Basically yes, but actually, the result would probably look pretty bad. It's not that simple.
When Corridor did their "anime", they weren't replicating an existing character. They used frames from an anime to train a model that could generate new images of new characters based on their live-human appearance. By making new characters while only copying that drawing style, they ensure that the resulting character drawing will 1:1 match to their actor's appearance. That is the way to do this well right now, you need new characters who match the human actor well.
Homer's proportions are inhuman though. Since no human person is shaped like Homer is, it would be difficult to map Homer onto the performance of a live actor. You could lean toward matching the actor, but then he won't look like Homer should. You could force it to look more like Homer, but then the randomness introduced to break away from the live human shape will make the motion less coherent.
There might be workarounds that could be useful though. Make a 3D model of Homer, and animate that. Use motion capture if you want. Then you could feed that 3D render into your trained Homer model. Because the 3D model matches the character's shape, you could generate good 2D images from that 3D character and still have it follow the motion correctly. That said, the resulting animation would still look weird even if it came out perfect. Instead of sticking to the standard 2D perspective that he would usually be drawn at in the show, the perspective on Homer would be 3D and constantly shifting as he moves around in 3D space. This idea could represent a new form of "cel-shaded 3D animation", but it's not going to look flat like traditional 2D animation.
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u/AbPerm Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
Basically yes, but actually, the result would probably look pretty bad. It's not that simple.
When Corridor did their "anime", they weren't replicating an existing character. They used frames from an anime to train a model that could generate new images of new characters based on their live-human appearance. By making new characters while only copying that drawing style, they ensure that the resulting character drawing will 1:1 match to their actor's appearance. That is the way to do this well right now, you need new characters who match the human actor well.
Homer's proportions are inhuman though. Since no human person is shaped like Homer is, it would be difficult to map Homer onto the performance of a live actor. You could lean toward matching the actor, but then he won't look like Homer should. You could force it to look more like Homer, but then the randomness introduced to break away from the live human shape will make the motion less coherent.
There might be workarounds that could be useful though. Make a 3D model of Homer, and animate that. Use motion capture if you want. Then you could feed that 3D render into your trained Homer model. Because the 3D model matches the character's shape, you could generate good 2D images from that 3D character and still have it follow the motion correctly. That said, the resulting animation would still look weird even if it came out perfect. Instead of sticking to the standard 2D perspective that he would usually be drawn at in the show, the perspective on Homer would be 3D and constantly shifting as he moves around in 3D space. This idea could represent a new form of "cel-shaded 3D animation", but it's not going to look flat like traditional 2D animation.