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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

The thing that really kinda bewildered me is when I learned that so many games like that: Final Fantasy 7, Baldur’s Gate, had full 3D scenes created and then rendered individual frames for backgrounds. I had thought it would have been easier to just draw and paint scenes instead.

Feels like so much work. You fully realize an entire scene and then capture a couple angles at most.

Of course I should have known better given the handful of times a scene comes to live via an FMV cutscene.

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There are a bunch of considerations. As resolution and color depth goes up it becomes harder to throw a lot of graphical detail on the screen through traditional illustration, so games that went down that route increasingly became flat and cartoonish, while 3D games could be filled with textures, lights and "greeble" architecture. It was also a way to enforce style consistency. Lucasarts didn't have "art direction" as a role until DOTT, and their earlier games show a lot of style drift between assets. Early 3D enforced a style through the constraints - often not a good one, but definitely something that could look consistent just through the model/texture/light process separation.

The biggest one is actually animation. Animation gets expensive as you add more detail, and when you add resolution, you discover a need to add more frames of animation to make it still look smooth, so your art costs can explode. The use of 3D here is motivated by having camera-independent animation, and being able to use it for every minor environmental effect: think of every Myst-style game where you pull levers and push buttons and open doors. Character animation in early 3D was bad, but it was also "enough" to look representative, so it ended up beating traditional or live action approaches.

The Banner Saga or Cuphead are examples of the amount of time and care it takes to do high resolution 2D artwork properly. Those games are absolutely breathtaking because of it, but their development cycles took a very long time for relatively short games because of it. You just can’t keep up with a 3D asset pipeline.

As I understand it, the prerendered backgrounds in these games were rendered as video clips. This was an efficient way to superimpose 3D on a 2D backdrop. But I imagine it may have affected how crisp the backgrounds could look.

Use of video clips for backgrounds was possible but rare. The opening of Final Fantasy VII is a good example, where it blends seamlessly from the opening FMV to control of the characters. You are correct that it affected the quality. You could easily see the video compression artifacts. The more common non-video backgrounds looked better.

The thing is, the characters need to be in the screen using the correct perspective. So making a simple 3d model, that’s basically only looked at from one or two perspectives that then allows to have a correctly rendered character, is perhaps less work than making an illustration and then creating a 3d mapping and occlusion model for the character.

In the game, many of the scenes do use illustrated backgrounds. For example towards the end of the game, the caves. Here the calculation may have been the other way round (easier to do illustration).

I think a lot of the small detail required for a close up 3D model can be omitted for large scenes viewed from a specific angle at a distance like that, so it maybe ends up being easier in the long run, especially when you start being able to reuse assets (which again, from a distance is easier to do without variation to still have it look good). Almost everything that would require complicating a simple shape for detail purposes could be done through a texture without almost no quality loss, and that's without bump mapping.

The important thing and this applies to movie VFX as well is that you’d don’t actually build the parts that can’t be seen.

Inadvertent githyanki genital exposure would present at least one contrary example.

The corollary is that if you already have the thing built you can kitbash with it to sometimes unfortunate results. It’s all about taking shortcuts.

Given the direction this was going, I was hesitant to look up "kitbash", expecting it to be a niche anime fetish.

Turns out it is quite innocent, but it's still adults having fun with models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitbashing

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