Using a 3d Modelling Tool to Render Sprites for a 2D Game
Monday, October 08 2007 - xna, blender, art-and-design, 3d-studio-max
This is not really a tutorial, but more of a response to a forum question, I used a process simular to this in my Xillian Project.
When modelling the Models that will become sprites I try to make sure that I have the lighting effects the same for each of the soon to be sprites. This normally means that the default lighting in the apps and the camera positions need to be changed. This change is generally just moving the camera so that it faces directly to the face/view that I want. In the case of a side scroller I would target the left or right sides, for top down I would face the camera to look at the top.
When I am happy with the view and lighting I would then change the render output so that the background renders as transparent, this way when I do the final render the image will have a transparent background. The final stage is to render the output using the modelling tools tool of choice. In the case of some renderers this could be an external tool, but in most cases I just use the built in render tools.
One thing to note is that most times the images are rendered at a high resolution; this is how I like it. I like it this way because once I have the high res image I can then scale the image to the size that I like. This scaling could be done inside the XNA Application, but normally I just use something like Photoshop to resize the image.
In the case of animations for your 2d images, the 3d modeller can also be used. Once I have the model drawn and facing the way I like I would add the animation sequence that I am looking for. When done I would again turn to the renderer and make some changes. With most tools the renderer will render each of the animation frames to single files and then build the video sequence, these images are what I would use to animate the 2d sprites.
Now that I have the final images complete from the Modelling package and rendered to a 2d image, I now would go through the scaling process. I really spend a little bit of time doing this because sometimes when you do scale the images you will loose some of the image quality. This is where your eye would come in. At this stage I would magnify the image several times so tat I can see the image at a pixel level. This way I can sharpen the image so that it looks right and fits in with the game or application.
Anyway that is it for the moment, if people do have any more questions on the process above, please comment and I will try to answer your questions.
Link to the Xillian Project...
