I love you all to death (Just so I can smash bros with you) (SSBWiiU/3DS)

[alexmach1]

The only part that I would say Tropical Freeze has the upperhand visually over Smash is the fur. But IIRC, the reason Tropical Freeze is more visually appealing is because of the fact it uses particle effects for the fur, compared to Smash using polygons. Kinda comparing apples to oranges here

Just going to clear this up, in games particle effects are never used for fur. DK Tropical Freeze uses the same method as smash, as well as polygons on the edges of the fur to blend the effect better. It looks better in Freeze because DK is the main character model, and thus appears on the screen most of the time; artists have to give it the most attention and detail, whereas in Smash Bros there is no real main character model, so they each receive an equal amount of detail(albeit lower than Tropical Freeze due to the amount of objects onscreen at a time)

For clarification, this method is highly used across many games. Here's a good video explaining the effect. Polygon layers are stacked on top of eachother at different distances, then given a transparent layer texture to emulate individual hairs while saving on polygon count.


The effect becomes most visible at closer views, as the polygon layers are visible near the hands in this screenshot:


For further clarification, Smash Bros 4 uses around 3-5 layers for the fur on all characters whereas DK from Tropical Freeze has about 6-10.