I'm trying to speed up my delivery of programmer art like so: Now it's taking me like an hour or two to make one of these sheets using my current process, so I'm wondering if there's a way to speed up what I'm doing(like using different packages or something different) My current process: 1. model, rig and animate in anim8or For each frame of animation and angle(this happened 64 times for the above sheet!) -2. position the camera in ortho view to the right angle -3. Render the scene with alpha 4. using imagemagick convert *.bmp -transparent black guy.png 5. move all the images going the same direction to their own folder(like all the ones going up to an up folder, all the ones going up-right to the up-right folder, etc) In each folder:(8 times with this image) -6. with imagemagick run convert *.png +append stripdir.png(replacing dir with the direction) after that's all done I move all the strips into one folder and finally with imagemagick run convert strip*.png -append sheet.png can anyone see a way to speed things up in this process?

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Original post by Anonymous Poster Those are the same actions (figure animation) from 8 different view angles, arent they???

yes

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You say you animate 64 times, if its 8 times the same poses shouldnt it really be 8 poses then rotate each pose the 8 angles to minimize the work??? (maybe you meant that but didnt make it clear???)

animate is in step 1 that happens once, not 64 times, and yes I'm already doing what you're saying.

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Most of the operations could be done with a custom program in DirectX, taking the 8 pose data sets (which you have to do by hand) and then automating the render, alpha building, writing to BMP as a sheet (unless you can get a PNG function then manually/batch processing the convert to PNG). I would write such a program if I had to do hundreds of such sheets. Someone else might know if sucha tool exists somewhere (somebody must have done something like this as the 8 angle view animations were used alot in games, but it might not use the same input format you want and might produce strips that ypu still have to glue together).

yes if such a program exists that would be awesome, but I think the time it'd take for me to learn directX well enough to make such a program would outweigh the amount of time I'm spending on the steps and I'm guessing a program/script to do it already exists, just don't know what to look for.

Man Im looking for something similar, and have the same exact problem as you.

Im doing all my screenshots with the windows print screen and I really tired right now. The game im making is going to take me for ever at this pace.

Maybe there is someone in the game community that had this problem and has a little program to make this automatic?