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#should I have put actual effort in the background? yes but I'm very lazy
animehouse-moe 3 months
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Ishura Episode 2: Alus The Star Runner
I'm trying hard, I'm really trying hard to give Ishura the credit it deserves, but it's a struggle and this episode just further highlights that. Not much to talk about since it's mostly bemoaning circumstance, but I just want to give Ishura a bit of a chance.
First of all, Ishura is a very... wordy series. Yeah, kind of obvious since it's a light novel, but I more so mean that the presence of a narrator is borderline abused to describe characters and events in the LN. And I mean, when it's written like that it works. When you have to listen to a narrator say those things though it becomes very taxing.
I really don't want to say that Passione is not putting forth much effort in adapting Ishura, but I think that I'm comfortable with saying that they're satisfied with keeping things pretty well in line with the source material. Not the worst thing possible, but when you have so much opportunity to improve upon things via the medium you're working in, it's not exactly great seeing those things left as is.
Anyways, that's really the only complaint I have from the more broad strokes of an adaptation perspective. The real first complaint I have is the fact that this is being called a Passione anime. The first image is the 2D animation credits from Passione, and the second is all the CG credits from Sanzigen.
Clearly, one is pulling more weight than the other.
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Regardless of whether there's more effort put into the CG side though, the fact of the matter remains that composition is grossly overlooked within this work, and the series pays for it dearly.
Yes, a good deal of the CG animation is good, that sequence of Regnejee fighting the wild horde of Wyverns is great, and there's some good animation in Alus vs the dragon (we just don't say a word about the dragon).
But even within those aspects of really great work, the glaring issue remains the composition.
Take, for example, Regnejee's Thermal Arts. Looks great, sounds and feels great, but even in a simple sequence like that visual effect we find issues.
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The beam of fire that Regnejee is preparing to fire off here is far away from the wild wyverns in the frame. However, that Thermal Art is shown to be placed in front of said wyverns. Plain and simple, a very glaring mistake for how simple a fix it is.
It just sets the tone for the level of quality in composition you should expect out of the series, and that level isn't great. Sure, in some cases like Alus visiting Nagan here, it looks good, but this is the type of scene that these models were built for. It's a blurred background, an up close shot that doesn't really try to give Alus texture through god awful color blending, and there's not any 2D work to better contextualize his model. But the real important piece is that he's in a dark scene with flat colors. There's no sun in the sky, there's no brightness or any variables to the scene, so there's nothing that has to change about Alus' model.
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Conversely, Passione also proved that they can do good compositing work with these models, as we get a great look at Regnejee earlier in the episode.
He's in bright light, he has contrasting colors in his background, but he still looks good because of the composition. The armor actually has some semblance of a reflection in it, there's movement in the foreground of the frame, and there's actual composition appliedin the form of shadows and depth of field.
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Similarly though, Regnejee is isolated in this frame, and is not doing much. If I were to argue any point with these two frames it's that the compositing is lazy and isn't putting a consistent effort in in any sense of the word. I mean, just look at the difference between the above Regnejee, and this one.
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It feels almost embarrassing how different the two are.
And that's really my core issue with the show through these two episodes. The work in post completely destroys the production effort of so many people. They can make aspects of this series look great. The boarding might have taken a hit compared to the first episode, but it's still solid. The CGI fight for the wyvern hoards may have been short, but it looked impressively solid. Yes, the Dragon looked terrible, but Alus' part certainly had its moments. Even the visual effects dotted throughout the episode are good.
But something as simple as composition, or even the color design is enough to ruin that effort. It's tough to watch, especially because I've seen the good that the light novel can provide, and I know that Sanzigen and Passione are capable of good work.
So hopefully through this whining about the glaring issues plaguing this production thanks to a handful of aspects, I've convinced a few people to stick with the series. It's got potential, and it will still have its moments. It's just that like with many productions as of late, the issues and challenges created stem from singular or simple issues that remain unaddressed. It sucks, because it weighs on the industry and our experience as viewers a great deal.
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j-ellyfish 4 months
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I know exactly what person you are talking about...they seem to think just because they put "ai art" in their tags it's going to help...like...no, because people reblogging might not know (I don't like starting drama, but I do think people should avoid the "art" of this person if they can) also they use the tag "digital art" in their posts, and that's so disrespectful to real digital artists who actually can draw and spend hours and even days on their art to share with the world...
And they even hide it at the very end of the tag list, like I can't help but assume they're trying to hide it and fool as many people as they can 馃槄
Yeah, I was almost fooled myself yesterday, thank God I was feeling too lazy to type the hetalia tags myself so I scrolled past the og tags and I noticed the "ai art" one. I felt so betrayed I needed to spread awareness 馃拃
I wish these people would bother channeling their efforts into actually learning to make art instead of "putting effort" (yeah some of these people think it takes skill and effort to type prompts, to the point of calling themselves artist ... Lmao, I do mess with AI every once in a while because I'm curious to see what atrocity it'd generate, and it takes absolutely 0 skills once you get the gist of it - which takes like, 15 mins at most) in something so detrimental and disrespectful to ART itself, and real artists.
Eugh, I am pretty sure I recognized the art style AI stole from a legit Hetalia fanartist (who was probably active in the 2010s, dunno their name but I remember their style) in one of that person's fake hetalia artworks. It's so enraging!
... If they are so creative to spend their time coming up with prompts and mental images of the fanart they wish existed, then they should be creative enough to actually pick up a pencil, traditional or digital, and start their journey to become real artists!
Please, learn to enjoy the process, learn to be proud of yourself for your improvements instead of letting disgusting thief AIs take from you the joys and challenges of being an artist.
I spent the last two days working on just the background of a drawing. Was it time-consuming? Yes. Was it challenging? Yes. But that's the point! Art is always a risk, it's always a challenge with yourself be it small or big, because a bad art day and the realization that there's room for improvement is always waiting for you, but the satisfaction of having literally created something that previously didn't exist, and it existing because you manually laid every stroke and chose every color and kept going by trial and error until it looked right... It is all so satisfying! Being able to say "this exists because I put my time, and efforts and eyes and hand and heart in it" ...
How can you trade this all with an empty window where you type stuff and a robotic thief steals right and left to give you what you had in mind?? An AI could NEVER deliver 100% the picture you have in your mind. Do you know who can? YOU!
I genuinely hope this AI ""Art"" hype will die down and rot in hell like N F * Ts did.
I do believe AI itself can be useful for artists, for instance to get references for very specific things that can be hard or time-consuming to find, or to study chromatic harmony (which is something AI admittedly does well), but it must be ethically sourced (artists could be able to upload their artworks if they wish, and they should get a royalty for anytime the AI uses their work as a base) and have some kind of anti-piracy feature. For instance, every generated picture might be kept in a hidden archive and whenever there's suspicion that someone used AI Art improperly (posting it as their own work, or worse making money out of it), the picture can be uploaded on this archive and see if it matches any picture that the AI previously generated.
I know it's delusional, but I truly hope we get to a point where this garbage gets properly regulated.
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ibijau 3 years
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concept: the Piet脿 but it鈥檚 Nie Huaisang holding his brother鈥檚 body :)
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