3d art vs hand drawn art

[jack_norton]

I personally prefer hand-drawn art (manga or any other style). However my real question to you is: would you play a game with 3d pre-rendered images ?
Like this one below:

to me as developer would be a big advantage since I could make those myself. No need to pay/wait for an artist, delay projects, and so on. But I'm not sure that people could play games at all with this kind of art (I know that I wouldn't be much interested in playing a VN/dating sim with such art if I saw him on a website).
What's your opinion on this art style ?

[Vatina]

Personally.... I don't like it. Usually I prefer hand-drawn over 3d. Plus, 3d art as the one you've shown often end up looking very stiff. I feel like I'm looking at a Barbie doll ^^;

[DaFool]

3D can still work:

http://dafool.visualnews.googlepages.com/ag3_pictorial

hints: less occidental, more oriental features

Personally, I would just make 3D chibi characters and max out cellshading. No one would complain, although it would limit your gameplays to the childish kind.

[Jake]

Personally, I don't think 3D is really ready for this kind of thing yet. But if you were to pursue that kind of thing, then I'd agree that a good cel-shading renderer/material/whatever would probably be preferable to a realistic look - it's more forgiving, avoids the uncanny-valley, etc. I really liked the graphics in Eternal Sonata/Trusty Bell in that regard, personally. But again, they were very anime, which probably helps.

3D can still work:

Huh. I'd have used some of those pictures as evidence against, to be honest. Particularly this one; the glossy, plastic skin is off-putting, the way the girl's arm passes through the guy's is distracting... One of the really big problems in 3D modelling, as I understand it, is the squishiness of things like skin - it appears to be very hard to get a fleshy object to interact properly with a hard object to make it look like someone is holding a thing, let alone fleshy with other fleshy objects. Instead, 3D things usually look like they're passing close to other things or stroking them rather than holding or grasping them, which in turn makes them look far more like dolls than people.

And this is leaving aside the utterly disturbing breasts that girl on the right has!

hints: less occidental, more oriental features

The ones you're showing aren't really "more oriental", but "more anime"...

[DaFool]

this one the glossy, plastic skin is off-putting

That's sweat indicating 'horniness'... LOL yeah many people hate that about Illusions games.

Eternal_Sonata

Was this available on the PC? I don't have a next-gen console to enjoy it.

[Dalton]

I mostly find, that handdrawn graphics have more feeling to the, than 3D-rendered.
I can not imagine myself playing a visual novel with 3D-rendered graphics. I barely can get a feel for the characters looking at them. And since I am really a character person (meaning I would be okay with a bad story if it had good characters), I need to get a feel for them.

[Jake]

Eternal Sonata

Was this available on the PC? I don't have a next-gen console to enjoy it.

Nope, I think just XBox 360 and PS3. There are plenty of screenshots around on the web, though. It still suffers from floaty-hand syndrome, of course, I just like the halfway house between cel-shading and regular lit rendering.

[papillon]

I know someone who's making a 3d visual novel (see here) and I've seen someone doing a retelling of Fatal Hearts using the Sims for graphics... but while that was sort of cute, it's also sort of creepy. the 3d models tend to look scary a lot of the time.

[delta]

Bad 2D art can still be endearing.
Bad 3D art is horrible.

The best-looking 3D VN I've ever seen is Time Leap, and it's still uncanny and unconvincing. Oh, and there is Valkyria Chronicles, but you aren't Sega.

[jack_norton]

Well, glad to see I wasn't the only one thinking that
Indeed 3d graphic sux. Even if you're Sega and make very cute 3d, I still prefer traditional 2d. Even outside of games, my favourite cartoon movies are miyazaki's ones, not those full 3d american cartoons.

[Samu-kun]

3D is hard to do with characters because of the uncanny alley. However, I don't think it really applies to us much because we're generally trying to do the anime style, which actually avoids the uncanny altogether anyways.

There's the soft shaded figurine style.

The partial celshaded Eternal Sonata style.

Or just the "I can't believe that's actually 3D" cel shaded style.

If you know how to actually make these kinds of art, then yes, 3D is actually a very good alternative to 2D. Not only can you get a near limitless amount of shots from different angles very quickly, but it's also relatively easy to rig your model to a skeleton and get many different poses quickly and easily as well.

I don't think the picture you provided looks much good though. It has too much of the uncanny alley going for it.

[Hime]

The bad things about 3D in my opinion is that the pieces done with aren't in fact invidual: once you have seen the model from a couple of different angles, you know what to expect. In 2D on other hand the characters look always at least a bit different as the artist's feelings and skills waver. 2D isn't as "perfect" as 3D, but it's actually the good side of it - imperfection is inviduality. I'd prefer 3 2D CGs over 300 3D ones.

[Aashtarsrain]

I still prefer traditional 2d. Even outside of games, my favourite cartoon movies are miyazaki's ones, not those full 3d american cartoons.

Indeed, I do agree that it's a matter of preferences and personnal taste, so there should be space and choice for everyone and every art, and I definitely think it's one of RenPy's great strengths. Personnally, I love 2D and anime but I love to work with 3D myself, though I perfectly know it's not that popular on this forum, which can be quite discouraging sometimes but anyway... Of course, it depends on the overall quality of the pictures, but I don't see why I would not have played the 3d VNs and demos posted here, as well as the ones with photos, and the ones with the same drawn fair-haired girl again etc, and in fact I enjoyed most of them. So there might be others too.

[Samu-kun]

The bad things about 3D in my opinion is that the pieces done with aren't in fact invidual: once you have seen the model from a couple of different angles, you know what to expect. In 2D on other hand the characters look always at least a bit different as the artist's feelings and skills waver. 2D isn't as "perfect" as 3D, but it's actually the good side of it - imperfection is inviduality. I'd prefer 3 2D CGs over 300 3D ones.

You know, you can change the look of 3D models over different angles using scripting. (although not many people bother to learn it) If anything, I don't know where you get the idea that 3D modeling is a sterile art, because just as much emotion and feeling goes into a 3D piece as a 2D one.

[Jake]

If anything, I don't know where you get the idea that 3D modeling is a sterile art, because just as much emotion and feeling goes into a 3D piece as a 2D one.

A 3D model is always an abstraction of the creator's intention, one way or another. You don't paint directly the output images, they're created by cold, unfeeling - sterile algorithms.

Sure, you can put expression into 3D models, but it's a lot harder to notice that expression amongst all the maths than it is with a 2D drawn image, even if that image was drawn in Photoshop - the expression is evident in line weights and brushstrokes of colour and so on.

Not to mention the fact that 3D models - even the ones with nice shading or cel-shading - still seem to have serious trouble holding things, which still makes them look like dolls.