Keeping Score

Animators Have it Down to a T (Rex)

Saw this article today at Yahoo! News: Animations Reveal How Dinosaurs Might Have Walked.

Wow, I'm thinking. Someone at Yahoo! finally got around to watching Jurassic Park. I guess that's news these days or something. "I finally saw Jurassic Park! Say, let's put it on the front page!"

No, no, it's much more pathetic than that. These "scienticians" evidently put movement constraints on the joints of the bones, say the ankle can't move backwards past 90 degrees or whatever, and wound up generating thousands of possibilities. The animation they put up on their site they claim "looks no better or no worse" than the rest of them, meanwhile claiming that "animators" can "take a pile of digital bones and move them in any way they want. This part is easy..."

Look, I hate to break it to you asshat elitist jerks, but your animation looks nothing like a two ton dinosaur out for a walk. It looks worse than some stuff I've seen from second year college students. Shit that animators "moved in any way they wanted" THIRTEEN YEARS AGO looked better than this.

Since you dorks know nothing about 3D animation, it might suprise you to know that we've been puting rotational constraints on our joints for roughly a decade now. Even before then, we had rotational constraints in the form of "if it looks broken, don't do that." We used our better judgement. Yeah, that idea you had where the ankle can't move past a certain point? Been there. Done that, poindexter. And on top of that, ours still looks real, and yours looks like a weak-sauced computer simulation.

Next thing you know, scientists are going to discover that painters have been mixing paint wrong all these years, and publish a monochromatic color wheel of mud.