What causes 3D animated “bloopers”?

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I’m talking about things like [Merida’s eyes being all buggy when animating Brave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4405qEhBmEM) or [everyone’s hair going in weird directions in The Incredibles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_MQnH54XaA) or [Shrek’s arms suddenly getting really long](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNngNiYXuVE). Why does the animation fail in (apparently) random and uncontrollable ways?

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11 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Most of the time, it’s human error on a technical level.
For instance, hair simulation is a complex thing to achieve.
Virtual hair have a lot of parameters to describe how it behaves: weight, curlyness, rigidity… in short a TON of stuff.

Let’s imagine rigidity:

– Give it medium rigidity: it behave like normal hair.
– Give it too much: it’s hard like concrete, feels like plastic
– Give it too little: it moves around like crazy, like a liquid

Let’s imagine weight:
Weight translate to how much force the hair is pulled to the ground.

– Normal weight behaves like normal.
– Too much: the hair is pulled too hard, it doesn’t react much with wind + follows the head too closely (does not “float behind” when the head moves around)
– Too little, it barely moves and float around
– Zero weight, it does not move at all! Because 0 weight means no pull force towards the ground
– negative weight… the hair is pulled towards the sky?!? Huh!

But how do you find out these “normal” values?
By trial and error until you get a feeling for it, which produces bloopers.

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