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Fighting Game Headquarters |3| [Cinematic Title Expansion Coming Soon]

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Shouta

Member
that's weird. I always thought his sf4 stance was a natural transition to 3d. He was actually facing his opponent with his fists up.

It's a more of real fighting stance than his SF2 one but it's not exactly a natural transition. Posturing in the stance changes what kind of attitude it's supposed to get across. SF4's is more earnest about fighting where SF2 has this certain element of confidence or swag to it, at least to me.
 

Tripon

Member
More images from Famitsu
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Still waiting quietly for Ibuki and Urien DLC content. It's gonna be a while until July.
Ha! Skullgirls wouldn't be easier in SFV quality 3d. It wouldn't be Skullgirls at all. You see Skullgirls has characters morphing and tearing and squashing and splitting apart super fluidly. To do that in 3d requires making extra models, baking animations, more UV work and a lot more bug testing for glitches because its easy on disjointed models that split and morph between moves to handcuff glitch or get folks stuck and stretching and breaking like UMVC3 Ryu glitch stuff or more accurately Trials HD rubber band glitch stuff.

2d is harder because you have to hand animate every single frame of animation. While this gives you a ton more control to go as loud and fucking nuts as you want you still have to actually draw each frame. Plus every frame is actually about 3 to 4 seperate projects.
1. the rough
2. the linework (very tedious and very specific on line thickness aka line weighting. Can get pretty technical with brush settings for consistency)
3. the color flatting or big solid colors that make up your character palette
4 the shading layer for the shadows usually done with multiply settings on the layer mode
5 the highlights layer for the lit areas of the image usually done with screen settings on layer mode

Now compound all that with a VERY technical drawing. I'd say on a scale of 1 to 10 that Kirin image was like a 3 or 4 and thats without morphing and whatever into other shapes. Imagine someone with a shitload of beads or a complex texture on their clothing to keep consistent between frames. The more of the character that's covered in linework the more lines to keep up with between frames or it'll look really jumpy and offputting when it animates.

My shit...doesn't do well with 2d. Its too detailed on textures in most cases. Some in the amount of shapes. Armor can get tricky to keep track of in 2d animations if there are enough seams and patterns on it. Skullgirls is just amazing. When I saw Eliza's beads I flinched HARD. Those had to be a fucking pain to animate swinging constantly during her 1600+ frames of animations. My stuff is front loaded with a lot of technical cg but I only have to model it once. The tradeoff is that its animations take more work to even get squash and stretch let alone morph shapes.

This is why folks are still struggling to pull off something like say Darkstalkers in 3d. Its really really time consuming in 3d to make and it increases bugtesting and collision glitches if models do that stuff. Its why I sometimes wonder if I'll be forced to do all this and still have to just prerender the models as frames for my animations and fill in some stuff by hand in 2d after that. I wont know till I'm further in.
Nice post!

It is good to see an informed post about 2D around these parts. Both styles have got their pluses and minuses. Some fighting games can really benefit from 3D while others shine in 2D. Doing in 3D what Skullgirls and Darkstalkers accomplish in 2D would be no small featt.
If folks dont stop changing specs on systems with iterative stuff like this and the rumored Xbox One models they may as well switch to PC. The one major advantage of consoles to developers is standardized specs and hardware. On PC there are shitloads of different graphics cards, processors and OS concerns for developers and its hard as shit to spot and fix all that stuff.
The patching policies themselves can change things immensely. Skullgirls' PC port was a godsend because Mike released patches almost daily for what felt like two years. The constant patches fixed and updated things at such a speed that the PC version became the definitive version until 2nd Encore came out on PS4 with extra content. People have currently got their sneaking suspicions that the PS4 and Sony are the reason SFV DLC content is releasing at awkward times because they might not meet Sony's certification requirements.
 

shaowebb

Member
I see. So say if Capcom wanted to do Street Fighter V in 2D? How much harder would that be? Does 2D always tend to be more difficult than 3D or is that only because video game technology haven't caught up with the detail in films yet? I've heard from animators that it is actually easier to do 2D than 3D in a large scale production.

SFV in 2d? They could technically just export the animations as frames in either PNG or jpeg or something and then save them as sprites to do that if they wanted. Puts a helluva load at load time for all those images but works better at runtime that way. Less to process. Models take up less space than sprites but during runtime can eat more memory. Mainly due to physics, cloth effects processing deformation modifiers, and especially if you are using particle effects because they force a ton of light and shadow processing on your game. 2d you just draw that shit. Like I said...more to load, less to run.

If you mean to redraw it all from scratch then it'd still take a helluva lot and thats even with the really simple outfits of Street Fighter. Its easy to do 3d but it takes longer if you haven't got the staff to work on it. Drawing is much easier than 3d, but drawing all those frames takes forever if you dont have a large animation crew. I suppose a 2d remaster of SFV wouldn't be that bad considering they could export animations as frames to trace for poses though but thats a bit ludicrous to even speculate. This is more just answering stuff on a technical basis than any realistic "they could do it" sort of scenario because theres no reason to do it.

2D isn't always more difficult than 3d. On large scale productions where you have a LOT of animators its easier because you got the staff and there are no holdups with technology. You make it and its ready to go. Just draw and send to code. With 3d there is lots of geometry to cleanup, and fiddly stuff like I mentioned earlier involving the dramatic increase in bug fixing it can cause as well as runtime memory consumption. Thats why its easier if you got enough to work on it in 2d. You dont have to figure out a way for some machine to make something look right...you just draw it, ink it, color, and shade it and call it done. The 3d slows down most artists on animation ideas and execution. Problem is the 3d makes complex detail more doable because they only have to set it up once with those details and never have to redraw it.

To sum it up 2d is easier to animate whatever you want but slows down dramatically on high detail character designs and requires large teams. 3d has no issues with any level of complex designs but has issues with complex animations and fully mimicking 2d animations organic look and feel. Just work within the means of your staff and budget. Im a one man production crew on assets so I dont have a choice...it'd be too much to draw. I have to go 3d.

Another thing about 3d is if you wanna make a change to the model you can and you do not sacrifice your animation. 2d...you gotta redraw or recolor every frame for that stuff. This is a big feather in 3d's hat...ease of revision. Plus with DLC outfits being a popular seller these days its very very appealing to make the flip to 3d just for longterm sustainability of profits but thats more about economics...you were asking questions on the technical differences in 2d and 3d and their appeal. Business is an entirely different thing to discuss.
 
Registered for Dreamhack Austin. I registered for SF5 weeks ago under SixMachine, but today I signed up for Pokken as GuileChomp. Sadly I had to buy the 3 day passes instead of the BYOC since those were sold out. If any of you guys are going, I don't mind saying hi to you all. Even though he probably won't be eligible for the tournament, I wish I could try Guile for it.
 

Nuu

Banned
SFV in 2d? They could technically just export the animations as frames in either PNG or jpeg or something and then save them as sprites to do that if they wanted. Puts a helluva load at load time for all those images but works better at runtime that way. Less to process. Models take up less space than sprites but during runtime can eat more memory. Mainly due to physics, cloth effects processing deformation modifiers, and especially if you are using particle effects because they force a ton of light and shadow processing on your game. 2d you just draw that shit. Like I said...more to load, less to run.

If you mean to redraw it all from scratch then it'd still take a helluva lot and thats even with the really simple outfits of Street Fighter. Its easy to do 3d but it takes longer if you haven't got the staff to work on it. Drawing is much easier than 3d, but drawing all those frames takes forever if you dont have a large animation crew. I suppose a 2d remaster of SFV wouldn't be that bad considering they could export animations as frames to trace for poses though but thats a bit ludicrous to even speculate. This is more just answering stuff on a technical basis than any realistic "they could do it" sort of scenario because theres no reason to do it.

2D isn't always more difficult than 3d. On large scale productions where you have a LOT of animators its easier because you got the staff and there are no holdups with technology. You make it and its ready to go. Just draw and send to code. With 3d there is lots of geometry to cleanup, and fiddly stuff like I mentioned earlier involving the dramatic increase in bug fixing it can cause as well as runtime memory consumption. Thats why its easier if you got enough to work on it in 2d. You dont have to figure out a way for some machine to make something look right...you just draw it, ink it, color, and shade it and call it done. The 3d slows down most artists on animation ideas and execution. Problem is the 3d makes complex detail more doable because they only have to set it up once with those details and never have to redraw it.

To sum it up 2d is easier to animate whatever you want but slows down dramatically on high detail character designs and requires large teams. 3d has no issues with any level of complex designs but has issues with complex animations and fully mimicking 2d animations organic look and feel. Just work within the means of your staff and budget. Im a one man production crew on assets so I dont have a choice...it'd be too much to draw. I have to go 3d.

Another thing about 3d is if you wanna make a change to the model you can and you do not sacrifice your animation. 2d...you gotta redraw or recolor every frame for that stuff. This is a big feather in 3d's hat...ease of revision. Plus with DLC outfits being a popular seller these days its very very appealing to make the flip to 3d just for longterm sustainability of profits but thats more about economics...you were asking questions on the technical differences in 2d and 3d and their appeal. Business is an entirely different thing to discuss.

Thank you. This post is very informative. I've asked this before and it is interesting I get a variety of responses.

So the gist of is if you have a game with not too many animation frames like say a point and click adventure game, 2D is likely easier. But if it has a lot of animation frames and complex character art like say a fighting game, 3D is likely easier.

This explains why most adventure games and platformers released on indie games tend to be 2D due to the lack of animations per character and variety of characters on screen.
 

Line_HTX

Member
No need for talk. LET'S DO THIS!

That was a seriously long crouch into flash kick, lol

What's that new vertical Sonic Boom at 0:24?
 
Ouch. A lot of those Guile animations are rough. They legit just copy & pasted half his animations from SF4 & it just looks out of place. Flash Kick is the most noticable offender in that trailer.
 
Guile looks straighforward, solid. I really like the Juiced up EX booms can be comboed into flashkick.

Wonder if he will retain his uppercut normal, (down Fierce)
 
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