Glad to see you working on this again Howard! -- Looks great as always! -- I hope you don't abandon it again though!!

One question:

Are you using a full-screen shader, or are you using a per-material shader? -- or a combination of both?

So, I've finally delved into 3ds Max's material editor and discovered how to make some pixel-art looking stuff:



There are still some artifacts, and this doesn't have hueshifting, so I've got a long way to go, but the body/arm/leg portions (not his eyes or mouth/nose) is an image texture material I've rendered to resemble DKC graphics.

I would love to learn how to make hueshifting and dithering possible directly through this (rather old) method, but I've yet to spend enough time to learn how to do it. The method I used was from Howard's Irkalla mech demo, so it's pre-rendered, but I would love to be able to get a similar look in Unity in realtime at some point. It'd be really cool if Howard would share even his incomplete Unity shader project with us! I would love to play with using indexed colors with 3d models directly!

For now though, I'll keep plugging away at pre-rendered sprite materials... I'd prefer not to reinvent the wheel anymore though...

Somehow, we game designers seem to do that quite a lot, don't we??


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Update:



This one is a LOT better render-wise, and without a ton of artifacts! Got a lot of the pixel stuff sorted now! I even did a little hueshifting manually!

Sorry for the slow reply and the hasty edit -- Here's what I meant:





About frame 4-14 I fixed the sash a little to show what I meant regarding the 3d depth of the ribbon/cloth thingy, but your edit wasn't far off except you didn't put enough shadow across the form in some areas (such as the thin line of pixels moving down the sash over a couple of frames as it flops outward via the windy gust). As counter-intuitive as it may seem at first, it's highly more appealing to use shadow movement to crease the form as often as possible where it can make sense because this adds a lot of life to the subject and, as mentioned previously, it creates a lot more change (even if that change is made primarily with color!) In my edit, I have tweaked the lighting on the belt (but ONLY for a few frames -- I left its movement the same more or less silhouette-wise, and the others I left alone entirely -- hasty edit, as mentioned before, but hopefully you get the general idea).

Additionally, if you study the frames I mentioned, you'll notice that it allows the viewer to get a better sense of the form when you can show large surfaces (such as the tops of the waves of the ribbon/sash) and edges across the front of (even very thin ribbon-like) structures. You'd be amazed that, despite the obvious thickness of a single pixel, indicating edges via movement with those (like I did even with the "ahoge" you mentioned) creates a lot of information that the pixels themselves, as a static image only, could just barely hint at.

The biggest issue with the hair that I tried to explain before was actually in the wind direction of the belt and the hair, not the ahoge. The hair looks really cool, but as others mentioned, it appears as if she's standing under a helicopter that's just throwing wind straight down in waves. While that works, more or less, if you have no other way of indicating movement with a sprite's hair for one reason or another, you should consider having the hair mimic the most important frames of the belt if you can. This is particularly useful when the hair mimics the belt where it curls from the wind at the tips. Hair movement is rarely different from soft-cloth movement.

The original hair indicates wind direction is straight down (as mentioned by others as well as myself), so it looks very much at odds with the belt's movement (despite the belt helping to add a LOT of character). The simplest way to fix such strange movement, at least in this character's case, is to remove the spikiness from the back of the character's hair during the wind change direction (the gusts that kick the belt around to the left) to minimize the appearance of the wind blowing to the right (from the front of the character), since the wind appears to be coming from the back of the character during those gusts, in relation to the belt. I just kept the nice flowing shadows, but shaved off the spikes during the gust frames. Doing this allowed a nice transition between wind-directions thanks to the gust, and gave her hair a lot more life because it created a lot more change in her otherwise repetitive hair cycle.

Keep in mind that anytime you can add in "waves" of secondary movement and vary them between some other portion of that movement (by offsetting them in time or space), your character automatically begins to look more alive and lifelike because that's how nature works -- through cycles of change -- and very few things in nature move lock-step with one another. The more you attempt to mimic this rhythm in your art/animation, the more your stuff will attain a look and feel that appeals on a deeper level to the viewer because of their connection to this rhythm.

I hope this makes sense.

@Indigo

That's a bad-ass animation process right there. I'm assuming you could do something similar in Toon Boom Harmony nowadays (as far as rotoscoping the 3d background, vector line widths, etc.), but to be able to do that stuff all in Blender is quite nifty! No idea, though, what all is behind that monster of a shader's setup that he uses to do the rim-lighting and auto-light the 3d background in the video, but there's a TON of those 'noodles' going on there in the first couple of frames of the BG rotoscoping portion. I'd imagine it has something to do with the averaging of the normals of the vector lines/splines of the Grease-pencil though, and their angle to the lighting widget (which I don't think actually can be done in Toon-boom Harmony yet...), but it's definitely a cool concept and probably would be great if it was something we could all have access to! Either way, thanks for sharing dude!


Regarding rendering and the concept of animation using 3d2d sprites:

As mentioned before, I'm not as familiar with shaders as many 3d artists are, but I know what makes 3d stuff tick and how that applies to games efficiency-wise in terms of what's doable in a real-time engine. That being said, I've been struggling between 3d and 2d recently, and this is mostly because of what 2d generally LOOKS like when compared to 3d mimicking the same styles -- and until seeing that Guilty Gear video I linked to above, I wasn't convinced the two could ever be married convincingly enough without A LOT of effort that's, quite frankly, very unrealistic for a small indie team:

Some examples of unrealistic indie 3d2d sprite workflows:
http://kofaniv.snkplaymore.co.jp/english/info/15th_anniv/2d_dot/creation/
http://www.siliconera.com/2012/02/09/the-art-of-blazblue-part-2-animation-phase/

On the other hand, when I saw the video in my original post above for the first time, I had the spark of an idea that it might be possible to create these sorts of 'sprites' in ultra high-resolution vector-style art as 3d models in realtime (if desired) -- and all it would take would be a proper shader (realtime would be ideal) with the proper threshold for highlights and shadows, an AO map (hand-painted), and a 3d model with a texture used only for colors and linework only (as mentioned in the video, using UV maps to control the line width!)

This simple process would obviously need to be tweaked, but if perfected, we could use 3d models directly in games (with linear animation curves) and have 3d2d 'sprites' of infinite resolution that look perfectly like cartoons, and could possibly surpass pixel art in some areas, but without the heavy workload of animating every lighting or clothing change by hand for every single frame, for every single action, and lead to much more varied environments in games that can affect the characters more, leading to more immersion and better-looking 3d cartoon-style games in general, at least in my opinion.

The shader, if created properly, could simulate actual airbrushed falloff in some cases too, leading to the same tools being used for both games as well as film-style animation (such as what Indigo posted) where all the heavy-lifting would be done for you (linework/coloring/shading/etc.) and all you'd have to do is draw over it to simulate your own style. Since Anime, at its core, is the cleanest possible cartoon rendering style (aside from pure black and white!), it would lend itself well to any further shading tweaks/styles that one could imagine, with all the form and coloring intact from the outset!

My personal interest in this is to create workflows that allow 3d models in 3d games to look 2d-rendered, especially when they use traditional 2d-oriented views (particularly side-scrolling and top-down views) so that games with gameplay akin to SNES-era RPGs and Platformers can get the high-res treatment they deserve and also have some fun camera and lighting shift effects to play with in the process. Much of what made those games great came from their limitations -- and with a limited perspective on, say, an isometric strategy game or whatever other type of game you can imagine, when mixed with 3d2d sprites (again, do reference the Guilty Gear video), with each character having their own light source, our games can again resemble the amazing visuals of games of the past -- without having to hand-paint our lighting on our 3d models to make them look as sprites (after all, lighting and shadow do change when sprites move... yet, it doesn't seem to do that on a lot of the 3d DBZ games, does it? [Tenkaichi series, I'm looking at YOU!] )

To close:
A pretty decent example of a high-res sprite that could have potentially been better-served as an 3d2d model (the rest of the iOS game looks MUCH worse! )

Spoiler