You got all wrong. The Udon drawings had anatomy mistakes, that is, muscles or bones where they shouldn’t be. The sprites could very well be better than the original. Just imagine if masters such as Earl Norem were hired to make them. There are several French, Italian, and American masters who could get it done and turn STHD into a masterpiece.
If you hire the proper artists. The vast majority of Eastern artists lack the talent, experience and proper training to create high-quality comic-style animations.
This is a sweeping generalisation and borderline ignorant. There are plenty of artists in Asia who can do fine art and not just comic art. They’re more than capable of doing a realistic still-life or an anatomical study. To claim only people in the west know how to draw just because you don’t like the “popular” style is ridiculous.
Alice: Nightmare Returns is an American game with so-so gameplay but great art direction. Take a look at the concept art some day. It’s gorgeous and uses all sorts of different mixed media. The team who did it is also almost entirely Chinese. There’s not an anime-styled anything to be found anywhere.
I might as well say that Americans can’t draw because I’m not a fan of the way Jim Lee draws Batman. It’s a ridiculous and ignorant statement. There are just as many hack artists in the west as there are in the east, but no one goes on deviantart, looks at these people, and claims “NO ONE IN THE WEST CAN MAKE HIGH QUALITY ART”.
UDON, whose art you hate so much, is all American by the way.
Just because a person draws in a style that you may not like, it doesn’t mean they don’t know how to draw. Good artists draw in a style they like - it doesn’t mean they can’t do anything else. Picasso is one of the greatest artists of th 20th century, yet his famous works are surrealist stuff that aren’t all that realistic. Do people go around saying “OMG HE CAN’T DRAW?”. He can, but he just chooses to draw people with messed up faces.
Claiming Asia is a sea of lousy artists is ridiculous.
There were tons of mistakes in the original sprites. In HD they stand out a lot more. With UDON adding extra ones, you get HDR.
By in-betweens I mean adding frames of animation besides the key ones. They could have added frames (and modify existing ones) to improve the animation without modifying the gameplay. But the project was so under budgeted that they even had to downgrade the color palette. If the work was done by a talented team of experienced sprite artists with a decent budget the game could have looked great. And both the animation and the resolution matter.
By the way, I can’t back oldschool in this one. There are hundreds of talented Asian artists. (also Picasso sucks)
Of course most don’t do western-style comics. How come Joe Madureira hasn’t drawn any manga? Your question is pointless.
You have a problem where you think what style people draw with == skill.
According to you, the people who animate Adventure Time can’t draw for shit because Adventure Time is drawn with a simple style. Your blind disdain for Asians is ridiculous.
The coloring job on some of these painted images is smoother and more detailed than the vast majority of mainstream American comics, many of which use SIMPLE, STYLIZED, ARTWORK. ::gasp!:: You mean Americans don’t draw everything in a realistic style?! D:
Very difficult. Everything would have to be blown up and traced or 100% redrawn. Odds are they are bitmap images (typically way way quicker to make than vector art which is resolution independent) so they aren’t resolution independent. That’s the main downside to 2D, it’s not like 3D where your assets are fairly portable to high resolutions since a lot of games are beginning to do the whole hi-res 3D to gameplay quality 3D model thing. 3S looks ok largely from the use of a lot of filters and the fact it looked really good for the resolution it was at but it still looks pretty pixelly to me.
I think once you do some studying in 3d modeling you’ll realize how much more easier it is to do than 2d sprites. Like even models like Shuma from UMVC is easy for high end studios to do.
There’s no such thing as HD-ifying. You can either:
A) Make them bigger (which will just make them look pixelly or blurry)
B) Redraw them.
The problem is that the sprites are low-res. Meaning that someone’s nose might be like, one pixel, and it will look fine. But when you enlarge that sprite, that 1 pixel nose just looks like a big brown block in the middle of their face. Details that looked fine when things were small look horrible now that the size is so much bigger. So in order to do it properly you’d have to redraw a lot of things.
Honestly, if you liked the old sprites, then play at the original res. If you want a game in true HD (and not just enlarged), it really has to be redrawn.
you are talking about the cream of the crop though. the rest of the anime industry caters to niche audiences inside Japan with low quality production and low skilled staff. they are mostly for DVD though and are unlikely to be ever televised.
a lot of animators and voice actors even use aliases when they participate in such productions.
I participated in discussions in forums specialized in Japanese animation and unfortunately the situation in Japan is just like that. besides, the talented animators are absorbed by the video game industry.
What you’re basically saying is that the talented people do good work and the mediocre people do mediocre work…
…which is true in EVERY industry. And, like in every industry, there are a select few who are very skilled and a vast majority with varying degrees of competence. What you describe certainly isn’t something special to Japan, and certainly not special to animation either.
Every SyFy/B movie ever is a product of the same thing, isn’t it? Unskilled people putting together shitty productions. Same goes for every lousy shovelware videogame or shitty indie comic – and last time I checked, those kinds of things exist in every country.
Japan is peculiar though since they produce 60 % of the worlds animation.This gives them a far larger share in mediocre works too.
hence why the Japanese animation industry is peculiar, let alone when their system is already ancient and needs to change.
Which is, precisely, why their drawing skills are largely underdeveloped, for the most part. It doesn’t take only talent, but study and training, which they lack due to the low quality requirements of both mainstream and underground Japanese animation, nowadays. The anime/manga style is to a drawing what pop + autotune is to music, except the artists actually do have some talent - but lack training and experience.
