I remember doing web animation back in 2000, and having to ink each penciled frame by hand, vectorizing the inked drawing and then coloring it in Flash. Now you can train a CNN to vector pencil drawings. Probably train a CNN to color everything too!
While I can see a lot of animation tasks being eliminated, I would like to imagine that they would hold onto some artists to spend some of that saved time embellishing and strengthening the quality of the final work.
But most of the heavy lifting will now be done with the press of a button. It's like Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
As with most deep learning papers, though, the results aren't independently reproducible. The dataset is private, the source is closed, and it hasn't been turned into a product. The magic inking button is still a ways off yet.
I'm really asking, because I've downloaded the project and skimmed the paper, but haven't had time to vet these assumptions. On the face of it, it seems everything is provided, but you've vetted it further and learned that isn't true?
They're not required to release code and a dataset. If you can get away with doing less why not? Everyone in every discipline does this. Finance, home improvement, retail, consulting...
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