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Chaos Dragon: When 5 creators play D&D

Can we maybe not use the word 'trap?' It's pretty mean.

Anyway, the anime will not be quite as entertaining as the logs of the game, given that it will lack everyone being constantly suspicious of Urobuchi, while having to be reminded to stay in character so they don't play as though they're suspicious. :V
 
Aaron Peori said:
Unless they got an animation budget matching Akira, there was no way those character designs were going to be anything but simplified when they got down to, you know, actually animating them.
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Blonde and Doge Ear look like different characters entirely.

One isn't even a man anymore.
 
Ford Prefect said:
Can we maybe not use the word 'trap?' It's pretty mean.
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No, no it's really not. No more than any other term used for classification of popular character archetypes that are used by just about everyone involved with media. I understand why you may think that or are saying that, but saying that 'trap' is mean is like saying 'genk' or 'tsundere' is somehow mean.

It's not mean at all.

Edit, god damn it I keep forgetting to copy and paste things over to the previous comment.
 
Lilithium said:
No, no it's really not. No more than any other term used for classification of popular character archetypes that are used by just about everyone involved with media. I understand why you may think that or are saying that, but saying that 'trap' is mean is like saying 'genk' or 'tsundere' is somehow mean.
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I don't agree with you at all, and it doesn't exactly cost anything to not use. If even Danbooru of all things can shift away from its use I don't see why we can't.

Shintouyu said:
But it's Nasu! How could they not grant him Unlimited Budget Works again?!
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Budget is not really a critically important element of animation. You need money to make anime, but there isn't a box you can put money into to get animation out of. Animation is actually pretty cheap - animators are paid next to nothing. Like the biggest cost for any given production is going to be the television slot.

Simply put, not every animator is Hiroyuki Okiura or Mitsuo Iso. The more complex an image is the harder it is to draw, and the harder it is to draw moving. And if it's too difficult then - even if you can do it at all - you probably can't do it fast enough to keep up with the schedule of the show. The most important resource in animation is time, and once the show is airing no amount of money can buy you more time.

As it stands, the Unlimited Blade Works television anime looks good mostly because Ufotable has really honed its skills with photography, post processing and CG integration. It's a quite talented studio but the quality of the animation is not unusually good. Fate/Zero was quite subtly off-model for basically its entire run (if I were to speculate I'd say that UBW was split-cour in response to difficulties they had during the run of FZ, but that would be speculation).

Anyway, anime character designs are always compromises imposed by the necessity of animating for television. That's the case for Chaos Dragon as much as any show.
 
Hassam said:
What are they calling them now?
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As mentioned, they use otoko no ko, which is the Japanese slang. It's a pun, incidentally. Otoko no ko would normally be written as 男の子 and just means 'boy,' but is instead written 男の娘. While it's pronounced the same the last character is actually 'musume,' for girl. It's a less loaded term so it was phased in on danbooru.

Renu said:
So it was... on-model according to the studio's charadesign? Or did I completely misunderstand what you said?
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There were a lot of weird fish eyes in the second half of Fate/Zero. I don't think it was intended as such.
 
Ford Prefect said:
Can we maybe not use the word 'trap?' It's pretty mean.

Anyway, the anime will not be quite as entertaining as the logs of the game, given that it will lack everyone being constantly suspicious of Urobuchi, while having to be reminded to stay in character so they don't play as though they're suspicious. :V
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Oh shit... My bad.

*Edits post*
 
Ford Prefect said:
Anyway, anime character designs are always compromises imposed by the necessity of animating for television. That's the case for Chaos Dragon as much as any show.
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With increased use of CGI it seems that they are working around it somewhat. Some of the benefits of CGI are that one you create the assets you can reuse them at your leisure. While it's harder to get abstract shots like you could with hand-drawn animation, in general it cuts down a lot on the drawing time supposedly, since all you need to do now is play with the camera work and animate the characters.
 
Kokurokoki said:
With increased use of CGI it seems that they are working around it somewhat. Some of the benefits of CGI are that one you create the assets you can reuse them at your leisure. While it's harder to get abstract shots like you could with hand-drawn animation, in general it cuts down a lot on the drawing time supposedly, since all you need to do now is play with the camera work and animate the characters.
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I'm not really sure exactly what you're suggesting animators are using CG to do?
 
Ford Prefect said:
I'm not really sure exactly what you're suggesting animators are using CG to do?
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Essentially it saves money and in theory allows them to maintain more complex character designs due to not needing to redraw them frame by frame..

If I remember right, Macross Frontier was a notable entry that used CGI so that they could have good mecha and transformation scenes without blowing the entire budget on the first episode.

I'm not actually sure where I'm going with this too, but I was presenting CGI as a possible solution to simplifying character designs in order to allow for ease of animation. I haven't watched the new Fate series yet, so I can't comment on how it looks, but I have seen how artists use 3D models to create dynamic scenes and it's all rather interesting.
 
Kokurokoki said:
Essentially it saves money and in theory allows them to maintain more complex character designs due to not needing to redraw them frame by frame..

If I remember right, Macross Frontier was a notable entry that used CGI so that they could have good mecha and transformation scenes without blowing the entire budget on the first episode.

I'm not actually sure where I'm going with this too, but I was presenting CGI as a possible solution to simplifying character designs in order to allow for ease of animation. I haven't watched the new Fate series yet, so I can't comment on how it looks, but I have seen how artists use 3D models to create dynamic scenes and it's all rather interesting.
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Kingdom used CGI and it was horrendous, at least in the first season. It really depends on who's doing it.
 
While the use of CG has opened up genres to studios that might not have the skilled animators necessary to handle mecha animation (giant robots, spaceships, fighter jets and so on are pretty difficult to animate) it can't really be used as a supplement to character animation in the way you're suggesting.

While some shows - most notable Kantai Collection - have used it to supplement for hand drawn animation in certain circumstances, actually using it to augment a hand drawn image would be ... I don't want to say impossible, but at the level of development the industry has currently it would be extremely difficult. Even studios which are very good at CG integration like Ufotable would probably be incapable of doing it without very considerable effort.

CG is also slow. You tend to have to order your models months in advance, while you can be doing character design partway through a show. It's a useful tool but it's also pretty limited, even setting aside the question of aesthetics.
 
Man, I remember seeing the announcement of the game session in english on the typemoon wiki. It feels like it's been years.

And they are actually animating this. Oh boy.
 
Ford Prefect said:
As it stands, the Unlimited Blade Works television anime looks good mostly because Ufotable has really honed its skills with photography, post processing and CG integration. It's a quite talented studio but the quality of the animation is not unusually good. Fate/Zero was quite subtly off-model for basically its entire run (if I were to speculate I'd say that UBW was split-cour in response to difficulties they had during the run of FZ, but that would be speculation).
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The quickly bought box models they used for some of the scenes in a store room made that pretty clear.

To expand off what Ford Prefect is saying, CG is pretty good at setting up some scenes and perspectives. UFO table used it for the box scene I mentioned earlier (one of the earlier UBW episodes). But actually building out models? That's a very long time, especially for characters. I've seen assets stay in turn around hell for months. A studio usually doesn't have the time or budget to play around with that.
 
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