my friend and i are working on/planning a tc for EV nova. but our problem is, both of us have very little skill when it comes to 3d modeling - at least when it comes to recreating our designs. We were toying around with the idea of drawing the ships by hand, scanning them in, rotating manually w/ graphics converter and then turning them into sprites, bla, bla, bla.

i have two questions. first of all, do the resources in nova allow for a grid derived from a 2d image (meaning that we take the image, rotate it the necessary amt of degrees over and over and make our own grid, etc)?

and the second question is, if that is possible, is it also possible to make weapon/engine glows or running lights for sprites that are not 3d-modeling based?

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I would say yes to both, but be prepared to put in a lot of work with an image editor such as Photoshop.

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Yes to both in the extent the engine does not care at all where the sprites come from.

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if you want to hand draw ships, I suggest you learn a program like strata to the extent that you can animate a spin. Then draw your ship in a perfect square (leave a lot of black space if the ship is skinny, but make sure you draw it on a square) and make a single square polygon or a cube or something that is square from the top. Map your drawn ship onto it from above, position the camera so it's looking straight down, and animate the object spinning. It's a much easier way to get handdrawn sprites that way(as long as you aren't changing the shadows each time). Also, you can use the same scene every time, so you don't have to make a new animation each time - just change the texture on that object.

I hope that made sense. I used that method to make handdrawn sprites once, and it worked really well. You don't have to know how to model beyond a square either.

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sparky, on Aug 31 2004, 01:27 PM, said:

if you want to hand draw ships, I suggest you learn a program like strata to the extent that you can animate a spin. Then draw your ship in a perfect square (leave a lot of black space if the ship is skinny, but make sure you draw it on a square) and make a single square polygon or a cube or something that is square from the top. Map your drawn ship onto it from above, position the camera so it's looking straight down, and animate the object spinning. It's a much easier way to get handdrawn sprites that way(as long as you aren't changing the shadows each time). Also, you can use the same scene every time, so you don't have to make a new animation each time - just change the texture on that object.

However, that may result in cutting down or eliminating certain details, mainly the use of shadows. If you haven't noticed already, many 3D models converted to sprites have shadows that are completely different in each and every rotated object. Shadows are a big deal as it indicates from which directions the source of light is coming from. You may have to take that into consideration.

About a year ago, I successfully used the Mac freeware program Cartoon Editor to automate creation of rotating-ship movies for 2D ship sprites. Check it out -- rotating your sprites in GraphicConverter sounds like it would involve a brain-deadening quantity of repetitive work. Other programs that are dedicated to making GIF animations should have similar abilities (though I never did succeed in doing it with ImageReady).

As to adding glows, lights, etc. to 2D sprites: it definitely works. Check out my True Abomination plug for an example. Orcaloverbri9 and ArcAngel Counterstrike are a couple of other forum regulars who have experimented with 2D sprites.

Oh, and the frames for your sprite don't have to be square. Standardizing on square frames may save you some difficulty as you work, but non-square rectangular frames don't choke the engine.

Coraxus, on Sep 7 2004, 02:19 AM, said:

However, that may result in cutting down or eliminating certain details, mainly the use of shadows. If you haven't noticed already, many 3D models converted to sprites have shadows that are completely different in each and every rotated object. Shadows are a big deal as it indicates from which directions the source of light is coming from. You may have to take that into consideration.
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Yeah, I kinda assumed that they wouldn't be using shadows just because it's really hard to make them look even through the whole spin. It looks flickery if you try to paint it.

Anyway, what I would do is render a flat sprite spin with no shadows and paint on the shadows m2s has already made a handy sprite grid.

It's just so much easier than rotating every time.

And if you're wanting to do angled sprites - good luck, I hope you're good at animation because that will be really hard.