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2D & 3D / 3D2D Animation Workflow Proposal
« on: April 27, 2016, 02:14:11 am »
2D Animation is HARD work.
It is oftentimes A LOT of work too. That workload only increases the more you want to animate a character in a 2D game. There must be another way for people with little time who want to develop cartoon-looking art. And, if the ideas/workflow in the video below could be expanded upon into a more user-friendly way, we could really be onto something:
https://youtu.be/yhGjCzxJV3E?t=790
As a die-hard 2D artist AND animator, I have often envied the fancy toolsets 3D artists have available to them. Many 3d apps have tools you can just click a button, slide some edge-loops and vertices around, and then BAM, you have a sword, or a barrel, or even a full-on character, all prepared for you to spiffy-up and throw a skeleton on to animate it with as many different animations as you'd like (many times this involves simply reusing other pre-made animations with a whole different visual representation thrown on top of the nice animation!) -- and even with all of that, the most time-saving thing is -- you never have to worry about drawing your subject ever again! You can simply animate -- and give life to your otherwise static drawing. The problem is, 3D, unlike 2D, isn't really "drawing" in the traditional sense... but it can definitely be just as much fun.
While creating sprites and drawing frame-by-frame is easy enough for me, I've often wondered whether there is a better way to save time on developing assets that aren't aimed at being photo-realistic.
If you've watched the video above, especially all the way to the end, you should probably be aware that this stuff isn't /easy/ to do -- at least not yet. However, what they did do -- and shipped as a AAA game, I might add -- is surprisingly low-tech for what's possible with the visual style they've accomplished.
Speaking of what's possible -- although they mentioned (sadly very short-sightedly, I'll admit) in the question/answer session that something like an RPG isn't quite possible with this technique they've used, if you think about TRUE classic top-down RPG's of the past (or even something like Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, for example!), a visual style like this could work /very/ well. You wouldn't need a global light source to do that (as you have a 'sprite' layer!), and most importantly, your art style would mimic the beautiful sprites of the past, each having their own light source (mostly similar, but still independent of the environment they are a part of) -- and these 'sprites' would simulate "infinite resolution", which is the secret to all really great pixel art. And, to think, creating epic games like this with minimal man-hours in art would be many people's dream. My own included.
So... A proposal.
I want us, as a community, to consider developing a more general-purpose workflow to create 2D3D 'sprites' like the ones in the video. If we gained enough support, we could have dedicated tools to make developing these 2d3d sprites much easier than using something like XSI Softimage to wing them -- which XSI is nice, but is quite obviously not optimum. And perhaps a shader and workflow in some currently-available 3d programs could be used for now to suffice until then.
Any technically-inclined fellow 2d3d animators/programmers up to a challenge...?
If so, feel free to post any potential workflows you have to accomplish something like this here in this thread. We can all tweak and discuss these workflows in order to potentially come up with something reasonably faster than the one they came up with for this Guilty Gear game (that could work for top-down RPG games too, for example!)
I've got a few workflows in mind myself, but I'd like to hear your input first!
PS: Here is some additional information to consider:
Guilty Gear PDF (unofficial)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/65cwf6kjuezhwdl/GuilltyGearXrd_shader.pdf?dl=0
Japanese Cel-Shading Plugin
http://d-creation.sakura.ne.jp/plugin/dc_normaldrag/index_english.htm
Softimage Video of Cel-Shading Normal Process
https://youtu.be/YE-AnfhqZqg
Older Discussion
http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?137282-Celshading-shadow-adjustment
It is oftentimes A LOT of work too. That workload only increases the more you want to animate a character in a 2D game. There must be another way for people with little time who want to develop cartoon-looking art. And, if the ideas/workflow in the video below could be expanded upon into a more user-friendly way, we could really be onto something:
https://youtu.be/yhGjCzxJV3E?t=790
As a die-hard 2D artist AND animator, I have often envied the fancy toolsets 3D artists have available to them. Many 3d apps have tools you can just click a button, slide some edge-loops and vertices around, and then BAM, you have a sword, or a barrel, or even a full-on character, all prepared for you to spiffy-up and throw a skeleton on to animate it with as many different animations as you'd like (many times this involves simply reusing other pre-made animations with a whole different visual representation thrown on top of the nice animation!) -- and even with all of that, the most time-saving thing is -- you never have to worry about drawing your subject ever again! You can simply animate -- and give life to your otherwise static drawing. The problem is, 3D, unlike 2D, isn't really "drawing" in the traditional sense... but it can definitely be just as much fun.
While creating sprites and drawing frame-by-frame is easy enough for me, I've often wondered whether there is a better way to save time on developing assets that aren't aimed at being photo-realistic.
If you've watched the video above, especially all the way to the end, you should probably be aware that this stuff isn't /easy/ to do -- at least not yet. However, what they did do -- and shipped as a AAA game, I might add -- is surprisingly low-tech for what's possible with the visual style they've accomplished.
Speaking of what's possible -- although they mentioned (sadly very short-sightedly, I'll admit) in the question/answer session that something like an RPG isn't quite possible with this technique they've used, if you think about TRUE classic top-down RPG's of the past (or even something like Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, for example!), a visual style like this could work /very/ well. You wouldn't need a global light source to do that (as you have a 'sprite' layer!), and most importantly, your art style would mimic the beautiful sprites of the past, each having their own light source (mostly similar, but still independent of the environment they are a part of) -- and these 'sprites' would simulate "infinite resolution", which is the secret to all really great pixel art. And, to think, creating epic games like this with minimal man-hours in art would be many people's dream. My own included.
So... A proposal.
I want us, as a community, to consider developing a more general-purpose workflow to create 2D3D 'sprites' like the ones in the video. If we gained enough support, we could have dedicated tools to make developing these 2d3d sprites much easier than using something like XSI Softimage to wing them -- which XSI is nice, but is quite obviously not optimum. And perhaps a shader and workflow in some currently-available 3d programs could be used for now to suffice until then.
Any technically-inclined fellow 2d3d animators/programmers up to a challenge...?
If so, feel free to post any potential workflows you have to accomplish something like this here in this thread. We can all tweak and discuss these workflows in order to potentially come up with something reasonably faster than the one they came up with for this Guilty Gear game (that could work for top-down RPG games too, for example!)
I've got a few workflows in mind myself, but I'd like to hear your input first!
PS: Here is some additional information to consider:
Guilty Gear PDF (unofficial)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/65cwf6kjuezhwdl/GuilltyGearXrd_shader.pdf?dl=0
Japanese Cel-Shading Plugin
http://d-creation.sakura.ne.jp/plugin/dc_normaldrag/index_english.htm
Softimage Video of Cel-Shading Normal Process
https://youtu.be/YE-AnfhqZqg
Older Discussion
http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?137282-Celshading-shadow-adjustment