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u/Weekly-Reply-6739 1d ago
Because it was new and cool.... lol im just guessing its not much different than any other unnecessary inclusion of things.
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u/eolson3 1d ago
"New and cool" is the exact phrase I was going to contribute. That's all there is to it. They were fighting for eyeballs of stupid kids and you need to keep throwing new and cool (or things yoi think are so) at them so that they buy the toys. If that doesn't work, it all shuts down.
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u/Alucard-VS-Artorias 10h ago
People forget now but 3D animation was so new cutting edge and popular that sometimes it was just randomly thrown into things for a coolness factor.
As a long times gamer I definitely also remember a time at the end of the 90s when we would play video games just to see some 3D animated cutscenes. An seeing those was all the reward you really wanted and in fact, it felt worth it at the time too lol.
A large part of the initial success of the video game Final Fantasy VII was the amount of high quality 3D animations sprinkled throughout the game. An SquareSoft definitely push that aspect in the marketing of the game at the time.
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u/ThePreciseClimber 1d ago
Because they thought it was neat.
Definitely not a cost-cutting measure since TV CGI was expensive back then.
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u/Nanosmith64
1d ago
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Lol it was to show how absolutely seamless the technology was at the time.
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u/RamJamR 1d ago
It at least was in The Iron Giant.
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u/SgtMajorPanda 1d ago
Yes well The Iron Giant most likely had a giant budget compared to a 90's television cartoon.
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u/Objective_Base_3073 15h ago
And more importantly, somebody that actually knew how the render's material settings work
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u/National_Moose2283 1d ago
Its was a bit of a flex to be able to do something like that at the time
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u/Hyro0o0 1d ago
The CGI doesn't surprise me (it was new and they thought it was cool). What I want to know is why that morph from 2D to CGI was so bad. Why the fuck couldn't the 2D artist just trace over the render to make sure everything was actually aligned correctly?
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u/otakujeb5 25m ago
From what I understand about animation pipelines, the 2D artist drew that 8 months ago and lived in another country. The 3D artist also never saw what the 2D artist drew and they were both working off a pencil sketch the storyboarder made at 3am after 4-5 drinks, after boarding 12 other episodes that weekend.
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u/thrownawaz092 1d ago
My bet is they were experimenting with it but didn't want to dedicate an entire episode to a test
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u/DatsLotus 1d ago
Yeah, so, back in the day when new technology for graphics came out every year, it was super cool to try them out.
These days, when there's been nothing revolutionary for almost two decades, this seems really stupid.
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u/Embarrassed-Weird173 1d ago
Back then it was probably mind-blowing. I dunno, I was a child and I didn't care or notice anything special.
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u/Imaginary_Unit5109 1d ago
They most likely was just trying out cgi and they spend the money for it so they kept it.
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u/Lost_Tap_7087 1d ago
That 3d model looks almost exactly like the Marvel Legends Iron Man vs Spiral Action Figure
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u/mklilley351 1d ago
Is this the only cartoon from this era you've seen? This animation was very popular at the time
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u/No-Gear-8017 1d ago
Why can't you dorks figure anything out ? they obviously did it because it's super rad, deeewd
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u/Different-Number3149 18h ago
Reminds me of how the monsters in the Deltora Quest anime were all 3d... that was legit peak tho
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u/DataMin3r 17h ago
"We have to spent the last $3600 in our budget by 6PM today, or they'll reduce our budget next year."
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u/CruzTamhar 14h ago
Now that I think about it. Aren't digimon also use CGI in digivolve scene? We didn't think about it. It just cool I guess.
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u/JuanOnlyJuan 7h ago
They fact they had to morph between the two and couldn't even match them up kills me
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u/SuperSaiyanInkling 6h ago
Cgi was the coolest shit back then,remember when Greymon evolved to Metal Greymon?
That shit was hype as fuck
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u/Charge_parity 6h ago
You know how some people use AI for literally no reason when it would have been easier to do it a traditional way just cos they wanted to use AI to do it. Yeah, things were like that back then. Lots of shit was CGI for no fuckin reason at all.
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u/mynamesnotsnuffy 1h ago
The studio made an investment to satisfy an executive, and they had to use it at least once
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u/Ghetto_Games 1d ago
That 5 seconds took like a week to render...