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August 28

What do you call the "standard CG movie animation style"?

There seems to be an animation style used in almost every CG animated comedy movie, including every Pixar feature-length film, many of the DreamWorks Animation films, many of the recent films from Walt Disney Animation Studios, etc. The defining characteristics, as far as I can tell, include:

Physically-based light transport and shading model
Exaggerated, cartoony proportions and materials
Human characters are rendered with smooth, uniform skin and "Pixar eyes"

So rather than "non-photorealistic rendering", this is photorealistic rendering of unrealistic scenes. Is there a specific name for this style of animation? « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 16:16, 28 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if there is a name for this, but when CG animation doesn't follow the Pixar model, that is when it tends to more photorealistic effects, it drifts into the uncanny valley. See criticism leveled at films like The Polar Express and other films from ImageMovers Digital Animation; the partnership between Robert Zemeckis and Disney Studios. There are very good reasons why the so-called "Pixar" model of CG animation works, and why other styles tend to get bad reviews. --Jayron32 00:11, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That "uncanny valley" style is indeed weird. It's kind of like high-tech rotoscoping. The difference is that you know rotoscoping when you see it - it's vaguely realistic but cartoonish enough to not seem truly real. The "uncanny valley" style doesn't work. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:31, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's not quite true. Animation that's between Pixar-style and photorealistic tends to fall into the uncanny valley, as you noted. But there are also films that use physically-based rendering but with a completely different type of visual design—The Lego Movie, for example, used CG to fake stop motion animation. That movie didn't follow the Pixar style, but it clearly also avoided the uncanny valley! There's also Avatar, which was mostly mocapped CG and skipped straight over the uncanny valley into hyper-realistic. So it's clearly possible to do other types of CG successfully. There's just that one particular style that is very prevalent. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 01:21, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]