Monster Strike (Training and skills adventure mechanics)
Monster Strike is a very popular and successful videogame for tablets and high end phones whose original animated series have been awarded in Japan with innovation for the 3D animation industry. Their shaders are really wonderful to admire. Some of the animated scenes are clean motion capture data with physics applied to hair.
Chapters are 10 mintues long for season 4. They publish on youtube every Saturday morning reaching many thousands viewers. If you haven´t seen monster strike by studio XFlag, go check it out on their official channel.
The Dragon Prince (Season 1 – Netflix)
Another honorable mention is for Netflix’s the Dragon Prince, not that this is a videogame franchise, but it´s a very appreciated visual product for streaming services. Season 1 was launched on November and will surely continue for a second season. The characters are well constructed and I gotta say I was amazed for the quality of the show all together regarding NPR animation.
Sonder (Unity 3D game engine)
Last but not least SONDER is a story produced in UNITY 3D game engine. Producers wanted to see how a realtime project would be generated for stylized animation. All though Unity 3D game engine was prepared with some special addons and scripts to generate different kind of passes like motion blur, shadows, diffuse and others, the result is something to delight on. A very simple story about a man who wants to keep the love of his life by protecting a little blue plant. Here again, we see the camera work excell on giving depth to struggling scenes.
Last but not least we’ll talk about how a well equipped strategy covers every aspect not only for videogames but also as aesthetics for future NPR movies.
Of course we want to talk about Spiderman.
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
With amazing download content to carry on new missions, we see the Marvel´s franchise through all videogame consoles lead the pointers to -yet another Spiderman movie- but not just any movie. “Spiderman into the Spiderverse” will introduce Miles Morales, a young teenage boy who will meet other spider heroes from other universes.
The art style for this movie took around 2 years to be fully developed in what we see today in the movie. I personally liked the design of the characters in this movie, they seem fresh, very well defined set of universe-rules that will totally immerse you into the story.
This frame already made movie history as the cinematography is very clear, readable, exciting. The artists want to know what do you think about the movie, so they kindly let the social media do it´s job on twitter using the hashtag #Spiderverse
The director of the movie is Peter Ramsey.Spiderman into the Spiderverse has been nominated by a lot of film experts as a quality movie for art direction, plot, and even rotten tomatoes gave it a 98% positive review, truly making history for a 3d animated feature length movie.
Even the hashtag #Spidersona started to crawl the web on twitter after the first week’s premiere of the movie.
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse (continued..)
If you check the movie, the cartoon parts are hilarious, but overall Miles Morales is presented as a normal kid with normal problems, I guess this is what clicks with the audience. To have someone very human, with fears and doubts. This is why I believe this Movie will definitely be a winner at the Golden Globes for Animation, because we are transported with the coming of age of the protagonist and his responsibility to assume the role of a hero by defending the city from a catastrophe in the plans of the villains.
Art direction on this movie is such delight. If you noticed the connection between grafitty and the halftone dots a comic page has, we can definitely say the pop-art culture is present on every frame of the movie. Art team created a specialized set of brushes to develop concept art for the movie. Special rules apply to the movie: for example motion blur is only applied using RGB channel displacement and all highlights are to be represented using white halftones.
Soundtrack from this movie is genius. Taking you from heroic to funny comedy, to suspense. Soundtrack is something I definitely recommend you listen very closely.
I´d also recommend you take your chance and see it on 3D, it is totally a well-worth entrance to the theater for the experience.
Vaughan Ling created these amazing concept artworks for the movie “Into the Spiderverse” using Blender.
You can read the complete story here
Thank you very much. This is a year in review for NPR influence in games and movies. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
My name is Pierre Schiller. Don´t forget to subscribe, share and visit my blog. Happy new year.
