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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

Taking shortcuts on your hobby, and being afraid of parts of your hobby, defeats the point of having a hobby. Why not learn to draw and animate from imagination? That way you'll be limited only by imagination.

Not to belittle the technical achievement, of course.

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Well, to each his own, I guess.

I spent several years learning to draw and paint, it was a great hobby. BUT, I didn't get to the point of being able to draw character-type art. That level of drawing is hard, due to the uncanny valley.

Also, I think it's also cool that he decided to try a different technique than hand-drawing, and went on to (A) get good results and (B) document it clearly. Doesn't feel to me like a "afraid of part of your hobby", more like "how do I get around my own limitations?" thing.

Plenty of professional animators use rotoscoping. Modern CG animators often reference video recordings of themselves acting. It's just another tool, not some form of cheating.

Sure, but the linked post is titled "Balls to learning how to animate, let's film some parkour!"

That does not imply being afraid of it, but seeing is as too time consuming.

"Balls" here does not refer to courage, but is used roughly as a synonym for "bullshit" or similar terms.

The point is to achieve realism. It's incredibly rare to see animations made without copious reference to film that actually looks nearly as realistic as something that's rotoscoped (or captured using other motion capture methods). If you want realism, it's pretty much a waste of time to manually animate it if you can rotoscope - you can always opt to add your own details to it afterwards.

I wouldn't personally presume to lecture anybody who is willing to learn parkour about 'being afraid' of parts of their hobby.

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