Do you feel the CG still holds up in 2020?

[CyberCubed]

The first season was designed around late 2011/early 2012 for a 2012 debut. If you have the show in HD, how do you feel the CG holds up in 2020? As we know the show itself looked better as it went on (Seasons 3+ looked better CG-wise than the first two seasons), but do you think the CG holds up?

I worry the show might look very dated in a few years time and become difficult to rewatch. I guess the cartoony art style helps it since it's not done in realistic art.

[neatoman]

The CGI does not hold up. I rewatched season 1 in 2017 and felt it was pretty primitive looking, that was a mere 5 years after it debuted. So no, the CGI does indeed not hold up now wither, aged really poorly really quickly. Even aside from being kind of weak now, there are aspects to the animation that were always questionable. Any liquid that appears seems to behave like thick gravy, there's always a surprising lack of background characters and the backgrounds themselves tend to be reused way too often so it'll come across like NYC consists of a single block. In fairness, this is budgeted more like a cheap toy commercial (which is kind of why this show exists in the first place, to market a toyline) rather than genuine entertainment, it was never going to age gracefully.

[Zog The Magnificent]

I think it holds up fine. Sure, in the beginning the animation wasn't quite as good, which led to things like a conspicuously empty New York, but in terms of the other things, the cartoon is stylized enough that the shortcomings are hidden and it still looks great. It's sort of like the Jimmy Neutron cartoon, which you would think would looke terrible now, but actually looks okay, again due to the styilization. The 2012 show still has detailed character models, fluid action, and proper lip syncing, with animation that only gets better and more detailed as the show goes on, which is especially evident in the fight scenes.

[IndigoErth]

It's fine... the show isn't that old at all and technologically speaking, 3D animation for cartoons hasn't exactly changed that much between then and now. Being a cartoon, the only thing there is to not hold up over time in the relative near future is just from future shifts in the typical look and animation style of those sorts of cartoons. But even then it's artistic decisions and cost. Good luck getting more detailed looking "kid" series without it costing a lot more.

The early part of this one doesn't feel as fluid in animation, but... art style and cost as well, given that the same technology is already long capable of realistic 3D.

edit: Come to think of it... maybe the success of that series and its merchandise sales allowed it the funds to put more money into it and smooth out the animation and afford the increased render time after that first season. Hmm.

[newfan]

It only ended in 2017 (though you refer to the early seasons). The show still works for me, later seasons look a little better but I think they were more limited to what they could do early on (even having long hair on Karai and April) The random extra humans could look dull (Kirby for example) but I didn't care so much about them, I liked the look of a number of characters and there are some impressive fight scenes in the show. Maybe give it a few more years before I look again and ask that question.

[sdp]

It was never amazing CG, the cartoony style works and for the most part it holds up, human characters are the ones that will suffer the most of course. I don't think it looks much worse than it did when it first started airing.

[IndigoErth]

Plastic looking 3D hair always bugs me a little, but what has to go into more realistic hair in that medium would have taken an oversized bite of budget then it reasonably needed to.

Heck, better development of hair in it isn't even all that old either. Disney's Tangled for example, if I recall correctly, the advancements within 3D for what they wanted and needed for that film didn't even exist yet so they had to invent it themselves. Which is awesome, because companies with money to do it are always able to bring those advances to 3D/CGI in general. But Tangled came out in 2010, only two years before TMNT 2012 premiered. Not that plug-ins didn't exist for hair already to an extent, but it was still improving not that long before the time 2012 was itself in the development stage.

Hopefully it will eventually become easier and cheaper to do so maybe a future 3D show, were another to exist, might be able to spruce that up a little and avoid looking so plastic.

[IMJ]

I think it absolutely holds up - especially for a T.V. show. There's a big difference between Transformers Beast Wars CGi which was primitive and lacked any appropriate kinects (hence, doesn't "hold up") and TMNT '12 which had gorgeous animation with art direction commanding texturing on the somewhat smoother side.

It's the same thing as the PS2 era Batman, Superman and TMNT games. They hold up incredibly well because the art direction was intentionally simplistic (animated styles, cell shading color, etc) although they were designed in the PS2 era of processing power.

And so, TMNT '12 probably isn't perfect by any means but to say it hasn't held up I think misses the point completely about art direction versus quality of cgi.

[Whatswiththeheadbands?]

I never thought the show looked that great when it first aired

[AquaParade]

Originally Posted by Whatswiththeheadbands?

I never thought the show looked that great when it first aired

Me neither, when it comes to character design and fluid animation.

However, the show has some great choreography and dynamic storyboarding that give it an edge, visually.

[Whatswiththeheadbands?]

Originally Posted by AquaParade

Me neither, when it comes to character design and fluid animation.

However, the show has some great choreography and dynamic storyboarding that give it an edge, visually.

I do like some of the art design. Shredder's design was pretty good. I liked the subtle ways they made the turtles look different from each other. Splinter's walking stick being see-through green I thought was supposed to be solidified ooze.

Over than that, I think everything looked too flat and lacked depth or character.

[newfan]

This thread reminded me that I am yet to buy all the series, so I just bought the first half of season 5 digitally. The turtles themselves do come up best over all when looking at everything but I'm sure not feeling it looks old and dated already

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Can someone upload a few images comparing the early seasons with the late ones?

[The Great Saiyaman]

Originally Posted by Original TMNT Cartoon Fan

Can someone upload a few images comparing the early seasons with the late ones?

Okay. Here's a compilation of clips from all four seasons, you actually see the animation evolve.

Go to around 1:12 in this clip to have the declaration scene from "Turtle temper" which in my opinion has the worst animation of the first season.



The trailer of the season two finale: Very obvious that the daylight version of New York city was not used that much before, since certainly with the car scene and Raph and Casey running past that newspaper stand, the layering is still questionable. The dark certainly hides a lot of flaws in the animation. But that's offset by for example the scene where Leonardo is being thrown through the window, that's something that the first season would have never been able to pull off.


By the time season four came around, almost all the kinks had been ironed out, although I still say that the fight scene against Fishface still had a very bad layering problem of him and the water.

[Dejablue]

Stylized cartoonish CGI will always look fairly decent. Its not like hyper realistic CGI that starts to show its age much faster.

[oldmanwinters]

I always liked the CG on the Turtles' animation, but the backgrounds often bored me for being too bland, at least when the episodes were set in the city.

[TigerClaw]

I think the CGI was pretty good. But pretty good for TV that is. It wasn't the kind of animated CGI that you see in the movies these days. But it was certainly good despite some of design decisions they had for certain characters.

Also with the show's budget. They couldn't populate the city with people in the background. Which is why lots of stuff on this show felt empty at times.

[PApagreg]

I say it mostly holds up but the show, the character models looks nice but the show was also weak when it came to liquids. When I'm re watching the show on Pluto TV I don't get a lot of instances where I say "this does not look good". Still if we do get another CGI TMNT cartoon I kinda want it to be done in the Dragon Prince style(minus the low frame rate)

[Zulithe]

some people acting like the CGI in season 1 was comparable to Reboot from 1994 or something

2012 did improve its animation over time, but the main problem was always the asset reuse and not the animation of said assets IMO. Lots of duplicate assets, particularly background characters, or scenes that look pretty empty even though it's NYC and there should be tons to look at and stuff going on in the background. It's not realistic to expect them to have filled the backgrounds out tremendously like a feature film would, but they could have pulled some magic tricks to make things feel less empty.

It's far below the budget and quality of something like Clone Wars but I'm pretty satisfied with what they pulled off.

[newfan]

A lot of content there Great Saiyaman, I felt the scene of Leo going through the window in slow motion quite effective.