So it IS possible to make anime look like the 90s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GDmGaUI8-c

>>7630744 (OP)
>let's make it.
>Is it time for AI to write code?
>Is it time to question people’s creativity?
Nice try Pajeet.

I don't care for the 90s, the early 2000s to 2012ish was perfect before they completely eradicated the muted colors look anime once had.

>>7630744 (OP)
Jannies, clean the fucking garbage.

>>7630744 (OP)
so you just made me watch a 30k views shitty lil ad. should i punch you in the throat?

>>7630744 (OP)
You want to restart CEL shading, piece by piece? hand-painted transparent sheets of celluloid, known as cels. Will there be animator with the skill or the patience for it? Probably. someone with passion could do it. But you will need a lot of money and a lot of time, to produce such anime, and I strongly suggest that you make sure the story is worth doing cel shading. Also good luck at trying to get the old tech, challenging but also possible if you got the will, remember in all things, if you got the will you got a way.

>>7630744 (OP)
Obviously it is. You could easily adjust the contrast/colors and add grain to a lot of modern anime and make them look old.
But that's not what people want these days. Everything has to be oversaturated and contrast rich and be 90% smear frames

>>7630785
I do cel art, a few other anons do it too, and there's some youtubers. Had some threads before.
The main issues are twofold:
>real, consistently-made for industrial use, cel paint does not exist anymore
There are some ways to replicate how it works but without the standardization of large batch production its limited to still paintings and very short animations, because you will get color variations
>Trace Machines do not exist anymore
JP studios used these to print the sketches onto their cels. Very expensive and rare now because relatively few were actually made, and they were JP-exclusive. They're like an inline thermofax designed to run a sled with the sketch and cel sandwiched together for perfect alignment.
I have no idea how western studios printed the lines, maybe I just failed at searching but I could only find it alluded to rather than described or photo'd.
You can replicate this with a monochrome laser printer or a thermofax but the alignment will most likely be off by a significant degree, and the laser printer lines aren't going to be quite as black. Additionally you can easily have fail prints where ghosting occurs.
>standard-sized, punched cels do not exist
They shifted to polyester films by the end of the era, but still were called cels. Laser printer transparencies work but opacity issues occur with less layers from how thick they are. Punches for animation pegbars can also be expensive.
>Multiplane cameras do not exist
Being able to independently move cels around a background accurately requires a huge machine. You could photograph every cel and chroma key them now i guess
>Many effects used film methods to produce
Some, like underlighting, are known to be be possible to replicate in blender but this area hasn't been researched much..
You can work around all this shit but it dramatically slows the work down from having to fiddle with each cel individually and develop digital methods to replicate expensive effects

>>7630744 (OP)
They did something similar in the last movie. BUt guess what, nobody cared aside from odlschool DB fans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML46tmha3AQ

The same way people think pixel art HAS to look janky and jagged as fuck because they play on emulators with an image upscaled eight times on a modern flatscreen TV, the "90s anime" look is entirely dependent on two things : your cheap CRT monitor and the cheap VCR your unemployed uncle used to record it.

There's a reason why the only people trying to recreate it that way are from south America, when you ask the japanese to draw old shit from the 90s they'll remember the DVD release and you'll very rarely see scanlines, chromatic aberration and such.

>>7630753
>the early 2000s to 2012ish was perfect before they completely eradicated the muted colors look anime once had.
2000's were peak colorful. If anything modern anime is where everything looks gray.

>>7630815
Ok but are those his teeth of his lower lip?

>>7630815
>"90s anime" look is entirely dependent on two things : your cheap CRT monitor and the cheap VCR your unemployed uncle used to record it.
>when you ask the japanese to draw old shit from the 90s they'll remember the DVD release and you'll very rarely see scanlines, chromatic aberration and such.
True to an extent. The "borderline glitch art" stuff is only some people who take it to an extreme. But the muted colors, graininess, slight wobble, and other qualities of cel animation were caused by the physicality of the materials and the fact that each frame was photographed. Difficult to replicate digitally (not impossible, but takes work. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjX-j5OzeVg , you could apply this over non-3D art as well.)

>>7630816
>2000's were peak colorful.
Your screenshot still has muted colors. Nothing in that image is excessively high chroma. They're all dulled down, they just look bolder because th background is pastel to an extreme.

>>7630801
Like I said, if there is a will there is a way, I can tell you right now, the old tech are engineering problem, just get the right guys and solve the problems. You got to reinvent the wheel and solve each problem of why cel shading was abandoned in the first place, create new solutions to each problem, and make cel shading easy and cool again. The authentic feeling can be recreate thriugh new tech. I can tell you right now you just need to envision the solutions, because you already detected all problems, that means you are already half way there! You got to hold on to that dream, and you got to envision and make it, if you can streamline the process, you will create art history, new cel shading tech for future animators, the future of cel shading is on your shoulders. You got this! I believe in you!

I know Gundam did this for I think one of their mobile games but I just cannot find the fucking video

>>7630834
https://youtu.be/F0i4i6mcueg

nvm

>>7630850
> mfw challia bull
peak as hell

>>7630744 (OP)
For ever 100 people who say that want cel animation back I'm pretty sure like 97 of those people just want good color palettes and actual shading

You most likely can emulate traditional animation digitally. Like most stuff from 2000’s. FLCL anyone?
But people tend to avoid it because it’s fake. They think it’s beneath them.
Same case with shooting movies with film vs digital. Even if it’s possible to add a convincing film filters/effects, no serious production will do it.
Muh genuine.

>>7630785
if 2 guys could get all that equipment and get good enough to make cuphead, so can a small animation studio.

>>7632433
cuphead was colored digitally.

>>7630753
coincidentally, 2012 was when sword art slopline came out

>>7632359
>>7632726
everything that was done with great difficulty in the past can be easily recreated digitally today.

>>7633881
>>7632433
I don't get why people think Cuphead is the one and only thing that's ever done hand drawn animation for a video game, other games like Skullgirls/Indivisible also featured hand drawn sprites but everyone creams their jeans over le old timey art style and forget there's a bunch of hand drawn work out there, I'd even argue a huge amount of 2D animation you see starts on paper in one way or another.

>>7630785

>>7630801
>perfect alignment
I thought they had to manually align the cel and paper, you mean it just keeps it from going out of alignment as it runs through? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MZA-ov99LU
>laser printer lines aren't going to be quite as black.
Another problem (worse in my opinion) is that the lines aren't completely solid, mine leaves tiny bits that aren't completely filled in.
>ghosting
Was this actually narrowed down to a specific cause yet?

I wish I had the space right now to experiment with this stuff, it's just too much of a pain in the ass with how small my room is.

>>7630753
>arly 2000s to 2012ish was perfect before they completely eradicated the muted colors look anime once had.
i feel im going insane, i thought the common consensus was that anime coloring had gone to shit during the early digital era with overly literal and dull colors with no harmonization, but i keep seeing posts of people now praising it because of those exact same reasons, but genuinely look at the average scene of something like fma 2003 and it just looks cheap, where's the perfection people talk about?

>>7632359
>>7633881
>"You want cel animation back because of the color pallete's and shading. I want cel animation back for a chance to buy the physical cels of my favorite animations. We are not the same."

>>7630744 (OP)
This is 2000s-2010s aesthetics. Are you a fucking zoomer or something?

>>7630744 (OP)
What the fuck was the point of this thread, why are people replying to it?

>>7639435
Because a retard thought this sequence was freshly animated but it's from the original show from 1989 and its infuriating.

>>7638932
>I thought they had to manually align the cel and paper, you mean it just keeps it from going out of alignment as it runs through?
This is a better video of the sled than the sailor moon one https://x.com/catsuka/status/1677615179196952578
You can see the short pegbar much more clearly.

>Another problem (worse in my opinion) is that the lines aren't completely solid, mine leaves tiny bits that aren't completely filled in.
Using the highest DPI and turning off toner save makes them less crispy. But yes you get a "printed" dotted look where it's lighter.

>Was this actually narrowed down to a specific cause yet?
I did some digging around using an LLM and problem seems to be related to setting the printer to the right paper setting and possibly "warming it up" first. But the basic issue is that the toner isn't all getting deposited properly and some is left on as it progresses the sheet through.

Laser printers don't have the heat/pressure settings manually adjustable and my experience has been that they don't give out what the exact pressure and heat settings are for the different paper types if you ask. So it requires trial and error.

>>7638964
>where's the perfection people talk about?
It depends on which anime you are looking at and what you are comparing it to. The dull colors roughly match what was going on in the late 90s. Excel Saga was digital (there is even a joke in the anime about this) and that was 98. Steam Boy was early 2000s and it fits in with Otomo's other works in terms of the colors. OVAs almost always have higher budgets than TV anime, but within each range there's a lot of variability. Digimon Adventure looks like absolute shit for much of the first Cour, and then gets better and worse depending on allocation as Toei realized it had potential. The movies are also fantastically done. Toei has some of the gnarliest costcutting and they really pulled out all the stops once digital lowered the floor for how bad you could make it look.

>>7630744 (OP)
For some reason there's a lot of 3D artists who have gotten really good results mimicking classic anime, but not so common in 2D.

There are some fun things you can do with Blender even in 2D, though. Stacking up 'cels' made with PBR materials and replicating all the effects physically with cycles works really well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_pegjjvf-I

>>7630744 (OP)
There's actually decent info about this ad in this video. Never really knew about some of this stuff. DB is kind of perfect for art analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g799-4rB0IM

buy an ad

>>7630744 (OP)
Always was.

The traditional inking and cell painting always looked superior to digital coloured slop, but digital is cheaper and anime is produced on wafer thin margins so they're pretty much forced into this digital colouring corner.
Maybe AI can actually save the day on this though.
Animate a modern scene and run it through a retro anime filter where the colouring isn't garish flat tones or horrible digital gradients, and instead emulates texture and mark making and brush work and all that visually enjoyable real feeling. Would probably need a lot of clean up and a good amount of supervision to make sure stuff looks ok, but we might get something good out of it.

The alternative is just stay on that digital slop grind forever as anime just becomes more and more disgusting 3D bullshit as the producers push the creatives into cheaper and cheaper and cheaper methods of working.

Because God knows as much as I'd love to see the studios actually return to traditional cel painting and hand drawn animation, because it's clearly the best fucking option by a mile, I know it's just not happening. Maybe as a one off passion project if we're lucky, but I won't hold out hope that anime will EVER look as good as the 80s/90s again.

So it's 3D slop or AI deception

Which way eastern man?

>>7648426
>So it's 3D slop or AI deception
The ad's retro look was made with filters and effects though. But, it makes me wonder how long did it take for a 30 second ad to be made like this.