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PaperclipPerfector
6mo ago
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It seems that 3D CGI animation has completely won against more 2D traditional animation styles. Looking at the animated media consumed by my kids these days, EVERYTHING is 3D-modeled CGI. I don't know of a single piece of animated media for kids that is not anymore. But is any such 3D CGI better than traditional animation? When I say "better" I mean, does it make better art than it would be if they did the same thing in traditional animation? Is there anything that this medium does really really well? Does it connect with us in a better way, make us feel more in any way?
I'm going to guess that the best thing that CGI does is "be cheaper". This makes sense, as once you produce a CGI model, you can use it forever, and you can adapt it to make new models. Do you want to make a scene of a crowd cheering? For traditional animation, you'd have to draw each person in the crowd over and over and over again, 24 times for each second. That's a lot of people to draw! For CGI, you can take one model, change it slightly to make other people, or use other preexisting models, and then animate them in a much less time consuming process than drawing frame-by-frame.
However, most 3D CGI stuff that I've seen looks kinda bland. As a case study, we can look at all of the Disney live action stuff vs the original animation. With the original animation, the artists pour lots of character into their characters. They exaggerate movements, change their faces to be very expressive with human-like characteristics. With remakes that extensively use CGI like The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, the characters are just kinda flat. I suppose this is exacerbated that Disney has tried to make all of the characters seem anatomically appropriate, resulting in Simba looking kinda like he's meowing instead of horrified when he sees Mufasa die, etc. But even without this caveat, I can't really think of any CGI that I feel like did something amazing. As another example, I've heard about the animators who make pokémon sprites complaining when pokémon switched over from 2D sprites to exclusively 3D models starting around 2013 ish. They complained about how you just can't give the same level of character to a 3D model as you can to a 2D sprite. Just making something look realistic does not necessarily make it better art.
Can anyone point to any 3D CGI media that does something really well, that elicits an emotional response that traditional 2D animation could not? Is CGI just a cost-saving measure to churning out bland media?
I think it's mostly a labor-saving measure, although modern AI art will help a lot with that.
I play a lot of AVNs, and I see that the quality of 3D art is a smooth slope. Anyone can set up a content pipeline with some mildly customized assets and start churning out a new render for each line, the biggest limiting factor is probably their GPU. Getting the renders to look good and not uncanny probably doubles the work, getting the animations to look good probably quadruples it.
2D art required a real artist to even start making something. That's why most, if not all, 2D VNs stick to blurred backgrounds and a few posed images of the characters for the majority of the scenes, with only the pivotal scenes switching to a few full-screen drawings with the characters in more dynamic poses. Animating 2D art is much, much harder. Tools like Live2D and Spine are incredibly labor-saving, but the barrier to entry is super high, as you can't just draw the key frames and hire some lesser artists to do the in-betweens. You have to know which scenes can look good with Live2D, how to break down your first key frame into pieces and rig them to make the animation. And it still won't let you do something like this, the vast majority of Live2D animations looks barely better than Saturday morning Hannah-Barbera classics.
In a couple of years AI art will help a lot. Right now, there's not enough LORAs or what's their name that let you churn out images in the style you want and almost everyone uses the one that has the same energy as polystyrene moldings. It forgets tiny details between different drawings, so animations are right out. But all of this can and will be fixed. I'm reasonably sure Disney is currently busy making AI tools that will let it go back to lavish 2D animation and open-source tools will catch up with Disney a few years later.
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