3D makes us better

[DCillusion]

Here's what I don't understand.

Every time someone makes a game in 3D, many people say, "I like the old 2D art much better."  Rightly so, as you would have to be a large company, (or have a workstation & a lot of free time), to make a 3D game that looks half-way decent.  To make a good 2D game you simply have to be a good artist.

There aren't many of those, however, leaving a lot of our art lacking.  The lure of 3D being you can make any object look good if one were to care enough to take the time.

My question is why doesn't anyone try using the sega-inspired, now mainstream, cell-rendering.  Once only for high-end packages, it's now available for every platform; even the free Blender.  Cell-rendering doesn't require hardware-intensive radiosity lighting or shading.  At low-resolutions, it's a joke, but at, about, 800x600 & up, it really looks like a drawing; creating a piece of artwork similar to the size Sierra used in creating their beautiful low-res games.

Like Sierra, one could take this art, shrink it down, & viola!  A true low-res gem!!

I really think this would affect the quality of our games.

[MrColossal]

I don't know how much you know about 3d but you still have to be a good artist.

Also, you still have to have a lot of free time or a large company or an animation set up to make a good 2d game that looks halfway decent. 3d and 2d are practically the same when it comes to making art for them.

Sure, animating a 3d character might be the tiniest bit easier but it is in no way super easy.

The lure of 3d for me isn't that objects looks good or anything, it's that there are things you can do in 3d that can't be done in 2d [no matter what DG says].

[scotch]

I wrote a long post on why I think cel shading is a pointless, and not very good looking gimmick, but actually... for many of the people here it might be a shortcut to a professional looking style, and it does generally look better rendered into 2d games than other kinds of 3d.
However, if you can master 3d animation enough that your cel shaded characters don't look completely wooden you can probably 2d animate well too, they're not totally dissimilar, and good 2d always beats good 3d in a 2d engine, like AGS.

And I agree with Eric, the main advantage of 3d is the effect it can have on gameplay, something which doesn't exist in AGS "3d".

[PaulSC]

3D heals wounds both physical and psychological.

[Kinoko]

I actually love cel-shaded 3D when it's done right. Jet Set Radio, Giftpia... these games make it beautiful.

I have absolutely 0 problem with people saying they like 2D art better when a 3D game comes out. It's just an opinion and one  I typically share. I find a lot of 3D artists try to win their aguments technically, like "But it's better because of this and this!". It's all still objective. It doesn't matter how technically perfect 3D is, I still adore old 320x200 2D art and it'll always be that way for me.

I'm not saying YOU had that argument, er, I just got to thinking about it because of your topic ^_^ Theres my 2 cents.

[Gilbert]

I like the old 2D art much better.

[Bernie]

I like working with 3D and 2D - I've done stuff in both fields and I love it. DCillusion's idea sounds nice and worth giving a try.

The thing that bothers me about 3D is that a lot of new adventure games try to make stuff look as real as possible instead of exploring new styles.

[stuh505]

The amount of effort that goes into building and animating a 3D scene is enormously greater than whipping up a few paintings.  Artists must be hired to draw concept art, modellers must be hired to model everything, more artists must be hired to draw textures, people must rig the models, then animate the models, programs with quality physics simulations are not cheap...you can use Maya or XSI, and Max for some things...but try orders of magnitude more work.  Cell shading isn't so easy to make look like real cartoons, either.  That takes skill.  And all of it takes artistic ability...I would say, that almost everyone in the pipeline needs to be an accomplished artist.  All that when you could just paint 1 picture and scan it in?

[Gilbert]

But with 3D you can actually use one model for all the poses and views, no need to redraw them frame by frame, moreover, you can actually buy/rip/steal/modify (hehe) some pre-built models which saves a lot of work.

In my opinion they're different things, and shouldn't be compared normally, each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The main problem is, when something was made (game, movie, or whatever) which actually won't need 3D but 3D was finally used, sometimes they may look great, MOST of the time, that just ruin the products, which can even be done better using 2D.

[MrColossal]

Stuh, don't you think you're being a little awkward when you describe the entire process it takes to make a 3d scene and models and textures and physics [for some reason] and then just say "Whip up a few paintings?"

[DCillusion]

If I misunderstood anyone - let me know

I don't know if it would be as difficult as working out physics, I'm still talking about a mostly static enviornment. 

it's true that you'd still need some talent for art, but I also think it makes the art easier if you can always be perspective-perfect & only have to draw the art once, (which has already been stated).  You can also work & rework any part of the image until it's perfect.  With 2D you, sometimes, must rework an image in its whole to fix it.

one the worst things that can rip you out of the reality of any game, (2D & 3D), is the absence of the little details that make your world seem real.  You make an awesome tool shed, & spend hours filling it with everything important.  The process takes hours, & it's beautiful, but what about the stupid things that you don't really see.  Things like: some nails on the ground, splinters, a loose board, a fallen screwdriver, etc.  These are things an amature designer can't be bothered.  He/She hasn't the time.  Here's where I think 3D really shines.  Thousands of free-&-legal boring objects can be taken from the internet, (about 15,000 from Turbosquid alone).  Grab these items, scatter them amidst your incredible scene & you've got something great.  Some people may consider this an easy answer, but it's something to think about.

I'm not sure if some people fully understood the post by saying they like 2D better or 320x200 is better.  I'm sorry I wasn't clear.  I theorized that one could cell-render a 3D scene in say: 800x600, 1024x768, etc., to create an art cell.  The cell would then be resized to fit the lowered resolution.  This is a similar technique that Sierra used.  The goal of the render is to be as close to a 2D image as possible.

As far as animating, you are probably still on your own.  It seems that in these types of games, the 2 are almost mutually exclusive; so what ever you can achieve.  Although Sierra was notorious for relying heavilly on rotoscoping & motion-capture.  Even so I'm, almost, inclined to call the scene & the animations apples & oranges

Thanks for all the input; please continue to respond.  I recently threw out a nearly-finished game of mine, (done entirely in 2D), for looking to "Photoshopy" & I'm looking for a new technique.  I have a lot of knowledge of & am quite good at 3D imagery, but I also enjoy the days of lo-res sprites & would like to make a game where I wouldn't have to toss my talents out the window just because it isn't nostalgic enough for me.

[Bernie]

While you could go and create a fully rendered 3D scene and resize it to lo-res (320x200), you could also create a bigger-than-ingame drawing in photoshop or something and resize it. Drawing small details isn't that much of a problem.

It would still look more natural (more drawing-like) than a 3D rendered scene and it's probably faster, too.

I'd say that for 800x600 and upwards, 3D would be worth considering, because creating drawings for such high resolutions can be quite hard.

[scotch]

Certainly for backgrounds 2d is the way to go for AGS scenes, if you're only going to be viewing a room from one angle you may as well draw it, modelling is no easier, especially if you're just doing a cel art style (which I think looks wrong for backgrounds anyway, even animation that uses cel shaded characters typically has painted backgrounds, cel shading is a compromise between quality and speed needed for animation frames).
I also think that would look better in AGS, although I'm certainly not anti 3d.
Cel shaded characters on hand drawn backgrounds like in Runaway is a much better idea, because it does save your animation time for high res characters.  If I ended up doing the character animation in TJH part 2 I'd have to do it this way, there's no way I could draw 800x600 2d animation alone.

And stuh, you can't really compare the commercial 3d game making process to one artist making 2d backgrounds.  If I was doing the whole 3d thing myself I'd say one 3d room is about the same amount of work as one 800x600 room painting, and one animated 3d character is a similar amount of work to a 2d one (maybe more to create but less to animate).  I agree you'd need the same amount of art skill to do either well, and 3d is not going to make bad art good.

[Snarky]

This thread shows off some 3D-rendered backgrounds that look great in VGA.

I think some artists on the forum have mentioned that they'll make a quick 3D model of their room, take a screenshot and paint on top of that. That way they can establish perspective more easily, try different camera angles and so on. This sounds like a very reasonable method to me, especially with something like a map editor for a game, which can be quite quick and easy to use.

[DGMacphee]

The lure of 3d for me isn't that objects looks good or anything, it's that there are things you can do in 3d that can't be done in 2d [no matter what DG says].

I said what now??

EDIT: Now I remember what Colossal's talking about it. It was a thread from ages ago (and one that's mysteriously disappeared for some reason) where in it I was saying that adventure games don't need graphics to exist, and that graphics only enhance the game but are not mandatory to the game's construction. In the thread, I posed that the graphics of a certain game could be converted to textual descriptions. And I think my theory is valid since text-based adventures existed long before most graphical adventures.

Sure, the game isn't as good without graphics, but the game still exists -- and that was my point. And this was based on my theory that an adventure game relies upon two necessary components: a narrative and interactions. Graphics, music, and so forth only enhance them game, but aren't necessary.

This isn't the same as saying what can be done in 3D can be done in 2D -- I don't think I've ever said that, or ever believed it. In fact, the only decent graphics I ever been able to do are in 3D using a rendering program called Imagine 4.0.

I believe there's a lot you can do with 3D programs, especially ones with Zvarily functions.

[stuh505]

MrColossal,

Alright, the physics could be avoided.  But they also might need to be there.  If you're going to be animating characters wearings robes and cloaks, you'll probably want some kind of cloth simulation...and likewise, you may want to have some animated flowing hair that uses actual hair.  But there are workarounds you're right.

Still, I think it is a lot less work to hand paint a background than to build a 3D scene of equivalent detail.  A painting is probably going to take under 20 hours, whereas a single scene might contain 100 paintings as textures, each of which can take an arbitrary amount of time to draw...and there are so many other aspects that come together.

For some things 3D is faster, but you'll never see a single room painting that takes months of 9-5 work for a single person, and you can EASILY see this amount of time put in for a single 3D scene.

[scotch]

This discussion is about people here, using cel shading in 2d ags games.  Sure a whole 3d level of a game could take one person a couple of months, but for one static 3d screen, well I think it's about the same amount of work, textures included.  I've spent a week on one painted AGS background easily.  If I'd done the same scene in 3d it'd take around the same amount of time.  If I had done it in cel shaded 3d that minimizes the amount of texture work so maybe it'd be faster.
Not that I think that'd look good, and I have a fair amount of 3d experience, to a newbie it'd not be an easy process.
And physics? Why? most ags animation is pretty crappy, and not even most commercial games use cloth physics.

For people considering 3d backgrounds I'd suggest not doing cel shading, there are some good examples of nice 3d rendered low res graphics that use normal textures and lighting in the critics lounge.  No radiosity or anything complex, just basic 3d scenes.  It can work very well.

[stuh505]

scotch, this image is just a small part of a 3d scene that I was working on.Ã,  I didnt' even finish this 1 character, and I've already spent more than 200 hours working on it.

http://img202.exs.cx/img202/7358/saibekkillingfields9br.jpg

just for this character, I've got over 300 3d objects, and almost as many unique texture maps drawn in photoshop.Ã,  And physics simulations are necessary to animate this character as well.

in 3D, the time that it takes to build and render the scene is dependent on the complexity of the objects in the scene

In 2D, it is not really dependent on how complex the scene is...to a small degree yes...but mostly its only dependent on how large the scene is and how much detail you put into it.Ã,  theres only a finite amount of space and for any given resolution that you paint at it can only take you a finite amount of time.

I could paint this same image that I have in 3D in less than an hour.Ã,  It wouldn't be quite so damn detailed, but still...I mean for contrast the picture of the farm hut I painted in the EGA/VGA topic in the critics lounge took me under an hour.Ã,  to do that in 3d, it's all a question of how detailed I want to do the trees etc...using a tree modeller I could do them in probably a day of work, all in all though that scene would probably take me about a solid week of work.Ã,  I guess I just work slow?Ã,  But if I just work slowly, then wouldn't my 2D work be slow also?

[MrColossal]

That image is way too big.. scale it down.

[scotch]

Well, depends on the artist then I guess.  As for me, I could certainly not paint that in an hour.  But I could model it in a day or two, and I could paint it in a similar amount of time (mixing the two would be fastest, did you paint the background?).
However, the whole point of the cel shading idea seemed for people who are not good artists to have a short cut to backgrounds with good perspective, well drawn lines, in a half way decent style, without having to learn skills.  For them I think basic 3d might be quite worth it.  It wouldn't look great, but I think placing some boxes and stock models around and applying textures/shaders is easier than learning to draw properly.
I'd prefer it to (most) MS Paint rooms, but only just.
For someone who can paint well there is probably no advantage, as I've said, go for 2d if you can do it, it works best in AGS.  And again, the main advantage of 3d cel characters is in character animation, I'd even consider that myself.