Street Fighter in Sumi-E

Back when I posted E.G.Y., Street Fighter IV was still in its early stages. There were only 2 videos available... a teaser of the opening sequence and a Ryu vs. Ken demo. There were only screenshots of Ryu and Ken, but it looked like something that was never done before. The intro. animation can be described as painting in motion. Each frame looked like a finished oil painting. The hits and fast motion were exaggerated with sumi-e ink splashed.


During gameplay, the characters look like carefully painted sculptures. They were definitely modeled in 3-D, but have a hand-painted quality to them. There must've been a tremendous amount of work put into this because I don't think it was merely 2-D textures mapped into 3-D models. It looks as if each individual frame was colored separately. So if you add this up so far... an oil painting is considered high art... a representation in 2 dimensions. A 3-D model, like a sculpture adds a 3rd dimension. Combining many images viewed in sequence created the illusion of motion and adds the element of time. Then when user inputs control different motions over time, the element of interactivity is added. All of these things could make Street Fighter IV the highest form of art to date!

Since my previous post, more of the characters have been developed. If you want to see what Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Guile, Honda, Dhalsim, Zangief and Blanka look like, check out IGN. At least we know the original 8 world warriors will be back in #4. I can't wait to see Sagat. He's the one I'm always most interested in because he's one of the largest video game sprites.