Arcane director of animation on how they did it
mashable.com
mashable.com
Unfortunately this article doesn’t provide much actual detail on the production process. From the descriptions here and watching the series, it seems to be what I’ll call “Borderlands on Steroids”. 3D camera, characters, and elements, but 2D matte paintings for backgrounds and hand-painted textures on everything to look pseudo-2D. The added 2D explosions and random elements are probably done in post. Great composition overall and very satisfying to watch.
Arcane had similar impression on me as 'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse' did in terms of animation quality perhaps Arcane is even more visually appealing considering a personal bias for steam-punk(Arcane-punk seems to be a term now); Sound Engineering is great too.
> "the backgrounds are digitally hand-painted and the texture on the characters is crafted to get that graphical look that fits with the environment. We also mainly use 2D animation for the FXs (explosions, tears, smoke...) to reinforce the painted look"
The animation style reminds me in a way to Spiderman - Into the Spiderverse style of animation, but with a totally different tone/style (Arcane being more "rough"/handpainted, flat and darker). Specially the battle scenes have a very similar composition between Spiderverse and Arcane, though again with its differences (Spiderverse seems more Japanese-like animation on steroids, while Arcane is more handpainted style).
Basically - time and money. And willingness to spend it.
Also glad that the article confirmed that they don't use MoCap. It was such a great choice. I recently watched another visually exquisite animation movie on Netflix (the one in the Bright universe). There they used completely flat shading to achieve toon look for characters and environment, but made the characters move with MoCap animations. It looked very eerie.
Mitchell's vs the Machines and Into the Spider Verse are good examples of how the industry is slowly moving into allowing different styles of animation than the Pixar Standard.
Could not have been a better introduction to Miles Morales. I'm so ready for another dozen Spider-man movies featuring his character.
Sony Animation ( who you misattributed to marvel) were already pushing animation style heavily. Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
There's also tons of animation variety from outside America. The issue is that in America, a lot of the style was defined by Pixar. Which was probably the biggest experiment of them all.
But even among the major studios, there's a lot of variety in style. Trolls is incredibly stylized and DreamWorks really pushed style far in Kung Fu Panda 2.
Even Pixar are now experimenting more with style with Luca and Turning Red.
This is also only considering feature film work. If you pay attention to shorts, there's a huge variety.
It comes down to Art Direction. Arcane and Spiderverse are expensive and require an insane amount of per shot bespoke work. A lot of people also tend to find hyper stylized content not as compelling. So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.
It's the same plasticky "Pixar style" as any other computer animated movie in the past 30 years. And I'm saying that as someone who enjoys the movie immensely.
> There's also tons of animation variety from outside America.
This is true, and it's my mistake not to mention this.
> So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.
Indeed. And that's why it's surprising to see experimentation to come from these two sources (Sony Animation may have made it, but it was Marvel who agreed to it: they guard their properties like hawks)
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was very much pushing animation style dramatically at the time and brought a lot of Fleischer, UPA and Looney Tunes animation into 3D for the first time.
Regarding your point of Marvel agreeing to it: Sony still owns the rights to Spider-Man for a lot of domains. That was purely a Sony film with little to no Marvel input. Source: I worked on it.
The source of experimentation have been Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been pushing for experimentation ever since they directed the extremely successful Lego Movie. They also did Cloudy with Meatballs.
They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.
Lord and Miller definitely like to push the style of their films, but a lot of the technology used to achieve that style from Sony is from trying to closely adapt the rubber hose animation style of Fleischer cartoons in an attempt for Sony to differentiate themselves as a studio.
They really pushed it in Hotel Transylvania, their next feature film, where they were bringing Genndy Tratakovsky's style to 3D.
They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.
It’s now part of their MO to push the envelope and have each of these films “be their own thing”.
Fortiche has no relationship with them, but they would have never been allowed to do what they did here without those films having been produced IMO.
If you’re interested to know more I recommend you listen to the Roger Deakins’ podcast with them.
Additionally there have been tons of very stylized content pieces before that. Look at anything by Robert Valley, Alberto Mielgo or just look further out into European or Japanese animated work.
Certainly Spider-Verse helped prove the viability of a heavily stylized film, but Arcane would have existed without it.
A lot of what they did was being done in Gobelins films before (and I suspect Fortiche employs many Gobelins students)
Lord and Miller are fantastic and certainly push style. But I think you're attributing too much to them.
The artists you cite are not part of the industry, and the whole point is how Chris+Phil changed attitudes in the industry. The overall world always knew other styles were possible. But the industry needed a jolt.
I won’t push it any further, but they pretty much changed the industry attitude on this. I am aware of Fortiche’s previous work, but it’s a long way from a few million dollars in cinematics to this.
Even the style that Fortiche ie using in Arcane only seems to have fully developed in their other work in the past 2/3 years.
Anyway sort of a meaningless discussion. Not trying to prove anything, just saying they were leaders in this space.
Both Robert and Alberto are fairly well regarded art directors. You're clearly not familiar with the industry, which is fine, but at least refrain from making statements like that.
The fact that you can credit them with it all and dismiss Alberto as not being part of the industry is depressing. I suggest actually seeing who the initial art director they hired for Spiderverse was.
Even before Lord and Miller, Shrek is a completely different style of film than Pixar was putting out.
There were tons of CG films even around the early 2000s and 2010s that were experimenting in style. They just failed to reach critical success or weren't as in your face about it,
Lord and Miller certainly made the best films that also embraced style, but you're entirely too dismissive of the other people in the space, while laying too much at the feet of Lord and Miller.
They're certainly amazing directors and pushed style in their films, but saying they gave the industry a jolt is retconning things. Spiderverse definitely moved the needle a ton, but it's more than just them.
There's a trailer pretty prominently featured at https://arcane.com/en-us/ if anyone wants one. Looks pretty nice though IMHO it feels like it'd work better as a Moving Painting with a lower frame-rate, the way Spider-Verse did - there is definitely such a thing as "too high" when it comes to framerates in stylized work.
Without spoiling anything, I'll just say there's a large supply of scenes that are animated incredibly beautifully and in very unique ways. Arcane is the first series that made me cry PURELY from the beauty of the animation. (The plot is great, but nothing exceptional -- This is a series I love just for how well it's animated and how well it plays with its own music)
The _only_ thing that bothers my a tiny bit is that they added a bit too much film grain in my opinion; but hey, can't have everything :)
Though not an animation, I find that Oblivion is like that too.
Original title: 'You don't have to play 'League of Legends' to enjoy the masterful animation of Netflix's 'Arcane'; Is an usual Mashable clickbait.
Subtitle: 'The series' director of animation takes us through exactly how they did it.'; Is better and I've condensed it.
Besides the title and source of the article it has some valuable information about how the animation studio blended the 2D, 3D and hand painting to deliver appropriate animation for the story without offending the game players who have invested in the characters.
I am not a League of Legends player.
One of the things that I love about Arcane is the gorgeous and unique art style. It's just a beautiful series. Some of the sequences are jarring in their departure from the rest of the series, but in a good way - think gasp of delight, not immersion-breaking.
It’s fascinating to see how Blizzard keeps missing the boat on taking some of their ideas beyond the corporate ‘ambition’ cap Activision put on them.
Here’s some animation they made for their competing MOBA heroes of the storm years ago:
They just don’t run with any of their ideas anymore, and alas, Riot has a fucking whole TV show on Netflix. I won’t even link the superb WoW Warlords animated stories.
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-worst-week-for-blizzard-has-been...
They failed to capitalize on custom wc3 maps, so dota allstars spawns the moba genre with LoL, Dota2, smite, and countless others, tower defense games and other maps all spin off to make their own games. They make SC2's custom map functionality worse which cripples any chance for capturing further innovation.
They completely torpedo e sports with the release of SC2 which many consider just inferior to SC:BW, completely ignore WoW arena, or any kind of innovation at all with WoW, only releasing uninspired expansions to further milk addicts. Now players have gotten bored enough to jump ship to FFxiv and they are losing their cash cow. Lets not forget the entirely forgettable Warcraft movie too.
Even Overwatch was supposed to kill cs:go but it is basically treading water now, especially since the sequel was delayed and Jeff Kaplan has left. The pro league is a joke compared to the big names. HOTS was abruptly abandoned. Hearthstone was basically their only great success (but I assume is stagnating like everything else now), without it they basically have nothing which is why they have turned to remakes recently (and have failed spectacularly with wc3r and had to outsource d2r in response). They basically have nothing substantial until d4 or Overwatch 2, both of which were delayed until 2023 at the earliest. Now with all the workplace culture scandals they are hemorrhaging talent on top of everything and have effectively lost their position as one of the most desirable studios to work for in the industry.
I don't think Blizzard knows how to make good games anymore, that part died long ago.
Also I played a lot of LOL back in the days, and I didn't remembered any of the characters or saw any link to the game. My SO has never played the game. So the relation to the game really stops at the subtitle (and the look of the characters).
The mouths mimic real movements but fail to do it properly, you can notice it especially when the lips should come together on plosive sounds.
Still, it's an entertaining show and I wish they'd do more like it.
When I first started watching, though it looked amazing, I joked that this is how end-of-gen PS5 games will look like.
To put it another way, even if the real-time renderer was every bit as good, a game wouldn't quite retain the same cinematic feeling except in some limited cases/genres.
Guilty Gear Strive (and also Xrd to a lesser extent) do a really, really good job of mimicking 2D animation while being entirely dynamic, 3D animation. Of course, as you said, a lot of that is because it’s a 2D fighting game. So the players have no control of the camera or lighting. Each character in a match has lighting hand applied separately from the other character and separate from the lighting of the environment, so they always have perfect lighting, even if it isn’t physically correct.
And just like how Arcane was in production for ~5 years, there is no secret to how Guilty Gear looks: it’s just a lot of hard artistic labor. It isn’t necessarily like the only thing preventing games from looking like Arcane is a hardware problem.
Although, I wonder if stylistically, Arcane will start a trend of bringing back texture heavy games with baked in lighting (as opposed to raytracing everything).
https://reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/r0f9aw/realtime_control...
Graphics should get there honestly.
Arcane doesn't push the technology for graphics. You could get visuals like it in the PS3 or PS4 era .
What it does really well is art direction, a lot of which is cinematography. Games can do it already, it's just a matter of a studio wanting to commit to that style.