Question about cost and time to draw and animate a character in Skullgirls

[MegaMix]

I recall the entire hoopla around the Indiegogo campaign for Squigly and Encore's release. There were a group of, rather ignorant, internet lurkers who thought it was ridiculous that a character could cost $150,000 to create, let alone the usual $200-250k. However, quickly various developers began commenting on the price as being exceptional indeed, but in terms of how low the price was. I recall reading somewhere that it costs almost a million dollars to create a single character in Street Fighter IV, so a character in Skullgirls for almost a tenth of the price was a steal.

Mike Z actually elaborated on this. In short, it costs around $1,000,000 just to create a character in a game like Battlefront.

However, to me this results in more questions than answers.

The first thing that stands out is why an average character model in Star Wars Battlefront is more expensive than Skullgirls. First of all Skullgirls characters are in high resolution 2D which is widely said to be significantly more expensive to do than common 3D models. Second off is that Skullgirls has far more animations that are also far more detailed than a game like Battlefront. Now to be fair people pointed out that Battlefront's is a AAA game, however many have stated that other games have had similar budget for their models.

I guess my questions could be summed up as:

1. Why are Skullgirls characters so much cheaper to make than many 3D games, such as possibly Street Fighter IV, despite it being in high quality 2D with lots of animation?
2. How many people get assigned to draw and animate each character? Apparently it takes around 2,000 hours to create character. How many staff are assigned to work down those 2,000 for that character?
3. How much more time would it take doing a Skullgirls character over say a character in the style of Street Fighter IV or something similar?

 

[MegaMix]

Nobody? :(

 

[Fumako]

Why are Skullgirls characters so much cheaper to make than many 3D games, such as possibly Street Fighter IV, despite it being in high quality 2D with lots of animation?

AAA games are elaborate money laundering schemes, kinda like The Room

 

[Sinclair]

Why are Skullgirls characters so much cheaper to make than many 3D games, such as possibly Street Fighter IV, despite it being in high quality 2D with lots of animation?

i hope this answers ur question

 

[Fumako]

I thought 3d animation is simply making a model then posing it around?
I mean, Xrd is the only one I researched to some degree, I get it being expensive with manually added shadows(shadow maps? I have no idea) and other stuffs. And for some games like battlefront, I guess the expense comes from motion capture and realistic lighting/texture?

 

[Sinclair]

I thought 3d animation is simply making a model then posing it around?
I mean, Xrd is the only one I researched to some degree, I get it being expensive with manually added shadows(shadow maps? I have no idea) and other stuffs. And for some games, like battlefront, I guess the expense comes from motion capture and realistic lighting/texture?

3d animation is harder because ALL THOSE WIRES MAN1!!!
But really, 3d animation and anything 3d is so so so much work, and i can understand how much work is put onto 2d animation, but 3D is even more work...I think L0 just made their job easier by color mapping everything and greyscaling the frames, 3D is a bunch of wires and modeling and texturing..

IDK, go watch this i guess

Its not street fighter, but it IS 3d :(

 

[EU03]

We kept costs down by barely squeaking by with minimal pay and being relatively smart about production and sticking close to our framecount budgets.
Each character was handled through by many people (character design, animators, clean up).

ArcSys had said that the effort spent for 3D models in Xrd was roughly the equivalent of making all the animations in 2D sprites. Most of the effort is frontloaded onto the character model and rigging (and adding the extra polys and bones to do all the warping for cinematic poses), then they can animate the rest and changes to the character model are easy to do. It can be expensive especially if you are going through an iterative process where the artists and animators are still figuring out how the 3D design is going to work.

2D animation is more natural and simpler to achieve exaggerated motions because you just have to...draw it, rather than rotating and nudging a rig in 3D. The consequence is that...you have to draw everything!

 

[MegaMix]

We kept costs down by barely squeaking by with minimal pay and being relatively smart about production and sticking close to our framecount budgets.
Each character was handled through by many people (character design, animators, clean up).

ArcSys had said that the effort spent for 3D models in Xrd was roughly the equivalent of making all the animations in 2D sprites. Most of the effort is frontloaded onto the character model and rigging (and adding the extra polys and bones to do all the warping for cinematic poses), then they can animate the rest and changes to the character model are easy to do. It can be expensive especially if you are going through an iterative process where the artists and animators are still figuring out how the 3D design is going to work.

2D animation is more natural and simpler to achieve exaggerated motions because you just have to...draw it, rather than rotating and nudging a rig in 3D. The consequence is that...you have to draw everything!

Great post, thank you. If you don't mind me asking something else. I realize that Guilty Gear Xrd uses a different type of style which resulted in their models being very time consuming and costly (even considering that they don't animate that well). I'm curious how much cheaper/less time consuming would it have been if you guys decided to make Skullgirls with say Street Fighter V quality models and animation? I mean Street Fighter V doesn't seem to incorporate such an ambitious model and rigging style.

 

[EU03]

I don't think Skullgirls would have adapted very well into the traditional 3D model setup. It might have been cheaper, but it would have looked really bland/bad.

Skullgirls animations use a lot of exaggeration, and we took a lot of inspiration of how Vsav did it; you see a lot of stretching and deforming on one end of the spectrum and all the way into complete transformations.

That's why animation in SFV/SFIV doesn't look very good... There was a good article (don't recall the link) that showed why all the 2D animation in 3S sold the action and movement so well and how all of that was completely lost in the 3D transition to SFIV. It's servicable, but it's lacking so much energy.

Xrd took a different approach to replicate the original GG 2D animation, which is very fast transitions from key to key. People might look at it and say "Xrd looks so choppy", but ArcSys wanted the player to immediately identify important frames in such a fast-paced game, which is really the most important thing. By using their more elaborate rigs, they can make much more exaggerated frames in the animation to look more like 2D GG.

Like I said before, if we wanted to animate Samson transforming into a giant monstrosity or Sekhmet bursting out of Eliza, we would just draw it out. If we were doing it in 3D, it would have probably taken us months of concepting and designing the tech alone to get it to even look right in the first place. If we were constraining to the SFV model, I don't think we could have done even 80% of the animations in SG; characters like Peacock alone would have been impossible.

 

[MegaMix]

I don't think Skullgirls would have adapted very well into the traditional 3D model setup. It might have been cheaper, but it would have looked really bland/bad.

Skullgirls animations use a lot of exaggeration, and we took a lot of inspiration of how Vsav did it; you see a lot of stretching and deforming on one end of the spectrum and all the way into complete transformations.

That's why animation in SFV/SFIV doesn't look very good... There was a good article (don't recall the link) that showed why all the 2D animation in 3S sold the action and movement so well and how all of that was completely lost in the 3D transition to SFIV. It's servicable, but it's lacking so much energy.

Xrd took a different approach to replicate the original GG 2D animation, which is very fast transitions from key to key. People might look at it and say "Xrd looks so choppy", but ArcSys wanted the player to immediately identify important frames in such a fast-paced game, which is really the most important thing. By using their more elaborate rigs, they can make much more exaggerated frames in the animation to look more like 2D GG.

Like I said before, if we wanted to animate Samson transforming into a giant monstrosity or Sekhmet bursting out of Eliza, we would just draw it out. If we were doing it in 3D, it would have probably taken us months of concepting and designing the tech alone to get it to even look right in the first place. If we were constraining to the SFV model, I don't think we could have done even 80% of the animations in SG; characters like Peacock alone would have been impossible.

Incredible reply. Though I guess what I'm truly curious of is what would be the time difference if you decided to say "fuck it" and just go with Street Fighter V models and style of animation rather than Skullgirls (meaning you abandoned the complex Skullgirls animation). How much cheaper/less time consuming would that take? Sorry for being so persistent with this question, but it seems that developers don't usually answer this.