Sprites are not hard to make, once you've sorted out how to do 3d.
Here is a 'Road Atlas' of the procedure - for the 'Street Level' you need to read the relevant ReadMes very carefully.
Essentially you need to download the suite of Nova tools and stuff which are all available on the add-ons page. Read the read mes and the Nova Bible carefully, and look long and hard at a particular ship before you start.
To make a sprite, create a ship in you favourite modelling application, and then create an animation which will rotate it from 0 to 350 degrees in 36 frames. Then create a camera (or equivalent) which enables you to view it rotating from a 45 degree angle. Zoom the camera out a bit, as you're going to need the extra space for your glows.
Make the movie with this, and this is your first ship movie. Use the relevant utilities (with their readmes) to turn this into a sprite and mask.
Next, you want to make the same ship with glows. Using whatever technique you prefer, create the glows so that they float around the ship. Now make the ship completely black and lightless, so that you can't see it, but it does obscure part of the glow at particular angles.
You can do this again for the ship lights. Leave any animations within the ship well alone for the time being.
Do the same procedure as before - this is now your glow sprite. Follow the instructions in the readmes to create this. The procedure creates a 36 part pict sprite and the appropriate mask.
You are best off trying this to replace an already existing sprite in order to get the hang of it.
Unfortunately, although Nova accepts PICT sprites or RLEs, it won't accept a sprite to replacing an RLE, so you will have to use the ENRLE utility to create the relevant RLE, and you will need to create a SPIN resource to make this happen. The SPIN tells ENRLE how big and how many the sprites are.
Note that Nova requires its spins to be an exact multiple of 8 pixels in each dimension.
Once done, paste the RLEs into a plugin file with the ID of the ones you are replacing. You will need to update the SHAN resource for the appropriate sizes.
Hey presto, this should all work, and your new ship should appear in place of the old one.
As I say, this is just the Road Atlas overview, but there is nothing intrinsically difficult about doing it.
---
The other part of your question was about learning 3d. Unfortunately although you can learn to use Photoshop in a couple of hours, 3d is rather more tricky. There are five basic steps in the 3d learning process
-
Views and manipulations - it's quite tricky to get the hang of viewing and moving 3d objects in a 3d space on a 2d screen. Play with a simple cube for a while until you get the hang of it.
-
Modelling and deformations. You can create models in a wide variety of ways. It's best to begin 'Lego' style by sticking together primitives - cubes, pyramids, spheres and other basic forms. You can then move on to lathes, lofts, NURBS, metaballs and whatever other modelling your program offers. Subsequent to that, you should experiment with deformations. The deformations you can perform depend on the type of model. Analogous to vector vs bitmap, models are either defined by beziers or as triangular meshes. You can usually convert from bezier to mesh but not the other way around, so do any bezier deformations you want before converting.
-
Texturing. Before you get carried away with intricate models, you should begin experimenting with textures. Textures aren't just pictures stuck on the model. With textures you can control all the ways light bounces off the object. This includes shadows on the surface created by a bumpy texture. Using textures, you can turn a simple cube into a Borg space ship without any further modelling. The masters of 3d are masters of texturing.
-
Cameras, lights, volumes and effects. Sorting out the positioning of the lights and cameras is what makes plain models exciting. Most of the effects you can apply are based around the camera, the light, or the air around the model. For example, an engine flare is a conical light with a mist effect.
-
Motion and animation. Finally, you can have all these things change with time. In a good program, anything you can define can be defined to change over time.
Hope this helps a bit. Ultimately its about playing around until you're comfortable, and then remembering all the ideas you had on the way.
------------------
M A R T I N T U R N E R
(url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/vftp/show.pl?product=evo&category;=plugins&display;=downloads&file;=FrozenHeart104.sit.bin")Frozen Heart(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/vftp/show.pl?product=evo&category;=plugins&display;=downloads&file;=FemmeFatale.sea.bin")Femme Fatale(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/dl-redirect.pl?path=evo/plugins&file;=Frozen Heart - the No.hqx")Frozen Heart - the Novel(/url)
(This message has been edited by Martin Turner (edited 03-19-2004).)
