The Super Inevitable Street Fighter V Story Thread

No doubt shinkiros got skills, but other than a few exceptions (usually artwork of females which are stunning) im not really a fan

I got no problem with him, but his work is not SF

I like him do jobs as “guest artist”, but in no way i want his stuff to influence SF style

Like never pls

Got truly no idea why they gone to hire peoples with so far (from Bengus/Capcom) background

I seen some other works of one of the 3D modellers and all problem become clear

He got skills but he’s stylistically very incompatible

The sad part is that it could be on purpose to de-japanize the final result

#2019stillKenface

No small issue is that the 2D boxer pose just cannot be created with a realistically proportioned and positioned 3D model, at least not without a really wonky camera lens.

Arc System Works might would do it for a victory pose, but they’d do so by putting the camera in a specific position and then (unrealistically) rescaling and repositioning various parts of the model by hand to get the final appearance that they wanted. (For a result that would look like a laughable atrocity from any other camera angle.)

Working on SFV you have to work within SFV’s requirements. That means you don’t get to break the model for dynamic posing purposes. You don’t get to give boxer a giant bicep for a single pose. Outfits are either static, or controlled by physics simulations, which means you don’t get to do really dynamic clothing. So you don’t get really baggy shorts, robes are glued to a character’s chest, hoods don’t flare open and robes don’t get to flare back (or at least don’t look good when you do get them to do so.)

Could the SFV model and texture work be better? Certainly. But failing to live up to the 2D concept art isn’t entirely the fault of the modellers.

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Nope, it’s the fault of the art director.

Guilty Gear and Dragon Ball Fighterz absolutely nail their looks, for instance.

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Agree, Yeah the it is, they lack coordination and probably they just handle it to an artist without strick guidelines or some sort of art direction and the best evidence of this is Chun li’s proto facial details in MVCi that look’s close to Kristen Kruek face.

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It’s not the cause of cheap equipment or poor talent it’s an artist decision because even in low poly designs like Chun li in SF4 pachinko or SFEX has more Chun li likeness. Even fan made Chun li is more Chun li than MVCi proto Chun li, because its not because they are not talented but they were intended to look like that. Kruek is not ugly and she is beautiful but she not supposed to replaced the face of Chun li in video games.

Another thing is that If people were following the comic book industry and the popular live action movies like mcu and dcu, If you guys would notice that the comic book counterparts are being replace in facial structure to look like their live action counterparts. This may have the case with MVCi Proto Chun li, which felt like it was woman cosplaying Chun li rather than being Chun li.

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This is why DBFZ looks good and amazing even better than the current DB animation because they are very faithful to the source material rather than an artist giving his own interpretation, probably they are FANS also of the DB franchise so it looks amazing and the reference in manga from details even repetitive version/clone manage to have it’s.

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The problem giving it to an artist that is not a strong fan into SF or not so faithful with the franchise will just mold the character to another popular character that is influential to him as his own interpretation and vision of the character rather usual.

Some artist tries to innovate and wants their own vision, style and etc to superseded and replace the design of their own, We even see that SFV concept Ryu and Bison unlike in SF4. It’s obvious they are trying to change and replace the whole SF visually.

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This post x1000!

It looks like Bengus art style is particularly dependant on perspective and character deformation to work right, so the first decision regarding how SFV was going to look like, before even going to the modeling, was whether to use Bengus’ style or go for physical simulation, but not both.

I really want Capcom to drop it entirely in SF6 in favor of a cel shaded style that resembles Kinu’s.

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Guilty Gear and Dragon Ball FighterZ used a completely different approach, one that was both expensive and labor intensive, and one specifically designed to mimic 2D hand drawn sprites.

While the approach wasn’t new, Arc System Works pioneered it into an extreme. They used a completely different approach to texture maps just to eliminate jagged lines. They hand-modified a duplicate set of normals, for relatively high poly models, just to make sure the models were shaded the way they wanted. Beyond that, they animated a separate light source for each character, just so the character would be lit in the optimal way for every animation frame. Every frame of animation is adjusted by hand, body parts scaled and adjusted, to produce the exact appearance that they want. They even introduced intentional small “errors” to make it look like hand drawn animation.

Funnily enough, the GDC speech revealed that this was all driven by a desire differentiate Guilty Gear from BlazBlue. Having decided to stick with hi-res sprites with BlazBlue, they needed to come up with a different look for Guilty Gear, and decided to try to recreate the look of 2D sprites in 3D, and specifically some form of 3D that wouldn’t be tied to display or texture resolutions. They weren’t trying to cut costs, and were actually willing to pay extra to establish that new approach.

Along with ASW figuring out ways to streamline their processes, DBFZ could presumably get away with more corner cutting.

Capcom instead went with the industry standard approach. Even if SFV’s model style was primarily driven by cost-cutting outsourcing, I’d bet it was also driven at least somewhat by negative responses to SFIV’s style. Even if people at Capcom were impressed by what ASW achieved, Capcom would probably not have been willing to devote the money or effort necessary for Capcom to copy the effect.

Perhaps I should say that I’ve never denied that Capcom compromised on SFV’s model quality. I’ve been critical of it before. Honestly, I’ve been critical of every step of the process, as has been seen in some of my older complaints about SFV’s clipping issues. (Something which could have been reduced at multiple steps of the design chain, going all the way back to the concept art stage, if anyone at Capcom had bothered.)

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Yes but implying there is not model deformation, etc going on in SF5 is either ignorant or disingenuous.

It happens all over the place.

They’re just doing not doing it particularly well and they’re working off ugly fucking models with bad proportions because of an over-all bad art aesthetic.

It’s systemic.

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It is a different type of model deformation. Standard model deformation is done just to try to keep models looking “human” when posed.

One of the more extreme examples shown with Xrd Sign was to reproduce the exaggerated foreshortening of a 2D May pose, which involved inflating her hand to nearly the size of her head while simultaneously shrinking her legs and feet.

I believe ASW cut back on that kind of stuff later, probably deciding it was too much work.

So you mean the stuff that Street Fighter does with characters such as Vega and Chun-Li in win poses?

That’s already in the game.

I think I am in a minority in this thread, but I love the way SF5 looks and animates. It’s not too anime, and gives a nod to many artists from before that helped create the SF aesthetic. Among fighters of its generation, it stands out and it’s easy for the laymen to understand and follow.

I think some of the proportions are off, but overall it still looks like Street Fighter. In game, SF5 also has some of the best visual redesigns and animations of characters in their history.

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To me it’s not about pretend 1/1 recreation to concept sketches, but to catch what they mean

Example pic used with Rog, tbh i got no problem with Rog himself… i consider him one of the good models in the game

I’m saying i don’t like they took modellers so far from SF, people that don’t understand (or care) about capcom style and don’t seem familiar with the characters

And i can’t accept “yeah but x and y are good looking” because like for many things also for design a chain is strong as it’s weakest ring

In some cases it’s painful clear they got no idea what they’re working on, see Alex looking older than his SF3 self, just to take an easy one

I don’t pretend them to pull a GG and bring artworks to life, i’m very ok with the normal 3D game way… but when SF give me overwatch vibe you’re doing it wrong.
At cost of sound asshole, you’re just the 3D modeller and you can get some LITTLE freedom, but you’re not the artist, follow the fucking line pls

We got monster artist in Bengus/Kinu/Ikeno/Akiman that in years created what is SF, i will like we don’t throw to shit all that just to please random passengers for marketing reasons

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Sakura should have the SGS too:

I like Kinu more than Bengus, but not by that large margin
I get why Kinu is that popular, but there’s so much more going on in design than instant eye candy
She’ elegant, Bengus got energy, Ikeno is solid etc… i like all of them, ideally SF should benefit from best of all of them
Btw Kinu of SF3 and Capcom vs SNK days is my fav, she was strong even on her weakness there.
Now she feel better at what she like and less strong on what she don’t, but is probably just the freedom to can do just random artworks vs the duty of carry the game’s art

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SFV’s visual approach is much more convenient towards smooth animation, dynamic lighting aaand alternate outfits. There’s no way they’d go the ArcSys route and drop that.

They could have made better checks to keep some characters on-model and good looking, and also they could have been more careful with the real time physics and clipping, though

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I agree with everything you said but I just want to add that copying a fictional character based on the actor’s looks has been around in Western animation since the boom of CGI. DreamWorks are literally famous for doing this and still do that today (remember Will Smith Fish anyone?)

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SFV looks very good in terms of models and animations, although there’s still a lot of room to improve in order to become a proper 3D version of the sprite games.

And why are people still harping on proportions? Bad proportions are good, they exaggerate and emphasize the stuff that needs to be exaggerated and emphasized. Makoto’s feet and hands in Third Strike are all legitimately bigger than her head and she looks gorgeous like anything else in that game.

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@Baines

I also watched the arcsys GDC video as soon it was posted and I also watched the SFV GDC video too which I posted also here a year ago.

I suggest watch both GDC videos and also some article about SFV development, to understand which is priority in design for each game development and what is not.

For SFV animation it’s more gameplaywise for being intuitive(easy to read) as a design goals/priority, which aim is to greatly emphasize impact and collision better than the other fighting games including other SF iteration. So it’s not the animation.

Animating a 3d model is a different job from those that molds and sculpts a 3d model to avoid confusion. The same as the one that do the texture which just follow the artistic goal of the leads.

So the animation isn’t the issue here to be clear, they are the one that did better compare to the previous games even modern one like MVCi.

SFV animation > MVCi animation

And to further the distinction…

for gameplay standpoint of animation SFV > the XRD and even DBFZ

Since were talking about not conveying real life animation and not also about visual anime show like animation but rather for gameplay inituitive in animation.

The issue here is the artistic direction which serves as the style guide for the texturers of 3d models to follow.

The labor cost or workforce isn’t the issue here as the difference.

It’s not Capcom + effort + stylistic choice = replicate Arcsys works

It’s not also Capcom + effort + budget + stylistic choice = replicate Arcsys works

The difference is that Arcsys has a specific engine or dev kit for fighting game.

In fact even Namco Bandai that is a huge giant video game company that had been using cell shading style for numerous anime games for years need to do a partnership with Arcsys, because that technology is exclusive to Arcsys for them as of now.

It’s a mistake to say that it’s all about budget and talent, the real issue here is from being disorganize and not staying faithful to the source material.

It’s not that they cannot do this(SFZ, SF2 or SF3 looks) like people imagine because of budget or technology, the thing is they cannot do those(SF2, SF3 or SFZ) because those weren’t the design goals to begin with.

Everyone(not just artist) has their own vision of beauty and innovation that can affect their design choices and goals. And also everyone has a unique idea and perception of better.

Not everything that is visually innovative is right, that’s why there is so called “uncanny valley” and why some pixelated work better in motion. this is why SF is better to be cartoony than photo realistic.

It’s obvious that SFV had problems with those, observe Kage storyline which used a different model in Ryu and the illustration. Same thing with the one I really hate Birdie with Magic Sachel where he keep his giant Donut lol. Include also Bison in SFV cinematic mode final battle. You know that there is no unified ideas and some do have conflicting ideas in the world it works with. This is not just a problem of SF but also other popular modern games.

Yet lately Classic Bison and Sagat is more better classic than SFZ Ryu in SFV. Same thing with Sagat stage which is like a direct translation from 2D compare to the other SF2 like stage.

and also this:

What they should have done and keep up:

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Because many don’t understand SF style yet they want the most popular brand to fit theyr taste

Is one of the problems SF have