After Effects Aesthetics
You've got a 2D sprite game and wish to augment it with capital "P" Pizzaz? But not much money on expensive 2D art and animation? Well, time to renew your Adobe Creative Cloud © license! Introduce z-axis to so you can enable fancy diorama look with dramatic camera motion. Add light sources and deep glow on objects so it's really radiant and hyper real looking. Apply the strongest color grading filter out of Magic Bullet presets. Fake depth of field! For like additional pop and stuff. Maybe some per-object motion blur too but idk gamers hate it for some reason. God rays and light streaks are a given but don't forget to use a shitton of particles and glow whenever there's a special effect on screen.
Square Enix coined an "HD-2D" term for this, but we have no time thinking of nouns. There's only 3 months of After Effects subscription left and we already pirated all our plugins.
Square Enix coined an "HD-2D" term for this, but we have no time thinking of nouns. There's only 3 months of After Effects subscription left and we already pirated all our plugins.
25 Games
15 Comments
Not to dunk on these games btw, some of these are in fact my all-time goats! But Octopath looks damn gnarly
i honestly like the octopath artstyle but the game is asssss
Yeah, """HD-2D""" suuuuucks
wait what? people think octopath looks bad?? i thought it was really pretty :0
Octopath looks amazing fr
Octopath is:
1. Some of the worst color grading in the medium
2. Glossy early unreal engine 3 looking ass 3D environments
3. Epilepsy inducing flashes
4. And yet with all the glow and illumination they don't even bother lighting character sprites up unevenly to ground them in the environment somewhat. They only receive ambient light sources.
Compare it to Rain World and how well that one does lighting of 2D parallax objects and detailed flatwork.
1. Some of the worst color grading in the medium
2. Glossy early unreal engine 3 looking ass 3D environments
3. Epilepsy inducing flashes
4. And yet with all the glow and illumination they don't even bother lighting character sprites up unevenly to ground them in the environment somewhat. They only receive ambient light sources.
Compare it to Rain World and how well that one does lighting of 2D parallax objects and detailed flatwork.
To each their own
great list
i will maintain that bashing realtime 3d shadows and bloom against 2d sprites is one of the ugliest visual design choices ever adopted by the medium and i cannot wait until it stops being a trend. solid list
Piss Christ Chic
i dunno im looking at the screenshots i took of octopath and i like how bright and sparkly it looks. if anything i thought rain world environments blended into each other too much, but i guess its just a matter of preference
Will always find it funny how, even with its own sets of errors and issues (and the fact one has yet to release), the LAL remake and the upcoming one for DQ3 already do a better job of utilizing the HD2D aesthetic than the game that kickstarted the style in the first place
Gonna nom CrossCode as a good example of this, though I don't think the devs used After Effects in any major way. The game uses post-processing atop well-animated and detailed 2D visuals in some neat ways, mainly to depict Lea's bizarre sense of reality in the virtual world. It doesn't just feel like hyperactive shaders for the sake of looking cool IMO.
This list made me realize how Octopath looks like these OtoMADs where they randomly make a 3D scene with a bunch of sources as 2D sprites
Cakewalking
1 year ago