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Hello! My name is Dan,
I’m an animator, and this is New Frame Plus.
Replicating the look of hand-drawn anime in 3D is a daunting challenge.
Even the anime industry frequently struggles to produce CG results
that don’t fall into some weird, animation uncanny valley.
It’s just SO EASY to get a result that feels vaguely wrong-looking,
and most of the CG anime success stories seem to be the shows
which are willing to embrace their distinct 3D look.
The same has largely been true for anime video games.
Many game developers have taken a crack at
this same 3D anime challenge over the years,
but nearly all of the successful examples are the games
which aim to heavily EVOKE the anime style
without actually trying to fool anybody into thinking
that they’re looking at a series of drawings.
But there is one game studio out there who has been
pushing this envelope further than any other,
and that studio is Arc System Works.
And, before I start talking about how they achieved this, I do want to point out:
much of what I’m about to say here comes directly from a GDC talk
given by technical animator Junya C Motomura back in 2015.
You can (and should) check that talk out yourself later.
I will link to it below.
So Arc System Works, as a company,
has been kicking around in some form since the late 80s.
They’ve worked on a lot of things,
but the genre of game they are most famous for is: 2D fighters.
This studio is VERY VERY GOOD at making beautiful,
high-energy, competitive anime fighting games.
And the anime fighter that originally put
them on the map back in 1998 was Guilty Gear.
It was fast, it was stylish, it was beautiful.
Now fast forward to the 2010s.
Guilty Gear hadn’t seen a proper sequel since 2002
and Arc System Works was looking to bring their
pillar franchise back into the spotlight.
But now that they had several other high profile anime fighters on the market,
like BlazBlue and Persona 4 Arena,
Guilty Gear’s stylistic niche was feeling a little crowded.
So, rather than trying to compete with their own products,
Arc System Works looked for a way to set the next Guilty Gear apart from the pack.
And the choice they ultimately made
was that the next Guilty Gear title would abandon its traditional 2D sprite animation
in favor of fully 3D character models.
Now, why would they do that, you might ask?
These sprites are beautiful!
Well, there are plenty of enticing incentives to switching a fighter to 3D.
On top of giving your game a more modern look,
with 3D animation you can more easily support higher resolutions,
you can make your animations smoother without breaking the art budget,
and you can actually move the camera around the characters in dynamic ways
when you want to, which has all kinds of exciting potential.
It is for these reasons (and more)
that many other fighting game franchises have made that jump to 3D over the years,
and to varying degrees of success.
But most of those franchises had taken that leap with the understanding that doing so
would necessitate at least some degree of aesthetic change.
Street Fighter, for example, went from looking like this…
...to looking like this.
Marvel vs Capcom went from this…
...to this.
And Mortal Kombat went from this…
...to this…
...and eventually to this.
And each of these 3D overhauls more or less captures
the spirit of their sprite-animated originals,
but those development teams had clearly embraced the fact that
moving to 3D would inevitably require some aesthetic changes.
But Arc System Works went into the new Guilty Gear with a different mentality.
What if they DIDN’T accept that aesthetic change?
What if, instead, they set out to make their leap to 3D as INVISIBLE as possible,
while still reaping many of the benefits 3D has to offer?
And so, Arc System Works set out to tackle the challenge of building a 2.5D fighter
with 3D character models while still retaining
the look of the series’s sprite-based origins.
Which meant: they were gonna have to figure out how to make 3D anime look right.
Fortunately, ArcSys had some big advantages going into this project.
First: they had a LOT of 2D experience.
Their teams had been producing 2D anime fighters for years.
They were intimately familiar with the visual style that they now needed to recreate.
And second: their team had actually been using 3D tools
as part of their pixel animation pipeline for a long time!
Every pixel art character in BlazBlue began life as a 3D model.
In order to streamline their pixel animation workflow,
each character was sculpted and posed in 3D first to lay a foundation,
and then the pixel artists would use that posed model as reference,
which not only sped up the entire animation process but also ensured
more stylistic consistency across all the artists on the project.
So ArcSys had both the experience and the tools they needed to make this work.
All that remained was figuring out the HOW.
The first step was getting the fundamental look of an anime character right,
which they achieved through a combination of character model design,
some really clever texture mapping techniques,
and some impressive custom cel shaders designed to
replicate the look of traditional anime character shading.
Most importantly, the application of this shading effect was highly customizable.
The team’s character artists could endlessly tweak and finesse how light
and shadows fell across each character’s unique features.
What’s more, each character got their own independent custom lighting.
See, in most forms of 3D animation, you often want to make it look like your
light sources are affecting every character or object in the environment similarly.
It helps to sell the fact that everything in
the scene is inhabiting that same 3D space.
But in Guilty Gear Xrd, every character has their own individual light sources
which affect their body and NOTHING else in the scene.
Later versions of the game would add the option for more dynamic scene-based lighting,
but this original approach to the problem was really clever,
because it mimics the way those classic 2D sprites would have originally been colored,
with each character having their own shading hand-drawn in and no
ability to change that shading based on the character’s environment.
So now they had the characters looking right,
but there was still the remaining problem of getting them to look right in motion.
And that’s (arguably) an even bigger challenge,
because anime has a very distinct animation style.
See, anime’s unique look is a by-product of its production limitations.
Animating any television series is a challenge,
because you've got to produce an entire season of TV on
a FRACTION of the budget that most animated films get.
That is a daunting problem, and the approach that TV animation studios
around the world have developed to solve that problem is: Limited Animation.
Limited Animation is a technique (or really, a huge collection of techniques)
that TV animation studios have been honing for decades.
The goal of Limited Animation is maximum efficiency;
to find as many cost-saving and corner-cutting measures as possible
while sacrificing as little visual fidelity as you realistically can,
all in order to get the most bang from your limited buck.
This is why you so frequently see anime characters
hold on a single drawing for as long as possible.
It’s all about animating performance and actions using
as few drawings per second as you possibly can,
while still making sure that you’re doing enough
drawings to adequately sell those actions.
How few drawings can you get away with?
And if you HAVE to create additional drawings to make something look right,
can you get away with only re-drawing specific parts of the character?
Maybe just their mouth? Their eyes? Their hair or clothing?
Sure, you can make this action look great with 10 drawings,
but can you make it look great using just 8 of them?
How about 6?
Awesome, we can only afford 3 so, good luck!
You see Limited Animation all over western TV as well,
and it’s really fascinating seeing how different sectors of this industry
have found different approaches and solutions to that same problem.
But if you’re wanting to truly imitate the look of anime specially,
capturing the feel of this Limited Animation style is the key.
And Guilty Gear’s animators achieved that by throwing out standard 3D technique
and approaching their animation pretty much exactly the way 2D animators do.
Rather than crafting a series of key poses
for the computer to smoothly interpolate between,
the animators treated each pose as a still drawing,
a series of hand-crafted 2D images.
See, one of the inherent benefits to computer animation
is the way the computer can fill in the gaps between your key poses.
Like, if I put this ball on screen and I say "I want keyframes here here here and here",
the computer can be like “Oh here, lemme help you out”
and make the ball smoothly travel from keyframe to keyframe,
which can be really really helpful!
But what ArcSys’s team basically did was say:
“NO. Stop it."
"Just have the ball be here... then here... and then here... then here."
And we have animator-y terms for this, like
“Stepped keys” and “held keys” and whatnot, but the point is
by not allowing the computer to smoothly interpolate between their keyframes
Arc System Works’s animators made it so that each pose they made
behaved just like a 2D drawing would,
and they could then choose exactly how long they wanted each “drawing”
to linger on screen before the next one popped in.
Again, exactly the same as a traditional hand-drawn animation workflow!
And basically the same as their old sprite animation workflow too,
if you think about it.
You can even see examples of them holding parts of the body still,
just like a 2D animator would when they didn’t want
to have to redraw the whole thing for the next frame,
while still animating secondary parts of the character like hair or clothing.
It is completely unlike how we would animate something in 3D normally,
but it absolutely evokes the look of anime’s Limited Animation.
But that, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Because, to complete the look of 2D anime,
the animators also had to add a generous helping of imperfection.
See, perfection is something that computers are GREAT at.
A computer can make every movement perfectly smooth,
every body proportion perfectly consistent,
every light source and shadow perfectly correct.
But hand drawn animation - by its very nature - contains imperfections;
subtle variations in expression and slight changes
in body proportions from one frame to the next.
So, to maintain the illusion of something hand-drawn,
the animators had to force 2D’s imperfection BACK into the computer’s perfect system,
tweaking each key frame ever so slightly to implement those flaws
that make traditional animation look hand-made.
They also had to stylize and exaggerate their animations
the same way 2D animators would,
warping character proportions and exaggerating perspective intentionally
for emphasis or dynamic appeal.
This was made possible by the fact that each of these character’s animation skeletons
contains far more animatable joints than your average 3D game character,
sometimes over 500 of them.
And that's something you can do when you've only got
to render two characters on screen at once!
This not only allowed the animators to deform and shape these
character models to implement that imperfection I mentioned before,
but also gave them freedom to warp the character proportions
in some extreme and bizarre ways when necessary.
And if all those joints weren’t enough to do what the animators needed -
like if the character needed to morph into some entirely different form -
well, then they could just swap in another character model on the fly.
Then there’s the effects animation.
Not only did they accentuate all of these character animations
with some gorgeous hit effects and speed lines
(all of which are animated 2D textures),
but - when necessary for certain effects like the clouds of dust at a character’s feet -
they modeled those clouds in 3D frame by frame.
And that is bonkers.
Basically, in all things, the Arc System Works team had one edict:
“Kill Every Thing 3D”.
If something felt 3D, you found a way to fix it.
And, as I have hopefully made clear at this point,
the solution was - more often than not -
quality tools and an extraordinary amount of brute force.
To sculpt the character model and the shading and the posing
and the effects and even the LIGHTING if necessary
- FRAME BY FRAME - until the entire game looked like a series of hand drawn images.
Just like with traditional animation,
everything onscreen had to be an intentional and artistic choice,
not a computer’s automated solution.
And the results?
Well, a lot of folks (myself included) didn’t even immediately recognize
that this was a 3D game when we first saw it.
Usually, it wasn’t until we saw the camera move
for the first time that we stopped and said:
“Wait a minute….
...no way. Has this been 3D the ENTIRE TIME?!”
Guilty Gear Xrd may not always succeed in fooling your brain
into thinking it’s looking at a 2D fighter, but STILL, this is an amazing achievement.
And that was just their FIRST try!
For their next attempt, Arc System Works would face an even greater challenge.
Because creating a convincing faux 2D anime aesthetic
for your own original property is one thing,
but emulating the look of an established and beloved anime series?
That adds a new layer of challenge.
This time, Arc System Works couldn’t just recreate AN anime look,
they had to successfully nail Dragon Ball’s unique aesthetic,
AND stay true to the animation of characters that
their target audience had likely grown up with,
AND - on top of all that -
they actually needed to make it look BETTER than those old anime series.
They had to replicate what a nostalgic DBZ fan sees in their head
when they think back on their favorite moments from the show.
And as one who did not grow up with Dragon Ball,
I confess that I cannot speak authoritatively on this one,
but - if the level of delight I’ve been hearing from
Dragon Ball fans over the last year is any indication
- I’m gonna go ahead and guess that they did pretty good.
And I really love seeing the subtle differences in approach and style between these two games.
Like for example, Dragon Ball FighterZ has a different approach to smears,
relying more on those classic old school speed lines
instead of Guilty Gear’s smooth, stretched-out solid shapes.
I love all of the Dragon Ball-influenced posing on these characters
and most of all, I love that the animation in this game
has slightly lower fidelity than the previous game
in order to feel more true to the source material.
It's in the way that the Dragon Ball fighters hold their
poses for seconds at a time with only their mouths moving.
The way they’ll hold on a single frame longer than the Guilty Gear Xrd fighters will.
Or… ok, look at Sol Badguy’s idle animation.
His name is Sol Badguy, by the way. Guilty Gear is bonkers.
But yeah, look at his breathing.
You see that expansion in the chest?
The way it stretches out that buckle strap on his clothes?
That is a level of subtle motion fidelity that you are
not going to see very often in a show like Dragon Ball,
and you won’t see it in Dragon Ball FighterZ either,
because it just wouldn’t look right.
And the really exciting thing is that this whole approach Arc System Works has
developed is still relatively new and unexplored.
I mean, they’ve only really done this trick twice so far.
But their third attempt is on the way.
The upcoming GranBlue Fantasy Versus looks to bring
yet another subtle variation on the anime aesthetic.
And Arc System Works is also the publisher for that
new Kill la Kill fighting game that just dropped.
Granted, actual development duties for that one seem to have been handled by A+ Games,
the same folks who made that (also very nice looking) Little Witch Academia game,
but I can’t imagine there wasn’t at least SOME
knowledge-sharing happening between these two studios.
If there’s one thing that the production of these games shows
(and it’s something that Motomura has said himself),
it’s that achieving this look wasn’t about developing some new,
never-before-seen technology.
It was simply a matter of applying the same tech we use
for everything else toward a different visual target,
and being willing to bend our production approach
as necessary to achieve our aesthetic goals.
I cannot wait to see what Arc System Works has in store for us next,
and I really hope to see more studios take a crack at this sort of thing in the future.
Again, definitely check out Junya C Motomura’s talk if you’re
interested in learning more about how they achieved this.
He gets into more of the technical details like
the nitty-gritty of their cel shading and texture work.
It’s all just so very darned cool.
Also, a big thanks to Geoff Thew of Mother’s Basement
for double-checking my script on this one.
If you’re curious to learn more about the history of anime games,
he actually made a video cataloging that very thing.
I will link to it below.
I hope you've enjoyed this!
Be sure to subscribe and bell-ring and all that other stuff if you haven’t already,
and consider supporting the show like all of these absolute champions.
Thank you for watching and I’ll see you next time for more New Frame Plus.
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