When the sprite graphics in a Video Game are made by conversion of an image created externally (such as a photograph, CGI render, hand-drawn artwork, video feed, etc.) into a sprite, as opposed to the pixel art methods typically associated with the creation of video game sprites. When photography is used, the photos could be anything from Real Life pictures, to actors, to Stop Motion (e.g. Claymation models). This can actually save a lot of time and effort in the production cycle, but the results are often not as pleasing (particularly with photos).
This was popular in the The '90s (The 16-bit Era of Console Video Games) before processing power and tech prices could make Polygonal Graphics practical for home computers and video game consoles. The process could actually make more detailed graphics than many of the early polygon-capable game systems since it was taking more advanced CGI and converting it to 2D images — as a result, even some games in The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games took advantage of the technique.
The practice largely died out around the Turn of the Millennium as consoles became powerful enough to produce real-time 3D graphics that looked better than converted sprites did. The Game Boy Advance, which had the same specs as 16-bit consoles, was the last platform where the style was common. Other examples after the end of the '90s are rare. There are Retraux examples that deliberately try to evoke the look of older games, but the style has not had the same widespread nostalgic resurgence as other forms of pixel art.
Compare Sprite/Polygon Mix (and can overlap if the sprites or bitmaps are also digitized). Also compare Pre-Rendered Graphics.
Examples:
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Adventure Games
- Sierra used this technique heavily in their '90s adventure games, though the artists would usually touch up the sprites in their paint programs. They did this heavily in games like King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow but left the sprites largely untouched for the Police Quest games to fit the series' more naturalistic setting. Phantasmagoria also seems to drift back and forth between digitized actor sprites and heavily Chroma Keyed Live Action.
- Eclipsium prominiently features an animated sprite of the protagonist's hand that's made out of live action footage and this can include held items (ranging from a bucket to a giant key) and even special effects depicting the Lovecraftian Superpowers. The sprite is pixelated and dithered to fit in with the rest of the game's Retraux aesthethic.
- The Game Boy Advance video game adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe uses digitized sprites for player characters and backgrounds.
- The Neverhood's graphics were done using claymation. The CD includes a "behind-the-scenes" video showing how the claymation and CGI were created.
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds uses actual 3D models almost everywhere, but the wild audience of the Treacherous Tower is pre-rendered, to avoid rendering too many characters in addition to the (already numerous) monsters in the arena with you.
- Toonstruck has sprites for the protagonist Drew Blanc made by filming Christopher Lloyd in a brown jacket.
- Zelda's Adventure's human sprites are made from overhead photos of the developer's office staff, while non-human characters use clay models.
Beat 'em Up
- Power Rangers:
- Mighty Morphin Power Rangers - The cutscenes for the Genesis and Game Gear versions use these.
- Power Rangers Time Force - The Game Boy Advance version has digitized screenshot scans and promotional art for non-gameplay screens and 3D models for gameplay sprites.
- Power Rangers Wild Force - Same as above.
- Power Rangers Ninja Storm - Same as above.
- Power Rangers Dino Thunder - Same as above.
- Power Rangers S.P.D. - Same as above.
- Streets of Fury uses high-definition sprites of live-action characters, sometimes with a color filter for enemy variants.
Fighting Games
- Avengers in Galactic Storm by Data East has sprites pre-rendered out of 3D models in order to differentiate themselves from Capcom's Marvel-licensed Fighting Games and their drawn sprites.
- The Batman Forever Licensed Game by Midway Games uses this, which coupled with the controls being very similar to the ones from Midway's own early Mortal Kombat games inadverently makes it kind of a spiritual precedessor to their later Mortal Kombat Mythologies.
- Battle Monsters is another Japanese Mortal Kombat Klone from the same makers of Survival Arts and likewise they digitize live-action performers.
- Blade Strangers has sprites pre-rendered out of 3D models, with the lack of anti-aliasing and other effort to clean the sprites making them look a bit rough.
- Studio Saizensen's previous fighting game effort - Blade Arcus From Shining - also uses the Digitized sprites aproach.
- ClayFighter used actual clay models, ones that in the first and third games were made and animated by Danger Productions. This was part of the reason the decision to make it a fighting game was made, feeling the genre's large characters were well-suited to the medium.
- Taito's Dino Rex has digitized dinosaur models.
- Dong Dong Never Die has the entire cast be digitized. Most of the cast are recorded in live acition by real people, and there are also prerendered-out-of-3D-models appearances of Huo Chai Ren, Mario and Inugami Korone.
- Jackie Chan: The Kung-Fu Master features live action digitization of not just the titular actor, the rest of the cast (except for the Mysterious Lion) all have been portrayed by actors and martial artists that showed up in a film of his.
- Killer Instinct was made using digitized sprites from pre-rendered models and motion capture of character designer Kevin Bayless who modelled some of the moves.
- The Mortal Kombat series started out this way, with sprites and animations based on filming live actor performances. Most of the more "monstrous" fighters, such as the Shokan, were made with clay models.
- One Must Fall 2097 has the HARs and the fight backgrounds prerendered out of 3D graphics, contrasting with the hand-drawn Animesque appearance of the pilots and the news anchor.
- Done for the character sprites for Persona 4 Arena, according to an interview.
- Pit-Fighter used sprites and animations based on filming live actor performances
- Primal Rage uses digitized stop-motion figures as sprites.
- Ragnagard is a Neo Geo fighting game that features prerendered CG characters. In an interview
, the designer Hiroaki Fujimoto initially wanted to go with traditional animation, but the higher ups that have witnessed the likes of Donkey Kong Country saw the prerendered graphics as a more effective time saving measure.
- Rise of the Robots uses pre-rendered 3D models, and the hype machine derived a lot out of this fact.note
- Street Fighter: The Movie uses sprites made from live-action actors with the game's attract mode going as far as to promote the cast. Most of the actors from the movie reprised their roles for this gamenote , with some of them wearing outfits more faithful to the franchise, and it was a bit of a challenge for some of the actors to perform their characters' more outlandish moves.
- Survival Arts is a Japanese Mortal Kombat Klone and similarly used digitized sprites from filming live actors. There are no clone fighters such as Subzero/Scorpion, but the budget was crap so the costumes were often worse than the first Mortal Kombat.
- Tattoo Assassins used sprites and animations based on filming live actor performances, with some of the design elements like the titular Tattoos being rather obviously pixel painted on top of the frames.
- Twin Goddesses: Three of the eight fighters are rendered this way. Those being the co-protagonists Nina and Syllin as well as the main antagonist Carmilla. All other fighters are made in a 2D hand-drawn art style.
- Way of the Warrior used sprites and animations based on filming live actor performances
- Some of the late-90's WWF arcade games such as In Your House featured sprites of the actual wrestlers like Bret Hart and The Undertaker.
- X-Perts (Beat 'em Up Spin-Off of Eternal Champions) has characters prerendered out of 3D graphics while keeping the backgrounds in traditional pixel art.
- The Untouchable, an obscure Mac game which, much like Mortal Kombat, filmed its actors and digitized them in the game. Some of the actors are acomplished martial artists in themselves, with some of their characters' more complicated moves displaying some impressive choreography. The developers did commit some mistakes in their aproach to live action fighting however, including the way the game handles sweeps, whose animations include the actors just hearing the cue to jump themselves tripping, something that could have rectified with editing the animations to start at the exact time they jump.
- Bikini Karate Babes by the same developer as The Untouchable has the same aproach. They did introduce throws, for which they have recorded seperate footage for every single combination of the characters throwing each and every single of the opponents.
First Person Shooters
- Alien Vs Predator for the Atari Jaguar used live-action actors for the human characters and physical models for the weapons and Alien/Predator characters.
- Some of the monsters from Doom (1993) and Doom II were first created as clay, 3D, or latex models which were photographed and then rendered into sprites. The weapon sprites in the early Doom games were also based on and retouched out of photographs of toy guns, as well as the very real chainsaw Tom Hall's then girlfriend used to own. In mods, it's common to see weapons from modern 3D games imported into Doom via the same technique.
- In Dead Trash all enemies are animated in this manner, being photos of real-life actors crudely animated with frames countable on one hand to give it that 90's retraux look.
- Rise of the Triad used the Apogee staff in costumes to create the enemies. Tom Hall played the final boss.
- Blood (1997) also used detailed models for all the monsters. More info about the work process can be found here.
- Killing Time for the 3DO used live action actors for the various enemies as well as physical props for the weapons. The PC port replaced them with lower resolution, more traditionally made weapons and enemies on par with other games in the genre like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D.
- PowerSlave used model puppets for monsters in a similar way to Blood.
- The first Dark Forces game was populated using these. It's easy to tell what's rotoscoped, what's hand-drawn, and what's a digitized render by the light levels of the sprites. Sprites with minimal lighting like those of the Dianoga and Gammorean Guard are drawn, moderately shaded human enemy sprites are rotoscoped, and the highly shiny droid enemy sprites are taken from renders.
- Brazilian FPS Hades 2 used actors and costumes for the majority of its sprites, The rest being renders.
- Harmony (2009), A standalone Zdoom engine game that uses painted clay figures and models for all of its graphics.
- As detailed in this Dev Blog, Ion Fury carries on the tradition of the mid-90s FPS with character sprites starting out as pre-rendered 3D models then overpainted on top of the renders.
- System Shock features sprites for several enemies made from pre-rendered 3D models.
Light Gun Games
- Area 51 (Arcade) used actors for the human enemies/allies and stop motion animation for the alien enemies.
- Lethal Enforcers 1 and its sequel, Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters. Lethal Enforcers 3, released in 2005, would switch to polygonal graphics.
- Operation Wolf 3
- Revolution X
Platform Games
- The Sega Genesis and Game Gear game Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble features these.
- All graphics elements (sprites and backgrounds alike) from the first three Donkey Kong Country games were created from renders of 3D models created and animated on expensive SGI workstations.note
- DK: Jungle Climber also uses this same technique for its sprites.
- Vectorman: The title character and nearly everything is made of polygon graphics turned into sprites.
- Gargoyles on the Genesis used this to contrast the futuristic machine enemies with the hand-drawn sprites of enemies from Goliath's original time.
- Iji's sprites are 3D models from Blender, rendered with flat-shading.
- Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island used the technique for the opposite effect, with the artists scanning hand-drawn sketches and manually drawing sprites over those to get the look of a storybook. The opening cutscene does use the more traditional CGI application popularized by Donkey Kong Country.
- The first Mario vs. Donkey Kong game features 3D models digitized as sprites in the same vein as the SNES Donkey Kong Country trilogy. This can be seen with Mario, Donkey Kong, the Toads, and the Mini Marios, where they clash against some of the other sprites like the backgrounds, items, and enemies.
- Kirby's Dream Land 3 also used the Yoshi's Island technique, where its sprites were drawn in pastels first before they were digitally scanned to be inserted into the game. The style is so thorough that the whole game looks like a chalk drawing, even the menu screens. Some of the original drawings were showcased in the booklet included with Kirby's Dream Collection.
- Toy Story (Disney Interactive) had sprites based on the CG models used in the film.
- Many of Disney's video games throughout the '90s such as Aladdin and The Lion King used cels drawn by Disney's film animation team drawn specifically for the game.
- Sprites in Wario Land: Shake It! used hand-drawn animated cells.
- Mischief Makers does this along with Sprite/Polygon Mix.
- Castle of Magic actually gives this ability to the player. They can take photos of real-world objects and turn them into sprites in the game, for everything from the basic gem pickups to the bosses' heads.
- Penguin Brothers: Many enemy sprites are obviously digitized 3D models, as are the zoomed-out versions of the player characters.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- The Mega Drive-era games tended to use pre-rendered 3D models for pseudo-3D bonus levels. Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles also used prerenders of Sonic and Knuckles for the title screens.
- Sonic 3D Blast, having isometric gameplay, used the technique for the entirety of its graphics.
- Sonic Blast, being released around the same time as 3D Blast and near the end of the Game Gear's lifespan, is a 2D side-scroller that experiments with pre-rendered graphics, with limited success given the reduced horsepower behind the system.
- Sonic X-treme was going to have polygonal levels, but it would have used prerendered sprites for player characters and enemies. After its cancellation, Sonic's Schoolhouse recycled Sonic's sprites, in addition to using prerendered graphics for other characters.
Puzzle Games
- In Uncle Albert's Adventures, The sprites for every animal and a few objects are made out of 3D models.
Racing Games
- Mario Kart: Super Circuit and Mario Kart 64 both use digitized sprites for racers and items.
Real Time Strategy
- Age of Empires I and Age of Empires II used CGI Renderings for trees, animals, buildings, and units alike.
- Star Craft uses CGI renders for its buildings, units and landscapes. The 2017 remaster also uses pre-rendered sprites but with a much higher resolution. However, the renders used for the original game had been lost, so most of the assets had to be recreated again from scratch. Some were reused from StarCraft II.
- The first two games of the Total War series, Shogun and Medieval, used CGI Renderings for every unit.
Role-Playing Games
- Cosmic Star Heroine for the most part uses pixel art, but some ships are 3D models converted into sprites.
- Deltarune: The Arc Villain of Chapter 3, Mr. "Ant" Tenna, has quite the Non-Standard Character Design compared to the others. Unlike most characters, who are represented in pixelated flat-color sprites, Tenna is a digitized 3D model who has a higher frame count when moving, compared to the more static movements of the cast.
- Nihon Falcom made character and enemy sprites in The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, Ys: The Oath in Felghana and Ys Origin by digitizing 3D models.
- Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 use 3D models converted into sprites for all of their graphics. The sole exception were talking heads, created from clay models painstakingly digitized into 3D and then saved as sprites.
- Early installments of the Final Fantasy series feature monster graphics generated by directly scanning the artwork into the game.
- The Golden Sun games on the Game Boy Advance digitized most of their sprites.
- A modern example: Project Zomboid uses this as a Retraux.
- The Enhanced Remake of Quest for Glory I used clay models for its in-battle monster graphics.
- Super Mario RPG, much like Donkey Kong Country, derives its sprite and environment graphics from pre-rendered CGI models.
Shoot 'em Up
- Most CAVE shmups starting with Espgaluda II feature 3D models that are digitized as sprites. When these games got ported to home consoles, these ports added console-exclusive modes with higher-resolution sprites to take advantage of HD displays, although most of these ports still feature "Arcade" modes that recreate the lower resolution of the arcade originals.
- Cho Aniki: Kyuukyoku Muteki Ginga Saikyou Otoko. There is a short video in the main menu showing how the digitizing were created.
- Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire has many enemies, particularly bosses, made of prerendered polygonal models.
- Silpheed for the Sega CD FMVs with prerendered 3d objects for the backgrounds, while the player character and enemies were polygons rendered in real time.
- Stardust by Bloodhouse (one half of what would later become Housemarque) marked itself as one of the earliest computer games (coming out for the then six-year old Amiga machines) with sprites made out of prerendered 3D models, with their use of colors giving the game a distinct visual identity.
- The Reap, Housemarque's later isometric Shoot 'em Up carries on with the pre-rendered graphics aproach while still running on a 2D game engine.
- Platypus features everything from ships to scenery being made from clay figures.
Simulation
- Factorio uses 2D sprites created from highly-detailed 3D models for a retraux aesthetic resembling late '90s/early 2000s computer strategy games. It's Justified, considering the very intricate moving parts of almost every machine that would bog down most computers if there were tens or hundreds of them onscreen as individual 3D models, which considering the main gameplay would almost be guaranteed to amass that many contraptions.
- RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and 2 use screencapped 3D for its vehicles and most scenery, while everything else was standard sprites. Seen here.
- In several of the Forza Motorsport games the crowds are flat sprites with copypasted photos of the developers.
- SimCity 4 superimposes pre-rendered building sprites over low-poly 3D models. This can be revealed by modding the camera◊.
Wide Open Sandbox
- Saints Row IV has the mission Saints of Rage, where The President goes into a 16-bit side-scroller to rescue Johnny Gat. However this is actually an Inverted Trope, as technically the game is still in 3D (and given massive filter to make it look blurry, choppy, and low quality) as your customized protagonist appeared with your currently equipped outfit in the mission, just having a large Genre Shift just for the one mission alone. It's all, naturally, Lampshaded, and comes complete with choppy sound bites and nonsensical food healing items. With modding, you can even walk around the Saints of Rage zone in third person.
- Cards in VOIMA are animated gifs that are based off of 3d models made for the game. They are used to portray creatures and craftable items(but not blocks or slabs, which are portrayed with voxels instead).
Other
- American Girls Premiere and its predecessor, Opening Night, used chroma-keyed footage from live actors and props, with the former using the American Girl catalog along with actors dressed as characters from the franchise, and the latter using generic characters, sets, and props. It wasn't as refined as Mortal Kombat's though, as the characters were poorly chroma-keyed, and was grainier due to the dithered 256-colour palette.
- Jack King-Spooner, the developer behind the likes of Judero, does graphics for most of his games out of photographing real tactile objects, whenever would it be found objects, action figures that have been repurposed/modified for the final design, or clay models built, painted and posed out of scratch.
"I often feel a bit distanced from the art of videogames because it's not immediately clear how they were made and somehow I feel that the humanity is kept at arm's length. Not everyone knows what a normal map is or UV mapping but most people have squished some clay."
- Sociolotron sprites are still renders of 3D models at various animation frames. The independent developer didn't have the artistry to illustrate the full graphic set needed to animate the characters, and at the time most systems and internet connections didn't have the speed to render huge communities of 3D animated models. It was a necessary compromise that has lingered while the developer focuses on game mechanics and setting instead.