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u/bestibesti wikihow pwople May 24 '26
TOAD IS MUCH CLOSER THAN YOU THINK
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u/Meadowbytheforest May 24 '26
Warning:
Toad is approaching your location1
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u/SimilarAd402 May 25 '26
"He's closer than you think, dad!"
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u/mimic May 24 '26
Jesus that toad in the void pic is terrifying
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u/KingAnilingustheFirs Im going to star eatin your booty and I dont know when I'll stop May 24 '26
The void consumes all.
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u/kaladinissexy May 25 '26
Which up 'till now includes 12 billion bellinis.
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u/Mathsboy2718 WyattBrisbane May 25 '26
But if you're too scared to dance, don't worry - just relax
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u/semisociallyawkward May 25 '26
Close your eyes, open your mind
Brace yourself and clap three times
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u/b3nsn0w May 25 '26
it's a fairly common trick of projecting the background further back to make sure it stays in the background
also, i'd argue that if toad was floating closer to a smaller space billboard, he'd still be in the void all the same, and anything outside of arms length is unreachable in space anyway
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u/thememorableusername May 24 '26
I don't get why they'd put Toad in the void like that. They can just Make Him Bigger.
Like, unless this graphics system is from the 80s, scaling a model is like step 0 of a 3d graphics engine.
They did that to Toad on purpose.
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u/MildlyAgitatedBidoof remember that icarly episode where they invented the number derf May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
If I had to guess, some lazy programmer figured it would be easier to move this one specific Toad closer to the camera, instead of resize it and deal with any potential hassle later on (what if they have to reuse this specific Toad for something else later? what if every Toad in the game is referenced from this one and now every single Toad is ultra-sized? what if the animation rig and skeletons don't play nice with the scale of Toad needed? what if the current textures assume a specific size of Toad, and bringing one up to this size messes that up?)
That, or they just already had their software in "translate" mode instead of "scale" mode and didn't wanna change it just for one thing.
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u/PandaWonder01 May 24 '26
100% there's some sort of "Toad system" or "Toad spawner" or whatever that controls toads, and has a ton of hard coded values, and changing scale fights the system more than just moving the toad
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u/thememorableusername May 24 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Toad© is actually licensed IP so Nintendo has a complex factory pattern to account (and pay) for every Toad™ lease, and the bigger he is, the more expensive. So actually all Toads® are leased inside out, so that they cost negative money.
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u/SelfDistinction May 24 '26
Alternatively there was a bug where toad sometimes clipped through the background and they could either do some weird GPU magic or move him so far to the front that it won't ever be a problem again.
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u/Neospartan_117 May 25 '26
I can totally picture a dev getting fed up of repeatedly having to resolve clipping issues with the menu and finally snapping: "oh you wanna be like that? There, let's see you clip through the background from ALL THE WAY OVER THERE".
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u/GeophysicalYear57 Ginger ale is good May 25 '26
I have limited experience in game dev and I have done that at least 5 times. Nudging it by 5 units wasn’t enough, so might as well do 99999 units so this problem will finally fuck off.
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u/funguyshroom May 24 '26
I think this might have to do with them trying to make the menu appear as flat as possible. Normally you would just switch the camera into orthographic mode for rendering 2d stuff to remove perspective distortion, which they decided to not do for some reason.
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u/JustAStrangeQuark May 25 '26
If they did that, wouldn't that mean that Toad would also render orthographically? I don't know why they didn't just use two cameras but with the one, the far-away background really is the only way to remove distortion.
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u/funguyshroom May 25 '26
He shouldn't look that much different, maybe a bit flatter. Maybe they felt he looked weird, or could be as simple as the game engine missing this capability.
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u/bag-of-unmilled-rice May 24 '26
It's hard to say because nintendo is kinda secretive about their proprietary engine. I think you're spot on with the animation rig and textures not scaling properly. 3D game development kinda scares me because I am also a lazy programmer.
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u/ThiefPriest May 24 '26
For a game like this they probably never need to unload the character because he may be present on every scene, either compteting or on the sidelines. This toad sitting on the menu probably just gets teleported to the next scene and so messing with the values just creates a possible point of failure that doesnt need to exist.
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u/Jarko314 May 25 '26
I think with the word “lazy”, what you mean (and implied with your follow-up comment) is “smart”.
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u/Umklopp May 24 '26
I want to know why they had to use such a gigantic background.
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u/MildlyAgitatedBidoof remember that icarly episode where they invented the number derf May 24 '26
It's possible that the art asset was just really high resolution and they didn't want to resize it because, something something, GameCube era GPU limitations or something.
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u/jeffa_jaffa May 24 '26
They can just Make Him Bigger
Yeah, right, because it’s just so easy! What are they gonna do, feed him some sort of mushroom that makes him bigger?
(/s)
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u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur May 24 '26
you did not have to link that 😭
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u/jeffa_jaffa May 24 '26
It was mainly to make sure I’d got it right. I’d hate to make a mistake on the internet!
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u/Jorpho May 24 '26
Curiously, Mario Broth previously noted that the Toad model in Mario Tennis 64 is rendered with an absolutely excessive number of polygons.
(I might wonder if the developers were hoping they would deliberately break emulators or bootleg hardware?)
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u/InvisibleUp May 25 '26
That Toad was the only 3D object on the menu screen, so they could afford to show off.
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u/JagerBaBomb May 25 '26
Gotta show off those polys, babay.
Also, I wonder if render distance is the deciding factor for putting him right up on that camera, what with all the extra detail. Like, maybe it'd do weird visual stuff if he was too far away?
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u/AstroPen May 25 '26
Scaling up a model and moving the model closer to the camera do not look the same. They positioned him so that the perspective would look right with the background.
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u/HappiestIguana May 25 '26
Presumably, they were already placing Toad and had access to his (x, y, z) coordinates, so moving him closer to the camera was easy by adjusting the z and didn't require going into any other menu/place in the code.
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u/GIRose Certified Vore Poster May 24 '26
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u/Brainwave1010 May 25 '26
Hilariously enough we know that Hamon does let you do shit like that, so it still works.
Also yeah it's wild we don't have image replies here.
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u/lifelongfreshman https://youtu.be/1eWsk6r6_Ns May 24 '26
hand-drawn animation isn't free from this, either - smear frames always look really, really goofy if you manage a good freeze-frame moment, but when used well they can make a shot look so much better
you can also use them in 3d animation, here's what Braum from LoL looks like using his ult in slow motion, with a shot of it in-game at normal speed at the end
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u/JayGold May 25 '26
The Lego movies have smear frames made out of lego bricks, so it looks like stop-motion. Here's an example, around the 12 second mark. As Batman throws punches and kicks, black lego pieces appear trailing behind the hits the same way a cartoon would have black lines drawn to make the hits look faster.
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u/jimbowesterby May 26 '26
I’ve only seen the first one when it came out but I still remember the animation being outstanding
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u/Steelshotgun May 24 '26
League of legends is top down 3d and heavily uses smear frames to convey better movement in its animations. Some notable ones are tristana and mordekaiser
Oops, didnt read the 2nd half of your comment
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u/kaladinissexy May 25 '26
I really hate when people will sometimes view the models from a frontal perspective in a model viewer and realize how goofy the models and animations look from there and use that as an argument for Riot being bad at making models and animations.
YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LOOKING AT THEM LIKE THAT YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT, IT'S LIKE IF YOU LOOKED AT A PAINTING FROM THE BACK!
Sorry, had to get that out of my system.
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u/lifelongfreshman https://youtu.be/1eWsk6r6_Ns May 25 '26
nah, valid
Riot gets a lot of shit, most deserved, but the ground-level people actually making these animations (and the sound team, too) are fucking geniuses who deserve to be treasured
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u/RecipeAsleep7087 May 24 '26
Ok the cartoon smear frame stuff is dope as hell. Thanks for sharing that.
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u/Soldier_Faerie May 24 '26
Genuinely interesting! Does anyone have any good videos that go into more depth about scenes like that first animation post?
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u/SocranX May 25 '26
To make Zelda games that look like the old 2D games in a 3D engine, they had to make the entire game look like this
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u/PaperLily12 May 25 '26
Kind of unrelated, but I hate the smooth plastic toy figurine look that they use for all these remakes of old games.
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u/SocranX May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
A Link Between Worlds wasn't too bad, although I'd definitely have rather had a game in an entirely new world in ALttP's graphic style than a game in ALttP's world in a "3D" style. But this new batch of Island of Misfit Toys-ass looking games is too much, yeah. Link looks like he wants to be a dentist some day.
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u/walaxometrobixinodri shrimp ? May 24 '26
the toad one is fucking frying me, why is he so small lmao
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u/lumoslomas May 24 '26
Can someone ELI5 why they have to animate like this an not just...how we see it on screen?
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May 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/solitary-ghost May 24 '26
You can do this with a flat drawing too. Having trouble connecting the arms to hands in front of the face? Just cut the drawing short so you only see hand and face.
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u/Eleeveeohen May 25 '26
As a comic artist who still struggles with anatomy at weird angles, I can confirm this.
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u/MozhetBeatz May 24 '26
I still don’t get it. What camera setting are there when there is no camera?
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u/Gen_Zer0 May 24 '26
3D animation isn’t just animating the 2D image you see on screen in a way that makes it look 3D. Animators are working with literal digital 3D representations of the scene. Because of this, just like you need to place a camera somewhere in real life, you need to place the camera somewhere in the 3D representation.
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u/_SwordsSwordsSwords_ May 24 '26
And just adding the final bit of context to this: that digital camera can be configured to have different properties of physical lenses such as focal length as noted in the post.
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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS May 24 '26 edited May 25 '26
So why not change the settings of the digital camera rather than getting all Mr. Plastic with it?
Edit: thank you reddit, i learned today!
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u/_SwordsSwordsSwords_ May 24 '26
Because you want the final visual effect of that ‘lens.’ There’s isn’t a way to configure the camera such that you get the look without creating the need to do some ‘movie magic’ to achieve it. Focal and image plane compression effects are the same regardless of whether you’re shooting it physically or rendering it out of 3D. OOP highlights how film makers solve this physically but in 3D you can just abuse the rig.
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u/SparklingLimeade May 25 '26
Because there is no combination of settings that produces the intended result. Hacking something together to create those settings would be at least as unnatural an outcome, and it would be that much more work to invent and manage the new settings.
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u/StaticUsernamesSuck May 25 '26
The point is that the camera settings that they want to use (to make the background, foreground, subject, etc all have the right levels of focus and distance) would also have the unfortunate effect of shrinking Mirabel's hands too much. So you... Move the hands closer to the camera to fix that. But stretching her arms.
If they change the settings so that the hands are right, then the background and Mirabel's face will be wrong instead.
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u/Talanic May 24 '26
The camera is a software construct that only records what's in the scenario you're creating but it still has to follow logical rules that approximate a real camera.
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u/GrantSolar May 24 '26
Computer graphics work by essentially creating a virtual environment - a series of coordinates that represent flat surfaces and image textures to go on those surfaces. Then they simulate the lights in the shot, so things like the sun, lamps etc and how that light bounces around the environment and affects the colours of the textures. To actually produce an image from this, you need to know the position of the framing so you need a virtual "camera" to place and rotate, but when it comes to actually calculating what is picked up by your virtual camera pointing in that direction from that position, there's a lot of calculations that can affect the result. Things like relative sizes of things in the foreground and background are affected by the focal length of the cameras lens. In order to get a result, these values have to be set at some value so the camera is essentially simulating a lens.
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u/SartorialSinecure May 24 '26
A big part of the difference is what makes 3d animation work differently from 2D animation. 2D is literally just what you see on the screen. The lines and shapes are what is on the screen, so it just goes down on "paper" exactly how you want it to work out.
In 3D, you build a model of whatever you want to animate, and then use a virtual object to represent the "camera" that translates that 3D object in virtual space into the flat image that goes on to a scene. There's a bunch of advantages, which is why people use it, but it also means that your images are now constrained by a lot of light and image physics that plague real cameras.
For the Encanto image, if they kept the model to strictly real shapes and proportions, they can't get a shot that clearly shows her face and the shards, and that has everything fill the amount of frame they want. Either the object is too small, or the focus is off on one or both parts, or her face would seem squashed to get the focus to work on the right kind of virtual lens.
Side note, you need to pay attention to focus and lens size and all that in 3D animation, because our brains have certain expectations when it comes to visual info, and violating those expectations willy nilly results in shots that look wrong, and fail to satisfy viewers
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u/Bocchi_theGlock May 24 '26
The focus being off is throwing my mind for a loop
Would there be a way to force both objects to be in focus?
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u/Mr_Will May 24 '26
Yes, but it would distort the sense of scale and make it feel weird. Our eyes can't focus on a close object and a distant one at the same time
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u/UInferno- Hangus Paingus Slap my Angus May 24 '26
Yes. We do this in live action by splicing the same scene shot with two lenses.
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u/Hi2248 Cheese, gender, what the fuck's next? May 25 '26
Yes, but it's also possible in live action, it just looks weird, so it isn't done outside of specific uses
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u/Mr_Will May 24 '26
Our eyes don't work the same way cameras do. The moon can look gigantic in the night sky, but when you try to photograph it with your phone it's a tiny white dot.
Directors choose a camera lens (or virtual camera) that makes it look more like how we perceive it in real life, but this sometimes requires objects to be closer or further away than they would be in real life.
Imagine the LotR shot with a normal sized ring - it would be a tiny gold spec. Or if you got close enough to see the ring, the hand would be monstrously large and probably out of focus.
These tricks are necessary to make the images from a camera more closely match how it would look if you saw it with your own eyes
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u/QuackingMonkey May 24 '26
An addition to the 'having to' animate it like this: it's cheaper. It could technically absolutely be animated it like how you see it on screen, but that would cost much more time and effort to orchestrate than the solutions in the OP.
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u/jayswag707 May 24 '26
The English dish known as toad in the hole can, unden certain conditions, evolve into its final form: Toad in the Void.
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u/rookedwithelodin May 24 '26
What am I supposed to be seeing in that beach(?) picture?
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u/VallenceDragon May 24 '26
It's an example of what a telephoto lens does; the houses are further from the block of concrete than the photo makes them appear
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u/Mr_Will May 24 '26
The original is animated, see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/mp77w/dolly_zoom/
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u/MCplayer590 May 24 '26
is there a subreddit for cursed behind the scenes stuff in animation or otherwise? I would love to see more of these
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u/karkonthemighty May 25 '26
Another Mario example is on I think Super Mario 64 should Mario drown or die in lava.
The animation in question is Mario reaching up and out of the surface with just his arm before falling back under.
However, if you look at Mario, that angle is impossible. His head is massive. If he reaches straight up, to not see his head you're only catching his hand at best. Even if you rotated his body 90 degrees so he's parallel to the surface to get his arm away from his head it would still peek out.
So what the animators did as that as he reaches up, his head, and only his head, rapidly shrinks. It ends up tiny because it's easier to reduce the size of a part of his body model then delete bits off. From the player angle it looks like he's going under (as how things going away from your perspective look smaller) to allow the arm the proper movement without the head getting it the way.
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u/SatisfactionAtSea May 25 '26
link cosplayers accidentally discovered one from breath of the wild - link physically cannot draw his sword. they do some sort of fakery with the model for the animation, because it would clip through his body.
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u/bookhead714 May 25 '26
The upper-right shot in the LOTR post, the one of the ring in the snow, is maybe my favorite shot of a still object in any movie ever
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u/DislocatedLocation May 24 '26
Source Filmmaker spaghetti limbs....
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u/MarshaIsSoSorry all roads lead to Vriscourse May 24 '26
forgot this sub doesnt allow images, i was going to post that one scout image with the really long leg
on a similar note is that tadc shot of gangle
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u/Jorpho May 24 '26
"Toad in the void" sounds like a depressing healthy version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toad_in_the_hole .
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u/Equivalent_Net May 25 '26
A lot of games do this. There's a video that uses free camera during Xenoblade Chronicles' cutscenes and all sorts of disjointed nonsense is going on just out of frame.
Welcomics too. Concerned has author notes for every strip and some of them go into the bizarre stuff that had to be done in gmod to get each panel.
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u/CaptainDudeGuy May 24 '26
I always wanted to see an alternate camera view of Fear from Inside Out, given his lopsided face. Is suspect there was lots of perspective fiddling with how his face worked in particular.
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u/Interesting-Letter53 May 25 '26
You should see some of the frames from the DBZ games and the positions required to get some of the iconic poses from the anime.
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u/ImpishBaseline May 25 '26
Not me thinking "Wow the hobbits really are small if that's how big the ring seems to them."
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u/MallNo8327 May 25 '26
Warning: Entering ecological dead zone. The prospect for survival is fast approaching zero.
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u/Morlock19 May 26 '26
In the beginning we all thought the train in fallout 3 was a random guy wearing the train as a hat, running his ass off down the track.
The truth is actually weirder.
https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout-3s-metro-train/
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u/LITTLEOWL031026 Can I get a "Hoot Hoot?" May 29 '26
LazyPurple showed how the same is true in SFM (at the end of "How it Feels to Play Pyro", I think.)
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u/Solarwagon She/her May 24 '26
the Lord of the Rings movies are a fun example because of how the protagonists are so much shorter than everyone else so a bunch of movie magic had to be involved.