Omaha Game Developers Association

I know some developers have a heck of a time coming up with good looking characters or art for games, so I figured I would share the techniques I and many other developers use to come up with decent looking characters for 2D games. A couple games that have used this Technique are Diablo (1 and 2), Myth the Fallen Lords, and the Original Starcraft. This technique is not new at all and is a pretty basic one to use.

The first thing I actually start with is a 3D model. Ill use a zombie from the 3DRT zombie pack.

3DRT Zombie

Luckily for us he comes with a bunch of animations.

The tool I will use for this is Spriteforge, you can get it from D-Graphix it cost $20 and greatly simplifies the process of making sprites for us. As a disclaimer I do not get anything for mentioning this product, and you can actually do everything without this product using Milkshape, 3DS Max, Wings 3D, or any other 3D application but in most cases those programs either cost (ALOT) more or are a bit more difficult to set up to do this.

I wont make an exact tutorial because the program itself is pretty straightforward. Im just describing the technique really rather than the process, but here’s a quick rundown of the steps,

1. Import your model
2. Select your camera angles (as simple as selecting some check boxes
3. Select your lighting and background color (if using a background at all can be set to transparent)
4. Setup your frame sizes, and how many columns and rows you want
5. Hit Render!

The program will loop through all the angles you set and generate a nice sheet like this (minus the word zombies of course)

Zombie Sheet

I only generated the running animation at one angle because I can use Flash or whatever program to actually rotate the image, this will generally be the case for any top down games. For isometric games however you would need to generate a sheet for each angle your character would face.

With the generated sheet you can whip up stuff like this rather quickly,

Animated Zombie Gif

It didn’t take long to do it looks decent, and you can continue developing. You don’t have to use this process just for animated items either, you can use it for any 3d static buildings, or objects that you need in your 2D game.

Tags: 2d, rendering, sprites

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Game Asset Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.