Yes that is a risk when relying on reference. The similar thing happens when you rely too much on rotoscoping for your animation. For the 3D reference I personally would only pick a few landmarks on the 3d reference to keep the drawing looking solid and the rest I would throw away so that I can squash and stretch and distort. The 3D reference is not an end in itself, merely a tool. This requires good judgement and discretion on the artist, but I think, at least for me, would be extremely helpful tool.schwarzgrau wrote:The good thing about something like the 3D guides you talking about is that they are absolutely accurate, but that's also their downside. For example I noticed if I use TVPaints Out-Of-Pegs function too much my animations get absolutely mechanical. I don't want to say you need to overthink every inbetween, but if you got a perfect guide for every frame you will propably stop thinking and loose the looseness of it.
It's like comparing pose-to-pose animation with straight-forward animation. Pose-to-pose is great for staging a shot and keeping the characters constant etc. but you're loosing the life of it really fast.
That's the reason why a film like paperman doesn't work for me (apart from the story). It misses the tiny bit of imperfection even the last hand-drawn Disney features had.
I understand that the purists don't like this idea and that's fine, but I think there are many who would.