There has been several attempts to make cartoon TV shows in 3D, or look realistic. For instance, Simpsons’ first attempt looked something like this:
It was really fun, but didn’t actually capture the essence of Homer, which for me is nothing more than this:
Many artists have tried to do so since then, but honestly, they scared me more than make me laugh. Some amazing examples:
Pretty awesome, but they are stills mostly. Hard to animate that. Recently though, I have discovered other examples that seem more feasible to me, as they are just plain 3D models, not so post-processed, and in my opinion they capture pretty well the essence of the characters (from Futurama, in this case):
COOL !
For those of you who always asked themselves how are The Simpsons done, you can check this video (sorry it´s in Spanish only, from Chile TV apparently):
I always thought they had some kind of software to manage camera angles automatically. I even thought sometimes (specially for the most recent seasons) that backgrounds or characters where initially animated in 3D, and then rendered as 2D, but it seems they are animated traditionally.
The video is pretty old though, so things probably changed in the last years.
Some other hilarious examples:
And some other pics as a present. Not in 3D, but really fun !!, and very appropriate for T-Shirts… ja jaaa:
All of them come from here.
Cheers!