Making Image Strips From 3D
I have read many forum requests for a way to turn 3D models into sprite sheets. If your 3d program can spit out animations as images then this program might be able to help. I use Cheetah3D, and if you do likewise then you are sitting pretty because I have a javascript file you can stick in the Macro Scripts directory for spitting out the frames into separated folders for 8 directions. You will simply have to adjust the camera settings, FPS, and maybe a few others to suit your models. stripanimation.js.
When you are prompted, find or make an empty directory and it will create (or you might have to create) 8 folders named se, s, sw, w, nw, n, ne, and e. It will insert 8 frames into each one of these directories. If you have another 3d program you might want to set something like this up.
The program that puts it all together is a java application (it’s what I’m decent at). You need to do a few steps for this to work quickly if you are using the 8 folders as mentioned above. First, decide how you want the strip layed out with the columns and rows text boxes. Next, open a Texture/Template from the menu. What this file does is it gives the size all the images will be scaled to. If the images are already the size you want just open one of them here. Finally, in the file menu press “Open 8 Strips”. When the file dialog opens select the folder that contains the 8 direction folders and press open. You will see your images strip quickly followed by a save dialog, just name that direction with a “.png” extension and do this 7 more times as it prompts you.
If you either want to do individual strips or just make one big sprite sheet then use the “Open Mask/Strip Directory” option in the menu rather than the 8 folders option. Please bear in mind this is a development tool, quickly put together to accomplish a necessary task. I am also including the source code with it. I put a BSD licence at the top of the two files I wrote.
This is a Netbeans project file, the gui code was generated.
I would prefer to answer technical questions about this on the forum, so please post those comments there. Thanks.
