![cuphead drawings cuphead drawings](https://pm1.narvii.com/6702/7392b2de3d1b51512264de75229300025bf6bc1a_hq.jpg)
The team only had five full-time animators, one background artist and one digital painter the assets in Cuphead are scanned in digitally once they have been drawn and inked to then be coloured in Photoshop, and that's the one and only modern conceit the team has had to make in the interest of actually ever getting Cuphead finished – the process of inking onto transparent cells and painting directly onto the back of the glass is pretty messy and very expensive, and the last thing the studio needed was any more complications to its design process.īut the results are immediately impressive. Marija is responsible, not only for production, but also for inking and cleaning up close to every single art asset you are likely to see in Cuphead. It's a truly impressive work of art complex and delivered with care, in every aspect of its very being. Most modern games will feature animation loops, but AAA studios do their best to hide them, Cuphead does the opposite, revelling in the chaos that such a combination creates. So, for every one second there will be 24 individually-drawn frames, and they would just loop within that to make it 60 frames per second," she says, which is how Cuphead is able to get that strange, unhinged, almost David Lynchian-vibe to its movements. "In wanting to remain as authentic as possible to how they did things in the '30s we thought it was really important to be animating at 24 frames per second. Studio MDHR splits the rate in which the game's animations actively play (24 frames per second, the speed of traditional film and era-appropriate cartoons) from the actual framerate that the game runs and plays in (60 frames per second, to ensure smooth, fluid and precise action). "If there is an attack in the game that is fully animated but it isn't fluid or it doesn't fit well it will get scrapped and we will start over."Ĭomplicating matters further is the way in which Cuphead deals with framerate.
![cuphead drawings cuphead drawings](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/4e/68/49/4e68496930db96dc4224ed72b40771e6.jpg)
Which, given the speed of the moment-to-moment play and the rapid pace that the screen will typically fill with all manner of projectiles, is pretty wild. We never wanted to submit to the desire to just rush it, to do the work quickly to get Cuphead out there," she continues, going on to note that some attacks could involve upwards of 30 frames of animation to execute. "We just wanted to make a game that we loved, that we could be proud of. "We said 'all right, let's go all in! Let's go big or go home" Marija Moldenhauer, Studio MDHR "It's definitely been a labour of love," Marija laughs, an understatement if I've ever heard one, adding, "oh, and a lot of paper." There's a somewhat disruptive, anarchistic feel to the development of Cuphead. This is not how video games are traditionally made this isn't even how cartoons are made anymore. If you were to see a maniacal carrot bearing hammers for hands spinning 360, for example, that isn't a 3D image being spun artificially in software, that's individual frames for each stage of the rotation – each of them needs to be individually drawn, inked, and coloured before being inserted into the game for that animation to be constructed and, eventually, played. Levels, characters, bosses, attacks and their animations, everything, is done by hand.
![cuphead drawings cuphead drawings](https://www.drawingtutorials101.com/drawing-tutorials/Video-Games/Cuphead/grim-matchstick/how-to-draw-Grim-Matchstick-from-Cuphead-step-0.png)
In order to really nail that aesthetic authentically, Studio MDHR would adopt the same production techniques that Fleischer and Disney popularised in the early '30s every single asset and animation – motion, movement and action – that you see in the game started life as a pencil drawing on a piece of paper. Cuphead is heavily inspired by vintage Fleischer Studios and Disney hand-drawn animation, by the works of ComiColor, Van Beuren, Columbia Pictures, Copley Pictures and many more. But the reality is that this process is painstaking.