(It's a work in progress, promise.)
Wow, before I continue, I just have to say that Blogger is being unusually glitchy today. I press enter to skip a line and my cursor goes flying all over the place. Might just be me but still... odd.
Anyway, I've been busy looking at a lot of 3D animation, even as entertainment! (How's THAT for two birds with one stone?) And recently went to see a recently released film called Rio (twice in a week) that I found to be particularly noteworthy for its rather bizarre blend of realism and anthropomorphism. Usually, bird characters are notorious for being very anthropomorphised - wings become arms, feathers become fingers, beaks become lips, etc. very little of their natural movement is conserved - in fact, the best example I can think of other than Rio is the pidgeons in Bolt which were also good for it, though the difference between those and the characters in Rio is that they are more comedy relief and aren't true protagonists and so they don't have the duty of conveying all the emotions the protagonists of Rio have to. That being said, Rio is probably the best (in terms of realism) mainstream film I've seen yet for capturing the mannerisms of birds while the emotiveness and likeability of the characters doesn't suffer at all for it. For the most part, wings are wings, beaks are beaks, and feet are feet and hands... which is sort of right, parrots and the like have very good control of their feet.
It reminds me of Ratatouille which was also kind of unusual for retaining more animal characteristics than are usually retained in this sort of animated film. I have to say it makes a pleasant change. I really appreciate the love and care it must take to believably recreate the animalistic motions in these sorts of characters (particularly in birds) and I think it does help the characters from an emotion standpoint - they become more the animals they're based on than humans that sort of look like animals, though the rendition does work well in films like Kung Fu Panda (2008). A film that also comes to mind is Valiant (2005) in which the pidgeon characters are VERY humanlike... actually, the mouse character is too. Now there's a comparison I need to add to my research. Rio/Ratatouille versus Valiant in terms of animation style. Wait. Wait. Another one is coming to mind... Ah! The Ugly Duckling and Me. Very very humanised rat and bird characters to compare, though the CGI in that film was already outdated by the time it was released... ah well, animation is what's important.
The worst thing is, I don't know about The Ugly Duckling and Me, but I think Valiant would have been much more effective if it had more of the realism that Rio had; I think rather than making the characters more small flying humans (with only small references or changes to dialogue to remind you that they're little pidgeons, besides the overtly human-like visuals) if they were actually displayed closer to the small, vunerable birds they are the film could have 1) been less offencive with racial stereotypes and 2) had a greater sense of peril. Rio did an excellent job of making the characters have conflict on their own level (via Nigel, the primary bird antagonist) but also keeping the audience aware of the bigger picture (via many perils of the city and smugglers). Valiant should theoretically have a big focus on the bigger picture (they are delivering messages during warfare after all) as well as the bird antagonists.
I know I've never been keen on characters with too many humanized characteristics so there's obviously some bias present, but I do think Valiant could have worked very well if the characters were... how to say it... less soldier, more pidgeon.
On a completely different note, I recently purchaced a new game that was on offer - well, actually, quite an old game. It's The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Now, going back to a game like this:
After being very used to games that look like this:
Is naturally going to have the player urking at the graphics for a while until they get used to them. That's normal. But the thing I noticed was... why are the characters in these older games made up of multiple pieces as opposed to characters in newer games that are usually a smooth mesh? I'd say obviously graphical limitations but doesn't having several parts make the model just as graphically straining as having the same model joined together, with the same poly count? I'm thinking it might be to allow the characters to perform nessessary animations without having to worry about essentially 'scoring' the joints so that they can bend without too much deformation (and therefore ending up with a lower poly count) but can I hear anyone else's ideas about why this might be?
That randomness aside, it's back to work, turning these messy notes into readable material. I need to finish my dragon model too (I'm thinking of prioritizing the Faun for now until I make my desired tweaks to the dragon's mesh - and I still need to figure out how to do those wings. I've been looking at a couple traditional dragons in CGI - Dragonheart, Dragonheart 2, Eragon, The Last Dragon, etc. No one ever animates bats in detail in 3D... or maybe I just need to search harder. Poor bats. So cute but they never get any love!)
Anyway, I'm off for now, see everyone tomorrow!
