spam me with your favorite artists/art styles

[jack1974]

Thanks is a very interesting thread for me, even if of course just representative of a very small % of my customers.
Sadly, many times I am unable to choose exactly the artists I would like for every game/occasion for a myriad of factors, like: being too slow/busy (which would mean delaying the game by 2-3 years), unable to draw certain things (couples for example, or backgrounds) or simply artists disappearing (recently happened less though).
Sometimes I feel like finishing a game right as I wanted to do it is some kind of miracle

[jack1974]

speaking of art styles for fun I made a test render of a random character I bought in the past, what do you think (ignoring the hair physic issue lol).
I saw some pretty popular games done with 3d recently on Steam. Of course doing a good result in a single portrait image is easy, but mixing it with backgrounds etc is another matter.
The main advantages of 3D would be:
- small animations
- unlimited pose/camera changes (the only limit would be how much I'm willing to wait rendering times lol)
- possibility to do games that with 2D art would be impossible to do. For example, customizable characters wouldn't be an issue anymore. I could have romance scenes even letting players choose gender/race/etc the only limit would be again the number of combo/render times

of course I'm still working on my current games with the manga art, but who knows maybe in future I could try a test game and see how it goes.

[Franka]

I still don't want "realistic" looking 3D characters. It's painfully obvious that the characters are posing dolls with dead eyes, and once you've seen a few of those characters, they all start looking the same.

The only popular games featuring Daz3D (that I know of) are porn games because sex sells. If you want to go there, fair enough, quite a few people make a comfortable Patreon living doing that.

[jack1974]

Yes I know that the most popular are the porn ones And I also know that while they make a ton of money it's not easy at all (some have animations with full voiceover and so on, like 3d movies).
However in my specific case I was also thinking more like, you could have a character perform combat moves/animations, have enemies/monsters moving, etc. So even in a future RPG the 3D stuff enables things that normally are too expensive to do with 2D (maybe with pixel art).

As I said I would only do it maybe as side projects to raise some cash to keep doing my usual games. I prefer manga/hand drawn art myself too

[jack1974]

is this less doll?
Just doing it in background while I code the new cards. I should try to do a video, since that might be the real unique advantage of 3D (since obviously I could never do a video in 2d).

[Franka]

Now it's a doll you forced to smile.

Nah, I'm a 3D hater, so don't listen to me too much.

While you might not be able do video in 2D, you can add small animations with Live2D, like breathing, blinking or motion in NSFW scenes. That's already a step up.

[jack1974]

Haha to be honest I don't like 3D either. But of course my tastes doensn't matter, is the majority of people that decide

The next version of Ren'Py should have built-in support for Live2D (since they'll implement shaders and stuff) so it should be definitely easier. Right now you can't do it except for using pre-rendered videos which is a bit of a waste of time/space/VRAM.

[Jaeger]

I find that 2D graphics age better than their 3D counterparts, but the latter has come a long way. Perhaps you could go for more stylized art if there is an issue of uncanny valley effect from realistic models.

3D models can also mimic 2D through cel shading.



Unlike Arc System Works' previous titles, Guilty Gear Xrd uses 3D models for their characters but used rendering techniques that gave the illusion of 2D sprites.

[jack1974]

Yes that looks great, but those kind of effect are extremely hard to obtain, you'd need custom 3d models and are way too expensive for indies

[Jaeger]

While I don't expect anyone to replicate Guilty Gear Xrd specifically, there some indie games that use cel-shaded graphics. Void Bastards, Grimshade, and Necrobarista are a few games that come to mind. That being said, your situation may be different from the respective developers of the aforementioned games, thus it may not be a viable option for what you want to do.