Hi
Ive worked a bit with 3d studio max to export animated characters (soldiers, dogs etc) to a sprite sheet for use in my top-down 2d game. But its a bit messy and has tons of stuff i will never use.
Any good idea what could be a suitable program? I need:

Animate basic character functions, walk, die, hold weapon etc (if a set of basic anims and models are included like humanoid walking, running that can be modified its great)
Export them to a sprite sheet so i can use them in my 2d game

I dont need high quality textures as my sprites are very small (think almost like an rts like red alert), but its important its easy to modify a given character, change color/texture of shirt/torso for example to get variety.

Any such program around? Basically something streamlined for what i need, not a full 3d program (such as 3d studio max is)

Thanks
Erik

Fragmotion can do this out of the box.

Blender can do this to, but you'd need a script to control the exaxt camera and poses, and then you'd have to assemble them yourself.

Blender can do this to, but you'd need a script to control the exaxt camera and poses, and then you'd have to assemble them yourself.

Assembling frames is a job for the Python script, to ensure consistency and maximize automation; you can write files (spritesheet metadata, maybe archives) and call external processes (e.g. ImageMagick's montage), or even load Blender's output files and process them internally.

Ok but this isnt a built in feature in blender then? Is what i ask for hard to achieve? Ive never used blender. Would it be somewhat simple to start with some basic human model and go from there? Change textures, try to make some "bones"(?) animation?

I googled fragmotion but ive never heard about it and its homepage is rather strange and also has lots of religious text in it which seems unrelated. It seems better to get into blender maybe as it has a larger userbase no?

There's this but it's $50 http://www.garagegames.com/products/spriteworks might see if there is a trial.

Ok but this isnt a built in feature in blender then? Is what i ask for hard to achieve? Ive never used blender. Would it be somewhat simple to start with some basic human model and go from there? Change textures, try to make some "bones"(?) animation?

If you wish to use Max, maybe it can be scripted in similar ways; if a command line renderer is available you might be able to script it from the outside.

Building spritesheets is not a reasonable built-in feature for a general purpose 3D modeling application; such a tool would need to be either almost as flexible as generic scripting and therefore low-value, or too opinionated to suit all needs; and in any case it would involve too much image processing to fit with the rest of the application.

You have to write a religious prayer to start using fragMotion!
Not enough the homepage was obnoxious. Such a douchbag making this program.

Total nonsense, so blender it is then.

For my game, I used blender to create my sprites.

My workflow :

• create the model, setup an orthographic camera
• create the animation to convert
• render the animation as individual pictures (png, transparent background)
• use a tool like image magick and write bash scripts to scale and assemble my sprite sheet