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    2.5 Extra Dimension


    Dre

    By Dre | September 26, 2009

    So for a while now I’ve been on a personal pursuit to discovery the technique of which a few number of games use to animate their characters and scenes. The search has not been easy, but I finally figured out what it’s called and how it’s done.

    This animation technique is called 2.5 Extra Dimension.(2.5Ex.D) This technique is most noticeable in such games as Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade and even more noticeable in games made by Tinkle Bell.(NSFW!!!!!)

    I’ve even done a quick animation to show you more of what I’m referring to. Unfortunately I had to compress the file with the all mighty bolt of zeus.
    Click here to see!

    The reason I am so interested in this technique is because it gives very smooth animated results without having to depend on vectors(flash animation). As a result of that, one can achieve what can only be define as “living works of art”. The down side is the finished product comes out with a pretty huge file size.(hence the compression of the example)

    As I was searching for a tutorial or at least an explanation of the process, I kept coming up short. Thankfully I was finally able to put the small pieces together and conclude that the animation was being done with Adobe After Effect. I happen to already have this program but never used it.(animation is new ground for me) It has a pretty steep learning curve, especially if your ignorant to 3d meshing/animating in general; delightedly I was able to put together that simplistic example. There are still plenty of things I need to figure out, but the gist is understood.

    The process starts in Photoshop; draw and color the image which ever way you want and flatten the image once it’s done. Cut and separate all the parts of the image by layers you want to be animated. This is very important, make sure you have them all on different layers.(ex. separate the mouth from the heard with different layers) Once you’re done, save it as a .psd with a different file name and open up After Effect.

    In AF, import that .psd and it should show up with all the different layers separated as it was in Photoshop. Honestly, at this point if you are unfamiliar with AF it would be best to take some time to look around menus and search up on some tutorials.(that’s what I plan to do) Basically, I took the separate layer images and warped them to give the illusion of living images. AF is able to produce this with perfect Photoshop quality output. There are a BUNCH of effects this program offers, not only that but you can alter these different layers on a 3 dimensional plan; giving it the illusion of moving through the image.(living art!)

    So, what does this all mean for me? Well, not much yet. I plan to look more into this technique but for the time being, I just wanted to show off the results of my crusade.

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