In the genre of Japanese animation, Nichijou is an anime that’s famous among animators
for where it spent its animation budget.
While other cartoons put all their money into fight sequences and making sure the first
and last episodes look spectacular, here comes Nichijou like hey, I’m going to put all
my money on spilling a pot of curry.
There are lots of interesting and funny sequences, but I wanted to take a closer look at the
penny soccer scene.
I’m going to play it for you.
This is a scene that goes seamlessly from 3D to 2D.
I’m dumbfounded.
I want to see exactly where or how they did this, or when it switches from 3D to 2D, so
let’s take a look here.
We start off with the 2D show style.
Go to pure 3D, where the background and the characters are 3D models.
There is actually no animation here at all.
The only thing moving is the camera.
At some point in here the character animation becomes 2D.
Is that also true for the background?
No.
No, it’s not.
The background stays 3D.
The part that gives it away is when the camera comes back around to its final resting spot.
Look at how perfectly those desks align with zero changes in line quality.
If they were drawn by hand those lines would wobble.
Compare the desks with the characters.
Line motion, no line motion.
Has this classroom setting always been 3D and we didn’t realize it until now?
Backtrack to the setup before the scene I played.
Is that desk the same as this desk?
It’s really hard to tell.
Look at the white feet here and the gray feet here.
That’s the only thing that suggests to me this desk is hand drawn and this one is not.
And maybe the fact the hand drawn desk outline better matches the characters than the 3D
desk.
If we leave the soccer scene and go earlier into the episode, a shot like this shows the
hand drawn nature of the desks.
There are lots of little differences between chair backs.
How do the backgrounds stay so accurate?
The background artists draw on top of a 3D model to begin with.
You can make a 3D setting in a program like SketchUp and use it as reference for drawing
the same classroom at any angle accurately.
Alright, back to soccer and I think I know where the character animation changes.
These highlights in the hair are painted directly on to the 3D model.
They stay in the same place even as the camera moves.
And it’s right… here… that it changes.
Now you can also see a change in the lines.
From here to here they do get a little bit thicker.
The reason the rest of the rotation looks like it’s still 3D is because the character
animators have the 3D models to draw on top of for reference.
Animating on top like that is called rotoscoping.
For the final animation, the 3D characters are removed and all we see is the 3D classroom
and the 2D characters.
As for why this is the switching point, it’s likely because the characters don’t look
believable in 3D once the camera gets this close.
There aren’t any lights or shaders in the 3D setting, so shadows like this wouldn’t
show up unless somebody drew them by hand.
2D animation also lets you reposition anatomy.
This mouth would not show up on the side of the face on the 3D model.
And that’s the secret to switching between 2D and 3D animation.