Thread by @EIectroDev

This is unironically a great example of automation vs manual work
I'll explain why this happens and the pros and cons of each cus it's really cool🧵

https://twitter.com/SBLAST91/status/1815383998916415791

In splatoon 1, hair physics are seemingly hand animated, it's not noticeable for small animation but in more extreme ones and during animation transitions it's a lot more clear. The wii u may have not been able to handle real hair jiggle or it just wasn't seen as an option

Despite it looking stiff at times, it allows for tentacles to form very distinct and form intentional shapes, look at how the hair in the second picture helps creating a squid-like silhouette

And back in Splatoon 1, it wasn't even that much work! The game only had two hairstyles, and only one featured long loose tentacles, the other was simply two little limbs on the back

Splatoon 2 seems to have retained the hand animated tentacles, but experimented a bit more with procedural animations, especially in octolings, to give some life to the tentacles

This was probably done due to S2's short dev time before launch, it's clear they wanted a more lively movement but to meet release, staying to the old method with a simple addition on top was the smart move

Also, while I say the tentacles were "hand animated" there was probably still some physic system behind it, that was then baked in the animation and tweaked to not look weird. From 1 to 2 there's definitely a much nicer animation quality

For Splatoon 3, the entire player model got a complete overhaul, eye masks were 3D, proportions were taller and slimmer, and a ton of other elements followed along, hair included

The devs took this as a chance to give hair complete dynamic physics, the tentacles look a lot more dynamic and varied, especially during looping animation as they smoothly set in place, all with little work

The tradeoff for this was a lack of manual tweaks, sure the devs can tweak things like how much a section of a tentacle wiggles, but due to technical limitations they can't collide with things, causing a lot of clipping

Because of this, they also lack a lot of the manual shapes that helped define older hairstyles, and paired with them getting new models that aren't always 1:1, comparisons between games can get quite funky

Splatoon 3 also features 24 hairstyles, and since the hair physics runs in-game, adding lots manual tweaks gets hard if they were to be always checked in game
I do think they could have least made crazier styles to use with this new system tho

One method is simply more artistically driven than the other, it happens every time in game development.
Usually the more manual methods age the best, but it's ok to use more automated ones to ease workload and get more dynamic results despite being less artsy

One good example is lighting in games, in weaker consoles devs would use vertex paint to lighten or darken models and simulate shadows, but one can't deny real time lighting and shadows are also good despite being less manual by nature

I hope with Splatoon 4 the tentacles keep the current system while refining it and enchance it manually, maybe they could even be able to collide with things around them
A mix of manual and automated methods can create very pretty results

btw, I obvisouly don't 100% know how each game works, I never looked at the game's code or whatever, just making assumptions from lots of footage