For those who haven’t seen it yet, Arcane really is beautiful to look at even if you don’t like LoL. It’s worth a watch just for the sheer level of art that went into many of the shots.
Unfortunately this article doesn’t provide much actual detail on the production process. From the descriptions here and watching the series, it seems to be what I’ll call “Borderlands on Steroids”. 3D camera, characters, and elements, but 2D matte paintings for backgrounds and hand-painted textures on everything to look pseudo-2D. The added 2D explosions and random elements are probably done in post. Great composition overall and very satisfying to watch.
Seconding this. I've never played LoL, and it has to be clearly said that the show is perfectly enjoyable without having any background. In fact, the plot twists will be more enjoyable if you know nothing about the game. So if anyone has doubts, seriously go watch this one. It's breathtakingly beautiful, but the story doesn't fall behind.
I agree with your comparison with Boderlands, But I also think XIII[1] was a pioneer of the said effects in a game(or at least from the ones I've played in early 2000s).
Arcane had similar impression on me as 'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse' did in terms of animation quality perhaps Arcane is even more visually appealing considering a personal bias for steam-punk(Arcane-punk seems to be a term now); Sound Engineering is great too.
Are we just talking about cel-shading here, or something more specific? cel-shading goes back at least to Jet Set Radio in 1999 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Set_Radio).
The whole thing actually looked eerie to me for a few episodes. It really looks like a moving painting in a way that I’ve not seen before. Worth a watch simply for the animation.
> "the backgrounds are digitally hand-painted and the texture on the characters is crafted to get that graphical look that fits with the environment. We also mainly use 2D animation for the FXs (explosions, tears, smoke...) to reinforce the painted look"
The animation style reminds me in a way to Spiderman - Into the Spiderverse style of animation, but with a totally different tone/style (Arcane being more "rough"/handpainted, flat and darker). Specially the battle scenes have a very similar composition between Spiderverse and Arcane, though again with its differences (Spiderverse seems more Japanese-like animation on steroids, while Arcane is more handpainted style).
You can’t make a plug-in since the approach is extremely hybrid. There are lots of things in arcane which are hand animated 2D animation and hand painted 2D backgrounds.
I'm personally quite curious as to how they managed to achieve such painterly lighting. Even with aggressive post processing and touch-ups, they had to have been doing some shader magic to achoeve the base of the effect.
Painters painted the textures. There's some simple lighting on top when necessary, but it's mostly old school hand painted textures. People have gotten used to viewing productions that use math (shaders) to emulate paintings and/or reality, which are incredible in their own right. But this is simply a team of extremely talented painters, who are masters of light, tasked with painting 3D models and tweaking textures per scene.
Just what I was looking for. IMHO Arcane marks a milestone progress in Animation technology.
Also glad that the article confirmed that they don't use MoCap. It was such a great choice. I recently watched another visually exquisite animation movie on Netflix (the one in the Bright universe). There they used completely flat shading to achieve toon look for characters and environment, but made the characters move with MoCap animations. It looked very eerie.
There's nothing new about the tech. It was just the willingness to go that far artistically. (am a 3d artist working in the industry)
Mitchell's vs the Machines and Into the Spider Verse are good examples of how the industry is slowly moving into allowing different styles of animation than the Pixar Standard.
God, it's been said a thousand and one times, but in case even one person reading this hasn't seen it: you have to watch Into the Spider-Verse. I remember my mouth literally falling open at some of those scenes, and I'm not even, like, particularly "into" animation or anything. Such a visually astounding movie (aside from everything else to love about it).
I agree. His character in the comics had a different design and was more noting imo. For example, in the movie when he’s complaining about his new school, he says “I’m only going here because I won that stupid lottery”, and his dad replies “you passed that entrance exam just like everybody else”. The comics also have the lottery but IIRC make no mention of an entrance exam. Lots of subtle changes like that added up to make him a much more sympathetic hero IMO
It's very surprising that in the 30 years of computer animation the sources of actual experimentation with the style come from ... Marvel and Riot Games.
Sony Animation ( who you misattributed to marvel) were already pushing animation style heavily. Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
There's also tons of animation variety from outside America. The issue is that in America, a lot of the style was defined by Pixar. Which was probably the biggest experiment of them all.
But even among the major studios, there's a lot of variety in style. Trolls is incredibly stylized and DreamWorks really pushed style far in Kung Fu Panda 2.
Even Pixar are now experimenting more with style with Luca and Turning Red.
This is also only considering feature film work. If you pay attention to shorts, there's a huge variety.
It comes down to Art Direction. Arcane and Spiderverse are expensive and require an insane amount of per shot bespoke work. A lot of people also tend to find hyper stylized content not as compelling. So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.
> Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
It's the same plasticky "Pixar style" as any other computer animated movie in the past 30 years. And I'm saying that as someone who enjoys the movie immensely.
> There's also tons of animation variety from outside America.
This is true, and it's my mistake not to mention this.
> So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.
Indeed. And that's why it's surprising to see experimentation to come from these two sources (Sony Animation may have made it, but it was Marvel who agreed to it: they guard their properties like hawks)
Are you simply talking about the shading style? Because otherwise there's nothing similar in style between Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and any Pixar film of that generation.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was very much pushing animation style dramatically at the time and brought a lot of Fleischer, UPA and Looney Tunes animation into 3D for the first time.
Regarding your point of Marvel agreeing to it: Sony still owns the rights to Spider-Man for a lot of domains. That was purely a Sony film with little to no Marvel input. Source: I worked on it.
The source of experimentation have been Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been pushing for experimentation ever since they directed the extremely successful Lego Movie.
They also did Cloudy with Meatballs.
They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.
Lord and Miller definitely like to push the style of their films, but a lot of the technology used to achieve that style from Sony is from trying to closely adapt the rubber hose animation style of Fleischer cartoons in an attempt for Sony to differentiate themselves as a studio.
They really pushed it in Hotel Transylvania, their next feature film, where they were bringing Genndy Tratakovsky's style to 3D.
The source of experimentation have been Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been pushing for experimentation ever since they directed the extremely successful Lego Movie.
They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.
It’s now part of their MO to push the envelope and have each of these films “be their own thing”.
Fortiche has no relationship with them, but they would have never been allowed to do what they did here without those films having been produced IMO.
If you’re interested to know more I recommend you listen to the Roger Deakins’ podcast with them.
Fortiche have been working on Arcane for almost seven years now. That predates Spider-verse being publicly known.
Additionally there have been tons of very stylized content pieces before that. Look at anything by Robert Valley, Alberto Mielgo or just look further out into European or Japanese animated work.
Certainly Spider-Verse helped prove the viability of a heavily stylized film, but Arcane would have existed without it.
A lot of what they did was being done in Gobelins films before (and I suspect Fortiche employs many Gobelins students)
Lord and Miller are fantastic and certainly push style. But I think you're attributing too much to them.
Before Chris and Phil did what they did, there was nothing but the Pixar Standard in Western CG studio animation.
The artists you cite are not part of the industry, and the whole point is how Chris+Phil changed attitudes in the industry. The overall world always knew other styles were possible. But the industry needed a jolt.
I won’t push it any further, but they pretty much changed the industry attitude on this. I am aware of Fortiche’s previous work, but it’s a long way from a few million dollars in cinematics to this.
Even the style that Fortiche ie using in Arcane only seems to have fully developed in their other work in the past 2/3 years.
Anyway sort of a meaningless discussion. Not trying to prove anything, just saying they were leaders in this space.
Both Robert and Alberto are fairly well regarded art directors. You're clearly not familiar with the industry, which is fine, but at least refrain from making statements like that.
The fact that you can credit them with it all and dismiss Alberto as not being part of the industry is depressing. I suggest actually seeing who the initial art director they hired for Spiderverse was.
Even before Lord and Miller, Shrek is a completely different style of film than Pixar was putting out.
There were tons of CG films even around the early 2000s and 2010s that were experimenting in style. They just failed to reach critical success or weren't as in your face about it,
Lord and Miller certainly made the best films that also embraced style, but you're entirely too dismissive of the other people in the space, while laying too much at the feet of Lord and Miller.
They're certainly amazing directors and pushed style in their films, but saying they gave the industry a jolt is retconning things. Spiderverse definitely moved the needle a ton, but it's more than just them.
This article really lacks a clip, or even just a trailer, to show this stuff in action.
There's a trailer pretty prominently featured at https://arcane.com/en-us/ if anyone wants one. Looks pretty nice though IMHO it feels like it'd work better as a Moving Painting with a lower frame-rate, the way Spider-Verse did - there is definitely such a thing as "too high" when it comes to framerates in stylized work.
I don't think any trailer can do Arcane justice. The animation style varies quite a bit across the series. (Not as much as Love+Death+Robots, but still quite a bit).
Without spoiling anything, I'll just say there's a large supply of scenes that are animated incredibly beautifully and in very unique ways. Arcane is the first series that made me cry PURELY from the beauty of the animation. (The plot is great, but nothing exceptional -- This is a series I love just for how well it's animated and how well it plays with its own music)
I agree. Assassins Creed Valhalla is also quite beautiful, but I still think Arcane is on another level in terms of composition, color palette, shapes, attention to detail, etc.
Original title: 'You don't have to play 'League of Legends' to enjoy the masterful animation of Netflix's 'Arcane'; Is an usual Mashable clickbait.
Subtitle: 'The series' director of animation takes us through exactly how they did it.'; Is better and I've condensed it.
Besides the title and source of the article it has some valuable information about how the animation studio blended the 2D, 3D and hand painting to deliver appropriate animation for the story without offending the game players who have invested in the characters.
I don't follow, what component of the original title is clickbait? "League of Legends" is relevant to Arcane (it's the basis for the show) and your edit removed it from the title.
But the context of the whole article was the interview with the animation director about how they managed the animation, I felt inclusion of "You don't have to play 'League of Legends'" in the title was a deliberate attempt to get reactions by pitting LoL players vs non-LoL players.
I absolutely adore Arcane for a ton of reasons, and it's gotten me very interested in the setting of Runeterra.
I am not a League of Legends player.
One of the things that I love about Arcane is the gorgeous and unique art style. It's just a beautiful series. Some of the sequences are jarring in their departure from the rest of the series, but in a good way - think gasp of delight, not immersion-breaking.
They just don’t run with any of their ideas anymore, and alas, Riot has a fucking whole TV show on Netflix. I won’t even link the superb WoW Warlords animated stories.
Blizzard has been the walking dead for a very long time now. They could very well be the Xerox of the video game industry. At that point of merger, they were big dogs in esports, and had the best rts, arpg, and mmo games out but they haven't done anything up to that level since then and have been completely incapable of capitalizing on their position, letting all of their advantages slip away.
They failed to capitalize on custom wc3 maps, so dota allstars spawns the moba genre with LoL, Dota2, smite, and countless others, tower defense games and other maps all spin off to make their own games. They make SC2's custom map functionality worse which cripples any chance for capturing further innovation.
They completely torpedo e sports with the release of SC2 which many consider just inferior to SC:BW, completely ignore WoW arena, or any kind of innovation at all with WoW, only releasing uninspired expansions to further milk addicts. Now players have gotten bored enough to jump ship to FFxiv and they are losing their cash cow. Lets not forget the entirely forgettable Warcraft movie too.
Even Overwatch was supposed to kill cs:go but it is basically treading water now, especially since the sequel was delayed and Jeff Kaplan has left. The pro league is a joke compared to the big names. HOTS was abruptly abandoned. Hearthstone was basically their only great success (but I assume is stagnating like everything else now), without it they basically have nothing which is why they have turned to remakes recently (and have failed spectacularly with wc3r and had to outsource d2r in response). They basically have nothing substantial until d4 or Overwatch 2, both of which were delayed until 2023 at the earliest. Now with all the workplace culture scandals they are hemorrhaging talent on top of everything and have effectively lost their position as one of the most desirable studios to work for in the industry.
I don't think Blizzard knows how to make good games anymore, that part died long ago.
The last battle on the bridge in Arcane has maybe 15-to-20 seconds of action, and it's more engaging, exciting and mesmerizing that... most anything in the past many years
That show is the most amazing show I've watched this year (along with Inside on Netflix). I highly recommend it, even if you're not into animated shows.
Also I played a lot of LOL back in the days, and I didn't remembered any of the characters or saw any link to the game. My SO has never played the game. So the relation to the game really stops at the subtitle (and the look of the characters).
Reading these comments. I did like it, overall, but not enough for breathless praise. I guess I’m the only one who found the series needlessly violent and forcing the plot points too much. It’s an overall trend I’ve noticed: tons of violence and almost no way to resolve conflict but with violence. Feels like a cultural shift toward war at times.
I have to say, I love the style, and the animation is certainly good, but after four episodes I realized I was in uncanny valley due to mouth animation.
The mouths mimic real movements but fail to do it properly, you can notice it especially when the lips should come together on plosive sounds.
Still, it's an entertaining show and I wish they'd do more like it.
Just watching the trailer I thought that this is by far the most beautiful animation I've ever seen. I can't imagine the amount of work it was to paint all this stuff. The only fault I found with it is the face animation. The beautiful faces move in a stiff way that seems out of place.
I was in awe the entire thing. Best animated series I've ever seen. Textures, animation, lightning, facial expressions, overall effects. Everything is top notch. I don't even play LoL and I was left wanting a single player game with all the characters.
The reading experience on the website is terrible. Scroll through ads to find content? And then automatically get redirected to another site before you can complete the whole thing (could’ve been a fat finger on my part because of the number of ads, but still).
It's not at all like that for me, probably because I have installed the basic tool that is necessary for using the web at all. Please, improve your life:
The big, unsolved problem there is that much of the 'look' relies on great camera composition and lighting specifically for that shot. This is something that's pretty specific to film and can't be recreated for games where the player is the one in charge of the camera.
To put it another way, even if the real-time renderer was every bit as good, a game wouldn't quite retain the same cinematic feeling except in some limited cases/genres.
Guilty Gear Strive (and also Xrd to a lesser extent) do a really, really good job of mimicking 2D animation while being entirely dynamic, 3D animation. Of course, as you said, a lot of that is because it’s a 2D fighting game. So the players have no control of the camera or lighting. Each character in a match has lighting hand applied separately from the other character and separate from the lighting of the environment, so they always have perfect lighting, even if it isn’t physically correct.
And just like how Arcane was in production for ~5 years, there is no secret to how Guilty Gear looks: it’s just a lot of hard artistic labor. It isn’t necessarily like the only thing preventing games from looking like Arcane is a hardware problem.
It all comes down to art direction. There's nothing technologically special about Arcane. In fact, a fully 3D game with the player in control of the camera wouldn't look as good because Arcane uses flat 2d backgrounds and billboards throughout. The artists are in full control of what you see in the production. In a game with an interactive camera, custom shot/color/light composition is lost and would only look as good as the best games already available today.
Although, I wonder if stylistically, Arcane will start a trend of bringing back texture heavy games with baked in lighting (as opposed to raytracing everything).
Pointing to a photorealistic image in response to a heavily nonphotorealistic and art directed show doesn't make much sense.
Arcane doesn't push the technology for graphics. You could get visuals like it in the PS3 or PS4 era .
What it does really well is art direction, a lot of which is cinematography. Games can do it already, it's just a matter of a studio wanting to commit to that style.
Unfortunately this article doesn’t provide much actual detail on the production process. From the descriptions here and watching the series, it seems to be what I’ll call “Borderlands on Steroids”. 3D camera, characters, and elements, but 2D matte paintings for backgrounds and hand-painted textures on everything to look pseudo-2D. The added 2D explosions and random elements are probably done in post. Great composition overall and very satisfying to watch.