Animation

Konsui Fighter utilizes a unique animation process that draws inspiration from traditional rotoscoping and hand-drawn animation techniques, imbuing it's characters with both naturalistic movements and a unique style. The game features an estimated 1400 character frames, each of which requires anywhere from one to three hours of work from motion capture to in-game. Let's take a look at an example of how a special attack makes it through the process!

MOTION CAPTURE

Each animation begins with live motion capture on a green screen set, performed by a variety of motion capture actors. Here we can see Itami's chain toss being performed by lead director Shayne Helms, while PR manager Logan Jensen provides weapon puppetry for the chain prop.

HAND-DRAWN FRAMES

Next, lead artist Jas Carpenter draws the base animation frames, referencing the motion capture frames provided. He completes these as pencil sketches, and then provides them for scanning. Once each character's frames are completed, Jas puts together the color palette to be used during the digital colorization phase.

Digital Colorization / Game Assembly

After each character's frames are completed, they are scanned and provided to one of our digital colorization artists. The colorization artist will take the scanned frames and color palette, and perform cleanup and colorization. Once the colorization is completed, the frames go through a finalization process where they are scaled for gameplay, have a stroke effect applied to strengthen the outline of the character, and are trimmed for spritesheet packing. Finally, frames are assembled and given game metadata through the Konsui Editor, an in-house tool used to construct characters for Konsui Fighter.