Re: Main character animations.

[Al Riddoch <ajr@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 11:08:50PM -0500, Steve Baker wrote:
> Tony Joblin wrote:
> 
> > I was reading in a book about developing games for Linux where the author
> > used a technique as follows. First develop a 3d model, they used a shareware
> > program called AC3D (approx $40), then render using POV ray to get 2d
> > images. Admittedly no animation was used, just wanted to get 2d images of
> > the spaceship for lots of rotations. I haven't tried it, I hope I have
> > described the process accurately and that it may be of use to you.
> 
> Yes - it's a good way to get smoother sprite animation than a human artist
> could manage in a reasonable amount of time.
> 
> You'll want to render at much higher resolution than you need so you can
> get them antialiased - also render against a 'blue screen' background so
> you can delete the background and have transparency in the right places.
> 

I have used blender to do non animated rendering for most of my work. It
supports oversampling and rendering with an alpha channel, so both 
tricks you describe above are unnecessary. The results I have got have
been pretty good, hampered by my at best mediocre modelling ability.

Al