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?
In: Technology
Animators are not sitting there animating each and every point on the 3D model. There are just too many of these points. So instead they set up the rules for how each point will move and then let the computer deal with all the details. One common technique is to set up a skeleton of the character and then map each point on the model to a part of the skeleton. So when you move the skeleton the computer can calculate the position of every point on the model. For cloth there is a different algorithm doing fancy cloth simulation to figure out how the cloth will hang on the model. For hair you actually have particle simulation which calculates the path that particles would take if they were shooting out from the top of the head and then drawing this path as a strand of hair.
The bloopers you see here are when the computer is not giving the animator what he wants. It can be that a certain skeleton position the calculations break down and you get weird results. Or the cloth simulation does not handle a certain edge case. All sorts of things which look weird.
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