Jonathan Cooper is Animation Director on an unannounced project at Ubisoft Montreal.
I love isometric 3D in games, so alongside the awesome EDGE I have a new love on iPhone in Eboy FixPix. I’ve been a fan of his for some years now but have found a new level of appreciation for the work when viewed in pseudo 3D by tilting the device to achieve the parallax effect and sync up the image correctly.
This is a good time to share a trick I found online, enabling one to dive into the assets of many app-store games to get an idea of how they were created. Simply copy the app file (work with a copy so as to retain the original file, which you’ll find in your My Documents…\iTunes\Mobile Applications folder) and rename it from .ipa to .zip – from here it’s possible to explore the contents and view the available movies, images and animation frames with WinZip or similar.
It should be noted that some apps are better than others, (depending on how well-organised the developer is and, as far as I can tell, the bit-depth of the .png files), but there are some gems to be discovered.
3 Comments on this post
Jonathan
5 Jul 2010, 7:23pm
I’m assuming this is in reference to the Ghibli Game post?
2D animation outside of western feature films doesn’t traditionally show a new image per frame, and are often done on 2s (each image is displayed for 2 frames – so a second-long sequence at film’s 24fps would only require 12 images).
This is even more so in anime, where still images can be held for seconds at a time. This is most often a production consideration, (less frames requires less work), or in some cases like anime it can be a stylistic choice. It causes the resulting motion to display less smooth than using many in-between frames.
With 3D animation much of the workload is reduced due to the computer calculating the interpolation between frames, so it’s become the norm to expect a full 24 different frames per second, (or higher in games and HD films), creating the smooth look of 3D animation compared to most 2D efforts.
I just wondered if the developers had considered animating at a lower frame rate and keeping it that way in the final game, or even applying filters to the curves to produce a similar effect more akin to the original source material – something I’ve experimented with using mocap in the past to a very eerie effect.
Jad Nohra
6 Jul 2010, 4:12am
oops yeh sorry its the ‘Ghibli Game’ post I was referring to.
I see, cool thx.
Jad Nohra
5 Jul 2010, 1:34pm
“removing the in-between interpolation to more accurately recreate the 2D feeling”
what exactly do you mean by that Jonathan?