With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.

Oh, absolutely. I was thinking more in terms of 2D doing traditional flat 2D views like side-view platformers or top-down views. I can completely understand that as soon as you try to emulate 3D with even something as simple as an isometric view it’s going to be much more work than just doing straight 3D.

Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.

I can understand this too.

You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.

I imagine that a lot of 2D games use these kinds of techniques.

However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.

Got it, thanks!