Comments on: Differences Between 2D and 3D Game Art Production

By: Juuso - Game Producer

Juuso - Game Producer — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 07:16:45 +0000

This article sure got plenty of interesting ideas. For me 2D and 3D are represent something like “match-3″ (2D) game compared to “first-person-shooter” (3D). I didn’t even give much though that you can mix them up a lot.

Anyway… I still think pretty much the same as JB here. 2D might require more time (especially if needed to change lots of things)

By: JB

JB — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:19:35 +0000

In my experience, it takes the same amount of artists to create, but more time to produce 2D. We create the characters and animation in 3D before rendering them to 2D sprites that always require some sort of touch up.

By: Joey

Joey — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 17:21:50 +0000

I like this article for the most part. One thing I have discovered when working with the two: It’s a lot easier (in my opinion) to make 2D games look good. Especially when you want to support older computers and video cards.

My favorite method is to make 3D animations and sprites and use the rendered results. That way the game runs very fast on older cards due to the low poly-count but it still looks good. For instance this is what I do in my OSS snowballz game: http://joey101.net/snowballz/

With doing 2D I think it is also much better to use OpenGL (or DX) rather than SDL. How to define 3D and 2D is rather fuzzy IMO.

By: Queight

Queight — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 08:14:11 +0000

I’m working on 2d game with bone animation. I implemented camera, that not only change it’s position, but even rotation (z axis) and scale. Of course it’s not like fully 3d camera, but it’s the best I could do.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:55:09 +0000

Seconding Joshua with an aesthetic point, 2d art is more iconic so its more about character design and symbolism, while 3d is more hyperrealistic and about trying to represent something as REAL – which is a whole other cage match.

By: Joshua Smyth

Joshua Smyth — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:30:13 +0000

You make some good points from a production pov, but I would like to point out that 2D as a technology has basically plateued – 32 bit colour, alpha blending, current 3d acceleration and high resolution are all you need technologically speaking to produce a great looking 2D game. Which means that in the 2D realm everyone is on the same playing field. The little guys can compete with the big guys. But the 3D plateu is still quite some time away.

By: ZeHa

ZeHa — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 09:55:39 +0000

That is wrong in my opinion:

“This makes it quite easy to create different facial expressions when everything is set up”

Perhaps it IS easy to alter the bones etc, but it’s NOT easy to get GOOD facial expressions. In my opinion, even the praised movies like “Shrek” and so on totally lack in good animation and facial expressions. So far I haven’t seen a 3D-animated movie that gets close to 2D-drawn movies, especially in that domain.

Of course, this shouldn’t mean that creating good stuff in 2D is a lot easier – it’s hard enough, too. But in your blog post, that paragraph definitely sounds as if “drawing animations in 2D is hell, while 3D bone-bending is a piece of cake” ;)

By: Roman Budzowski

Roman Budzowski — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 08:49:56 +0000

We make great use of 3D prerendered graphics. You can achieve awesome results using 3D, though 2D has it’s advances, and it’s not just change of camera view. 2D has it’s own style (if done properly). And that style is something that can differentiate your game from many others that use prerendered 3D.

By: Anon

Anon — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 07:53:03 +0000

Wouldn’t that be the differences between vectors and pixels?

If you used voxels in 3D, the process would be similar to 2D pixels and vectors in 2D would be like normal 3D.

(I haven’t seen anything that would let you map textures, ect, onto 2D vectors but it’d be possible)