The Animation of Guilty Gear Xrd & Dragon Ball FighterZ

Hello! My name is Dan, I'm an animator and this is New Frame Plus. Replicating the look of hand-drawn anime in 3D is a daunting challenge. Even the anime industry often struggles to produce computer-generated results that don't fall into some strange, uncanny valley of

animation

. It's VERY EASY to get a result that looks vaguely wrong, and most of the success stories of CG anime seem to be shows that are willing to embrace their distinctive 3D look. The same has largely happened with anime video games. Many game developers have attempted this same 3D anime challenge over the years, but almost all of the successful examples are games that aim to largely EVOKE the anime style without trying to trick anyone into thinking they're watching a series. of drawings.

But there is one game studio that has been surpassing this area more than any other, and that studio is Arc System Works. And, before I start talking about how they achieved this, I want to point out: a lot of what I'm going to say here comes directly from a GDC talk given by technical animator Junya C Motomura in 2015. You can (and should) check it out for yourself further late. I'll link it below. So Arc System Works, as a company, has been around in some form since the late '80s. They've worked on a lot of things, but the game genre they're most famous for is 2D fighting.

This studio is VERY VERY GOOD at creating beautiful, energetic, competitive anime fighting games. And the anime fighter that originally put them on the map back in 1998 was Guilty Gear. It was fast, elegant, beautiful. Now fast forward to the 2010s. Guilty Gear hadn't seen a proper sequel since 2002 and Arc System Works was looking to bring its pillar franchise back into the spotlight. But now that they had other high-profile anime fighters on the market, like BlazBlue and Persona 4 Arena, Guilty Gear's stylistic niche felt a little crowded. So instead of trying to compete with its own products, Arc System Works looked for a way to differentiate the upcoming Guilty Gear from the rest.

And the decision they ultimately made was that the next Guilty Gear title would abandon its traditional 2D sprite

animation

in favor of fully 3D character models. Now, why would they do that, you might ask? These elves are beautiful! Well, there are plenty of attractive incentives to switch a fighter to 3D. In addition to giving your game a more modern look, with 3D animation you can more easily support higher resolutions, you can make your animations more fluid without going over the artistic budget, and you can actually move the camera around the characters in dynamically whenever you want. a, which has all kinds of exciting potential.

It's for these reasons (and more) that many other fighting game franchises have made the jump to 3D over the years, and with varying degrees of success. But most of those franchises had made that leap understanding that doing so would require at least some degree of aesthetic change. Street Fighter, for example, went from looking like this... ...to looking like this. Marvel vs Capcom went from this… ...to this. And Mortal Kombat went from this... ...to this... ...and eventually to this. And each of these 3D revisions more or less captures the spirit of their sprite-animated originals, but those development teams had clearly accepted the fact that moving to 3D would inevitably require some aesthetic changes.

But Arc System Works launched the new Guilty Gear with a different mindset. What if they DON'T accept that aesthetic change? What if, instead, they set out to make the leap to 3D in the most INVISIBLE way possible while reaping many of the benefits that 3D has to offer? And so, Arc System Works set out to meet the challenge of building a 2.5D fighter with 3D character models while still retaining the look of the series' sprite-based origins. Which meant: they were going to have to figure out how to make 3D anime look good. Fortunately, ArcSys had great advantages in participating in this project.

First: they had a LOT of experience in 2D. Their teams had been producing 2D anime fighters for years. They were intimately familiar with the visual style they now needed to recreate. And second: his team had been using 3D tools as part of their pixel animation process for a long time! Every pixel art character in BlazBlue started life as a 3D model. To streamline their pixel animation workflow, each character was sculpted and posed in 3D first to lay the groundwork, and then the pixel artists would use that posed model as a reference, which not only sped up the entire animation process but It also ensured more style. coherence between all artists on the project.

So ArcSys had the experience and tools they needed to make this work. All that was left was to figure out the HOW. The first step was getting the fundamental look of an anime character, which they achieved through a combination of character model design, some really clever texture mapping techniques, and some awesome custom cell shaders designed to replicate the look of traditional shading. of anime characters. Most importantly, the application of this shading effect was highly customizable. The team's character artists could infinitely modify and refine how light and shadows fell on each character's unique features. What's more, each character has their own personalized and independent lighting.

See, in most forms of 3D animation, you often want to make it appear that your light sources affect all characters or objects in the environment in a similar way. It helps sell the fact that everything in the scene inhabits that same 3D space. But in Guilty Gear Xrd, each character has their own individual light sources that affect their body and NOTHING else in the scene. Later versions of the game would add the option for more dynamic scene-based lighting, but this original approach to the problem was really clever, because it mimics the way those classic 2D sprites would have originally been colored, with each character having their own shading. drawn by hand and without the possibility of changing that shading depending on the character's environment.

So now they had the characters looking right, but there was still the problem of getting them to look right in motion. And that's (arguably) an even bigger challenge, because the anime has a very different animation style. See, the anime's unique look is a byproduct of its production limitations. Animating any television series is a challenge, because you have to produce an entire season of television with a FRACTION of the budget that most animated films get. This is a huge problem, and the approach that television animation studios around the world have developed to solve it is: limited animation.

Limited animation is a technique (or actually, a huge collection of techniques) that television animation studios have been perfecting for decades. The goal of limited animation is maximum efficiency; to find as many cost-saving measures and cuts as possible while sacrificing as little visual fidelity as possible, all to get the most out of your limited money. That's why you so often see anime characters stick to a single drawing for as long as possible. It's about animating performance and stocks using as few drawings per second as possible, while also making sure you're doing enough drawings to adequately sell those stocks.

How many drawings can you get away with? And if you HAVE to create additional drawings to make something look good, can you redraw only specific parts of the character? Maybe just his mouth? Her eyes on him? Her hair or her clothes? Sure, you can make this action look great with 10 drawings, but can you make it look great using only 8 of them? How about 6? Great, we can only afford 3, so good luck! Limited animation is also seen all over Western television, and it's really fascinating to see how different sectors of this industry have found different approaches and solutions to the same problem.

But if you really want to truly mimic the look of anime, the key is to capture the feel of this limited animation style. And Guilty Gear's animators achieved this by discarding standard 3D technique and approaching their animation almost exactly as 2D animators do. Instead of creating a series of key poses for the computer to smoothly interpolate, the animators treated each pose as a still drawing, a series of hand-drawn 2D images. See, one of the inherent benefits of computer animation is the way the computer can fill in the spaces between your key poses. For example, if I place this

ball

on the screen and say "I want keyframes here, here, here and here", the computer can say "Oh, let me help you" and have the

ball

travel smoothly from one keyframe to another, which which can be really very useful!

But what the ArcSys team basically did was say, “NO. Stop it." "Just make the ball here... then here... and then here... then here." And we have animation terms for this, like "staggered keys" and "held keys" and What's Not , but the point is that by not allowing the computer to smoothly interpolate between their keyframes, the animators at Arc System Works made every pose they made behave like a 2D drawing would, and then they could choose exactly how long they wanted each " drawing."” to stay on the screen before the next one appears. Again, exactly the same as a traditional hand-drawn animation workflow!

And basically the same as your old sprite animation workflow too, if you You can even see examples of them holding body parts still, just like a 2D animator would do when they didn't want to have to redraw everything for the next frame, while still animating secondary parts of the character like hair or clothing. . It's completely different than how I would do it. Normally we would animate something in 3D, but it absolutely evokes the limited animation look of anime. But that, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg. Because, to complete the 2D anime look, the animators also had to add a generous helping of imperfection.

See, perfection is something that computers are EXCELLENT at. A computer can make every movement perfectly fluid, every body proportion perfectly consistent, every light source and every shadow perfectly correct. But hand-drawn animation, by its very nature, contains imperfections; subtle variations in expression and slight changes in body proportions from one frame to the next. So to maintain the illusion of something hand-drawn, the animators had to force the 2D imperfection BACK into the perfect computer system, adjusting each keyframe slightly to implement those flaws that make traditional animation look hand-drawn. They also had to stylize and exaggerate their animations in the same way that 2D animators would, warping character proportions and intentionally exaggerating perspective to give it emphasis or dynamic appeal.

This was made possible by the fact that each of these characters' animated skeletons contain many more animatable joints than the average 3D game character, sometimes over 500. And that's something you can do when you just have to render! two characters on the screen at once! Not only did this allow the animators to warp and shape these character models to implement that imperfection I mentioned earlier, but it also gave them freedom to warp the characters' proportions in extreme and strange ways when necessary. And if all those joins weren't enough to do what the animators needed, like if the character needed to transform into a completely different form, well, then they could just change another character model on the fly.

Then there is the effects animation. Not only did they accentuate all of these character animations with some gorgeous hit effects and speed lines (all of which are 2D animated textures), but, when necessary for certain effects like the dust clouds at a character's feet, They modeled those clouds in 3D frame by frame. And that's crazy. Basically, on everything, the Arc System Works team had an edict: "Kill everything 3D." If something felt 3D, you found a way to fix it. And, as I hope I've made clear at this point, the solution was, in most cases, quality tools and an extraordinary amount of brute force.

Sculpt the character model, shadows, poses, effects, and even LIGHTING if necessary, FRAME BY FRAME, until the entire game looked like a series of hand-drawn images. As with traditional animation, everything that appeared on screen had to be an artistic and intentional choice, not an automated computer solution. And the results? Well, a lot of people (myself included) didn't even immediately recognize that this was a 3D game when we first saw it. ByUsually, it wasn't until we saw the camera move for the first time that we stopped and said, “Wait a minute…. ...no way. “Has this been 3D THE WHOLE TIME?!” Guilty Gear And that was just his FIRST attempt!

For their next attempt, Arc System Works would face an even greater challenge. Because creating a convincing faux-2D anime aesthetic for your own original property is one thing, but emulating the look of an established and beloved anime series? That adds a new layer of challenge. This time, Arc System Works couldn't just recreate ONE anime look, they had to achieve Dragon Ball's unique aesthetic AND stay true to the animation of the characters their target audience had likely grown up with, AND on top of all that. - They actually needed it to look BETTER than those old anime series.

They had to replicate what a nostalgic DBZ fan sees in his head when he remembers his favorite moments from the show. And as someone who didn't grow up with Dragon Ball, I confess that I can't speak with authority on this topic, but - if the level of delight I've been hearing from Dragon Ball fans over the last year is any indication - I'm going to move on and I'll guess they did pretty well. And I really love seeing the subtle differences in approach and style between these two games. As for example, Dragon Ball FighterZ takes a different approach to blobs, relying more on those classic old-school speed lines rather than the solid, smooth, stretched shapes of Guilty Gear.

I love all the Dragon Ball-influenced poses of these characters, and I especially love that the animation in this game is slightly lower fidelity than the previous game to feel more faithful to the source material. It's in the way Dragon Ball fighters hold their poses for seconds at a time with just their mouths moving. The way they'll last a single frame longer than Guilty Gear Xrd's fighters. Or... okay, look at Sol Badguy's idle animation. His name is Sol Badguy, by the way. Guilty Gear is crazy. But yeah, look at his breathing. See that expansion in the chest?

The way he stretches the buckle on his clothes? That's a level of subtle motion fidelity that you won't see very often in a series like Dragon Ball, and you won't see it in Dragon Ball FighterZ either, because it just wouldn't look right. And the really exciting thing is that this whole approach that Arc System Works has developed is still relatively new and unexplored. I mean, they've only done this trick twice so far. But his third attempt is on the way. The upcoming GranBlue Fantasy Versus looks to bring another subtle variation to the anime aesthetic. And Arc System Works is also the publisher of the new Kill la Kill fighting game that was just released.

Of course, the actual development tasks for that one seem to have been handled by A+ Games, the same people who made that (also very nice) Little Witch Academia game, but I can't imagine there wasn't at least SOME knowledge sharing. happening between these two studies. If there's one thing the production of these games demonstrates (and it's something that Motomura himself has said), it's that achieving this look wasn't about developing some new, never-before-seen technology. It was simply a matter of applying the same technology we use for everything else toward a different visual goal and being willing to modify our production approach as necessary to achieve our aesthetic goals.

I can't wait to see what Arc System Works has in store for us next, and I really hope more studios try this kind of thing in the future. Again, definitely check out Junya C Motomura's talk if you're interested in learning more about how they achieved this. He goes into more technical details, like the nitty-gritty of his texture and cel-shading work. Everything is so cool. Also, many thanks to Geoff Thew of Mother's Basement for reviewing my script on this one. If you're curious to learn more about the history of anime games, he made a video cataloging just that.

I'll link it below. I hope you enjoyed this! Make sure you subscribe, ring the bell and all that if you haven't already, and consider supporting the show like all these absolute champions. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time for more New Frame Plus.