Development:
SNK Overseas Manager Yoshihito Koyama revealed that the game is going to be "3D mixed with 2D"; this led to speculation that the game could use cel-shading to give the game a 2D look, but it was later revealed at AOU 2008 that KOF XII will use newly-drawn 2D sprites on detailed 2D backgrounds. Producer Masaaki Kukino informed Kotaku that the game is one hundred percent hand drawn, there being zero cell shading in the game. He has also stated that the main goal of the game is to give a new "rebirth" to the series. They have no intention of changing the main series into 3D in the future. The staff decided to create the new graphics during 2005 and 2006, and commented that they spent triple the amount of time developing it than the previous game.
In an interview with Fighters Front Line, Kukino replies that each character took 16~17 months to complete with a team of 10 different designers. Additionally, the sprites were personally checked by Nona for quality. Due to the time demands of drawing such detailed frames of animation, as well as the decision not to incorporate older assets as previous games in the series have, there will be only 20 playable characters
They make a 3D model in the Style of Nona's art, and give it the animations they plan to have in the 2D Characters. They also set a light source here, which comes with the benefit of showing where character limbs would self-shade the character, on their global light source style.
This character is then draw in pixel-by-pixel art style, by multiple designers. This means there are no gradient fills, and it means that each line is drawn by hand, on a computer. Unline BlazBlue (Which uses a rather simple "3 tones per color" shading style (Base, highlight, shadow), KoF XII uses multiple shades per same color (Looks more like 5+), to give the 2D sprites more of a rounded, realistic look.
This pixel art is then passed back by Nona, who makes sure the art is consistent with his style. At this time, he also touches up the characters with extra details (Perfecting facial animations, clothing folds, etc), all in an attempt to make sure the work is of a consistent style and quality.
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Of course, there could be more passes and all, but this is the gist of it.
Because of all this, the characters seem to have some nice tricks added to them. They seem to have dynamic highlighting on them (such as when getting hit by fireballs), as well as dynamic shadowing (Such as when stepping in the shadows at the sides of various stages. They also have very nice self shading from their own limb and hair movement, pretty much during every motion (in stances, during moves, etc.) Shading on clothing seems to be done with hand-drawn graduation, but self-shades are represented as hard shadows.
There is a lot of detailed secondary animation, as well. Iori actually is lip-synched pretty well when he speaks to you in his command throw. Characters wince at small hits, and when Athena blocks bows and is pushed back, her skirt and hair kick up a bit from the impact (I'm sure all characters do, I just really noticed it on her.) I'm not sure if I've seen detailed "Reeling from standard block" animations in 2D fighters before. (continued)
Blazblue used Hand drawn vector artwork, which produces very sharp oulines. So think of that as drawing on a computer with a tablet, or scanning in pictures to the computer.
KoF does is dot-by-dot, so compare that to opening up MS paint, turing on the square grids, and filling in each dot one at a time, to make the outlines. of the characters.
A lot of people don't appreciate how labor-intensive KoF's method of graphic creation is, and I find that pretty sad. Resolution isn't everything! And animation is a LOT more than how MANY frames each motion has, it's dependent on what you DO with each frame, and how consistent those things are."
Each character in KoF XII has about 600 frames of animation, I believe they said. Imagine 11 people drawing 600 images that require dot-by-dot animation, seperately, and then having to make sure the shadows, clothing folds, muscle deformation, and facial animation is consistent between all matching frames.
Then imagine having to come up with the special effects for each character (there seems to be very few shared special effects in this game), High-resolution portrait art (which is probably done early on), gameplay, etc.
As an example, In pixel art, making sure shades / highlights stay consistent comes with "Counting pixels". For example, if a shadow is 32 pixels wide, I've gotta make sure that it stays that width in each frame, while taking into account the deformation of the shadow, as clothing folds and perspectives change. I mean, sure, you have to do that for vector art, to a degree, too, but it's not a "per pixel" thing there.
KoF XII has a lot of secondary animation, too. If they were satisfied with stagnant faces on the characters, no secondary animation, no "touch ups" by Nona, and using the same special effects for more characters, they could probably cut MONTHS out of the production time per character, and in turn, serve up more characters in the same time frame.
But they decided to add MORE per-frame detail to characters that are multiple times more detailed, pixel-wise, than their old ones. Their standards of what constitutes a character have actually risen. A pretty daring choice.
Especially in 2D.
There's no "free" lighting work in a 2D game. (Ok, there is some in this game; dynamic shading when walking into light/dark areas of stages isn't hand drawn, that's a programming trick with color pallettes/opacity.)
There's no "free" cloth and hair dynamics.
There's no stable of facial animations that have data that can be shared between character models.