I’m not sure, but the shift to HD definitely made making 2D a more costly proposition, as the Arc interview I linked mentioned.
Regardless of when or why the shift happened, right now 3D is cheaper for a fighting game.
Lightskin, I’m confused as to why you keep thinking 2D is cheaper than 3D. I keep coming up with examples and interviews that show you otherwise, but could you at least show me where you’re coming from? Do you have any experience in animation or something that you’re not sharing?
If Street Fighter 4 were made in HD 2D Sprites, despite the fact it would’ve been a pain in the ass to create, it would’ve been cheaper to make and probably wouldn’t have sold as well; but CHEAPER NONETHELESS.
THIS IS FACT!!!
Just like it’s cheaper for Disney to create 2D Traditionally Animated Films, despite the fact it’s a pain the ass; but have discontinued because CGI films sell better. Hence there’s more return on their investment, regardless of how expensive it is to make CGI films.
You can NOT ARGUE AGAINST THIS.
I’m going to assume this is a mistake.
OK, let’s break this down.
It’s a pain in the ass to do it with sprites. That’s why it would take FOREVER. This is why KOF requires 16 man months to make ONE character. What part of TIME = money are you not getting here? Big teams of people don’t work for free. 3D doesn’t require as big of a team.
Yes, CG movies sell better. But many of the costs required to make a CG feature film DO NOT CARRY OVER to making a fighting game. 2D vs 3D in FILM is different from 2D vs 3D in GAMES. Here are some examples:
A game can often be created on an off-the-shelf consumer PC. You can develop a game using Unreal Engine 3 using an i3 if you wanted to.
A game can use off the shelf game engines, (CAPCOM already had an engine) or in the case of Skullgirls be developed by relatively few people.
A game doesn’t need this, except for pre-rendered cutscenes.
Many games, especially Skull Girls/SF4 with a cartoony style, will not need this.
So yes. CG does do better marketing wise. But you can’t cite CG MOVIES when talking about making GAMES. And if we’re talking GAMES, especially FIGHTING games, 2D IS more expensive, because it’s more TIME CONSUMING.
So there are your FACTS. What else you want to argue.
Yeah that was a mistake. I fixed it.
ASW is still doing sprites. And I believe they doing the rotoscoping thing too.
SG is all hand drawn.
It’s 2 different styles, you can’t say it’s more expensive and time consuming because ASW and SNK’s methods are when LZ isn’t doing the same thing.
We know the time frame SG makes a character, I’m sure that 3D characters from scratch take as long to get to the same level of detail. And the technology they would’ve had to lease to make some good looking 3D models would’ve been higher than what they’re using to make good looking 2D.
My head hurts. LOL
The reason why ASW does the 3D route is because they can plan and tweak all the moves as much as possible ahead of time before having to touch the 2D. Having the animations done in 3D already also guarantees that your proportions are correct the first time, since animators can just trace over the models proportions. Also, the 3D model being used isn’t detailed at all. It’s just a placeholder. This saves them the time in the long run of having to tweak drawings because characters look weird, proportions are off, etc. If you have less mistakes the first time, then there will be less redrawing.
Skullgirls is more time consuming because they’re going pure traditional – all 2D all the time, and as result get the look they want with the squash/stretch and other traditional animation goodies. Downside is that more mistakes will happen and they’ll have to spend time correcting things.
I’m not trying to argue making a good 3D model isn’t costly or time consuming. In fact, rigging a model is a huge bitch. I despise rigging. I hate it with a passion.
Where the savings come in is that once you’re model is properly set up, you can animate new moves and stuff till the cows come home with relatively little effort. This is something that you can’t do with 2D because every move is a struggle that requires brand new art every time.
Let’s say you spend 300 hours making a proper 3d model. Once it’s done, making him walk, jump, whatever is fast as long as you know what you’re doing. Don’t like how he runs? You can go back and change it super quick. You will never touch the model and all the work you’ve put in ever again. You don’t have to make a new model every time you make a new move. It’s like posing an action figure.
Now let’s say you spend 10 hours making a character punch in 2D. Now you want to make him punch differently. Unlike with 3D, you have to go back and change what you’ve already done. You have to cut frames. You need to redraw existing frames. You have to add frames.
For every still drawing you have to:
A) Do rough animation
B) Clean linework
C) Color
This x1000 or however many drawings you need. Every time. Change something? Go through the process again. Add something? Go through the process again, etc. In the case of skullgirls, this requires so much work that they have a team of freelancers they farm this out to. It can’t all be done in-house. Almost all Japanese and US cartoon shows farm work out to Korea and only have the main poses done in the home country.
One of my teachers in school worked on Beavis and Butthead. That show had a style that was simple as shit, and they STILL had 90% of the art done in Korea because it was so time-consuming and outsourcing to a korean sweatshop is cheaper. And unlike with CG movies, the work involved in 2D is always the same, regardless if you’re doing movies or games.
The reason why I’m so adamant about the 2d/3d animation thing is because I’m an animator. I’m aware of what both entail.
bchan009, I already know and understand the processes for both 3D and 2D, the pros and cons, and agree with most of what you’re saying as it relates to this. It’s your conclusion that “Therefore 2d is more expensive than 3D, especially in fighting games” I vehemently disagree with.
As an example, Skullgirls which is using 2D HD resolution art assets, the MOST FRAMES of animation ever per character in a 2D fighting game, yet is substantially cheaper to produce than a Street Fighter 4 3D character.
You’re really comparing the costs an indie game by a relatively small team of people, who contract out a large chunck if their animation, use a custom engine built by their main programmer, and utilize a specific workflow that minimizes wasted frames and animations to a large international videogame company that’s been around for decades?
Yes, because we’re comparing high quality produced 2D characters and art assets to high quality produced 3D characters and art assets in a fighting game. It’s funny you bring up Skullgirls being an indie game, when there were a lot of people questioning their indie status once they found out their characters cost over 200k to create.
Those people don’t know what Indie is. It has nothing to do with budget.
Agreed, but most people do associate “Indie” with creating game from parent’s home in basement.
How many people were required to make one character in SFIV? How many people were required to make one character in Skullgirls? CAPCOM had a MUCH bigger team. Who all had higher salaries than the people who did Skullgirls probably did.
All those people had fulltime jobs, company supplied equipment, benefits, and all the other trappings of a full corporation. Skullgirls had the majority of its work farmed out to local animation students who were paid part-time. There’s a world of difference in salary ALONE.
Here are the game credits for SFIV.
http://www.allgame.com/game.php?id=62418&tab=credits
How many modellers are there? How many riggers are there? There’s a 2D painter crew. There’s a GOD DAMN CLOTH SIMULATION CREW. And most of these crews have SUPERVISORS. Those supervisors also need to be paid. Some of these crews are bigger than the ENTIRE SKULLGIRLS INTERNAL ANIMATION TEAM, and they probably get paid more. And this is just the people DIRECTLY involved in making the characters. What about the head art director? I’m sure he had something to do with the characters. What’s HIS salary? How about Ono? Did he have nothing to do with characters? How much are they paying him? What are the power and electricity costs during the months they made those characters? How many people worked extra to program the special effects needed to make Ibuki’s dash effect in Super (and they did have to do this – they mentioned it in an interview)? How much did THOSE people need to get paid per month?
Not to mention SFIV debuted with 20 characters. Skullgirls debuted with 8.
Now let’s talk voice actors. Voice actors in the US don’t get paid a super lot unless they’re top tier. In Japan they used professional level voice actors, recorded in a professional studio. Ask someone who works in the sound industry how much studio rental time and mixing costs are. AND SFIV had english voices too, so let’s double it. That means 40 voice actors. And you can guarantee they had more people working on sound than the Skullgirls people did. ALL WHO NEED TO BE PAID.
CAPCOM’s team is HUGE. Cut out the cheap freelancers and Skullgirls team is miniscule in comparison. One month combined CAPCOM salary for all the people who touched Ryu ALONE is probably enough to feed the core Skullgirls team for several months.
Make SFIV using Skullgirls level 2D animation. Tell me how much it costs. The team will be WAY bigger than it is NOW.
This is key, I believe. 3D requires a lot more initial investment than 2D. Yeah, animating a 3D model is easier than animating traditionally, but making good looking 3D models is something that is way beyond an indie / underbudgeted developer. You can do good looking 2D with small budgets, but doing good 3D is pricy and demands more people.
On the long run (for its re-usability mainly), 3D is the best option if you can afford to pay for top notch stuff. For smaller developers, it’s not such a great option (see Arc and SNK’s 3D efforts). If Skullgirls was made with 3D models, it would have not looked very good. Better to make an impact with top 2D animation than to get lost in the ocean of mediocre 3D products.
As an aside, weren’t the sprites in KOF XIII made (the spritework) by one person per character?
Agreed, so now we’re getting somewhere.
My next question is could a professional indie team create a highly detailed, animated, and balanced 3D fighting game character that rivals the quality of Street Fighter 4 for less than it takes for Skullgirls to create their HD, 1300+ frames of animation 2D character?
If not, then why?
It’s unfair to say an indie developer can’t make good 3d models. In the case of Skullgirls, one person made some on his own: http://shoryuken.com/2012/01/02/amazing-fanmade-skullgirls-3d-renders/
The key point to my argument is the time involved. The longer time you take on a project, the more hours and cost build up. And when it comes to fighting game assets, character animation is easily the longest, most tedious, and thus costly part of the process.
In KOF the SPRITES were done by one person per character, and that’s 16 manmonths of time. You gotta pay that guy the whole time. And that’s not counting the person before him who did the 3d model, and the person who animated the 3d model first.
There’s no doubt Skullgirls benefits from 2D art, but it’s done because it looks good. NOT because it’s cheap or easy. It’s a cost they were willing to swallow so that the game would look the way they wanted it to.
Why is this so difficult for Bchan009 to understand?
Because I actually DO the things I’m talking about. Because I have good friends who work at Blue Sky and Dreamworks. I have teachers who have worked for Nickelodeon, MTV, and Disney. Because I spent 4 years of my life doing nothing but learning how to animate and have a shitty degree to show for it.
The time it takes to make and setup a 3d model is STILL LESS than the time it takes to draw EVERY move, and TWEAK every move endlessly the old fashioned way throughout the ENTIRE LENGTH of a game’s development. How many times do you think Ono said “OH WE SHOULD MAKE THIS MOVE 3 FRAMES FASTER”. How many times do you think every move from every character is changed in the development process? How many times do you think they added moves? Subtracted moves? Changed moves? A game can take YEARS to finish. And you’re changing and redrawing moves the WHOLE DAMN TIME. Having a 3D model you can just manipulate makes this process INFINITELY easier and faster.
What, you think they just hit the switch that says “3 FRAMES FASTER” and all the drawings for that move are untouched? NO. You have to redraw. Rework. ALL of which is almost unnecessary in 3D.
It’s the TWEAKING and CHANGING that sucks up time. And it’s the TWEAKING and CHANGING that is so much faster in 3D.
And like I said, this is a FIGHTING game.
Where is the 3D budget going? The CHARACTERS. A few backgrounds, but mostly the characters. THAT’S IT.
This isn’t Halo. There aren’t entire 3D environments you have to build. You don’t have to model every floor, every wall, every ceiling. This isn’t Crysis. You don’t have to model realistic foliage that will move when the player touches it. We will never see the underside of the dock that they fight on in the Jungle stage in SFIV. We will never see the inside of the diner in the Las Vegas stage.
The 3D budget for a fighting game is WAY lower than what you’re thinking, and the money saved is ALL IN THE LONG RUN – ANIMATING CHARACTERS.
Take a look at this. In 3D you can give different characters each others MOVESETS. Sure it looks like shit because hackers didn’t change the models as well. But the fact that you can PORT OVER AN ENTIRE MOVESET without even doing anything already shows you how flexible 3D is for this kind of game. In 2D this is IMPOSSIBLE. There’s NO easy way to make any character do ANYTHING without drawing a shit ton.
You’re asking if a SMALL indie team could make a game rivaling a LARGE team…are you serious? That’s a dumb question.
A more serious question is, if CAPCOM made a 2D fighter, how many people would THEY need? How much would THAT cost? CAPCOM is a bigger more powerful company. They won’t use freelance art students. They’ll hire as many PROFESSIONAL animators as required. They will pay these people fulltime. NOW compare the cost of 2D SFIV to 3D SFIV. Man hours alone would prove what I’m saying.
Alternatively, if Skullgirls went 3D and made the SAME EXACT game, but using 3D character models, then yes. It would be cheaper than it is now.
Here’s the Skullgirls breakdown: http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/the-little-fighting-game-that-could/1100-4587/
See that step there? With 3D it’s not even necessary.
We’re solely talking about cost and yet you’ve gone on another tangent about the benefits of using 3D.
I give up.