Monday, October 24th, 2022

Masahiro Sakurai Talks 3D Animation of Kazuya Mishima in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

  

Masahiro Sakurai, creator and director of the Super Smash Bros. series, recently shared an interesting new video analyzing 3D character animation. As eagle-eyed TEKKEN fans would know, Kazuya Mishima's triple spin kick in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate cleverly retains an animation technique that was used in the original TEKKEN games — its charm still appearing in modern installments like TEKKEN 7
 

 
During Kazuya's iconic "Hellsweep" motion, his character model's torso twists unnaturally for a few frames of animation, made more noticeable by rotating the camera around the model. The motion, timing, and speed of Kazuya's twist motion for his kick adds "oomph" and fluidity to the move (as it would for a real martial arts kick), the end result making it more appealing and pleasing to the eye of the player. This 3D animation technique can be traced back to 1993's Virtua Fighter, also mentioned in Sakurai's video (below).

 

 
As Mr. Sakurai states in the video, he believes there's no such thing as "too far'" when it comes to designing attack animations for 3D games. Obviously, the same concept is applicable for 2D games, as well. The director also touched on the fact that that some game developers don't push their animations far enough, because they worry about the character model looking unnatural. The results speak for themselves!
 
 
In addition to demonstrating how this 3D animation technique was used in Virtua Fighter way back in 1993, Sakurai's video also shows some rare footage of the original Super Smash Bros. prototype originally titled Dragon King. (Another of Sakurai's recent Youtube videos dives deeper into that, if you're interested.) In the early prototype build of Super Smash Bros., Nintendo was experimenting with this same style of 3D animation.
~TFG Webmaster, Frank Joseph | @Fighters_Gen

 

 Source:  Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games (YouTube)                  Related Tweet:  @Fighters_Gen

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