How many fingers does the average man have? 5
So why the fuck do animators give human or anthropomorphic characters 4 fingers. This shit pisses me off so fucking much. When I pick a series I find interesting with 4-fingered characters, I write the creators a very angry letter for their incompetency. STOP DOING IT. YOUR CHARACTER IS NOT A VICTIM OF YAKUZA'S CUSTOMS.
It's easier to design and animate.
The Simpsons had an elegant solution, wherein they referenced it as a joke sometimes.
>in another million years, man will have an extra finger
or that bit where Homer worries about their kids being inbred and we see them as real humans for all of two seconds. I would argue that anytime characters don't look like actual humans is a great time to appreciate multiple universe theory.
>t.lookhowsmartIam(evenwhendiscussingbullshitcartoons)
this.
I always thought this was a lame excuse
It's not like they really animate the fingers individually to begin with
For proportional reasons. If you're designing a simplified cartoon character, make it simple. When you don't, you get an ugly pack of sausages like Steven Universe.
(you)
How exactly do you think animation is done? Like you wave a magic wand and the fingers move, and the time it takes depends on how many fingers you wave the wand over?
Arms move in a lot of dimensions so they don't rig that well. So that means you often re-draw an entire arm or hand a frame at a time. If you have to draw a thousand frames, which is faster? Drawing 4,000 fingers, or drawing 5,000 fingers? It's the former - and I'll give you a tip, 1,000 frames is less than one minute of animation so do the math for a twenty minute show. Also it's both hands, so really it's 8,000 fingers versus 10,000 fingers in those 1,000 frames.
3D is a bit of an exception, but even then it looks clumsy and unnatural if you don't animate hands correctly, and nobody ever moves only the fingers they need. You really move them all, so the more fingers, the more animation.
Why not draw two fingers then?
Like everyone else said. 4 is the compromise between 5 fingers, which is more work to animate, and 3 fingers or below, which looks really unnatural.
anything less than 4 ends up looking too weird
It looks alien, but you notice plenty of artists do like to draw two fingers on their aliens.
This, Walt giving his characters 3 fingers and a thumb saved his company million in animation.
Flash animators got away with zero fingers for like a decade
Flash is awful and took plenty of engineering to get it to even function like useful animation software. The modern "Adobe Animate" still doesn't do well without modding.
>4 fingers for cartoony characters
>5 fingers for "realistic" characters
This is how it works. Toons look bad with five fingers. Just look at Steven Universe.
Because there are very few hand gestures that require the ring finger to be doing something different than one of the fingers next to it, so you can approximate most of them with only three.
>Why not draw two fingers then?
because then they'd look like mutant turtles or something.
>cartoon can't seem to decide if their characters have 4 or 5 fingers
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Ur a little bich, try drawing homer Simpson with 5 fingers while keeping his arm width. You'd have to make the hand big or the fingers blanket. That'd look awful.
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