/vr/ - Retro Games

4) Designing a sprite from a 3D model
In the mid-90s, numerous developers were caught short by the success of Virtua Fighter and the advent of 3D. Some missed the bandwagon while others took unusual paths. SNK practiced multi-track drifting, using 3D in a traditional way with the games produced for the Hyper Neo-Geo 64 and in an uncommon way with Art of Fighting 3, a 2D fighting game with a somewhat difficult gestation, as Nobuyuki Kuroki recently recounted: “For Art of Fighting 3 the plan was to use both motion capture tech and 2D animation style graphics. Some of the staff went to the US and worked on motion capture for about a month. We obviously needed to put other key parts of development on hold until we received the motion data. Most of them could not be rendered directly from the motion captured data and the designers ended up with a lot more work than they expected.”
Naoto Abe added that SNK didn’t have the necessary equipment for motion capture in Osaka, hence this one-to-two month trip to the USA.
This experience didn’t discourage SNK to use 3D models for another 2D fighting game -The King of Fighters XII- more than a decade later (2009), although there were differences in the creation process. As detailed on the official website of the game, the graphic designers started by creating sprites, then shaped 3D models based on each of these sprites. They animated these models and traced some frames with pixels, resulting in a total of 400-600 2D frames per character.