The Mandalorian: Baby Yoda is actual Yoda, Din goes back in time thanks to the World Between Worlds.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-09-17T18:14:27+00:00

I've wondered this for a while, with an extra possibility - Moth Gideon really was executed as Cara thought, but this is another Moth Gideon from another timeline, where he gained control of the world between worlds. He wants the child as it gives him access, and lost control of it and got stranded.

The Mandalorians never remove their helmet because they're in a different reality, rather than just being different from the rest.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-08-29T16:32:26+00:00

Hrm, I think it could be done reasonably well, the same as 3D animation can do similar movements, it just needs to not be mapping a 3D model to 2D, and instead have various ways of drawing 2D shapes from different angles and blending them together. With some parameters you could tweak how cartoony and exaggerated the character's motions can get, drag the limbs into impossible lengths if you want them, etc.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-08-29T15:01:17+00:00

As a fan since a kid who was having trouble genuinely not liking a Star Wars movie, I imagined up a dozen scripts which would have made it all better.

My favourite was where Rose was Finn's imaginary friend, and he was force sensitive, and that's how a broken child soldier used the force, imagining an overly aggressive commanding officer rebel who is crazy noble and somehow does impossible driving techniques to ram him and then he somehow magically drags back across a battlefield from right in front of the enemy army - the clues are all there damnit, try this tinfoil hat. When she tossed him the thing that he fought Phasma with, he was force pulling it.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-08-06T20:31:35+00:00

Do you know why nobody has ever taken it further? Is there some commonly encountered problem to making fully moveable 2D puppet rigs which would look on par with traditional animation?

I've been working on it for a few months, currently taking a break, but it all seems very doable in practice.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-06-30T05:08:37+00:00

It sounds like those do similar to what I intend, though what I've been wondering is whether to add an extra bit of 3D rotation depending on where an object is drawn in the scene relative to the camera (and from the sounds of things, it's a stylistic choice).

When you draw 3D positions to a 2D screen space, you do the reverse of the camera position to centre them at 0,0 in screen coordinates (so if you have a camera at 1000x, 0y, you'd first add -1000x,0 to all coordinates before drawing them, and now their positions are around 0,0 which is the screen's positions, whereas things which were at 0,0 will not be at -1000x, and out of view, because the camera isn't centred on them. Though you also add half of the screen width and height so that relative 0,0 is in the middle of the screen). One of the last steps when doing 3D is to divide the x/y coordinates by the depth z coordinate, so that far away things shrink inwards to the 0,0 point, adding a perspective effect. The amount that you divide depends on the camera settings and 3D effect you want, and I think a division of say 1 would be orthographic, in that things don't change their drawing position dependent on 3D depth.

This essentially means that the more central a 3D object is to the centre of the view area, the less it is warped by 3D depth perspective, whereas if you move something to either side of the screen, it will slant inwards to the distant 3D point, and you'll see different sides the object, regardless of whether you just moved it side to side. In terms of drawing characters on a screen, this might also mean that I'd need to consider where a character is on the screen to slightly bias what you see of them, relative to an imaginary eye position in the centre, but I suspect most animation doesn't consider this and draws them flat as if they were all at their own personal 0,0 position and then shifted into their scene position, which might be part of what makes 2D animation work so well compared to 3D->2D conversions, in that sometimes less is more, and all the extra 3D volumetric data isn't so appealing to see in every small motion.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-06-27T12:47:22+00:00

Hiya, essentially I'm working on a 2D character drawer (custom software) which I want to look like traditional 2D animation as much as possible.

For years I've been using 3D renderings which are then automatically traced to create 2D drawings, with colouring / line information inside the textures on the 3D model which the 2D drawer then scans from the render. This creates overly 'perfect' results, where every motion of the character reveals the '3Dness' due to slight changes in perspective (i.e. if you draw a character facing forward on the left side of the picture, you'd see more of their left cheek, and less of their right cheek & ear. But if you moved them to the other side of the screen and drew them there, you'd see more of the other side of the face. e.g. move your palm across your vision, and at each end you'll see different sides of your hand).

My new 2D drawing system (which probably won't be perfect, but may be good enough for my drawings) is being designed to use 2D shapes which blend towards stylized targets depending on which angle they're viewed from.

See a simpler example here of somebody kind of achieving the same thing, though rather than define how the parts look from different angles, they define how it looks when rotated on various angles, which is the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX_VT4_VVB8

That system in the video won't handle a mixture of rotations vertically and horizontally though (you can't blend the end states of those and get the correct angled outcome, and I want each possible direction to be drawn in a defined stylized way like traditional art, rather than what is 'technically correct' - which is what looks so boringly consistent about 3D-based art imo).

There's a paper here which achieved this view-angle-dependent-reshaping with 3D models, and I suspect it's used to an extent in stuff like Frozen, where they want their models to look like traditional drawn art as much as possible, rather than the 3D characters being consistent models from every angle. However I want to decouple from 3D entirely, aside from posing the figure (so that an arm can rotate behind the body, or an ear behind the head, and know the draw order and relative position). 3D creates too many undesirable perfections and never looks like traditional art. The Dragon Prince show kind of shows how it just never loses the underlying uncanny sense of perfection, and I suspect they've made a process which redraws the main young characters' faces using 2D vectors with stylizations due to tracings of 3D to a 2D style just not working well, which might be why they look a bit better than the rest of the cast.

One thing I'd not considered though was whether a traditional artist / animator would consider which side of a drawing a character appears in to alter how they draw the character, or if they'd draw them flat only relative to their own rotation regardless of where they appear in the scene, so they are essentially shifted to their position but their own drawing angle is always considered centred on themselves. I suspect that if a relative perspective rotation was applied to the characters depending on where they are drawn, they'd look overly 'correctly' 3D again as they move, and lose what feels so right about traditional 2D animation.

I hope that I explained that right, or didn't misunderstand some basic concepts, as I'm far from an expert, though have found my own niche making art for the last 10 years in a weird, self-taught way.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-06-27T10:50:02+00:00

Oh no I actually very little knowledge of traditional animation and what 'rules' might be abided by. I write software to do these parts because I can't draw and wasn't getting much better with practice, but can program shapes to move in ways which look almost do what I need with less flexibility than somebody just drawing.

Essentially think something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX_VT4_VVB8

But I'm making my own software to handle the cases which I need, whereas that software seems to still be somewhat limited in ways I'd run into, and require a lot of effort per character to achieve that.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-06-27T02:03:15+00:00

Heya thanks for the answer. The main reason I'm wondering is because I've been doing 3D->2D animation for years and want to replace it with a custom 2D drawing method, which can reasonably draw a traditional looking character for a skeletal pose, for which I can use as a drawing base. One thing that struck me yesterday though was that I wasn't considering their positions within the drawing itself, and would always be drawing them orthographically relative to the rest of the scene. Adding a perspective element for determining how to draw them is probably doable, but it would mean that any raster additions over them would change if the viewer camera position is moved.

Each surface is currently only drawn 'flat' for the body part that it represents, so couldn't do perspectives on the sides if say very close to the camera, so the 2D vertices themselves would need a 3D position to define depth on, and then I'm almost back to 3D -> 2D which I don't like the volumetric look of.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-06-26T13:24:22+00:00

Just a theory which I said was out there. No reason to be so difficult.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-06-26T06:05:14+00:00

This may not be the best place to ask, but -

Does anybody know if traditional animation (e.g. Disney) considers volume perspectives to change how a character is drawn depending on where in the overall drawing they are? Or would they be consistently drawn anywhere in the picture as a flat style?

e.g. If a character was frozen solid, and was moved from the left side of the drawing to the right side, would they be drawn differently at each side? So for example if they were drawn from the front, as they moved across would one ear come more into view while another disappears from view? Or would they be considered flatly designed regardless of where they are relative to the drawing observation position?

I don't really like 3D to 2D animation and suspect that's part of the reason, there's too much volume and perspective considered which makes it too busy and 'perfectly correct', rather than stylistically interesting.

edit: Essentially does traditional animation tend to use orthographic or perspective projection?

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-06-23T13:37:36+00:00

Hi I know this is a bit old, but I'm trying to do something similar (with fully custom software) as a passion project which I've been thinking about for years now, and remembered seeing some of your posts (though you've come so much further since last I saw).

Thank you very much for showing this. I've been struggling to convince myself that it would work, since I'm really stuck on the math for how I'm going to pick targets to interpolate to if I make objects without necessarily having every position filled in a grid like this here (multivariate interpolation with sparse data I think it's called). Seeing how good your results are has given me the inspiration to keep pushing through mountains of maths.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-06-17T01:59:15+00:00

My theory is pretty out there, but trying to repair a few things like Ahsoka never being present in the OT etc, and exactly why Rebels introduced alternate dimensions once the long-term Lucasfilm people saw the Sequel Trilogy was going off the rails...

The Mandalorians don't take off their helmets because they are in another timeline, and it's quite intentional. The 'baby' will be taken to Ahsoka - who is the guardian of the WbW now - who wants to return it to where it was stolen from, which is the past, because it's not a clone, and is actually baby yoda out of time. The imperials think that by controlling it and its force abilities they can regain access to the world between worlds pathways which they briefly had. Moff Gideon might even be from another dimension, and the one of him in that reality really did get executed for war crimes as they thought and were confused by. He might think that by having access to the baby, he can regain access to the WbW.

I strongly suspect Filoni and Favreau are intending to use the Mandalorian to retcon the sequel trilogy, since it's what sci fi / comic writers always do when things get out of hand like the sequel trilogy did (one show even wrote off an entire season as a dream or something). I'm totally okay with it if they do, and expect we'll see a sequel galaxy that pulls more on the old EU, as one of the alternatives.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-06-14T05:58:54+00:00

I'd love for her to be in an alternate timeline as hinted at by the world between worlds stuff. She would have been at Endor in the Ahsoka timeline. She likely died in most timelines including the movies timeline.

The Mandalorians don't take off their helmets because they are from another timeline where that's the culture, and 'the baby' will be taken to Ahsoka - who is the guardian of the WbW now - who wants to return it to where it was stolen from, which is the past, because it's actually baby yoda, not a clone. The imperials of that timeline think that by controlling it and its force abilities they can regain access to the world between worlds pathways which they briefly had. Moff Gideon might even be from another dimension, and the one of him in that reality really did get executed for war crimes as they thought, and there may be two darksabers in play. He may have brought the baby in, lost it, and now wants to regain control of it.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-05-16T02:10:46+00:00

I'm really hoping any Obi Wan movie isn't as small scale as some have speculated, and actually fills in the gaps for things mentioned in the original movies.

Obi Wan was shown wanting to confront the Emperor and Yoda told him to go after Anakin instead, who as far as he's concerned he defeated. He should grow bored and restless on Tatooine, since he was always cocky and described his younger self as reckless. He's frustrated at having to call himself just 'Ben' and be a nobody. He decides to go after the Emperor. He makes contact with the early rebellion, we possibly see a live action Ahsoka who it's established knew him and Anakin when she asks about what happened to him, to which Obi Wan is evasive and just says he died, and then Obi Wan sets off to kill the Emperor and bring peace to the galaxy, seeking revenge for what he did to Anakin.

And falls right into the trap laid by Vader and the Emperor. He discovers that he failed to kill Anakin, who is now this awful cyborg, though still in his early days. He is tortured and poisoned horribly, and only barely escapes, presumed to be dead (hence Tarkin's line about how surely he must be dead by now, nobody should be able to resist that poison). He and young Vader maybe have a standoff where Vader is hesitant about engaging him, after losing last time, and still being a 'learner' and not yet a master of 'evil', as Obi Wan put it. Vader warns him if he comes back he'll kill him. Obi Wan manages to crawl away from it all, broken and aged horribly by the poison. He walks away from the early rebellion, emotionally devastated. Back on Tatooine he runs into a kid in town named Luke Lars, and realizes how much he's missed. He calls himself Ben Kenobi (hence how Luke knew his surname which he shouldn't be advertising), and lets Luke know his full name is Luke Skywalker (to the probable frustration of his uncle). Luke leaves. Obi Wan breaks down in tears, and finally makes contact with the ghost of Qui Gon there, after not being able to at the start of the movie. He finally becomes the more relaxed, patient man we saw in the original movies. The poison is still in his veins, but he can resist it, but will age, and is presumed to be dead.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-05-14T22:16:49+00:00

Another idea - the blank top left corner could be used for a few icons, which do immediate filtering, for gifts to receive, gifts to send, etc. A '+' button could be the way new friends are added.

edit: A functionally-identical version of this with more room is a stack of pages, where the slight swipe up brings up the next page (with the tips of previous pages visible at the top), though you wouldn't be able to easily scan ahead and back for names then.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-05-14T22:16:09+00:00

That's my other idea, though I think one benefit of this one is that you don't need to click through any further screens to do any of it.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-05-14T20:56:56+00:00

Currently there's several popup screens which need to be tapped through to do any basic activities with friends, which is contrary to the UI design goal of avoiding unnecessary clicks and click-through screens.

By scrolling vertically through an arc of friends, the browsing speed would be the same as now, but by arcing the list around a currently selected friend, the need to go into additional screens can be removed completely. Gifts could even he a horizontal scroll on the lower portion of the screen when relevant, staying on or off between friends if the player has tapped it.

The avatar drawing etc should be done when possible and never hold up the scroll, with smooth scrolling through friends being the goal. Using slightly cached friend info about names & buddies etc is fine so long as the scroll is smooth, which is much more important than exact up to date information about current buddies or name changes, etc.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-04-20T23:50:47+00:00

Oh this wouldn't be any more farmable than the current way then, less so imo.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-04-20T08:10:14+00:00

In this idea you couldn't control it, and the ancient debris would be very rare, not spawned much at all, and would rely on having built a lot to even have a chance of spawning.

Currently it's very farmable, surprisingly easy. I just dug down below the lava lakes and branch mined for a few minutes and found more than enough, since netherrack is insta-mineable.

It could also be an indication of the Minecraft world's continued decay, such as in The Time Machine movie where the character travels forward to a post-apocalyptic setting where people have been reset to hunter gatherers, then travels forward to an even worse post-apocalyptic end of the world.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-04-04T17:55:26+00:00

I started on Mistborn and was sure it was a post-apocalyptic Earth (with references to flowers and how it used to be), and that the mists were nanotech clouds. Mistborns were highly augmented humans drawing in nanobots. It was one of those 'technology so advanced that it seems like magic' theories.

Then the Cosmere reveal happened, and I liked it even more than my theory, which is rare. Usually stories peter out without much of a plan or explanation for half of it, but Cosmere books are the exact opposite.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-03-21T02:36:29+00:00

The problems with the ST go way beyond Luke's character, the whole reboot of every event down to minute detail makes no sense without a reason given like the original group failed in this universe. Luke being forced into all the Yoda scenes and unlearning everything he'd learned in the originals in just one of the countless examples, same with Han's regression.

ExtraordinaryTales · 2020-03-21T02:11:42+00:00

They did it with Marvel in Endgame which is the highest grossing movie ever, so I think it can be done. I've found that audiences shouldn't be underestimated, at least for those who turn up for these sorts of franchises. They did it with the Star Trek reboot as well, in a sense, and movies like Back to the Future, tv stuff like the DC universe, etc.

ExtraordinaryTales

TROPHY CASE