Im trying to make a decision on what art style should I use, the style used in diablo 1 looks like the most bang for my buck since I can have lots of animations from a single model so I was wondering if anyone knows if there is a site that talks about this particular workflow in a little bit of detail ( or maybe some tutorials on using 3d for making 2d art etc) thank you

Angle the camera in an isometric viewpoint.

Export the animation as frames.

Er.. that's pretty much it. Once you've done this your model has become a 2D animation just as if you'd made it pixel by pixel.

Basically what he said, although if you want to include the Diablo feature where the sprites show exactly what the player equips them with, it's going to be a lot more complicated than that.

Yea if someone can detail that process a bit that'd be awesome ;)

btw it doesn't hurt to optimize your frames before they go into the game either. There's a big difference between how they come out of the renderer, and how you're going to want them to look ingame.

ie



into



Of course if you're a whizz at rendering options and settings you probably won't need so much touchup, but I'm not. Mine was just a simple Photoshop "shadow/highlight" filter for each frame, easy with a macro.

Ah I also artificially blurred my texture, and subsurfaced my model, because I didn't want the result to look too sharp and polygonal

This is excellent.

[Edited by - tonyg on January 19, 2009 8:37:12 AM]

Thank you for all of your answers