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Tsukamoto and Kamei are back to on the SFIV
dev blog talk about the many different tricks
of the trade that they used make the SFIV characters look
like... well... themselves.
Having watched this game grow up from its very
first models, I can really say the team has done an
incredible job. It's easy to overlook their
great work, because their success just means the
characters are instantly recognizable as your favorites
from Street Fighter, but as they mention, it's *really*
hard to make 3D models deform themselves in the same
(often insane) way that the 2D sprites could do so
easily.
Some nerdy dev
stuff to be sure, but required reading for future
character modelers! Thanks as always to SRK's
Azrael for his speedy and spot-on
translation.
--
Hey everyone, it's
been awhile! This is Tsukamoto.Last week our Dev Blog took a break as Ms.
Shiozawa's blog featured a special update announcing the
sale date! After watching the anime trailer, Juri's way
cool closing line of "This won't hurt a bit" has been
stuck in my head.Well then, this
week I'd like to talk with designer Mr. Kamei about the
character designs. What kind of episodes took place
during the development of Street Fighter
IV?

--
First off, tell us about how the character designs for
SFIV were decided on.Kamei:I spoke about this a little in the 2nd blog entry,
but when deciding the direction of the SFIV characters
there were quite a bit of twists and turns. In trying to
determine their shape, with the 3D body, silhouette, and
volume, we came up with many different variations before
deciding. For example, we had a really thin Ryu, a larger
Ryu, a Ryu with a big body but small head...in the end,
we felt that the current model was his best look in 3D.
But before we got to that point, there were over 10
different variations of Ryu.
--
What was the general feeling you were going for?Kamei:We wanted to bring the
flavor of the old SF to life. Basically, in 3D games
elongated bodies look pretty cool but we thought it
wouldn't really fit well with a fighting game. With the
exaggerated movements according to the game systems, the
characters have to move many times faster than a normal
person would. So we had to do modeling and deformations
in order to match that, and the more we do the more it
becomes unsightly to see. So in order to get both a cool
look and easy-to-understand movements working together,
we setting on doing deformations of the old pixel style.
With pixels, you can easily understand their silhouette,
and we can also include some cool deformations. By adding
deformations, we can have easy-to-understand expressions
in just a few frames of movement.Tsukamoto:Even for female characters,
they can have facial expressions where you see them
taking merciless damage.Kamei:Yes we included that. But
personally, I'd like to improve upon that and have the
characters sustain injuries. Everyone looks cool when
they win without taking damage, but if you just squeeze
out a victory then they should look all beat up
(laughs).Tsukamoto:A
face they wouldn't want to show to anyone. But, if you
get too detailed with that then the game's rating will
shoot up, so you'd have to pull that off very well.Kamei:Aside from the face,
fighting games have a lot of intense movements. A jab
punch comes out in 3 frames - 3/60ths of a second - but
in that short time we'd like you to be able to recognize
the forearm, the upper arm, and if their fist is clinched
or not - that's the kind of silhouette we're aiming for.
So that's why we basically haven't changed our way of
thinking from the pixel era.--
The movements in SFIV definitely feel like they are easy
to understand.Kamei:You know, in SFIV we've added a transformation
ability to every part. For example, when a character
throws a punch, their fist will scale slightly to become
larger. During the pixel era, in order to make an
impression on the players, when characters threw punches
their fists were drawn just a little bit bitter. So
depending on the character, there are scale animations to
exaggerate parts of their body as they throw attacks.
Internally, its only a 1.05 magnification, so if you take
a quick look at it you won't notice, but I think the
silhouette will leave an impression.Tsukamoto:Without scaling, you don't
really get the good feeling that is Street Fighter. It
would be more accurate, sure, but it would be a little
harder to understand. This is one of the benefits and
drawbacks of 3D models.Kamei:Yeah, 3D models as-is aren't very
interesting.Tsukamoto:Yeah, they're too straightforward. During the 2D era
when everything was hand-drawn, the designers could think
"This is a really heavy punch, so let's have the
character's face warp a little bit, mouth wide-open, and
we'll draw their fist a little bigger" and then they
could animate it that way, but for 3D models that type of
thing became a little difficult. At one point, we did
think about making it more realistic, but then after
giving it more thought we considered not making it in 3D
at all. But one of SFIV's themes is replicating the great
things about 2D in 3D, so we pressed on...this is
probably one of the hardest things for the designers to
tackle.Kamei:It took
a lot of steps to get to that themes, but in the end I
feel like we were able to stick to our roots and make a
design, like the pixel era, where you can understand a
lot of things in just a short span of frames.-- Speaking of pixels, the SFII and
Alpha series styles were pretty different. Were there any
episodes in relation to this?Kamei::As the Alpha series was based on
anime, the deformations were more severe and the
information content was less than compared to the SFII
pixels. So what happened for the new characters such as
Guy and Cody, everyone had their own personal image of
what they should look like. Even just asking the
development staff, no one could agree on what Guy should
look like (laughs). As there were a lot of opinions, it
was pretty hard to get to a place we would all agree on.
Of course, this is true for any series, but it was the
most difficult for the Alpha characters.-- It seems like it'd be easiest and
fastest to just copy the silhouette from the pixel art
and make the model from that.Kamei:We did that at first, but in just
making them 3D as-is there were various problems that
popped up.Tsukamoto:Guy was particularly difficult.Kamei:As Guy was the first Alpha
character we ported over, we had to spend a lot of time
thinking in what way to do the deformations. If you look
at Ryu you'll get a good understanding of this, but in
fighting games, most characters basic pose has their
knees bent. They don't stand straight, but somewhat bent
over. But Guy stands straight up with one knee straight.
So he ends up towering over Ryu, and in 3D, what happens
is that we have to make his legs short. His kicks have
less range than his punches (laughs).

Tsukamoto:For pixel art,
we can just draw the legs long and they'll look cool! As
Alpha was 2D, we could have these cool and cute anime
kicks for all the characters, and that was one of the
Alpha series's charms. But in 3D that becomes a difficult
thing.-- Were there any other
difficult characters?Kamei:....Chun. (laughs)Tsukamoto:Yeah, Chun was a handful! Her
model was changed so many times, I lost count!
(laughs)Kamei:We
changed her face even after the loketests.Tsukamoto:The Chun-Li from
then and now are completely different.Kamei:From the questionnaires at the
loketests, we realized that the players wanted a better
Chun. So we finished up all the other characters first,
then our lead modeling designer appointed the "Month Of
Chun Improvement" and we got to work (laughs).Tsukamoto:Yeah, I remember
that (laughs). We did that more than once, Arcade Month
of Chun Improvement, Console Month of Chun
Improvement...Kamei:Our lead designer was the one who would make the
adjustments on her model body, then as her face changed
(facial expressions) we'd have to fix that as well. I was
the designer in charge of Chun-Li's facial expressions.
So then the lead designer would make an adjustment to her
body, and I'd follow up with the facial adjustment. Then
we'd take a look at it, and if it didn't feel right we'd
have to fix it again. That went on for quite a
while.-- Were there any
characters where things went smoothly, or that you liked
working on?Kamei:I'll
have to go with Honda. Also, Dhalsim, Zangief, and
Blanka. I'd played SFII when I was a kid, and I feel that
their image in SFIV is the best match to that time. Its
just how I feel, but I think that big strong characters
are the easiest to reproduce.--
Dhalsim is a pretty unique character.Kamei:Yes...speaking of, Dhalsim was one
of the first characters we were able to get up on screen,
after we figured out how to do Ryu. It was Ryu, Ken,
Blanka, and Dhalsim. After figuring out the design
direction with Ryu, Ken was easy enough to follow suit.
Then Ono asked if we couldn't make some of the more
unique characters, so we decided to make Blanka and
Dhalsim.Tsukamoto:When SFIV was still just in the inspection stages,
we still hadn't officially gotten the green light for
development. The developers as well as Ono were still
trying to figure out just what "IV" would be.Kamei:I thought, "This might
be the last time I get to make a Street Fighter
character, so I'm just going to do what I want! Give
Dhalsim as many bones as I like!" So as a result,
Dhalsim's preparation got the elegant treatment
(laughs).Tsukamoto:Yeah, thank goodness we gave
it our all back then. Its all about our love - if we
didn't love the game, it wouldn't have been made.-- Kind of surprising that Chun-Li
wasn't among the first models to be made.Kamei:Yeah, we didn't have
Chun-Li. If we think about The Month of Chun Improvement,
if she'd been around back then then development would
have come to a screeching halt! (laughs) Oh, I don't mean
that as anything bad against Chun!Tsukamoto:The Month of Chun Improvement
was pretty heavy. Did it make you hate Chun?Kamei:Not at all. There are
other characters who turned my dreams into
nightmares.-- Such as?Kamei:...Dhalsim. (laughs)
At first, we couldn't get Sim's stretching animation
right at all. In particular, his arms would get jagged,
and we couldn't get them to stretch beyond a certain
point without getting all messy. I'd always end up saying
"Curse you Sim, why do you have to move like this! This
is impossible in 3D!"Tsukamoto:I remember we asked if it was
okay if Dhalsim's arms only stretched a little bit.
Okada's answer to that was "No!" (laughs) But we
eventually got them stretching beautifully!-- Is
there anything else you'd like to point out about the
SFIV character design?Kamei:What I'd like the players to
notice is the level of detail given to SFIV's shader. Its
a bit difficult to sum up with a shader is, but it's
something that really adds a nice touch to the outward
appearance of the 3D models. If you look at the
expressions during Focus Attack or at the results screen,
this will give you an idea of SFIV's unique shader. The
extra touching effects in the PC version also come from
the shader. Even with the same model, the shader can
really add an extra sense of quality.-- You mean the poster or watercolor look effect!
That's the shader?Kamei:That's right. The shader has many different uses and
tools, but in SFIV what we were going for was the moving
painting look. Make the artwork of Street Fighter come to
life, in 3D, and give it a sense of depth and presence -
we felt that would be the most interesting expression for
the game, and that's how we developed our shader.Tsukamoto:As we re-did Ryu's
model over and over again and looked for our direction,
we also advanced our shader at the same time. I feel its
a very unique expression, so I would be happy if everyone
were to take note of it.
-- Are
there any last words you'd like to leave to the fans who
are looking forward to the character designs?Kamei:With SSFIV, since we
had the experience of SFIV behind us we thought we'd be
able to complete the development in no time, but this
time as well we tinkered with it right up until the
deadlines. The characters of SF are all very
individualistic, so getting that to properly come across
in 3D takes some trial and error. But in the end, I feel
the new characters retain that high quality feel, and are
designed to fit right in in SSFIV! If you have any
thoughts after buying the game, I'd love to hear them.
Please shoot me a line!Tsukamoto:Well, we mostly talked about
arcade SFIV, but I hope you all enjoyed today's
entry.The qualifiers for the
National Tournament are under way! Arcade players, do
your best! We here at the offices are praying that the
players will really enjoy the tournament!Well then, see you next week!