Styleized Sprites (Adventure Quest Style)

Hello everyone, I'm mainly a 3D developer and have been wanting to try out unity's 2D applications. I always use my own assets so I'm interested in learning about the creation and different styles of 2D sprites. One style that I have always loved is based off of the Adventure Quest game series. They seem almost like cartoon characters instead of traditional sprites and I would like to know if there is an official name for this style. As well as when using this style do they create the body parts in layers and just use rotation to animate the sprite or do they draw out the sprite frame by frame like traditional cartoons?

 

kind of like anime, but a bit different. lol

 

I had to take a quick look on YouTube
and it looks like Adventure Quest was med in Flash with vector graphics. So they are not sprites but that doesn't matter, same results can be achieved with many different systems and techniques. Honestly, the quality isn't impressive...

Quick explenation: vector art is made up of vectors and points combined with color information compared to sprites that are made up of lots of (blended) dots that carry color information. Flash got a built-in animation system which they probably used. The body parts were animated separately with parent-child connections and the animator wasn't very skilled.

The art style is often referred to, as westernized Anime/Manga. It is a bit negatively branded because it is like a poor adaption of the Asian techniques. If you want to dig into its roots, head into the Anime/Manga/Korean Manga swamp (personally enjoy that stuff because they got intelligent stories intended for grownups). You will soon notice that these genres actually are made up of a plethora of different art styles. You got the basic triangular faces with big eyes to really realistic styles.

Hm... we got old-school anime stuff like Escaflowne and Record of Lodoss War but there is probably more modern stuff out there where you can see the similarities much better. In the meantime, below is some quick examples of different other methods to produce HQ 2D stuff. There is also games out there, I've seen some asian RPG's that does a wonderful work with achieving stuff that looks like animated cartoons but do not know their names... YouTube can probably research this on your own. The overall goal in the industry is to produce 3D content that looks like 2D and have the animation flow and feeling of Disney movies. The reason behind this is because it is faster to produce large quantities of content with 3D that are animated.

Guilty Gear Xrd

This game uses 3D models that got normal maps that were manipulated in a very specific way together with advanced shaders and fancy camera work.

Skull Girls

This game uses traditional sprites and animation techniques to achieve everything.

Naruto: Rise of a Ninja

 

The animation style of using body parts is sometimes called Paper Puppet animation.
There are some tools available for this, like Spline and Spriter.

 

Thank you so much for the replies, I went ahead and tried to replicate the 2.5D style models and textures and slapped the unity toon shader on, I uploaded a video to my youtube with the demo. I think I'll continue to go deeper into the style and see about custom toon shaders and what not. I really enjoy the look so far. Here is the link to the video if anyone wants to take a look

 

Very Interesting.

 

Looks like you are on to something there.
2 Thumbs up!

 

Not shabby for something that you slapped together

There is also Street Fighter 5, I personally find it interesting because they blend 2D into 3D and try to make it work together even though you can see what is what.

You probably want to start reading the thread "Convincing 3d that looks like 2d.... Wow" at Polycount.
It got lots of interesting information on this whole topic with picture examples etc. Notice the trick they use to get shadows to move across the face like on a real, cartoon character? Make a HQ character like normal, then a LQ model but make the normal map from the LQ and apply it to the HQ and shadows will move over the character like they do in cartoons (unrealistic).

Something that is often forgotten when people try to make 3D characters look like they are 2D is that the black lines on the character often change sizes and bend in different ways. This is a topic best studied from traditional cartoon art to better understand when to make it thinner and how to pick between a round or hard edged corner etc.

Have fun

 

Wow that is some beautiful artwork that they have done for SF5. I'm going to take a look at the polycount link. As well as trying the normal baking from a low quality model to high quality, I never thought of that before. Let's see what we can muster up here