Sprite generating tool

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Not sure if I’ll put anymore time into this but I made it last week just as a learning exercise.

The videos are shot in my android project so most textures/models would be much higher resolution on PC. Since it’s not a big game world you can also use extremely high polygon models that you wouldn’t otherwise have in a game to pre-render sprites from, and on PC you could also have textures up to 4096x4096, rather than 1024x1024…so could easily capture images 512x512 or larger, or create much longer sprite animations.

This is output from a skeleton with outline shader on android: (animates vertically)

Basically I set some pre-defined camera positions for straight on, isometric, and top-down angles you can switch through. You can rotate the model 90 degrees in either direction to get the same camera shots at multiple angles. There’s also an option to keep the model spinning and loop animations so you can make running animations with transitions to different directions

You can adjust the number of pictures taken and the size. In the video it makes 256x256px tiles, removes the pink background and packs them into a single texture.

Once you have the camera angle you want, you simply click an animation on the right to play it and load it into the slot to play during the capture. Once you’ve selected the animation, made sure it’s the one you want, you press the K key to clear the screen, snap your number of shots, isolate them using the alpha channel, and save them in the applications folder.

This is a video showing a few shader options I threw on:

And here’s a video showing what the animations are like when played back, before I removed the pink background or added the GUI:

Just wanted to share another use for unity to make tools in addition to games, I might make a tutorial or something in the future.

edit:: You can also use it to remove a range of colors, here’s a nasa pic I removed a range of colors from, not sure a purpose yet just messing around, I wanted to generate a level based off nasa space images, like populate stars or planets based off the picture…(black dots in picture are pixels removed for matching my range)

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Seems like something that could be good for the asset store? Are you planning to release it?

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I might just make a tutorial when I have more time. Then I could explain better how the pieces work together, or heck I guess I could make a pdf tutorial with sample scene and throw it on the asset store for a few bucks, or a free version on an ad filled page on my site to increase traffic.

I figured a standalone version would help people not using unity more than unity users. I had a heck of a time finding animated sprites that weren’t made with rpg maker when I was working with 2d.

This is a similar program but I couldn’t get all my textures to load on several of my models and it’s $50 http://www.garagegames.com/products/spriteworks

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I generated some sprites and found if I open the atlases with Tiled I can make good various combinations of animations really nicely.

Here’s some sprites animated on a webpage generated from it: http://www.pugetsoundtraining.com/Portfolio/index.html

hehe

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Make it better than : TheGameCreators - TheGameCreators

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Wow I never knew there were other programs besides the spriteworks one from garage games…thanks for the link

If you use it in Unity it’s already way more customizable as you can position lights around the stage however you want(and unity takes care of importing fbx, obj, etc).

The only thing you have to do to models you add is tag them with “screenshot” from a dropdown and drag a script onto them(which I could probably just add dynamically to anything tagged screenshot), when you hit play they’ll spawn at a spawn point with the camera already setup and controls so you can get the same shot angles from all your models.

Then in Tiled you can make a whole storyboard or put together various atlases from the same char with numerous animations very easily that line up perfectly.