Rendering 3d models to 2d sprites

[huZba]

At it's best, when it's using clean graphics, the game looks quite nice.

[Helm]

yeah these aren't super, but they're alright.

[ndchristie]

my question : what about those says "i was better than and faster than pixel-art"?

nothing...?



as far as the youngsters, when i was little i could totally tell pokemon and zelda (simple, clean pixels) from turok (a mess).  I also thought the original tomb raider had great graphics and the the virtua fighters looked like people, so when it comes to modern renders......idk

i did totally prefer the look of street fighter to killer instinct and warcraft II (which was cleaned up considerably) to age of empires (which was goofy)

[Redshrike]

Didn't Mario RPG use this technique?

[Cow]

Yeah, it did. And I do very much like the look of that game.

[Jad]

It matched rendering technique with the graphical design and general game movement/dynamics.

And when you do that, you always succeed. I mean, cave story's physics would've felt fucked up had the graphics been in the style of contra 4. The tiling and design would also have been (insert opposite of benefited, I don't speak this language <) by another rendering style.

In the same way, Golden Sun with it's fantasy storybook pastelle aspirations would've benefited GREATLY from low-contrast CLEAR pixel-art.

O:

Sorry for cave-story ranting, I just finished the game with SECRET ENDING after hard level and 4-form final boss (: So I'm thinking about it all the time.

God damnit, that game has a gratifying ending. How come some indie games do it so well? O:

[baccaman21]

To the OP - Is your friend refering to PRE Rendered art or Rendered on-the-fly?

One of the companies I was producer at, we had a realtime 3d render engine on the GBA which we rendered polygonal information to the sprites in realtime... I don't know if this has been discussed here at all...

it's benefits being that one could rotate the polygonal mesh to any angle giving you limitless positions for your characters to be positioned (great for extreme sports style games [aka: tony hawks/dave mirra]) - plus you could have quite a lot of animation detail with quite a low memory footprint.

it's downsides - limited poly's meant low res characters - which look a bit crap close up but you can jsut about get away with at the res they were rendered at... even so, hand drawn stuff could be much more interesting in terms of detail

[AdamTierney]

One of the companies I was producer at, we had a realtime 3d render engine on the GBA which we rendered polygonal information to the sprites in realtime... I don't know if this has been discussed here at all...

Vicarious Visions did that on the GBA Jet Set Radio and Tony Hawk games and it looked fantastic, mostly because of the slow rotation (like doing spins in the air).

I think pre-rendered sprites are generally pretty ugly and an artistic cop-out. The strength of 2D pixel animation is that the animator can burn lots of personality and effects into the animation, as opposed to 3D models where you're limited to the polys and rigging of the original model. When I see this in games, I generally take it as either laziness on the part of the developer or an overbearing publisher, shrinking down console assets rather than finding a real artistic direction for the handheld game itself. Nintendo does this occasionally - I remember Mario v. DK had pre-rendered sprites (and the animated pretty awful). New Super Mario Bros. fakes 3D on many of its minor enemies (like goombahs) by using renders for them, but polygons on the major characters.

[griffy6]

Sonic Rush

I guess Sega figured that Sonic had been in so many 3d games, people wouldn't even recognize a 2d Sonic anymore. Either that or they got lazy, but it still looks pretty weird next to those cool backgrounds. (Besides, that wasn't the only "revolutionized" thing about the game -- the emerald mini-game was full 3d and the music was warped into weird hip-hop crap..)

[ndchristie]

I forgot to mention that while Age of Empires was kinda shittily done, Age of Empires II not only had a better resolution and art direction, but it also had the most important thing - a budget!  what could have been the regular bunch of uninspired medieval blandness is actually a wondrously colorful, READABLE environment that did exactly what it needed to do - make the real-time strategy battles/city-building that was going on look frigging cool.  Not many games have environments that help the gameplay as well as the atmosphere like these do.