Stop-Motion Spriting: is it feasible?

[FaustWolf]

Time for another episode of "Silly Questions from FaustWolf."

So, spriting is a mammoth process -- you spend hours building a frame for an animation, and then you have to start from scratch (or significantly alter the recently-finished frame) to progress.

What I'm wondering is, would it be possible to apply a sprite to a model in the form of a texture, and take snapshots of the model in various poses to create additional sprite frames? For example, would these four frames from Crono's sprite sheet be enough to create a very pixelated-looking Crono model?


And then you could, say, turn the model around, raise its arm, and get this?


I've never heard of doing this before, so it's probably a silly suggestion, but just wondering if anyone's ever tried it.

[BROJ]

Yeah, Treasure Hunter G did that. Link: http://www.fantasyanime.com/legacy2/hunterg.htm

EDIT: Apparently, so did SMRPG.

EDIT[2]: Ah, I was a little confused at first, but now I see what you're talking about. Like Ramsus said further on, you'd want to create a model and a custom texture(s), rather than apply the [Chrono] sprite to a model.

[Ramsus]

Imagine if you split the sprite into its movable parts, use them as separate sprites (i.e. left arm sprite, head sprite, right arm sprite, etc.) connected at the joints. Then you could rotate/transform each of those parts independently.

That's what it'd look like. In other words, pretty crappy whenever you "pose" them, but better than nothing.

That's because the sprite's form is already fixed -- it's implied by the outlines and the shading. Even if you use it as a flat texture, the form is still being defined by the model's texture, and not the model itself. So when you pose it, it can look really awkward (like the character has broken arms or legs or something).

What you really want to do is create a 3D model whose form is based on the form implied by the sprite, then add textures based on the sprite's coloring and patterns.

That'll give you what you're really looking for, which is an easy way to generate lots of sprites just by posing a model.

[FaustWolf]

Aha, thanks guys. Wow, I didn't know Treasure Hunter G did that. The sprites in that game do seem to have a certain 3D look to them, so I'm guessing Donkey Kong Country and SaGa Frontier also used the technique Ramsus describes. Fascinating!

[Ramsus]

Falcon's Eye (a graphical frontend to the game NetHack, which has ASCII graphics), also uses pre-rendered graphics for the sprites and background tiles (done with POV-Ray). I don't think Saga Frontier's artists did this for their sprites though, and adding a somewhat "3d" look to sprites isn't that hard to do by hand, especially if you avoid outlines and emphasize the form with the shading instead, and modeling is really a waste of time with low-resolution sprites unless you need a lot of different frames.

Personally, I would just design a really simple model for the basic body types, render all of the needed frames/poses, then touch each frame up by hand to detail and stylize it. You'd still save time, as the model would act as a guide for the shading and form, and it'd look better than rendering alone, especially with lower-resolution sprites.

[ONSLAUGHT]

A friend of mine once made a Chrono comic literally called The Chrono Comic. It was okay, but they actually pulled off a vid before where they did such a thing. ifyou check it out, he had a somewhat vulgar humor. He also made some pretty wierd jokes in it too.

[FaustWolf]

Any link to the spriting video Onslaught? Did they use techniques discussed here to generate all the sprites they needed for the comic?

[ONSLAUGHT]

No, just checked. The video's down. The comic is still up but the video is gone. Which kinda makes it hard to follow.