161–170 of 194 posts
'Many developers who try to achieve the retro aesthetic overlook how much magnification is going on, resulting in not one, but several different resolutions at once. Not only can this be unsightly, but it’s “showing its strings,”which defeats the purpose of limiting your resolution in the first place.'
For some reason I find that really jarring.
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The average mobile user plays exploitative "freemium" garbage to kill time in lines. How can you expect them to appreciate the art behind it? How does your second statement follow from the first? Does choosing to play freemium mobile games somehow mean you have poor artistic taste?
Good question. It's also fairly simple to answer. Players of freemium games fall into two categories: People who have some emotional draw to it (maybe they like the art) and play it despite recognizing that the mobile freemium game industry is a giant social engineering experiment aimed at extracting money by exploiting weaknesses in the unaware human mentality. People who don't recognize this, either by simply lacki…
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A fundamental difference between Japanese and Western animation is their approach to motion. Western animation emphasized fluid motion, attempting to stick to the maximum framerate (24 FPS) allowed by the film medium as much as possible. This could produce striking results, but tended to limit artists to more simpler, slower, more deliberate stretch and squash movements that would make sense when interpolated across…
Ex-animator from the US here. Most Western animation has historically been done at 12fps ("on twos"); you go to 24fps for very fast motion or stuff you want to be super-smooth. This holds even in big-budget 2D theatrical features[1]. You will also find no small amount of super-stylized motion - dig up "The Dover Boys" (dir. Chuck Jones), commonly cited as the first cartoon to experiment with the smears, multiple imag…
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I agree with your sentiment, I think the author makes some decent points but is pretty biased towards an aesthetic he prefers and the art tools he's most familiar with. The sf4 example is particularly demonstrating of that, people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation, that doesn't make it lower quality animation, it's a trade o…
How can he be biased, beyond his love of pixel art? He more or less concludes pixel art is not the best choice, and he sides with the public's opinion on this issue . Read the comments. He is not blaming anyone for this "pixel tax". To my eyes, the SF4 Chun Li is infinitely inferior to SF3, and I'm not even an animator. And haven't played either game, so I truly have no preconceptions at all in this case.
In Mortal Kombat, the typical shaolin monk character has a typical "shoot fireball" special move. In the latest SNES game, a badass dragon made of fire shoots out of his hand and explodes on contact with the enemy. In the next game, for the PlayStation, it looks like he is flinging a flaming turd at his opponent. Final Fantasy had similar problems in the transition from awesome 2D (FFVI) to awful 3D (FFVII).
Both Mortal Kombat and Final Fantasy eventually got 3D high definition graphics right, in my opinion. I hope eventually the artists will be as good and as experienced at making 3D art as they were at making 2D art in the SNES era.
A big thing about pixel art and it's issues today is that what he mentions as pixel art, isn't so. I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc. But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version. However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played…
I agree with your sentiment, I think the author makes some decent points but is pretty biased towards an aesthetic he prefers and the art tools he's most familiar with. The sf4 example is particularly demonstrating of that, people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation, that doesn't make it lower quality animation, it's a trade o…
And it has been done with 3D animation, Pixar is an easy example: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GnfdLp0PcSg
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I can't directly compare the SF3 and SF4 animations: they're just totally different art forms. That said, as somebody who loves pixel art, I still really love what Capcom did with SF4's art style. The artists of SF4 definitely took a bold direction; the SF4 games don't really look like any other 3D fighting games. The characters are cartoonish without falling back on the crutch of cel shading; they're realistic witho…
> The artists of SF4 definitely took a bold direction; the SF4 games don't really look like any other 3D fighting games. The characters are cartoonish without falling back on the crutch of cel shading; they're realistic without looking like drab psuedo-photo-realism. To me they look like childrens' action figures, fighting it out on the screen. Actually, Arc System Works ironically was the one who pushed the envelope…
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distort…
Speaking of that 8-bit sound, check Rob Hubbard's outstanding composition for 'Monty on the Run' (1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EcgruWlXnQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42WuUpBuHE (AgentX) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9hPOUvgKTA (AgentX II)
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distort…
>CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video Too bad for him that such things do not exist.