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[deathtotheweird]

hiring a competent 3D modeler/animator is on the average much more expensive than hiring a competent 2d animator/pixel-artist. this is a fact.

you can build a 2d game off free tools and suffer no consequences. building a 3d game from scratch is much more difficult, and using third party engines and tools like unity and 3dmax can be very expensive (especially if you wanna go commercial). getting a 3d game to look good in this day and age is a lot harder than getting a 2d game to look good.

don't turn this into some gayass discussion about 2d vs. 3d game development. Just know that I'm right and you're wrong, argument ends here. Want to make a new thread for it? Go for it, don't derail this thread further.

(fucking splits)

[gimymblert]

hiring a competent 3D modeler/animator is on the average much more expensive than hiring a competent 2d animator/pixel-artist. this is a fact.

you can build a 2d game off free tools and suffer no consequences. building a 3d game from scratch is much more difficult, and using third party engines and tools like unity and 3dmax can be very expensive (especially if you wanna go commercial). getting a 3d game to look good in this day and age is a lot harder than getting a 2d game to look good.

don't turn this into some gayass discussion about 2d vs. 3d game development. Just know that I'm right and you're wrong, argument ends here. Want to make a new thread for it? Go for it, don't derail this thread further.

Time to split this into a thread, I'm a thread splitter 
I do not agree based on experience, but there is nuance, Not every case fit a nice 3D is better, but generally for a lone poor dev, 3D yield higher result. I have also some reserve about the marian argument but ... SPLIT!

[deathtotheweird]

you don't agree on what?  you don't agree that 3D tools, in general, are more expensive than 2D tools?  or do you not agree that modelers/animators are harder to find and more expensive than their 2D counterparts?

go to polycount forums and compare the prices of artists with whatever sites you would go to in order to find a 2d artist. you will find that 3d modelers are much more expensive.

compare the price of Photoshop to the price of 3DSmax. $3500 vs. $700

the difficulty of creating 3d games vs 2d games is mostly subjective and not a topic that I am interested in discussing.

[moi]

software are more expensive, but if you have the software then it is a world easier to do 3D than 2D.
Also there are a lot of good free tools such as sculptris, for example.
When making a 2D game most of the time is spent fixing technical/engine problems. Most 3D engines take care of the bigger problems such as collision for example.
The only problem is that 3D game creators tend to get in the trap of realism and they end up making games that all look the same stylistically.

[gimymblert]

Blender is free and feature complete, complex operation like UV mapping is easier with too. Unity 3D is free and most pro function are unnecessary and optional, you can even emulate them in the free version if you are good enough.

Animation and modeling is relatively trivial in 3D and infinitely editable and blendable.

Learning 3D is surprisingly easy once you get the basic, and generally you can have decent result with just "tracing" a model sheet. It's modular and part are infinitely reusable. A lot of thing come for free compare to 2D effect (rotation, shadow, shader) and is generally only a few doc/google away.

If you keep generic gameplay you have better result faster in 3D (no fancy cam, no fancy control, no tricky stuff).

Marian did a lot of tricky stuff, so I did with my sonic clone, but it was less inherent to 3D than poor choice. Notice marian's gameplay also change from 3D to 2D and the 3D was really a curved 2D (acting in two spatial reference is tricky) with retro fitting of 3D physics (even more tricky), also realistic shadowed (if fantastical) 3D model with muddy look was poor to do. Myself I was doing arbitrary platforming (arbitrary gravity and surface) who happen to be just mathematically difficult.

Now some context favor 2D, not having animation, not having to change artwork midway, tiling style, etc... a lot of tradition made 2D quirks more acceptable (pixel art, tile, etc...) which in 3D are style suspect near AAA style (3D tile is considered poor until minecraft made it a style).

In the end it's all down to knowing how to create a style that fit the constrain.


Here is my first character in 3D ever, I didn't use a sheet (proportion is off) but was following a video tut with a different model. After that tut I never use a tut again and was free to do whatever I want in blender for games. Notice the texture is just a crude paint over as the shadow (baked ambiant occlusion mixed in gimp) get all the work done and yet it feel a bit painterly (no dark shadow trick).

Being alone (and not having to hire someone) 2D is way too expensive.

[ANtY]

Here is my first character in 3D ever, I didn't use a sheet (proportion is off) but was following a video tut with a different model. After that tut I never use a tut again and was free to do whatever I want in blender for games. Notice the texture is just a crude paint over as the shadow (baked ambiant occlusion mixed in gimp) get all the work done and yet it feel a bit painterly (no dark shadow trick).

Woah, that's impressive, I had some approaches to 3d but never got it.
Also I like 2D much more than 3d.

[moi]

having good (expensive) software makes a difference though.
There's no comparison between the characters you can do with zbrush and the characters you can do with blender

[DavidCaruso]

I don't think that it can really be argued that making a great 3D game (which actually utilizes the third dimension to its fullest extent, no 2.5D stuff) is far harder than making a great 2D game, just due to there being a lot more to think about. If all you want to talk about is art assets, I can't really say much since most of my basic experience is in 2D but from what people have told me in the past it just seems that 3D art has a higher entry barrier, and once you get past that the learning curve is a bit less steep than 2D art from there.

[gimymblert]

you don't know a lot about 3D modeling apparently However zbrush is use for modeling, it is used for creating uber hipoly to be backed into low poly.

Usually the workflow work like this:
- make a low poly game ready mesh in whatever 3D package
- import it in Zbrush to add details (no texture at all)
- Import back the hipoly for baking the low poly (or maybe it can be done in zbrush too not sure)
- You can retopo a hipoly on regular 3D package in case of you had model thing in zbrush.

Z brush is more part ogf a chain than a complete package.

However, blender does have a hipoly sculpt thingy to do the same, and sculptris is a nice counter part to z brush (not as feature complete)



This is blender obviously.

@david caruso

It's mostly a perception issue, people have less qualm doing blocky thing in 2D than in 3D.
Also that's true that people are more comfortable with small skill in 2D than in 3D, because it's more "immediate". Nobody have to seek tut for a stick figure. But in the long run, 3D outsell 2D in low skill context.



Replace procedural by 3D and handcraft with 2D

[deathtotheweird]

Also there are a lot of good free tools such as sculptris, for example.

Sculptris is not a good free tool for 3d game development. It's a good free tool for rough draft, first pass modeling, but I can't imagine any serious 3D artist using it in their workflow/pipeline, it just lacks so many features.

And Gimmy, to do 3D art on par with what players expect today is a lot more difficult to do than a high quality 2D game that players expect today. You need not only mechanical skill, and the knowledge of a particular piece of software but you also need to be an artist. In comparison to 3DSmax or Blender, Photoshop/GIMP/etc are miles ahead in terms of easy of use. When drawing 2D art to be used in a game, all you really have to do is draw it and click export as png.

OK there's really more steps to it than that, but the steps to modeling something and rigging it to be ready for a game as enormous. You have to model it, bake high quality normal maps, then make a low poly version, then retopologize it. then you have to animate it, but before you do that you have to rig it. not to mention uv-mapping and texturing. It's just a lot of work in comparison. And you have to do that for nearly EVERY THING IN THE GAME. With 2D art you draw it, export it.

[gimymblert]

Yep but 2D scale linearly, you have to draw every direction and draw each frame and then in case of modification you need to toss everything and start anew.

3D? reuse, recycle, re purpose. All character can share the same base topology and the same base animation, you can code variation so if you are not an artist you can generate diversity. You can swap part to create modular character, and you can leave a lot to some code instead of doing it yourself (feet planting, auto gaze, lipsync). 3D plateau very fast. There is a reason "character generator" are becoming a trend in modern open world game.

Hi quality 2D is very expensive if you have to redo things and is higly tied to context, a new anim is new artwork completely. And it work in only one direction, you want a new one OUPS! x2 of work! and you want to combine animation? x10 of work! Also the same human resource have to do the animation and the visual, so it's x baby in nine month.

In 3D you can work animation and visual almost independently and batch animation on multiple character. In 3D it is just a matter to animate the skeleton, no need to add new artwork. SO in the end 2D is more expensive. You don't see much AAA 2D game anymore in 2D (and even them are cheating like murasama and it's not even AAA). I export 3D as easily as 2D (export to fbx, ready to use in Unity, done).

Good job finding great 2D animator.

But of course it's NOT all black and white, we can caricature both camp

[Falmil]

All those points are why I like the idea of 3D more than 2D, though I have never done either and I am sure they would both kick my ass.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

the way i think of it is: 3d is harder to make the basic "model" for, but animating 3d is easier, because you don't need to redraw it for every single frame of animation the way you do with 2d. so animation in 3d is cheaper (in terms of time expenditure) than animation in 2d, but creating the initial model is harder in 3d than creating a single frame of a single sprite in 2d

i like games that mix the two. xenogears, final fantasy tactics, ff7, and so on

[ink.inc]

Hmm, I hadn't thought of it like that, Timmy.

Thanks.

[deathtotheweird]

I export 3D as easily as 2D (export to fbx, ready to use in Unity, done).

yeah, but that only works with some things. like very basic low poly objects. but if you are making a high quality game, you can't do that. or those models would take up wayy too many draw calls-resulting in terrible performance. so you have to bake the normal maps from the high poly model, and then lower the poly-count without making the model look like shit. then you still have to uv-map and texture it. which still can be a pain in the ass. so you're doing 2d and 3d work at the same time essentially.

I don't think either of them are inherently more difficult, it's all subjective in the end. But what I am saying is that the learning curve of the tools is obviously higher when making 3D art.

Photoshop is relatively simple and painless to use. Anyone can pick it up in a few hours or days at the most. But to fully learn how to model, to having it ready in-game, it requires extensive use of each software involved in the pipeline. It takes days and weeks (even months..!) to fully learn how to use some of these programs.

Photoshop? Run the program and you can start drawing almost immediately. 3DS max? Read the manual, read some tutorials, spend a few days on it and you'll be lucky to have a decent model at the end of the process. Then you have to learn all the other steps just to have it ready to be used in-game.

[_Tommo_]

Programming side, if you go with freeware tech, 3D is hell of a lot more difficult than 2D, and that's a fact.
There is a load of excellent and complete 2D free game frameworks, while for 3D there's only Unity non-Pro (and I don't know if it has royalties too).
If you go with custom tech, 3D asks you to know a lot more than splatting an image over a background, often you end writing shaders, animation systems, particle systems and whatever; also, editing game worlds requires powerful tools that often with 2D games aren't even useful... a 2D engine is an excercise, a 3D one is a beast.

And with 3D performances are king! ok, this is maybe moot on PC, but just go making a 3D game on iPhone or Android without being really experienced and see if you can achieve the next angry birds  

[Dragonmaw]

A good 3D artist has to be both a good 2D and a good 3D artist.

A good 2D artist has to be only a good 2D artist.

If you are going strictly off of skillsets required, 3D has more requirements. Modeling, animation, texturing, and rudimentary coding are all necessary for a 3D artist. Conversely, a 2D artist needs only worry about animation and texturing.

Difficulty is variable depending on each person's personality.

@Paul: You neglect that 2D doesn't have to have constant redrawing either. Tweening and flash-based animation is becoming far more common.

[gimymblert]

@allen

You have to learn everything, I'm an artist, I Have huge pain with programming right now, rolling the tut and all. A programmer still have to go through tut for decent 2D art. Of course as an artist I don't consider rolling a tech being part of the equation, and unity is not alone, there is rendering free tech and UDK, even blitz3D can have something.

The problem  is that you pick extreme case and say it's the basic case. 3D is still easier even if you bake it into 2D image afterward. Once I avoid learning 3D to do a simple dating sims, I regret as in the end 3D was faster to render in 2D. 3D is not just realtime, you can also trace over dummy (done in steampunk's otomo animation). Low poly can be pretty and you don't need hipoly to have detail normal map, you can draw them manually in a hi rez grayscale.

Easier in a production way of seeing thing, it's more flexible. Basing prod on 2D is prone to dependency I don't want to run in the future. So I have invest in 3D for better result.

Of ourse You can hire anyone and leave it to him.


However My goal is to raise some awareness on how to think about 3D in a prod, one size does not fit all, and clever planning trumps everything. Not all project NEED hi poly baking shit, heavy and complex texturing, uber realistic shader and shadow, i mean look at wind waker! even sonic colors have relatively basic texture use in more than great modular composition. And a creative mind, even low skill can still use primitive and end up with some awesome looking game (think 2D mario style).

At the end it's all about how your taste dictate the look and production cost. There is a sweet spot.

@dragonmaw, production was what is in my mind. Case in point Sophie Houlden.

[gimymblert]

To illustrate what I meant:


Well somewhat
/lol

[deathtotheweird]

no, not all games need high poly models to look great. and no you don't have to go the extreme work I detailed. but even creating a bare minimum model is 10x more difficult than opening up photoshop and creating a bare minimum line drawing. I don't see how anyone could disagree with this.