http://gdcvault.com/play/1022031/GuiltyGearXrd-s-Art-Style-The
I think this was just put up a few hours ago on the GDC Vault. The speaker is Junya Christopher Motomura who works at Arc System Works as a 3D Artist/Tech Artist. There's lots of technical information in here on the process of creating the character models, getting the cel-shading right, animation as well as some live demonstrations inside the software they used. There's lots of good stuff in the talk, but some things that stood out to me personally:
- They wanted to make it as 2D as possible. This required a very handcrafted approach from their artists when it came to creating the character models as well as animating them. He mentions "intention" a lot throughout the talk.
- Character models are around 40k triangles. No normal maps were used.
- The artists manually modified the vertex normals on the character models so that they looked good from any light angle. This allowed them to not have any unintentional shading problems.
- The techniques they used are not new at all and there was "nothing innovative technology wise". He says the style could have been done years ago, but it was the artists' intentions that pushed them to do it along with "the right staff in the right place".
- In the Q&A Motomura said there were around 4 3d modelers. The character models took 2 months of work and animation took another 2 months. The model, textures and rigging is done by the same person. The Q&A also touches on a few topics that weren't highlighted in the main talk.
- Maintaining 60fps on PS4 was done easily as the shader is not very resource intensive. Shader and polygons had to be toned down for the PS3 version though.
There's a lot more in the video, so you should definitely check it out if you're interested.
I think this was just put up a few hours ago on the GDC Vault. The speaker is Junya Christopher Motomura who works at Arc System Works as a 3D Artist/Tech Artist. There's lots of technical information in here on the process of creating the character models, getting the cel-shading right, animation as well as some live demonstrations inside the software they used. There's lots of good stuff in the talk, but some things that stood out to me personally:
- They wanted to make it as 2D as possible. This required a very handcrafted approach from their artists when it came to creating the character models as well as animating them. He mentions "intention" a lot throughout the talk.
- Character models are around 40k triangles. No normal maps were used.
- The artists manually modified the vertex normals on the character models so that they looked good from any light angle. This allowed them to not have any unintentional shading problems.
- The techniques they used are not new at all and there was "nothing innovative technology wise". He says the style could have been done years ago, but it was the artists' intentions that pushed them to do it along with "the right staff in the right place".
- In the Q&A Motomura said there were around 4 3d modelers. The character models took 2 months of work and animation took another 2 months. The model, textures and rigging is done by the same person. The Q&A also touches on a few topics that weren't highlighted in the main talk.
- Maintaining 60fps on PS4 was done easily as the shader is not very resource intensive. Shader and polygons had to be toned down for the PS3 version though.
There's a lot more in the video, so you should definitely check it out if you're interested.