[krapp]

Isn't drawing inbetweens one of the ways a lot of animators break into the industry? Key animation is usually an expert position for lead animators, but how will anyone become a key animator without being able to learn the process?

[magicmicah85]

I would think the software with AI becomes available to the students for learning and starting with key animations becomes the thing you learn how to do as a novice. I don’t know how feasible that is, but in my experience software and techniques become more obtainable over time.

[dylan604]

Who does that style animation today? It seems so much of it is 3D animated with a cell style render. I'm not an anime fan, so maybe somebody is still doing cell based animation, but that would blow my mind. So breaking into the industry seems very strange to me.

[krapp]

The problem of denying animators necessary fundamental experiences by automating the opportunities to learn that experience away with AI is the same problem either way. You can't just arbitrarily remove human skill and effort from the creative process and expect the end result to be more efficient and of equal or greater quality, anymore than you can expect the quality of a codebase to always improve by removing lines of code. The problem here isn't explicitly that inbetweeners exist, it's that animators aren't being paid commensurate to their Abilities.

AI isn't simply a tool like Photoshop or Blender, which augment an artist's existing skill. AI is designed to simulate and replace human creativity in the same way automation replaced physical human labor elsewhere. That's a fundamental difference. Replace physical animation with cel animation and the skill and talent of the animators still matter, even translated to another paradigm. Replace a human artist with AI, and the value of their talent is just gone. Even if the AI is trained on that specific artist's work, it can't grow and expand its horizons the way that human artist can, it can only iterate on what data the model already makes available, and express generalities based on that.

And why bother have human beings involved at all when you can just train an AI to do the whole thing? The whole business case for AI is devaluing the market value of human creative/knowledge based labor or automating it away altogether.

[dylan604]

I never suggested using AI. You've confused the topic. I simply asked who was animated with hand drawn cells. Switching to a 3D animated but cell rendered output has nothing to do with AI. Just look at Beauty and the Beast. Look at Archer. Look at so many anime titles. Hand drawn/painted cells was just not practical, and the whole industry changed.

None of that suggests using AI.

[ronsor]

Anime is traditionally done frame by frame. Mostly America focused on the 3D craze or puppets/Flash-style.

[dylan604]

Traditionally doesn't mean squat for someone trying to break into the industry today as the original comment proposed. Mostly America is also a bizarre comment as well. Just look at all of the animated content from Disney, WB, etc to see all of the hand drawn/painted frame-by-frame. So I'm really not sure of your point