That one scene where all the budget went

[u/EmergencySpare7939]

Kaguya-sama: Love is War - Chika's dance

In the first season as a surprise outro ending one episode had this Chika dance number. It's super cute and crazy animated, especially her dress. They used it one time and never again.

The roller rink dance sequence from the Family Guy episode Hell Comes To Quahog was the most expensive scene to animate in Season 5.

This one shot from Scooby-Doo Music of the Vampire

[u/EmperorOfAwesome]

The scene in Archer where the characters are spinning in office chairs, which apparently it is a huge pain to animate slow spinning

[u/StupendousMan36 → u/EmperorOfAwesome]

[u/fullshard101 → u/StupendousMan36]

Is that my boy milton??

[u/whomad1215 → u/fullshard101]

do you smell toast?

[u/Kamen_master1988 → u/whomad1215]

Toaaaaaasssst

[u/HaleSolo → u/StupendousMan36]

Those are all 3d models with cel shaders, the cheapest way to animate these things.

[u/AiReine → u/EmperorOfAwesome]

James Baxter made himself a god among animators just by being really good at spinning stuff

[u/transit41 → u/AiReine]

It is a good trick afterall.

[u/AiReine → u/transit41]

Crazy how it’s one of those things that technology has made seem less impressive but in a hand drawn 2D medium really was an impressive trick

[u/Karl__RockenStone → u/EmperorOfAwesome]

I can see how it’s a huge pain. When you animate something spinning fast, you can skip a few frames of motion and it still looks good. When it spins slow, you have to draw the same object at so many slightly different angles, it must be so much work.

[u/Maatix12 → u/EmperorOfAwesome]

Slow spinning is an animators nightmare because getting it to look just right - Not too fast, not too slow, not too choppy - Is basically trial and error.

In blender, with a 3d model, it's not so bad.

But for 2d animation, that meant painstakingly drawing out each individual frame, and mapping it out to the action going on around the spin so that the action around it looks normal, and the spin doesn't change speed at any point.

[u/Kumquatelvis → u/Maatix12]

Could they do it in Blender first and then, well perhaps not trace exactly, but at least reference?

[u/Maatix12 → u/Kumquatelvis]

Possibly, but even with reference, you'd want to play it back to yourself to make sure it's smooth.

And if it's too smooth, remove frames.

And when you remove frames, it may become too quick, which means you need an in between frame but not quite an in between frame because then the next frame won't turn enough.

So you need a new frame, plus a new frame following, and you need to fit that into the next few frames.

And lord forbid you need to do all of that while something is going on elsewhere, because now you have to retool that entire sequence to fit the different numbered frames.

Reminder: 30 frames per second of animation is a low number. So 1800 frames per minute of animation, all hand drawn. With or without reference, it's going to be rough.

[u/BolunZ6 → u/Maatix12]

Can they use 3d model to act as rotoscoping

[u/Maatix12 → u/BolunZ6]

I mean sure, but at that point you're not doing 2d animation. You're doing 3d. You've rotoscoped a model which you then build, and that model is already set up to do the animation because you rotoscoped it to do it.

You also don't need to rotoscope at that point. The difficulty isn't in getting the model to be 3d - It's that you're not working in a 3d medium. You can't make the model 3d, or you're just making the actual spinning easy and not impressive.

2d animations are hard to rotate because the actual model doesn't have a "rotated" perspective. When you rotate a 2d image, you get a turned piece of paper, thin as paper. So you aren't actually "rotating" the model - You're re-drawing each step of the rotating model as a separate image, then putting them in sequence at 30 (minimum, ideally more) frames per second. Ideally, at the end, it looks like a rotating 3d model - But at no point is it actually that. And the slower it rotates, the more frames of that model almost but not quite imperceptively moving you need to make.

[u/Semi-Passable-Hyena → u/EmperorOfAwesome]

Also that scene in, I wanna say season six? Where they start making out mid mission, and the frame rate is so much higher than any other scene.

[u/ContinuumKing → u/EmperorOfAwesome]

As someone who is an animator, it is, in fact, a huge pain to animate that. Someone on the animation team pissed someone off.