#early computer animation

I'm bringing Hexy back.

Good visual reference on Hexadecimal (And Reboot in general) is shockingly hard to find, so when I found a guy who had done 4k upscales of the series on YT, it was time for some screencaps.

It's a pity the first(ish?) truly all-CG cartoon was probably not preserved in a state that would let it be re-rendered at higher resolution. What was at the time a massive technological undertaking could be rendered real-time on a mid-tier computer now.

Her whole mask-swapping gimmick was, itself, a way of turning tech limitations into an interesting feature. Save time on facial animation and lip synch while making her more memorable.

Every action cartoon series needs a villainous femme fatale, and Hex dispenses with most of the subtlety. She's a dominatrix-witch with a, uh, sprite-tight red leather bodysuit and latex or possibly black painted metal gloves and thigh-boots.

None of us should have been surprised by Blackarachnia is all I'm saying.

And like any good villainess, she's got a full on murder-mode.

And this is going to take more than one post.

Beyond the Mind's Eye (1992) dir. Michael Boydstun.

We take sophisticated, high-end computer animation for granted these days. Even smaller movie studios are putting out stunning, high-definition 3D animation. It wasn’t always like this. A mini clip from 2023’s Elemental, showing the amazing CG graphics of the 2020s. Obviously, modern computer animation had to start somewhere. That somewhere includes a number of primitive and simplistic animated…