What You Need to Know:
- The Wuhan University and Hubei University of Technology have developed a program called AnimeGAN that can quickly transform real-life photos into anime-style images like those from Makoto Shinkai or Hayao Miyazaki!
- In the abstract of the paper regarding AnimeGAN, the scientists refer to the difficulty and laboriousness of making anime by hand since there are so many factors to consider like lines, shadowing, lighting, textures, colors and more. With AnimeGAN, all of these adjustments are made automatically after properly training it, which would change the way animation in done if it is perfected!
- Long story short, each artist's style has a different RGB balance; Miyazaki's is more on the yellow side and features more detailed outlines. AnimeGAN can do that! The way the program is now works best with landscape images where people aren't the main focus. If you wanted to—and know how to—though, the paper mentions being able to train the program with images of people so that it leaarns how to properly transform them too!
- If you're into the IT part of it, you can read the whole paper on GitHub.
- If you want the TLDR version, this GitHub article will give you the overall science of it (in somewhat more layman terms) and it's open source so you can get it and play with it yourself if you're into that! Make sure to share your pics if you do!
Source: github
There's a filter for ya, Honey-chan!
That would be my favorite! I hope they do make it into one!