Wow. This week, I’ve started animating We’ve had some nearly-final shots for awhile — the “Earth in Space” shots, but those were kind of trivial. I’m now working on a complex “real” shot for the first time. It’s a particularly tough one close to the beginning of the Pilot (and the “Prolog” and the “Preview” based on the Pilot). I’ll go into some detail on the construction of this shot i our Patreon “Patron Newsletter” this month.
There are several factors we have to balance in coming up with a style of animation and rendering for “Lunatics!” You might think that 3D animators should always try for maximum realism (“photorealism”) when making animation, but this is not necessarily a good idea. First of all, the human eye is extremely good at spotting errors in photorealistic renderings and especially in animation. This is the basis of the problem known as the “uncanny valley effect”: if you have extremely photo-accurate models and renderings of characters, then even the slightest error in movement creates a disturbing “creepy” effect. Such animations are often described as “zombie-like” or “doll-like”. This is because we are very sensitive to tiny differences in the way real people move.
