Sunday, July 11, 2010

DirectX 2D Sprite Animation



I've been working on my first plug-in for Artismo 0.11.5 (dev). The Sprite Capture Plug-in will take the current animation sequence and export the animation to a bitmap as a 2D sprite map for import into any 3D Isometric engine.

The benefit of this plug-in is to quickly generate realistic 3D animations and run them in 2D. Several games use this technique. For example Diablo, WarCraft III, StarCraft, and other 2D sprite engines.

I had written a program in the past to allow me to create these animations by hand, but I had to draw every frame. So, a walk sequence which had 10 frames had to be drawn in 8 directions which was 80 frames for one animation sequence. So, if you wanted to have the character swing the sword while walking, that was an additional 80 frames.

With this tool, I create the 3D model with animation, and export any sequence I want. The penguin above is the test model. There are a few minor tweaks but this plug-in is almost ready.

Happy Coding!
Jason

4 comments:

  1. Great job! I know you've been working hard on that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm getting a lot of hits on this subject. If you're interested in using this tool let me know. It works with my editor but it's a nice tool.
    Have a look through this blog for snapshots of results.

    If you would like to see more on this subject, let me know here.
    Jason

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, this is great!
    I used that SpriteSheet to test my Ray-Casting-engine. Take a look at my blog freakjns.blogspot.de

    If you dont want that i use that pic i will remove it..

    JNS

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete