* tradition (we've always done it this way! retraining is hard! - which gets mentioned a lot in the article) * stylistic choice ('toon shaders' keep getting be

* tradition (we've always done it this way! retraining is hard! - which gets mentioned a lot in the article) * stylistic choice ('toon shaders' keep getting better but still look kinda weird compared to what an expert animator can do; there is a distinct visual pleasure to looking at A Cartoon versus a 3D model) * it's fun! There's a certain magic to making a series of still drawings come to life. * malleability (if you want wild takes, distortions, weird transformations, extreme poses, etc, you have to do a lot more work in a 3d package and explicitly model it, then figure out ways to swap it in versus Just Drawing It; hell, even a simple costume change for a few scenes is a lot more work in 3D) * much more complicated and expensive tools (the traditional pencil and paper method is gonna cost you maybe a couple hundred bucks to get started, a pro-level 3D package is going to be around a thousand bucks, more if you end up with the common workflow of one package for modelling, and another for animating, plus there's a crazy steep initial learning curve - I'm working on a show pitch intended to be in super-stylized 3D, and I'm really not looking forwards to learning how to wrangle that if it actually goes anywhere.) We're seeing a lot of lavishly-made 3D feature cartoons, but the 3D tv cartoons we're seeing are a lot rarer. This is because it costs a hell of a lot more to meticulously model a bunch of new stuff for every episode compared to drawing it - you always want to have new places to go, new characters to deal with. That said the state of the art of making 3D look like a cartoon has come a long way, my favorite current example is Guilty Gear Xrd, which is completely done in Unreal and is nearly indistinguishable from a hand-drawn fighting game. And had a lot of sweat and blood behind the scenes making it look that way: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022031/GuiltyGearXrd-s-Art-Style-The http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022031/GuiltyGearXrd-s-Art-Sty... TV studios are starting to experiment with this; a friend of mine at Nickelodeon (who previously ran the all-cg Kung Fu Panda show) is working on a project that's being built and animated in Unreal: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/gdc-2016-a-glimpse-at-the-real-time-future https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/gdc-2016-a-glimpse-at-the-... - search on 'Project 85'.