons in the movie.The reason why this discontinuity can be detected is not because the digital picture is not as good as hand-drawn, on the contrary, it is more realistic than traditional cartoons. Disney's first completely paperless character was the flying (walking, jumping, pointing) blanket from Aladdin.To make it, a Persian rug is first drawn on a computer screen.The animator folds various poses for it by moving the cursor, and then the computer fills in the intermediate frames between the poses.Finally, the digitized blanket motion was added to the digital version of the other hand-drawn parts.Several of the animals in Disney's latest animated feature, "The Lion King," were computer-generated in the same way the dinosaurs were made, including some swarming beasts with semi-autonomous swarm behavior.Now, Disney is working on their first fully digital animation, which will be released in late 1994.It will serve as a living advertisement for the work of former Disney animator John Lasseter.Almost all of the film's computer animation was produced by Pixar.The company is a small, innovative studio located in a renovated business park in Richmond, California.

I stopped by Pixar to see what kind of artificial life they were hatching.To date, Pixar has produced four award-winning computer-animated short films, all of which were written by Lasseter.Lasseter likes to animate normally inanimate objects—bicycles, toys, lamps, or trinkets on a bookshelf.Although Pixar's films are regarded as high-level computer animation works in the computer graphics circle, most of its animation parts are actually "hand-drawn".It's just that the tool Lasseter uses for drawing is not a pencil, but a mouse; his drawing board is not wooden, but a computer screen.If he wanted his toy soldier to become depressed, he would bring up a smiling face of the toy soldier on the computer screen, and move the mouse to pull the corner of the figure's mouth down.After studying its expression, he might decide that the toy soldier's eyebrows should not have drooped so quickly, or that his eyes blinked too slowly.So he dragged these parts with the mouse. "I don't know of any other way to tell it what to do to make its mouth look like—like this," Lasseter said, making an O with his mouth in surprise. , "And it's a little faster and better than doing it myself."

I heard more about human-computer interaction from Pixar production supervisor Ralph Guggenheim: "Most hand animators feel that Pixar's approach is to feed sketches into the computer and then come out. A film. We were once banned from the animation film festival because of it. But if we did, we could not have made such a good film... At Pixar, the most important thing we encounter every day The problem is that computers have subverted the traditional animation process. The new process requires animators to describe what they want to draw before doing it!" As true artists, animators, like writers, often don't know what they want to express until they see their work.Guggenheim repeatedly emphasized: "The animators will not know what the character looks like until it is drawn. They will tell you that it will be very slow when starting to make a story, because they have to gradually become familiar with it. their characters. Then, as they became more and more familiar with the characters, the drawing speed became faster and faster. By the time the film was halfway through, they knew the characters well, and the characters began to be drawn in the frame. Come alive."

In the animated short "The Tin Soldier," a toy soldier has a feather on his hat that moves naturally with the soldier's head.This effect is achieved using virtual physics or what animators call "drag, drag, swing".As the root of the feather moves, the rest of the feather moves in the manner of a spring pendulum—a fairly standard physics formula.The exact way the feathers wobble is not pre-programmed, but appears realistic because it obeys the laws of physics of wobbling.However, the faces of the toy soldiers were completely artificially manipulated by an experienced animator.In other words, the animator is a stuntman.The way he plays the character is by drawing it.Every animator has a mirror on his desk, which the animator uses to draw his own exaggerated expressions.

I asked the artists at Pixar if they could imagine an auto-generated computer character where you feed it rough sketches and out comes a digital Daffy Duck that can do mischief on its own.All I got was serious nos and head shakes. “If you could feed a sketch into a computer and draw a good character, there wouldn’t be any bad actors in the world,” Guggenheim said. "But we know that not all actors are good actors. You can see a bunch of people who impersonate Elvis Presley and Monroe at any time. But why don't we be fooled? Because the job of impersonators is actually very complicated. You You have to know when to twitch which corner of your mouth, and how to hold the microphone. It’s not easy for a human actor to do this, how can a computer sketch do it?”

The question they ask is one of control.As it turns out, the special effects and animation industry is full of control freaks of all kinds.In their view, the subtleties of acting are so subtle that only a human controller can guide digital or hand-drawn characters to make their choices.They are right. However, in the future they will no longer be correct.If the computing power of computers continues to increase as it is now, within 5 years, we can see synthesized characters playing the leading roles in movies. Not only are their bodies synthesized, but their behaviors are also synthesized.

In the game, the realism of those synthetic dinosaurs has reached a near-perfect level.Visually speaking, the fleshy bodies of these dinosaurs are no different from the ones we expect to be directly photographed.Currently, many digital effects labs are assembling elements that can be used to create realistic digital human actors.One lab specializes in digitizing hair, another focuses on hand movements, and a third focuses on facial expression generation.In fact, digital characters are already being added to Hollywood movies (and no one is aware of it), for example, a synthetic scene that requires someone to move in the distance.However, it is still a challenge to make the natural folds and drapes of real clothes; if it is not perfect, it will make the virtual characters look dull.In the beginning, though, digital characters will only be used to pull off dangerous stunts or be inserted into composite scenes—but only for long shots or crowd scenes, not close-ups that grab the audience's attention.Making virtual human forms that look like real ones is tricky, but it's within reach.

It takes a little further to simulate the actions of real characters.It is especially difficult to get facial movements to the point where they appear to be real.According to graphics experts, the last stronghold in this field is the expression of characters.Controlling the movement of the character's face will be a tough battle.