Who doesn't love a good parody?

If you love games like Animal Crossing, as well as online cartoons, then look no further!  A few days ago, one of my personal favorite online animators, Max Gilardi, aka "Hotdiggetydemon," posted his new cartoon, titled as "Isabelle ruins everything."  It parodies the popular Nintendo 3DS game, "Animal Crossing: New Leaf," by showing what would happen if the player's second in command, Isabelle, takes charge over the town.  The hilarious dialogue between the mayor and Isabelle entertains the viewers by basically explaining why a Marxist government wouldn't work in today's world.  I found it to be rather smart, as well as pretty adorable.

Gilardi has been known in the past to be rather controversial in his subject matter, and many of his cartoons involve explicit material, such as violence, swearing, and sex.  This animation, however, is oddly innocent compared to many of his other past creations.  Other than a few moments of light police brutality, the cartoon overall felt very refreshing to watch compared to many other popular online animations out today.  It was mostly dialogue that consisted of little swearing, and a more informative commentary.  The animation is also superb, and the little quirks, such as the way their mouths moved, made me fall in love with this.  If I ever had the opportunity to work with an animator like this, then I would do it in a heartbeat.

2D features on 3D models

With lots of 3D animation in various movies, television shows and games, a fairly common animation and design feature is the usage of 2D features on the models. An example of this can be seen in the following:

The animator, Max Gilardi, uses both Maya and adobe flash to achieve this effect. It adds an interesting look to the characters, and makes things in many ways, easier. Facial rigging in 3D is very time consuming, and isn't easy.

Using 2D features for faces and fine details can be a good way to speed up production. This style is used in television animation as well. Most notably in my opinion, on the Spanish show "Jelly Jamm"

The show boasts an interesting visual style with great stylized animation. The characters' facial features are all 2D, save for the king, who has a mixture of 2D and 3D features. These features are implemented in a later render in the animation process.

Even I've used this visual style, both to speed up production and to save on polycount (I was working on a video game)

All the ghosts featured in the game have 2D textures for moving facial features. I wanted to still have 3D features on the face and body to give the models themselves variety.

Without textures, everything in here would be gray cubes!

The use of 2D textures in 3D things is actually very common, especially in video games. Keep and eye out for it!