What's the best(free) program for designing plugin sprites and getting them in a form that can actually be used in EV/EVO?

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Unless I'm mistaken, there is no program that automatically takes a ship image and rotates it to automatically create the whole sprite, you have to do that manually in an image manipulation program. Just remember the format, each image must be a square with sides that are multiples of 8 pixels. The sprite is a square grid of images, each one rotated slightly clockwise from the last. Normally the rotations are in 10 degree increments, and the grid is 6x6. This ensures that the sprite always points in the exact direction it is facing, since the EVO engine rotates ships 10 degrees at a time.

As for actually designing the sprite images, I don't know anything about that, except that 3D modelling programs are normally used, particularly Strata 3D (which is freeware) and Lightwave, among others.

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The last time I was on this board, the price of dumb questions was really high.
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(This message has been edited by StarStrafer (edited 04-05-2001).)

What's really annoying though is patching the 36 pictures together.. Believe me... it sucks

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Arrrrrrr, matey!!!!

There are a couple aps that take your 36 pictures and assemble them into the sprite grid; the one I have came with Shipwrite and is called p2s, and I believe the other on is pics2sprites, or something to that effect. I actually prefer to put my sprites together by hand though: I describe my method for doing so (url="http://"http://home.earthlink.net/~squibix/art/sprites.html")here(/url).

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i've had good experience with m2s. but first do the sprite like 4x larger and do the transer to 256 colors in photoshop after shrinking (you regain color and it'll do antialiasing, it doesn't always work right in 3d apps).

ComputerLizard

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Originally posted by ComputerLizard:
i've had good experience with m2s

Well it's not thaaat hard to use.

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While we're on sprites; I had all my little pics ready for p2s and then it didn't recognise them when I tried to open it. I used strata, and I'm not really sure what went wrong.

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(This message has been edited by Evil Penguin (edited 04-08-2001).)

Okay, I'm just starting to try using Strata to make my own ships. There are a few somewhat useful tutorials (url="http://"http://www.stratazine.com/tutfrm.html")here(/url). The simplest way to make a sprite, I suspect, would be to render the ship from the proper angle and use that. By the way, the light source hitting the ships in EVO comes from the Northwest, doesn't it?

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The last time I was on this board, the price of dumb questions was really high.
Ask me what I'm doing.

The one I use is MakeSpďn. It is very easy to use and works very well. It assembles the 36 pics, makes a mask, makes the spďn resource, ect ect ect.

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Actually, if you know what you're doing (and I do), you can get POV-Ray to render all 36 frames at once in the appropriate format. Then a second render for the mask, and you're set to go.

Being an amature programmer is useful.

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Quote

Originally posted by StarStrafer:
**Unless I'm mistaken, there is no program that automatically takes a ship image and rotates it to automatically create the whole sprite, you have to do that manually in an image manipulation program. Just remember the format, each image must be a square with sides that are multiples of 8 pixels. The sprite is a square grid of images, each one rotated slightly clockwise from the last. Normally the rotations are in 10 degree increments, and the grid is 6x6. This ensures that the sprite always points in the exact direction it is facing, since the EVO engine rotates ships 10 degrees at a time.

As for actually designing the sprite images, I don't know anything about that, except that 3D modelling programs are normally used, particularly Strata 3D (which is freeware) and Lightwave, among others.

**

(url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/meebo/strata101.htm")http://homepage.mac....o/strata101.htm(/url)
(url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/meebo/sprites/sprites101.htm")http://homepage.mac..../sprites101.htm(/url)

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(This message has been edited by Metzen (edited 04-09-2001).)

Hehe,
Metzen seems to get used to posting links to his ingenious tutorials
(After all, there have been dozens of "how do i make ships/sprites with a 3D program like Strata' threads :D)

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Arrrrrrr, matey!!!!

Quote

Originally posted by StarStrafer:
**Unless I'm mistaken, there is no program that automatically takes a ship image and rotates it to automatically create the whole sprite, you have to do that manually in an image manipulation program.

**

Actually, there is...

Makespin 2.0 can take one picture of a ship facing up and rotate it in 10 degree increments and make a complete 36 frame spin with just that one image (makes a mask also). It won't look as good because the edges won't be nice and clean and there won't be any cool shadows, but It'll work fine. The B5 plug for EVO uses hand drawn ships that are spun manually from one image, probably in Makespin.

PEACE YO!

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Quote

Originally posted by Black Beard:
**Hehe,
Metzen seems to get used to posting links to his ingenious tutorials
(After all, there have been dozens of "how do i make ships/sprites with a 3D program like Strata' threads :D)

**

I've finally went through and found all the links that I made. Time to hack together a web page

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