*Double posts*
I know I promised this a long time ago but it's better later than never, right?
NOTE: I'm TERRIBLY sorry about the jpg quality of images, I have no idea why paint saved them in jpg.
Anyway, I'll show you what
I do to render starcraft sprites in 3ds max:
First things first. I have this old Cornelius the rooster model I made a while ago so I'm going to use it.
Our goal is to get 17 frames (what a normal frameset has) out of that model without being stupid and doing it like rotating the viewport with the orbiting tool and so. We want to be smart and manage to do it automated for perfection.
If you have ever noticed (duh) the frameset is only half of the unit rotation, SC engine takes care of the rest by only mirroring the frameset so what we actually need is half rotation. I'm going to use my Arc tool under the spline menu to create an arc:
You can find this arc tool under the create menu and selecting the shapes submenu and clicking arc.
What I did with this arc is that I zoomed out a little bit so the grid gave me some idea of the proportion. I zoomed out and used the grid squared (the ones a litle more dark) as a reference. The circle, to cover all the model should be in a 2x2 square if you notice but since it's a semicircle I click the start and then the end of the arc and then I click at mid distance 1 square away from it to create a semicircle. If you don't know how to create arcs it's like this: First click defines start and second click defines end and third click defines the curvature of the arc. Pretty easy, right?
Okay, but why is this useful? Because you're about to create a camera that will use the arc as a path. You'll see.
Create a new target camera, I usually create the camera where it is going to start travelling in the path but it really doesn't matter where you place them.
With that tool, create a new camera
in the top viewport and targetting the center of your model, or at least a part near your model but center would work best, other certain angle would be just weird.
Your top viewport should look kinda like this now:
Now we're going to tell that camera to use that arc as a path so it generates the rotation for us.
Select the camera if you don't have it selected and go to "Animation" menu and select constraint and then choose path constraint.
Your mouse pointer should now have a dashed line following him. Click the Arc and the camera should automatically move to the start of the arc. I'll give you 10 seconds to enjoy how awesome you feel right now.
If you are curious and have already played a bit with max you'll notice the time line in the bottom and that you can drag the button all the way from 0 to 100 and preview your animation by just draging it from one place to another. If you do this right now and if you have the camera you created active in one of the viewports you'll see the rotation of the model while you travel in the timeline. But the rotation is rather orthogonal, like, right from the "floor" it views the model. We need to somehow set it to the "right" elevation angle so it looks like in SC. The frames in SC are not really exactly viewed from top or from a side. The camera takes the frames at the very magical number of 45°. So click your arc and in the front viewport move it up at exactly 1 grid square, see why the grid is useful
Note that the "target" of the camera will still be in the floor and that the camera will go up with the arc, that's because you assigned the arc to be it's path. Now the camera (if you have the camera in an active viewport) will see the model at a certain elevation angle. Just calculate 45° if you can't use the grid. It should be like in the posted image above.
If you look at the timeline you'll see that you have 100 frames, we need to tell it to only make us 17 frames. You'll find this really cool button called time configuration.
And now a little window will pop up with the current time settings, now don't get too excited and just type 17 in the frame count.
You need to press the Re-Scale time button and in that box that pops up you'll modify the frame count to 17.
Now your time settings will be configured and the timeline at the bottom should change from 0 to 100 (as it was before) to 0 to 16.
And if you drag the button all over the bar you'll see the half rotation of your model.
Now we need to render the frames. This is easy.
Click the render button. The one that looks like a teapot and then another box should pop up and you'll change the time output in common parameters to a "Range from 0 to 16".
And now you'll go to render output and click the "files" button. by pressing this it will ask whatever format you want to save it as. For SC it should be 8 bit BMP, although it is an optimized pallete and has never really worked for me. You still need to apply the SC pallete with PS or your favourite image editing software.
Now you'll see that the "save file" box next to the button is enabled, you can either check it or un check it if you're going to test it our before and so. If not, leave it checked and just press the big "Render" button there and it should save your frames in the path you previously selected.
And that's pretty much it. The rest of the work is up to you, modelling, palleting, iscripting it and so on...
I hope this is useful for somebody else than me
If you have any more questions post them.
EDIT: There's also a method of doing this with a full circle but it's waaay more complex and it has the same effect.
Also, I used 3ds MAX 2008 (9) for this but I'm pretty sure you can do this since whatever version max started supporting cameras which should be Max 4 or something
Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Aug 3 2008, 8:49 pm by Corbo.
fuck you all