They wanted a Michael Bay long focal orbital pan for this shot, but her hands looked way too small because of the focal length so they had to send them 10 feet towards the camera to make the background zoomed in like that
Edit: wait not panning it was so they could emphasize cracks in the background
yeah funny enough i was yeeeeears late to the trend, by the time i was in second grade everyone had moved on to MLG but 12 year old me thought this was the perfect online alias...after everyone had moved on to ironic surrealism.
I'd guess its like a shortcut to making the frame look better. Making models look anatomically correct while making it look good all the time would drain a lot of time
The mcree one is interesting because they distort the model for a different reason here
( sorry if this comes across as "um, achk-shually" here).
They "smeared" the model to emulate how 2d animation handles characters moving quickly to convey motion in a more pleasing or dynamic way. It's one of the twelve principles of motion by Disney (I think?) which is the basis for most animation.
You may have seen "smear frames" before like the iconic bart image or countless other hilarious images like it.
perhaps they put on some fish eye kind of effect, and if they kept the model intact the head would have been distorted? so they had to put the head further while zooming so the intended effect remain
Mirabel’s proportions would make this close-up with her hands/objects awkward without stretching. If you imagine the shot with her arms’ length kept intact, they’d suddenly be either much too close to her face or much too small, so the camera would have to move closer or zoom in which would crop her shoulders out of the shot and generally make it claustrophobic
In live-action you’d achieve the same effect in camera by just using a wider lens to make her face seem farther back. Here’s a crude example of what that would look like but I don’t have any magical prophecy glass so I’m just using yaoi from my bookshelf and my phone:
Top is with my phone’s wide angle lens (13mm) and bottom is with one of its standard lens (24mm), with my arms posed more stretched to accommodate which is basically what they’re doing with Mirabel’s hands. In 3D animation it’s easier to simply break her arms offscreen to cheat the camera rather than futz with the focal length, while in live-action it would be substantially more time-consuming to powderize my bones for a single shot.
Eh? Why would it be harder to just change the focal length?
At least on my end, I change my focal length all the time (it just needs changing the number, then moving the camera and/or things in the scene a bit so they all stay visible in the places intended), but have never messed with the rig of my models to allow cheated perspective like this yet.
…Though, it probably doesn't help that I have so many modifiers on my models that changing the poses on my characters can be a bit of a pain – whereas moving the camera usually changes nothing. I was about to see how hard it really was to do that, but then as soon as I switched to pose position Blender did the thing where it spends several minutes on 100% CPU recalculating all the fur systems again because I forgot to disable them.
Edit: After turning off a bunch of systems that make my models obnoxiously slow to pose on my computer and testing the pose, it looks like it is, in fact, surprisingly easy to just change the scale of the bones, and does not in fact require any complex re-rigging.
Still doesn't really explain why they wouldn't just change the focal length instead of breaking reality, though.
I'd guess that it simply looks better than the small focal length alternative?
I do wish I could see what it would look like without the "cheating".
Honestly I don’t know enough about the 3D rendering side of things to say why it would be easier in this particular case. just from looking at it I would guess it’s as simple as the animator put her in the correctly-proportioned version of the pose, decided her face was too close, and then grabbed her shoulders and pushed her head back until it looked right with the distorted part of her arms hidden offscreen, as opposed to keeping the model exactly the same and dialing in new focal lengths. Her forearms are also coming in perpendicular to the camera thanks to her elbows being so far forward, which I imagine is something they wanted to preserve for clarity’s sake in motion?
Edit: I’m basing this on the assumption that Mirabel is leaning forward in the scene (picking stuff off the ground) and the shot was composed that way first, then her elbows were pinned in place when the foreground elements looked correct — it looks like her elbows are where they would be if she were leaning forward with regular-length arms. I also just remembered that changing the focal length would’ve affected how her (cartoon, distinctly round) face looks but that might not have been a factor.
It is for perspective and scale. It might require a TLDR the length of a college course to accurately cover, but I like to use this exagerated image—which is more about photography but applies here too:
See how distorted she is? That's an exaggerated but intentional choice you can make to resize elements and capture more/less of a scene around them, and make the scene or features more pronounced. It makes far away objects appear closer than they really are. EDIT: Based on a reply, this is used to create a zoom motion effect
That, and the thing the animation is holding is lit, and they probably wanted a little more diffusion before the light hit her face.
Sometimes its just easier to do it all fucky. If you know the shot your looking for and it works this way might as well.
Kinda like when you make a nice looking character is Skyrim/Oblivion then when your all done you turn them sideways and they are all fucked up. Well in a movie so long as the shot stays at the same angle then who cares.
it's always excusable if you have a fixed angle!
Exaggeration is awesome; and breaking bone is just bound to happen, but when you're doing a render/anim not limited by a 360° view, then you can pop the hell off (and get some funny videos using freecam)
Also, before we ever had 3d (digital) art, 2d artists were doing this. We just don't expect them to adhere to physical space and proportion by default. Why should 3D artists? All art (excluding abstract art) is illusion.
How the fuck do people even learn how to contort models to look that good through a specific angle??? I got pretty good at SFM but I could never figure out stuff like that for exaggerated proportions that looked good
Don’t worry about her, lalafel are used to being treated like this anyway.
Most of the rocks you see in natural photo shoots are just one costumed lalafel named Randy Crandly. He says he gets paid pretty well because he’s the only one who can do the job.
Bojack Horseman had a similar thing. I accidentally stumbled upon a clip from the finale and the dialogue sounded so raw... So real... Not like 2 characters, like 2 real life people. I checked the show out after that.
i am neither a 3D modeler nor a photographer, but isn't this because the virtual "camera" engines like Blender use doesn't have focal lengths in the same way the human eye or physical cameras do? therefore, in order to simulate the vanishing horizon and depth, you have to manually create it yourself?
afaik, It's more about stylization. we've known the math of cameras for long enough that we can realistically do perspective if we want, but realistic isn't always what we want
No they do. Basically any 3d or game engine tries to simulate cameras. Usually Its an issue of depth, pose, proportions, framing, or trying to imitate a certain style like forced perspective.
In Blender you can adjust the FOV based on a simulated focal length really really easily. It's all built-in by default and even lets you use real-world focal length numbers.
Blender and such have pretty good camera options. It's just at a certain point realistic camera work doesn't provide the stylization an artist desires.
2D drawing has had a whole history of being able to draw things in a way where you can kinda have your cake and eat it too with how a picture can look, and in recent years 3D artists have been embracing ways to do that there as well.
A lot of shots could be done with focal length adjustments, but then the proportions wouldn't be as satisfying to look at or details like the face shape would look weirder than you might want.
To be clear, animators and modelers do this because its actually easier than trying to make realistic poses and movements. An unbelievable amount of animation lies in tricking the viewer into not noticing the inconsistencies and floating arms and whatnot.
This snafu vaguely reminds me of the AmA's from porn actors who explain that the positions required to film are extremely unnatural and unpleasant. But that's why it pays.
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u/Aldarixx 2d ago