You do not need to be the biggest fan and/or connoisseur of the anime aesthetics to know that it is renowned for its authentic and distinctive visual style, interesting storytelling, and very expressive characters.
For many years, or even decades, this aesthetic was dominated by 2D animation, which utilized hand-drawn frames in order to bring its characters to life. However, as time went by, technology decided to “meddle” and introduce 3D animation, which has completely transformed the anime world.
Even though many people were quite skeptical toward this new addition, it turned out to be one of the best things that happened to this landscape. That’s why it’s safe to say that today it plays an integral role in expanding the visual capabilities of anime, while concurrently sticking to the good-old “recipe” that made this medium popular.
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Going Back To The Basics
Before this guide further dives into this topic, let’s first learn more about the foundation of the anime style you fell in love with. Before the world was introduced to 3d anime animations, it first got familiar with the classic anime style, which is renowned for a couple of visual elements that make it so recognizable. This refers to:
- Huge eyes
- Dramatic lighting
- Very stylish clothes and hair
- Emotional facial expressions
Hand-drawn animation enabled creators to highlight all of these characteristics with superb precision. Over time, all of these elements became almost immediately associated with this art form.
Lots of popular works, such as Cowboy Bebop and Neon Genesis Evangelion, contributed to the visual identity of anime in the last century. These productions have also leveraged conventional animation strategies and, at the same time, have experimented with creative visual tools and storytelling.
3D Animation – The Inception
The late 1990s and early 2000s were the moments when the anime world decided to jazz things up by implementing 3D animation. Back then, CGI (also known as computer-generated imagery) had become a lot more accessible in the global animation industry.
At first, anime productions utilized 3D solely for the environments and objects, instead of characters. How come? Well, that’s because it was a lot simpler to create vehicles and large-scale action scenes with CGI than to do it in the “old-fashioned way”.
These experiments weren’t as good as the 2D anime, due to different lighting, shading, etc., over time, creators have successfully overcome these hurdles, and perceived all these experiments as extremely valuable for their anime journey.
Massive Progress In 3D Character Design
Certainly, one of the major breakthroughs when it comes to this was the enhancement in 3D character design. In its inception, 3D characters looked too realistic, which wasn’t a positive thing, because the real nature of the anime world is too magical and fairytale-like to be that realistic.
To change this, creators made specialized shading techniques that were supposed to emulate the appearance of hand-drawn artwork. This strategy helped 3D characters to resemble their 2D counterparts.
Based on everything that was written today, the only thing that can be concluded is that a 3D animation is a combination of two worlds, the conventional one and the one that’s innovative, and these are the elements that make it so effective.
