3D Modeling for 2D Games

I have a bad case of programmer art. So, what's a lone guy to do? How about using popular 3D packages to generate 2D art? Well, that's exactly what I'm doing. The hard part was figuring out how to do characters. So, I broke down and bought Poser 6 (I've used it before so I was familiar with what it could do). I imported a model (not created by me). I then set up the initial camera and went a rendering. There are 8 directions my guy can walk and each direction uses 13 frames of animation (yeah, I don't need that many). Poser has the ability to render movies but instead of outputting to avi, you can just output to individual image files. So let's see my first screenshot:


This is a screenshot of all the frames for my guy walking in all 8 directions. However, Poser renders each frame to individual files which means I actually ended up with 104 images that I had to splice together for T2D (or write a gazillion datablocks). So I fire up VS.NET 2005 and within 1/2 hour I created my fancy whizbang Animated Sprite Maker (catchy title huh). Here's a screenshot:


Basically, you add individual images, hit the go button and it splices them all into a single frame based image. I first had to create 8 images for each of the directions. Then I grabbed those 8 images, put them into the Animated Sprite Maker, clicked the "Tile Vertically" button and it produced the image you saw in the 1st screenshot. Which leads me to the actual game (actually it's a screensaver but for now it functions more like a game since I control the little dude). Here's the screenshot of my animated man in action (if this were a video you would see that he walks in all 8 directions depending on which keys you press):


And there you have it. Using Poser 6 for 3D modeling, I easily created a full set of sprites for my 2D game. Now, I will say that since Poser 6 does cost $249, this solution obviously isn't for everybody. I'm sharing just to spark other coders imagination who are graphically disable such as myself.

-Mark

P.S. The screensaver shown here is just 1 screensaver in my SickSavers project. There will be others to go along with the collection. I have an updated description of the project, but for some reason, I can't update the project page with the detailed text. If anyone's interested, I'll post it here.