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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 would add to this: playing LoL and knowing the characters and story doesn't add that much to the experience. It feels very much like its own thing.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XIII_(2003_video_game)

I think Into the Spider-Verse was amazing, but Arcane's story is more adult.

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).

I meant the combination of 2D, 3D and hand drawn elements.

Borderlands really shouldn't be the one getting credit for this art style. Codehunters was first: https://vimeo.com/7432584

Reminded me of Afro Samurai, but I see that AS came out a year later than Codehunters.

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.

It does say a bit:

> "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).

whoever manages to make a blender plugin mimicking this is going to be FAMOUS (on blender.stackexchange.com)

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.

You do every shot differently. That’s the only way. That’s how they did Spider Verse.

Basically - time and money. And willingness to spend it.

A bit lacking on the plot, but for animation and art direction - not bad at all.

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