HEY I'm thinking of making a 3dmm game
 

I want to use many characters as sprites, but I can't help but feel like there's a better way to get them than the way I'm currently going about it.

So I made a greenscreen background, and I've been lining the characters up (the first frame has some guides to help me get the model in the right place) then I screenshot each frame and remove the green background one by one. I managed to do patrick and gustave like this.. but it's a ton of work. Especially because eventually there may be more animations I want to use than run and jump. Can anyone think of a better way to do this?

Hmm.

Create a green screen background in 3DMM and add the characters and all the animations you want in the scene. Use 'Spider' to capture the animation as a GIF. Collage all the images into one and remove the green screen, maybe?

This image is from the 3dmm point and click game "Troubling Teleportation"
"Sure. Yeah, not sure if there's an easier way it could've been done, but frame-by-frame screenshots is how I did it. I sort of used a green screen within 3dmm and then just set that green color to be transparent. Was pretty time-consuming, but something easy to do mindlessly while watching youtube videos or whatever in the background. Here's the folder for the "karate kick" animation, with the raw screenshots and the final cropped sprites:"

his pants are green dummy dummy dumb dumb boy!

Green pants, the biggest mistake in mankind.

1. Get Paint.NET




2. As Kane said, get Spider




3. Run the Spider EXE, then animate all the actions you need as frames in 3DMM. Be sure, in the Spider window, to set the resolution to 1920x1080. This saves you from having to upscale manually later.






4. Do not use Spider for GIF recordings, it's always a bit choppy or too slow. Instead, for sprites, just capture every frame of the actor's actions by advancing one frame and hitting capture again. To capture frames, click the "Browse" button before you start, and enter a dummy file name in the folder you want your images to be in. Name it something like "JerzyKarate1.png". Also, make sure the 3DMM window is in that green screen scene. Afterwards, make sure no other windows cover the 3DMM window, then choose the action you want and fully animate it. Go back to Spider, then click the capture button once at the start of the action. Advance one frame, then capture again with a different filename (just manually edit the filename by typing it in), like "JerzyKarate2.png". Keep doing this for every frame of the actor's action.







5. You should have all of your frames ready now, so open Paint.NET and open each frame as well. Then, get the magic wand tool, then go to the top and set the tolerance to 5%.










6.THIS IS WHERE IT SPEEDS UP A LOT. Going to each frame, just click on the green area with that tool selected, and hit the delete key. No need to save for now.




7. Finally, with all the images unsaved, try to close the program, and if it prompts you to save your work, click that. It'll now save all of the images automatically.



Done!!!

For 4, use GIF - it may be choppy/slow but it'll still capture every frame. Don't waste time manually saving each frame as a different png/jpg.

For 5 onwards, if using Photoshop, use the Load Files into Stack script. I assume Paint.net will have similar tools (or downloadable scripts). This will tile every image onto one document, so you'll only have to remove the green background once.

Paint.NET has gif editor plugins, but they instead just layer it and keep each frame as it was. You still need to floodfill + delete, but I guess it'd be much faster than manually editing.

Also, I think most game editors don't accept GIFs, and rather just accept image sequences or sprites, so it'd be slightly more of a pain to split it back into a GIF.

What are you talking about?
Spider (GIF anim) > Put all the GIF images into one doc with script/batch/tile > Remove the green background > Save as PNG/JPEG/BMP etc

Yeah there's loads of tools to dump gifs to sprite sheets

love you guys

:)

:)

:)