totally - they lowered quality to get under the bar >_<
shading quality was most definitely lowered
"So, we turned to Udon to help solve this problem. First, they identified that all of us (Capcom and Udon) were aiming way too high with our render style. In the original style, we were going using at least 6-8 tones to go from the darkest to the lightest values of a particular color. This, as some fans actually pointed out, is extremely hard to do. We decided to stick it out and go with that route and unfortunately, it didn’t work out too well.
Udon’s suggestion was to take the tones down to about 4. So now, a particular color will go through about 4 shades when going to light to dark. Some tweaking was also done to the line art to match this new rendering style as well. The overall result is a different style that is still going to be in full HD, but will be more efficient to animate and therefore get the game to you guys sooner. It also looks pretty damned good.
Once Udon and Capcom agreed to go with that route, we had to essentially reboot the whole art pipeline. The character art pretty much started over from scratch with new reference art from Udon. Using lessons we learned from the start of the project we are now using a team that utilizes more Udon talent and an outsource partner (still very necessary) that uses a smaller, but more focused group of artists."
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