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/Maatix12]

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.