New sprites?

VikingR

Now that Baldur's Gates supposedly has become more "open" engine-wise - do you think modders will be able to implement new character/monster sprites? Sprites are really the only thing that bother me about the visuals. Even the old Ultima-Online ones look better.

I've always wondered why it is so hard to edit them, but then again I'm no modder.
How do you even make a sprite? Right now, I kind of imagine (excuse my ignorance) it as drawing the figure pixel by pixel from every perspevtive and subsequently animate them, kind of like a *gif file.

I would love to run around with that cowled-wizard-sprite or the Gandalf-sprite that Elminster has.

waardenius

Well, you can indeed use the Elminster-sprite through Shadowkeeper.

Other cool ones to use are Lavok, a moose, and the guy sitting at a chair chugging tankards of ale.

Kirkor

Original sprites were made this way:
Developers made 3D models. Then the models were rendered into sprites - a 2D pictures, moving at 30fps.

Original 3D models are gone, and we left only with sprites.
To make fully functional character, you must make hundreds of THOUSANDS frames. So there is no way to edit existing sprites or adding more detail. Simple sword thrust animation has 30 frames per second. And there are several different directions you character is facing, many different weapons etc. For each of these there are different cloth sets, different races, etc...

I guess they could just make 3D models from scratch and render them, but then they would have to do it with EVERY sprite, so it wouldn't look out of place. It's worth alot of work and money...
Also, contract limitations probably wouldn't let them, to replace all of the old sprites.
Other than that, most people would whine anyway

Cuv

Moving this to the modding forum:D

stardog765

Is there any way to get them to render less pixelated? Like I have seen some screenshots from others where their characters looks nice and smooth. Almost like there is FSAA on them.

Does that make sense?

doodles

stardog765 said:

Is there any way to get them to render less pixelated? Like I have seen some screenshots from others where their characters looks nice and smooth. Almost like there is FSAA on them.

Does that make sense?

They probably just look smoother due to the images being compressed/resized etc. into smaller pictures from high resolutions which always makes games look better in screenshots.

stardog765

Hmm ya that could be. Thanks for pointing that out before my OCD really kicked in!

Hatachi

Kirkor said:

Original sprites were made this way:
Developers made 3D models. Then the models were rendered into sprites - a 2D pictures, moving at 30fps.

Original 3D models are gone, and we left only with sprites.
To make fully functional character, you must make hundreds of THOUSANDS frames. So there is no way to edit existing sprites or adding more detail. Simple sword thrust animation has 30 frames per second. And there are several different directions you character is facing, many different weapons etc. For each of these there are different cloth sets, different races, etc...

I guess they could just make 3D models from scratch and render them, but then they would have to do it with EVERY sprite, so it wouldn't look out of place. It's worth a lot of work and money...
Also, contract limitations probably wouldn't let them, to replace all of the old sprites.
Other than that, most people would whine anyway

I'm really not into doing 3D art, but could you automate the vast majority of the 3D model to sprite conversions automatically in Blender? You would just need to make the 3D models to be rendered into sprites. Am I wrong on this?

IchigoRXC

@Hatachi I am sure you could automate the rendering out of sprite images once you had all the animations and dimensions you needed. All in all, it would be a lengthy process from start to finish.

Methuselas

I've been toying with this idea. It wouldn't be that hard to create certain new bipedal monster animations, provided I knew what the animations were. For example, Attack 1, Attack 2, Death, etc. Advances in rendering techniques have changed the scope of sprites. Now, this really is only going to work with monsters like Gnolls, Orcs, Bandits, etc.

I could create a simple rig, that has all the animations already done, to which someone could bind a simple model to. Keep the polycount to around 1k for humanoid sized models and once I get a base model done, I could paint the weights and export that, so people could quickly paint weight their own models.

This would only work with monsters that had their own weapons. I'm not exactly sure how IE uses the character sprites with the weapon sprites.

Methuselas

Kirkor said:

I guess they could just make 3D models from scratch and render them, but then they would have to do it with EVERY sprite, so it wouldn't look out of place. It's worth a lot of work and money...
Also, contract limitations probably wouldn't let them, to replace all of the old sprites.
Other than that, most people would whine anyway

You would have to make a separate 3d model for each monster.

For characters, you would have to make a separate 3d model for each character class, then race, then helm, armor, weapon, shield. Each one would have to be rendered out N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW, 'cos it's my understanding the engine overlays the items on top of the character sprites.

Spells are another story. Most of those can be handled by textures, particles and emitters.

Kirkor said:

I'm really not into doing 3D art, but could you automate the vast majority of the 3D model to sprite conversions automatically in Blender? You would just need to make the 3D models to be rendered into sprites. Am I wrong on this?

You could batch render the animations (which is what I would do) and since the sprites are so small, it wouldn't take that long, if you were doing low-quality renders. For another game I was working on, rendering wall sprites, at 24 total, using Mental Ray, 4 render passes and production quality rendering took almost 4 hours, on average and these were 112x88 pixels.