SpriteForge Released
Community Forums/Showcase/SpriteForge Released
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 Create masses of outlined quality spritesets/frames in 4 easy steps:     Come take a download <2Mb!: http://www.d-grafix.com/?page=software get started guide here: www.d-grafix.com/tutorials/spriteforge/ |
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| Looks pretty rad. Shame I know nothing about 3D models haha, maybe next year... |
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| Cool. Never would of thought of that in a million years. How'd you come up with it? |
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| I originally wrote it because i hate the whole organizing cameras, ratios and post processing involved when using a 3d program to do this. I wanted to write a tool that needed no post-pro (adding outlines, alpha etc.) and would get the ratios exactly right from a re-useable enviromnent. Ive had the actual spriteforge renderer for in-house use for a while now, but as it is script based (originally with key controls only I knew) it wasnt very friendly. So i wrote a nice script front-end using the blitzmax gui and i had a tidy little app :) . Being script based it makes it quite powerful and really easy to expand. Also, people could use the script to write exports from other 3D apps. Looks pretty rad. Shame I know nothing about 3D models haha, maybe next year... Thats the beauty of it, you dont need to. You just need some licenced/free 3d models to use. Like taking photos of pottery.. you dont need to know how to make a vase, just how to use a camera =O) |
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| Cool. Never would of thought of that in a million years. How'd you come up with it? PaceMaker has had this capability for a long time. Creating 2d animation from 3d models ( 12mb .wmv ) SpriteForgelooks more specialised to the task though ! Good work ! |
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| Looks very good although have you thought of expanding its ability to 'pack' the images more tightly. While animstrips that blitz3d/plus/max? use are very user friendly there is always a lot of wasted space (all those transparent pixels) in these sorts of images. One of the free image packer utilities in the toolbox can pack these sorts of images but I don't think it has alpha support - maybe you could add that ability to your program. Also - how well does it handle antialiasing? Good to see someone's made an app for this though as it would be quite useful for many people I would think. |
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| Pacemaker is a great tool, but as you say this app is more focused on the actual conversion and will appeal to people who use other animators or have a whole library of 3d media that have to follow the same rules, sizes etc.. "Also - how well does it handle antialiasing?" You can choose to give the outline an 'antialiased' look by choosing the outline's alpha option. The free lite version is capable of exporting, so feel free to play :> only limitation is it has a watermark if the individual sprite area is over 2500 pixels (thats a 50x50 200x25 etc....) "have you thought of expanding its ability to 'pack' the images more tightly" Thought about it and is being researched. ;) One thing that confuses me about packers though, is where do you store the frame information? Or do prople hard code this? Without the correct offset the sprite would just jiggle about when animated. |
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| Pacemaker has support for this? Didn't know that. Though I'm doing less and less animation, these days |
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| The antialiased look would be essential for modern 2D games running on 3D cards (e.g. BMax Games). I presume it exports as 32 bit png? |
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| yes 32bit png or 24bit bmp with optional black/white mask image. |
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| I tried your demo and it froze up in the rendering process. |
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| Hi Fuller, What happened when you clicked on the set offset and zoom button, Do you get anything on thescreen, anything visual at all, does it get as far as the png builder? it may freeze for a little while while compiling the output, especially if its a large page. |
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| Sorry if the answer is staring me in the face but what size sprites can it do? It's a great tool! I always hate the idea of having to draw 2D walk cycles and wished there was a way I could do it working on a 3D model. |
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| Max 640x640 although i may expand this if enough people request it, (but who really needs sprites that big!!!) The Free lite version can have a max area of 2500 pixels without a watermark. Thats 50x50, 25*100, etc... The pro version has no watermark up to 640x640 and you get free updates & notifications, and good karma :) |
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| Ive added a simple tutorial to the help to get you started. www.d-grafix.com/tutorials/spriteforge/ |
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| the demo here seems to watermark no matter what :s |
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| It will watermark any sprite with an area of 2500 pixels. Try 50x50 or 25x100 in table setup on step 4. No text will apear on the actual final render. |
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| ah I see so its rather limited :|, looks good tho :) |
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| It looks exciting, but I don't do sprite stuff - In fact, I still haven't used 'Teddy Edward'. |
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| Wow, this is wonderful. Recently I asked someone the price of taking a 3D model and doing this same exact sort of thing, and it would have cost hundreds of dollars per angle! Definitely going to buy (in the near future). By the way, you should whip up a quick demo with that robot sprite you made - just to show it off. If you don't have enough time and trust me, send it via email so I can do it for practice. Just an empty room with the robot moving around ;) |
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| This looks very interesting... I've been looking for an excuse to mess around with 3D again and this looks like this'll be my excuse. |
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| "By the way, you should whip up a quick demo with that robot sprite you made - just to show it off. If you don't have enough time and trust me, send it via email so I can do it for practice. Just an empty room with the robot moving around ;) " Good plan, prehaps i could write a simple game demo. See what i can knock up in a week lol. |
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| Registered :), payment sent today :) |
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| thanks, all helps to feed my little man :) (MY SON that is, not feed the other 'little man' on women of ill repute etc... er.. not that hes little, just little-er than me... ill shut up now.. *Ahem*) |
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| would be nice to have upto 1024x1024 images IMHO, buildings can be quite big and 640x640 is limited. |
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| For the sake of completion: The latest version of Fragmotion also does this (admittedly without outlines, but is only $2 more and does shadows). It would be even better if it offered more rendering styles. I remember doing a project that required cartoon rendering, so this wouldn't have worked in SpriteForge, PaceMaker or Fragmotion. |
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| Hi Beaker Ive been using fragmo for ages and cannot find that at all, and its certainly not in the manual. Could you explain how you would render 45 degree orthographic sprites from several models in 8 directions with fixed lighting in under 5 minutes prep time. (Im interested to see how other progs do it so i can improve mine) For the sake of simplicity, spriteforge is designed also for doing this really quickly and can be used by 2d people who have little 3d knowhow. It also allows you to add simulated effects like SEMs and lighting effects like fire flashes or magic glow when char casts a spell etc. I am currently researching a shadow solution although with sprites they are usually too small to matter. For the cartoon shader (although turning the ambient light up to 100% and using flatshades is cartoon-ish) im trying for a kind of two shade blender. Its experimental and have no idea if its gonna work so no hopes :) @ edzup "would be nice to have upto 1024x1024 images IMHO, buildings can be quite big and 640x640 is limited." I never thought sprites that big would be needed but thinking about it i guess it could be useful for large buildings etc. Ill see how big i can make it I guess i could have a forced screen mode (like the st renderer for ted) but that would depend on the users hardware. |
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| Actually, I'm not sure mr fragmo has released that version yet. And I admit its probably a lot more simplistic than yours. There are 3 ways to achieve cel-shading: Sphere mapping (not great) Cubic mapping (good) Homemade vertex coloring (very good/sharp, not for realtime, but shouldn't be a problem for this) You can also do outlining in 3D, but that might clash with your 2D method. I think for shadows you should offer the option of exporting them seperately (so you can alpha them in Bmax/Sprite Control etc). |
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| you can already do sphere mapping (load a second texture in channel 2 and add its fileame to the filters list ie. texturefilter=filename,64. cube mapping could be a possibility, ive never used it for anything but reflections so if you give me an idea of how this would work ill see what i can knock up. vertex coloring is how im doing the shadows, im thinking about doing proper lightmaps but this may be a bit over my head unless i can find a way of issuing a separate second uv channel 'pixel' to every pixel for every texture used :) Or mabe theres a way of doing it with normals. Hmm.. Damn im thinking again :O |
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| This is exactly what Ive been looking for... Ordered/paid and waiting.... cant wait!!! Give it to me NOW!! (BTW I know its a 2 years old thread... ) |
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| It's a very useful product. I've got a license myself as well. There's a small problem with Vista though. It gives a notice about colors when starting the app. But it doesn't keep the program from working though. |
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| Ive got my product key - thanks D4MM4N. I'm not using Vista ATM, so I haven't seen any errors... I was going to load up the models in Blender and rotate them in an animation, then export them to png... but Ive got quite a few models... and this does the trick very nicely. Good work D4MM4N! |
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| Is SpriteForge also for use in BlitzPlus to make isometric (3d look in 2d) games? |
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| With Spriteforge you can create spritesheets of a 3D model. So it can be used for any language. |
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| Correct, the output is completely non specific (png or bmp). |
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