I forgot to mention it here, but I posted a video tutorial some weeks ago about how exactly I make 2D animation in 3D games, such as in “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth.”
I didn’t think this tutorial was necessary, but some people have asked for one, so I planned to make one for some time now. Sorry it took so long.
Also, I apologize for my quiet and stammering voice, I never was a good public speaker.
I’m happy to announce that “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth,” my hand-drawn 3D puzzle platformer, is just about complete.
And you didn’t think I could do it! Well… ok, I didn’t think I could do it. I said months ago that this would be finished in August 2014. I hoped to get it done a few weeks ago, but even now, it looks likely to get released just before September.
Here’s our official announcement for our newest game: “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth,” currently in development!
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Recently, “Titanfall” released. The poster child for Xbox One (despite still not really making use of that mandatory Kinect camera, and being multiplayer only), it’s certain to sell a few million this month. It’s also being released on Xbox 360 and PC, and according to recent articles, it requires about 48 GB of hard drive space to install on PC.
Similarly, Watch Dogs, Ubisoft’s newest action adventure franchise, is said to look fantastic on PC (with high settings), but requires a minimum of 6 GB of RAM, 25 GB of hard drive space, and a quad core processor to run.
These are large requirements. What happened to being able to run PC games with only 2 GB of RAM, on a Intel dual-core? Why do you need so much hard drive space, when most games used to require so much less?
Times are a ‘changing, folks. All thanks to next-gen.
I’m surprised I didn’t see this research before, but I’m glad I have now, and wanted to quickly tell you about it.
Hand-drawn (traditional) animation and 3D (computer) animation have been separate forms for a long time. The over-abundance of computer animation has caused some people to mutter, but computer animation is easier and more effective in many ways, so some animators have tried to merge the benefits of both mediums. Oscar-winning Disney short “Paperman” is one such example of how such a style might work (still not able to replace hand-drawn in my opinion, but it comes very close and captures the general heart and soul very well).
But on this webpage, you can find a research paper by Eakta Jain (and Yaser Sheikh, Moshe Mahler, Jessica Hodgins) at Carnegie Mellon titled “Three-dimensional Proxies for Hand-Drawn Characters,” just one of several efforts made by Jain to somehow use traditional animation with modern technology. The included video shows the potential of combining 3D computer models for physics (with environments and cloth effects) with hand-drawn characters. It looks great, and was partially funded by Autodesk (creators of 3D software “Maya”) and Disney Research. Love or hate Disney, their research division really does catch on to some fantastic work.
Of course, it appears additional technical input is required on the artist’s part to make the two artworks mesh together properly, and I assume this is all pre-rendered and may have little to do with the potential in games or real time tech demos, but it looks good nonetheless.
The website I’m talking about is here: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/threeDproxy/ . Give it a look, it might inspire you.
