Homestar/Homsar's face

Teeth

I noticed that, in keeping with the tradition of the website, Homestar, Homsar and The Cheat are only ever seen from diagonal angles. At first I just attributed that to very careful camera work and some mesh flipping. But I was playing through Strong Badia the Free yesterday and I noticed that Homsar's head changes sides as you walk past him in Marzistar, and it made me suspicious...

So are Homestar and Homsar's faces, The Cheat's whole body, Coach Z's hat, Strong Mad's nose, etc all shot at certain angles and flipped when they change sides, or is it all handled automatically by the game engine? If so, that's pretty clever.

Omnisweater

I think it's automatic. I remember seeing a video before the game came out in which an animator was rotating the camera around Homestar, and his head was changing angles automatically.

Will

Yep, all handled in engine. There are occasional times when the choreographers have to get fancy and do some manual manipulation, but those are pretty few and far between.

Teeth

Ah. I take it some manual manipulation was done for the Dangeresque 3 intro, in which we sort of see Homestar's face from the front?

Also, another dead giveaway is when Strong Bad, Strong Sad and Homsar are walking out of the Homsar Reservation, and Homsar's body is quite obviously only being shown from two angles as the camera pans around.

Redrot

Well... It is easy to do that in Flash, but hard in 3-d anim like this. I think that they blurred the face a little bit then had them appear the other way.

pizzadude

The only time I know when you see the front of Homestar's face, was in this. But It's only for 1 to 2 frames, and it's not in SBCG4AP.