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[diegzumillo]

This is something that popped up in my head. Imagine a very low poly model animated it in classic stop motion style, by re-positioning every vertex for each frame (that's why it has to be very low poly). No rig and no interpolation.

In my head that looks cool. But before I try doing it myself I wanted to see if it's been done already. So far I didn't find anything like that, does anyone know of anything similar out there? The two closest things I found is actual stop motion made in a 3d animation software and animated voxel, which is very trendy right now. But that's not what I have in mind. I would like to see if it has the effect I'm imagining, and if there are tools to do that already.

[Richard Kain]

This is entirely possible, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. For starters, it will significantly decrease the amount of freedom you have in your model. As an added point, it will take FOREVER. There is a reason why hardly anyone does stop-motion animation anymore. It is incredibly time consuming.

I do like the idea of approximating the "style" of classic stop-motion animation. But I would recommend attempting to approximate it without animating every point frame-by-frame. You can achieve a similar look with a rig and a few extra keyframes to add a bit of "jerkiness" to the animation.

[diegzumillo]

I don't think it would decrease the freedom. If anything, having a new model for each frame should increase the possibilities even. You don't have to preserve polygon count, for example. But it certainly sounds very time consuming! that's why I immediately imagined it as extremely low poly.

[Richard Kain]

Most animation systems using keyframes don't actually let you have multiple models. They just let you move the individual points on your models around. But the number of points, and the connections between them to form triangles, remain consistent. That's why I say it would be limiting. You would have to sculpt the initial model in such a way that there was a fairly large number of polygons, so that you have more flexibility for sculpting it into different shapes. Doing this in low-poly would limit you considerably.