No Flow in CGI: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
▲<small>{{quote box|The Force, or extra strength hair spray? You decide.}}</small>
In old or low-budget CGI, the characters will never wear loose garments, have long hair or include anything that might flow or rustle in wind or when moving. This was the case because early CGI software and hardware limitations made anything other than clunky, [[Uncanny Valley]] inspiring graphics impossible. These technical limits and costs are slowly being pushed back, but it's still hard and costly to simulate.
To circumvent these limitations, authors and graphic artists got creative and made a few concessions and stylistic choices. Here's a small list:
* Girls and women would have short hair and wear skintight gear. When they did have long hair, it would be done up in buns or heavily "moussed", becoming an immobile block.
* Films or TV episodes or entire ''series'' would take place in settings whose inhabitants naturally lacked loose garments and billowing hair. For example, being [[Toy Story (franchise)|plastic toys]], [[
* All loose fabrics will be inert, either by being drawn taut or by never having a breeze/character move them.
Averting this trope is something of a Holy Grail for CGI animators, which can lead to being averted ''too'' hard. A lot of instances of flowing hair or gowns end up flowing ''too much'', taking attention from anything else in the scene, like Dr. Ross' hair in ''[[Final Fantasy:
Although to be fair, in real life a lot of people's hair barely moves. In CGI, a "good" movie has the characters medium-length hair moving as if it's submersed in water. In real life, it would barely move at all, even long hair comes nowhere near close to it, becoming a case of [[Reality Is Unrealistic]]. For an approach to averting this trope, see [[Jiggle Physics]].
{{examples|Examples}}▼
== Films -- Animation ==
* Also true to a limited extent in traditional animation. This is why Belle's hair was usually in a ponytail in ''[[Beauty and
** In the direct-to-video sequels and the TV series, the carpet's elaborate design was downgraded so it could be drawn without CGI. Compare the [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_YtQFcCXNo6k/TAANptMk7fI/AAAAAAAAFMw/NeOwtWQC06Y/s1600/carpet11.jpg carpet as seen in the feature] with the
** Averted hard with ''[[
* In 2001's ''[[Final Fantasy:
* ''[[Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
* ''[[The Incredibles]]'':
** Violet's hair took ''a lot'' of work to animate properly. To the point where Pixar animators had to cut a scene showing the family hiding underwater because of how much effort it would take to properly animate her hair in those conditions.
** Practically all characters have hair that is affected by wind, water and movement. Violet's is the most noticeable, but Dash's hair is definitely not static when he runs at high speed. Dash's hair was the most difficult of the lot of them; it had a general shape that it needed to keep, but it also needed to react to stimulus like his vast speed properly, without stretching -- ''much''. It took over a year of work to get his hair right.
*** Helen's hair when they first land in the water after {{spoiler|the plane gets blown up}}. ''Oy.''
** In the director's commentary on the DVD, they say that a relatively understated scene early in the movie caused lots of headaches. Mr. Incredible is examining his old costume and notices a rip from his fight with the robot (which prompts him to get a new costume, and it's that same rip that tips off his wife that he's being a superhero again, and...) Apparently, it is very, very hard to use CGI to animate someone sticking a hand through a hole in cloth.
** Another simple scene was processor-intensive: when the costume is chucked in the garbage can at Edna's and slowly slides in from the edge; it was incredibly difficult to simulate.
* One of the reasons [[Pixar]] stuck to making movies about plastic toys and bugs in the early days was because it avoided problems like this. Observe the difference in how dogs are modelled in ''[[Toy Story (franchise)|Toy Story]]'' (static, plastic-looking) compared to ''[[Toy Story 2]]'' (appropriately fuzzy). And even the characters that were ''supposed'' to look like plastic in the first ''[[Toy Story (franchise)|Toy Story]]'' film had noticeably limited facial animation compared to the next two films.
* By the time they produced ''[[Monsters
* Most human females that appear in Pixar films normally wear either pants or tight clothing. An exception to this rule would be a female patient in the dentist's waiting room near the end of ''[[Finding Nemo]]'', who is apparantly mistaken by both Nemo and the Tank Gang for Darla, especially in the fullscreen version where the exposed portion of said patient's legs are completely visible in all three of her appearances.
** However the environment completely averts this with plants realistically moving with the [[Incredibly Lame Pun|flow]].
* ''Barbie as Rapunzel'''s braid looks okay, but when she wears her hair "loose" it looks like it's made of rubber. Semi-justifiable because it took [[Disney]] [[Development Hell|years and years]] to perfect the technology for their [[Tangled|telling of the story]].
* ''[[Cars]]'' mostly exemplifies this trope; but there are some shots of flowing water, and the tearaways near the beginning of the movie produce various realistic flames which are especially impressive to anyone who knows how difficult realistic particle animation is.
* ''[[
** Averting this trope is the reason why this movie is the second most expensive film ever made. They did very well with the hair, clothes, and water... but the fire not so much.
* In the commentary for ''[[Over the Hedge (
* You can see the technology improving in the ''[[Shrek]]'' movies. In the first movie, it took them a lot of effort to make Fiona's hair sway and Shrek is bald. The second movie used a new engine for handling hair, and they have lampshaded it by showing a scene where Prince Charming takes of his helmet to show his incredibly smooth and wavy hair. ''Shrek 3'' added the ability to model longer flowing hair, and they used that to render the different hair styles of the princesses. In ''Shrek 4'', there is a scene where Fiona appears as a warrior and you see her long curly hair swaying in the wind. [http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/shrek/the-whole-story-evolution-of-hair Here's] a video that shows the evolution of Fiona's hair.
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== Films -- Live-Action ==
* The original ''[[King Kong]]'' averted this, though by accident. It was unavoidable that the hair on the Kong model would move around as the animators worked with it. However, on film, this works well, as it just looks like Kong's fur is moving in the wind.
* This is [[Invoked Trope|invoked]] in ''[[Tron
== Video Games ==
* A particularly glaring example would be Ezio's cape from ''[[
* Even though there is little flow, there are ways to fake it, at least in the [[
* In ''[[Dungeons
* ''[[
* Very common with mods for ''[[The Sims 2]]''. Though creators of mods have improved tremendously since the old days, it's not uncommon for it to appear that the sims are using industrial strength hairspray and way too much starch in their laundry. Also, a lot of custom content creators try to fix this and end up with the hair having a gap under the neck, skirts with black areas under them, and even feet bending at the ankle(usually with high heels that are higher than what is usual in the game).
* According to developers, some of the character design changes in ''[[Castlevania]] [[Castlevania Judgment
* In the original ''[[Castlevania
** And in the original ''Rondo'', Richter is wearing a long trenchcoat with a flowing bandanna, and his appearance in ''Symphony of the Night'' shows him with back-length hair and an even longer coat. In ''DXC'' he looks like a reject for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as a result of this cost-cutting.
* The reason we never get a 3D Alucard based on Ayami Kojima's design is because it would be really, ''really'' hard to make a 3D animation as magnificent as his ''[[Castlevania
* Lara's trademark ponytail in the original ''[[Tomb Raider (
* ''[[Primal]]'' did something similar with Jen's distinctive pigtails, as well as with one or two other characters, most of whom suffered from the 'hair through the neck' problem.
* ''[[
** The same happened to Solid Snake in the original ''Metal Gear Solid'' for PSX, whose design includes a long, flowing bandanna. It slowed the engine down so much, though, that the ends were eventually cut off. In ''[[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty]]'', the bandanna tails follow his motions almost perfectly and even flutter noisily when he opens a door to the storm on the deck outside, and was exaggerated by the tails on the Infinity Bandanna being as long as Snake is tall, giving an impression a little like a ninja scarf.
** Snake's [[Spy Catsuit|skintight outfit]] might be an example of this trope, though, since the original plan was to put him in combat fatigues, but they didn't have the technology at the time to realistically move them in the wind of the storm [[And Now for Someone Completely Different|Snake's part of the game was set in]]. It worked out [[Fan Service|well enough, though]]. [[Stupid Sexy Flanders|Stupid, sexy Snake...]]
** ''[[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty]]'' also averts this with Raiden's hair, though it doen't seem to have much weight so it looks a bit unrealistic.
** In ''[[Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater]]'' Snake's clothes react convincingly well to wind etc.
* ''MLB: The Show 07'' on the [[
* ''[[Super Mario Bros. (
** In ''[[New Super Mario Bros
** The Mario series' relationship with this trope pre-dates three-dimensional graphics: Mario's trademark cap was added because the developers didn't want to have to animate hair. The mustaches were also a result of not wanting to animate a face.
*** Animate nothing. The mustaches were so you could ''tell there was a face to begin with''.
** This was also played straight with the original version of [[Big Bad|Bowser]], who was actually depicted without hair in that game. However, he did have hair in the SNES remake.
** Starting in ''[[Super Smash Bros Melee|Melee]]'', the ''Super Smash Bros.'' series has a few features that blow in the wind ([[The Legend of Zelda|Link]]'s cap, the ''[[
* In ''[[City of Heroes]]'', only one character, Ghost Widow, has flowing hair. The developers stated this would be a huge performance bottleneck if they extended it to everyone else. Even still, her hair is a bit too elastic for its own good. Also played straight with every piece of clothing or equipment (most noticeably in the robes), besides the capes. The capes, which are the source of Ghost Widow's hair physics, work nicely, since they flow and move rather nicely, but the elasticity is still there. Especially noticeable when using travel powers, since any quick movement makes the cape double in size temporarily. Champions Online uses basically the same physics, too.
* ''[[Mortal Kombat]]''
** Made painfully clear in ''Mortal Kombat 4'' with Sonya's frozen ponytail. Later games, made for more powerful systems, managed to avert this: almost everyone has some part of their hair or clothes that flaps freely (in fact, Goro and Kintaro has front flaps added to their [[Loin Cloth
** Inverted with Shang Tsung: Much like he did in the first game, he was originally intended to have long flowing hair in ''Mortal Kombat 3'', which used live-action motion captured actors for the character sprites, but it apparently caused problems, so he had a ponytail instead. In ''Deadly Alliance'', his first appearance in 3D rendering, he had...long flowing hair. Admittedly, this was at the point where technology could accomodate for this, since he wasn't in ''4''.
* Inverted with H-Game developer ''Illusion'', since it devotes ''a lot'' (and with good reason) of its developing efforts on giving compelling animation to the games' girls, especially to their hair. To the point that it's jarring when its compared to the flat-boxed environments.
* ''[[
* Squall's fur collar in ''[[
* Hair in ''[[
* ''[[
* As of ''[[
* In ''[[
* By ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'', Valve was comfortable giving Zoe a ponytail and bangs. Although they did a pretty good job animating the *Ahem* Boomers [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzipB3lS-bo&has_verified=1 large bodies...]
* And now several of the unlockable items in ''[[
* In ''[[Oblivion]]'' and ''[[
** Skyrim however has a problem with flowing clothes. This is most noticable on the Nightingale Armor, where the cape seems to be anchored at the hip, causing it to unnaturally bend with the PC's body movements rather than actual flow. Similarly any dress or robe in the game will cling onto the legs of the wearer as they walk, rather than realistically wave.
* ''[[Second Life]]'' partially avoids this with animated hair and skirts available as purchased items. It still has clipping issues, but it does look okay most of the time. The default avatar hair ("slider hair") does not flow at all, nor does default avatar skirts. Also, most hair is created with either toruses, which are easy to bend into locks, or sculpties, which are user-defined shapes. Neither of these support the "Flexible Path" option. Hair in ''Second Life'' thus ranges from very well-done hair that doesn't flow, to somewhat crappy-looking hair that flows properly.
* ''[[
* In ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', capes do flow, but not particularly well. It's especially obvious when the character has a tail, like the Tauren and the Draenei do. Then the cape sways in perfect sync with the tail, but doesn't fall properly at the end of the tail. They also don't wrap around or cover the body, but fall straight down the back like a towel tied around the neck. Capes also clip ''horribly'' while riding a raptor mount.
* ''[[
* In ''[[Rock Band]]'', there are no guitar straps in the animations because of this. The guitars still act like the straps are there, just invisible. The mo-cap people wore guitar straps and nobody bothered to adjust the models for it. Also, at least one of the potential hair models for female rockers will give them pigtails made of concrete.
* Played straight in ''[[
* In the ''[[Saints Row]]'' series, there is a wide variety of long hairstyles to choose from, ranging from corn rows to dreads to ponytails to straight, elbow-length hair. Every single one of these styles is as rigid and stiff as a plank of wood. It's particularly noticeable in a cutscene in the second game, where your character is thrown around during a fight with a rival gang
* In ''[[Alan Wake]]'', Alan's shirts and jacket behave very much like shirts and a
* According to the folks at Double Fine, the original main character of ''[[
* [[
* In ''[[God of War (
* ''[[Flower]]'' is all about averting this, despite not depicting any humans. Grass, flowers, petals in the breeze, and other objects all blow realistically in the player-controlled wind.
* Most of the characters in ''[[Dead Space (
* ''[[Dead or Alive]]'': Assuming you can tear your eyes from the physics-insulting boobs, you may notice the terribly animated hair.
** In ''Dimensions'' they use a different engine for handling long hair that stops it from clipping through the girl's shoulder every time she moves. Long, flowy dresses will still flow strangely at times, but I'm sure [[Panty Shot|the male audience doesn't mind]].
* ''[[Kingdom Hearts
* ''[[
* [[Resident Evil]] has had a noticeable relationship with this since the very beginning. Chris and Jill's gear is skintight and all enemies have nothing to flow with them. For 4 games the only character who ever got a ponytail was Claire and every outfit was unusually formfitting. The first game to really get out of this was [[RE 4]].
* In ''[[Eternal Sonata]]'', characters like Polka wear beautiful, bulky layered dresses which remain static and unmoving in all weather, and the characters run around with their arms at a perpetual 45-degree angle to avoid having to interact with the fabric.
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== Web Animation ==
* The ''[[
* Played with in ''The Legend of Zelda: The Light Of Courage''. Link and Zelda's hair and clothes are completely stiff, but Ganon's robe flows ''way too much'', at one point even ''falling halfway off'' when he moves too fast. (This was actually a mistake, but they decided to [[Throw It In]] because it was [[Rule of Funny|funny]].)
* ''[[RWBY]]'' usually averts this trope, but sometimes its [[Off-Model]] moments can include failures to flow cloth and hair. After the change in animation engines between volumes 3 and 4, the Off-Model moments all but vanished, and both clothing and hair were handled far better.
== Western Animation ==
* ''[[
* One of the trope's first widespread sights was in ''[[The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest]]''. Whenever the characters entered the virtual Questworld, they would wear form-fitting armor instead of clothes, and due to the animation techniques, hair would look like a sculpted helmet, flow be damned.
* Various shows by [[Mainframe Entertainment]] had to use this trope. ''[[
* ''[[Shadow Raiders]]'' is set in space, with aliens made of rock, magma, who are insects, reptiles or robots. So no-one even ''has'' hair, nor wear billowy clothes. Only the reptiles of Bone have moving membranes/ridges on their backs, which do move along with them. A few rare scenes features static fabrics in the throne room of planet Fire.
* ''[[
* ''[[
* In the ''[[Star Wars:
* Usually played straight in ''[[
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[[Category:Animation Tropes]]
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