Why? It's much easier to draw a pixel sprite instead of creating a 3d model and then doing tricks to render it as 2d..
It's never a sprite though. Even back on the Super Nintendo game sprites had 9 angles * lots of actions * lots of frames for every animation. Multiply that by different lighting in modern games, and using the power of a 3D engine starts looking like an obvious choice. I know lots of games do this for environments. I assumed they did it for everything.
During the 80s the pixelized sprites were drawn to be as realistic as possible given the inherent limitations, but when you make a retro-game now, you probably want to target the de-facto aesthetic itself, and then my guess is you don't want to go too far in the realism direction. Clever use of few animation frames and angles conveys this better than blindly just rendering and scaling down using some optimal resolution reduction algo..
3D doesn’t transfer well to stylized 2D. That’s one of the primary reasons why people are still doing it manually. Pixel art also has a much lower barrier to create.
It's a very high barrier. Because you can't interpolate animation, or move bones around, or slap a different texture if you don't like something.
Every motion in every direction has to be animated. It's akin to creating animation by drawing every change on a separate sheet of paper, photographing it, and then stitching together.
The barrier of entry is indeed low. It doesn't take much to start sketching some pixel images. Making a coherent animated whole out if it? Very labor intensive and hard.
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Why? It's much easier to draw a pixel sprite instead of creating a 3d model and then doing tricks to render it as 2d..
It's never a sprite though. Even back on the Super Nintendo game sprites had 9 angles * lots of actions * lots of frames for every animation. Multiply that by different lighting in modern games, and using the power of a 3D engine starts looking like an obvious choice. I know lots of games do this for environments. I assumed they did it for everything.
During the 80s the pixelized sprites were drawn to be as realistic as possible given the inherent limitations, but when you make a retro-game now, you probably want to target the de-facto aesthetic itself, and then my guess is you don't want to go too far in the realism direction. Clever use of few animation frames and angles conveys this better than blindly just rendering and scaling down using some optimal resolution reduction algo..
3D doesn’t transfer well to stylized 2D. That’s one of the primary reasons why people are still doing it manually. Pixel art also has a much lower barrier to create.
It's a very high barrier. Because you can't interpolate animation, or move bones around, or slap a different texture if you don't like something.
Every motion in every direction has to be animated. It's akin to creating animation by drawing every change on a separate sheet of paper, photographing it, and then stitching together.
The barrier of entry is indeed low. It doesn't take much to start sketching some pixel images. Making a coherent animated whole out if it? Very labor intensive and hard.