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Comment by mikkom | Hacker News Reader

Why? It's much easier to draw a pixel sprite instead of creating a 3d model and then doing tricks to render it as 2d..

And hand-drawn images look better if the artist is skilled.

King of Fighter 12 sprites, which are regarded as being high quality, were made from 3d models. They first animated 3D models, selected specifics frames, then traced sprite over those.

https://kofaniv.snk-corp.co.jp/english/info/15th_anniv/2d_do...

> then traced sprite over those.

In the past this was called roto scoping and used to capture outlines and movement of real objects for animation. The end result is still a hand drawn and shaded object instead of just a screenshot of a posed 3D model.

ah yes. now that you say it, i recall they did that for Terminator 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0xp74uIZO4

Why? It's much easier to draw a pixel sprite instead of creating a 3d model and then doing tricks to render it as 2d..

It's never a sprite though. Even back on the Super Nintendo game sprites had 9 angles * lots of actions * lots of frames for every animation. Multiply that by different lighting in modern games, and using the power of a 3D engine starts looking like an obvious choice. I know lots of games do this for environments. I assumed they did it for everything.

During the 80s the pixelized sprites were drawn to be as realistic as possible given the inherent limitations, but when you make a retro-game now, you probably want to target the de-facto aesthetic itself, and then my guess is you don't want to go too far in the realism direction. Clever use of few animation frames and angles conveys this better than blindly just rendering and scaling down using some optimal resolution reduction algo..

3D doesn’t transfer well to stylized 2D. That’s one of the primary reasons why people are still doing it manually. Pixel art also has a much lower barrier to create.

It's a very high barrier. Because you can't interpolate animation, or move bones around, or slap a different texture if you don't like something.

Every motion in every direction has to be animated. It's akin to creating animation by drawing every change on a separate sheet of paper, photographing it, and then stitching together.

The barrier of entry is indeed low. It doesn't take much to start sketching some pixel images. Making a coherent animated whole out if it? Very labor intensive and hard.

Only if you keep it really low resolution and low framerate. If you want something higher resolution, multiple camera angles or fluidly animated doing it in 2D quickly becomes impractical.

Guilty Gears for example started out with 2D sprites and then went 3D with Guilty Gears Xrd[1][2], but with a lot of trickery to keep it looking 2D'ish, though that always was more anime-style than pixel art.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUvSsOtPKA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E

Factorio's graphics are 3D rendered via a pipeline to 2D sprites, multiple angles for the character & vehicle models, but only one for buildings since the camera angle is fixed. I mean that's not really pixel art anymore (fairly high resolution), but still a 3d-to-2d pipe.

I think (but I am not sure) the sprites in Fallout I (1997) and Fallout II (1998) were created as re-touched 3D renderings.

(I am instead sure they revealed that the characters in video animation were re-touched recordings of created puppets.)

Many techniques may be part of the creative process and of the production.

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