Who gives the Toaplan/Cave (early) games that iconic look?

[Pixel_Outlaw]

I'm just wondering if anyone knows the sprite artist that gave the early DonPachi and DoDonPachi games their signature chunky highly detailed look? Similar sprites can be seen in Gekirindan.

I'd love to find out who this person is so I can study their techniques a bit more.
Also since Cave seems to have gone with CG sprites is this person still employed and making pixel art?

[SapphireDensetsu]

Junya Inoue (Joker JUN) may be who you're looking for. Now, he didn't do DonPachi (I don't know who did DonPachi), but he did do:

Portions of DoDonPachi
All of ESP Ra.De.
All of Guwange
All of DoDonPachi Daioujou
All of Deathsmiles (some of it looks prerendered though)
And finally, all of Deathsmiles IIX.

He also did the pixel art in Air Gallet by Gazelle, and Batsugun and Dogyuun by Toaplan.

--Neue

[BareKnuckleRoo]

They had larger teams than just one person - I'm not sure if one person was in charge of art direction of not, but DoDonpachi's credits "design" to: Naoki Ogiwara, Akira Wakabayashi, Hiroyuki Tanaka, Junya Inoue and Riichirou Nitta. DonPachi specifically credits graphics work to A. Aburatani, K. Asaba, J. Fujisaku, R. Nitta and N. Ogihara.

Riichirou Nitta and Naoki Ogiwara get credited in both, so they're probably worth looking into. Joker Jun is best known for his character designs, but he's not the only one doing the art in his games. It's likely that they designed DoDonpachi in mind to be similar graphically to Donpachi, and it was just the original art team in Donpachi that decided on that 'look' for the enemies. DOJ, DFK and SDOJ definitely take the look in a different direction, particularly DOJ with its use of prerendered sprites.

[trap15]

It has nothing to do with Joker Jun.

The pixel artists for DDP and DP came from Toaplan, and many later Toaplan games share this same look (coming to mind is FixEight, Batsugun and V-V). I recommend looking at the shared staff between those games (arcade-history.com is great for this).

I doubt those artists have been at CAVE in decades since they gave up on pixel art after DDP.

[RegalSin]

I think the question is, who is the person who did the character designs, and made the decision to display them the way you see them on screen, the way they are. I think the animators, would be annoyed if they had to come up with things, and choose colors, contrast, and that stuff.

All pixel art is representive of their life size or photogenic counter part, till the late 1990's where many did, animation sprites that are equal to cell art. I don't know why that is important, because it is alot of editing, and having teams of people, is the best way.

One person can design the pencil, but then of course is inking and coloring it. Then that is given to the animator or animators, and finally the people who takes that work, and work on the pixel. The art director, in charge usually is the one who has the final say, in how it looks verses the person with the idea.

Like Take the Dragon Ball vs Dragon Quest vs Chrono Trigger vs Blue Dragon. That is one person, and or other people mimicing his work. digitizing the work is not the problem, it is fooling the eye into accepting it.

Another one is the guy who did the adventure island, Ghouls and Ghosts, as well as Famitsu magazine covers, along with many other magazine art. You can clearly identify his work and the wannabes.

Geonoids from Rome, to that air brush artist has a direct difference and any other artist that use his ideas.

[viper_phase1]

If you're serious about studying this style then I suggest you take a look at the excellent Commercial Critique Challenge that was undertaken on Pixelation several years ago:
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=4212.0
There are some good insights here. Symmetry and layering are the key design features in my opinion. It's a fun design choice that you can spend a lot of time refining.

[SapphireDensetsu]

Thank you for answering the question far better then I ever could, everyone!

[futurematt5]

If you're serious about studying this style then I suggest you take a look at the excellent Commercial Critique Challenge that was undertaken on Pixelation several years ago:
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=4212.0
There are some good insights here. Symmetry and layering are the key design features in my opinion. It's a fun design choice that you can spend a lot of time refining.

Hey nice thread!!

[Blinge]

I doubt those artists have been at CAVE in decades since they gave up on pixel art after DDP.

Hey man, can you elaborate on this?
As a comparison, how were the enemy sprites produced for something like Ketsui?

[ciox]

I doubt those artists have been at CAVE in decades since they gave up on pixel art after DDP.

Hey man, can you elaborate on this?
As a comparison, how were the enemy sprites produced for something like Ketsui?

They are just 3D models rendered from multiple angles that may or may not have been touched up a little after being made into 2D sprites.
If you download this http://www.spriters-resource.com/ds/ket ... eet/37151/ you can basically see every 3D model that was used to make Ketsui's bosses and midbosses.

[gray117]

I doubt those artists have been at CAVE in decades since they gave up on pixel art after DDP.

Hey man, can you elaborate on this?
As a comparison, how were the enemy sprites produced for something like Ketsui?

They are just 3D models rendered from multiple angles that may or may not have been touched up a little after being made into 2D sprites.
If you download this http://www.spriters-resource.com/ds/ket ... eet/37151/ you can basically see every 3D model that was used to make Ketsui's bosses and midbosses.

They were inevitably still adapted in pixel art terms. A lot of art was clearly derived increasingly from 3d elements from doj onwards - and one could argue they became dependent upon it as a means of production - but it also evident [albeit more as a supplement] in their earlier games. Whether or not it's the same people that do the work is another matter, but there will still be plenty of pixel pushing even in their more current games.

Derived from 3d or not - there's a different [necessary] emphasis in producing for low res games, and I suppose my argument is that these skills remain more transferable to contemporary production than may be immediately appreciable - whether you think they've done a good job of it, or not

[trap15]

No, there's essentially no cleaning up in any of the pre-rendered CAVE games.

3D model -> render to small sprite -> shove in gfx ROM

That doesn't take any pixel art skills, that's 3D modeling skill. The only 'different' skill there is to make the model not look horrible when rendered at such a low resolution (which mostly just means not putting too much detail in).

Pretty sure the original pixel artists didn't base their art off of renders, it would have given a very different look even if they did trace over and clean up (look at KOF13 for this).

[Ed Oscuro]

Another quite visible early user of slightly edited rendered 3D was Raven Software (CyClones, Heretic, Hexen all show the process at a mature level, though it's there in Shadowcaster too). It is interesting that some companies were quite complacent about editing while others worked on it slavishly (and since I'm already offtopic, note that many areas of Riven now look terribly outdated given our greater familiarity with 3D worlds - and this despite many hours spent by the artists retouching images).

[ptoing]

As far as the backgrounds go there is surprisingly little 3D in many of the newer games. Also some enemies are more or less pixelled still. Examples being the main body of the stage 3 midboss in Galuda 2 and the stage 2 midboss in Akai Katana, which both are pretty static and have no rotating parts, etc.

I think most of the backgrounds these days are by Tanaka, judging from some interview, which also is linked somewhere here. They use a mix of pixel level detail digital painting, photosourcing and some 3D.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/155 ... stage1.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/155 ... stage3.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/155 ... stage5.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/155 ... stage1.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/155 ... stage2.png

Not much 3D here.

The PGM titles seem to have more 3D (esp Ketsui), one example of which I just noticed the other day, when playing some Akai Katana again. Stage 1 at the end clearly uses the same 3D asset for those crane things. And possibly the same water texture, hard to tell with how colour reduced the PGM stuff is.

But yeah, still lots of non 3D, at least for the backgrounds.

[Nguyen VinhLOC]

Similar sprites can be seen in Gekirindan.

Neo XYX in 2013 also have the same sprites either

[Lander]

Totally righteous bump, brah...

I always figured it was the 'pre rendered but good' factor. Take the quick route, then spend a bunch of time slavishly refining it into spritework.
Interesting to see Trap claim that there's little touching-up; that'd imply extremely nice 3D models, then? Something about the look just doesn't have that raw Neo Geo hardedge that's so common in prerenders.

[Lethe]

hgih qualty graphix from polish cave game