90s CGI aesthetic

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Someone in the Western Animation thread mentioned motion capture in regards to this test animation, I'm just not believing it. It would've been super impressive if that was the case, but I'm just more impressed that DreamWorks chose early on to avoid going all Looney Tunes in 3D. Blue Sky would later prove it was completely possible to do, yet I'm glad DreamWorks didn't go that route.

So yeah, interesting little piece of history that gives us a glimpse into early DreamWorks.
Don't forget Chris Farley was the voice of Shrek until his sudden death after 90% of his voice work was completed
 
Don't forget Chris Farley was the voice of Shrek until his sudden death after 90% of his voice work was completed
And they had to rework the movie due to it being tailor-made for Farley.
 
I miss pre rendered backgrounds in horror games for the sheer amount of unique detail you won't find in a typical game that just reuses assets over and over (remake 2, 3 and 8 still using shit from RE7 for instance. Capcom is really getting the most out of the bolt cutters and chains).

Closest thing to capturing that amount of detail from that era in a 3D space was the original Silent Hill trilogy.
I like how early CGI's uncanny human effect really added to the unsettling nature of its horror. I would prefer it be this way actually.
SHill2_conceptart2.jpg
 
And they had to rework the movie due to it being tailor-made for Farley.
Thus Farley's closest friend Mike Myers was hired to re-record the lines, only to re-re-record the same lines but with a Scottish accent.
 
Looks really good for the time. Ignoring the obvious mocap, the lighting and fog effects are great.
It definitely is, especially for a test footage that's a product of the mid-90s. Looking at it, it surprisingly feels like a mass improvement over what Pixar did with Toy Story when that was released half a year prior
 
I fucking love the retro CGI aesthetic.
So much so I bought a Laserdisc player solely to be able to watch all the Mind's Eye releases.
I feel like something was lost when the technology advanced to the point of being able to reproduce realistic environments and humans; since that obviously wasn't on the table until mid-to-late 90s at earliest, a lot of the computer animated shorts tended to gravitate towards the surreal and the abstract. They had real artistic merit to them I think, whereas now it's just another form of animation, which ironically has more or less doomed it to the same age ghetto as traditional animation was.

CGI equivalent of Heavy Metal when?

Or did we already have that with Final Fantasy: Spirits Within?
 
That's not what I was saying.
I know. That's what I was saying

But to answer your question, the closest we've been getting to a CG Heavy Metal is Love, Death & Robots
 
Another gem from PDI
 
The scene where leaving the vault for the first time in the Fallout series is great
The sequel's intro actually looks pretty good for 90s CGI, I feel like it has something to do with the lighting.
 
One of the most famous movie theatre policy trailers and not just for 90s standards either
 
There are some animations rendered in Pov-ray on Youtube that have this vibe.
 
POV-Ray is pretty neat, I've tested it out before. The only downside with it though is that anything created in it including the models are script based, meaning by default it doesn't come with a modeler and creating environments would have to be scripted in manually. And it doesn't help that all the plugins to make 3D modeling easier for it are either super outdated or hard to find and get set up.
travieso-big.jpg
This is a render from 1997 that was made with it.
 
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