What method does Clash Of Clans use for animations?

My next game is going to be sort of Clash Of Clans 'ish. (nothing like it but similar graphics style), but zoom in as far as you like and I can't tell how they animate their little characters. Too many on screen to be 3d I would have thought, so is it sprite sheets, generated from rendered 3d models? Same with the scenery, is it just 2d isometric tiles?

 

That's just 2d isometric. All chars are rendered and sprite sheets. You can easily see that as they don't turn and move continuously like 3d models would.

 

Thanks, I did think so, but it was the detail when zooming in that made me think twice.

 

Is it possible they swap rendering, like Levels of Detail? If done cleverly, the player would never know. The graphics I've yet to grok are the 2D animations that look like Flash animations, except running in Unity (like Tap Titans). I love that style!

Gigi

 

Vector animation. Back when I was still keen on presentation I bought Anime Studio:

You may also want to check out SmoothMoves on the asset store.

Try the game Rise of the Dough to see if this is what you are after.

 

I must admit I've been vary wary of using Smoothmoves, there is no indication of speed in the docs, One of my games used skinned meshes as the characters and I was severely limited in the number I could have on screen without limiting the frame rate. I need COC style characters in the hundreds on screen. Ideally I'd like them 3d so all my particle effects can be used. I think I'll spend some time figuring out some way of cheating with 3d characters. I suppose I could make them all cubes with faces on them

 

I just thought @Gigiwoo might find it useful if he wants to make that ultra smooth vector style of animation. I should say I have not used SmoothMoves but the demo in the web player has no performance issues on my 6 year old laptop even in the later difficulty (after grabbing the meat cleaver) when there are many pizzas attacking. Granted it is still quite simplistic overall.

I got Anime Studio just to make it easier to do 2D animation rendering out the frames as png files. It is a useful software product for animation. It can make those silky smooth animations but I was only after a 6 to 12 frame cycle which I think is plenty.

 

Thanks for the suggestions! Smoothmoves, in particular, looks excellent.
Gigi