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Development Forum Breed sprites and Maya    Mad_Doodles      7/6/2016 Heya. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with creating creature sprites in Maya (which by the way you can get for free here if you're a student: http://www.autodesk.com/education/free-software/maya) or similar programs. Specifically, how have you gone about rendering the models in the correct poses for the sprite sheets and body data files? I was envisioning just placing the required sprite sheets in Maya and lining the model up, but if there's a better or easier way to do it I'd love to know! Thanks for your time. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Missmysterics   7/6/2016 Your method sounds fair enough to me, if you want the same kind of motion normal creatures have, then copying the body part positions in the sprite file sounds like a good idea.   Mad_Doodles   7/6/2016  2 If that's currently the only way to get things done then I may well look into making a set of "blank" creature models for people to use with Maya and other programs if I can make them compatible, using animation keyframes to automatically move the model into position in the future. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Lurhstaap     7/6/2016 That would be extremely handy and very cool. Conclude with killer catchphrase. (Lurhstaap) "This is not knowledge - this is information!" New Model Army, "Courage"   Moe     7/6/2016  1 The principles I used in 3ds Max should work in Maya. 1. Pick a body part you want to render. Head? Body? Thigh? 2. Keyframe animate the body part in the correct angles, 1 frame per position. For instance, a Norn's head starts looking down, then forward, then up, then straight up. One frame per angle rotation. 3. Set up a camera that, every 4 frames, jumps to a different facing. For instance, you'll notice that Norn head sprites do left, right, front, back. So start with left, then after 4 keyframes abruptly rotate the camera to the new facing, right. So on and so forth. 4. Duplicate the keyframes for the body part you're rendering so it constantly repeats, so that each time the camera moves, the model is ready to rotate again in the starting position. 5. Render the set. Save the files with a 0-.bmp filename. Most rendering engines can be set up to apply a suffix automatically, so the resulting filename will be something along the lines of: "0-0, 0-1, 0-2," etc. Sprite builder can then use it's "import all" feature to quickly import sets named in this manner. Sadly, 3ds Max did not let me do this, so I had to actually write a special script that runs post-render to rename all the files. You may have to do something similar. This greatly speeds up the creation of sprites in general. That's my method. Just duplicate the necessary rotation keyframes across the timeline and move the camera. Then just render it out with the right filename so that spritebuilder will just import them all.   Mad_Doodles   7/7/2016 That sounds great, thank you. When I have the poses done once that'll be it at least, I'll just have to be careful to nail the poses the first time. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.

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