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INTEREST: Belle, BEASTARS Show How the 3D Models Change Depending on the Angle

A lot of the weirdness in CGI anime comes from how fast and loose the classic "anime" visual style plays with perspective at different angles. In a 2D piece, it's generally up to the tweeners and the art director to keep faces looking consistent as they move between angles, requiring several distinct hand-drawn frames, but in 3D you're often stuck with a single mesh that will be rendered from different angles, and there are pretty much always going to be a few angles where it stops resembling the artwork it's based on.

You'd think the rise of anime-styled video games would be pushing the tech along at breakneck speeds, but most of them settle for the traditional approach of using a single model that ends up having a few really bad angles, in spite of this being such an old and well-known problem. Mega Man Legends 2 solved it way back when by using different animated facial textures for a few static angles. The only video game series I can think of to openly use the approach in this article is Ace Attorney, but they actively swap the models in real-time (you can sometimes spot the cut) rather than performing the deforms in real-time.

Another interesting approach I've seen precisely once was Nihon Falcom's Zwei II, which had a layer for facial parts inside the head mesh and used clever z-ordering to make it seem like it was layered on top, allowing for the distorted perspective present in super-deformed visuals to look correct even in rotating shots. That's another trick I haven't seen anywhere else, despite being so clever and (seemingly) cheap to implement.

Another interesting approach I've seen precisely once was Nihon Falcom's Zwei II, which had a layer for facial parts inside the head mesh and used clever z-ordering to make it seem like it was layered on top, allowing for the distorted perspective present in super-deformed visuals to look correct even in rotating shots. That's another trick I haven't seen anywhere else, despite being so clever and (seemingly) cheap to implement.

(There are some stuff I wanted to quote, cannot decide what to pick without it being a wall of text. But good examples and concerns was made there.)

I believe Arc Systems (whoever models the guilt gear games) have also remodeled and adjusted for each frame of animation.

Huh, I would have thought that if you have a model you could just move it or the camera around it. Didn't know you had to adjust the model depending on the angle. Interesting stuff

A lot of the weirdness in CGI anime comes from how fast and loose the classic "anime" visual style plays with perspective at different angles.

A western (but big in Japan) example — in the Peanuts strip, the characters have their eyes and nose drawn above their ears when facing forwards, but in a line when facing sideways.