Well, ayways, IM trying to put ships into the game. I know you hvae to get those 36 shots of the ship from every 10 degrees to use for the sprites(not there yet). Anyways, I've got the ships textured in Strata, but, I was wondering if any of you guys knew of a good way to rotate the object 10 degrees, so that I can get 36 good renders of my ships to make the sprites.

I wonder if my tutorial is still online... hrm...

Ok, it is! Find it here:
http://evula.org/ewa...tutorials/spin/

It was written for Strata 3D 3.0.2 free but the fundamentals are still relevant with any newer version. One thing to note is that if you are using 3.5 base, the animation facilities are not available...

well, that sorta halped. Most of the stuff i got. But not all of it. Like, hoe do i get the Y view setting? And i didnt really understand the rtotation thing to make it hvae 36 rotated framse thingy. ome further help would be appreciated.

Septcanmat, on Oct 13 2004, 10:09 PM, said:

Like, hoe do i get the Y view setting?
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Ok, that's something that isn't in there as the tutorial was written like 4 years ago or something... It was written for the classic engine and a lot of the renderings were done top down - hence the omission.

Here's how I do it:
- insert a camera
- to get the 45 degree angle, position it at x=0, then y=n, z=ąn (depending on what direction the ship is modelled at). n should be a value that lets you fit all the ship (and flares) throughout the rotation
- set the camera so it is set to "square" - this isn't necessary but as I started doing sprites for the classic engine, I'm just a sucker for tradition
- when you go to render, open the camera and render from it rather than the main modelling window

Septcanmat, on Oct 13 2004, 10:09 PM, said:

And i didnt really understand the rtotation thing to make it hvae 36 rotated framse thingy.
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I'm not sure what you mean there. Follow the steps in the tutorial and it takes you entirely through it... If you could be more specific in what you don't understand, it would help

Ooookay, I think I know what you're asking about. I use an ancient copy of Strata Vision, so I've grown aquainted to its little quirks.

Open up your strata file, and hit command-H to bring up environment settings. Set the background to black. Make sure the ship is facing towards you in the 'front' view. Make sure you're in orthographic viewing mode. Then, switch to top view. Now, group all the components of your ship together. Using the rotate tool, shift-drag a corner handle of your grouped ship, until it faces straight up. Now advance the animation end frame slider to frame 35. Advance the animation current frame slider to frame 16. Hit command-T, and you'll get the transform dialog box. Make sure you've checked 'relative' for the rotation you're about to do. Now, in the y-rotate box, enter in -155.6756756756757, and hit OK. Once you've done that, advance the current frame slider to 20, and hit command-T again. Then enter in -38.91891891891892 in the y-rotate box, and hit OK. Now advance the current frame slider all the way up against the end frame slider, on frame 35, and hit command-T once more. Enter in -155.6756756756757 in the y-rotate box, and hit OK.

You've animated your ship! Now to capture that animation into a movie file.

Use the zoom in and out tools, until you have the ship on your screen at a size you want to render it as. Select the move view tool, and drag down on the bottom handle. This is to create the perspective effect of your ship pointing towards the screen or away from it. Don't drag the screen down too much, but just enough to get that effect. Now, change the view from orthographic to wide-angle. Select your ship, and move the current frame slider all the way back to the beginning. Now, select the open box tool on your toolbar. While holding down the option and shift keys, center the cross on the middle of your ships center-dot. Click and drag to form what you'll use as the bounding box for your ship animation. To check to see if you've made your box too small, try scrubbing through the animation to see if any ship parts extend out of the box. If this happens, go back to the first frame, and select the too-small bounding box. Hold down the shift and option keys again, and drag the corner handle of the box to make it a little bigger.

Once you've got a good bounding box, you now are ready to capture the movie file.

From the camera menu, go to stills (not movies, STILLS) and select 'best' from the menu. Now for the tricky part. Because Strata makes you use that big fat camera icon, you have to position it somewhere near the upper-left hand corner of the bounding box, and then hold down. Hold down until it becomes a cross, and then drag that cross to the upper-left corner of the bounding box. Release the mouse, but don't move it. Now, hold down, without moving the cursor for a few seconds. It will become a cross (hopefully centered on that corner), and now you can drag it to the lower right corner, exactly on the corner. Now the rendering dialog box should come up. Enter '1' in the starting frame box, and '36' in the ending frame box. Select the highest possible render settings (smooth, extra-smooth) from the two menus where you can specify render settings. Finally, make sure you're rendering a square image. If the image size is slightly off, say 43 by 44, then you would change the 43 to a 44, so it would read 44 by 44. Now, hit OK, and specify Quicktime movie as your saved file type, and save your file to disk. Set the quicktime compression settings as high as you can, hit OK, then watch and wait out the rendering.

Once the rendering finishes, you'll be able to preview it, but I've found that setting it to loop and hitting play doesn't show it rotating very smoothly. Drag the movie file onto Quicktime player, then specify loop, and watch as your ship spins around seamlessly.

You have a completed ship sprite animation! Now download wOOtware's 'Sprites', and drag your movie onto 'm2s'. Voila! Sprite files! :laugh:

Here are some sprites I created using this method:

Granite Warbird
Granite Warbird mask

And, here's an engine glow. I did this by making an oval coming out of teh ship's backside, and then selecting both the ship and the oval, and controll-dragging the oval's rotation dot onto the ships rotation dot. Then, I selected just the oval, advanced teh currrent frame slider to frame 16, rotated it so that it was behind the ship, then went to frame 20, rotated accordingly, and then frame 35, and rotated accordingly. I gave the oval an almost completely translucent, light blue color, and then went into advanced settings, and changed the glow factor to '0.4'. Then, I made another texture that was completely black, with no shinyness or transparency, and applied that to the ship. I rendered it as before, making sure that it had the same pixel dimensions, and here is the engine glow for the Granite Warbird:

Granite Warbird Engine Glow
Granite Warbird Engine Glow mask

Hope that helped!

btw: I'm stuck myself on mucking through the stupid shän resource using EVONE, so I haven't done anything with this ship. Anyone, feel free to put it in a plug!