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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2147 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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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?

Some extra thoughts:

One thing that 3D CGI excels at is total animation. 2D animation is really restricted by the medium. Characters usually move in the plane that is perpendicular to the camera and the camera can pan or zoom, but its orientation is fixed. Total animation, that is, having the whole scene move relatively to the camera, is incredibly expensive, as you can no longer rely on background cels staying put and animating just the characters.

Let's say you're drawing two characters running along a long hallway of sorts, constantly avoiding oncoming obstacles. The easiest way to animate them is to have them run to the right. If you want them to run towards the viewer, you have to radically simplify the corridor, probably having a relatively short loop of wall and ceiling decorations. Anything more complex is total animation and it simply blows the costs of the animation sky high.

3D CGI is total animation by default, so you can have your characters and camera do whatever they want. Model your hallway once and you can have your camera weave and bob around the obstacles, circle around the characters, have the characters get closer to it or lag behind and all this without having to redraw every frame from scratch.

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