EDIT:: UPDATED VIDEO

Here's an x-ray shader:

Another video of different Shader Options:

I just mocked this up and was thinking of things to add design-wise.

I was going to obviously add some point lights you can toggle on or off, change the color, intensity and maybe position of. Then add some key default positions you can move the camera or model to (say isometric, dimetric, etc) or some free form movement.

I need to line up the animations with the screenshots obviously, currently it just blindly snaps shots at intervals while playing the animation, but I need to have it determine the length of the animation and determine key frames for each. Just need to make them dependent on each other.

Then I have two directions to go. Do I let users load their own models, or team up with some artists to sell a kit with a huge library of models you can generate 2d art from.

What do you guy's think, would this be useful? You press 1 button and it snaps 8 shots, I could make it any number but currently it snaps 8 shots, resizes them to 256x256 tiles and packs them into a single texture(sprite sheet, atlas).

Obviously it needs to be cleaned up, I just made it:

Well, to answer your most basic question, I would definitely love to use this utility. :)

Here's my input:

What do you guy's think, would this be useful? You press 1 button and it snaps 8 shots, I could make it any number but currently it snaps 8 shots, resizes them to 256x256 tiles and packs them into a single texture(sprite sheet, atlas).

For this to be a full featured utility, you're really going to want to give the user as many options as possible. 4 shots, 8 shots, 13 shots, various tile sizes, some basic skinning features (I don't mean anything complicated, just allow a user to get 2 or 3 enemie types out of one model through color variations and the like)... all of these would be great additions. Of course, that all depends on how much time and effort you want to put into it.

Then I have two directions to go. Do I let users load their own models, or team up with some artists to sell a kit with a huge library of models you can generate 2d art from.

I think depending on what you want to do with it, you could distribute your basic utility with maybe one or two sample models and charge a fee for various model packs. You could use that money to pay said artists, maybe you could even get some college student type modellers to sign on and work exclusively for a chunk of that potential future money.

Also, people will want the utility to use their own models. But, don't think of that as a particularly bad thing. I mean a lot of your market for this sort of thing will be folks like me who make 2d games, would love the above functionality, but are incredibly intimidated by the thought of messing around with anything 3d (and thus, are unlikely to have their own models to use). :)

thanks man, I made a better clip that shows quickly making 3 different sprites(at bottom). I made it so you can type the animation you want to play by name(string), set the delay between shots, set the speed of the animation, so you can do adjustments to get it right. Now I need to measure out the camera angles for isometric, dimetric, etc.

I should probably make you configure settings that are stored in xml, then when you load it, it checks the settings, so you can keep the settings across multiple models.

Loop + single shot toggle, and for a quick setup I could add a bunch of lights that you can toggle on/off with checkboxes, or go further and let you manually drag it where you want and set the color+intensity.

I was thinking once I get the whole framework up I could ask people who sell 3d packages if they wanted to do some royalty split or something to and release their sets as a package. A castle pack for example that you can shoot different tiles from at isometric, dimetric, etc with different lighting configurations....

The sprites look like this:

Here's the video:

EDIT:: Also each time you run it, it generates 8 png files 0-7, so if you only want 4 frames you open image3. Or if the 8th shot isn't right you can open the shot before it with 7 shots from the same sequence. Each time you run it, it overrides the 8 shots from the previous sequence.

For some reason it packs them down up, down up, down up rather than horizontally....will have to work on it...also use the alpha to remove the pink.

And there are already sprite generators, I think I should capitalize on providing cheap content in modules or as extension by teaming with people selling stock models.

Then I have two directions to go. Do I let users load their own models, or team up with some artists to sell a kit with a huge library of models you can generate 2d art from.

Let users load their own models, then you can provide your own models and let users load them the usual way. Then you get both at the same time =D

Yeah I honestly don't know how much I want to put time into it. So far it's been a great learning exercise of useful stuff. Today I figured out how to remove the pink pixels before it packs them and writes the PNG which is pretty cool. You can also set the number of frames up to 16 tiles it will fit on a 1024x1024 texture.

Here's what I did today:

Just loops through any animations and throws them in buttons on the right side, I set up a couple different camera angles and you can rotate the character around in 90 degree intervals I was going to change to 45 degrees at a time.

I dunno what other angles I should include really...

When you generate the texture it'll just hide the GUI. I was working on a template you fill out then press generate, and allow you to save the settings you can load in the future.

You can switch the camera around and click different animations. Clicking an animation "loads" it as the one to play for the sprite generation. You can change the delay between shots as well which I found helpful when messing with animations of various lengths. You can also set the speed of the animation to slow it down.

Looks pretty cool. Perhaps you could provide different rendering options? Like cartoon shading or drawing outlines? Shadows?

I could add a list of pre defined shaders a person could flip through to give a variety. I hadn't thought about edge detection, which is why I'm asking what I should add, thanks for the idea, I'll get a collection of shaders together.

I just threw up another short clip showing generation of several sheets from the same model quickly: I like the skeleton better than the knight I had since he shows it off better. The script removes the pink pixels from between his bones, ribs, etc even the tightest spots, at the end of the video I zoom in on the sheet to show.

I don't really see a point of adding more camera angles, using the front facing, isometric, or top down camera you can rotate the model to get shots from the side or back.I should let you zoop it back away from the model at each of those angles in case part of the animation is cut off by going outside the screen.

EDIT:: The shaders are actually a good way to spice it up: