But is 3D needed at all?

But is 3D needed at all?

Posted Feb 22, 2006 21:22 UTC (Wed) by amikins (guest, #451)
In reply to: But is 3D needed at all? by nlucas
Parent article: Toward a free metaverse

Techniques for 3d models of entities have progressed to the point where it is actually more effective and efficient to define a simple 3d model with textures and animate accordingly than produce the numerous single frames needed for 2d "sprites". The quality of image and smoothness of animation is increased even with a fixed camera angle.
Interestingly, with certain situations, it's possible to achieve similar quality to prerendered 2d sprites with an overall -lower- memory footprint; with pre-rendered images, if you have a sufficient number of possible options, you've got a lot of rastered images to throw around. With a 3d model, all you have to worry about is the model itself, the textures for the model, and the animation definitions.
The use of 3d for what traditionally was 2d is not that senseless.
That's not to say 3d isn't used inappropriately at times -- I, too, have seen many games using 3d hardware as essentially a blitting mechanism -- but there -is- value here, used correctly.

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