Hey I''m looking for some information regarding sprites {you know take 32 pics of an object and put em together w/ a hot point and you got yourself a sprite?} I wonna make em but I''m an artist not a programmer, where do i start? In a perfect world I''d like a program that I can plunk renders of a 3d object I build into and it does the work for me. {it would be cool if it was free too!} If there is no such thing... well, could you point me in the right direction so I can make a sprite manually? {I''m not adverse to a little hard work}

open up a paint program like windows paint or paintshop pro and start drawing what ever and it saves it as a bitmap or some file that is 2d

Yes I understand that you need 2d images but how do I put them together? Maybe I''m not using the right terms to describe what I trying to do. I can get 32 views of an object, {32 drawings of ''something'' from 32 different angles, that is the easy part!} but what I want is to put those views together with an appropriate hot spot and be able to give this complete ''sprite'' to a game programer so that he/she can use it in a game. I have seen ''sprites'' available for the use of programers advertised on the net. That is what I want to make. Please forgive my ignorance if I have not explained myself properly. And if I''m ovelooking something simple here, perhaps you could enlighten me.

Hi!

Well, I''m not sure what exactly you want but here it goes:

If what you want is to sell images for making games, then just create them and save them in a graphic format commonly used - tga, bmp, jpg, etc.. -. The programmer have to be able to gather these images and create the appropiate structures inside his game to control each frame of animation and to validate the object - that''s what I think you call a ''hotspot''-..

Hope it helps, laters!

Usually a "complete sprite" is a two dimensional grid of all of the frames for all of the angles the sprite can be viewed at. I believe most 3D packages are capable of exporting frames to bitmaps named sequentially (at least the one our artists use can, 3DStudio I think). What is normally done is a cut and paste job to fit the frames into their appropriate place in the grid. I wrote a utility for our artists to take all of the frames and create the grid automatically. I''ll have to see if I can release it if this is what you''re looking for.

Breakaway Games

Yes, creating and selling 'sprites', that is the sort of thing I am interested in. I've been doing lots of research and some of the people I talked to mentioned the '32' views and the 'hot spots' which I mentioned.

To quote my source: "Sprites are the simplest way to represent characters and objects in most applications. In windows based programs, sprites are drawn on screen using the basic windows graphics routines This allows for the incorporation of anything from line drawings to 3D type objects without having to program your own graphics handling routines.

Sprites don't have much in common from app to app.. they do have to use basic image and animation formats ....you can generally find a way to take a sprite created in one program and convert it to a a sprite that can be used by another app.(sometimes with great difficulty)

A good engine for sprite based programming has been developed by these guys at:

http://www.clickteam.com

Two older programs available as shareware are:
-Klik and Play (designed for win 3.1, but can create sprite objects that
can be used by every other Klik Product)

-The Games Factory (a little more advanced, and may take awhile to
learn)

The sprites are converted to "Active Objects" in these programs (just a name for prites with control properties) They use a directional system, each direction being able to handle a single image, or an amimation, and some very good, very fast results are easily achieved.

These sprites can import in most types of images, and it is up to you where you want to create sprites out of hand drawn images, images exported from 3d modelers, or video capture yourself walking/standing/jumping and use those images.

For visual purposes, all you need are the images, but for any sort of programming manipulation, you will need to work with hotpsots and action points. These are easily set in both editors: The hotspots provide the program with a coordinate reference for your sprite. This is used for testing for the location of your sprite in the programs world. Action points allow your objects to interact with your program from coordinates other than your hotspot. For a train sprite, the hotspot might be near the wheels. An action point near the smoke stack would allow you to create other sprites to represent smoke clouds coming out of the stack.

I use MMF, one of Clickteam's products for a lot of my work. Don't be put off by the names....This is a French company, and the marketing in North America has been handled badly, most people here don't take these
programs seriously, but TGF,CnC, and MMF are a real alternative to Macromedia in European programming houses."

The above helped me a great deal, but if it's every programer/game for itself as far as graphics and sprite engines are concerned than perhaps that grid would be the best option. Then I can let you programers do what you do and I can stick to making pretty pictures.

Edited by - Ed on 1/21/00 3:52:39 PM

Well if you just whann sell your art to others it''s very simple.

Draw your image using what ever drawing tool you have. Then produce all the different animations and view you want. ex: walking, running, jumping etc... Make sure to be consistant as in all the seuqences must be the same amount of frames. It is not neccessary but preferable.

Now for example lets just say you have produce a gimp using 3ds and you make it walk... It takes up lets say 16 frames of animation. You have the following choices...

1- Save up each frame of animation in all the popular formats(bmp, tga, jpg, etc...) So you will have 16 separate files x the number of formats you want to support. In different sizes of resolution and give them liek that to the programmers and have them do what they want with them. Dont worry to much about format programmers are capble of loading them all up, but sometimes they prefers some to others.

2- Create a template. What I mean by template is the following. You will create lets say an X x Y size image that can fit all your animation sequences like walking, running etc... Let''s say the first animation sequence is walking and it''s a 16 x 50 sprite. First thing you do is create a grid wich is 1 cell of height and x number of cells for the number of animations. So you will create cells of 16 x 50. So to separate each cell you will draw a oixel thick line on each side of the cell. There should be a 1 pixel border around each cell. Once you have the first sequence, right under that you put the next sequence and so on. Again you have to be consistant on the cell sizes, it''s preferable taht all cell sizes be the same, but again through programming you can extract any part of the image. Once you have your tempalte all you have to is sav it in the different formats and there you go!

If you want I can e-mail you a small template!