Just a post about a curious observation about Mickey Mouse. Rendered in 3D, Mickey's ears are stubbornly two-dimensional. I wonder how much trouble that was for modern animators.

What time I have to watch television is spent watching children's programming. The favourite right now is Mickey Mouse Clubhouse from the folks at Walt Disney. The characters are rendered as 3D objects in a computer generated landscape.

But for all the 3D wizardry, Mickey's and Minnie's ears are rendered in the traditional 2D method. In the animated cartoons, the ears of Mickey and Minnie Mouse always face the viewer.

Besides giving the characters a distinctive look, the strange behaviour of the ears made life easier for the animators who didn't have to draw the ears in transition from face on to edge on. Apparently in one animation there was an attempt to make the ears behave in a physically real way, but the look was unsatisfactory and the mouse ears remained face on ever since.

What strikes me, though, is that though this design rule would have made life easier for the traditional cel animators, the CGI guys were probably having conniptions. Like any 3D graphics engine, you give the computer the coordinates of the objects, the viewer, and the lighting sources, and the physics takes over. The computer knows how to render the scene maintaining the correct perspective of all the objects.

But now they have those ears that defy all perspective rules. Even as Mickey's 3D head turns, the computer has to keep the strange two-dimensional plane connected to his head, with these two circles moving up and down and side to side on the face of this plane. There is nothing normal about these ears in a 3D space. In fact, I'd be curious to know if the 3D engine the studio is using had the capability to render these, or more likely had to have a custom function set created to handle the weird ear physics.

I just found it amusing to think of a trick designed to keep life for 2D animators simple might be the source of some grief for 3D CGI guys.

Posted by: Steve Janke at 08:53 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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