CES 2015 happened last week. Beautiful tvs, new laptops and tablets, a lot of car-tech… but I’m going to talk about an innovation from about a month ago that’s more up my alley.
Most of the posts on this blog makes it clear that I like 2D animation. My first game (which got Greenlit on Steam recently, I’ll talk about that more in a few weeks) is one of the first truly 3D games that has a hand-drawn character. I did this because I am annoyed that no one has really done that before. However, “Live2D” is a company that has been trying hard to make it easier for developers to do that, and so their latest effort, “Live2D Euclid,” comes closer than ever. Their website is available here: http://www.live2d.com/en/ , and a video of their latest technology can be seen here:
It appears their “Live 2D Euclid” system can work on many different 3d engines, including Unity3D. It also appears that the system uses layering of 2D images and transitions as the camera moves to create the 3D effect. So… basically it’s very much like what I’ve already done. If you look for it, you can find my examples as far back as Spring 2013.
Live2D Euclid and Dust Scratch Games… pretty similar, eh?
I’m not saying I’m mad. On the contrary, I’m mad that I haven’t seen any developers using Live2D Euclid yet to make prominent games that feel hand-drawn! It is possible, people! I want more developers to use it, more companies to start making their own solutions for it! This is exactly the sort of thing I hoped would come out of my work (whether or not I actually had anything to do with it), but people need to USE it! So I thank Live2D and hope they keep going, I might find a use for them myself one day!
Also note that Live2D is making complete user-friendly solutions, where I’m only using methods and trying to describe to others how they would go about it. Also, Live2D has been doing this for a while, it’s only with Euclid that they came to finally have a true-3D application, where previous versions were limited. Notice that they’ve only focused the application on the face for the 2D aspects, and that they’ve separated individual parts of the face, which would be a bit more complicated to separate and create, but also allows for flexibility in what you are drawing. There are a number of reasons to why they would focus on the face only, including hardware limits and the fact that it may not look quite right if everything used the system (until a demo is shown that creates the entire body this way, I’m skeptical). In the meantime, I’m trying my own solution to fix exactly that, with some success. Speaking of which, I have a paper I want to submit on the topic, which is due in a few days… I better get working on that.
Anyway, have you used Live2D? Have you seen anything else that uses Live2D? What did you think? Have you used other solutions for this type of problem? Please let me know!
