The Clock Crew should go 3D. At least part-time.

[Sinister Clock]

2D animation is slowly dying off, I think it's time for the Clock Crew to do more 3D projects. 3D animation is much more streamlined for collaboration, which is what the Clock Crew excels at.

If we got in some features for 3D animation on the site, I think we could make more amazing things. We could have a library for people's rigged characters for one. In the same way we used to submit our FLAs for other use, we can submit 3D models instead, so that other authors can pose and animate them, in ways they couldn't with the traditional FLAs.

Collaboration would probably work a bit differently, with the amount of time going in to a 3D animation, but if we organise our selves we can run a very efficient pipeline, one person models, the other does environments, the other does the key frames, another does the splining, etc... Pretty much working as a small studio, except we have so much more crew members at our disposal than most, really good, animation studios do. And using place-holders, those synchronising servers and good management, we can all be working simultaneously.

The only thing is I don't know how many people hang out here who are all in to the 3D. Every one here who has a serious interest in animation as a hobby or a career should definitely learn the basics. A lot of 2D animation is transferable to 3D, you just have to get over the first hurdle of understanding the technology before you can speed off exploring your own potential.

With 3D, I believe we can make the Clock Crew an amazing catalyst of artistic potential, we could make some of the greatest films, exploring artist possibilities with no restrictions, we could influence the world.

[VuBawlsClock]

To be honest, and not trying to derail this, but I don't like 3d animation much.

[VCRClock]

I don't know what it is about 3D that makes me not interested. I like Pixar movies, yes, okay, but usually when an animation makes me go "holy shit," it's something 2D. I guess it's harder for me to see how much human effort is involved in 3D animation when you know how much of it is handled by computers. (I am aware of the irony of a half-ass bitmap-tweener like me making such a statement.)

That and I'd much, much, much rather watch crappy amateur 2D animations than crappy amateur 3D animations. Primitive 3D and just plain bad 3D is so hideous that 3D animation has become guilty-until-proven-innocent territory for me.

[PezClock]

2D is actually easier to animate.

[pop-tart]

[PezClock]

That song... It is so catchy

[d u m p y]

i kinda really don't like 3D animation.

[FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK]

That and I'd much, much, much rather watch crappy amateur 2D animations than crappy amateur 3D animations. Primitive 3D and just plain bad 3D is so hideous that 3D animation has become guilty-until-proven-innocent territory for me.

You can do shitty 3D animation and still be good. Look at all those old gmod animations. That shit was hilarious.

[PezClock]

I like gmod. But I don't have half-life so I can not use it.

[VCRClock]

You can do shitty 3D animation and still be good. Look at all those old gmod animations. That shit was hilarious.

I don't mean to say you can't make a good movie in bad 3D. I'm mostly talking about visuals, not content, anyway.

I'm trying to get my thoughts together on this, but it's hard. I'm definitely biased through my exposure to the Crazy Frog, terrible commercials, advertising mascots, and cartoons - all manner of bad characters that just happened to be 3D. There's plenty of good 3D animation out there, it's just not what sticks with me. Bad animation clichés do. So I go in expecting the worst, unless I know that the creator is capable of better.

further ignorant soliloquy on 2D versus 3D animation follows:
Maybe it's easier to tell when someone has fucked up a 2D animation because, for one reason or another, it "doesn't look right." With 3D, in many cases you're either trying to approximate a real, physical object (and a lot of people stop at "eh, close enough"), starting with a physical object and trying to distort it so that the viewer knows you weren't trying to be realistic (and somehow I think this is less ugly in 2D, but I'm sure some of Picasso's contemporaries had opinions about him, too), or maybe not even starting with a physical object but just generally trying really hard not to remind your audience that your object is computer-generated. With 2D animation you're just suspending your disbelief the whole time. It's practically not even pretending to take place in 3D space.

[RobClock]

Posting to say i also prefer 2D over 3D animation.

[clockradioclock]

I don't mean to say you can't make a good movie in bad 3D. I'm mostly talking about visuals, not content, anyway.

I'm trying to get my thoughts together on this, but it's hard. I'm definitely biased through my exposure to the Crazy Frog, terrible commercials, advertising mascots, and cartoons - all manner of bad characters that just happened to be 3D. There's plenty of good 3D animation out there, it's just not what sticks with me. Bad animation clichés do. So I go in expecting the worst, unless I know that the creator is capable of better.

further ignorant soliloquy on 2D versus 3D animation follows:
Maybe it's easier to tell when someone has fucked up a 2D animation because, for one reason or another, it "doesn't look right." With 3D, in many cases you're either trying to approximate a real, physical object (and a lot of people stop at "eh, close enough"), starting with a physical object and trying to distort it so that the viewer knows you weren't trying to be realistic (and somehow I think this is less ugly in 2D, but I'm sure some of Picasso's contemporaries had opinions about him, too), or maybe not even starting with a physical object but just generally trying really hard not to remind your audience that your object is computer-generated. With 2D animation you're just suspending your disbelief the whole time. It's practically not even pretending to take place in 3D space.

If I may add: 3D tends to showcase technological advances more than it does anything else. Better technology means better, easier to use 3D animation software. More processing power means finer, Pixar-smooth rendering, which has very little to do with the artist using Maya and more to do with the artist writing rendering software (I insist that software engineers are artists in their own right). 2D tends to depend on character and style of artwork from its inception (this can be applied to 3D filmography, though it rarely ever is in Hollywood). There is no fathomably sane way to emulate reality on a visual scale using 2D animation. And so, as you suggest, it is easier to get involved with the narrative because we're not stuck trying to figure out if the movie is trying to look like it's real life or if it acknowledges its shortcomings and expects us to forgive them.

Deciding what defines a strong artist or a good film, based solely on the medium and the methods used for achieving an effect, is probably entirely subjective. You may, for example, better appreciate the generic 3D commercials if you knew the kind of work that goes into modelling, skinning (texturing?), shading, and animating each element on scene. I certainly don't know, so it's all pretty generic to me. What I do know, however, is that a great artist will make himself known regardless of medium (see: 3D animator David O'Reilly).

An interesting thing to consider is stop-motion using IRL props and miniatures. On the one hand, it rather resembles 3D animation what with the modelling, the texturing, the lighting, the camera work, the semi-adherence to a general aesthetic ("these are dolls"), etc. On the other hand, it's entirely fbf, it's old-fashioned, it does not pretend to be real, etc--much like 2D animation. I'm not sure where I wanted to go with this suggestion, I think I just wanted to introduce what I think is a weird grey zone in animated filmmaking.

[d u m p y]

like man if you wanna do three dee that's fine, go for it, yknow? i mean, it's worked before
i just don't think we should ALL transition over to it. just makes no sense to me

[AnkhClock]

im not even good at 2d movies

[miracle fruit]

i enjoy a good 3d animation, like colins bear

[Sinister Clock]

I'm sure 3D won't be everyone's thing, but I think it should definitely be included in the Clock Crew. I might start up a small collaboration with other 3D clock artists, though I don't know many who do 3D and are still active here. The biggest problem I suppose, would be making sure clocks don't drop out or not do work, but I think Pass The Flash stuff shows that we can work together in an efficient manner.

Would anyone be interested in that? Like a 30 second animation, set on a single scene, with a limited amount of characters, say three or four. For that we'd need at least a modeller of the characters, if possible we could have another person to design the set, a writer, and a rigger; some could do more than one thing, depending on how many people are up for it. Probably some voice actors too, but we got plenty of talented talking peeps.

[AbsintheClock]

Fuck 3-D