2011-11-18

Smear frame methods in 3D, examples from 2011 Warner Brothers short


A link to this upcoming Warner Brothers short was posted on the AM Facebook page recently.
The full preview can be seen here. A handful of AM mentors and alumni worked on this movie.

Methods in the use of smear frames in 3D has been a matter of interest for me, so I thought I'd share two fleeting examples extracted from this short. Because of persistence of vision, combining multiple frames of motion into one frame like this does not look wrong at full speed, it's an effective technique for achieving the appearance of very fast motion by effectively merging multiple frames into one. In the top example, Sylvester's bat goes from fully up to fully down with just this one single inbetween frame, a very snappy action.

It's great to see 2d-like method being applied in 3D, instead of the more common method of motion blur via rendering. Because such 1-3 frame fast motions are only perceived subconsciously, there is arguably a greater degree of freedom-of-abstraction that an animator can take liberty with in these contexts. But at the same time, using such a method does seem to remain something of a special case, an exceptional treatment.

I wonder if those blur lines were volumic or were applied via vector art after rendering?

No comments:

Post a Comment