Your project looks very promising.
Good luck!

These renders will need a lot of cleaning to look like passable KOFXII sprites.

From the top of my head you're dealing with too many stray pixels due to topology issues, your shadows aren't ray-traced (a massively important part of the XII look), and the shadows/ineffectual palette make your colours bleed into palette entries of the wrong shades.

I can't help you much in regards to topology versus stylized end-products, so you have to find the closest 3D match to whatever 2D style you'd like to reduce the amount of editing you have to do.

To help with the last two entries maybe switch to ray-traced shadows and/or make the palette you use to catch your colours three-fold.  The first pass is a larger palette that ensures no colour bleeding happens, second pass is running that through a program with the reduced colours placed properly in an identically sized palette to sort things, then third is loading those sprites through the final palette.  Do your edits after the final pass.

Actually, the main thing is that you're letting the 3D software pick out the midtones.

If you look at SNK's 3D models, you'll see they're flat shaded with really hard outlines. There's only one color for lit areas and only one color for areas in shadow. See below:



The midtones as well as the adjustment to the outlines are all done manually by an artist. You're going to have a hard time matching that automatically because the software will go for realism and what you really want is to go for aesthetics, which is tough to teach the software to do.

I like your model, but I would probably give him even a bit MORE muscle. He's a boxer after all, so his arms and torso should be bigger than those of Ryo (perhaps something in between Ryo and Ralf?). Another thing you need to work on is your posing. The movements are stiff and a bit robotic. You have to consider things like windup, follow-through, inertia, etc...

I promise this is all constructive stuff. Your work is very promising!

We're both right on this, to be fair.  SNK did go 2-tone, yes, but we have more control over midtones now since those games were made.

If you're rendering midtones you have either a lot more (or a lot less) editing based on how you went about setting up your material/smoothing groups to force the renderer to draw lines for certain details.  That and change your lights to render ray-traced shadows to lose the blurry drop shadow edges.

There's no true shortcut for any of this if you're going to be dropping big names like KOFXII as your inspiration, sadly.

Anderson Masters said, October 26, 2017, 12:31:40 am

I understand your point, and i've use it on some tests, but i'm searching for a configuration like guilty gear xrd now

Make up your mind, first it was Blazblue, then KOFXIII and now Guilty Gear Xrd; which is it? They're all completely different from each other in terms of shading and proportions.

If you're working in Blender you can't do something they did in a totally different engine.  The two environments aren't alike at all.  The method you're using now requires that you pick a style, get it as close to the source of said style as possible (if not completely original), and do something.

Feet still moving around too much.  Remember IK when animating as it can force your feet to remain stationary during animation.  Maybe research animation in general.

She's raising her knee a bit too much. Also, when we walk, we usually raise our heel first, then as we move our leg forward, we lower our heel and raise our toes, then step down heel first, then toes right after.

In your version, her feet are mostly flat throughout the entire motion and the left leg seems to be stepping down toes first.

I know it seems like nitpicking, but all those things are things that even if you don't notice directly, they leave you with this sense of "I can't put my finger on it, but something doesn't seem right".

i think you're focusing too much on the "kof conversion" process gimmick and not enough on actually animating fluidly. the actual devs didnt start off with the shading, they started with animating the models well with rough shading and then they clean up and then add it in afterwards.

focusing more on the other things than actually animating well enough will only slow you down and hinder your progress much more down the road

You're getting the inertia of the skirt wrong. As the body moves forward, the skirt will try to remain in its original position. This means that the skirt should be moving backwards in relation to the body, not forwards. (maybe once gravity kicks in and the skirt catches up with the rest of the body, it can overshoot and flap forward a bit).

Right now it looks like there's a puff of air coming out of her you-know-what (sorry for being crude).

I would also recommend giving her at list a tiny bit of windup before throwing her punch. It lacks impact otherwise. She should raise her hand slightly in front of her face and THEN throw her punch. Otherwise it looks like she's pushing something, not punching something. If you don't want to give it windup, at least have her twist her body a bit as well as twist her punching arm.

it would be cool if you look at bi bang beat Burai yamamoto, rick strowd, Franco bash, little mac, balrog, tj combo, Vanessa, Heavy D, Dudley as references for certain animations
to get that boxer feel for the characters

interesting project

Right now it doesn't look like the punch has enough momentum behind it to make her spin.  Make the wind-up to the actual punch more exaggerated.  Some other minor/major issues include odd foot placement in every animation, her hair moving backwards in her walking back animation, and so on.

Skirt animation starting to look better.

Anderson Masters said, December 17, 2017, 06:36:20 pm

Make her torso lean back, not forward. She's moving backwards so her weight should be backwards too.

Anderson Masters said, December 17, 2017, 06:36:20 pm

There's not enough wind up and her feet are all over the place. The alignment for that animation is going to be a nightmare. (Helios beat me to it)

Here's the same sprite without the feet movement:

The rolling punch still has like, zero momentum behind it.  There just isn't enough wind-up to cause her to spin around like that.  Seems it may also benefit from a frame or two at the end to make the transition back to her standing state smoother.  So I guess some modification on both ends of the animation would help.

There are a couple of odd things about her walking animation too, but the most notable is her stiff front-facing ankle.  Look up some walk cycles online or even in fighting games (JJBA/VSAV/SF3 are fantastic references for all things walking related) to get a better flow going.

Your sprites are looking better and better.

The skirt in that jab moves in a unnatural way. It would not blow forward at all; it would blow back and them come back to a resting position.

Keep up the good work!

I was pretty skeptical at first regarding how much progress you could make with nothing but shaders, and I have to admit I'm pretty impressed with the results.

I still think you have a lot of work ahead of you when it comes to the initial render. The shading is impressive, but it's being used on models that don't really match the art style and proportions used by SNK. Your animations are also still kind of wonky-looking and robotic. Still, it's definitely impressive how much farther ahead you end up by following this method rather than drawing from scratch on a flat shaded render.