Wrong approach to making a Guyver game.

[*V Guyver]

For a number of years now, I've seen various attempts by different people to try and create a Guyver game, and much of it with mixed results. The firs problem is designing the game, but the second problem, which is probably the hardest thing and easiest to give up on is creating the material. 

In just about every game we've had people create art, sprites, and CGI from scratch. All intent on making a good game. What people under estimate is the difficulty in drawing or constructing a Guyver, let alone all the complex Zoanoids. So it dawned on me... we've all been going at it the hard way. A few of us have the actual poseable figures from the Guyver. Considering the simple editing I've shown you can do to erase some of the obvious plastic sections, and if you lower the colors, you can effectively turn the toys/models into actual sprites. 

So here is what I suggest as an experiment, take a Guyver figure, set some correct lighting on a pure white none reflective background, and bit by bit, attempt to create an animated gif of the character as if it were walking. From there we can actually test out weather or not this is a good quality, faster method of creating a basis for guyver games. I intend to make my own experiment on this, but with a different figure since  fully poseable Guyvers would break my bank. But I am considering trying out a Spartan figure due to all the detail and price.

There are hurdles to all this though, not all figures can do this, some have to be in an angle, there is a need for patience and skill, and a Need to study how to do the animation by using a chart or a sprite sheet from a game to help figure out the correct frames and motions, but it's very doable. Also, unlike the majority of action figures, the Guyver's aren't as obvious in having joins as say... WWE wreslting toys. Another set of toys that are also pretty good base models for what I have in mind is Gundam toys. 

A basis for animation is not too hard to follow. 






If you want an example of games with stop motion animation, look up Clay Fighter for the genesis or N64.

Oh and this also brings into mind my earnest desire to see Guyver on Robot Chicken... preferably with the Robot Chicken Nerd in the Armor.

 

[odin]

I'm familiar with this concept, you can get the same effect by just using someone as a model and make him pose in a green screen and take photos or videos of the person moving, it is the same technique used by developers of old who made games like Prince of Persia or Karateka hence why they had such fluid animations, no matter what technique you use you still have to make the sprites or models from scratch, that is the great disadvantage for a series such as the guyver, there is no such game related resources for people to make fan games hence why I started the Guyver Rebirth project, to create those resources.

[*V Guyver]

That's a given, but after watching Rueben Kee's (god bless his soul though he left us too early) work on Dragon Claw, I realized that it was more simple in converting it than I had originally thought. Don't get me wrong, still hard work, and lots of editing and frames, but it has the potential to cut out a good portion of the labor in the process of creating the sprites.

After he had created his 3D model and animated it, he lowered the colors for a 2D sprite, and the animation was very smooth. This is what I'm going to try out, to see if it's feasible with an action figure.

Thinking back, I wonder why i didn't think of this earlier. I actually considered what you mentioned, me up against a wall doing poses, and later drawing over them to get some animations down as a Guyver set up. Than I realized, I'm a lousy artist, hardly practice, and i'm much better at graphics editing on a computer.

[*Jess♥]

Best make sure you think carefully about lighting. That's big drawback number one.

drawback number two is the joints on your figure. if you're not careful you could weaken them. I damaged the joint on my figure by posing it too much.

drawback number three is the difficulty you will encounter getting the pose exactly right.

following the diagram above will make guyver look stupid. guyver has a different method of walking, different weight distribution etc.

 

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with anyway

[odin]

best of luck with that then, I would do the same thing but I don't have a figure with the articulation needed for the guyvers fighting style so I will just keep doing it the old fashioned way.

[*V Guyver]

Best make sure you think carefully about lighting. That's big drawback number one.

drawback number two is the joints on your figure. if you're not careful you could weaken them. I damaged the joint on my figure by posing it too much.

drawback number three is the difficulty you will encounter getting the pose exactly right.

following the diagram above will make guyver look stupid. guyver has a different method of walking, different weight distribution etc.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with anyway

Yeah, I was thinking about that too, wasn't too sure how durable they are. It knew that there were some limitations, but from what I've seen, they are flexible enough, and the range of motion can be made up for. For example, I already knew the head,like most action figures is incapable of looking in a range of directions. So I planned to keep the basic animations with a standard head position, and later animations, which required limbs or the head to exceed their built range, I could just edit the positions in photoshop. The joints can be edited too to make them less obvious, and lighting like you pointed out could be a problem, but that's what trifolds are for, light control.

Whenever Robot Chicken converted a character for their animation, they had to essentially destroy the figures joints and build new ones to make them usable. I wont be doing that to a figure, god forgive a $300 guyver figure, but, for other figures it's possible to look into. Another option I can consider is to dismantle a figure. Once dismantled, i can take shots of each part, convert them, and than recombine them on photoshop in any manner I want. If you want an example of something taken apart and than recombined for animation, I suggest you look at Gundam battle Assault II.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oob5mz8DUB0