sabertoothwalrus: I think Rise of the Guardians (2012) has the highest level of skin detail I’
sabertoothwalrus: I think Rise of the Guardians (2012) has the highest level of skin detail I’ve ever seen human characters in 3D animation get, and it is also the most successful at having realistically-textured human characters without them looking uncanny or like boiled dough. How to Train Your Dragon (2010) comes in second. You wouldn’t really expect these 10 year old movies to achieve that better than today’s??? but modern animation still looks so odd in comparison. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019) looks amazing in every aspect - except skin and hair. It might actually be because the lighting and backgrounds have become so hyper-realistic, our brains scrutinize it more harshly. On top of that, they stopped giving the characters pores, veins, dark circles, and wrinkles!! They can render hair much, much finer now, but it lacks those harsh edges that give them those nice crispy specular highlights, and instead looks like an amorphous blur. Everything looks airbrushed or out of focus.If the characters don’t match their environments, they’ll look out of place. I think Toy Story 2 (1999) looks better than all the others in the series, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that in 1999, they couldn’t make hyper-realistic backgrounds yet, so the characters actually matched the world they existed in. Sony Pictures Animation is the only studio that’s been good about this recently. Into the Spider-Verse (2018) is a good example, and Connected (2020) looks visually consistent as well. I hope more studios will follow suit or just go back to 2D animation where this isn’t nearly as much of an issue lol -- source link