passion that drove devs who actually cared about the game and werent coporate slaves to add things into the game with high attention to details just because
>how do you know the devs added details everywhere that they didnt need to to make the game more immersive
I assume you asked the same question to your doctor when he said you were mentally moronic?
if a game has good music, good atmosphere, a good artsyle, features they didnt need to put but is in the game anyway and makes it better, and fun gameplay then you can say the devs had passion when making this
To be fair, did it ever occur to you that all of those things are completely subjective? How is one supposed to know what to do if the right thing varies from person to person?
There's no such thing as subjective, that's just a cope for people high on their own farts. If you let go of your own ego it's extremely easily to subjectively judge certain things, and ascertain whether or not they are good. Some things are just inherently pleasing to humans, and only a small minority would be genuinely turned off by something you can rate as objectively good.
You can tell soul because it has a human element to it, and humans like human things. You can look at Slay the Spire and think, ah man, this art is kinda bad, but you can still see that a great deal of human effort went into making the art. Even if it's not got the sheer skill level of a master artist, the art is extremely soulful, and the game is beautifully designed, objectively. Maybe it's not to your taste, but the game oozes soul, most people see it, if you can't, that's a you problem.
Honestly its feeling, and its most obvious when something lacks it. Biomutant is an objectively bad game on pretty much every level. It has passion put into it, it failed the developer was trying to do something out of their skill an resource level. Sunset Overdrive wouldn't exist if the design by committee hacks at most publishers had their way. Minus some terrible quips and obnoxious writing the game very obviously has soul put into it. Lets look the the most soulless passionless title in all of video history the FIFA series. No amount of passion went into this game, it is a corporate product with no soul. Nobody sat down and said I want to make the best possible soccer game that people will be play for years to come. This is yearly released entry. Design committee lazy cash grab. So lazy in fact they got caught repackaging an old game a new product with old dates from a previous year because they give ZERO fricks.
it's very easy to tell if someone put effort and passion into something
in particular, you need an attention to detail. but not just any detail - specifically what aspects of it they focused on, the stylistic choices, how well they adhere to it
in the top image there's nothing distracting you from the important part of the screen. his body is more dynamic and fluid, it's less rigid and more full of interesting shapes. whoever designed the top put a lot more thought into it than the bottom, which is little more than a static design bended a little bit. in the top, you see his body stretch with straight, clenching his teeth as he struggles. there's no way to argue that bottom has as much effort put into the design of the character as top has.
United State Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964 >I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But -I know it when I see it-, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
this raises an interesting question, is there a game that has zero soul but is still good?
Of course. A game can still be mechanically very solid, but have nothing particularly appealing on an astetic point. I wouldn't really be able to give examples because I mostly play games if the artstyle or aestetic appeal to me, though.
i can't really say a clear answer but i say, when i think about the game world needs to be smaller, crafting system is tacked on or constantly spamming teleport i would say that those kinds of games can end up being soulless.
OG Resident Evil is actually still the most "purified" RE experience simply because it's the only one with no obnoxious gimmick like invincible stalkers or shit like crimson heads. It's refreshingly no-fat and they really do need to bring it to modern consoles
We have experienced a severe cultural decline, so yes, but we have also seen technological progress which is the only reason there are exceptions to this rule.
>actually going to /vp/ for that screengrab
you gay gooning moron, that's literally what it looks like and I only noticed this now like 10 years after the game's been out
Sorry. I've been on-edge lately, what with the state of this board. Everyone's out to push their agenda at all costs out here, it makes you think everyone's just a bad actor with no shame.
>water gone >random fish added, sitting at nothing but an empty sand field instead of a beach
Is this fanmade? It looks awful, but not entirely from a new=bad standpoint. It just looks like someone without understanding was just adding details for the sake of adding them.
You cant have fires either which this fricking CARTOON did multiple multiple times. Could you drop the pedantic nuslop slurping homosexual act for a single second to address the point about the composition?
the rendering of the stick and marshmallows on the bottom and the rendering of the character on the top, don't reply to me, I am correct and nothing you say will change facts
And? it still has soul. Soul has nothing to do with actual technical quality. Something can be utter shit but soulful, or extremely well-made but soulless.
the only significant difference between the two is the expression, purposely exaggerated and unique in the top, generic in the bottom, probably taken from some sheet of all his expressions and the bottom having the most generic eye-level 3/4 view shot compared to the slight looking up angle with a better angled pose
pose and expression are not the only difference, there is clearly a nice slightly washed out matte look to the old one, where as the new one is insanely saturated and bright
I'v been looking at that image for a good while and concluded that there is no meaningful, unbiased difference between those two images. The only difference is the time and circumstances in which they were made. Generic expressions? No more generic than old ones. Slight tilt in angle? A personal style, choice, circumstances or a mistake, nothing to do with consciousness consideration.
The point is, all these discussions of "sovl" are based on hindsight and bias. Not that I'm saying there is no valid arguments, it's just that any piece of "evidence" that is used in these discussions is circumstantial, while the core problem is anything but tangible facts, it's just a "feeling", yet even that feeling, ask someone who grew up on this "sovless" content, he would say that this old stuff is bland and boring.
I want to say "sovl" is like metaphysics to physics, a bridge that will never be connected. Yet even than, if you go further, sooner or later even AI will be able to replicate this "sovl", like it already did with these "medical dark fantasy themed" prompts, which at that point, this sovl almost seems like nothing more than simple nostalgia..
You’re wrong, the older top pic had more effort and love put into it than the skill-less diversity hire in the bottom pic, you keep saying “factually” there’s no difference but
In the top picture, do you see how the nose overlaps the eye?
Do you see how the mouth looks like it's sticking out and wraps around the body just a bit?
Look at the marshmallows in the stick, see those lines that make it look like the marshmallow has been punctured? See the shadowing on body and clothes, see how the limbs, hands, and shoes are large and pronounced?
Contrast that to the bottom picture. The face looks like it was slapped on the body, the limbs look off model, the marshmallows are just slapped on to the stick, there's little shadowing done on the character.
The top looks like it was animated by someone that cares about how their cartoon looks, the bottom looks like it was animated by someone that doesn't care if they live or die.
Soul is the love that you put into your work. If you don't care to make something that looks good, interesting, or maybe even just down right ugly, then it won't have soul and it won't be good.
Besides the universally appealing textured look of traditional cell animation on the top, you can already tell that the bottom one is going to reuse a lot of frames and shapes, resulting in shallow animation. The top one probably has every frame drawn fully and thus better animation. These two are enough to divide one into "soul" and the other into "soulless" to me.
The first time I remember myself saying something was soulless was the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland. All style but no substance, but even the style felt empty
The best way to put it is probably "Effort that shows the creator cared about it".
Like let's put it this way, using AI to make a HD Upscale may technically be "better" for a lot of people, but a low-res original that may had some small detail that will probably just be blurred out by the resolution shows that the creator cared more.
Same deal with things like small dialog choices and easter eggs barely anyone will see. They aren't technically impressive and run counter intuitive to the modern gamedesign that says "EVERYONE MUST SEE AND EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING!", but they showed that the creator cared and made the effort to put them in.
>low-res original that may had some small detail that will probably just be blurred out by the resolution shows that the creator cared more.
I disagree only because I do AI upscales. ESRGAN is shit and will add artifacts to the image, but in general a good AI upscale will do the opposite of what you're saying. Whatever small details or blemishes you didn't even know were there will be greatly exaggerated until you can't ignore them.
I concur. It doesn't help that actual developers and publishers are using shit like waifu2x and charging money for it (hello kingdom hearts 1 and persona 3 portable)
Personality and a sense of vision. It can't be articulated in words, because the articulation is the thing itself. Description and analysis come up short. You feel it or you don't.
That autistic Ganker poster who made threads about the "stage" in modern cartoons has completely broken me.
I don't know how to explain it, once you notice that characters are just kind of plastered over top of a stage instead of actually within the scene it fricks with your head.
No it's worse, it's like new cartoons can't actually do any form of perspective but still have this weird pseudo 3D look to the environments and it's just very bad and makes me feel bad and you should feel bad.
To answer what they mean by "the stage"
They are trying to say backgrounds now look "isometric". Back then they made art look 3D with real 3d perspective and good angle placement for more interesting shots, now modern backgrounds look like its in drawn in a grid like flat projection with parallel lines devoid of depth, like Age Of Empires instead of a real 3D game. Likely because learning perspective is 100% something modern artist actively avoid doing anymore.
It doesn't, but it could be argue more screen space means more effort to add more staging perspective which makes warping look even more obvious.
I think the real answer to this is simply it's just not a priority anymore. People back then had an entirely different mentality of animation back then, now it's basically a parody of what kids thought animation was, "magic" so when, as adults now, they do this shit themselves it's like a crude version of what they grew up on.
I'm sure the scene from the newer episode here makes some people mad and I'm absolutely not saying it's better than the old one in any way, but I think it should be acknowledged that it's way more dynamic and animated than most of the shit kids have had to watch for the past 15 years
I'm sure some people would further say that it's OVERanimated/"forced" animation to keep the attention of ADHD iPad baby brains but I think that's preferable to the stiff digital puppet show sludge that almost every other cartoon has degenerated into. Someone had a vision for that scene and they cared enough to do real work on it
The issue with this is not the animation, it's the behavior of the characters, Squidward used to be a well-meaning man who became jaded after having to put up with too much idiocy, and Spongebob was a similarly well-meaning moron who did shit that just happened to be annoying.
In the new one Squidward is an unbearable narcissist designed for the audience to hate and openly root against and Spongebob is an accident-prone imbecile who acts as a vehicle for the writers to punish Squidward in gruesome ways.
This is why shows should not run indefinitely. I can't even blame the new staff, the characters have been run to the ground and there's just nothing you can explore with them anymore.
This illustrates my biggest problem with nu-Bob which is that the show is obsessed (in most clips I've seen, anyway) with using gags that portray excessive pain or disgusting shit
The one on the right has twice or thrice as much shot variety and they are more interesting, which leads to seeing the same scene from different points of view. Which is to say the modern one has shit storyboarding
Sort of, its more screen real estate. Now animators have to draw more which costs more. The less screen transitions, new shot perspectives, the cheaper it is to make. Its all budget oriented. That is why the new Arthur episodes have that bouncy animatronic movement, a cheap way to mimic physics.
That's not the issue, the issue is that old cartoons were staged in such a way that they looked 3D dimensional and deep. Modern cartoons don't bother and just have someone draw the background and someone draw the characters seemingly without putting any thought into integrating the two, with the end result looking like a flat dull mess, something that looks like a cheap stage. I've noticed this for ages watching the occasional modern Simpsons episode out of curiosity, but never had a term for it.
They used to draw characters directly into the environment as one piece of art. This is a lot harder because you have to keep checking if the perspective is right and also you have to draw the same scene 300 times so it's expensive.
Today they just open the backgrounds folder and select "living room" and then go to the characters folder and pick the characters and then drag them over the background and animate.
I miss the days moronic posts were simply ignored, nowadays these contrarian posts reach 20+ replies. >Elden Ring is le BAD!!! >430+ replies
We had the adage “don’t feed the troll” for a reason
I noticed this type of phenomenon on my own too but I don't really watch many cartoons.
For instance, rick and morty is guilty of doing this. I know there are varied and interesting shots, but a lot of the time it just feels like a stage where there's two guys talking on it. I almost liken it to a sitcom (which you can argue rick and morty is anyways) which is just typical environments and camera angles with people moving across the same sets over and over. There's a lot of "rick and morty"-esque shows too that feel like they're done in the same fashion. It's interesting to see this is a problem with animation in general and not just this variety of shows
this is a vital component of soullessness, unfortunate but enforced (and perhaps evil but necessary) reduction of product quality to meet corporate timelines and lean standards. everyone's so god damn afraid of going bankrupt, bunch of cowards, they'll play it safe until even playing it safe isn't enough and they die. more artists need to embrace poverty and instability, better that than to die making mediocre assembly line product
That autistic Ganker poster who made threads about the "stage" in modern cartoons has completely broken me.
I don't know how to explain it, once you notice that characters are just kind of plastered over top of a stage instead of actually within the scene it fricks with your head.
this is just a difference between western and japanese cartoons
it's very rare for western characters to be viewed at angles other than how you would see them as if you were looking at a stageplay, which makes it easy to keep them on model
>it's very rare for western characters to be viewed at angles other than how you would see them as if you were looking at a stageplay
Just for future reference, the word you're looking for is the 3/4th angle. Basically the "family guy" angle where weird characters like Charlie look normal
They can't properly explain the issue, yet they see it clear as day. No matter how moronic they are, you are even stupider. Do you not notice anything in this comparison? How at the bottom the characters are drawn as if they are part of the scene and at the top its just a premade rig in ortographic projection.
If you still don't get it, this anon explain it the best
They used to draw characters directly into the environment as one piece of art. This is a lot harder because you have to keep checking if the perspective is right and also you have to draw the same scene 300 times so it's expensive.
Today they just open the backgrounds folder and select "living room" and then go to the characters folder and pick the characters and then drag them over the background and animate.
>Today they just open the backgrounds folder and select "living room" and then go to the characters folder and pick the characters and then drag them over the background and animate.
This. Less dynamism in camera angles just so they can slap their one-size-fits-all template characters into a scene cheaper and quicker is definitely a thing.
You are absolutely right, but some morons think that backgrounds were drawn every frame and that's also moronic. What a way to keep spreading misinformation on their part.
Catoons used to be storyboarded with tons of shots and cynematography in mind, and background was redrawn from the perspective of each shot once. Which means that for a certain scene maybe you do the background 8 times (and every single one of them was a high quality drawing, which built this notorious contrast between highly detailed backgrounds and lower quality very animated characters). Now it all looks equally shaded, they draw one background,and zoom on characters to create the illusion that things are moving but it's just one shot.
Isn't that just grain in the 90s show covering the illusion and making the animation blend berry with the background? Kinda like grain made the CGI in Phantom Menace look better than it looks in the remastered versions
Little bit, yeah. Truth be told digital animation could be helped a lot with some fake grain and blur
Also part of the issue is they didn't shade their main articles of clothes, which makes them stick out from the background, and not in a good way.
I do think most people actively ignore the fact sharpness makes everything flat and "soulless" but no one ever comments on that because since 1996 we all demanded media and entertainment to look as perfect and HD as physically possible, until it started making things look bad as a result.
It's the literal reason why AI is soulless slop because unless you literally force it to go against what it's trained on mostly to look for, it will product that hyper saturated sharp looking slop all the time.
You are absolutely correct in what you think this is about. But it's not about the technical assembly of a frame, it's about the visual design and portrayal of characters in their world.
See https://desuarchive.org/co/thread/143543295/#q143544024
And view the comparison video of a modern vs older scene involving Spongebob and Squidward. Ignore how low quality the content i.e. whats happening in the newer scene is, but concentrate on the spacial structure of the scene and perspective.
[...]
[...]
I found it
https://desuarchive.org/co/thread/143543295/
>old art is actually brought up in the thread and it ends whinging about "umm just because you noticed it before doesn't mean anything"
Ganker is moronic as usual. The "stage" being more blatantly visible in modern shows is simply due to bad art and production.
It’s more about off shoaring western animation to cheap sweat shops and relying on digital techniques to quickly pump out a product. Basically they’re lazy. Look at something like UC engage. Minute long clips of cutscenes for a mobile game. Very much using digital techniques and cg animation. But what they also did was fricking use all of the tools at their disposal to recreate the style and technique of the Gundam series. And it looks fricking good.
I still don’t understand why mainline gundam is the only one that bothers to show mobile suits for what they are. Military combat vehicles that would be hell to pilot. I don’t think any other variation shows moments like this with the gundam executing its commands to dodge missiles, juxtaposed to how Amuro gets thrown around due to the force of the maneuvers.
So you're saying everyone know feels greenscreened/photoshopped on top of each other instead of incorporated as a continuous image? I guess I can see that, I think it's because most camera systems in games are designed to see the environment first and the player is off to the side, which can be "turned off" and still see the rest as if the character never needed to be there in the first place. It's because they use different camera FOVs to create different projections of how characters interact with the environment for story reasons usually.
Take TF2. You're just playing in first person but not based on the characters height or head placement, it's just a universal camera with a floating gun superimposed on the side of the screen. But now that effect is the characters themselves in games like GoW.
This change can be explained pretty easily, it's the change of priorities in animation to be script-based rather than storyboard/animation-based. Animation is used as a medium to tell the written jokes rather than the visual component being the medium.
The Simpsons underwent this change during its run, hence the more wildly varied cinematography during the earlier years. It's cheaper to make shows without these more dynamic shots as they would require more unique drawings to be done rather than copying plainly from a model sheet.
Spongebob is still storyboard-based, but I imagine there are constraints in shots to cut costs.
It's unfortunate, because film is a medium unto itself. It shouldn't just be like a recorded stageplay (which a lot of media nowadays essentially is), but the way shots can be composited and arranged to elicit emotions ("pure cinema") is an artistic edge unique to it.
cost plays a huge role. animation is a business. shareholders demand profit. for large corporations keeping the lights on is more important then making a good show. when the goal is money, cookie cutter assets pasted over a scene is simply the most profitable way to make an animated show and has been the most profitable way to make an animated show for a long time
paying people to draw costs money. drawing takes a lot of time. combine this and drawing everything frame by frame as needed drives up production cost to insane levels. generic re-usable assets that can cover the vast majority of situations on screen is much, much cheaper. the longer the show runs the bigger the efficiency gains are. generally it is believed the loss in profit from the dip in quality on screen does not outweigh the massive savings in production. the switch to digital further increases the cost gap as animation frames can now be stored, re-used, and altered to make new episodes with forever. digital assets practically take up no space and re use has little to no chance of damaging the master images. throw in that in the near future if the neural networks work as designed; voice, writing, and new animation cells themselves can be interpolated using only existing assets. a show could run infinitely with minimal human involvement. there are some crude attempts at this concept already on the internet made with the tools available now.
>Spongebob is still storyboard-based, but I imagine there are constraints in shots to cut costs.
The cost-cutting comes in by their tendency to just have over a minute of characters standing there doing nothing but making random mouth noises per segment. Free time where they don't have to write anything and don't have to animate anything but flaps. It's bizarre to experience.
>the board dedicated to cartoons doesn't know how cartoons are animated
entirely unsurprising, but still sad
surprise-surprise, character (also object) animation and background drawings are different things, and you have to composite those things together properly so that the result doesn't look awful and fake
feel free to shit on modern cheap tv cartoons, but that problem is literally as old as animation itself, shit artists simply can't mitigate it
I thought the thread had a super in-depth discussion. Everyone seemed pretty educated on the subject, it didn't get derailed, and there was healthy debate, compared to here at least. I feel like not mentioning cheap 60's animation was definintely a miss, but you could definitely argue it was outside the scope of the thread
Kek, yeah I don't know why so many are overreacting about this. Or that they are so unobservant that they needed this to be pointed out.
Even back as a child in old cartoons you could anticipate where movement was ging to happen by virture of seeing static stuff that was still quite distinct from the background cel.
When a work does something "by feel" rather than obeying some strict design rule, the odds of success are directly correlated with SOUL.
You can tell that the top knows just how to bend whatever "on model" design Spongebob has in that era, while the bottom is the result of someone awkwardly working around the litany of rules in the book and still trying to make an exaggerated expression out of it.
I don't get it. Are you equating the actual production with the end format?
Digital animation can't reproduce how cel animation handled harsh light, because in cel animation, it's a literal hole in the drawing and a beam of real light is flashed through. This is why it gets a very natural glow that permeates through the rest of the image.
Turns out people are very good at detecting what's real and fake lighting, even in animation.
i don't think it's saturation but the clean line art with no variation i thickness plus all characters look the same with minor variations most of the time (no proper perspective) and they look like a template and they pop in different eyes, mouths, arms and legs depending on the pose and facial expression. Makes it seem artificial. This is why modern anime is much better than modern cartoons (both mostly suck compared to their older counterparts)
There's nothing wrong with digital animation, with the right colors, filters and shading you can make something that looks close to traditional cel animation
Hardly anyone does this because why put in extra effort if there's no financial incentive to do so?
The incentive would be to create something that looks good. You know, to build engagement with your audience by delivering quality products.
A novel concept that we haven't heard from in actual decades since npcs and drones just gobble whatever gets shat in their throats perpetuating a never ending cycle of lowering the bar and cheapening out
>Hardly anyone does this because why put in extra effort if there's no financial incentive to do so?
Wrong outlook. It's not about how much more money it could make, it's how much more money you're losing just doing it. If Art could be produced for free, as in it's like a servict duty to allow everyone to have at all times like the air you breathe and you're compensated greatly for your hard work, then every single art media would be soul maxed to oblivion, unless you're just a talentless hack. Most people making media today have talent but cannot and will not do more than what's needed because doing more gets them fired on the spot.
Unless they get fired anyways for not making their mandated slop make billions day one because the execs don't think their slop ideas are objective trash and believe the algorithm wouldn't lie to them.
In the context of video games it means game that has genuine effort and passion behind their development. Left for dead is a great example of soul. See this video if you want to get a better understanding of what soul means for video games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdRLNUGmFC8
The non-physical, timeless, absolute, and unchangeable essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations.
>There's really no joke to this other than THESE ARE THINGS I KNOW
Old Spongebob would've just showed a long line of background fishes auditioning for the role.
Yeah its from season 8 or something, I've only seen it because I watch spongebob on nicktoons to relax at night sometimes. It's an ok episode but definitely not anywhere near as good as the classics
Emotionally evocative or spiritually fulfilling.
So anything that makes you feel something that you might not have felt or influenced your perceptions to feel certain ways like horror, hyped, active, chill, whether it’s music, gameplay, aesthetic, or design.
>water color background >more detail
vs >simple design and colors >globohomosexual tier background
literally animation studios keep getting fricked over with budget cuts and shitty artists
This actually started because of Anime. Astro Boy was made to be easy to animate, and was a huge influence in the Anime culture and production.
So some boomer read the wiki page like me and thought about how much they could save by making slop in every category.
And that's how Calarts style came to be.
This isn't about soul, it's just about art direction. Both are made by art teams that like doing what they are doing.
Now that Ren and Stimpy remake? That's soulless. Literally manhandled to be soulless shit because the homosexual women making it hate how "mean spirited" the original was.
>Both are made by art teams that like doing what they are doing.
Grim
Haven't read the entire thread yet but it feels like widescreen plays a huge part in the whole stage thing.
>squidward calmly cleaning glass >squidward having tons of movement and phone ringing like a tiktok video
HOW HAVE NONE OF YOU moronS FIGURED IT OUT YET
"SOUL" IS A LACK OF REFINEMENT WHICH GIVES SOMETHING A UNIQUE SORT OF CHARACTER.
NOTE IT ISN'T JUST BEING SHIT ON PURPOSE, IT IS WHEN SOMETHING ISN'T AFRAID TO BE ITSELF. THIS CAN OFTEN MANIFEST IN THE FORM OF EXAGGERATION AND A WILLINGNESS TO BE A LITTLE OFF MODEL WHEN IT ADDS TO THE MOMENT.
This is actually just down to money. Old 50s animated cartoons cost a million dollars to make per episode, accounting for inflation. That was sustainable when you were the only game in town, not so much in the 21st century.
Bullshit.
Now-a-days there are a huge amount of tools, more so than before.
You can produce the same results at a fraction of the cost.
The only reason they don't is because they can save a few more pennies by going the even cheaper route.
You didn't spend millions on watercolors.
The reason why traditional 2D animation is dead is 2D being hard to learn.
You need to invest into your staff and keep people around which means paying them a decent salary. But everything these days is about profit maximization so you can't really have Paul earn 100k a year as a 60 year old animator with plenty of experience - not if you can have some fresh graduate who knows how to do flash animations who is doing the job for 50k - and once he starts making demands or mandatory salary increases happen you can replace him with someone new and cheap.
But at the end of the day this doesn't make a difference in the budget.
Let's say you have 10 animators on a 100k payroll. That's 12 million a year you have to pay. If you replaced those with flash animators or outsourced it to India the cost halfs to below 6 million a year.
But then you look at the overall budgets of those shows and realize that the actual animation is just a fraction of the overall budget.
The overall budget of a modern cartoon is way over 300k per episode ON VOICE ACTORS alone. That makes 3-5 million you have to spend each season just to get those characters voiced. Not to mention the planning, the equipment, the music, the post-production, the whole logistics.
Walt Disney kept his old animators around because he knew that they are worth the price and at the end of the day are the reason why people go into those theaters. But after that the investors took over and they just saw those old animators as expensive old farts who could get replaced with cheaper college grads which in turn means more payouts for investors in the short term. And nowadays pretty much no one is around who even knows how to do traditional 2D animation in the west so even if studios suddenly started giving a shit it would be very hard to train people. What you gonna do? Carry Don Bluth out of his retirement home and make him teach?
>Tightly knit small studio >Passionate developers >No outsourcing >No one relies on engine defaults for lighting >Concept artists aren't literally pulled from furaffinity and twitter
In a more direct sense, you could also attribute the difference to the available tools that have become easier to use and more abstracted over time.
In the above example, the background is a more detailed painting with a hand-animated character because that's just how shit worked. Early compositing would have involved much more manual work.
In the bottom example someone used digital tools to rapidly put together the background and keyframing to put together the character, the pipeline for asset creation and compositing is much shorter and more powerful but it's being underutilized.
Deadlines remain the bane of any kind of soul, be it in comics, animation or videogames.
[...]
As an example, actually, take a look at the Vortigaunt Chef in Half Life: Alyx. A lot of people have noted that the way he moves is really distinct and expressive and kind of unlike a lot of other things in the game. That's because he was animated by an ex-muppet puppeteer, and his animation rig is even set up similarly to the way Muppets are operated to accommodate for that artist's unique skillset.
God I hope mocapping just dies and we're left with a bunch of autists in VR using puppet rigs for everything.
>God I hope mocapping just dies
I don't think mocapping is inherently bad, but it definitely does get overused these days. Even HL2 made facial mocap look good back in like 2003. Facial scanning, on the other hand, is turbocancer and I'm so fricking sick of it, especially in Capcom shit.
old cartoons used cels which gave everything a little bit of depth with the dropshadow, now that everything is digital it doesnt have that dropshadow which makes everything blend in with the background
This isn't about soul, it's just about art direction. Both are made by art teams that like doing what they are doing.
Now that Ren and Stimpy remake? That's soulless. Literally manhandled to be soulless shit because the homosexual women making it hate how "mean spirited" the original was.
It’s the opposite of a polished turd, it’s a rough gem.
Most mainstream media is made with high fidelity equipment, lots of quality control but no inspiration whatsoever. So polishing a turd.
Soul is something imperfect, but at its core it’s unique and interesting and different.
Soul is when it's made with passion.
It's noticeable when it's made because of work, without passion and such (you can see it in the small details, or when they cut corners to have bigger profits, etc)
When you experience something during your childhood and nothing can compare to it as an adult because you no longer have that child mind that makes everything you experience take hold in ways nothing else can
i don't really like engaging with the argument so i just say it means old good new bad because i like arguing in bad faith and just defending the games i grew up with no matter what so whenever somebody mentions soul i just put my fingers in my ears and scream LALALALALALA
"SOUL" IS A LACK OF REFINEMENT WHICH GIVES SOMETHING A UNIQUE SORT OF CHARACTER.
NOTE IT ISN'T JUST BEING SHIT ON PURPOSE, IT IS WHEN SOMETHING ISN'T AFRAID TO BE ITSELF. THIS CAN OFTEN MANIFEST IN THE FORM OF EXAGGERATION AND A WILLINGNESS TO BE A LITTLE OFF MODEL WHEN IT ADDS TO THE MOMENT.
>"SOUL" IS A LACK OF REFINEMENT WHICH GIVES SOMETHING A UNIQUE SORT OF CHARACTER. >NOTE IT ISN'T JUST BEING SHIT ON PURPOSE, IT IS WHEN SOMETHING ISN'T AFRAID TO BE ITSELF.
So a professional has no soul? Only amateurs that aren't afraid to show themselves/interests even if they can't execute it correctly is soul?
"Lack of refinement" is a bad way of putting it, but it doesn't imply that it's bad.What that anon means to say is that "soul" generally acts as shorthand some degree of imperfection or strangeness or care to detail that comes from an artist's unique tastes or quirks, which might not reflect what the "perfect corporate image" of something. When something passes through too many hand and becomes too "refined", you lose the sense that it was made by an individual with distinct goals making distinct choices, both conscious and subconscious. This is also why AIslop is inherently soulless, since image generation programs are literally an automated "design by committee" system.
So it's really the human touch to make on model look imperfect but consistent. The ability to produce "good enough" results without going too off or too on model.
Pretty much. It's like how people can identify the exact artist who did the storyboarding for a given DBZ episode by how Goku was drawn; the whole appeal of creative mediums is experiencing the work of a human being. The further you get from something being made by someone's specific artistic intent, the less "soulful" it feels.
This isn't to say games with larger teams can't turn out good; you just need good direction to keep the "vision" consistent and let people play to their own strengths instead of trying to wrangle them into a time-crunched mold that may or may not actually care about the quality of the end result.
Wrong, AI images have soul all the time, and only the soulless slop enjoyers on the left hate AI for that matter
No, they don't. AI is a series of weighted averages trained on thousands upon thousands of images. AI is fundamentally soulless because no matter how many tweaks you make to the software or your prompts, it's still making thousands upon thousands of tiny choices using the work of other artists and photographers and so on to determine what is the most "objectively correct by programmed averages" result for the prompt given. It's automated design-by-committee.
Nah anon AI can and does have soul all the time and you only don’t recognize it because you are a soulless lefty slop enjoyer.
1 week ago
Anonymous
fine, post an example of soulful AI then
1 week ago
Anonymous
Well I have this I saved on my phone like a year ago but I see amazing stuff in the dalle thread also a lot of the porn is amazing. I should save more AI art.
>aren't afraid to show themselves/interests even if they can't execute it correctly is soul?
Yes.
Professional or amateur, if they do this, their work will have soul.
There is a certain level of soul in lack of refinement, here's a good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oci5LceCGw
Big Lez, drawn by hand with MS Paint, it looks terrible, but you can tell he was having fun with it, and that's soulful.
Here's Jarrad Wright's latest animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCd7EtBFlOM and it still looks like shit from a professional's perspective, but he's still having fun with it, which is why almost everything he does is soulful.
Pretty much. It's like how people can identify the exact artist who did the storyboarding for a given DBZ episode by how Goku was drawn; the whole appeal of creative mediums is experiencing the work of a human being. The further you get from something being made by someone's specific artistic intent, the less "soulful" it feels.
This isn't to say games with larger teams can't turn out good; you just need good direction to keep the "vision" consistent and let people play to their own strengths instead of trying to wrangle them into a time-crunched mold that may or may not actually care about the quality of the end result.
[...]
No, they don't. AI is a series of weighted averages trained on thousands upon thousands of images. AI is fundamentally soulless because no matter how many tweaks you make to the software or your prompts, it's still making thousands upon thousands of tiny choices using the work of other artists and photographers and so on to determine what is the most "objectively correct by programmed averages" result for the prompt given. It's automated design-by-committee.
But does this mean all 3D products are soulless? They all are unchanging and rigid, always perfect, always crafted to exist in a way that makes them look "good enough" from all angles.
>But does this mean all 3D products are soulless?
No. 3D models are akin to Papercraft or Sculpture; a model is still the creation of an artist, and that artist makes choice after choice after choice in setting up the way that model functions, animates, is textured, etc. Hell, a lot of more recent 3D work even finds ways to mimic "perspective incorrect" animation from the 2D side of things (i.e. mickey mouse's ears).
[...]
But does this mean all 3D products are soulless? They all are unchanging and rigid, always perfect, always crafted to exist in a way that makes them look "good enough" from all angles.
As an example, actually, take a look at the Vortigaunt Chef in Half Life: Alyx. A lot of people have noted that the way he moves is really distinct and expressive and kind of unlike a lot of other things in the game. That's because he was animated by an ex-muppet puppeteer, and his animation rig is even set up similarly to the way Muppets are operated to accommodate for that artist's unique skillset.
1 week ago
Anonymous
That sounds very impressive. Too bad most games aren't like that these days.
Absolutely not.
I'm not a huge fan of 3D animation, only because I'm a huge fan of 2D animation, but there's some shining examples of great 3D animation.
Hotel Transylvania is fantastic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4RK3jY7AVk
I loved Reboot too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuEJWmxWkKw
In the top picture, do you see how the nose overlaps the eye?
Do you see how the mouth looks like it's sticking out and wraps around the body just a bit?
Look at the marshmallows in the stick, see those lines that make it look like the marshmallow has been punctured? See the shadowing on body and clothes, see how the limbs, hands, and shoes are large and pronounced?
Contrast that to the bottom picture. The face looks like it was slapped on the body, the limbs look off model, the marshmallows are just slapped on to the stick, there's little shadowing done on the character.
The top looks like it was animated by someone that cares about how their cartoon looks, the bottom looks like it was animated by someone that doesn't care if they live or die.
Soul is the love that you put into your work. If you don't care to make something that looks good, interesting, or maybe even just down right ugly, then it won't have soul and it won't be good.
>"SOUL" IS A LACK OF REFINEMENT WHICH GIVES SOMETHING A UNIQUE SORT OF CHARACTER. >NOTE IT ISN'T JUST BEING SHIT ON PURPOSE, IT IS WHEN SOMETHING ISN'T AFRAID TO BE ITSELF.
So a professional has no soul? Only amateurs that aren't afraid to show themselves/interests even if they can't execute it correctly is soul?
where the frick did I say that? The OP image of this thread depicts a cartoon, made by professionals, having soul.
How is top image "lacking of refinement" then, professionals made that, not newbies, every frame they created was perfectly drawn exactly how they wanted it to look. It wasn't drawn first time and shipped out, they spent time making sure it doesn't look moronic.
Soul isn't a recently observed concept, the French figured this shit out in the 50s-60s, just by a different name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur
Admittedly what I posted there is a bit dishonest considering one was an OVA and so obviously has better production values, but you're exactly right, shading and artstyle are also extremely important and not strongly correlated with cost.
theres this one old image explaining how the japs were beating western animation and it mainly focused on how simple shading makes an image boring while having a variety of shading livens up the image, this was like an early 2000s image too if i remember correctly
that's disingenuous as frick lmao >comparing anime for adults and even movies to some childrens morning cartoons >cherry picked good vs cherry picked bad
yeah early 2000 anime sucked in artistic style and color depth, but people got actually tired of overshading. There were still plenty anime with high contrast
comparing movie shots during the height of japan's economy to serialized cartoons is a joke. also using pocahontas as the standard disney style is super disingenuous
this one is autistic as frick, you're comparing a key scene in an ova to a 30 second flashback in a weekly anime. it's a case of priority, not "passion" or skill
digital art was a mistake
but it's okay, in 100 years time people will have forgotten about old shit and they'll have nothing better to compare their contemporary stuff to, and everyone will be happy
In 100 years time we'll either all be dead or we'll have managed to make digital animation look similar enough to the old shit that nobody will be able to tell the difference
>top is from a 90's OVA from back when OVAs actually had decent production values and weren't just additional TV episodes made to sell more Blu-Rays >bottom is from a random episode for an anime that was so horribly rushed that even Toriyama was upset about how bad the animation was
Come on anon, that's not fair.
iirc it was because they needed to put something in the timeslot and they weren't ready for it so they just retreaded the movies so they could work on the rest of the story in the background or something, like it was rushed to shit but retreading the movies gave them a bit of breathing room
I've always thought of soul like this:
It is when developers are clearly passionate about the product they are making and go out of their way to include details that do not add to the "quality" of "playability" of a game but enhance the overall experience. The example I often use is from Warcraft 2, IIRC, where there is an option to test your sound card. When you click on it, a voice says a line. If you keep clicking it, the character will eventually get annoyed at you constantly testing your sound card and tell you to stop. Does this make the actual game itself better? No. It doesn't. The actual matches are the same. But it is something I remember fondly and laughed at when I was a kid. It was cute. It made me feel like a developer had fun when he came up with that idea, and it was genuine humor and not what someone thought others would think is funny.
THAT is soul. Going through the effort of recording lines for a small easter egg for the fricking sound test because they knew someone would spam the button and would get a chuckle out of it. Instead of thinking about quarterly reports, firing contract workers, appeasing stakeholders, and adding in whatever FotM is on twitter, they did that.
>9S calling you out if you set the voice volume to 0 while he's doing a diagnostic on 2B in NieR: Automata >Jak 3 letting you listen to in-character bloopers in the model viewer >Emil falling down the stairs if you wait long enough to advance the dialogue during a scene in God Eater 2 Rage Burst >Fate/Unlimited Codes changing Shirou's ultimate animation if and only if he uses it on Kirei as well as changing Gilgamesh's grab animation only on Saber in order to replicate scenes from the visual novel
God I miss when teams had as much fun making games as we had playing them.
A bunch of grifters intentionlaly exploiting algorythms making nonsense content mostly for kids. Elsa and Frozen is huge, Spiderman is huge, so they spam that shit out.
Soul is just a product of EFFORT and PASSION.
Reverse Collapse is the most soulful game I've played in a long time. So many features, contents, tiny details that didn't need to be there, but they were there. the game didn't even need to exist, but it did, because the creator loved his creation from over a decade ago. It was a pure passion project, and that's why the result is so good.
it ain't ever swinging back non, I am sorry i am the one who has to tell you that. minim alism has been pushed not only because it saves a lot of space but also because it is cheap to build and maintain
I know it's a real burger problem, but seeing the local McDonalds change to the new layout made me genuinely sad. Mostly because they got rid of the big booths and replaced them with those shitty bench seats. Lotta memories of that place with my friends.
>the imperfection of hand painted backgrounds and skilled cell animation, outlined sweat droplets, faded palette, colorful sand like aquarium gravel, and general color scheme of the image >photoshop gradient background with imitation flowers in the background, fence and beachgoers added, saturated colors, and no cohesive style other than 'detail'
I’ve seen this gif posted a million times but never noticed the Black person hands.
Soulless creation made by minorities and diversity hires, truly nothing new.
I like how the artist who did this scene actually defended himself saying he didn't want to make the head turn that stiff and that he didn't add the awful fist shake. A real shame because his portfolio was really impressive, almost feels like a waste to have him make this overly stiff crap
to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description "soul," and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.
Soul is the illusion of a deeper or higher dimension that is evoked in an indirect negative way. This is not the same as style. Style evokes a wider context through positive features. Soul is how you show what isn't shown.
I watched a talk by the animator of skullgirls where she mentioned how she had a breakthrough when she stopped trying to add more frames to reach an impossible standard of perfect detail, and instead used less frames in a way that telegraphed more information beyond what was actually shown. It's analogous to that.
There used to be more soul because the medium was limited by human effort, so humans used shorthand that other humans would understand. Now that a lot of animation is digital and done by machines there is much less of that shorthand involved. Of course if you're a passionate artist invested beyond a paycheck, you can make digital animation look just as good as hand drawn. But like all industries that's a rarity compared to a revolving door of talent to keep wages low
OP image is a perfect example
The above actually adheres to classic animation principles that make animated show look good
The bottom is objectively less skillful
People who can't articulate what exactly is done right or wrong in a game or show just call it soul
Your half right.
Magic used to have a much stronger mystique in the recession-era sets for many reason(painting being more prevalent, many of the best artists where still regularly commissioned for cards in the actual booster packs, ect.). But Tereri himself used to look much more iconic and be someone that actually looked liked they lead a nation and not some hollywood star.
Venser was cooler when he had the helmet on as well.
Eh, it was more about how nu-Teferi completey stole Venser's schtick in the cards (not in the lore) with the added bonus making it busted and with even more slow play.
By being the the five mana Blue White goto PW?
Historically I can't remember the role Venser served(if any) in modern/standard, but the card blinks and makes your stuff unblockable while nu-teferi provides card advantage, resources for responses, and spot removal.
So the role Venser would seem to serve is to provide evasion or utility like blinking ETB effects on your creatures, while scary teferi is a power-crept control piece that sucked, but what came after was even more cancerous.
Venser took the blinker archetype much more distinctly than Teferi did, he was sort of just le control UW until his shtick with the whole flashing thing happened when his creature card came out (phasing used to be his thing as well but that got dropped after Mirage).
That's not video games. Let's talk about video games.
A few of the Final Fantasy 14 bosses have soul.
Take Cloud Chaser, It's a mecha that guards the heart of a dreaded machine god who's about to frick up the timeline, it's also apparently a reference to some older FF game that I couldn't give a frick about.
You know what I do care about? The Aesthetic of how this motherfricker warps in from the ceiling, as a plane, transforms into a menacing robot, and proceeds to fight you to the beat of song that, by itself, was probably the deciding factor for thousands of people to play this game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE5QVXy_BZ4
Nothing is really explained about Cloudchaser, Kokytos, and many of these other bosses. This is because FFXIV is a confusing mess and the development team doesn't have the ability to relate the story, environment, characters, and bosses into something cohesive(on a whole, 3D for FF was a mistake). What does happen is sometimes you experience this transcendent moment where you go into a fight blind and the music, vocals, gameplay, and visuals come together in an experience all it's own. Did the illuminati build Cloud Chaser as a transforming jet or was it a result intrinsic to the machine god's creation? What the frick was Athena thinking making Kokytos? Is it some kind of proto godling or was she trying to experiment with something else? Who the frick knows, it's not an answer you're gonna find in a Wikipedia page.
It's when it's evident that a human with a vision crafted something, not just because he was told to do so, but because he was blessed/cursed with the promethean fire of creativity.
The reason most modetn games lack soul is that they are made by commity, based on economic charts and shareholder greed. They are soulless husks designed only to extract money, and "crafted" by armies of brainless ants with zero agency.
Indies can still carry soul, but they are often marred by the same greed and competitive strategies, only on a smaller scale. All the games have to be rogue lites, because making hand crafted content and experiences is "too time consuming", and the stories have to be bland to not upset or offend the lowest common denominator.
It's really like this. When you make a joke because you find it funny and maybe others will laugh with you, it is a soulful joke. When you try to make a funny joke to seem witty and intelligent for your own benefit, it is a soulless joke or mostly soulless at best. Now instead of "funny joke" think, "fun game."
Spongebob had a quicker fall than the Simpsons. Only season 1 and 2 are good. The rest is pure garbage.
All the memes you see online are from those seasons for that reason.
Why is modern artists so afraid of darkness? >Oh no, my character is too dark and is pitch black, the consumers can't see the details I worked so hard on. >Better turn the light up.
Counterargument: >"Actually, we don't need that smoothing tool"
Time, effort, and money wasted on developing something that should've been planned out better.
Now you know the smoothing tool isnt coming, instead of having to wait till monday during the team meeting where you have to pray your lead designer will remember to ask the lead programmer if a smoothing tool could be added to the tray editor
I meant the guy develops the smoothing tool all the way.
Then later finds out it actually isn't needed.
Could've been avoided with a bit of planning in meetings.
Broken clock. Yeah, as an adult I can't imagine using the brainpower to really map Far Cry 2 and navigate myself. Subtle pill on lost media and murdered software.
Personally I think Todd Howard is out of his element because gaming has always been focused on generational improvements on hardware and software, and that doesn't really exist any more. 8k Fallout 76 is still a pile of shit. 480p cs/tf2/l4d is still a masterpiece. The only way forward for real profitable game development is making real art, or making clickbait microtransaction slop.
Seems like an actually good management move. IDK the specifics though..
1 week ago
Anonymous
>Personally I think Todd Howard is out of his element
I think todd was really good at steering RPGs away from tabletop numberdriven freeform to open world exploration. From the interview and from what ive read at the time and in retrospectives, todd was the one that made oblivion temperate english countryside simulator. The whole modern open world crafting setup was something he ended up making the blueprint of. Maybe not on purpose, but his design sensibilities created that kind of open world
>fast travel >combat should be simple and functional, if you shoot someone, your bullet goes to the center of the screen, and you deal damage. No morrowind or Dnd shit where you just roll a die and if you arent specialized in that kind of weapon, you cant hit shit >recognizable pastiche >quest markers >a POI every 100m that will show up on your compas, meaning there is always a breadcrumb to pick up, and when the player finished the POI, the next breadcrumb is already on their compas >character building has been simplified more and more. Just pick a few flavor powers, your character is competent at everything at the core
1 week ago
Anonymous
>if you shoot someone, your bullet goes to the center of the screen, and you deal damage.
Like call of duty? How boring.
1 week ago
Anonymous
Its what the masses want. Just look at fallout 1, people get confused when their 1AGI no small guns tagged cripple cant hit a rat in the vault 13 cave. I personally like FO1 and 2, I liked morrowind, but its obvious oblivion and skyrim and FO3 do better, and the less RPG elements they keep, the better the game does.
1 week ago
Anonymous
That's pretty fair. I loved Fallout 3's open world exploration which NV and 4 lacked.
If he's going to move RPG towards what is considered 'basic' FPS then it needs a really good interactive story. Mass Effect is probably the standard until EA murdered it in the third game.
1 week ago
Anonymous
>freeform to open world exploration.
Too bad Todd's games are abject garbage for exploration
do you have the story about how todd gave a speech to the guys and it gave them the morale to get through a crunch or something? it seemed very sincere and not like the modern-day soulless crunch time shit you hear
i'm certain that's not the same story i'm thinking.. but a nice read anyway, even if it coming from todd himself could come across as sweet little lies. thanks anon
1 week ago
Anonymous
Either todd still has everyone at gunpoint or he really did manage to convince everyone they're gonna make it
>Why is modern artists so afraid of darkness?
someone here had a theory that it's because of LCDs and their terrible backlight bleed on black and that doesn't sound too off
I hate that Majora's Mask suffered from this treatment too. Compare the two and it's like night and day.
>OG had harsher black tones to give the characters a unique feel to them, and even give them a bit of mystery >remake/remaster makes everything look generic and cartoony and lit up, so the poor heckin kids don't get scared :~~*(
Right is not scary unless you have autism. It's mysterious yes, which I like, but the left is not bad at all but should have been used for a different Zelda game instead because as a remake it should have stayed more true to the original depiction. Both are good illustrations in a vacuum.
HxH 1999 v/s 2011 It's one of the most brutal examples of how good shading and a better soundtrack literally carries a show.
95% of the time 2011 just can't compete against the original, despite having much better animation and pacing.
The more you try to define what "soul" is the less you understand it. The picture is experimenting more with exaggeration and expression than the bottom, thus giving it "soul".
top is animated by people who understand what they're trying to animate. Bottom is animated by people who were told to make spongebob look pained.
anyone who lifted something really heavy knows it puts straight on your neck and jaw so your teeth clench and your neck stiffens while you tilt your head back, its just basic human nature or something, and the animators made it worn on spogebob's square body. Look at how the bottom one has him looking forward, like someone completely different drew the head and face and then pasted it on.
The 2 era of artists learnt different things.
If anything, blame the ~~*schools*~~ that just want to increase the graduation rate and hence dumbing down the lesson so even monkey can graduate and get a degree.
If you like spongbob, especially the classic era, than you should watch this video.
It goes into a little detail on how the show came to be and how Ween inspired it.
A timestamp of a time when people cared and tried, before excessive artistic qualities either died out, compromised, LCD-ed, or sold out and suffered a severe lack of that je ne sais quoi
SpongeBob is a good example because artistically there's a night and day quality difference, the creator died so everything is at the mercy of corporate frickers who use no judgement and appeal to the absent minded focus groups, and so many things from the 90s (granted very end of 90s, but still) get the "oh, you can't do that in 202X" treatment, and get sanitized to not offend the 12 really loud people on Twitter
Soul really is a thing, it's fine if you weren't around for the initial hype, and don't have the sense of nostalgia that others do, but it is a thing, and "soul" is by and large dead
The movie was the official end of the show. Everything after that was just monetized fanfic. 4 seasons and a movie was perfect but greed and disregard for the creator just kept it going.
When a company has too much time to practice and train their staff and you can feel a character has too much oversight and guard rails to prevent interesting things from ever happening.
The thing about animation is that it's expensive. Like, ridiculously expensive. And time-consuming People have been trying to cut corners with animation for as long as animation's existed as an art form. Hell, even cels were only created to save animators from having to redraw backgrounds every single frame.
If digital animation had been feasible in the 40s you better believe everyone would've immediately switched to it.
Soul is "effort", "personality", "unique characteristics", "passion", etc. It's something made with the love of making and not just made to be a marketable product.
Is it really due to customers wanting those colors or the car company only making those colors available. For example I was looking at Dodge's available colors a while ago and there were like 5 shades of gray.
yeah it is the rarest fricking thing to see a car that is not either grey, black or white, and when it happens it is usually a variation of red or blue.
I finally cracked the code and understand what "soul" is
It's the act of making something with genuine passion, and everyone involved had a unified vision. It's something with made with pure artistic expression brought to life with the tools given
Soul is not always perfect or good, but it does reflect something the creators wanted or the at very least tried their hardest to make it work, and can span the spectrum between good and bad
>Soulful good games
Kingdom Hearts 1
Metroid Prime
>Soulful bad games
Sonic 06
Dino Crisis 3
Contrastingly things that are soulless are just products, no different from something shit out from a factory assembly line. There is no passion behind them, and if there is, it only exists in small doses. Soulless products have no value, and even at their best are disposable. They're almost always made with the worst intentions and it can be felt.
>Soulless "good" games
New Super Mario Bros games
Nu God of War
3D games from 5th and early 6th gen are sovlful to me. I dunno why, maybe it's because technology had improved enough that it could produce 3D graphics that were beautiful-looking but still kind of limited unless you used your creativity.
games and entertainment will continue to get more soulless thanks to corporatization, cutting costs, and the mindset that WE NEED TO MAKE MORE MONEY EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUCCESSFUL
it will never be enough for them
This thread made me realize how many different camera angles and weird perspective shots were used in invader zim. That show must have been hell to work on by american cartoon standards.
soul is created, or formed, through the overcoming of obstacles or challenge in art, that allow the spirit (or "soul") of the creator or creators to shine through.
This is why "muh epic realism grafix" and frickhuge open world garbage are killing video games. Soul is bred through limitation, self imposed or otherwise.
I experience soul on a daily basis. I am not tethered to this one message board. I actively search for avenues of SOVL to absorb. I feel sorry for any one who feels the need to rant about shitty AAA game #8476 in a copypasted OP thread and post the same images over and over.
it's when I like a game
SOVL
-----------
soulless
passion that drove devs who actually cared about the game and werent coporate slaves to add things into the game with high attention to details just because
also bot thread
But how do you know?
by its soul
That's like asking how I know that something red is red. You look at it see that it's red.
It's never that easy.
>how do you know the devs added details everywhere that they didnt need to to make the game more immersive
I assume you asked the same question to your doctor when he said you were mentally moronic?
If you don't instinctively know or feel it, then you're an NPC
By not being a soulless NPC
if a game has good music, good atmosphere, a good artsyle, features they didnt need to put but is in the game anyway and makes it better, and fun gameplay then you can say the devs had passion when making this
To be fair, did it ever occur to you that all of those things are completely subjective? How is one supposed to know what to do if the right thing varies from person to person?
There's no such thing as subjective, that's just a cope for people high on their own farts. If you let go of your own ego it's extremely easily to subjectively judge certain things, and ascertain whether or not they are good. Some things are just inherently pleasing to humans, and only a small minority would be genuinely turned off by something you can rate as objectively good.
You can tell soul because it has a human element to it, and humans like human things. You can look at Slay the Spire and think, ah man, this art is kinda bad, but you can still see that a great deal of human effort went into making the art. Even if it's not got the sheer skill level of a master artist, the art is extremely soulful, and the game is beautifully designed, objectively. Maybe it's not to your taste, but the game oozes soul, most people see it, if you can't, that's a you problem.
Honestly its feeling, and its most obvious when something lacks it. Biomutant is an objectively bad game on pretty much every level. It has passion put into it, it failed the developer was trying to do something out of their skill an resource level. Sunset Overdrive wouldn't exist if the design by committee hacks at most publishers had their way. Minus some terrible quips and obnoxious writing the game very obviously has soul put into it. Lets look the the most soulless passionless title in all of video history the FIFA series. No amount of passion went into this game, it is a corporate product with no soul. Nobody sat down and said I want to make the best possible soccer game that people will be play for years to come. This is yearly released entry. Design committee lazy cash grab. So lazy in fact they got caught repackaging an old game a new product with old dates from a previous year because they give ZERO fricks.
Hello Sir.
It's the little things that only a person who gives way too much of a shit about something specific would care about.
My Dad works for Nintendo dummy
attention to detail and TECHNOLOGY (in old Ganker terms) is usually a good indicator.
Damn, thanks for reminding me it's been years since I've seen an actually interesting TECHNOLOGY thread.
it's very easy to tell if someone put effort and passion into something
in particular, you need an attention to detail. but not just any detail - specifically what aspects of it they focused on, the stylistic choices, how well they adhere to it
in the top image there's nothing distracting you from the important part of the screen. his body is more dynamic and fluid, it's less rigid and more full of interesting shapes. whoever designed the top put a lot more thought into it than the bottom, which is little more than a static design bended a little bit. in the top, you see his body stretch with straight, clenching his teeth as he struggles. there's no way to argue that bottom has as much effort put into the design of the character as top has.
By having good taste.
By being an experienced enthusiast. if you know, you know.
United State Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964
>I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But -I know it when I see it-, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
PS3 is the best
You just know
https://kofaniv.snk-corp.co.jp/english/info/15th_anniv/2d_dot/creation/index.php
Gee I dunno
maybe if you'ren't a pajeet, you would know, right?
D-do the troony devs at wienerstar not know what a nut is? Why did they turn it into a fricking circle? No way someone is this sheltered.
rockstar didn't make the remake, anon
>the nut on top has a circular texture
It was Rockstar's fault for this misinterpretation
What sheltered fricking moron californian smoothed out the nut
The game was "remastered" by a bunch of street shitters and chatgpt
I'm actually amused by how the 'Donuts' sign texture doesn't look AI upscaled at all compared to everything else I've seen in the remaster lol
You will feel it
You simply comes to knowledge
I don't "know"
I just feel it 's all
Verification not required.
Soul recognises soul
this raises an interesting question, is there a game that has zero soul but is still good?
fortnite no build mode
Super Mario Odyssey
NSMB series.
People with souls can recignise Soul
Of course. A game can still be mechanically very solid, but have nothing particularly appealing on an astetic point. I wouldn't really be able to give examples because I mostly play games if the artstyle or aestetic appeal to me, though.
YOU JUST KNOW
I can tell that your post lacks soul
i can't really say a clear answer but i say, when i think about the game world needs to be smaller, crafting system is tacked on or constantly spamming teleport i would say that those kinds of games can end up being soulless.
if you have to ask, you'll never understand zoomzoom
How do you know whether a woman is beautiful or not? Or whether a joke is funny or not? You just know
soulless question
Old good new bad
Name a single time this wasnt true.
The first resident evil compared to the resident evil 1 remake
But the remake isn't new
crimson heads are stupid and unfun. Also the removal of decapitations is nothing but a lack of soul
OG Resident Evil is actually still the most "purified" RE experience simply because it's the only one with no obnoxious gimmick like invincible stalkers or shit like crimson heads. It's refreshingly no-fat and they really do need to bring it to modern consoles
All moronic/subjective opinions, resident evil 1 remake is better than the og, cope
The 80s version of The Thing was a remake, and objectively superior to the film it was remaking. Same for The Blob and The Fly.
The Hills Have Eyes
Blade Runner directors cut
We have experienced a severe cultural decline, so yes, but we have also seen technological progress which is the only reason there are exceptions to this rule.
Effort versus ease
Perfect example of why trolling is an lost art
I like the the NPC's agreeing to this when every generation ever has thought this.
Genuine.
basically it's Moongrum vs Moonrythill
that lugia is sucking his own penis and i'm down to watch
wonder who's behind this post
>actually going to /vp/ for that screengrab
you gay gooning moron, that's literally what it looks like and I only noticed this now like 10 years after the game's been out
relax anon, i was just breaking balls and you're getting fricking fresh
Sorry. I've been on-edge lately, what with the state of this board. Everyone's out to push their agenda at all costs out here, it makes you think everyone's just a bad actor with no shame.
understandable
don't give up, anon
Rare. I guess I shouldn't be demoralized.
ha! gay!
*her own penis
the sex though
Can't unsee it now.
>water gone
>random fish added, sitting at nothing but an empty sand field instead of a beach
Is this fanmade? It looks awful, but not entirely from a new=bad standpoint. It just looks like someone without understanding was just adding details for the sake of adding them.
>water gone
it's brine, moron. you can't have water while underwater.
It's goo.
no, that's the name of the location. It's an underwater brine pool in reality
homie, you know what I meant.
>you can't have water while underwater.
Look up brine pools
You cant have fires either which this fricking CARTOON did multiple multiple times. Could you drop the pedantic nuslop slurping homosexual act for a single second to address the point about the composition?
>redditbob
go back
best post
passion and effort
This
The bottom one is much less expressive and actually uses fundamental animation techniques.
The bottom looks awkward and the background doesn't help frame the scene correctly
*the top one uses fundamental techniques etc
While the bottom is less expressive
Grifter thread.
the rendering of the stick and marshmallows on the bottom and the rendering of the character on the top, don't reply to me, I am correct and nothing you say will change facts
Soul is a byproduct of something being created out of genuine passion, rather than for profit or out of obligation.
I create things out of genuine passion and they're fricking horrible
And? it still has soul. Soul has nothing to do with actual technical quality. Something can be utter shit but soulful, or extremely well-made but soulless.
That reeks of soul you soulful homosexual
that is full of soul you frick
even the way the photo was taken is incredibly soulful
horrible or not, doesn't mean it doesn't have soul
and its not horrible.
shit soul
mr lahey.. is that you talking, or the liquor?
>hating your own soul
Damn
unironically a lot of soulful artists hate the flavor of their own soul
That's what makes it incredibly unfortunate.
the only significant difference between the two is the expression, purposely exaggerated and unique in the top, generic in the bottom, probably taken from some sheet of all his expressions and the bottom having the most generic eye-level 3/4 view shot compared to the slight looking up angle with a better angled pose
pose and expression are not the only difference, there is clearly a nice slightly washed out matte look to the old one, where as the new one is insanely saturated and bright
I'v been looking at that image for a good while and concluded that there is no meaningful, unbiased difference between those two images. The only difference is the time and circumstances in which they were made. Generic expressions? No more generic than old ones. Slight tilt in angle? A personal style, choice, circumstances or a mistake, nothing to do with consciousness consideration.
The point is, all these discussions of "sovl" are based on hindsight and bias. Not that I'm saying there is no valid arguments, it's just that any piece of "evidence" that is used in these discussions is circumstantial, while the core problem is anything but tangible facts, it's just a "feeling", yet even that feeling, ask someone who grew up on this "sovless" content, he would say that this old stuff is bland and boring.
I want to say "sovl" is like metaphysics to physics, a bridge that will never be connected. Yet even than, if you go further, sooner or later even AI will be able to replicate this "sovl", like it already did with these "medical dark fantasy themed" prompts, which at that point, this sovl almost seems like nothing more than simple nostalgia..
Alot of text to say alot of fricking nothing
Soulless post
You’re wrong, the older top pic had more effort and love put into it than the skill-less diversity hire in the bottom pic, you keep saying “factually” there’s no difference but
proves you wrong.
Besides the universally appealing textured look of traditional cell animation on the top, you can already tell that the bottom one is going to reuse a lot of frames and shapes, resulting in shallow animation. The top one probably has every frame drawn fully and thus better animation. These two are enough to divide one into "soul" and the other into "soulless" to me.
a buzzword stand-in for nostalgia invented by underage spastics.
The first time I remember myself saying something was soulless was the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland. All style but no substance, but even the style felt empty
That’s what happens when you don’t have a tard wrangler keeping the creatives in line
Very true. But you might wind up some anon who thinks creatives should get to make 100% of big boy decisions
The best way to put it is probably "Effort that shows the creator cared about it".
Like let's put it this way, using AI to make a HD Upscale may technically be "better" for a lot of people, but a low-res original that may had some small detail that will probably just be blurred out by the resolution shows that the creator cared more.
Same deal with things like small dialog choices and easter eggs barely anyone will see. They aren't technically impressive and run counter intuitive to the modern gamedesign that says "EVERYONE MUST SEE AND EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING!", but they showed that the creator cared and made the effort to put them in.
>low-res original that may had some small detail that will probably just be blurred out by the resolution shows that the creator cared more.
I disagree only because I do AI upscales. ESRGAN is shit and will add artifacts to the image, but in general a good AI upscale will do the opposite of what you're saying. Whatever small details or blemishes you didn't even know were there will be greatly exaggerated until you can't ignore them.
I concur. It doesn't help that actual developers and publishers are using shit like waifu2x and charging money for it (hello kingdom hearts 1 and persona 3 portable)
Something that's charmingly low quality, ie. eurojank and independent projects
Personality and a sense of vision. It can't be articulated in words, because the articulation is the thing itself. Description and analysis come up short. You feel it or you don't.
>It can't be articulated in words
>articulates it in words
That autistic Ganker poster who made threads about the "stage" in modern cartoons has completely broken me.
I don't know how to explain it, once you notice that characters are just kind of plastered over top of a stage instead of actually within the scene it fricks with your head.
That's called layering.
No it's worse, it's like new cartoons can't actually do any form of perspective but still have this weird pseudo 3D look to the environments and it's just very bad and makes me feel bad and you should feel bad.
I don't watch new cartoons, so no I don't feel bad.
considering most "new cartoons" are GC the post you're referencing is full of shit.
I saw that poster too
god damn memetic hazard
post number?
I found it
https://desuarchive.org/co/thread/143543295/
HOLY SHIT IT'S REAL
FRICK YOU
To answer what they mean by "the stage"
They are trying to say backgrounds now look "isometric". Back then they made art look 3D with real 3d perspective and good angle placement for more interesting shots, now modern backgrounds look like its in drawn in a grid like flat projection with parallel lines devoid of depth, like Age Of Empires instead of a real 3D game. Likely because learning perspective is 100% something modern artist actively avoid doing anymore.
Haven't read the entire thread yet but it feels like widescreen plays a huge part in the whole stage thing.
It doesn't, but it could be argue more screen space means more effort to add more staging perspective which makes warping look even more obvious.
I think the real answer to this is simply it's just not a priority anymore. People back then had an entirely different mentality of animation back then, now it's basically a parody of what kids thought animation was, "magic" so when, as adults now, they do this shit themselves it's like a crude version of what they grew up on.
I'm sure the scene from the newer episode here makes some people mad and I'm absolutely not saying it's better than the old one in any way, but I think it should be acknowledged that it's way more dynamic and animated than most of the shit kids have had to watch for the past 15 years
I'm sure some people would further say that it's OVERanimated/"forced" animation to keep the attention of ADHD iPad baby brains but I think that's preferable to the stiff digital puppet show sludge that almost every other cartoon has degenerated into. Someone had a vision for that scene and they cared enough to do real work on it
Yeah that example is more like working within limitations, not incompetence. Like a fan game with no budget instead of a AAA game.
old spongebob would have stuck the landing
Its essentially just no composition, nudirectors. Anime has similar problems
Specifically: https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2022/08/05/the-layout-crisis-the-collapse-of-animes-traditional-immersion-and-the-attemps-to-build-it-anew/
The issue with this is not the animation, it's the behavior of the characters, Squidward used to be a well-meaning man who became jaded after having to put up with too much idiocy, and Spongebob was a similarly well-meaning moron who did shit that just happened to be annoying.
In the new one Squidward is an unbearable narcissist designed for the audience to hate and openly root against and Spongebob is an accident-prone imbecile who acts as a vehicle for the writers to punish Squidward in gruesome ways.
This is why shows should not run indefinitely. I can't even blame the new staff, the characters have been run to the ground and there's just nothing you can explore with them anymore.
This illustrates my biggest problem with nu-Bob which is that the show is obsessed (in most clips I've seen, anyway) with using gags that portray excessive pain or disgusting shit
I unironically 100% blame the israelites and gays for this
The one on the right has twice or thrice as much shot variety and they are more interesting, which leads to seeing the same scene from different points of view. Which is to say the modern one has shit storyboarding
Sort of, its more screen real estate. Now animators have to draw more which costs more. The less screen transitions, new shot perspectives, the cheaper it is to make. Its all budget oriented. That is why the new Arthur episodes have that bouncy animatronic movement, a cheap way to mimic physics.
...When did Spongebob turn into a mix of Tex Avery Show and Ren&Stimpy?
When they hired former Ren & Stimpy guys to be part of the production team.
this is what they mean when they say "cursed with knowledge"
I don't get it, the background has never been animated in cartoons
That's not the issue, the issue is that old cartoons were staged in such a way that they looked 3D dimensional and deep. Modern cartoons don't bother and just have someone draw the background and someone draw the characters seemingly without putting any thought into integrating the two, with the end result looking like a flat dull mess, something that looks like a cheap stage. I've noticed this for ages watching the occasional modern Simpsons episode out of curiosity, but never had a term for it.
They used to draw characters directly into the environment as one piece of art. This is a lot harder because you have to keep checking if the perspective is right and also you have to draw the same scene 300 times so it's expensive.
Today they just open the backgrounds folder and select "living room" and then go to the characters folder and pick the characters and then drag them over the background and animate.
>if only a modern cartoon didn't have these problems..
But this show is soulless slop
no, its soulful slop
Nah it is mr pickles era gay shit
>implying that spamtopia could ever be soulless
Smiling Friends is great, I can’t tell if I’m responding to some troll saying “good thing is bad” for easy (you)’s or not anymore.
Yea and you probably also liked Mr pickles but hated superjail
I miss the days moronic posts were simply ignored, nowadays these contrarian posts reach 20+ replies.
>Elden Ring is le BAD!!!
>430+ replies
We had the adage “don’t feed the troll” for a reason
Averi sexo
Season1
Soul
Season 2
Soulless
I have to look up a torrent for S2.
this just shows modern cartoons suck and relying on 3d scene building.
I noticed this type of phenomenon on my own too but I don't really watch many cartoons.
For instance, rick and morty is guilty of doing this. I know there are varied and interesting shots, but a lot of the time it just feels like a stage where there's two guys talking on it. I almost liken it to a sitcom (which you can argue rick and morty is anyways) which is just typical environments and camera angles with people moving across the same sets over and over. There's a lot of "rick and morty"-esque shows too that feel like they're done in the same fashion. It's interesting to see this is a problem with animation in general and not just this variety of shows
>try and escape the stage
>storyboard director uses your work as an example of what not to do
grim
I mean yeah, on a tight network TV production schedule having to make a whole new background for a single shot isn't a good idea.
this is a vital component of soullessness, unfortunate but enforced (and perhaps evil but necessary) reduction of product quality to meet corporate timelines and lean standards. everyone's so god damn afraid of going bankrupt, bunch of cowards, they'll play it safe until even playing it safe isn't enough and they die. more artists need to embrace poverty and instability, better that than to die making mediocre assembly line product
this is just composition. Cartoons today have shit composition because they are made by people with no skills trying to copy sitcoms.
yeah
these Ganker gays never watched a hanna barbera cartoon
this is just a difference between western and japanese cartoons
it's very rare for western characters to be viewed at angles other than how you would see them as if you were looking at a stageplay, which makes it easy to keep them on model
>on model
Soulless
Why does every show have to have this disgusting two-tone shading now? It looks terrible. Is it to save bandwidth for streaming services or something?
streaming artifacts the shit out of solid colors
That can't be true
it is when things are saved as mp4
>two-tone shading
that's no tone shading
>it's very rare for western characters to be viewed at angles other than how you would see them as if you were looking at a stageplay
Just for future reference, the word you're looking for is the 3/4th angle. Basically the "family guy" angle where weird characters like Charlie look normal
no fricking shit
no fricking shit cartoon characters are animated and the backgrounds are seperate
are these people moronic?
They can't properly explain the issue, yet they see it clear as day. No matter how moronic they are, you are even stupider. Do you not notice anything in this comparison? How at the bottom the characters are drawn as if they are part of the scene and at the top its just a premade rig in ortographic projection.
If you still don't get it, this anon explain it the best
>Today they just open the backgrounds folder and select "living room" and then go to the characters folder and pick the characters and then drag them over the background and animate.
This. Less dynamism in camera angles just so they can slap their one-size-fits-all template characters into a scene cheaper and quicker is definitely a thing.
You are absolutely right, but some morons think that backgrounds were drawn every frame and that's also moronic. What a way to keep spreading misinformation on their part.
Catoons used to be storyboarded with tons of shots and cynematography in mind, and background was redrawn from the perspective of each shot once. Which means that for a certain scene maybe you do the background 8 times (and every single one of them was a high quality drawing, which built this notorious contrast between highly detailed backgrounds and lower quality very animated characters). Now it all looks equally shaded, they draw one background,and zoom on characters to create the illusion that things are moving but it's just one shot.
Isn't that just grain in the 90s show covering the illusion and making the animation blend berry with the background? Kinda like grain made the CGI in Phantom Menace look better than it looks in the remastered versions
Little bit, yeah. Truth be told digital animation could be helped a lot with some fake grain and blur
Also part of the issue is they didn't shade their main articles of clothes, which makes them stick out from the background, and not in a good way.
I do think most people actively ignore the fact sharpness makes everything flat and "soulless" but no one ever comments on that because since 1996 we all demanded media and entertainment to look as perfect and HD as physically possible, until it started making things look bad as a result.
It's the literal reason why AI is soulless slop because unless you literally force it to go against what it's trained on mostly to look for, it will product that hyper saturated sharp looking slop all the time.
You are absolutely correct in what you think this is about. But it's not about the technical assembly of a frame, it's about the visual design and portrayal of characters in their world.
See https://desuarchive.org/co/thread/143543295/#q143544024
And view the comparison video of a modern vs older scene involving Spongebob and Squidward. Ignore how low quality the content i.e. whats happening in the newer scene is, but concentrate on the spacial structure of the scene and perspective.
TL;DR: theres more to old good new bad
If the link doesnt work use
Frick you're right. Why did they do that?
im just skimming the posts, these just look like one point perspective backgrounds. which is literally the least dynamic way to make a background
>old art is actually brought up in the thread and it ends whinging about "umm just because you noticed it before doesn't mean anything"
Ganker is moronic as usual. The "stage" being more blatantly visible in modern shows is simply due to bad art and production.
It’s more about off shoaring western animation to cheap sweat shops and relying on digital techniques to quickly pump out a product. Basically they’re lazy. Look at something like UC engage. Minute long clips of cutscenes for a mobile game. Very much using digital techniques and cg animation. But what they also did was fricking use all of the tools at their disposal to recreate the style and technique of the Gundam series. And it looks fricking good.
I still don’t understand why mainline gundam is the only one that bothers to show mobile suits for what they are. Military combat vehicles that would be hell to pilot. I don’t think any other variation shows moments like this with the gundam executing its commands to dodge missiles, juxtaposed to how Amuro gets thrown around due to the force of the maneuvers.
>THIS ARTSYLE LOOKS LIKE AIDS, I'M LITERALLY CUMMING
old gundam is the definition of cheap garbage, get the frick outta here
>garbage
You’re thinking of worthless shit like Star Wars or Star Trek
So you're saying everyone know feels greenscreened/photoshopped on top of each other instead of incorporated as a continuous image? I guess I can see that, I think it's because most camera systems in games are designed to see the environment first and the player is off to the side, which can be "turned off" and still see the rest as if the character never needed to be there in the first place. It's because they use different camera FOVs to create different projections of how characters interact with the environment for story reasons usually.
Take TF2. You're just playing in first person but not based on the characters height or head placement, it's just a universal camera with a floating gun superimposed on the side of the screen. But now that effect is the characters themselves in games like GoW.
This change can be explained pretty easily, it's the change of priorities in animation to be script-based rather than storyboard/animation-based. Animation is used as a medium to tell the written jokes rather than the visual component being the medium.
The Simpsons underwent this change during its run, hence the more wildly varied cinematography during the earlier years. It's cheaper to make shows without these more dynamic shots as they would require more unique drawings to be done rather than copying plainly from a model sheet.
Spongebob is still storyboard-based, but I imagine there are constraints in shots to cut costs.
It's unfortunate, because film is a medium unto itself. It shouldn't just be like a recorded stageplay (which a lot of media nowadays essentially is), but the way shots can be composited and arranged to elicit emotions ("pure cinema") is an artistic edge unique to it.
cost plays a huge role. animation is a business. shareholders demand profit. for large corporations keeping the lights on is more important then making a good show. when the goal is money, cookie cutter assets pasted over a scene is simply the most profitable way to make an animated show and has been the most profitable way to make an animated show for a long time
paying people to draw costs money. drawing takes a lot of time. combine this and drawing everything frame by frame as needed drives up production cost to insane levels. generic re-usable assets that can cover the vast majority of situations on screen is much, much cheaper. the longer the show runs the bigger the efficiency gains are. generally it is believed the loss in profit from the dip in quality on screen does not outweigh the massive savings in production. the switch to digital further increases the cost gap as animation frames can now be stored, re-used, and altered to make new episodes with forever. digital assets practically take up no space and re use has little to no chance of damaging the master images.
throw in that in the near future if the neural networks work as designed; voice, writing, and new animation cells themselves can be interpolated using only existing assets. a show could run infinitely with minimal human involvement. there are some crude attempts at this concept already on the internet made with the tools available now.
Maybe if the economy wasn’t in shambles from money printing this wouldn’t be an issue
calm it with the antisemitic remarks
>Spongebob is still storyboard-based, but I imagine there are constraints in shots to cut costs.
The cost-cutting comes in by their tendency to just have over a minute of characters standing there doing nothing but making random mouth noises per segment. Free time where they don't have to write anything and don't have to animate anything but flaps. It's bizarre to experience.
Kids like bright colors and soundbites/memes to quote so that's they make.
Society is getting worse every single day. It'll eventually fall like Rome.
>the board dedicated to cartoons doesn't know how cartoons are animated
entirely unsurprising, but still sad
surprise-surprise, character (also object) animation and background drawings are different things, and you have to composite those things together properly so that the result doesn't look awful and fake
feel free to shit on modern cheap tv cartoons, but that problem is literally as old as animation itself, shit artists simply can't mitigate it
I thought the thread had a super in-depth discussion. Everyone seemed pretty educated on the subject, it didn't get derailed, and there was healthy debate, compared to here at least. I feel like not mentioning cheap 60's animation was definintely a miss, but you could definitely argue it was outside the scope of the thread
If u werent moronic you would have notice this years ago, its called suspension of disbelief u dumbfricking idiot.
Here let me break you more
Kek, yeah I don't know why so many are overreacting about this. Or that they are so unobservant that they needed this to be pointed out.
Even back as a child in old cartoons you could anticipate where movement was ging to happen by virture of seeing static stuff that was still quite distinct from the background cel.
You realize the same kind of celluloid cartoons also could do actual cinematography, if not camera angles that aren’t as flat as Family Guy
When a work does something "by feel" rather than obeying some strict design rule, the odds of success are directly correlated with SOUL.
You can tell that the top knows just how to bend whatever "on model" design Spongebob has in that era, while the bottom is the result of someone awkwardly working around the litany of rules in the book and still trying to make an exaggerated expression out of it.
I hate that everything uses digital animation these days
It all looks like dogshit
Nothing good has EVER come from digital animation
>Digital animation will never, EVER be able to replicate how classic cel animation handled harsh light
Yet I can see it in a digital format on a digital screen. Curious!
I don't get it. Are you equating the actual production with the end format?
Digital animation can't reproduce how cel animation handled harsh light, because in cel animation, it's a literal hole in the drawing and a beam of real light is flashed through. This is why it gets a very natural glow that permeates through the rest of the image.
Turns out people are very good at detecting what's real and fake lighting, even in animation.
i feel as if the colors they use on digital is too fricking saturated
i don't think it's saturation but the clean line art with no variation i thickness plus all characters look the same with minor variations most of the time (no proper perspective) and they look like a template and they pop in different eyes, mouths, arms and legs depending on the pose and facial expression. Makes it seem artificial. This is why modern anime is much better than modern cartoons (both mostly suck compared to their older counterparts)
There's nothing wrong with digital animation, with the right colors, filters and shading you can make something that looks close to traditional cel animation
Hardly anyone does this because why put in extra effort if there's no financial incentive to do so?
The incentive would be to create something that looks good. You know, to build engagement with your audience by delivering quality products.
A novel concept that we haven't heard from in actual decades since npcs and drones just gobble whatever gets shat in their throats perpetuating a never ending cycle of lowering the bar and cheapening out
wide screen is the real problem most of the time. everything is so spaced out its a headache to look at
>Hardly anyone does this because why put in extra effort if there's no financial incentive to do so?
Wrong outlook. It's not about how much more money it could make, it's how much more money you're losing just doing it. If Art could be produced for free, as in it's like a servict duty to allow everyone to have at all times like the air you breathe and you're compensated greatly for your hard work, then every single art media would be soul maxed to oblivion, unless you're just a talentless hack. Most people making media today have talent but cannot and will not do more than what's needed because doing more gets them fired on the spot.
Unless they get fired anyways for not making their mandated slop make billions day one because the execs don't think their slop ideas are objective trash and believe the algorithm wouldn't lie to them.
In the context of video games it means game that has genuine effort and passion behind their development. Left for dead is a great example of soul. See this video if you want to get a better understanding of what soul means for video games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdRLNUGmFC8
The non-physical, timeless, absolute, and unchangeable essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations.
which one is supposed to be souless?
the bottom one
something that's unique and doesn't blend in with the rest of the homogeneous slop
Is modern spongebob rehashing old episodes now?
Yeah, have been for awhile. They also made Bubble Bass into a prominent reoccurring character for some reason.
If only you knew how bad things really are.
>doodlebob
wtf they really did just throw in whoever
That's nothing, they've basically made Bubble Bass a main character now
I think giving him a bigger presence was lightning in a bottle, not that he's more relatable to the older audience than Squidward.
>prawn
How tapped are they if they're grabbing from the fricking games?
>no gorilla
>There's really no joke to this other than THESE ARE THINGS I KNOW
Old Spongebob would've just showed a long line of background fishes auditioning for the role.
Isn't the chicken spongebob meme from one of the newer seasons. Why does everyone act like its a classic era meme.
Yeah its from season 8 or something, I've only seen it because I watch spongebob on nicktoons to relax at night sometimes. It's an ok episode but definitely not anywhere near as good as the classics
SOUL
H-hayai!
both of them are soulless
Soulless
both of them are soul
Soul = anything Ganker played in childhood
Soulless = anything that came after
Emotionally evocative or spiritually fulfilling.
So anything that makes you feel something that you might not have felt or influenced your perceptions to feel certain ways like horror, hyped, active, chill, whether it’s music, gameplay, aesthetic, or design.
>water color background
>more detail
vs
>simple design and colors
>globohomosexual tier background
literally animation studios keep getting fricked over with budget cuts and shitty artists
This actually started because of Anime. Astro Boy was made to be easy to animate, and was a huge influence in the Anime culture and production.
So some boomer read the wiki page like me and thought about how much they could save by making slop in every category.
And that's how Calarts style came to be.
>Both are made by art teams that like doing what they are doing.
Grim
>squidward calmly cleaning glass
>squidward having tons of movement and phone ringing like a tiktok video
>calarts slop is "refined"
This is actually just down to money. Old 50s animated cartoons cost a million dollars to make per episode, accounting for inflation. That was sustainable when you were the only game in town, not so much in the 21st century.
Bullshit.
Now-a-days there are a huge amount of tools, more so than before.
You can produce the same results at a fraction of the cost.
The only reason they don't is because they can save a few more pennies by going the even cheaper route.
You didn't spend millions on watercolors.
The reason why traditional 2D animation is dead is 2D being hard to learn.
You need to invest into your staff and keep people around which means paying them a decent salary. But everything these days is about profit maximization so you can't really have Paul earn 100k a year as a 60 year old animator with plenty of experience - not if you can have some fresh graduate who knows how to do flash animations who is doing the job for 50k - and once he starts making demands or mandatory salary increases happen you can replace him with someone new and cheap.
But at the end of the day this doesn't make a difference in the budget.
Let's say you have 10 animators on a 100k payroll. That's 12 million a year you have to pay. If you replaced those with flash animators or outsourced it to India the cost halfs to below 6 million a year.
But then you look at the overall budgets of those shows and realize that the actual animation is just a fraction of the overall budget.
The overall budget of a modern cartoon is way over 300k per episode ON VOICE ACTORS alone. That makes 3-5 million you have to spend each season just to get those characters voiced. Not to mention the planning, the equipment, the music, the post-production, the whole logistics.
Walt Disney kept his old animators around because he knew that they are worth the price and at the end of the day are the reason why people go into those theaters. But after that the investors took over and they just saw those old animators as expensive old farts who could get replaced with cheaper college grads which in turn means more payouts for investors in the short term. And nowadays pretty much no one is around who even knows how to do traditional 2D animation in the west so even if studios suddenly started giving a shit it would be very hard to train people. What you gonna do? Carry Don Bluth out of his retirement home and make him teach?
>Tightly knit small studio
>Passionate developers
>No outsourcing
>No one relies on engine defaults for lighting
>Concept artists aren't literally pulled from furaffinity and twitter
In a more direct sense, you could also attribute the difference to the available tools that have become easier to use and more abstracted over time.
In the above example, the background is a more detailed painting with a hand-animated character because that's just how shit worked. Early compositing would have involved much more manual work.
In the bottom example someone used digital tools to rapidly put together the background and keyframing to put together the character, the pipeline for asset creation and compositing is much shorter and more powerful but it's being underutilized.
Deadlines remain the bane of any kind of soul, be it in comics, animation or videogames.
God I hope mocapping just dies and we're left with a bunch of autists in VR using puppet rigs for everything.
>God I hope mocapping just dies
I don't think mocapping is inherently bad, but it definitely does get overused these days. Even HL2 made facial mocap look good back in like 2003. Facial scanning, on the other hand, is turbocancer and I'm so fricking sick of it, especially in Capcom shit.
artists aren't literally pulled from furaffinity and twitter
I dunno, some furgays do pretty fricking great work when they're wrangled in.
old cartoons used cels which gave everything a little bit of depth with the dropshadow, now that everything is digital it doesnt have that dropshadow which makes everything blend in with the background
its super obvious in this pic for example
What's the context? Just some shitty nu callback to an old episode?
It's a redraw by a Twitter artist done in the modern style: https://twitter.com/Absorbantsy/status/1622448306835046406
This isn't about soul, it's just about art direction. Both are made by art teams that like doing what they are doing.
Now that Ren and Stimpy remake? That's soulless. Literally manhandled to be soulless shit because the homosexual women making it hate how "mean spirited" the original was.
Sonic the Hedgehog rings you drop on death. That's the innovative gameplay From brings to gaming in 2024.
>"Oops I guess I shit my pants again!"
Sandy's Cheeks produce more toilet slappers in a week that Spongebob ever will in his lifetime
It’s the opposite of a polished turd, it’s a rough gem.
Most mainstream media is made with high fidelity equipment, lots of quality control but no inspiration whatsoever. So polishing a turd.
Soul is something imperfect, but at its core it’s unique and interesting and different.
SpongeBob is a show for 5 year olds
Soul is when it's made with passion.
It's noticeable when it's made because of work, without passion and such (you can see it in the small details, or when they cut corners to have bigger profits, etc)
When you experience something during your childhood and nothing can compare to it as an adult because you no longer have that child mind that makes everything you experience take hold in ways nothing else can
not something you can define so stop asking.
When did SpongeBob become neon yellow?
i don't really like engaging with the argument so i just say it means old good new bad because i like arguing in bad faith and just defending the games i grew up with no matter what so whenever somebody mentions soul i just put my fingers in my ears and scream LALALALALALA
HOW HAVE NONE OF YOU moronS FIGURED IT OUT YET
"SOUL" IS A LACK OF REFINEMENT WHICH GIVES SOMETHING A UNIQUE SORT OF CHARACTER.
NOTE IT ISN'T JUST BEING SHIT ON PURPOSE, IT IS WHEN SOMETHING ISN'T AFRAID TO BE ITSELF. THIS CAN OFTEN MANIFEST IN THE FORM OF EXAGGERATION AND A WILLINGNESS TO BE A LITTLE OFF MODEL WHEN IT ADDS TO THE MOMENT.
I ADMIT IT IS HARD TO PIN DOWN BUT COME OOOON.
literally the people that do not understand soul in media dont have a soul
>"SOUL" IS A LACK OF REFINEMENT WHICH GIVES SOMETHING A UNIQUE SORT OF CHARACTER.
>NOTE IT ISN'T JUST BEING SHIT ON PURPOSE, IT IS WHEN SOMETHING ISN'T AFRAID TO BE ITSELF.
So a professional has no soul? Only amateurs that aren't afraid to show themselves/interests even if they can't execute it correctly is soul?
"Lack of refinement" is a bad way of putting it, but it doesn't imply that it's bad.What that anon means to say is that "soul" generally acts as shorthand some degree of imperfection or strangeness or care to detail that comes from an artist's unique tastes or quirks, which might not reflect what the "perfect corporate image" of something. When something passes through too many hand and becomes too "refined", you lose the sense that it was made by an individual with distinct goals making distinct choices, both conscious and subconscious.
This is also why AIslop is inherently soulless, since image generation programs are literally an automated "design by committee" system.
So it's really the human touch to make on model look imperfect but consistent. The ability to produce "good enough" results without going too off or too on model.
Pretty much. It's like how people can identify the exact artist who did the storyboarding for a given DBZ episode by how Goku was drawn; the whole appeal of creative mediums is experiencing the work of a human being. The further you get from something being made by someone's specific artistic intent, the less "soulful" it feels.
This isn't to say games with larger teams can't turn out good; you just need good direction to keep the "vision" consistent and let people play to their own strengths instead of trying to wrangle them into a time-crunched mold that may or may not actually care about the quality of the end result.
No, they don't. AI is a series of weighted averages trained on thousands upon thousands of images. AI is fundamentally soulless because no matter how many tweaks you make to the software or your prompts, it's still making thousands upon thousands of tiny choices using the work of other artists and photographers and so on to determine what is the most "objectively correct by programmed averages" result for the prompt given. It's automated design-by-committee.
Nah anon AI can and does have soul all the time and you only don’t recognize it because you are a soulless lefty slop enjoyer.
fine, post an example of soulful AI then
Well I have this I saved on my phone like a year ago but I see amazing stuff in the dalle thread also a lot of the porn is amazing. I should save more AI art.
Wrong, AI images have soul all the time, and only the soulless slop enjoyers on the left hate AI for that matter
>aren't afraid to show themselves/interests even if they can't execute it correctly is soul?
Yes.
Professional or amateur, if they do this, their work will have soul.
There is a certain level of soul in lack of refinement, here's a good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oci5LceCGw
Big Lez, drawn by hand with MS Paint, it looks terrible, but you can tell he was having fun with it, and that's soulful.
Here's Jarrad Wright's latest animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCd7EtBFlOM and it still looks like shit from a professional's perspective, but he's still having fun with it, which is why almost everything he does is soulful.
But does this mean all 3D products are soulless? They all are unchanging and rigid, always perfect, always crafted to exist in a way that makes them look "good enough" from all angles.
>But does this mean all 3D products are soulless?
No. 3D models are akin to Papercraft or Sculpture; a model is still the creation of an artist, and that artist makes choice after choice after choice in setting up the way that model functions, animates, is textured, etc. Hell, a lot of more recent 3D work even finds ways to mimic "perspective incorrect" animation from the 2D side of things (i.e. mickey mouse's ears).
As an example, actually, take a look at the Vortigaunt Chef in Half Life: Alyx. A lot of people have noted that the way he moves is really distinct and expressive and kind of unlike a lot of other things in the game. That's because he was animated by an ex-muppet puppeteer, and his animation rig is even set up similarly to the way Muppets are operated to accommodate for that artist's unique skillset.
That sounds very impressive. Too bad most games aren't like that these days.
Absolutely not.
I'm not a huge fan of 3D animation, only because I'm a huge fan of 2D animation, but there's some shining examples of great 3D animation.
Hotel Transylvania is fantastic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4RK3jY7AVk
I loved Reboot too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuEJWmxWkKw
Tell me the difference between KINO and SOVL right now.
In the top picture, do you see how the nose overlaps the eye?
Do you see how the mouth looks like it's sticking out and wraps around the body just a bit?
Look at the marshmallows in the stick, see those lines that make it look like the marshmallow has been punctured? See the shadowing on body and clothes, see how the limbs, hands, and shoes are large and pronounced?
Contrast that to the bottom picture. The face looks like it was slapped on the body, the limbs look off model, the marshmallows are just slapped on to the stick, there's little shadowing done on the character.
The top looks like it was animated by someone that cares about how their cartoon looks, the bottom looks like it was animated by someone that doesn't care if they live or die.
Soul is the love that you put into your work. If you don't care to make something that looks good, interesting, or maybe even just down right ugly, then it won't have soul and it won't be good.
I could kiss you, you 400IQ homosexual
where the frick did I say that? The OP image of this thread depicts a cartoon, made by professionals, having soul.
How is top image "lacking of refinement" then, professionals made that, not newbies, every frame they created was perfectly drawn exactly how they wanted it to look. It wasn't drawn first time and shipped out, they spent time making sure it doesn't look moronic.
bottom is on-model; bottom is soulful. it's like anime pornography
If you try to define soul it loses soul.
Soul is something you FEEL.
Its got nothing to do with what you THINK.
spiritual sense
Soul isn't a recently observed concept, the French figured this shit out in the 50s-60s, just by a different name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur
>inb4 some gay reposts this on shitter and people on the comments dont understand the post and disagree
Is your screenshot a meta joke about the wide-screen / “stage” problem
Every anon thinking soul is a science that can be described is soulless
Soul is effort, passion, artistry, and above all, genuine.
when will they learn that shading is what makes or breaks anime
Admittedly what I posted there is a bit dishonest considering one was an OVA and so obviously has better production values, but you're exactly right, shading and artstyle are also extremely important and not strongly correlated with cost.
Holy shit imagine if Super had the old DBZ artstyle... modernity is a mistake.
theres this one old image explaining how the japs were beating western animation and it mainly focused on how simple shading makes an image boring while having a variety of shading livens up the image, this was like an early 2000s image too if i remember correctly
this one?
that's disingenuous as frick lmao
>comparing anime for adults and even movies to some childrens morning cartoons
>cherry picked good vs cherry picked bad
yeah early 2000 anime sucked in artistic style and color depth, but people got actually tired of overshading. There were still plenty anime with high contrast
Here some real 90s anime
Please forgive my ignorance, but what's the purple-haired girl from the skin-tone section from? She's lookin' pretty good.
comparing movie shots during the height of japan's economy to serialized cartoons is a joke. also using pocahontas as the standard disney style is super disingenuous
>OVA, hey dumbass, both Trunks and Bardocks specials were TV SPECIALS, not OVAS
Would a TV Special not also have better production values?
Soul is leaves
Adding Slaughter's Prelude to the dub in this scene was an 11/10 decision.
“Bottom looks better because it is HD”
99% of society
this one is autistic as frick, you're comparing a key scene in an ova to a 30 second flashback in a weekly anime. it's a case of priority, not "passion" or skill
Someone should post the Kenshin webm where Kaoru first meets him.
Both episode 1 of the respective tv series.
digital art was a mistake
but it's okay, in 100 years time people will have forgotten about old shit and they'll have nothing better to compare their contemporary stuff to, and everyone will be happy
In 100 years time we'll either all be dead or we'll have managed to make digital animation look similar enough to the old shit that nobody will be able to tell the difference
not even an animegay but the top looks so much better it's insane. what happened?
We desperately need to go back to the 4:3 aspect ratio.
>top is from a 90's OVA from back when OVAs actually had decent production values and weren't just additional TV episodes made to sell more Blu-Rays
>bottom is from a random episode for an anime that was so horribly rushed that even Toriyama was upset about how bad the animation was
Come on anon, that's not fair.
Super just has a bad look in general even the episodes that had budget look worse than DBZ ever did.
I still have no idea why they decided to redo the films
iirc it was because they needed to put something in the timeslot and they weren't ready for it so they just retreaded the movies so they could work on the rest of the story in the background or something, like it was rushed to shit but retreading the movies gave them a bit of breathing room
>redditbob
I've always thought of soul like this:
It is when developers are clearly passionate about the product they are making and go out of their way to include details that do not add to the "quality" of "playability" of a game but enhance the overall experience. The example I often use is from Warcraft 2, IIRC, where there is an option to test your sound card. When you click on it, a voice says a line. If you keep clicking it, the character will eventually get annoyed at you constantly testing your sound card and tell you to stop. Does this make the actual game itself better? No. It doesn't. The actual matches are the same. But it is something I remember fondly and laughed at when I was a kid. It was cute. It made me feel like a developer had fun when he came up with that idea, and it was genuine humor and not what someone thought others would think is funny.
THAT is soul. Going through the effort of recording lines for a small easter egg for the fricking sound test because they knew someone would spam the button and would get a chuckle out of it. Instead of thinking about quarterly reports, firing contract workers, appeasing stakeholders, and adding in whatever FotM is on twitter, they did that.
>9S calling you out if you set the voice volume to 0 while he's doing a diagnostic on 2B in NieR: Automata
>Jak 3 letting you listen to in-character bloopers in the model viewer
>Emil falling down the stairs if you wait long enough to advance the dialogue during a scene in God Eater 2 Rage Burst
>Fate/Unlimited Codes changing Shirou's ultimate animation if and only if he uses it on Kirei as well as changing Gilgamesh's grab animation only on Saber in order to replicate scenes from the visual novel
God I miss when teams had as much fun making games as we had playing them.
i honestly believe spongebob is the main thing that keeps gen Z and gen Alpha from hating eachother like everyone else, shits been airing for 20 years
The new episodes are almost fricking Elsagate-tier and have strange nostalgia-bait up the ass.
the frick is Elsagate?
>newbie lurkmore etc
It's those weird disgusting YouTube Kids videos of popular characters.
lurk more newbie
A bunch of grifters intentionlaly exploiting algorythms making nonsense content mostly for kids. Elsa and Frozen is huge, Spiderman is huge, so they spam that shit out.
a pedophile ring that takes advantage of YouTube's algorithm to make low-quality fetish slop for kids
Soul is just a product of EFFORT and PASSION.
Reverse Collapse is the most soulful game I've played in a long time. So many features, contents, tiny details that didn't need to be there, but they were there. the game didn't even need to exist, but it did, because the creator loved his creation from over a decade ago. It was a pure passion project, and that's why the result is so good.
That is a dumb definition of soul, you can put effort into and be passionate about something soulless, and soul can be simple and accidental
what is love?
>Reverse Collapse
Just completed Chapter 5 like 15 minutes ago, it kinda fricked me up ngl.
Peak cinema.
more like
>classic horror
>liminal space
I can feel the stickiness of the surfaces for the top pic.
Top has character, it creates a story within the space provided
Bottom is purely utility and nothing else
I like to call this the apple effect. Like some sensory deprivation experiment gone wrong.
Minimalism is objectively the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. I can't wait for pendulum to swing back hard.
it ain't ever swinging back non, I am sorry i am the one who has to tell you that. minim alism has been pushed not only because it saves a lot of space but also because it is cheap to build and maintain
I know it's a real burger problem, but seeing the local McDonalds change to the new layout made me genuinely sad. Mostly because they got rid of the big booths and replaced them with those shitty bench seats. Lotta memories of that place with my friends.
i had to try
https://www.101soundboards.com/sounds/28442243-i-know-its-a-real-burger-problem-but-seeing-the-local-mcdonalds-change-to-the-new-layout-m
the actual reason why they do this is because it makes it way way way easier to sell the building off in 3 years when it inevitably goes bust
This is the best way I can explain it.
is the bottom one from Kai or Super?
Its just one of those things you can't really single down to one simple definition but when you see it you know it
can’t believe no one has come close to chuck jones in regards to minimalist expression after all this time
>hands you an invitation
I'LL KILL YOU
>the imperfection of hand painted backgrounds and skilled cell animation, outlined sweat droplets, faded palette, colorful sand like aquarium gravel, and general color scheme of the image
>photoshop gradient background with imitation flowers in the background, fence and beachgoers added, saturated colors, and no cohesive style other than 'detail'
>black arms
Soulless
>Black person hands
Really just the cherry on top for everything going to shit in the modern world.
Notice that marge no longer looks alarmed at maggie being missing, a calculated decision made to deter racists no doubt.
>soulless is when brown people
Really joggers your nogger
I’ve seen this gif posted a million times but never noticed the Black person hands.
Soulless creation made by minorities and diversity hires, truly nothing new.
Uhh this makes sense because the top one is an OVA and it had higher budget
I like how the artist who did this scene actually defended himself saying he didn't want to make the head turn that stiff and that he didn't add the awful fist shake. A real shame because his portfolio was really impressive, almost feels like a waste to have him make this overly stiff crap
to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description "soul," and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.
Soul is the illusion of a deeper or higher dimension that is evoked in an indirect negative way. This is not the same as style. Style evokes a wider context through positive features. Soul is how you show what isn't shown.
I watched a talk by the animator of skullgirls where she mentioned how she had a breakthrough when she stopped trying to add more frames to reach an impossible standard of perfect detail, and instead used less frames in a way that telegraphed more information beyond what was actually shown. It's analogous to that.
There used to be more soul because the medium was limited by human effort, so humans used shorthand that other humans would understand. Now that a lot of animation is digital and done by machines there is much less of that shorthand involved. Of course if you're a passionate artist invested beyond a paycheck, you can make digital animation look just as good as hand drawn. But like all industries that's a rarity compared to a revolving door of talent to keep wages low
thick lines, film grain, and painted backrounds.
OP image is a perfect example
The above actually adheres to classic animation principles that make animated show look good
The bottom is objectively less skillful
People who can't articulate what exactly is done right or wrong in a game or show just call it soul
Your half right.
Magic used to have a much stronger mystique in the recession-era sets for many reason(painting being more prevalent, many of the best artists where still regularly commissioned for cards in the actual booster packs, ect.). But Tereri himself used to look much more iconic and be someone that actually looked liked they lead a nation and not some hollywood star.
Venser was cooler when he had the helmet on as well.
Eh, it was more about how nu-Teferi completey stole Venser's schtick in the cards (not in the lore) with the added bonus making it busted and with even more slow play.
By being the the five mana Blue White goto PW?
Historically I can't remember the role Venser served(if any) in modern/standard, but the card blinks and makes your stuff unblockable while nu-teferi provides card advantage, resources for responses, and spot removal.
So the role Venser would seem to serve is to provide evasion or utility like blinking ETB effects on your creatures, while scary teferi is a power-crept control piece that sucked, but what came after was even more cancerous.
Venser took the blinker archetype much more distinctly than Teferi did, he was sort of just le control UW until his shtick with the whole flashing thing happened when his creature card came out (phasing used to be his thing as well but that got dropped after Mirage).
does anyone think that if you erased S1-S3 Spongebob would've become anywhere close as popular?
They got into a legal dispute over the cat photo
That wasn’t the dev’s cat? That’s dishonest soul
Nah, I made it up. You can still see the cat with the og graphics
Right cat is sexier
That's not video games. Let's talk about video games.
A few of the Final Fantasy 14 bosses have soul.
Take Cloud Chaser, It's a mecha that guards the heart of a dreaded machine god who's about to frick up the timeline, it's also apparently a reference to some older FF game that I couldn't give a frick about.
You know what I do care about? The Aesthetic of how this motherfricker warps in from the ceiling, as a plane, transforms into a menacing robot, and proceeds to fight you to the beat of song that, by itself, was probably the deciding factor for thousands of people to play this game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE5QVXy_BZ4
Nothing is really explained about Cloudchaser, Kokytos, and many of these other bosses. This is because FFXIV is a confusing mess and the development team doesn't have the ability to relate the story, environment, characters, and bosses into something cohesive(on a whole, 3D for FF was a mistake). What does happen is sometimes you experience this transcendent moment where you go into a fight blind and the music, vocals, gameplay, and visuals come together in an experience all it's own. Did the illuminati build Cloud Chaser as a transforming jet or was it a result intrinsic to the machine god's creation? What the frick was Athena thinking making Kokytos? Is it some kind of proto godling or was she trying to experiment with something else? Who the frick knows, it's not an answer you're gonna find in a Wikipedia page.
How can there be sweat drops if he's in water?
>food analogy
It's when it's evident that a human with a vision crafted something, not just because he was told to do so, but because he was blessed/cursed with the promethean fire of creativity.
The reason most modetn games lack soul is that they are made by commity, based on economic charts and shareholder greed. They are soulless husks designed only to extract money, and "crafted" by armies of brainless ants with zero agency.
Indies can still carry soul, but they are often marred by the same greed and competitive strategies, only on a smaller scale. All the games have to be rogue lites, because making hand crafted content and experiences is "too time consuming", and the stories have to be bland to not upset or offend the lowest common denominator.
>Gankerbob
One of if not the best flash game ever made and its legacy is reduced to this.
moron, left is soulless, right is soul
This is the definition of soul condensed in 7 seconds.
It's really like this. When you make a joke because you find it funny and maybe others will laugh with you, it is a soulful joke. When you try to make a funny joke to seem witty and intelligent for your own benefit, it is a soulless joke or mostly soulless at best. Now instead of "funny joke" think, "fun game."
Spongebob had a quicker fall than the Simpsons. Only season 1 and 2 are good. The rest is pure garbage.
All the memes you see online are from those seasons for that reason.
>implying season 3 isn't incredible
Frick outta here moron
Do you think we will get zoomers who in the future will make videos about zombibob just like how we started making about zombie simpsons?
>shit artists
It's more like animation companies encouraging artists to cut corners so they can produce episodes cheaply and quickly
blizzard deserves the kyoto animation treatment but actually DESERVES it
Why is modern artists so afraid of darkness?
>Oh no, my character is too dark and is pitch black, the consumers can't see the details I worked so hard on.
>Better turn the light up.
You need white and asian men developing in one room, not have a bunch of hires try to punch up indian spaghetti code
phoBlack folk cant see dark images well when they're outside
Counterargument:
>"Actually, we don't need that smoothing tool"
Time, effort, and money wasted on developing something that should've been planned out better.
Now you know the smoothing tool isnt coming, instead of having to wait till monday during the team meeting where you have to pray your lead designer will remember to ask the lead programmer if a smoothing tool could be added to the tray editor
I meant the guy develops the smoothing tool all the way.
Then later finds out it actually isn't needed.
Could've been avoided with a bit of planning in meetings.
Todd made him say this at gunpoint
todd seems to be a very charismatic guy. During morrowind he managed to keep the team together as they were about to go under.
he's known for his sweet little lies
Broken clock. Yeah, as an adult I can't imagine using the brainpower to really map Far Cry 2 and navigate myself. Subtle pill on lost media and murdered software.
Personally I think Todd Howard is out of his element because gaming has always been focused on generational improvements on hardware and software, and that doesn't really exist any more. 8k Fallout 76 is still a pile of shit. 480p cs/tf2/l4d is still a masterpiece. The only way forward for real profitable game development is making real art, or making clickbait microtransaction slop.
Seems like an actually good management move. IDK the specifics though..
>Personally I think Todd Howard is out of his element
I think todd was really good at steering RPGs away from tabletop numberdriven freeform to open world exploration. From the interview and from what ive read at the time and in retrospectives, todd was the one that made oblivion temperate english countryside simulator. The whole modern open world crafting setup was something he ended up making the blueprint of. Maybe not on purpose, but his design sensibilities created that kind of open world
>fast travel
>combat should be simple and functional, if you shoot someone, your bullet goes to the center of the screen, and you deal damage. No morrowind or Dnd shit where you just roll a die and if you arent specialized in that kind of weapon, you cant hit shit
>recognizable pastiche
>quest markers
>a POI every 100m that will show up on your compas, meaning there is always a breadcrumb to pick up, and when the player finished the POI, the next breadcrumb is already on their compas
>character building has been simplified more and more. Just pick a few flavor powers, your character is competent at everything at the core
>if you shoot someone, your bullet goes to the center of the screen, and you deal damage.
Like call of duty? How boring.
Its what the masses want. Just look at fallout 1, people get confused when their 1AGI no small guns tagged cripple cant hit a rat in the vault 13 cave. I personally like FO1 and 2, I liked morrowind, but its obvious oblivion and skyrim and FO3 do better, and the less RPG elements they keep, the better the game does.
That's pretty fair. I loved Fallout 3's open world exploration which NV and 4 lacked.
If he's going to move RPG towards what is considered 'basic' FPS then it needs a really good interactive story. Mass Effect is probably the standard until EA murdered it in the third game.
>freeform to open world exploration.
Too bad Todd's games are abject garbage for exploration
do you have the story about how todd gave a speech to the guys and it gave them the morale to get through a crunch or something? it seemed very sincere and not like the modern-day soulless crunch time shit you hear
i'm certain that's not the same story i'm thinking.. but a nice read anyway, even if it coming from todd himself could come across as sweet little lies. thanks anon
Either todd still has everyone at gunpoint or he really did manage to convince everyone they're gonna make it
What do you think the odds are Todd was involved in 9/11
>Come up to the podium one by one and kiss the fricking ring, or you're fired
Good guy Todd
>office le good
>wfh le bad
Kys israelite
>Why is modern artists so afraid of darkness?
someone here had a theory that it's because of LCDs and their terrible backlight bleed on black and that doesn't sound too off
I hate that Majora's Mask suffered from this treatment too. Compare the two and it's like night and day.
>OG had harsher black tones to give the characters a unique feel to them, and even give them a bit of mystery
>remake/remaster makes everything look generic and cartoony and lit up, so the poor heckin kids don't get scared :~~*(
the image on the right being hyper crusty as frick really brings down this post, anon
I couldn't find a better pic. Just pretend that it adds more soul to it.
facebook crust is the antithesis of soul 🙁
>t'discord troony
not my hecking nintendo game
Right is so kino. Not even a MM stan, but left tries so hard to emulate right that it ends up being a gobbled mess.
Left has the banker bawd and therefore wins
also Anju!
Don't be such a disingenuous homosexual. They literally made a bunch of artwork in the same style.
Just look at the skull kid.
>NO black allowed!! Only deep blue!
Right is not scary unless you have autism. It's mysterious yes, which I like, but the left is not bad at all but should have been used for a different Zelda game instead because as a remake it should have stayed more true to the original depiction. Both are good illustrations in a vacuum.
this lol. they're both excellent displays of expertise, with different choice of style on the shadow rendering
the real world is slowly losing its SOUL, how can you expect people to put soul in a game if it no longer surrounds them?
>"Hey kid, how much do you like videogames?"
Soul is the things you liked when you were twelve.
HxH 1999 v/s 2011 It's one of the most brutal examples of how good shading and a better soundtrack literally carries a show.
95% of the time 2011 just can't compete against the original, despite having much better animation and pacing.
The era of only using the top 60% of lightness values in all visual media forever had better fricking come to an end soon I swear to christ
The more you try to define what "soul" is the less you understand it. The picture is experimenting more with exaggeration and expression than the bottom, thus giving it "soul".
Jesus Christ, please tell me they didn't do a soulless remake of that episode.
Jesus
This is a classic example of a team being afraid of a boss. Nobody wanted to say no in a meeting. I can just smell it now. Lord, I can't not see it.
top is animated by people who understand what they're trying to animate. Bottom is animated by people who were told to make spongebob look pained.
anyone who lifted something really heavy knows it puts straight on your neck and jaw so your teeth clench and your neck stiffens while you tilt your head back, its just basic human nature or something, and the animators made it worn on spogebob's square body. Look at how the bottom one has him looking forward, like someone completely different drew the head and face and then pasted it on.
TAKE ME BACK
TAKE ME BACK
>the shirt and hair sway at the end
Wow people really used to give a shit huh
The 2 era of artists learnt different things.
If anything, blame the ~~*schools*~~ that just want to increase the graduation rate and hence dumbing down the lesson so even monkey can graduate and get a degree.
I hate that one of the only ways to get anything close to that kind of artstyle these days is AI
I would gladly watch whatever this was if it existed
Some modern anime have done a pretty good job recreating older artstyles. I'd love to see more like it.
What anime is that?
It's the first episode of Shinya Tensai Bakabon.
>tfw no angry busty tomboy gf
why live
to play video games?
This looks like one of those guides where the animators are told to push the pose instead of letting it be too static or flat.
I don't care that present spongbob is zombie show. It still not as bad as modern Simpsons was for 20+ season.
>Redditbob
Go back
"souls" refers to features of an artwork that produce or convey meaning without invoking any recognizable symbolic system.
If you like spongbob, especially the classic era, than you should watch this video.
It goes into a little detail on how the show came to be and how Ween inspired it.
here ya go
TL; DR
Especially in a fricking a screen cap.
Then go to another thread and let the adults talk
Soul or 'SOVL' is the noticeable amount of blood, sweat and tears put into a particular product by a passionate developer/developers.
For example, Blasphemous has SOVL while Blasphemous 2 has less soul.
A timestamp of a time when people cared and tried, before excessive artistic qualities either died out, compromised, LCD-ed, or sold out and suffered a severe lack of that je ne sais quoi
SpongeBob is a good example because artistically there's a night and day quality difference, the creator died so everything is at the mercy of corporate frickers who use no judgement and appeal to the absent minded focus groups, and so many things from the 90s (granted very end of 90s, but still) get the "oh, you can't do that in 202X" treatment, and get sanitized to not offend the 12 really loud people on Twitter
Soul really is a thing, it's fine if you weren't around for the initial hype, and don't have the sense of nostalgia that others do, but it is a thing, and "soul" is by and large dead
SpongeBob lost its soul way before the creator died
Just as much proving my point
The movie was the official end of the show. Everything after that was just monetized fanfic. 4 seasons and a movie was perfect but greed and disregard for the creator just kept it going.
>4
Nice try homosexual
When a company has too much time to practice and train their staff and you can feel a character has too much oversight and guard rails to prevent interesting things from ever happening.
Ganker has no soul. That's the actual reason it couldn't tell you
in 20 years, zoomers will called the bottom one soul and a newer shittier version will be the new soulless, the cycle will repeat.
>in 20 years, zoomers will called the bottom one sou
You do know that we zoomers also watched the early Spongebob episodes, right?
It's a symptom of caring both about the product and the consumer.
Atmosphere/feel of the game basically
Its irrational, just like the real world concept
The fool who went and shit his pants.
The thing about animation is that it's expensive. Like, ridiculously expensive. And time-consuming People have been trying to cut corners with animation for as long as animation's existed as an art form. Hell, even cels were only created to save animators from having to redraw backgrounds every single frame.
If digital animation had been feasible in the 40s you better believe everyone would've immediately switched to it.
insightful, anon
Still looks shit though.
Yeah, but you can have one or the other
Done in a reasonable amount of time
Looking incredible for single screenshots
spongebob clean and jerked 1teddybear he should be able to do 1marshmellow
https://www.101soundboards.com/sounds/28403266-just-to-let-you-know-squidman-you-and-your-sponge-and-starfish-friends-stay-out-of-my-fric
Soul is "effort", "personality", "unique characteristics", "passion", etc. It's something made with the love of making and not just made to be a marketable product.
This isn't even soul or not. Bottom is just worse on a technical level and has a worse composition.
Greenbros...
Is it really due to customers wanting those colors or the car company only making those colors available. For example I was looking at Dodge's available colors a while ago and there were like 5 shades of gray.
depressing to see it laid out like that. people actively moving away from a more colorful experience
Even though I would only pick a black car, that's still pretty sad.
unironically looks meh
1996 truly was when it all went down hill. We all said zoomers ruined everything.
yeah it is the rarest fricking thing to see a car that is not either grey, black or white, and when it happens it is usually a variation of red or blue.
same thing for motorbikes
>AIBlack folk posting in this thread
Leave soulless bug, you dont belong here
Go back to your general to shit on the artgays you steal from
I finally cracked the code and understand what "soul" is
It's the act of making something with genuine passion, and everyone involved had a unified vision. It's something with made with pure artistic expression brought to life with the tools given
Soul is not always perfect or good, but it does reflect something the creators wanted or the at very least tried their hardest to make it work, and can span the spectrum between good and bad
>Soulful good games
Kingdom Hearts 1
Metroid Prime
>Soulful bad games
Sonic 06
Dino Crisis 3
Contrastingly things that are soulless are just products, no different from something shit out from a factory assembly line. There is no passion behind them, and if there is, it only exists in small doses. Soulless products have no value, and even at their best are disposable. They're almost always made with the worst intentions and it can be felt.
>Soulless "good" games
New Super Mario Bros games
Nu God of War
>Soulless bad games
Most western AAA slop
pre-mandate vs post-mandate
What is "forced" soul?
kojima post-konami
Something soulless disgusing itself as something soulful without understanding how made the soulful thing soulful in the first place
also shitpost fodder
3D games from 5th and early 6th gen are sovlful to me. I dunno why, maybe it's because technology had improved enough that it could produce 3D graphics that were beautiful-looking but still kind of limited unless you used your creativity.
it's simple:
me like = good, true and cool
me don't like = bad, false and lame
what if i think soulless is soul and soul is soulless? what then smart guy? you can't stop me
games and entertainment will continue to get more soulless thanks to corporatization, cutting costs, and the mindset that WE NEED TO MAKE MORE MONEY EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUCCESSFUL
it will never be enough for them
This thread made me realize how many different camera angles and weird perspective shots were used in invader zim. That show must have been hell to work on by american cartoon standards.
soul is created, or formed, through the overcoming of obstacles or challenge in art, that allow the spirit (or "soul") of the creator or creators to shine through.
This is why "muh epic realism grafix" and frickhuge open world garbage are killing video games. Soul is bred through limitation, self imposed or otherwise.
>Game I was exposed to as an impressionable child = SOUL
>Game I was exposed to as a jaded adult = SOULLESS
>t. soulless automaton
Actually, you're right. I played Punch Out for the Wii as an adult, and thats the most recent soulful game I can think of. I concede.
I experience soul on a daily basis. I am not tethered to this one message board. I actively search for avenues of SOVL to absorb. I feel sorry for any one who feels the need to rant about shitty AAA game #8476 in a copypasted OP thread and post the same images over and over.