next »

[gimymblert]

Yep I don't disagree either, it's more about on the long run, 3D cost you less, even with learning the rope first. 2D is currently a big bottleneck for me. SO much I will do my texture in 3D shape too, render them and apply them back on a mesh.

[1982]

About the pricing, there is two things that affect it. Generally AAA gaming industry does stuff in high quality 3D, and that increases the costs because it requires great deal of time, learning and skills from an artist to be up to those standards. Also it requires three major skillsets; modelling, animation and texturing. Scripting skills don't do any harm either. Other thing is the software which is very expensive. Show me a AAA studio that uses Blender? While its good, it is no standard. If you want to be a pro, and possibly get some work in your area, you need to study the professional software. You also want to buy those software if you need to do commercial stuff as a freelancer. And price of your work goes up again. Sure you can choose to make stuff with Blender, but then you will be freelancer for rest of your life.

How about the 2D? Well in general 2D is somewhat considered to be less demanding so that is one thing that pushes down the prices. Go ask a game studios about this. One thing is that those are mostly indie games that use 2D graphics, and indie scene doesn't have that much money lying around. Also 2D-artists are happy to see lesser money that what they deserve, for some reason... Yeah and there is no big additional costs from software licensing so they cannot be used as adding up the costs.

Difficulty? It is never difficult for an artist who does what he likes to do. All I know that doing stuff you dont like to do is difficult. Price is not coming from the level of difficulty, it is coming from supply and demand. Demand for super-level 3D art is much more greater than for 2D. Mobile gaming boom might change the balance thou.

Then there is one more thing. 3D artists are considered to be more like technicians than artists. It is because 3D art is expected to be more or less reflection of our real world. Then you have to think about mechanics of reality and it starts to go into technical side of things. You are also paid for general knowledge of the world, architecture, construction, physics, biology, photometry... There is so much going on in AAA 3D art that you might not see at first glance. 2D is however mostly about artist impression. You deal a lot with abstractions and original styles, and so on. 2D is more about art, 3D is more about technics. And cold fact of this world is that unless you are Lady Gaga, technicians get paid more.

Sure there are artistic 3D, and technical 2D, but those are side notes.

[gimymblert]

Some clarification.



We should make a difference between cost per asset and cost within a production. 3D have higher cost per asset but lower cost "per production". Basically the ROI is much higher.

The skill ceiling to make things useful (for you) plateau quickly past the initial bump (no need for hand eye coordination, just keep a good eye) unlike 2D, the use of ref also give you quicker result than in 2D (most textures are generally derived, if not left untouch, from source).

Also Character modeling as in AAA is the highest difficulty but it is not all "3D need", most friends who are level env are shitty drawer.




Of course I'm not talking about breaking into the industry.




Edit

The best now is to make a table of adventage of when to use 3D vs 2D, hack, slash loot for exeemple benefit from 2D (low number of asset, no visual complexity per asset), Artistically I'm not sure owl boy whould benefit (it's the 16 bit feel), FEZ is obviously 3D and mix it up with pixel art.

My advice is more inline of the vector art tut for programmer. DO NOT FEAR 3D as is.



edit2

3D is good for programmer too because analytic thought yield more greater result irrespective of skills. But more than everything, what programmer really need is a style guide to mix up thing

[ANtY]

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.

And you could immediately start modeling and the result would be at the same level as starting to draw immediately without drawing anything before.

Also dynamic lightning in 3d works much faster.

[rivon]

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.

And you could immediately start modeling and the result would be at the same level as starting to draw immediately without drawing anything before.

He was talking about something different. With 2D you just open the editor, pick the brush tool or something and just draw a figure. Anyone can do that. With 3D, you open the editor and you're fucked because you don't know what the tools do and how to use them. Maybe after a bit of fiddling you would get to spawn a few cubes and move them so that you create a kind of minecraft character composed of cubes. If you want to create anything better, you have to look at the manual or tutorial or something.

Edit: and then, you still don't know how to rig the model or how to texture it. Manual again...

[tapir]

On a side note, If you're trying to imitate 3D (isometric 2d games) in 2D, it's harder than doing it in 3D.

[bart_the_13th]

Since it's talking about the difficulty, yes 3D is more difficult than 2D, in fact, 3D has more D than 2D
Creating 2D assets is just simply(no offense) drawing them, it's like WYSIWYG thing, you draw a sprite(f.e), then another draw one then another one to create sprite sheet.

In 3D, more efforts and more thinking is required. Just creating the model could take more effort, you have to spin the model around after every couple of changes just to make sure it looks right. Then comes the rigging part, the skinning part and animating part.

So to make it simple rough estimation:
Efforts in 2D: Drawing
Efforts in 3D: Modelling, Skinning, Texturing, Rigging, Animating.

So you can expect to pay 5 times for 3d assets than 2d assets, but that just a rough estimation

He was talking about something different. With 2D you just open the editor, pick the brush tool or something and just draw a figure. Anyone can do that. With 3D, you open the editor and you're fucked because you don't know what the tools do and how to use them. Maybe after a bit of fiddling you would get to spawn a few cubes and move them so that you create a kind of minecraft character composed of cubes. If you want to create anything better, you have to look at the manual or tutorial or something.

Edit: and then, you still don't know how to rig the model or how to texture it. Manual again...

Geezz... You remind me my first try using Quake2Modeler

[1982]

Since it's talking about the difficulty, yes 3D is more difficult than 2D, in fact, 3D has more D than 2D
Creating 2D assets is just simply(no offense) drawing them, it's like WYSIWYG thing, you draw a sprite(f.e), then another draw one then another one to create sprite sheet.

True this. Also, 2D is more about repetitive tedious work than 3D. If you do animation in 2D, you actually draw the basic figure only once, all the succeeding frames are repetition of the first with some variance. That is the most hard part of 2D art, trying to keep the work interesting.

[Μarkham]

So to make it simple rough estimation:
Efforts in 2D: Drawing
Efforts in 3D: Modelling, Skinning, Texturing, Rigging, Animating.

That list can be expanded a bit.
2D: drawing, key-framing, inbetweening, cleanup, coloring
3D: modelling, skinning, texturing, bump/displacement/vector mapping, rigging, weight mapping, dynamics (cloth, hair, etc), redoing any or all of the previous when you discover that something in the model needs to be change, animating, effects, lighting (for cut scenes, add rendering and compositing to the list)

[Theophilus]

3D obviously requires more work, but I don't think it can be said that it takes more artistic talent.

[gimymblert]

@Martkham
You did not mention the fact you skip doing shadow, details and keep the line simple because 2D animation is darn hard to get on a level of a simpel 3D animation with the same amount of details.

It's more like 2D cel VS 3D celshading
Clearly 3D celshading is easier, the only problem is the noob who don't know how to light up properly a 3D cel rendering so it have ugly shadow that cross the face and many other unwanted place.

Now Upping the quality of 2D animation to match the type of render hi freq you have with bumpmap cg and you are likely to shoot yourself on the fit.

Not counting that if something is off in the design, you have less to redo in 3D (you might keep and or just adjust the animation) than in 2D (everything). And it takes less time to learn to rig a cloth than actually manually animate it for similar result. And everything fluid?

It's not like you haven't compositing (and framing) in 2D too. You better have an awesome storyboarder because you won't adjust the frame anytime soon.



Basically 2D is more immediate, take more skills, need massive amount of knowledge for anything decent.

3D is less immediate, is more automated, takes less skills, knowledge can be channel more easily.

[1982]

but I don't think it can be said that it takes more artistic talent.

That is very hard to measure in any way...

[ANtY]

but I don't think it can be said that it takes more artistic talent.

That is very hard to measure in any way...

Obviously, cuz there is no such thing as talent. 

[XRA]

It all depends on the tools and the workflow you find comfortable... price of the tool doesn't mean it is better for you or faster.  
3D Coat has made low poly modeling absolutely natural for me personally.  Sketchup is faster than anything else I've used with doing level grayboxes. At this point I'd even use Sketchup for blocking out 2D platformer layouts..

I think 3d art can be very rewarding if given time to get accustomed to, there is a lot of untapped potential to be explored.

[Richard Kain]

3D takes more time and effort for the initial construction.

But 2D takes more time and effort for eventual motion.

You can open up Photoshop and draw a 2D line drawing. (in my case, fire up GIMP) But what happens when you need to animate your line drawing? You'll be re-creating your line drawing a few hundred times. And even then the fluid nature of your animation is going to be suspect.

You can open up 3DS Max and create a model. It will almost certainly take longer and require more technical expertise than the 2D line drawing. After all, you need to make the initial sculpt, then create a UV map, then rig it up with a skeleton. And all of those steps will require skill and experience to accomplish properly. But when it comes time to animate your character, all that preparation starts to pay off. Your character can be viewed from any angle, while animating. The game engine can automatically interpolate animations between key frames. What would have taken weeks, even months, to draw by hand can be achieved in minutes.

3D is more difficult, there's no denying it. But if your game is going to be animation-heavy, it is probably worth the extra trouble. If you don't intend to stock your game heavily with animation, or just go for a much more stylized approach to animation, then 2D is a more suitable option. It's a balancing act, and one that all indie developers deal with. I've seen several indies take the approach of creating simple 3D models as the basis for sprite animations. With the right approach, this can save on a lot of time.

[JWK5]

3D is more difficult, there's no denying it.

To whom and when accomplishing what (and at what level of quality)? The difficulty depends on what you are doing, how many artists you need (or have) to do it, their level of skill, etc.

Where you might need separate artists for 3D models, animations, textures, etc. you might need separate artists for 2D key frames, 'tween' frames, backgrounds, vehicles, characters, etc. 2D art isn't just outlines, it also requires good knowledge of lighting, coloring, etc. and you have to take into account your scene is not usually lit by the engine but drawn to appear lit so all visual assets need to be created with unified lighting and coloring in mind. Also, most game projects that are 3D are still relying on 2D artists (for HUD and menu designs, concept art, etc.).

I think the comparison of 3D difficulty versus 2D difficulty is too relative to be generalized in this manner. It really comes down to the teams (or individuals) and their goals.

[kamac]

I'd place my bet that 3d is way harder. Atleast in C++. (Comparing SFML vs Irrlicht)

[bart_the_13th]

I'd place my bet that 3d is way harder. Atleast in C++. (Comparing SFML vs Irrlicht)

It's about art (That said, I do think programming is an art)

I'm not a 2d artist(can't even say I'm a 3d artist either), but I can say that you can't simply compare 2d and 3d art difficulties. It's like comparing painting and sculpting. The difference is more to technical, the how-tos, not about the artistic skill since both requires one.

[kamac]

I rather thought about programming.

[gimymblert]

That's the difficulty about 3D which one
lol