Why does CG only work in action scenes?

A

All or Nothing

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I've noticed a trend in several CG shows over the years. It's that action and fight scenes on these shows are well done but mundane tasks like walking and talking look unnaturally stiff or stilted. I first noticed it with MTV's Spiderman. The webslinging and fight scenes were amazing (no pun intended) but characters engaged in a simple conversation looked like they were doing the robot.

Any reason for this?
 
Big movements are easier to animate than little ones. Walking and talking to someone takes a lot of little nuances to make it look natural.

Also there's the budget to consider - if it's an action series, you want to save up your really good animation for the action.
 
Big action scenes are one of the only things CGI has going against traditinal styles right now, IMO. Smaller movements look much more natural in 2-d, though I'm not quite sure for the reasons behind that.
 
Sparticus mentions a good point in that the budget plays a role in it. TV studios don't have the money that studios like Pixar and Dreamworks have. The talent at TV studios also factors in as either they aren't up to the level as feature studios or they don't have as many people working on it or both.

Another reason is time. Feature film studios have around 4 years to work on 1 movie and make it as best as possible when it comes to animation. While TV studios have to turn out lets say 13 half hour episodes within a span of a year. There just isn't enough time and resources to fine tune it to the quality of UP, Shrek, etc.

So basically its the same reasons why 2D tv shows aren't as nice to look at as a traditional Disney film. Hope that answers your question.

Edit:
Forgot to also say that working in 3D can be tricky at times( so can 2D as well ). It requires posing things out in step keys( so just poses no in betweens ), changing poses and composition, putting in linear keys( rough in betweens now ), smoothing the curves out, then changing the timing for overlapping action. It's really time consuming stuff.
 
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