Street Fighter HD Remix Traced

A comment by Gil over at the Capcom Digital site:

The person doing the new sprites is a tracer and nothing more. The following statement...

"he looked like a giant troll. That’s why the head was moved up and made a little smaller."

...is certainly misleading. It suggests the head was redrawn from scratch.

In fact the head was probably altered because it seems it was more convenient for the guy who's doing those terrible new sprites to TRACE the portrait of T-Hawk from an artwork for Street Fighter 2 - Turbo Revival (GBA). [picture]

The artwork was drawn by Capcom's Edayan. Why not mention this? If all you do is what seems to be TRACING Edayan's art why not hire HIM to do the job?

If the persons involved with this project are as big Street Fighter fans as they pretend to be they should at least give credit to the original Capcom artists when they trace their stuff. The whole matter is very disrespectful towards the original creators of the Street Fighter series.

If you guys TRACE over existing artworks at least mention which ones you are tracing and give them credit in your blog updates.

I'm still looking forward to this project but hope you will change the artist who is in charge of the sprites. [NeoGAF, Pixelation discussion]



Here's an unfinished proof of concept by Helm, and some words from the artist himself:



"Hello, I am Helm. Since this is a public project on the internet, I assume that criticism, no matter how harsh it might appear, is welcome. Here are some thoughts:

First of all my art is not finished (no, not even the parts that look finished. It would take more smoothing, more range and some overpainting to call it done) so I'm a bit ashamed anyone would link to it. I had to stop working on it for a period of time and when I returned to it my incandescent zest to go through with this had all but evaporated. I did some minor touchups and thought 'why am I still doing this? This is a stupid way to do game art. Should I spend another hour proving a fanboy point?' and posted what I had and hoped that would be the end of it. I don't think my take is particularily breath-taking, but I do think it's more pleasing than that's going on.

Some people will say 'HE CHANGED THE STYLE!' when they see this. I'd like those people to go back to the SFII art and notice something: It doesn't look like anime. It's intentionally more westernized by the capcom art direction. The portraits aren't all angular-jaws-dark-eye-shadows-huge-hips like the newer SF stuff so I say my attempt is more in keeping with the vanilla SFII art than the Udon art.

There's many problems with how Udon is doing this. The biggest and most glaring problem is that whoever is in charge does not have the anatomical knowledge of the capcom staff that made SFII. And SFII isn't exactly the wonder of anatomy (nor is my attempt). The second problem is that they're mixing styles. They take a t-hawk head from an illustration, put it on a turbo sprite... it doesn't work like this. If you're getting paid to do a remake of a very well-loved game, you might want to invest some thought in coherent aesthetics and art direction. Finally the people working on this are pillow-shading. Sprites are sprites, when you're doing illustration work (this isn't animation work as it should be, really) then you shouldn't just go with a silly 'darker around the edges, lighter towards the middle' mindset. It comes down to this: when you REMAKE something, you make sure to hire people who can do it BETTER than the original crew.

All this screams for me, at tiny budget. How many people are doing the art here? I estimate that I could do about 3 frames in a workday if I were under contract to work on this, given I'd have some time to get my methodology streamlined. SFII has how many frames of animation? 1200? How fast does the team have to work to get through those? What are they expecting? Seems like a bad plan. I expect this to get cancelled soon.

If I can put a single comment on the actual remaster idea it'd be: it'll look awful, even with the greatest HD art in the world, without more inbetween frames. Bigger resolution = bigger spatial gaps between frames. It'll look like a Monty Python animation."