Arc System Works, creators of the Guilty Gear fighting game series, went to great lengths to faithfully recreate the look of its 2D fighting game in 3D for Guilty Gear Xrd Sign, a painstaking process that technical artist Junya C. Motomura detailed at this year's Game Developers Conference.
In the video above, which was recently added to GDC's YouTube channel, Motomura describes the process of adapting Guilty Gear's 480p resolution 2D sprites to 1080p resolution 3D models for Guilty Gear Xrd Sign. The team at Arc System Works adhered to certain tenets in crafting believable cel-shading techniques for its latest fighting game, notably to "kill everything 3D." In other words, Motomura and team endeavored to make its 3D models look like hi-res 2D sprites with intentionally limited animation, character-specific lighting and hand-keyed animation during cutscenes and close-ups.
Motomura's talk is technical in nature, but still worth a watch if you're a fighting game fan or simply appreciated Guilty Gear Xrd Sign's stunning 3D graphics.
Guilty Gear Xrd Sign was released for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 in December.
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