Using 3D models to trace pixels?

[ptoing]

http://www.cnc-source.com/forums/index.php?autocom=downloads&showfile=83

[Mike]

This animation looks like it was rotoscoped exactly from a human model, or possibly a 3D one.  Or they have great animators and artists.




Oh and ndchristie that is probably exactly what I'm going to do for the 1st layer of paralax buildings in my game.

On a slightly unrelated note, does anyone know where I can find a pre-rigged human model for 3Ds max so that I can pose it and draw from it?

[Helm]

That is rotoscoped from a human person, with the head pasted on. I think it looks pretty horrid as a result. The human body, squashed vertically (because they wanted longer legs) and then with a tiny anime head. Also watch for appearing/disappearing details while it animates like on the knee or the inside of the thigh. Dancing seloutry, generally, a mess. But yes, it animates smoothly.

Mike: I use Poser for basic anatomic fact-checking.

[huZba]

Wow that voxel stuff is really interesting, gotta look into it more. In my mind voxels always were the kind of stuff that was in comanche games. Guess it's more versatile than i thought.

The street fighter character looks like it's rotoscoped on a human and then stretched around to kill the proportions. To me it doesn't sit well with the other sprites and the popping of details looks odd as well as the head that doesn't animate at all. It's smooth tho.... (helm beat me to it  )
 
3dsmax has a biped character rig you can use as is or rig a human character with it. It's really easy. Just do a search for "biped" in 3dsmax help.

[Mike]

That is rotoscoped from a human person, with the head pasted on. I think it looks pretty horrid as a result. The human body, squashed vertically (because they wanted longer legs) and then with a tiny anime head. Also watch for appearing/disappearing details while it animates like on the knee or the inside of the thigh. Dancing seloutry, generally, a mess. But yes, it animates smoothly.

Mike: I use Poser for basic anatomic fact-checking.

Its weird because only this animation looks awful for that character, the rest are done really rather well.  The idle doesn't even have toes or fingers and I believe the reason is because they couldn't properly draw the pixels for the toes or fingers because of how smooth the animation turned out.

Also I'm gonna check out the biped in 3Dsmax first since I have that program, afterward I'm gonna do a search for poser and see how much it costs.  I have a microman Sakura figure that I have been using for poses but sadly its limited because it needs to be able to stand up.

[Ben2theEdge]

I occasionally use very simple 3D models for reference when doing awkward perspectives/angles and such. I believe the new King of Fighters used some kind of 3D-rendered skeleton for their animations. And there's a Capcom game called Red Earth that uses it as well but not very well. In fact Capcom has done the 3D-render tracing thing quite a bit and always with piss poor results. As has been mentioned before, if you have proper animation technique, creating 8-direction running animations, etc. is perfectly doable and is way faster. In fact if you don't have your animation fundamentals down, the animation of your 3D model will be pretty stiff and clunky and your final character will be devoid of life anyway. So it's better not to use shortcuts unless you're forced to by time constraints.

Concerning Street Fighter 3 I'm pretty sure that's the only rotoscoped character. Rotoscoping is pretty easy to spot because it NEVER WORKS! Tracing an animation that you don't understand always results in wonky lines that shuffle around and appear and disappear for absolutely no reason.

[Helm]

Rotoscoping works on Flashback because the main character was capture and overdrawn with flats with not much individual detail that could theoretically jump around.

[Gil]

Rotoscoping works if you have a good animator. Unfortunately, rotoscoping is used 90% of the time due to time constraints and/or lousy animators...

Prince of Persia, the original, has pretty good rotoscoping, but the angle of the tiles destroys it basically.

[ndchristie]

the main problem with roto that i see is that people use it not as a tool but as a way out - they stop thinking about consistency and keying and what actually MAKES a good animation, particularly a good loop - the results, not so good.

Take the Ralph Bakshi lord of the rings movie.  everything about it looks like a high-budget saturday morning cartoon until gandalf' cape swirls suddenly with perfect physics and awkward times, and there are more equally awkward examples - opposite of the rest which had no physics but a pretty good sense of what 'worked.'

[ptoing]

Rotoscoping needs good animators and also decent actors to work. Quite a lot of the big budget Japanese animation studios use rotoscoping for in certain situations and they make it work. Lots of the old Disney stuff used rotoscoping and they made it work as well.