The authors of pixel Dead Cells used 3d pipeline to create 2d animation
Sometimes the lack of a budget and a lot of experience gives rise to brilliant ideas. The artist Dead Cells has figured out how to create animations for pixel games using 3d cheaply and quickly.
It all started with problems.
Thomas Vasseur (Thomas Vasseur) in the first year of development of Dead Cells was responsible for all the graphics alone. For the style, for the characters, for the backgrounds, for the animation and effects.
He also had no experience in drawing graphics by hand in such volumes. And in pixel art, the experience was quite small – two years.
Dead Cells
The development should not have been delayed.
And do the animation so that then changing one aspect or another does not lead to redrawing a large number of frames.
So Thomas came up with the idea to use 3d. He created a conditional character model and its skeleton in 3DS Max. Exported to FBX format. Then the magic began.
Basic three-dimensional model
The resulting mesh was visualized in a very low size without smoothing using a program developed specifically for this purpose.
The final result looked just like a pixel style.
It’s in low resolution
Then the animation was done by keyframes.
After that, each frame was saved in PNG. The normal map was also saved. The latter made it possible to visualize the final version using a cartoon shader.
Ready-made version in the game
But these are details.
The main thing: this approach allowed you to quickly make animations and, if edits were needed, make them quickly, and not redraw the entire sequence from scratch.
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