KOF XII Dot Art

[Gil]

http://kofaniv.snkplaymore.co.jp/english/info/15th_anniv/2d_dot/art/index.php

Be prepared to weep. When advertising meets pixel art. I'm very unimpressed by the graphics presented in the gallery. The marketing speak is just laughable. Rotoscoping is apparently used for the very first time in this game! Exciting!

[Atnas]

There was some discussion about this in the OT thread before it was translated. I recently saw it posted on a blog somewhere and read a comment like "omg these guys are gods i love japan". or something. I guess that's what they want people's reactions to be..? I'm not weeping because I don't really play fighting games, but I agree it's horrible. If you look at their steps, it actually gets worse as they "refine" the sprites because they're adding a lot of cruddy blurring between colors. And then they display the old sprites at some ungodly NN upsampling which would leave people to believe it actually might be an improvement over the old methods.

[ptoing]

The marketing is bad, and the art is generic looking. Tho that said, it is ok for what it is. I reckon they have tons of frames and quite a big artteam of which many probably are not super awesome animators. So to get consistent results this works.

Gil: This is not rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is only tracing over life action.

[Helm]

The effect is interesting, it's pretty depressing to see all this marketing speak about ART MADE OF DOTS, THEREFORE MADE WITH SOUL and then you see there's little to no pixel-level precision and control that didn't come from working with 3d models and then banding terribly on top. Also the time they spend on these, if they're telling the truth, it's really too much!

[Gil]

The game will probably play and look fine, I just don't buy the crap that this is the culmination of pixel art as an art form as the site states.

I compare their work method to rotoscoping, because they work over another animated medium. The difference with rotoscoping is that they can already add style elements to the animation which should make it more believable, but still a lot more stale than traditional keyframing. They also make it look on the site as though they're the first people working this way, which is simply not true.

And they really really need someone to explain them how pants work and look, because after all these years, they still don't get it right.

[junkboy]

Rotoscoping is apparently used for the very first time in this game! Exciting!

Didn't SNK use to rotoscope quite heavily back in the day? I'm pretty sure I've read about that somewhere..

[Gil]

That was supposed to be sarcasm :p

[Kren]

Iori Hair looks more like a helmet, seems like they ruined the character :/.

[CharlesGabriel]

I see it more or less something normal... not as impressive for the type of technology they use, but I have no complaints about it on the professional level... now that I have been extracting color palettes from old snes games (which has lead me to do a lot of sprite study and observation along the way), I have to admit it's really impressive how colors are placed and used, same as the style of characters made in fighting games specially from Capcom and SNK.

By the way, this is the first time I ever heard of rotoscoping... where do you guys learn all those terms, cause that's the type of stuff I'm yet to read (or find where to read it since no one includes any of this stuff in pixel art sites nor tutorials) about...

[Gil]

You pick em up in certain articles. As far as I know there isn't an extensive list of techniques somewhere lying around. You come across them after reading a lot I guess.

Rotoscoping:

An actor performs the animations needed, these are filmed. The keyframes are extracted from the movie and the animation is basically traced over these keyframes, then colored.

Example: Snowhite by Disney (I know no game examples, because they are usually very low in quality). As suggested, some of the older SNK games might have used them.

Work method in KOF XII (presumably):

3D model is created and then animated (probably from live action reference, maybe even 3D rotoscoped). The keyframes are extracted from the 3D model. The artist traces and works over the 3D keyframes.

You can see the similarities, which is why I called it rotoscoping.