A History of Pseudo-3D Games – Using 2D Animation With 3D Gameplay (as of 2018)

In 2014, “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” was released, and was hailed as a revolutionary title for being the first successful case of utilizing 2D animation in a fully 3D game.

… well, not really. It’s been quickly overlooked. But years later, I took some time to look up the idea to see if any other games were using a similar visual concept. Over 7,000 games were released on Steam in 2017 alone, by now there are tens of thousands of indie games across Steam and itch.io to choose from: surely, not all of them are using sub-par 3D models or 2D pixel art?

I’m surprised I haven’t really written a more formal article like this before. It should act as a good resource of existing games (both past commercial and more recent indie titles) that tackle the animation concept. I won’t be including purely 2D games that use 2D animation: while there are several excellent examples (2017’s “Cuphead” and 2018’s “Gris” come to mind), high-quality animation in these genres have existed for over a decade now, with far too many to count. We’re looking at “pseudo-3D” here, from over 30 years of history.

Latest Screenshot for “Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament”

Continue reading

Nvidia RTX – Ray Tracing and its Relevance To “3D Cel Animation”

Ever since its reveal last month in August 2018, and likely for months following its release later in September 2018, the tech industry has been abuzz about Nvidia’s newest line of high-end graphics cards. Titled “RTX” instead of “GTX,” the “RTX” line is capable of better “ray tracing” performance than even specialized industry-level cards from only a year ago. But what is “ray tracing?” And more importantly, to answer the question everyone’s been talking about: how does the RTX line effect the viability of “3D Cel Animation?”

No one is asking about that? Oh… well, I’ll talk about what I understand ray tracing to be, anyway. Complete with hand-made diagrams of irregular quality.

How light works in the real world.

Continue reading

Cool Industry Developments for Real-Time 3D Rendering and Animation

By chance, I stumbled across two different new toolsets (one for Unity3D, one for Blender3D) that could really change the game for animators. One is a Unity3D package called “Scene Track: The Game Media Exporter” (made by E*D Films in Montreal), and the other is a in-development Blender feature called “Eevee.” I encourage you to click on the two links or Google the project names for videos and screenshots to understand what they are, but I’ll discuss them a little more in this blog post.

Continue reading

GDC Talks – The Latest in Game Development Animation

There are a handful of conferences that talk about the research and innovation behind the game industry. Unlike other professional subjects, there are virtually no published works like other subjects in Mathematics or Computer Science, but there are still talks and presentations to attend.

One of the biggest conferences is GDC (Game Developer’s Conference) in the USA. And I just discovered via friendly reddit commenters that they have a YouTube channel with many of their talks uploaded for free, including some very specific animation talks that I was excited to watch.

Continue reading