• What Happened to Nice 2D Animation in Videogames (and Movies)? (Self posted)
    27 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yojZM5ZI8yg This is something I have been wanting to talk about for a long time. Finally beating cup head is what motivated me to. What do you think? I admit I have always leaned towards 2D animation.
Animating sprites is a bitch. Much easier to pose 3D models than having to draw each frame by frame.
I agree, I even specifically mention that. It's gotten to the point to where there are only a small handful of people who know how to make good sprite animation in the west. However 3D graphics themselves have a whole lot of issues all themselves which help inflate game/movie budgets.
I really like the video! I've always had more of a preference to 2D animation but it seems we're getting closer to making 3D look more like traditional 2D. I feel like Disney should be getting close, Paper Man was 2012 so it's been a while
One of the biggest incentives to use 3d is the ability to tweak and modify after the fact. In 2d, once it's on paper that's it. You can still modify it of course, but you'd have to do that for every frame. It's another reason why pixel art is so appealing to indies. It's way easier to re-animate 4 frames of 64x64 then 4 frames of 512x512 (or bigger, you get the idea).
There is also what Arc System works is doing by trying to make 3D visuals look as 2D as possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E
High quality 2d art in games is absurdly expensive and inflexible. Unlike television shows and movies, things have to continue existing outside of the camera, meaning every character and object need full animation cycles. It won't be much of a problem if everything is 16-bit or so, but you ask for quality that rivals the best, you pay the price. Best to compromise detail, and let consistency and composition to do most of the work. On the other hand, 3d have plenty of advantages to accelerate their creation process: object scanning, mocap, shareable rigging, shaders, physics and plenty of other automated process. Game making is a process that involves a lot of changes mid-production, and 3d is so much less susceptible to destructive workflow. I still very much appreciate 2d games and still play them a lot, but their limitation is very apparent. Try to amp up the overall quality, and the world becomes increasingly confined. While 3d worlds are progressively complex both aesthetically and systematically, 2d worlds continue to stagnant and struggle to innovate. They might have got tools to aid in production speed and quality, it is nowhere as revolutionary as 3d. They will continue to have their charm, style and exaggerations, but when you speak of volume, flexibility and long-term feasibility when accounting for the highest level of quality, they are wanting.
One of the annoying things about 3D is that everyone seems to be trying to achieve photorealism, which I think is one of the reasons for bigger costs in video games nowadays. Photorealism is a pipe dream and I would much rather video games have a designed and appealing aesthetic instead. The latter ages better.
It is expensive but so too is nice 3D. 3D animation has many advantages but it still costs just as much to do well, even more so if you compare the cost of producing a feature length 2D animated film to feature length movies. Zootopia costs 3 times more to produce than Aladdin for example.
I like that whole masking 3D to make it look like 2D thing too well.
http://www.noe-v.com/images/articles/terry_sprites.jpg I wish I could find a video on it but king of fighters 13 does the opposite by making 3D objects and placing pixels over them to more quickly make 2D sprites. So it's 2D sprites that have an almost 3D quality to them.
I get that its easier thats why i like it less. More effort was put into the 2d games than the 3d ones.
I always appreciate great sprite work, but hate when indie devs opt out for making extremely low-res sprites with little animation because they could have just opted out for higher res and details and switching to something like a 3D paperman style that allows them the advantage of quick 3D animations with at least having nice looking 2D sprites if animation time is an issue. For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-2Bez9LD1g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYwEkVPld28 Is one of my favorites. I wonder what happened to the artist who worked on Metal Slug and the like after polygons stopped being as popular, are they simply out of a job?
Honestly depends on the game. Fighting games are a really bad culprit of shit models/textures in 3D, but a game like GGXRD is perfect in how to use 3D while keeping a nice style/animation.
Video games, movies, and also TV. I just started rewatching my childhood favorite Buzz Lightyear of Star Command for the first time in 15 years, and it's been an absolute delight. One of the reasons for that is because the animation is incredibly fluid and expressive. There is no way it would have looked like this if made today, because kids cartoons - especially those tied to an existing property - are simply not given the budget they used to be given. The black hole of creativity that is Jeph Loeb's Marvel Animation is the prime example of that - the animation is some of the worst in the industry, and yet the shows do well solely because they are riding the contrail of the Marvel Studios juggernaut. There's no financial reason for them to go back to the old way of doing things, because they can find the same success and make even more profit by giving cartoons a shoestring budget.
reminds me of that side scroller from saints row 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmP6HnjuZdw
kof13 also nearly bankrupt snk again because of it. it's why they went for full 3d models for kof14
Whatever happened to digitized actors? https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/134167/db40f55b-b550-4b39-8280-51c71296e4ab/Fra1.gif
KoF14 was cheaper in general. Even if we don't consider switching from 2D to 3D the 3D graphics themselves are very cheaply made with many people comparing it to Dead or Alive for the ps2. As far as SNK I just hope they can get back on their feet. They are trying to make a few games based on King of Fighters and maybe one day we can get that nice pixel art back.
Tbh if done right, todays 3D can look better than 2D. http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/277/095/9f2.gif
Why do you think realistic visuals would be "expensive" Rendering is mostly handled engine-side, also you can pre-render 3d scenes easily if you must Movies are not video games, their production goals, team sizes, workflow, and staff are completely different. Inflation isn't relevant. PS- Isn't south park literally rendered in Maya
I raise you a Berserk 2016-2017 https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8616515/lmyfjl.gif
I check with land of the lustrous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZF4fJrPMC8
I usually just lurk around here, but I really like that we've got a discussion going on this subject and I wanted to drop my two cents in. Like with most of these situations, there's more than one reason for why there's less "fully realized" 2D animation in games right now. One of the biggest reasons for it though, from my experience anyway, is memory usage. If you're not careful about how you incorporate all that 2D artwork, having a ton of drawn 2D sprites can actually use up more memory than a 3D game. For example, you might have one image you're gonna give your game to use that's 2048x2048 pixels, but this one image will work like a sprite sheet and hold all of the artwork for your game. That way, your game only has to load one image to get everything it needs. If you use pixel art for a game, and kept your characters and artwork sized around 32x32 pixels or even 64x64, you could probably fit all of the art for your game on just that one big image, or a few if your game has more stuff going on. Super quick to load, and efficient! However, for something like Cuphead, that one 2048x2048 image can now only hold about 10-20 frames of animation for one character, and now you gotta load in a ton of those huge images instead of just one. Unless you've got some tricks up your sleeve on how to have your game render all that artwork (which there are ways to do, but they're not always easy to pull off), your game is most likely going to skyrocket in RAM usage and not be able to run on most systems and consoles. That problem only gets harder to solve with the advent of 4K displays, where that artwork now has to look nice at an even higher resolution. It's an interesting dilemma that'll keep changing as things keep rolling. Again though, that's just one big reason why you see a lot of indie devs and larger studios use either pixel art, modular animation (manipulating 2D drawings in real-time, think Rayman Origins or that Crusaders Quest video Tetsmega posted), 3D models stylized to look like 2D drawings, or some other thing. It's less about whether re-doing something in 2D is a pain (having a solid plan for your project and adjusting things only when a production allows for it usually means you can avoid having to throw away finished 2D artwork/animation), and more about whether another solution just might do the job better for your game in the long run. And yeah, 3D animation has made leaps and bounds compared to where it was ten years ago. 3D animation has long hit the ceiling in terms of making stuff look realistic and achieve similar elements to 2D art, and is kind of in this "now what?" state where we're seeing a lot of experimenting with the medium. Anyway, I've rambled enough for right now, so I'll stop there. Long story short, it kinda sucks not seeing so much fleshed-out 2D animation in games right now, but I like to think things will be getting better in time as the tech continues to improve and everyone also continues to get better at making these video games we love so much.
The issue is however a lot of companies are settling for just having an overwatch or Pixar style visuals which while not nitty and gritty are starting to become over used themselves.
An issue that neither 2d escapes from
Well 2D animation can obviously be unoirignal too (see everyone complaining about the "Cal arts style") but so far at least many 2D games have felt and looked completely original in their own way. Thankfully many games have shown that they want to hhave their own distinct style http://i.imgur.com/01wcFmq.gif https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/dragonscrown3.gif https://78.media.tumblr.com/59acf0cd07bdfc5db011b92d43bbba97/tumblr_oow5nnR9Ug1smaam3o1_r1_500.gif
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