I'll be the first to say, I don't know all that terribly much about animation. But I can tell, all the same, that there are some pretty distinct methods of animation. And, I can certainly imagine that someone might like certain types of animation but not others.

For instance, a fairly common method of animation (of a sort) is where an otherwise still image is distorted:

post #1033175

This is a fairly good example. You can see clearly that the actual art isn't being redrawn, but rather is being distorted into a new shape. This is particularly apparent in the second section of movement, on the lower body of the fox - the entire crotch area seems to extend and distort forward - such oddities are rather particular to this sort of animation.

Another sort of animation is puppet animation:

post #22374

Common in flash, but can be done in other programs as well. Largely made up of puppet pieces that can move independently.

There's also frame-by-frame animation, which I think is mostly what this consists of:

post #841859

You can clearly tell there's a lot of redrawing going on here, rather than repositioning or distorting...

There are other types of animation, of course. Manipulating 3d models, pixel animation... I'm sure others I'm not thinking of right now... And, of course, it's possible for an image to contain multiple types, but usually there's a dominant technique. Again, this isn't really my area of expertise though, so... Yeah.

But my point is that it is entirely possible to have different preferences for these sorts of things. Someone may want to search for certain types of animation, exclude or blacklist certain types, or whatever else.

So I wonder if we should try to reflect that in tagging?

• Kind of joking, but I thought of 'goonimation' for the first example (they tend to move like goo)

• puppet animation seems pretty uncontroversial IMO, it would just be a question of what exact tag name to use. Well.. it's basically how all 3d animation works too, so there might be some difficulty there.

• maybe some overlap between puppet and goo? for example, if this was furry, it'd be pretty reasonable to tag it with both, IMO.

• Frame-by-frame is a bit more complicated IMO. It divides at least into stop-motion (or jump-scare) and smooth.

• Pixel animation and 3d model animation don't need their own tags, that's just animation pixel_art / animation 3d AFAICS.

Personally: I certainly have preferences (♥pixel,♥smooth-frame-by-frame,⚔3d,⚔puppet, meh on goo-animation.) . But I wouldn't say they are strong enough that I would either search or blacklist them.

Yeah, I wouldn't expect pixel or 3d animation to require their own tags, because for our purposes there's already a reasonable way to search for them. That's why I mentioned them more as an afterthought than in the main body.

3d animation is a bit more complicated in reality, because you can have an animation which appears 2d, but which is actually 3d "behind the scenes", but that's really nuanced and difficult to tell.

I have reasonably strong preferences. I have 3d blacklisted, so that's not relevant right now, but I probably would cut out distortion animations from my searches frequently. Probably not enough to actually blacklist, but I'm really not a fan.

This was discussed in chat not to long ago.
The type of animation where the animation looks like wet cardboard is called Puppet Warp, which I proposed Puppet_Warp_(animation) for. Various other terms such as Wet_Cardboard_(animation), Lazy_Mans_Animation_(animation) which were suggested too. I was too lazy to make a forum post about it but yeah I would really like a method to blacklist lazy man's animation, especially since it is hard to find flash animations that are not that now. :v

Chaser said:
This was discussed in chat not to long ago.
The type of animation where the animation looks like wet cardboard is called Puppet Warp, which I proposed Puppet_Warp_(animation) for. Various other terms such as Wet_Cardboard_(animation), Lazy_Mans_Animation_(animation) which were suggested too. I was too lazy to make a forum post about it but yeah I would really like a method to blacklist lazy man's animation. :v

Yeah realistically we'd go with puppet_warp to avoid insulting anyone, but you really nailed why I dislike that sort of animation.

Not sure about the rest, but it'd be useful to have a tag for tween animations.

There's been more and more of those lately, and many of them have been low quality. The kind you can make in a couple of minutes from any still image. They're not currently searchable, and some users would likely want to blacklist those.

Clawdragons said:
3d animation is a bit more complicated in reality, because you can have an animation which appears 2d, but which is actually 3d "behind the scenes", but that's really nuanced and difficult to tell.

I guess you mean billboarding &| particle systems &| (toon shading | custom shaders) . But that doesn't really matter -- if we tagged something that looked 2d as 3d, then that would not be TWYS.

[&| = and/or]

Similar argument applies to all the other tags we might propose, of course ("Even if you know it's not actually X, if it looks convincingly X, tagging it X is what's appropriate")

savageorange said:
I guess you mean billboarding &| particle systems &| (toon shading | custom shaders) . But that doesn't really matter -- if we tagged something that looked 2d as 3d, then that would not be TWYS.

[&| = and/or]

Similar argument applies to all the other tags we might propose, of course ("Even if you know it's not actually X, if it looks convincingly X, tagging it X is what's appropriate")

I was certainly not proposing that we tagged things that look 2d with 3d. I was just saying that some animations render things in 3d and then apply a 2d "skin" to them (to my understanding).

Again, I'm not very well versed in this subject, but the gist of what I'm saying is that no, I wasn't suggesting tagging 2d looking things as 3d, was just saying that the technique of using 3d rendering for animations isn't exclusively linked to 3d-appearing animations - but that such a thing isn't really relevant to our tagging.

I guess? Like, I have experience in both 2d animation and 3d animation, and I'm not totally sure what it is you're referring to, could be a few things (like, just off the top of my head, just ordinary rendering, Blender's "Freestyle" renderer, Cel shading / custom shaders, postprocessing hacks, lattice deformation animation like Spine, a truckload of different things you can do with texture baking and extra rendering outputs like z-depth... Stuff like Guilty Gear XRD does which is basically a pileup of loads of different tricks and textures to get high quality 2d-looking output from a 3d mesh)

There are really so many options that fit the vague description you gave, that,well.. *shrugs*

savageorange said:
I guess? Like, I have experience in both 2d animation and 3d animation, and I'm not totally sure what it is you're referring to, could be a few things (like, just off the top of my head, just ordinary rendering, Blender's "Freestyle" renderer, Cel shading / custom shaders, postprocessing hacks, lattice deformation animation like Spine, a truckload of different things you can do with texture baking and extra rendering outputs like z-depth... Stuff like Guilty Gear XRD does which is basically a pileup of loads of different tricks and textures to get high quality 2d-looking output from a 3d mesh)

There are really so many options that fit the vague description you gave, that,well.. *shrugs*

That would be a result of how little I know about the subject outside of the very basics. As a result I'm just going to stand off here, because as I've repeatedly mentioned I'm in out of my depth.

The usual term used here is "base images".

We could use a tag single_base_image for animations that only show a single image being morphed and cut up, with no more than 50% of it being redrawn. Note that there's significant difference between "morphing", "cutting up" and "redrawing"

While that's technically correct, it doesn't seem very self-descriptive (base of what? I could see people tagging it for 'collection of minor variants' image sets, such as kevinsano often puts out)

single_base_frame MIGHT be slightly better (it does connect it more directly to animation, but could also be construed as related to comics)

But I think really that both terms are probably too technical -- the whole 'base image' idea is really about how the image was made, even though you might say that the method can be inferred from the results.

What does morphing cover? Nothing much, apparently. Might suit.

forum #182605
tag_group:art#seealso

Especially I would like to see these being tagged for couple reasons, puppet animation already being mentioned.

Another thing for me personally, I would seriously like to be able to search flash animations, which use vector graphics and flash itself to do the work. Because lately, flash has become only a container to view video files and flash basically only allows low quality flv videos to be embedded in itself. (and right now the tag vector seems to consist of art that looks like it's made with vectors and posts themselves are bitmaps)

^ +1
vector_animation ?

(although there might be corner cases involving flashes that contain videos that are rendered vector animation. Thankfully, I can't think of any such flashes offhand)

"Vector" is used as a noun in certain areas, as in "I made a vector of..". This should explain why all our so-called vectors are PNGs. A little bit of explanation on the wiki probably wouldn't go astray.

Clawdragons said:
For instance, a fairly common method of animation (of a sort) is where an otherwise still image is distorted:

post #1033175

This is a fairly good example. You can see clearly that the actual art isn't being redrawn, but rather is being distorted into a new shape. This is particularly apparent in the second section of movement, on the lower body of the fox - the entire crotch area seems to extend and distort forward - such oddities are rather particular to this sort of animation.

Image morphing. Maybe call it morphing or morphing_animation or something.

I don't understand why puppet_warp or puppet_warp_(animation) are bad choices? Morphing seems like it could get confused for transformation

@Genjar: How about motion_tween for those? That is what Macromedia (Flash) used to call it and Adobe still uses it.

Clawdragons said:
I don't understand why puppet_warp or puppet_warp_(animation) are bad choices? Morphing seems like it could get confused for transformation

By puppet, I assume you mean marionette. Not all puppets animate the same way.

Many similar terms can and often do get mixed up with each other. That's no reason not to use both if they mean two different things.

One clear line I would also like to be drawn is with the first examples morphing and second examples simple assets being moved around. In first image everything is being distorted, while other moves stuff as whole and I'm certain many would maybe like to search or blacklist one but not another.

Puppet_warp and Puppet_move? I would be fine with morphing, but that would not be good term for assets being moved as almost nothing is actually morphed.

savageorange said:
^ +1
vector_animation ?

(although there might be corner cases involving flashes that contain videos that are rendered vector animation. Thankfully, I can't think of any such flashes offhand)

"Vector" is used as a noun in certain areas, as in "I made a vector of..". This should explain why all our so-called vectors are PNGs. A little bit of explanation on the wiki probably wouldn't go astray.

Problem with that it would exclude flash files which are made with vectors, but do not contain animation.

Vector_(graphics) to have all posts that are mainly made with vector graphics, then maybe vector_(artwork) to contain bitmaps that were created with vectorized graphics and maybe disambig vector as then there's also vector_the_crocodile. As site does not allow vector filetypes outside swf, some level of tag for bitmaps should still be in place.

Also one tag already in use and most likely won't cause any arguments is frame-by-frame.

BlueDingo said:
By puppet, I assume you mean marionette. Not all puppets animate the same way.

Many similar terms can and often do get mixed up with each other. That's no reason not to use both if they mean two different things.

In adobe flash it is referred to puppet warp, see https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/warp-images-shapes-paths.html

It seems like the consensus is that at the very least the distortion type of animation is a fine and useful thing to tag, and we're just arguing about what to call the tag.

To that end I suggest that we just pick something for now, and if we decide that there's a better term, we can alias it. Sound good?

Clawdragons said:
But my point is that it is entirely possible to have different preferences for these sorts of things. Someone may want to search for certain types of animation, exclude or blacklist certain types, or whatever else.

So I wonder if we should try to reflect that in tagging?

Sounds like an excellent idea, imo

• added to tag group:art

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Also related (kinda)
https://e621.net/forum/show/182605