A boy is trapped in a cave that is filled with treasure. But it is dark. He can't see to find his way out. And even if he could see, can he get out?
He finds a lamp. Is it really real? He rubs it with his hand and it begins to glow!
The cave is fulled with light that shines and sparkles off all the untold treasure filling the caverns. In the center, towering above the boy is a Djinn.
"I am the Djinn of the Lamp." It says. Command me and I will give you whatever you wish."
The boy says, "I wish for gold! Give me gold!"
"What do you want gold for?" the Djinn asks.
"To buy nice things. Great things!" the boy says.
"Ask for the things!" The Djinn says, "And I will create them for you."
"But if you give me nice things, then someone will take them from me! I need gold to pay for an army to protect me and my nice things."
The Djinn laughs and says, "I will make you an army that worships you! They will be the greatest army ever. And they will never betray you."
"Then I will need gold to feed the army and to buy land to keep my nice things."
"These too I can make for you, master." The Djinn says. "You have but to ask."
The boy thinks about this. Then a sly smile crosses his face.
"Can you give me your power? So that I can make these things for myself?"
"Yes." says the Djinn,"But my power is tied to the Lamp. You must become one with the Lamp. Knowing all, seeing all. You will want for nothing because you will need nothing. The Lamp is perfection. You will live in a state of grace within it."
"Let it be so." The boy said.
The Djinn nodded and his light shone and filled the cave, the world, the sky. The boy grew until he was as big as the Djinn was. Was, because the Djinn shrank down and became an old man.
A look of perfect bliss appeared on the Boy's giant face. He was all powerful, all knowing. He retreated into the Lamp and assumed his position as its keeper.
The old man, who had been the Djinn sighed. He was tired. His back hurt. His clothing was worn and patched.
"I need a nap." The old man said. He lay down and went to sleep.
He woke many hours later and stretched. He felt much better. Like the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders.
The old man looked around. There on the floor was the lamp. He bent down, groaning, and picked it up. He rubbed it three times and the cavern filled with light.
The boy, now a giant appeared. He looked down and saw the old man.
"I am the Djinn of the Lamp. What do you want with me. I'm busy running the Universe."
"I need some new cloths and a new hat. Nothing fancy."
"Yes, yes." The Djinn said. He waved his hands and the old man's cloths changed. Nothing fancy, but very nice.
"There, your wish is granted. Now I must be off. My world awaits."
"Before you leave," the old man said. "I would like some breakfast. And a few gold coins. Jut a few, so I won't have to bother you so much."
The Djinn waved his hands and a table with food appeared. Beside the filled plate was a small purse.
"I must go now." The Djinn said. "Anything else?"
The old man started to eat. Between bites he said, "No ... Oh wait. Yes. Please unlock the back door to the cave."
The Djinn waved his hands, but paused. "Do you need a light? The cave will be dark when I am gone."
"No, that's okay." The old man smiled. He held up the Lamp. "I have a light."
I bought a Bambu Labs A1 Mini. It cost $199, on sale. I plugged it in and started printing excellent prints.
Previously I bought an Ender printer for around the same amount. Never did get it to work. I'm not an engineer or a mechanic. I have other technical hobbies, astronomy for example. I tried making a telescope mirror with results similar to the Ender printer. I buy ready made telescopes, not telescope kits.
I have immense admiration for those who can and will make telescopes and 3D printers. I'm very interested in the base technology. But when I want to print something, or look at a faint fuzzy, I just want the system to work.
(Interestingly, I actually like star hopping, the process of finding an observation target with a finder scope and star charts. Go to telescopes have no interest for me. Go figure ...)
To me this seems like a failure of the U.S. corporate/economic system. We should be able to make a 3D printer that simply works. We should be able to make a drones that work as well as the DJI drones. (My understanding is that Bambu Labs was started by a group of former DJI engineers.).
I don't have any solutions here. Not buying a Bambu Labs printer means I don't get to print things in 3D. I would pay more, but whenever I look into the various alternatives that I'm assured are turnkey, they turn out to not be turnkey. And if my Bambu printer breaks I can generally buy a new one cheaper than paying someone who knows what they are doing to fix it.
I'll admit this kind of offends my geek sensibilities. I actually agree, at least emotionally, with Geerling. But I also agree that the U.S. military industrial complex should be able to make excellent consumer facing 3D printers.
If I were doing commerce with the 3D printer I almost certainly would be using something else. Maybe. For what its worth, I'm basically printing out puppet mechanisms and art figures. Occasionally a wall hook or missing part for something that I happen on a STL file for.
In short, these Chinese companies are pushed by the state, in essentially massive dumping. And not only that, they get Chinese hardware patents granted on open inventions from the wider 3D printing community as their own creation & then try to push those spurious patents also in the West.
Great points. Using their printer "rooted" or with custom firmware seems like a decent compromise to me, kind of like what graphene is doing with pixels
If I had an actual need that wasn't being met, I might buy one of their printers just to root and run with custom firmware. I might just do it for the fun of it. Even with tariffs their printers are only running around $220 at Best Buy.
However, even that sounds suspiciously like a project in and of itself. I haven't had time to design and print anything in the last month. So I expect I'll keep rolling along like I am. Things could always change, though.
The part about Procreate is really spot on. If you draw on the iPad, and I do, Procreate just dissolves under your fingers and pencil. It's like working with paper and pencil. Almost. And it has Undo. Tactile feedback would be nice, but I'm not sure what that means. Paper and pencil has great tactile feedback. Trying to describe it with words is an exercise in frustration. If you don't draw, or write with a pen, ever, then I'm at a loss to explain it.
But it's there nonetheless.
We've got a long way to go to really understand UI and UX. A long, long way.
Now, please excuse me while I go and tap dance about architecture for a bit...
There's variation, paper to paper, pen to pen, pencil to pencil, they each present slightly differently. Write with a ballpoint on some receipt paper, then write with a fountain pen on some smooth, low absorbancy paper, then whip out one of those green engineering notebooks with a mechanical pencil.
For each task with a physical writing utensil and paper, you get a distinct experience that connects you physically to the task.
Once actually writing, there's a sense of finality, even the erasable pencil leaves a mark. Your movements have consequence.
Then there's the persistence. A piece of paper doesn't timeout to the lock screen. It's there, all the time, using zero energy to continue to exist. You can prop it up on your desk and forget about it until you need to reference it. If you're constantly going between two pages, you can lay them side-by-side without reducing their size.
I've always found writing/drawing on a tablet to be frustrating. It feels like I'm looking down at a notebook through a toilet paper tube, like I can never see the full picture. I used a wacom tablet with a chromebook and Xournal for years to take class notes. Something about disconnecting the stylus from the screen fixed those frustrations for me, like it took the expectations of paper away and provided the expectations of a pointing device.
> Tactile feedback would be nice, but I'm not sure what that means.
Modern Mac trackpads don’t really click, they vibrate upon sensing a certain amount of force, and the sensory illusion is good enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing.
I’m only suggesting this tongue-in-cheek, but perhaps there’ll come a time when the Apple Pencil can micro-vibrate in such a way that is so convincing it will make you feel as if you’re dragging it on paper with configurable roughness.
Those are wonderful! It's really interesting to see Jansson's take on the characters and settings. When I read _The Hobbit_ in the early 1970s, there was already a well established tradition of how to portray Tolkien's world. Jansson's seems very fresh to me.
Also of interest, and probably just as upsetting to some, is Gene Deitch's version of _The Hobbit_ which was made in the mid 1960s in an attempt to retain the movie rights. Made in 30 days!
The Hobbit is today usually viewed through the lens of The Lord of the Rings, and The Lord of the Rings is viewed with the baggage of 70 years of post-Tolkien epic fantasy culture.
Being deeply embedded in that culture myself, I must admit that these illustrations don’t appeal to me at all, and don’t match my mental imagery of the story. But I can see how they might have looked like a perfect fit to someone who read The Hobbit with a fresh eye when it was still fresh. I wish I could have read it like that.
I inhaled Lord of the Rings on first reading. I lived inside it. And it had no illustrations except maps, right? But later when the movies came out they were a big disappointment for ne, they were not the world I had visited. And they were boring. Had I not read the books before, they might have been just fine.
Yeah, the (Peter Jackson) movies were basically LotR seen through the lens of decades of D&D and Warhammer Fantasy, a peculiar aesthetic which of course grew off LotR itself.
I'm guessing that Tolkien would have deeply hated it all with a burning passion.
It's quite alright. Done in a classic childrens' story illustration style, rather than the modern sleek style of CGI-heavy fantasy. Tastes may have changed a bit in the last 60 years or so.
Getting knowledge from comedians is worse than having leaders who are reality tv hosts and failed casino owners? The leader in question is trashing the world economy, deporting people, without trial or due process, to concentration camps in El Salvador, and ignoring judicial orders.
I’ve seen very little cost cutting that matters in that $35 trillion dollar debt. But I’ve seen plenty of cutting social programs that will result in much misery. And trashing of long standing allies and economic partners.
For fun go and look at the history of the ups and downs of that $35 trillion dollar debt, and which administrations it shrank and grew under.
As for “billionaire businessman”, I’ll go with real estate swindler and gangster. And insurrectionist too.
I understand that it's not for everyone, but for me the value of an iPad is easy to understand.
I draw on it. Sketching and painting. I design 2D layouts on it. I sculpt on it. Lately I've been doing some 3D polygonal modeling on it.
Now are there desktop/laptop apps that can outperform an iPad? Yes. (Though, for drawing an iPad is hard to beat. I prefer it to my $3500 Cintiq in a lot of ways.) But the iPad is lightweight, both in actual weight and in the cost of starting to do something on it.
If I want to do something on a desk top, I first have to go to the desk top, boot it up, load the application(s), and deal with all the distractions and gravitas that a desktop comes with.
With the iPad I pick it up, swipe to the drawing app, or the sculpting app, and start messing around with something. Very low barrier to entry, and I can put it down just as quickly. It's very much like picking up a sketchbook as opposed to setting down at an easel, uncovering the pallette, pouring out some oils, etc.
And I can do it on the couch, in the car (not while driving of course), in a cafe, at the park, on a mountain top, waiting for someone in the lobby. You get the idea.
Lately I've been doing some hand drawn animation on Procreate Dreams. Very nice.
Not everyone does the kind of work I do, and has the same work habits and needs. YMMV.
I also write on the damn thing with the pencil. Not perfect, but its getting there. I can truthfully say that I've written some things that wouldn't have happened if not for having an iPad handy.
It's also great for reading comics and manga. I can't say that I like it for movies or TV. And I'm not interested in it for listening to music. But it's definitely an important tool for me.
As an animator for 40 plus years, I can tell you that in-betweening is a very difficult job. The fact that it's often cheaply outsourced is more of a factor that the people paying for the animation simply don't care about the quality. The results are seldom good.
As to how much poor quality in-betweening hurts the performance to the audience is a complicated discussion. Animation that is _very_ bad can often be well accepted if other factors compensate (voice acting, design, direction, etc.)
A good in-betweener is not simply interpolating between the keys. For hand drawn animation at least, there's a lot more going on than that.
We'll leave out any discussion of breakdowns here. For one it's a difficult concept, much more difficult than 'tweening to explain. The other is that different animators will give different opinions on what a breakdown is or does.
I will say, though, I think that properly tagged breakdown drawings could significantly improve the performance of ai generated in-betweens.
Anyone who is seriously interested in the process should read the late, great Richard William's book, _The Animator's Survival Kit_. This is especially true for those who want to "augment" the process with machine learning. The book is very readable, even for non-artists. And he gets into the nitty gritty of what makes a good performance, and the mechanics behind it.
Edit: Another good resource, and relevant to 3D animation as well, is Raf Anzovin's _Just To Do Something Bad_ blog. He has many posts on what he calls "ephemeral rigging" that are absolutely fascinating. Be aware that the information is diffused through out the blog and not presented in a form for teaching. His opinions are fairly controversial in the field. But I think he is onto something. (https://www.justtodosomethingbad.com/)
Post author here - would be very interesting to hear more of your thoughts on this! It's not easy to find a pro animator willing to consider the question given the current level reached by AI methods
I would suggest reading the Williams book as a place to start. Thomas and Johnson's _The Illusion of Life_ is also a must. Thomas and Johnson were two of Disney's 9 old men. The Preston Blair book, simply called _Animation_ is good.
The thing about animation is that it is not about interpolation. It's about the spacing between drawings. The methods developed by animators were not at all mathematical, but something that they felt out by experimentation (trial and error).
The math that does enter into it are directly related to the frame rates. If animation had started in modern times, with frame rates of 30 fps or 60 fps, it would have been a very different animal. And much harder!
At 12 fpt or 24 fps you have a very limited range of "eases" that can be done. So while eases do figure into it, its the arcs, the articulation, and the perceived mass of the parts of the character that make it seem alive. Looking only at the contours and the in-betweens misses all the action.
An awareness of the graphic nature of the drawings, the stylizations of figures and faces are also critical. Cartooning is its own artform and it is tied directly to the way human brains make sense of what the eye sees. Getting more realistic often takes you further from your destination.
Storytelling is also a core part of good animation. Making a character seem to think and react, like it is alive can be done by a good animator. But you won't get there by imitating the real world directly. Rotoscoping has very limited use in good character animation and storytelling. It's all about abstracting out what the brain feels is important and what it expects. You can get away with murder if you caricature the right details.
When I've worked with training new animators, one of the points I stress is that it is articulation and the perceived mass of the character that really sells a performance. The best art style in the world is nearly useless if the viewer doesn't buy into the notion that they are watching a thinking person reacting with a physical body to events in an interactive world.
My feeling is that you will get further if you build articualated rigs and teach the ai to make it move. 2D or 3D. There is footage of tiny AI driven robots in a Google eperiement that are learning to play soccor. The ai is learning to make them move and solve problems (running around the soccar field and scoring goals.) Very natural looking behavior (animation!) develops almost automatically from that.
Trying to solve the problem by dealing with lines, contours, and interpolation seems very far away from the important parts of animtion.
Just my two cents worth.
Get a copy of the Williams book, it's on Amazon. Read his thoughts, he explains things much better, and more entertainingly, than I do. Sharpen up your pencil and start making some simple walks. Simple stick figures and tube people work just fine. And you may find that you enjoy the art form. Even if you don't become an animator yourself, the exercises will deepen your appreciation and understanding of the art form.
I've read Williams' book, and I've studied animation and done some, though I wouldn't call myself an animator yet.
I hope to avoid building rigs because they're, well, rigs. Much nicer and more flexible to control things though drawing than a rig which has a bunch of limitations and then there are issues with hair/cloth/water/etc. What can be done without a rig is another question but the methods I reviewed in this post are not the most that can be done for sure.
Rig can mean a lot of things. Hand drawn animators often use a rig, it’s just the rig is made of graphite lines on paper driven by a meat based neural network.
I'm not just being cute when I say that. The problems the AI in the examples was having have distinct analogs with the problems human animators have. Arcs are a problem, as is the notion that in-betweens are mostly about interpolation.
As I said, timing and articulation are at the heart of most kinds of animation. Even very stylized animation must be aware of this, if not being a slave to it. Imagination and expression are important, but first the audience has to _believe_.
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