Turn Real Life Into A Cartoon 302
Saige writes "Ever wanted to see yourself in a cartoon? Before now, there were means to turn a single image into something cartoon-like, but some folks at Microsoft Research have come up with a method to turn a video into an animated cartoon. It's not up to doing it fully automated, as you have to hand-mark various parts of the video every 10 to 15 frames, but the video of the results is quite impressive."
Wow. Wow. Just wow. (Score:5, Funny)
That's it, good night folks, I've seen it all.
Re:Wow. Wow. Just wow. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow. Wow. Just wow. (Score:3, Funny)
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Waking Life? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Waking Life? (Score:4, Informative)
That's called Rotoscoping, and it's been around since before the original Lord of the Rings movie by Ralph Bakashi (1978).
That's not what the article was about, really, if you read it. Rotoscoping is modifying each frame individually, in a manner similar to how you do a cartoon.
If you RTFA (fat chance, I know), the article addresses this: "In addition, current techniques to turn videos into cartoons are very labor intensive; the artist has to render each frame by hand. And it still doesn't solve the 'jumping' problem.".
Re:Wow. Wow. Just wow. (Score:2)
Freudian Slip (Score:5, Funny)
"However, even the 300 frame video of the girl swinging on the money bars only needs a keyframe every 10 or 15 frames."
I just hope they don't make it part of Wordart or something.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:3)
--
The only place to look for deals: http://www.dealsites.net/livedeals.html [dealsites.net]
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:5, Informative)
Still running Windows ME, I take it... For as much as a bloated whale Win2k and XP are, BSOD is history.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:3, Insightful)
I have only had three "blue screens" on my wife's XP box, but the number of times that it spontaneously reboots (especially when using not-so-quick-switch)... it is mindboggling.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:5, Informative)
To summarise:
hated '95 - buggy and unstable.
Tolerate XP - stable.
Always love my Mac. Just because.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:4, Funny)
http://sbnsor.com/funny/macowner.mpg
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Or, in the case of my girlfriend's XP machine, it did it just because.
She got really upset a few days ago. Her printer disappeared. No real reason for it, it just stopped printing. It said it was there, it would self-test from the button, it just wouldn't do anything from the PC. She called me at work, so I told her to reboot. T
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:3, Interesting)
Then there's my home machine that runs 2K.
It's fine unless I plug a USB camera, Web-Cam, Scanner, or basically anything USB except a card reader into it. Heaven forbid I swap memory stic
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
My problem isn't BSOD, but I do notice that Windows will restart Explorer (blinking desktop, everything disappears, then reappears) all the time.
That said, I finally got the video file downloaded from the article, and it IS pretty darn cool, although it will be a while before we see any actual product that does this.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:5, Informative)
To turn this 'feature' off, do the following:
1. Go to System Properties.
2. Go to the Advanced tab and click on the Settings button in the Startup and Recovery section.
3. Uncheck Automatically Restart.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Some dude used this little detail to try to tell me my computer was secretly unstable. Like I wouldn't notice that all my apps etc are closed. Moron.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:3, Interesting)
oh i know what error that is (Score:2)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:3, Insightful)
For some yes, for a lot of others, no. If XP or 2k ever caused me to lose a multi-day-long-render, you bet ur ass I'd toss it without a second thought.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as someone who works on windows machines all day doing tech support for end users (on verticle market database frontends) I can honestly 90% of all bluescreens are caused by hardware problems or buggy device drivers.
I've had buggy device drivers kernel panic my linux box too - so its not just a windows thing.
I honestly can't remember the last time either my work pc (which runs Windows 2000) or my home pc which runs XP bluescreened.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Any Joe Programmer can hack together a device driver that can crash your system.
Only use WHQL certified drivers and you won't see STOP crashes.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:5, Interesting)
Only use WHQL certified drivers and you won't see STOP crashes.
While there is some truth to this, if you do this you will end up running very old (and sometimes quite buggy) video drivers. I haven't seen any recent video drivers that are WHQL certified. At least, not nVidia drivers. I suspect this is the same case with ATI as well. Probably not as much so for run-of-the-mill 2D cards.
While I've always loved to joke about how Windows blue screens at the drop of the hat, I have to say that XP has been relatively stable, both at work and at home.
The only time I've had my XP box regularly bluescreen was when I was using a quad-head configuration (two dual-head nVidia cards, one AGP, the other PCI) and booting into Linux. If I did a warm reboot from Linux into Windows, it would bluescreen every time. Power off the system, and it would boot up fine. I suspect someone was making some incorrect assumptions the state of video RAM when initializing the drivers.
-Twilight1
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Eh? The 61.76 drivers from nvidia are whql-certified. In fact, all released (non-beta) nvidia drivers are whql-certified. Perhaps you're thinking of ATI? I wouldn't know about that.
But I challenge you to point to a non-beta nvidia driver release in the last 3 years that wasn't whql certified.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_61.76.htm
Released July 20, 2004. Not the very latest driver, but it is definately "recent". Hell, it's less then 30 days old.
Or how about ATI?
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/Catalyst_46_Release
Released June 9, 2004. Also not the latest (the latest is 4.7) but not exactly old.
So, there are indeed recent WHQL 3D drivers for both ATI and NVIDIA cards. Moreover, their new drivers are usually as good as the WHQL drivers.
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:2)
Re:Freudian Slip (Score:3, Funny)
Technically, but that's just because they changed it to a delightful shade of indigo. Now it's a DSOISOD.
another Freudian Slip? (Score:2)
Didn't you mean "BSD is history?"
*rimshot*
MS got rid of the blue screen in XP... (Score:2)
Shoulda changed it to another colour though because the BSOD acronym still fits...oh well.
The new and improved B(lack)SOD includes brand new, even more vague and useless error messages too! Yay! At least they are MUCH less common than in Win9x/Me or NT.
Anyways, I saw the sample animation...looks way coo
Mickey Mouse... (Score:5, Funny)
If I'm a mouse (Score:2)
Pixar envy (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Not Already a cartoon (Score:2, Funny)
Just do something "newsworthy" and watch what M$NBC does to it. Coyote was a genius.
Re:Already a cartoon (Score:2)
Sheesh. Kids these days...
Re:Already a cartoon (Score:3, Informative)
real life? (Score:2, Funny)
Similar to Waking Life... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Similar to Waking Life... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Similar to Waking Life... (Score:3, Funny)
But here's my favorite part of the article...
"I hope there will be a time when people will be able to use this for their home videos. But at the moment it's not a one click process," said Cohen.
Wait a minute! Isn't that patented by Amazon!
ILL Clinton Live Machinima Show, August 2 [illclan.com]
sounds cool, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I tinker occasionally with animation and despite all the technology we have today, if you are a 2D/cel animator it's still an extremly slow process. But fun.
Physics Engine for cartoons... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Physics Engine for cartoons... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Physics Engine for cartoons... (Score:2)
A cartoon from Microsoft? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A cartoon from Microsoft? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A cartoon from Microsoft? (Score:2)
gotta remember to find the DVDs some time
Hasn't this already been done? (Score:4, Funny)
Seems simple enough (Score:5, Interesting)
It should be doing some edge detection for the inbetween frames, but it probably isn't. I hate to say this, but this is a simple application of known and existing technologies. Nifty for the guys that made it, but not exactly groundbreaking.
Re:Seems simple enough (Score:2)
I hate to say this, but I seriously doubt that you read a one page synopsis and have 100% accurately reverse engineered the system they are using.
"...not exactly groundbreaking."
So, you'll have the OSS knockoff written in no time then, right?
Re:Seems simple enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does everything have to be groundbreaking?
Sometimes the most important developments are the ones that simply involve someone taking the time to put two and two together.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"
If it's good enough for Newton, why not these guys?
Re:Seems simple enough (Score:2)
Re:Seems simple enough (Score:2)
Re:Seems simple enough (Score:2)
Wake me up when Longhorn gets here, so I can rag on that, too.
Re:Seems simple enough (Score:2)
And I mistook their childish examples for this being a product for kids. There is no product yet. Just a patent.
Good results still require: (Score:2)
2: Camera ability
That said, I'd be interested in giving this a shot for various projects.
I'm not bad... (Score:2, Funny)
Great. (Score:5, Insightful)
But then I came to my senses. Of course this kind of thing would never replace traditional animation. After all, you'd still have to have actors enact the scenes to be animated, the backgrounds would have to be set up or altered, etc. Setting up a shoot of a scene to be animated could end up being more of a PITA than just animating it to begin with. Though the end result could be a cool rotoscope/Waking Life effect, it's not a "cheat" to get an animated feature without the tedious work of animating.
Re:Great. (Score:2)
SP2 BAD, MS Cartoons GOOD? (Score:3, Funny)
SP2 and its funky TCP/IP stack BAD
MS Research Cartoon Videos GOOD
Am I on the right slashdot? I just read an article about how SCO is good and everyone loves them. Whats next, slashdotters start Reading TFAs? I'm so confused, all this talk about lana swinging on the monkey bars, wheres the cowboyneal option when I need it.
I'll just pretend that MS bought this from another company and is going to integrate it into longhorn in order to keep the competition out, yeah thats it, back to writing it M$ for me.
Breathe in... Breathe out...
Nothing new. (Score:2)
Re:SP2 BAD, MS Cartoons GOOD? (Score:2)
Oh.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oh.. (Score:5, Informative)
"I am also working with Michael Cohen at Microsoft Research on some graphics topics."
and further down the page there's this:
"Video Tooning
Summary: We build a system for transforming an input video into a highly abstracted, spatio-temporally coherent cartoon with a range of styles. We also go a little bit further to do a free-form deformation on Tooning results for exaggeration.
Jue Wang, Yingqing Xu, Heung-Yeung Shum and Michael Cohen. Video Tooning. ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGAPH2004). (pdf) (demo video, low resolution version at 10M)
Jue Wang, Yingqing Xu and Michael Cohen. Free-form Video Tooning Deformation. Poster on SCA2004. (pdf)"
Yes, this guy was working on the project. However, it was part of a team effort of which Microsoft Research (or at least Michael Cohen on behalf of Microsoft Research) was a part. You might also notice that Jue Wang has worked on other projects of which Microsoft Research was a part. Perhaps he's collaborating with Microsoft Research?
Microsoft's Not Really the 'Innovator' Here Anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Cohen's colleagues get zero name recognition in the MS article. Kind of awkward don't you think? It comes off as if the other workers' contributions are insignificant.
The parent is still very informative. We wouldn't have even known about the other contributors if it weren't for him.
And anyone who has worked under a big-name advisor on a project knows they have a tendency to take credit for more than they actually did, especially when foreign students are involved.
I don't get it (Score:2)
Full circle? (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't it interesting how throughout the last several years we've been researching and coding like hell to take cartoon(ish) characters and make them look as realistic as possible? Look at the work that went into transforming an artist's sketches of Dr. Aki Ross et al into the very real looking characters of Final Fantasy.
Now we're researching and coding like hell to go back the other way.
I'm sure there's a Microsoft joke in there somewhere :)
Cohen, remember the guy? (Score:5, Informative)
Anybody remember this guy?
This is one of the pioneers in computer graphics for a long time. You should remember him for his radiosity papers:
Cohen, M. F. and Greenberg, D. P., "The Hemi-Cube: A Radiosity Solution for Complex Environments", Computer Graphics, vol. 19, no. 3, pp 31-40, 1985.
Cohen, M. F., Chen, S. E., Wallace, J. R., and Greenberg, D. P., "A Progressive Refinement Approach to Fast Radiosity Image Generation", Computer Graphics, vol. 22, no. 4, pp 75-84, 1988.
And his book [amazon.com].
He even received SIGGRAPH award [microsoft.com] for his work
Re:Cohen, remember the guy? (Score:3, Funny)
What's this like? I've only ever received SIGKILL, SIGTERM, SIGINT....
Damn! (Score:2)
What do you mean, turn it into a cartoon? (Score:3, Funny)
What about using fitlers (Score:4, Interesting)
As an aside I love the effect on pets using the charcoal filters drawing filters. The fur translates surprisingly well.
Re:What about using fitlers (Score:3, Informative)
Family Tree (Score:5, Interesting)
Some time ago, Microsoft purchased a company called SoftImage. [softimage.com] Turned out to be a good investment in 3D development and film compositing with a product called the DS.
Meanwhile, in Tewksbury, the Avid Media Composer which ran only on the Apple Macintosh platform was ported to Windows when Microsoft made some investments in Avid. About that time Apple (unwisely) discontinued their six PCI-Slot Macintosh. [lowendmac.com].
When Avid noted that their product was dead-ended because its code basis assumed a raster that was limited to NTSC and PAL television format, they purchased SoftImage's DS [avid.com] in order to be able to easily produce software that will do film and high definition video.
Microsoft doesn't make investments for nothing. I believe I can do something very close to what Microsoft is doing for Mini-DV video on any format of video or film with the Avid DS -- though for a lot more money (something like $120K USD). I would not be surprised if they got the technology from that very old investment.
As a creative person though, I have to say I don't like the fact that the DS-Nitris will probably never run on a Macintosh. We have problems with ours that are related mostly to two issues: Operator screw-ups (expected) and Microsoft Windows XP Professional limitations, many of which do not exist in Apple's current versions of Unix.
Re:Family Tree (Score:2)
Microsoft Windows XP Professional limitations
Such as? I'm really curious.
Ralph Bakshi would love this (Score:2)
Anyhow, this is exactly what Ralph needs -- a way to film actors, and then make it sorta' look like a cartoon. I see it now, "American Pop 2"... oy.
Still, I spent a summer tracing from Super-8 onto paper and my results were less than spectacular, although my test film did get me some work back in the da
Microsoft used to have another product... (Score:2)
O great.... (Score:2, Funny)
Great (Score:2)
And you know some obnoxious dad who films every moment of his kid's life will just love this. Prepare to be bored whenever your friend of family member sends you his oh-not-so interesting home movies saturated with this, and other effects (sometimes better is less, okay?)
That said, it looks kind of cool, though I sus
Another concept.. (Score:2)
Still, it is an interesting concept.. and as I understand, the playstation2 is a huge seller. I had no idea there was such a market for this stuff. [eyetoy.com]
Re:Another concept.. (Score:2)
So does this mean... (Score:5, Funny)
It ain't all that (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate Microsoft products as much as the next guy, but MS research does do a lot of good work. However, it's usually in collaboration with research universities, as in this year's papers by Agarwala et. al. and Wang et. al. So it's not as if these papers just magically emerged from the bowels of MS.
Also, the two biggest names in CG, Blinn and Kajiya, have published jack by comparison since they went to MS. Blinn isn't even followed by an entorage of groupies any more.
Got it.... (Score:5, Funny)
Not again, thanks! I already found it here [dilbert.com].
Regards, Martin
Next up (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Animatrix 2? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wonder what this will do for anime? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I wonder what this will do for anime? (Score:2)
Basically, anything without supernatural elements, especially something blog-ish (like a lot of MegaTokyo) would be within reach of 3-5 hours with 2-3 people, instead
Re:Not real impressed (Score:2)
I'm genuinely interested.
Re:too much time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Like any large company, there are many different departments handling many different things.
Research is but one of those departments. And why deny them the ability to do further research? In the end, with what they've learned doing research it can only help their products that are already out in the market.
Re:let me guess (Score:2)
It does indeed look cool... (Score:2)