Vfx/animated cloth on Shinobi PS2 - How did it work?

GravityBwlast

Hey guys,

Not used to post in this part of the forums, but I have a question.
I have been watching some old Ps2 Shinobi gameplay and was amazed by their vfx tech, especially on the scarf of the character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBtlmpxTVhg

It doesn't look physics based or even geometry (just my observation, I don't know sh- about vfx) 
Do you guys have an idea how they achieved this? It's PS2 dammit and it looks so good. I love the level of stylization they have that would be possible with just physics I think.

Have a good day folks!

Ace-Angel

The easiest way would be to create a 'tracer' effect in the game either via the game engine if allowed or through the shader, kinda like many particle effects back in the PS2 game days, where things followed a node (say in this case, the face) and would register every X seconds the interval of the animation and position you were in. From there, the scarf would 'drag' along these 'splines' (if you will) with each part of the scarf having it's own delay on it, kinda like a gradient fall off.

More modern day examples would be when a player has a sword that they swing which created a screen distortion effect, although these ones are much simpler due to their usage and not on par with the scarfs more artistic use.

The only real issues I have is it seems most videos from the game are really low quality, so I can't tell if they were using some kind of fake camera particle system or an actual model, otherwise that scarf looks WAY too smooth for the PS2 era (which might explain the the very empty environments since the scarf wouldn't be playing havok with the performance). They might be using some extra polygons to help I guess with a Smooth-Step curvature  so the scarf isn't jutting in a linear fashion from position to position, but I'm not sure.

RN

At 3:48 you can see it closer. A wild guess is that, besides the scarf being a ribbon mesh that's animated procedurally (to make that delay effect like @Ace-Angel explained), there might be some texture warping as well, like from a DuDv map as explained in this article, for some added waviness.

GravityBwlast

Thanks a lot for the replies guys, exactly what I was looking for!
Cheers