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Fighting Game Community || Stream Monster Headquarters

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N

NEO0MJ

Member
BakedYams said:
I still got it folks. Time to get bodied at my local and rise as the phoenix that I am to slay fiends. The day I meet Combofiend, I'm going to show him the clip where I got a P on him and ask him for a rematch on top of the stage and get it streamed just for the lulz. Dreams can happen.
Click to expand...

Man if I were you I'd scurry out of the room whenever Combofiend appears.
 
shaowebb

shaowebb

Member
Sayad said:
They pretty much said it's as much work as making sprite characters, that was a nice read. Xrd is about the only game EPIC keep showing in UE4 reels even though it's using UE3, that's probably the most recognition they'd ever get, lol.
Click to expand...

Yeah, really. Heck I'd argue its MORE work than sprite characters easily once you consider the setup time and how much you got to spend on using controllers to animate your character's body. Granted you can bake animations and use slide controls to scrub between some poses and then edit from where you stop for new stuff, but as much of a shortcut as that normally is, its not gonna help much considering ALL the extra bones their rigging, weighting, and controlling on these models compared to normal ones.

Definitely impressive, but definitely not practical for folks to do this on small teams.
 
V

VariantX

Member
Guess there is a little benefit that the game can be ported to future hardware without compromising the visuals. But that is pretty far off from now. When you still have to do all the shading for each frame by hand its still a ton ofwwork to make it look really good
 
T

Thomasorus

Member
shaowebb said:
Yeah, really. Heck I'd argue its MORE work than sprite characters easily once you consider the setup time and how much you got to spend on using controllers to animate your character's body. Granted you can bake animations and use slide controls to scrub between some poses and then edit from where you stop for new stuff, but as much of a shortcut as that normally is, its not gonna help much considering ALL the extra bones their rigging, weighting, and controlling on these models compared to normal ones.

Definitely impressive, but definitely not practical for folks to do this on small teams.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure it's way more work than Blazblue (quantity wise) but it's probably more work time for them internally. Since they had no animator in the studio for Blazblue, they draw keyframes on paper, modeled the character in black and white with shadows and reproduced the keyframe with the 3D model. Once it was done they were sending the 3D models keyframes to China (or was it Korea?) in an outsourcing company that was doing the sprites for them and the in-between frames plus colors.
With Xrd they are doing the same exact process that they are very used to, except they have to build a better 3D model first which takes more time for sure... But once it's done, they can speed up the process and skip the sprite creation part since they only have to clean some shadows here and there.

I don't know what is more time consuming for them, probably Xrd since they have to do everything themselves... But it may be less work overall? I'm interested if you can answer a bit on this one Shaowebb.
Anyway Xrd is really impressive, Revelator even more.
 
Tizoc

Tizoc

Member
I just now realized that this is a Kinu Nishimura art piece o_O
kinu07.jpg
 
B

BadWolf

Member
Found some old SNK interviews here: http://shmuplations.com/games/

Fun reads:


Art of Fighting
Our original model for King was the actress Grace Jones from the 007 film. We made her white, then made her look kind of half-Japanese. She had those super high cheekbones, and her hair was closely cropped. But we felt that she wasn’t sexy enough after all, so we gradually started making her more girl-ish, until we achieved her present form. I think we should have given her a slightly bigger butt, though.
Click to expand...

Her charm point is definitely when her shirt gets ripped off. We redrew this over and over, too. People around us at SNK gave their various opinions about how it should look: “oh, her hands should move like this,” etc. Originally the conditions for her to make that pose were even more limited, but it looked so good that we increased its frequency. Ah yes, it was for the best.
Click to expand...

http://shmuplations.com/aof/

Psycho Soldier – 1987 Developer Comments

Kohyan (Planner/Producer) – “I hate Athena!” That’s what I thought when, right after the first game, it was decided that we’d have to start working on this sequel. If they come to me now asking for a third game… ugh, I don’t even want to think about it.

Wasabi (Character Designer) – Goddammmmmmn, I’m exhausted! Goodnight.

Koutoubu (Character Designer) – Psycho Soldier…… here’s what I got out of these last 6 months: a lack of sleep, a habit of sleepwalking, a taste for energy drinks, and belly fat. What I lost? My girlfriend. Ugh. Give me my youth back!!!

Manbou Kimura (Character Designer) – So tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired so tired

Aran Lee (BGM Composer) – Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. Look, another fail! A storm of fails. Under a cold winter sky in the dead of night, I trudgingly make my way to the last train home. This is supposed to be the time when I make my mark on the world, but I’m just spinning my wheels… spin, spin my life away. How can I escape this…?

Kenny Nishida (theme/ending song composer) – I’m Kenny, the guy who made Athena a superstar singer and made her All-Japan Tour dream a reality.

John Guso (Programmer) – For the big lizard enemy and final boss Shigu Do Dabide, don’t just look at their heads! There’s some subtle movement in their necks that you really should see. It is my masterpiece.

KKC (Programmer) – This was my first game programming challenge. The long battle is finally over. At this moment, I can really feel how far my health has declined. Am I really an old man at 24? Cherish your youth, everyone… it only comes once.
Click to expand...

http://shmuplations.com/athena/
 
O

oneida

Cock Strain, Lifetime Warranty
CommandThrower said:
Given Shin's history, that pic could have been much, much worse.

Whenever I browse GAF at work, I turn off all images. I blame nobody in particular for that, it's just the...safe thing to do.
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ShinMaruku

ShinMaruku

Member
I don't even know what's wrong with that pic. The Mika gifs are much worse. I bet if I put that none of you would say anything. :p
 
S

Sayad

Member
Thomasorus said:
I don't know what is more time consuming for them, probably Xrd since they have to do everything themselves... But it may be less work overall? I'm interested if you can answer a bit on this one Shaowebb.
Anyway Xrd is really impressive, Revelator even more.
Click to expand...
They outsourced a lot with Xrd too, if I remember correctly, their team was 25 or so in house dev and about a 100 they outsource to.

Edit:
Team of 25 that includes four programmers, three planners in charge of game design, 12 artists. Add to that a hundred persons they outsource work to.
Click to expand...
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2099538#post2099538

Yep.
 
ShinMaruku

ShinMaruku

Member
If ya have to do all that maybe that's a sign you should have them off by default at work in every instance like some others have said.

Because if that image is lewd....
 
shaowebb

shaowebb

Member
Thomasorus said:
I'm not sure it's way more work than Blazblue (quantity wise) but it's probably more work time for them internally. Since they had no animator in the studio for Blazblue, they draw keyframes on paper, modeled the character in black and white with shadows and reproduced the keyframe with the 3D model. Once it was done they were sending the 3D models keyframes to China (or was it Korea?) in an outsourcing company that was doing the sprites for them and the in-between frames plus colors.
With Xrd they are doing the same exact process that they are very used to, except they have to build a better 3D model first which takes more time for sure... But once it's done, they can speed up the process and skip the sprite creation part since they only have to clean some shadows here and there.

I don't know what is more time consuming for them, probably Xrd since they have to do everything themselves... But it may be less work overall? I'm interested if you can answer a bit on this one Shaowebb.
Anyway Xrd is really impressive, Revelator even more.
Click to expand...

Believe me, I'm no expert on this style as I'm just now toying with it, but I'd say that the GG Xrd method is without a doubt FAR more work than BB if BB is outsourcing frame art using 3d model keyframing.

You see making a 3d model isn't rough. Sculpting is fast and easy thanks to stuff like Zbrush and mudbox. Heck their are even autoriggers that can help shave some work too ( I use them when I can.) but you will still have to paint muscle weights to make the body's anatomy bend and flex properly. Then theirs still stuff like putting constraints and messing around with them on the attached costume pieces of their outfit and adjusting soft and rigid binds on them so the correct areas squash and stretch or dont.

^That stuff has to be done on EVERY model on any 3d work to animate it with the exception of using Zbrush's zspheres to just sort of pose your model without actually having anything proper to animate it...it may work for just setting up keyframes though but losing the ability to scrub a timeline to adjust a pose and having to use history to find those points isn't very alluring.

Anyhow all that modeling stuff has to be done, and aside from muscle weights it takes some work. If you are JUST posing your model to setup keyframes and then tracing those screenshots of those poses to speed up a 3rd party animation companies hand drawn pipeline then its super easy and not a lot of work even if you still have to wait for them to finish.

The GGXrd method is FAR more work than that. For starters unwrapping bodyparts themselves requires FAR more UV seams. Before youd just unwrap an arm as one piece and texture it, but for their method minimal seams is NOT the goal like a normal UV map. They are using the seams themselves to draw in details since unspecified black textures on a UV map are rendered more like vectors than rasters at zero detail loss if your UV is showing any. Black space is generally just negative space on your map's layout but if any is within the area of a map it'll render actual black lines on it based on coordinates like a vector instead of based on pixels like a raster.

Essentially they used a reverse method of texturing. Instead of painting patterns and gradients and fine line details by hand like normal then trying to keep the amount of seams on the model hidden and minimal so you couldn't see where patterns began and ended they used a different approach. They made the seams as visible as possible and used solid blocks of color within them and just used additional maps to tint those colors more or less based on lighting in real time.

This meant everything changed. Lights had to be carefully scripted at all times, new maps had to be painted for every frame's shading to keep it under control and to only generate the appropriate shadows as light sources move around them (i'm thinking they abused ambient occlusion mapping here), and they even had to be extremely delicate on how they setup depth maps too to control the falloff of light so it was sharp and anime like still.

All that before all the bones and controllers and frame by frame animation and manipulation of every joint on their incredibly high bone/joint count models. Heck they even use 3 sided polygons because they make smoother seam edges on UV maps than ones using 4 sided polygons.


Fun fact...I'd already talked to Q and said if rendering my models in my project ate up too much ram or hurt it online someday in alpha testing I'd just render the frames of animation out as PNG files and turn the damned thing into a sprite based game using PNG's of models to create the sprites. I'd still be able to use depth map techniques on those for shading/lighting in realtime as such tools like Sprite lamp prove anyhow. Neat to hear BB may have done something sorta like that in modeling with the intention of using those models in 2d. Given the amount of morph/squash and stretch they do it was probably easier to outsource for 2d hand drawn than to model 3d for those kind of animations and render them. That shit takes extra models and effort (as Millia's hair has proven in modeling exhibitions).

TLDR
If BB just made models, screenshotted them for keyframes and sent those off to 3rd parties to use to help them draw 2d stuff then its faaaaaaaaar easier than the uber modeling requires to make the stuff in GG Xrd between its highly complex bones, controllers, shaders, complicated UV maps and other different features. The amount of internal time it'd take to make the GG Xrd style stuff is pretty damned huge. 2d is simple...you just have to do each frame by hand. Considering they had to do the equivalent of that anyway to get the shadows to appear right and all the model squash stretch in GG Xrd its far easier to have just drawn it. Likely faster as well considering all the maps they did may have made each character nearly double the amount of time to animate in 3d than had they just made them in 2d though 2d sprites may take more memory and cause longer load times as well as possibly not stood the test of time as graphics and resolutions continue to increase.
 
P

Professor Beef

Banned
Barely fighting game related, but Indivisible looks really good. Saw the Game Grumps play it and everything and it looks really fun.

SolarPowered, you're supposed to be on top of this news, smh
<3
 
ShinMaruku

ShinMaruku

Member
He got a chance in Canada and Costarica, the rest, nope, not a chance in hell.
But I'm sure we'll get PR Rog at Capcom cup. He and Du and Snake Eyez and of course Dieminion have the best shot against the world, everybody else? Hell no. Du ain't fraid of shit, Snake Eyez has unique play style and Rog and Dieminion have the experience. Justin is just no Daigo will eat him.
 
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