Final Fantasy Tactics PSP - Great Cel Shading!

[leopadua]

Hi there,

just to save up some seconds of your life, the links for the trailers are:

For the WMV version:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=15971&type=wmv

and for the MOV version:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=15971&type=mov

BTW, its a good trailer, indeed.

Thanks for the post Thomas.

All the best,

[Hammy_W]

Oh boy, I'm a big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics way back so this is great! Thanks for sharing! That trailer is a blast. :) And this brings back tons of memory!

[P_T]

Heh I posted that yesterday in the Cell shading and 3D CG thread in General Discussion, but yeah, I'd love to know how they achieved the cell shading too.

[ThomasMahler]

http://www.square-enix.co.jp/fft/main_fft.html

If you click on 'Character' and down there on 'More Image', you'll get to see some turntable renders of Ramza, Delita and Ovelia.

Hope they keep rendering out characters that way. Would love to see a Cel Shaded version of Orlandu! :)

Man, that's really inspiring. I don't know why, but this thing makes me want to model cel shaded models until I figure out how to achieve such a look.

[ThomasMahler]

Actually, I've been thinking about this now. This is really interesting to me and I'll look into Cel Shading way more in the future, but the way I see it right now is that Cel Shading hasn't really got a lot of attention the last few years and I wonder why, cause there are a shit load of styles that could profit from more advanced cel shading algorithms.

For example, I'm a huge fan of Genevieve Godbout:

http://www.rose-a-petits-pois.blogspot.com/

Her stuff reminds me a bit of Al Hirschfeld, but way cuter and way more textural - and colored, of course. But I do love her illustrative style (looks a bit like Teddy Newtons work as well), I do love how she's playing with textures and puts them on top of her shapes and I think that's a field where clever Cel Shading techniques could do wonders.

Actually, Genevieve has been working with some other artists at Gobelins on a shortfilm, Sebastien: http://www.sebastien-lefilm.net/pages/voir_le_film.html

Now, the interesting thing is that they lost all the textural quality here, except for the backgrounds of course. All the characters are put into solid color shapes - cause it'd be darn hard and probably quite annoying to match the textures to the shapes.

Now, I've never seen any cel shading that came even close to Genevieves work, and that's a pity - Imagine if we'd have some shaders that we could tweak and paint in real time, I've once seen a great video demonstration of a cel shading app that's been created by some students for Siggraph that let you literally paint the toon lines onto the geometry, which was quite amazing. Now, we've seen stuff like Appleseed and I do think there'd be a huge interest in better cel shading tools - I wonder if Ghibli will ever switch to CG Animation...

[P_T]

Actually I like the style in this trailer better, it's what I wanted to achieve in my render. I like the crosshatch shadow and I've been trying to emulate that in PS. This is all I managed to do.
http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h310/Phlegm_Thrower/toonshadow.jpg

[ThomasMahler]

Is there a chance that you render out a turntable and apply the action to all the frames or use After Effects to achieve that effect?

Getting the look spot on on a still is one thing, but it's something very different to get it consistent when things move.

[P_T]

Eh, I don't think I even have the file saved. It was just 3 files of separate render passes that I found on my old HDD, (line, colour and AO) and pretty much the only layer I played with was the AO layer so I'm pretty sure I can get it to look consistent.

[kenshinw95]

http://www.square-enix.co.jp/fft/main_fft.html

If you click on 'Character' and down there on 'More Image', you'll get to see some turntable renders of Ramza, Delita and Ovelia.
I tried, but all that it did was make a "click" noise, and show a blank "scroll".. :sad:

Man, that's really inspiring. I don't know why, but this thing makes me want to model cel shaded models until I figure out how to achieve such a look.
Yeah, I keep trying to make cel shaded models, but they always either tend to look like "painted" comic/anime covers, or video game cut-scene "realism". Which don't look bad.. Actually those styles make the model I'm doing look kinda good. :D Just isn't cel-shading..

[DoubleSupercool]

Maybe it will actually be released in Australia this time :rolleyes: I am still a bit steamed that FFT didn't come out here. Thank goodness for FFT Advance, although my nephew has since taken off with it!

Thank goodness sanity prevailed, allowing us access to games from OS:

www.hcourt.gov.au/media/Stevens.pdf

[ambient-whisper]

Maybe it will actually be released in Australia this time :rolleyes: I am still a bit steamed that FFT didn't come out here. Thank goodness for FFT Advance, although my nephew has since taken off with it!

Thank goodness sanity prevailed, allowing us access to games from OS:

www.hcourt.gov.au/media/Stevens.pdf


tactics advance was nowhere near as good as the original. the story just wasnt there. and the maturity of the game was very very low. ( story wise ). this is definitely going to be a nice treat for psp owners, but its too bad that its only a remake. the psp still seems too much of a port/remake/sequel system.

i really hope that the DS tactics advance 2 wont be as dumbed down as advance 1. in the original tactics, the story made you want to continue to the next mission, in advance you could go through like 20 missions without any hint of story. it just became bland.

[DrBalthar]

I don't know I think the problem is that commercial applications need shit load of time to catch up with actual research in that area. Cross hatching pen&ink shadows and shading in research papers goes way back to SIGGRAPH 1997 and even earlier. Maybe there is not a big interest in that particular animation field. I think the hype of Cel shading has declined again and it probably peaked arround the 2002/3.

[archerx]

Maybe Final toon can do it? it seems pretty powerful.

http://www.finalrender.com/products/products.php?UD=&PID=37

[Per-Anders]

You can also try using Sketch & Toon (http://www.maxon.net/pages/products/modules/sketchandtoon/sketchandtoon_e.html) which is still one of the more advanced commercial systems out there even if it's older, and i suspect that's because the demand itself isn't that high, Maya also now has quite a nice Cel shading system inbuilt and based around PaintFX. But to be honest I really feel it's more technique than technology in this instance, it's about the forms and compositions and simplification you use, how little you can get away with rather than how much.

[noisewar]

Impressive looking stuff! Most cel-shading doesn't hold up in animation, and this does. Too bad it's fro the PSP =/

[kenshinw95]

It's cool, but kinda.. "weird". I mean it's cool that it looks like an animated watercolor book, but I guess the weird part is seeing the the 3D models that look like 2D watercolor painting/drawings which have that crosshatch shading to look like it's got more depth than just plain 2D which would be 3D.. :eek:

I think I pulled a brain muscle on that one. :D

[ambient-whisper]

i dont think this was all THAT impressive to be honest. the way i think its done is, render out a shadow pass thats standalone, ( perhaps maybe even harsh, then use that shadow pass as a mask to reveal an animated crosshatch loop image sequence on the model, and there really shouldnt be too much else to it. maybe there was, but i dont think it looks THAT complex. its not like the outlines and everything was animated, just the internal shading, so its much simpler to handle. if they spent the time to make it look as if the outline drawing was synced up with the internal shading, then it would have looked more impressive i think.

there seems to be some layers to it too. some standard toon shading, with perhaps some painted lines for details/shadows, with some of what i mentioned. play around in shake and i think anyone here could pull it off.

[knellotron]

The REAL innovation here is that Square finally showed actual gameplay in a Final Fantasy trailer! I never saw that one coming.

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