Most of them look like photoshop filter as per other comments, but IU and Billie Eilish definitely looks good.

It takes the presenter about seven minutes to go from "image opened in Photoshop" to "comic-style effect applied to image", and that includes a verbal explanation of each step. (The rest of the video talks about things like making sure the image is an adequate size, and adding extra elements like borders and dialogue balloons.)

After I wrote my original comment I thought about the filters. If Photoshop had a similar effect available as a filter, I'd assume it was achieved using a similar architecture as the OP presented.

While they don't look true anime style, they look properly very cartoonish, like someone would have drawn them.

Good job to the op.

The animation style this does look like is that of 2006's A Scanner Darkly, or 2019's Undone.

Rotoscoping is the technique. Basically, you film real life and trace over the frames by hand yielding an animated version of your irl footage.

Logically, very similar during production to how Avatar was made, but doing the rendering "by hand" (and being unable to change the camera after capture).

Pretty impressive results given the budget and time requirements.

Although rotoscoping is a venerable technique, the results we're looking at with this service don't bear much stylistic resemblance to early works like Fire and Ice or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (or more recent rotoscoped works like The Little Mermaid either). If they did, I'd have given them a pass on the 'anime' claim, even though calling the Disney house style — or Bakshi's — 'anime' is still a stretch.

[0]: https://github.com/bryandlee/animegan2-pytorch [1]: https://gradio.app [2]: https://huggingface.co/spaces [3]: https://twitter.com/ak92501/status/1457033482115420160/retwe...

Else, it's too much effort. People are gonna just close the browser tab, like I did.

Yeah, glad there were examples, saved me trying it. Results are nowhere close to what I expected. Zero of them looked like anime at all, for one thing. Many truly did look like one or two basic Photoshop filters had been applied, and that was it.

I'm not sure if you're saying it's bad because you're underestimating how powerful some Photoshop filters are, or if you're saying it's good because you aren't.

The Snap filter that does something similar to this looks much better, is live, and doesn't use a ton of deep learning I think :)

I do second the observation that this isn't nearly "Anime" style by any definition or sample of the style I've ever seen. I would expect to see these results in a GTA 5 loading screen.

Those that dismiss this as nothing more than a few filters are missing the finer details of what it actually does. There is a lot of targeted tweaking, like removing double chins and other old age artefacts. There are small embellishments, like adding a twinkle to the eyes or lip gloss where none was present before. The direction of a gaze is fixed towards the camera. And of course, although it's more cartoon style than anime, the eyes do become bigger.

The quality of your results depends on how appropriate your input is. Try something that has the potential to be Disney and you will get great results.

Sure, you could (with enough practice) get similar results by manually editing a photo. But the beauty of this type of conversion is that it allows for near instant effortless experimentation and (after some other improvements) application to sequenced frames.

The active model does lean towards feminizing and westernizing the subject. Mustaches are removed and an Asian subject will receive wide open blue eyes every now and then.

As with real artwork, the eye is drawn to embelishments, exagerations, and simplification and directed by composition.

In pieces by a competant artist, these add a new level of interest and dimension to the piece.

With these images, following what makes each image is always a dead end. There is no composition and the embelishments are mechanical, random and uninteresting.

For example, I find myself wondering why the the artist chose to paint the mouth so asymetrical. Is the artist trying to express an emotion? Who is the subject, and why have the been rendered as they have. It's confusing and a challenge to critique the artwork... until I realize its just bit of randomness generated by algorithm incapable of any creativity beyond how the programmer applied generic and randomizing programming methods.

There isn't and cannot be anything unique to any of the images. Once you've studied any one of them, you've really experienced most of what the programmer/artist has contributed.

Note that Japanese anime normally uses a much simplified style to increase the production speed. This naturally results in a highly distorted(?!) depictions that even humans often find disturbing. This makes anime-style difficult to mimic.

[0] https://github.com/vijishmadhavan/Toon-Me

It does look like it doesn’t work anymore though.

https://waifu.lofiu.com/

Just not anime material I guess.

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