We know that CGI (Beast Wars, Unicron Trilogy, Galaxy, Prime, FoC) tend to cheat a bit as well. But do toys of 3D designs tend to have a more accurate look and more intuitive transformation?

I know that G1 are based on 2D toon and the original Diaclone toy moulds, and then from Beast Wars onwards, the 3D characters(and Armada/Micron Legend and RiD/Car Robot) were designed to have a feasible transformable toy.

I personally find that toys like Maketoys Galaxy Meteor and PE Beast Gorira look really accurate in both modes to their source material while maintaining an intuitive and feasible transformation. This is in contrast to G1 car bots that require tons of panels and armatures just to compensate for the shape shifting, size shifting and morphing nature of the 2D Transformers.

Of course, Bayformers morph and size shift too, even more so than G1 toon.

Original designs for toy's sake like Fansproject and Maketoys seem okay, but appears unrefined, though not as far as Hastak retail level CHUG.

So what toys and their character counterparts have none or almost no shape shifting?

 

Slag and Snarl. Open, twist, flip, rotate, etc. Simple but effective. Grimlock and Sludge less so and Swoop (toy) was just a bit of a blocky mess.

 

Airachnid and Knockout were 3D models and turned out less than great. MP figures are great figures and super accurate to the source. I doubt the source material really affects the toys much at all. It seems more like budget and effort are the deciding factors.

 

Not necessarily. In the case of something such as Cybertron or even Energon, they're very similar to the toys because they were designed that way (granted, I don't know their exact design process but it's pretty clear that they're quite heavily linked, and most of those models cheat very little overall).

 

Do the Bayformers cheat (morph and size shift? I thoiught that was one rule for the designers, no cheating on the transformations. Of course, the toys still failed to match the transformations exactly, due to the intricate nature of the Bayformers transformations that could not be practically reproduced on a miniature toy ("now use the included tweezers to move panel 347 38 degrees counterclockwise and 5 mm to the left. Ok, step 104. We're almost 1/3 done!")

But that's tangential to your original questions. I don't have enough experience with toys based on CGI modeled characters to say.

 

I suppose the snarky answer is that they totally cheated on transformations when you consider the "Transformium" robots from Age of Extinction. But yeah, they totally cheated on transformations. They didn't do mass shifting, allegedly. That being said, Devastator still looked way too big in Revenge of the Fallen despite the sheer number and size of the Transformers that made him if you ask me.

I don't have a ton of experience with the Unicron Trilogy toys. My understanding is that they're close to the CG models, and like TCJJ said, they were built that way for a reason. On the other hand, Transformers have been straight up cheating since day one in almost all other respects starting hardcore in Season 3 of the cartoon (watch the Technobots not so much transform as morph like block marshmallows) to Arcee in Prime who mass shifts and loses almost all her front end kibble in order to keep her slim girl silhouette (not a criticism, just a statement of fact).

Weirdly, I think TF:A spent more time trying to make sure their characters had working transformations than Beast Wars did. While BW had generally accurate robot mode to toy models, their was a substantial amount of cheating on the beast modes (which almost never looked like the toys). They didn't 'transform' fully, tending to 'absorb' body parts, and you can basically forget about any kind of accuracy when it came to Blackarachnia in any incarnation, including her mutated gypsy spider waif look from Beast Machines.

Short answer: depends on the show.