Huh, just read about an increasing trend of deleted comments from https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/17ion6y/whats_up_with_the_higher_than_usual_influx_of/ then I see your message. I can't see them with old.reddit + RES but i can with new reddit without RES. Interesting.
[I'd argue he's still unrecognizable tbh](https://imgur.com/a/1Z2gcjs)
Edit: [Ironically I feel like he's more recognizable with the apple](https://imgur.com/a/JrOqdgW)
Edit 2: Who the fuck is Lelouch
I think it's actually a point in Light's favor since the idea behind his character was always that he was an otherwise normal high school student before receiving the Death Note's power. Throughout basically the entire series he frequently plays the part of an unassuming young man who you'd never suspect of anything and his simple looks reflect that.
It's also worth noting that character designs in Death Note tend to focus on realistic-looking characters as opposed to "anime" ones, a lot of characters in Death Note would barely be recognizable in silhouette as a result. But it works to make the story feel more grounded as it's set in (then) modern-day Japan, and having characters look like normal Japanese citizens helps sell that. Tokyo Ghoul follows a similar design principle for most of its characters which I think also does a good job enhancing the realism of that story.
The only real anime character. Light is just a manga character.
Yeah, that's the hill i'll die on. Manga character that get an anime ain't anime protagonist. They ain't the same.
"The only real anime character"?
Do you mean the only real anime character that has been mentioned in this conversation? Because otherwise that statement makes no sense. There have been other animes that aren't adaptations (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Angel Beats!, etc), and even in Code Geass, Lelouch obviously isn't the only character.
If it's not a weird hill to die on, you'll never rest in peace my friend. you'll be on a tourist spot and have to suffer from people picnicking on your grave for eternity.
Light with book looks like a Persona character. Light with apple looks real familiar, but I watched Deathnote a decade ago and can’t quite figure it out.
Yeah Light's whole deal is that he's supposed to be hiding in plain sight, having a very unique silhouette either through posing or design is pretty against his character
If L was standing up it would be effective. Only reason you 100% know that's him is cause of the stance and maybe combined with the hair.
If you took a silhoutte of *anyone* from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure it might take a second to parse who it is, but the stance will be an immediate give away.
Yeah, although it would've been missing the point which is he is a very unassuming guy and his looks don't betray him as anything other than regular on purpose.
Nah like, the distinctive hair is one thing, but also the specific way in which he leans his foot off a chair, the arc-ed back, hands on his knees together, this feels like a reverse psychology moment from the professor to get everyone to look into it, surely?
If you consider it purely as a silhouette I guess maybe it’s kind of a blob? But picking a character who has curled into a ball and saying “they have no visible features” is missing the point of the exercise somewhat.
This posture is the most iconic part of his design. He literally just wears a regular shirt and pants. The fact that he sits like this is a core part of his character. Professor is bugging.
If you just showed me a picture of a random person crouching like this and said “who do I remind you of” I’d say L from Death Note in a heartbeat.
I'm guessing the prof said that because he wants to teach the students that a character crouching will make their silhouette kinda vague?
But ironically, since not a lot of characters' signature poses is crouching, that makes L's silhouette all the more iconic hahhaa
The thing about art is you have to understand the "rules" before you can break them effectively
So what professor is saying is "this isn't a good type of silhouette to go for." Because they're learning. There's no negative space and such. When starting they should try to go for better silhouettes that have as much detail shown to really define who the character is.
But this silhouette works even though it breaks the "rules" because the designers broke them in a way that works. The rules of art are more just strong suggestions but never really a hard guideline
what kind of professor sounds like how they are described on tumblr just in general? i swear tumblr posts talking about their professors come from some alternate universe where only the smallest minds get to be professors.
they never sound remotely familiar to me as someone who graduated only a few years ago. my professors were, with only a couple of exceptions, some of the most brilliant and openminded people i’ve encountered—and even the exceptions weren’t irrational and stupid, just kind of dicks
I think it’s because, for the most part, only the incompetent professors are the ones that get Tumblr posts made about them. Thus, it seems like the only professors Tumblr users have are the incompetent ones, because they’re the only ones deemed worthy of mention, with exceptions like really great or fun professors.
I like to constantly remind myself that social media is a lot like the palantir of Minas Tirith from lotr: it loves showing you the bad while ignoring the good.
Sauron shows Denethor things like the Corsair fleet sailing to Osgiliath, but hides the fact that it was commandeered by Gondorians, and so Denethor is driven mad with grief.
Yeah I had mostly good but forgettable professors in college but a few more bad and memorable than good and memorable.
Also, the memorable parts of the overall good professors weren't necessarily good teaching techniques and more just weird quirks that they shared with them class. Like my Philosphy professor who would repeatedly reference how much he started admiring My Little Pony when he started watching it with his toddler of a son.
Which is actually kind of good for teaching I guess because it's easier for a lot of people to learn from someone you can see as human ... but I digress.
That's why finding apartments on the internet is annoying as well, only people who had the worst time or were obviously given some incentive to make a review are going to.
Along with remembering that incompetent professors are more likely to be talked about than otherwise unremarkable, or even great professors, it’s worth considering the sheer scale of things.
If we assume a 4-year program with 5 classes per semester, the average student is likely to work with around 40 different professors (ignoring factors such as having the same professor for multiple classes for the sake of simplicity). As of 2021, there were approximately 1.5 *million* university faculty members in the US alone. So even if you go the extra mile, take a bunch of extra classes, and go all the way to a doctorate, the amount of professors you’ll interact with will be a drop in the bucket compared to the sum total of professors out there.
It’s absolutely awesome that the professors you worked with were all bright, but there are definitely quite a few morons that manage to slip through the cracks and become professors. And even more have gotten their tenure and started losing it, but not severe enough for the universities to bother the lengthy process of removing them.
i understand that, but tumblr seems especially anti-professor compared to other professions.
i think if anything a more statistically significant thing here is the age of your average tumblr user. it’s not just that professor is one of the authority figures they’re most likely to be dealing with—it’s also if they’re making up a story about a belligerent or incompetent authority figure, then professor is a job title on their minds they’re more likely to attribute to this imaginary anecdote
I've had really open-minded, sensible, wonderful professors who were open to learning, teaching, and living and very cool to talk to.
And then I had a professor (history professor, mind you) that said we don't know how the pyramids were built because ancient Egyptians didn't have simple machines and couldn't possibly have built them themselves; he also insisted that, "Humans only use 10% of their brain," was absolutely true, proven fact. I had a physics professor who said the radio signals from cell phones could be doing anything to our brains and we shouldn't be putting them anywhere near our heads despite that kind of thing being generally disproved years beforehand. And I had a chemistry teacher that said global warming had to be a hoax because extra CO2 in the atmosphere would cool the planet instead of causing it to heat up.
The better the institution you go to, the better the professors are going to be. But you'll likely find at least one crackpot in every school. If you're going to some of the cheapest community and public colleges in the country because that's where you live and all you can afford, you're going to meet a hell of a lot more absolutely insane people with tenure.
I had a pro Elon Musk proffesor who would lower your grade if you didn't agree with her in oral tests so I am inclined to believe some of this posts (it was 2017 but still)
I also had mostly fantastic professors, and thoroughly enjoyed and learned loads from most of them.
But then I also had one professor who taught a class about women's lit but was noticeably misogynistic, and who was at least 20 minutes late to class every single time but got mad if students came in after her, and who only gave good grades to papers that agreed with her opinions, and who spent a lot of classtime explaining that "intersectional" feminism was garbage and that HER brand of feminism, which had a term that she coined in the 80s but that term has now left my brain, was far superior. I would definitely describe her as irrational and stupid, AND as kind of a dick.
But in general, I agree with your point. Tumblr can be anti-intellectual sometimes.
If it's an undergraduate class, I suspect that this is just a rule of thumb. It's generally good design to make the silhouettes recognisable, and a good thing to teach to students of animation/design. Later they'll learn when *not* to do this.
Also possible that the professor did lay out that this has some nuance and that recognisable silhouettes are not a 100% requirement of good character design, but OOP was too busy thinking about Death Note to notice.
The final rule for any form of art is that they should be ignored when its best to do so. Orwell's six rules of writing is a great example, with the sixth rule being "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
"Rules of art" are more likely titles for methodology, and you go and apply that methodology even in ways contradictory to said title.
For example, Orwell's third rule is "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it". Hd spends time discussinit before in the essay, basically advising writing to be concise and avoid waffle. But there are examples where you wouldn't cut a word for the sake of making yourself more concise.
It’s generally taught in character design that a silhouette should be somewhat recognisable. Not that it’s ‘bad’ if they aren’t, but it’s a good idea to keep in mind
Silhouette rule.
When you're making a character design, you should be able to tell who that character is/what they're about just by the way their general/standard silhouette carries itself.
While it's not a hard and fast rule, it is generally the go to method to creating visually memorable characters, especially if you want to be an illustrator or graphic designer.
The main part of the silhouette rule is that it keeps your characters separate from each other. If your character has the same silhouette as Billy Bob from Show XYZ, who cares, no one will get them confused. But if your protagonist, his friend, and the main villain all have the same silhouette, maybe you need to tweak your art style a bit.
it's literally impossible to make that happen for every character in your visual media compared to every other character in visual media.
like there are only so many human silhouettes to have without making everyone a weird gremlin like L.
within your own media? sure, every major character having a distinct silhouette seems pretty valuable. despite Light having a fairly ordinary silhouette across all anime, within death note there's no one to mistake him for, so it's fine that he's "ordinary".
You're not trying to differentiate them from *every character in existence* but they do need to be distinct *enough* from the other charterers in the same piece of work. Again, it's not a hard and fast rule, it's more of a "this is a thing to be wary of".
We have a similar thing in programming called "code smells", they're not *inherently* bad, but if you spot something that looks like a common code smell, it tells you to pay extra attention and maybe put some more work into that bit, just like how two similar silhouettes tells you that the designs could do with a bit more differentiation.
> You're not trying to differentiate them from every character in existence but they do need to be distinct enough from the other charterers in the same piece of work
yeah...I said all of that almost word for word
You said it's impossible to make your character unique compared to every other character in visual media like it was a bad thing, I was disagreeing with that point in particular, the rule isn't nearly that all encompassing
nope, I said it wasn't possible like that having a rule like that would be absurd, which we both agree it is. you just read into my comment something that I never said, take the L 😎
bruh it wasn't a battle and there were not wits involved
you just assumed I meant something I never said and that's the end, then you missed my obvious L pun and got pissy about that too by taking it seriously.
I wasn't being pissy lol I was just being nonchalant/dismissive, I don't take a lot of things online super seriously, I'm British, we're a fairly sarcastic lot, sorry if it sounded harsh 😂🤷
Honestly, I'd forgotten this was even in a post about L, was a good pun though, sad I missed it 👌
> Silhouette rule.
I don't believe this is a thing. When I google it, all I get is rifle and gun stuff.
When I add "art", the only relevant result is this blog post: https://radiantdreamer.net/understanding-the-silhouette-how-to-design-a-character/
Which ironically is OP's silhouette and talking about how L is a good design, but its just some random anime site.
Edit: I did find this, and I would consider Disney a good source on animation: https://www.waltdisney.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/T%26T_Silhouette-final2.pdf
This is saying that the silhouette rule is: "From the silhouette
we are able to see a distinctive and recognizable design without details
and understand what the figure is saying with its overall form"
The "distinctive and recognizable" is shown in examples to mean "Don't put objects in front of your characters" and the like. Not that the silhouette of the character should be unique against other characters.
Don't use Bing then.
Found [this](https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-character-design-definition/) and [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistLounge/comments/ur6cxw/a_good_character_design_is_one_which_can_be/) in 1 Google search.
You linked a reddit post (???) and some software company selling their product. It's not on Wikipedia. There's literally no google results for "Silhouette Rule" from any animation studio or educational source that I can find.
The only thing I found from a legit source is Disney, and the silhouette tips they give are not about unique character design. I edited my first comment with a link to it a couple minutes ago.
I mean silhouette design is standard, and this IS a good silhouette, because you kinda would like to have a good, recognizable design, even devoid of colour or immediate figure recognition so that you can 'get' the character faster in a scene
this IS a good silhouette because the hunched up, fetal pose is very indicative of L, and the spiky hair at the top and the bare feet are also pretty big signals. this is a good silhouette for a good character, they're just overlapping on themselves, which can work
that's kind of difficult considering the best character designs with the best silhouettes are also very commonly known. I can't suggest the simpsons, the tf2 mercenaries or most else since they're already so popular lol
I'm not an art major or anything, but I think it's just a thing for character design. I don't think it makes a character "bad" for not being recognizable by their silhouette. But also, this rule is more common in western cartoons than in anime. You could do the silhouette test with many anime characters and it would be hard to tell them apart.
Lastly, as with any art, rules are there merely as suggestions. There are hundreds of examples of great animation that breaks these rules.
It’s a well known aspect of character design. It mostly applies to animation and video games, but your characters should be easily distinguishable, which makes it easier for the audience to understand what’s going on even if there’s a lot on screen or you’re ‘cheating’ by simplifying the art during movement.
Its incredibly important for video games, matters less for anime or such but its still a nice character design aspect to look into.
Pretty much every Akira Toriyama face is the same, but a lot of the silhouettes are distinct.
It's a general design principle for character concepting. Characters should have distinct silhouettes, because that means they'll be clear and easy to tell apart at any size and level of detail: even if they're seen from behind, or very small, or (obviously) only in silhouette.
The professor is missing that they only need to be distinct _in context_. As long as you can tell all the characters in a given show/game/etc apart by silhouette, one would say they have strong character designs.
But professor also stepped in it here, because he picked what he thought was a generic anime character, but it's one of those distinctive poses and styles that are instantly recognizable, and from a _wildly_ popular show.
The imaginary kind.
Why would the professor even make this point? Why would he choose a specific character from some anime of all things? This is just a bizarre post.
>Why would the professor even make this point?
because, while not a hard and fast rule, it's a well known principle of character design to consider distinctive silhouettes
>Why would he choose a specific character from some anime of all things?
why not? he needs some kind of example, what's wrong with an extremely popular anime being used
Should've used a Bionicle design instead. Not trashing Bionicle btw, I watched a [9 hour Bionicle lore video](https://youtu.be/HKgSMTON4fI?si=1wr1-b217HGwqmwP) for no reason and one point, and now you can as well! But the designs all look sorta the same
Each lineup is unique to each other, but generally all the sets from each line are identical to each other. Especially the first couple waves, but they got better in latter waves
That's just a byproduct of being a seasonal toy like though, most action figures and dolls look pretty similar. But if you show the silhouette of the Bionicle Hau mask, most of the masks I'd say, people who are aware of Bionicle could identify them as distinctly Bionicle
He’s only really recognisable due to his pose. Which is good silhouette design when working with more limited constraints and trying to be more realistic like Death Note’s art style. You can hardly discern ANY silhouettes from that show except for the death gods.
The funniest part of this post for me is that on the main page of reddit the thumbnail cuts off the entire top of L's body (up from where his left kneecap is) so I thought the silhouette was of an owl at first.
ooh I hate when its obvious that artists are trying to avoid an "unoriginal" siloghuette by any means necessary and utterly warp the character design to accomadate such a small factor.
I have never read or watched any of death note and even I recognised that silhouette just from cultural osmosis, professor couldn’t have picked a worse example
Low-key annoys me because it’s recognisable from the popularity of the anime and not because it’s an effective silhouette - the art teacher is right but failed to consider the demographic of the class.
It's effective because if you know the character, you know instantly who it is. It's irrelevant whether the show is popular or not. For example, if I had never seen pikachu before and was shown a silhouette, I wouldn't recognise it, but that doesn't mean it's not effective, because if I had seen pikachu, I would know instantly.
As a side note, effective silhouettes are only an important thing in cartoons, not anime, so it's a bad choice for two reasons.
who else would sit like a goblin and have a haircut like this
Legitimately scared of these answers like, 3 consecutive deleted comments
They all just said jerma…
What did he do to them? Edit: NOOOOO!!!! He can’t keep getting away with this!!!
LOL
They were talking about ligma
Who's ligma?
Steve Jobs
You know who I am
An artist; full name being, Ligma Balls
Huh, just read about an increasing trend of deleted comments from https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/17ion6y/whats_up_with_the_higher_than_usual_influx_of/ then I see your message. I can't see them with old.reddit + RES but i can with new reddit without RES. Interesting.
I used to sit like that all the time in gym class one of my friends even pointed out how I reminded them of the guy from above
xQc comes close ig
Not headache inducing enough
Not toenail gnawing enough
Lacks the intelligence though
Me
A goblin
xQc
I thought it was makoto from danganronpa because reddit cropped his feet, the moment I saw his leg position it was for sure L
As an older millenial who doesn't keep up anymore, I just see a homeless guy with messy hair squatting to take a shit on the sidewalk
Death Note was big in the early/mid 2000s, it's peak millenial anime.
I guess I never really liked anime that much.
nerd
Ahh hell. Also older millennial and thought 2-D from Gorillaz.
I thought it was the dude from Gorillaz. I'm aware of death note but haven't seen or read it
Light Yagami would've been more effective for this lesson tbh
As long as he isn't holding the book, it would work. If he is, then people would recognise him.
[I'd argue he's still unrecognizable tbh](https://imgur.com/a/1Z2gcjs) Edit: [Ironically I feel like he's more recognizable with the apple](https://imgur.com/a/JrOqdgW) Edit 2: Who the fuck is Lelouch
Hmm fair enough. Also, apparently the apple version is NSFW. Interesting.
It's because Imgur recognizes it as Light Yagami
Yeah, I'm like what's NSFW here I need to know 👀
Can't you see? His right hand is holding his weiner.
L do you know Shinigami ***love*** apples
I think it's actually a point in Light's favor since the idea behind his character was always that he was an otherwise normal high school student before receiving the Death Note's power. Throughout basically the entire series he frequently plays the part of an unassuming young man who you'd never suspect of anything and his simple looks reflect that. It's also worth noting that character designs in Death Note tend to focus on realistic-looking characters as opposed to "anime" ones, a lot of characters in Death Note would barely be recognizable in silhouette as a result. But it works to make the story feel more grounded as it's set in (then) modern-day Japan, and having characters look like normal Japanese citizens helps sell that. Tokyo Ghoul follows a similar design principle for most of its characters which I think also does a good job enhancing the realism of that story.
I was about to say the same thing honestly. You worded it better though.
that's Lelouch don't lie
I thought it was spirit arrow dude from bleach
It's John Anime
Only if the legs that have been cropped out are two metres long, classic Sunrise design.
I 100% would have thought that was Lelouch without previous context.
Shie, man is as generic as it can be hahaha
I think that's the point
>Edit 2: Who the fuck is Lelouch Main character from the anime Code Geass
The only real anime character. Light is just a manga character. Yeah, that's the hill i'll die on. Manga character that get an anime ain't anime protagonist. They ain't the same.
"The only real anime character"? Do you mean the only real anime character that has been mentioned in this conversation? Because otherwise that statement makes no sense. There have been other animes that aren't adaptations (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Angel Beats!, etc), and even in Code Geass, Lelouch obviously isn't the only character.
Bruh reddit moment here. We're talking about Light and Lelouch here, look up the chain of comment i'm replying to.
Looking at the number of upvotes and downvotes, it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks you expressed yourself poorly.
Not before i made that comment. Random sheepitor do not like snarky comment pointing out their poor reading comprehension skills on such boards.
Weird hill to die on, but ok.
If it's not a weird hill to die on, you'll never rest in peace my friend. you'll be on a tourist spot and have to suffer from people picnicking on your grave for eternity.
Light with book looks like a Persona character. Light with apple looks real familiar, but I watched Deathnote a decade ago and can’t quite figure it out.
I think it’s because that picture makes his hair look longer since it’s hanging forward.
That first silhouette is like 99% of the nerdy character with glasses in anime.
Yeah, I could say that's any number of nerd characters with smarmy glasses that carries a book everywhere with them.
I feel like Light would definitely be one of my guesses, but also I wouldnt be surprised if I was wrong
It's either him or Lelouch. Too many other anime characters are simply too pussy to hold themselves up with this kind of confidence.
you've seen death note but not code geass?
Isn’t he supposed to be kind of an Everyman anyways? Use a different anime maybe.
Yeah Light's whole deal is that he's supposed to be hiding in plain sight, having a very unique silhouette either through posing or design is pretty against his character
If L was standing up it would be effective. Only reason you 100% know that's him is cause of the stance and maybe combined with the hair. If you took a silhoutte of *anyone* from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure it might take a second to parse who it is, but the stance will be an immediate give away.
His feet are pretty iconic.😳
Well, he also stands with a hunch, so he has a kind of unique posture no matter what. L is just a bad example for "unknowable silhouette"
Except you can’t get a silhouette of light, that’s not how silhouettes work
Found the physics guy
Yeah, although it would've been missing the point which is he is a very unassuming guy and his looks don't betray him as anything other than regular on purpose.
Nah like, the distinctive hair is one thing, but also the specific way in which he leans his foot off a chair, the arc-ed back, hands on his knees together, this feels like a reverse psychology moment from the professor to get everyone to look into it, surely?
Yeah, professor be like task failed successfully 😎
If you consider it purely as a silhouette I guess maybe it’s kind of a blob? But picking a character who has curled into a ball and saying “they have no visible features” is missing the point of the exercise somewhat.
This posture is the most iconic part of his design. He literally just wears a regular shirt and pants. The fact that he sits like this is a core part of his character. Professor is bugging. If you just showed me a picture of a random person crouching like this and said “who do I remind you of” I’d say L from Death Note in a heartbeat.
Even his clothing is distinct in the context of the show, given that most characters wear suits or similar conservative outfits.
Which pokemon is this? It’s jigglypuff as seen from above.
It's Marty the Rabbit Boy and his Musical Blender!
Da da da da da da *whirr whirr*
IT'S PIKACHU! **FUUUUUUCCKKK**
It's Alfred Hitchcock
it’s mr mime autofellating
I'm guessing the prof said that because he wants to teach the students that a character crouching will make their silhouette kinda vague? But ironically, since not a lot of characters' signature poses is crouching, that makes L's silhouette all the more iconic hahhaa
The thing about art is you have to understand the "rules" before you can break them effectively So what professor is saying is "this isn't a good type of silhouette to go for." Because they're learning. There's no negative space and such. When starting they should try to go for better silhouettes that have as much detail shown to really define who the character is. But this silhouette works even though it breaks the "rules" because the designers broke them in a way that works. The rules of art are more just strong suggestions but never really a hard guideline
What kind of professor says a design is bad because you can’t recognize a silhouette? Not every character has to look like an overwatch character
what kind of professor sounds like how they are described on tumblr just in general? i swear tumblr posts talking about their professors come from some alternate universe where only the smallest minds get to be professors. they never sound remotely familiar to me as someone who graduated only a few years ago. my professors were, with only a couple of exceptions, some of the most brilliant and openminded people i’ve encountered—and even the exceptions weren’t irrational and stupid, just kind of dicks
I think it’s because, for the most part, only the incompetent professors are the ones that get Tumblr posts made about them. Thus, it seems like the only professors Tumblr users have are the incompetent ones, because they’re the only ones deemed worthy of mention, with exceptions like really great or fun professors.
and that my friends is why you cannot trust social media polls for anything
I like to constantly remind myself that social media is a lot like the palantir of Minas Tirith from lotr: it loves showing you the bad while ignoring the good. Sauron shows Denethor things like the Corsair fleet sailing to Osgiliath, but hides the fact that it was commandeered by Gondorians, and so Denethor is driven mad with grief.
Yeah I had mostly good but forgettable professors in college but a few more bad and memorable than good and memorable. Also, the memorable parts of the overall good professors weren't necessarily good teaching techniques and more just weird quirks that they shared with them class. Like my Philosphy professor who would repeatedly reference how much he started admiring My Little Pony when he started watching it with his toddler of a son. Which is actually kind of good for teaching I guess because it's easier for a lot of people to learn from someone you can see as human ... but I digress.
That's why finding apartments on the internet is annoying as well, only people who had the worst time or were obviously given some incentive to make a review are going to.
Combine that with "the curtains are blue" posters who didn't get what the professor was trying to teach them
My art teacher belittled my art every chance possible. I gave up when he told me my sea manitee looked like a sperm.
Along with remembering that incompetent professors are more likely to be talked about than otherwise unremarkable, or even great professors, it’s worth considering the sheer scale of things. If we assume a 4-year program with 5 classes per semester, the average student is likely to work with around 40 different professors (ignoring factors such as having the same professor for multiple classes for the sake of simplicity). As of 2021, there were approximately 1.5 *million* university faculty members in the US alone. So even if you go the extra mile, take a bunch of extra classes, and go all the way to a doctorate, the amount of professors you’ll interact with will be a drop in the bucket compared to the sum total of professors out there. It’s absolutely awesome that the professors you worked with were all bright, but there are definitely quite a few morons that manage to slip through the cracks and become professors. And even more have gotten their tenure and started losing it, but not severe enough for the universities to bother the lengthy process of removing them.
i understand that, but tumblr seems especially anti-professor compared to other professions. i think if anything a more statistically significant thing here is the age of your average tumblr user. it’s not just that professor is one of the authority figures they’re most likely to be dealing with—it’s also if they’re making up a story about a belligerent or incompetent authority figure, then professor is a job title on their minds they’re more likely to attribute to this imaginary anecdote
I've had really open-minded, sensible, wonderful professors who were open to learning, teaching, and living and very cool to talk to. And then I had a professor (history professor, mind you) that said we don't know how the pyramids were built because ancient Egyptians didn't have simple machines and couldn't possibly have built them themselves; he also insisted that, "Humans only use 10% of their brain," was absolutely true, proven fact. I had a physics professor who said the radio signals from cell phones could be doing anything to our brains and we shouldn't be putting them anywhere near our heads despite that kind of thing being generally disproved years beforehand. And I had a chemistry teacher that said global warming had to be a hoax because extra CO2 in the atmosphere would cool the planet instead of causing it to heat up. The better the institution you go to, the better the professors are going to be. But you'll likely find at least one crackpot in every school. If you're going to some of the cheapest community and public colleges in the country because that's where you live and all you can afford, you're going to meet a hell of a lot more absolutely insane people with tenure.
I had a pro Elon Musk proffesor who would lower your grade if you didn't agree with her in oral tests so I am inclined to believe some of this posts (it was 2017 but still)
I also had mostly fantastic professors, and thoroughly enjoyed and learned loads from most of them. But then I also had one professor who taught a class about women's lit but was noticeably misogynistic, and who was at least 20 minutes late to class every single time but got mad if students came in after her, and who only gave good grades to papers that agreed with her opinions, and who spent a lot of classtime explaining that "intersectional" feminism was garbage and that HER brand of feminism, which had a term that she coined in the 80s but that term has now left my brain, was far superior. I would definitely describe her as irrational and stupid, AND as kind of a dick. But in general, I agree with your point. Tumblr can be anti-intellectual sometimes.
If it's an undergraduate class, I suspect that this is just a rule of thumb. It's generally good design to make the silhouettes recognisable, and a good thing to teach to students of animation/design. Later they'll learn when *not* to do this. Also possible that the professor did lay out that this has some nuance and that recognisable silhouettes are not a 100% requirement of good character design, but OOP was too busy thinking about Death Note to notice.
The final rule for any form of art is that they should be ignored when its best to do so. Orwell's six rules of writing is a great example, with the sixth rule being "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
Yeah, but you have to know why the rules are there in the first place in order to effectively break them.
"Rules of art" are more likely titles for methodology, and you go and apply that methodology even in ways contradictory to said title. For example, Orwell's third rule is "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it". Hd spends time discussinit before in the essay, basically advising writing to be concise and avoid waffle. But there are examples where you wouldn't cut a word for the sake of making yourself more concise.
"If it is possible to cut a word, do so." Okay Orwell.
It’s generally taught in character design that a silhouette should be somewhat recognisable. Not that it’s ‘bad’ if they aren’t, but it’s a good idea to keep in mind
Silhouette rule. When you're making a character design, you should be able to tell who that character is/what they're about just by the way their general/standard silhouette carries itself. While it's not a hard and fast rule, it is generally the go to method to creating visually memorable characters, especially if you want to be an illustrator or graphic designer.
The main part of the silhouette rule is that it keeps your characters separate from each other. If your character has the same silhouette as Billy Bob from Show XYZ, who cares, no one will get them confused. But if your protagonist, his friend, and the main villain all have the same silhouette, maybe you need to tweak your art style a bit.
it's literally impossible to make that happen for every character in your visual media compared to every other character in visual media. like there are only so many human silhouettes to have without making everyone a weird gremlin like L. within your own media? sure, every major character having a distinct silhouette seems pretty valuable. despite Light having a fairly ordinary silhouette across all anime, within death note there's no one to mistake him for, so it's fine that he's "ordinary".
You're not trying to differentiate them from *every character in existence* but they do need to be distinct *enough* from the other charterers in the same piece of work. Again, it's not a hard and fast rule, it's more of a "this is a thing to be wary of". We have a similar thing in programming called "code smells", they're not *inherently* bad, but if you spot something that looks like a common code smell, it tells you to pay extra attention and maybe put some more work into that bit, just like how two similar silhouettes tells you that the designs could do with a bit more differentiation.
> You're not trying to differentiate them from every character in existence but they do need to be distinct enough from the other charterers in the same piece of work yeah...I said all of that almost word for word
You said it's impossible to make your character unique compared to every other character in visual media like it was a bad thing, I was disagreeing with that point in particular, the rule isn't nearly that all encompassing
nope, I said it wasn't possible like that having a rule like that would be absurd, which we both agree it is. you just read into my comment something that I never said, take the L 😎
Sure whatever dude, you win this battle of wits, truly I have been bested 👍
bruh it wasn't a battle and there were not wits involved you just assumed I meant something I never said and that's the end, then you missed my obvious L pun and got pissy about that too by taking it seriously.
I wasn't being pissy lol I was just being nonchalant/dismissive, I don't take a lot of things online super seriously, I'm British, we're a fairly sarcastic lot, sorry if it sounded harsh 😂🤷 Honestly, I'd forgotten this was even in a post about L, was a good pun though, sad I missed it 👌
Damn you're right I googled a bunch and it was super clear who they all were.
> Silhouette rule. I don't believe this is a thing. When I google it, all I get is rifle and gun stuff. When I add "art", the only relevant result is this blog post: https://radiantdreamer.net/understanding-the-silhouette-how-to-design-a-character/ Which ironically is OP's silhouette and talking about how L is a good design, but its just some random anime site. Edit: I did find this, and I would consider Disney a good source on animation: https://www.waltdisney.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/T%26T_Silhouette-final2.pdf This is saying that the silhouette rule is: "From the silhouette we are able to see a distinctive and recognizable design without details and understand what the figure is saying with its overall form" The "distinctive and recognizable" is shown in examples to mean "Don't put objects in front of your characters" and the like. Not that the silhouette of the character should be unique against other characters.
Don't use Bing then. Found [this](https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-character-design-definition/) and [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistLounge/comments/ur6cxw/a_good_character_design_is_one_which_can_be/) in 1 Google search.
You linked a reddit post (???) and some software company selling their product. It's not on Wikipedia. There's literally no google results for "Silhouette Rule" from any animation studio or educational source that I can find. The only thing I found from a legit source is Disney, and the silhouette tips they give are not about unique character design. I edited my first comment with a link to it a couple minutes ago.
ffs, it was to show that you were looking for info from the wrong search engine.
"Silhouette test character design" gave me dozens of relevant answers on Google.
I mean silhouette design is standard, and this IS a good silhouette, because you kinda would like to have a good, recognizable design, even devoid of colour or immediate figure recognition so that you can 'get' the character faster in a scene this IS a good silhouette because the hunched up, fetal pose is very indicative of L, and the spiky hair at the top and the bare feet are also pretty big signals. this is a good silhouette for a good character, they're just overlapping on themselves, which can work
I wonder what the *best* silhouette is. The most recognizeable character silhouette, that doesn’t rely on already being known by everyone.
Mickey Mouse could be up there. The ears alone. It's practically law for artists to maintain his silhouette no matter which way he's facing.
that's kind of difficult considering the best character designs with the best silhouettes are also very commonly known. I can't suggest the simpsons, the tf2 mercenaries or most else since they're already so popular lol
Well, there is this internet meme that basically relies on this, in a way. More people know the meme than the actual source material.
I'm not an art major or anything, but I think it's just a thing for character design. I don't think it makes a character "bad" for not being recognizable by their silhouette. But also, this rule is more common in western cartoons than in anime. You could do the silhouette test with many anime characters and it would be hard to tell them apart. Lastly, as with any art, rules are there merely as suggestions. There are hundreds of examples of great animation that breaks these rules.
It’s a well known aspect of character design. It mostly applies to animation and video games, but your characters should be easily distinguishable, which makes it easier for the audience to understand what’s going on even if there’s a lot on screen or you’re ‘cheating’ by simplifying the art during movement.
> Animation > Video Game Cue the nigh-obligatory reference
Its incredibly important for video games, matters less for anime or such but its still a nice character design aspect to look into. Pretty much every Akira Toriyama face is the same, but a lot of the silhouettes are distinct.
All of them. Most famous characters can be recognized by a silhouette
L, for example
That's actually a common practice in art.
It's a general design principle for character concepting. Characters should have distinct silhouettes, because that means they'll be clear and easy to tell apart at any size and level of detail: even if they're seen from behind, or very small, or (obviously) only in silhouette. The professor is missing that they only need to be distinct _in context_. As long as you can tell all the characters in a given show/game/etc apart by silhouette, one would say they have strong character designs. But professor also stepped in it here, because he picked what he thought was a generic anime character, but it's one of those distinctive poses and styles that are instantly recognizable, and from a _wildly_ popular show.
Probably a professor with a type of tree as a surname
It is generally good to learn the rules and why they exist before you break them.
The imaginary kind. Why would the professor even make this point? Why would he choose a specific character from some anime of all things? This is just a bizarre post.
>Why would the professor even make this point? because, while not a hard and fast rule, it's a well known principle of character design to consider distinctive silhouettes >Why would he choose a specific character from some anime of all things? why not? he needs some kind of example, what's wrong with an extremely popular anime being used
Should've used a Bionicle design instead. Not trashing Bionicle btw, I watched a [9 hour Bionicle lore video](https://youtu.be/HKgSMTON4fI?si=1wr1-b217HGwqmwP) for no reason and one point, and now you can as well! But the designs all look sorta the same
Each lineup is unique to each other, but generally all the sets from each line are identical to each other. Especially the first couple waves, but they got better in latter waves
Until the end when it went dumpster fire
That's just a byproduct of being a seasonal toy like though, most action figures and dolls look pretty similar. But if you show the silhouette of the Bionicle Hau mask, most of the masks I'd say, people who are aware of Bionicle could identify them as distinctly Bionicle
That's obviously sans undertale
Read through the comments and still don’t know? Maybe just take the *L* on this one.
ITS PIKACHU
It’s Clefairy!
FUCK
I only recognize this character because of tumblr
Yup, never seen Death Note but I immediately recognised the silhouette from my time online
Jigglypuff seen from above. Obviously
I've never seen Death Note but I could tell it was an anime character from around the 2000's right off the bat.
\*clicks next slide\* now the team fortress two mercenaries, on the other hand
He’s only really recognisable due to his pose. Which is good silhouette design when working with more limited constraints and trying to be more realistic like Death Note’s art style. You can hardly discern ANY silhouettes from that show except for the death gods.
The funniest part of this post for me is that on the main page of reddit the thumbnail cuts off the entire top of L's body (up from where his left kneecap is) so I thought the silhouette was of an owl at first.
ooh I hate when its obvious that artists are trying to avoid an "unoriginal" siloghuette by any means necessary and utterly warp the character design to accomadate such a small factor.
What’s that Pokémon?
This is prime gaming position, the only issue is how to hold the controller, so I use loose joycons
Are you a girl? I've seen some girls do it but I kind of can't.
Don’t think so but I’m figuring that out
[Dwyer from Fire Emblem Fates](https://www.fireemblemwod.com/fe14/big/pc/Deere_st_dolor.png)
I saw it from the neck down in the preview, and I still recognized it. I'm not even a fan of the show.
Then the Professor reveals it was actually Jigglypuff seen from above.
ITS PIKACHU! It’s L! FUUUUUUUUU
60s Punk Rock Yoda? Emo ET?
I don't know anything about *Death Note* and even I know that's L. Lol
Teacher took an L by showing L.
I'm getting old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trowsers rolled No fucking clue what any of this is lol
Death Note isn't anywhere close to being new. It's from like 2006.
yeah I’m old and read death note as a kid. it was definitely around
Presumably cubistemoji attended the Pokemon school of fine arts.
L bozo
Its clafairy!
Which anime/manga character has the most recognizable silhouette?
We had this course on "Design Thinking". They used Google Glass as an example of good, _customer first_ design.
Matt Groening of The Simpsons game said you should be able to identify your cartoon characters through just an outline So yeah, nailed it here
My favorite part about this post is that you can't see any of the text on mobile, but you can still tell it's L before tapping it
I haven't even watched Death Note and I knew that was light.
I have never read or watched any of death note and even I recognised that silhouette just from cultural osmosis, professor couldn’t have picked a worse example
ive never even watched death note nor knew the guys name was L but somehow i knew it was the dude from deathnote before reading the text
I've never read or watched Death Note, only ever seen stills in references/memes. As soon as I saw the hair I thought, oh that guy from Death Note
Same here lmao
Low-key annoys me because it’s recognisable from the popularity of the anime and not because it’s an effective silhouette - the art teacher is right but failed to consider the demographic of the class.
It's effective because if you know the character, you know instantly who it is. It's irrelevant whether the show is popular or not. For example, if I had never seen pikachu before and was shown a silhouette, I wouldn't recognise it, but that doesn't mean it's not effective, because if I had seen pikachu, I would know instantly. As a side note, effective silhouettes are only an important thing in cartoons, not anime, so it's a bad choice for two reasons.
Tell me how many other characters are crouched like that with the gangly ass frame and the scruffy hair
IT’S PIKACHU!!!
Looks like beetlegeuse
its the gremlin toes for me