High Definition Retro gaming Art

You guys got to see this person's site.

It will blow your mind .

http://orioto.deviantart.com/

If these were real games I would with out a doubt buy them.

This game companies should make more games that look like these pictures.

I am so glad that the guy doesn't read "retro" as "boxy pixels".

well If it was "boxy pixels" art it wouldn't be high definition now, would it?

Yeah, seen a few of this guys pics before... he's quite talented, but it apprantly takes him something like 50 hours to draw a single image... so it's no wonder games don't look as nice as those images

~Sol

epic.

What's wrong with boxy pixels?

The Street Fighter HD crew made it clear: animating sprites at today's resolutions is waaaay too taxing. And you'd be expected to animate at 30fps at least, which would quickly drain your VRAM.

Now if someone manages to do a motion-estimating shader, we'd be all set.

I can't figure out why don't they use motion estimation in the asset creation itself though. It's a shoe-in.

Anyways, bone-animations and local deformation seem to be the way to go for both 2D and 3D. Construct can do both, yay!

Maybe using what we've got cleverly one of us can whip up something that looks like THAT? (thomasmahler's is kinda looking like that)

I dunno. A good digital painter should be able to paint one of those backgrounds per day, especially if the design decision is already clear. I'm not a digital painter at all and I paint my stuff in a pretty short amount of time and I've seen digital and matte painters doing amazing 'sketches' in half an hour. i think saying that it's not possible because that guy needed 50 hours to re-create an old game in terms of design using new digital tools is a cop-out.

The problem is one of animation - animating high res character sprites is a ton of work and having high res sprites, but not more animation phases gives the whole thing an unfinished feel (like Street Fighter 2 HD). But I guess you could achieve very good results if you'd do it in 3d, turn off the shading and paint the textures just as you'd paint the character - and then use post processing on the rendered sprites. I'm pretty sure with a little effort it could look extremely close to what he does.

I'm very sure that you could create games like that in todays day and age and that one could make it feasible for production - you'd just have to make the right design choices in terms of look and production.

A lot of the next-gen stuff we see today is much more complicated to create in terms of pure production work. Having painted backgrounds (you could still animate the layers that make up the composition) is a very, very efficient technique and much less time-consuming than what level and environment artists are doing today for real time backgrounds, IMO.

i think saying that it's not possible because that guy needed 50 hours to re-create an old game in terms of design using new digital tools is a cop-out.

I don't recall saying that it wasn't possible.

What I am getting at is, however, there are obviously large amounts of man hours involved in creating something that looks THAT slick. Even a higly accomplished artist would probably be surprised at how long it would take to render something of that quality... As you said, a good artist would take maybe a whole day to do something like that.

Let's assume there are 8 working hours in a day. To make a 30 frame "idle" animation for one character would take a week at least (discounting on the fact there would be no background etc if you were doing a character animation). So, unless you had a team of like 200 people who could all draw the "same" then making a 2d game with graphics like that would be unrealistic.

I am not saying beyond any stretch of the imagination, that it's not possible... just infeasible.

Why do game developers opt for 3d so much these days when a lot of times, 2d would work perfectly fine (and often give a better looking result IMO)?? Because it's EASIER to work with animations on multiple angles, and essentially you only have to draw/make the character one time, and the software does the rest of the "real work".

~Sol

Huh?

I said it would probably take a day to design and paint a background like that. Not the character animation. We have a lot of good character animation and motion retargeting tools in 3d now - so why wouldn't you make use of that? A week to create an idle animation? What?

Of course it'd take a lot more time to create everything in 2d, that's why I was saying that it'd make sense to create the characters in 3d and use the tools that are out there to make it feasible for production.

Why would you need a 200 man group to create a 2d game like that? o_O Vanillaware is doing some pretty awesome stuff and they're pretty freaking small.

Also, it's not like 3d is easier, but you usually find more people being trained in 3d than in 2d and for a loooong time now, everyone associated 2d with being 'outdated', so everyone jumped on that 3d train. Try to find artists now that are really good 2d artists that can design, paint and are good animators - good luck with that. The industry is always adapting to what's cool right now, to what's making money and 2d hasn't been hot for a long time now.

Try to find artists now that are really good 2d artists that can design, paint and are good animators - good luck with that. The industry is always adapting to what's cool right now, to what's making money and 2d hasn't been hot for a long time now.

That's... pretty much what I was getting at.

The guy's art we are talking about was not made in 3D... I, for some weird reason, thought we were talking about painting 2D art, and making games that looked like said 2D art.

Of course 3D is far more common.... like I said, it is easier to animate and render images a 3D object, than to draw a 2D object from scratch for every single frame. And yes, if you did make a game that looked as good as those art-works, in 2D, painting them by hand... you WOULD need 200 people (perhaps an exaggeration, but you see the point I am trying to make?) to complete a large project.

Those 200 people could easily be reduced to 10 if using 3D... because after the model is made, boned, and weighted, you can pose it however you want, on any angle you like.... tween the movements, or whatever you wanna do... and BAM you have a fully animated mobile character that you have to do very minimal work to in order to make "the next animation frame" should you choose to render it to a raster image (IE Diablo 2).

Sorry, but I got a little confused when I presumed we were talking about the thread topic and it turns out we were talking about making the same thing in 3D?

~Sol

That's... pretty much what I was getting at.

The guy's art we are talking about was not made in 3D... I, for some weird reason, thought we were talking about painting 2D art, and making games that looked like said 2D art.

Have you read my post before that? I was just thinking about how you could streamline a production in order to work out a project like that and I think it's very possible since todays next-gen projects are far, far more complex in terms of asset creation than anything he does anyway. Creating the character art in 3d would make a lot of sense in order to streamline character animation, but even if you'd decide otherwise...

[quote:1udfhbjj]Of course 3D is far more common.... like I said, it is easier to animate and render images a 3D object, than to draw a 2D object from scratch for every single frame. And yes, if you did make a game that looked as good as those art-works, in 2D, painting them by hand... you WOULD need 200 people (perhaps an exaggeration, but you see the point I am trying to make?) to complete a large project.

What the hey? We're still talking about making a game that looks like the screenshots that guy posted, right? So even if you'd do everything in 2d, even the character animation - for say, that Mario game he re-created, you'd _never_ need 200 people. I don't even know how you're calculating this. 200 people, dude? I think you're highly overestimating that artwork.

Look at this:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48398.html

Here we go. I'd be surprised if their team is larger than 30 people at best.

wow. that is the coolest thing i've seen in a while! i love vanillaware's stuff ...

What the hey? We're still talking about making a game that looks like the screenshots that guy posted, right? So even if you'd do everything in 2d, even the character animation - for say, that Mario game he re-created, you'd _never_ need 200 people. I don't even know how you're calculating this. 200 people, dude? I think you're highly overestimating that artwork.

Look at this:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48398.html

Here we go. I'd be surprised if their team is larger than 30 people at best.

Like I said, it was probably an exaggeration... how many people it would take isn't really the point. I was just trying to say, that the man-power-hours for something like that, made in 2d, would be phenomenal compared to the same thing made in 3d. Regardless of whether it was 1 person or 1000 people.

I don't want to argue semantics, I was just trying to make a generalised point about an observation. There aren't really any games that look like that dudes drawings (style aside)... and even though that trailer you linked looks damn fine, it's sort of "cheating" in the fact they are using a bones system, which again drastically cuts down on production time since you don't have to draw every single frame. Bones in a way, are a lot like 3d... you draw the thing once, twice, maybe a third time if you are unlucky, and use the bones to effectively animate the character.

If you say 200 people is unrealistic, then fine I believe you... but why does it take feature length animations made "the old way" hundreds upon hundreds of people to make over a course of 5+ years? Because they didn't have 3d, and they didn't have "bones"... everything was hand painted... frame by frame... from scratch.

~Sol

What the hey? We're still talking about making a game that looks like the screenshots that guy posted, right? So even if you'd do everything in 2d, even the character animation - for say, that Mario game he re-created, you'd _never_ need 200 people. I don't even know how you're calculating this. 200 people, dude? I think you're highly overestimating that artwork.

Look at this:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48398.html

Here we go. I'd be surprised if their team is larger than 30 people at best.

Still those are not animated Frame by frame those use bones, making it much easier to animate.

It doesent matter how many people you have working on a project you can have 30 people working on a project and it will take longer than having 60 people on a project. The real risk comes when you have a huge group of people with no consistency.