current obsession: artfight

this man comes up to you and steals your soul, wyd?

I’ll be bringing this up in my coming review of Spidops but some of the official artwork looks directly traced (or even auto-generated, with a few touch-ups) from the in-game models and it damn near hurts my soul. The artwork is the “real face” of a Pokemon and typically has more personality than the 3d graphics, because the drawings and the models exist for different purposes. The models are made to function in a 3d animated game. The drawings are made to look good and represent the character. THIS DOES NOT LOOK GOOD, and it’s glaringly cheap for something that over a hundred artists on my dash every day could have done better. As I’ll also be repeating in the Spidops review, its tcg card shows how much personality its design is capable of conveying:

Guys….seriously…..Toedscruel here is 100% traced over the model. That’s not an interpretation or theory, this is a 3d model lightly painted over. That’s the only thing that looks like this. A human not only can’t reference the model and draw this flawlessly symmetrical 1:1 mathematical replication of it but would not want to because it looks terrible.

Look at tentacruel. This is art drawn from just a sketch. No two tentacles the same width, head bubbles slightly uneven, bell drawn imperfectly on purpose so that the silhouette looks cooler and more balanced, wrinkles and seams placed where they look good rather than where a 3-d object forced them to be.

azpherambles

#i want to give the benefit of the doubt but no one would purposelly decide to draw something at an angle where like 90% of the eye is#covered so wierdly 

YES THIS BOTHERED THE HECK OUT OF ME

That tiny little sliver of right eye is not enough to look good as a deliberate choice, if you presented this in an art class they’d tell you to either show more of the eye or none of it. This is one of those things that happens only by following the exact details of a 3d object you didn’t care to pose in an aesthetically pleasing way before converting it to faux-2d. They weren’t doing this in just Gen 8, look at Barraskewda for one example:

Even when they’re posed exactly the same you can see that not a single detail of the artwork was traced over the model. The artwork has organic “imperfection” and “looseness” that makes a drawing look alive and appealing. The model was sculpted secondarily, like an action figure, to imitate the artwork as best as it could, but by necessity exhibits ultra-precise symmetry.

tldr; it’s the shading (cel vs. soft) i think and also pokemon is the most valuable franchise and has no excuse