[zoeysmithe]

Isn't a lot of 3D in shows and games "faked" to look good to the viewer?

I remember seeing this blog write up on what 3D animators do to make things look acceptable. Like make a character 9 feet tall because when the camera panned them, they looked too short at their "real" in-system height. Or archway doors that are huge but at the perspective shot, look "normal" to us. Or having a short character stand on an out-of-scene blue box to make them having a conversation with a tall character not look silly due to an extreme height difference? Or a hallway that in real life would be 1,000 feet long but looks about 100 in-world because of how the camera passes past it, and how each door on that 1,000 foot hallway is 18 feet high, etc.

I wonder if shows like Futurama used those tricks as well, so when you sort of re-create the 3D space the animators were working in by reverse engineering like this, then you see the giant doors and 9 foot people and non-Euclidian hallways, etc. Just because it looks smooth as the camera passes it, doesn't mean that actual 3D model makes sense at other perspectives.

[Tallain]

I don't have a ton of experience in this realm but from what I've seen it does happen a lot -- looking good is often better than being right. A great example of this is the way they tilted the models for Zelda's A Link Between Worlds[0]. Basically everything in the world is tilted back so it looks better for the camera angle, which is designed to mimic the feel of A Link to the Past.

[0]: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/11/20/the-t...

[Natsu]

I saw some video on A Difficult Game About Climbing a while back. The things they did to make the guy appear to grip the rocks and suck normally make the hands utterly bizarre when seen from the side.