Following a popular talk at this year’s GDC which discussed the art direction for Street Fighter V, Capcom have released part of their internal anatomy guide for everyone to read. Called “Anatomy: a strange guide for artists,” this document was designed during the height of the pixel art era, showing artists at Capcom the most important areas to exaggerate when creating character sprites.
The portion of the guide mainly focus on the male body, showing artists how to draw and animate characters. Focusing on specific body parts like the arms, shoulders and legs, the document shows how artists can elongate, shorten or otherwise exaggerate these body parts to create art which is both informative and cool to look at. While it is all in Japanese, the very existence of this guide shows just how much care went into designing character sprites for games like Darkstalkers and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Even though Capcom has left sprite art behind, the document is still used to teach new artists about Capcom’s “house style” when it comes to animating characters. The guide was actually created around the time of the Street Fighter Alpha series, and the first Darkstalkers game, explaining why Demitri is on the cover. Several famous Capcom artists collaborated on the guide, with Akiman acting as the editor.
The whole GDC talk is a must-watch if you’re interested in character and art design for fighting games, as it tracks Capcom’s process in refining Street Fighter V’s character art. It also touches on how Capcom’s artists would carefully exaggerate certain elements of character anatomy–a length of an arm, size of a muscle, the curvature of a spine–in order to present as much information to the player as quickly as possible.
Sources: CFN Portal via Madman’s Cafe; GDC Vault
