OGA tiles perspective from 3D
OGA tiles perspective from 3D
Thursday, January 26, 2012 - 09:47
Hey guys - I've been playing around with rendering tile sprites from Blender in all sorts of style and isometric perpectives. Has anyone tried doing the OGA tileset (offset top isometric) from 3D assets?
As well, pouring over Bellanger's work on the Medieval House, Cliff setup the tiles in pieces and render them as such (with a moving camera); is this a preferably workflow, or is it better to setup an entire scene and then manually strip out sprites from that?
Setting up an entire scene to render in one-shot is possible, but it's extremely hard to get the tiles the correct size. Basically your camera orthographic scale and camera Z position needs to be perfect otherwise the tiles will all be offset improperly and hard to slice up in the final version.
It might also be tricky if you're casting shadows, have to make sure you're not throwing shadows onto nearby tiles. Same if you're doing Ambient Occlusion, mirror/reflection, etc.
I still opt to render one tile at a time because it's easier for me to handle the output.
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Rendering in OGA tileset's style is going to be tricky in 3D. If you're using a 30 degree camera angle (as with isometric) flat square tiles would become a 2:1 rectangle. But you want square base tiles, not rectangles. You could build tiles that are 1:2 size so that it renders as a 1:1 square, in theory. I haven't tried this yet.
About the entire scene render: I must be missing something. Assume I have a fully put together room (say, spanning 10 tiles wide), a camera set for the isometric, and I also have a previously rendered tile at my disposal. What happen if I render the room at several fold resolution (so 2000x1000 instead of the 640x320 that I need), then shrink the image to match the previously rendered tile? Wouldn't that allow me to cleanly cut out 64 x 32(n) pieces?
(The reason I'm asking about this is that I have a hard time visualizing the pieces in isolation, the way you and Lamoot handled the house/bridge.)
About the OGA/JRPG style - fiddling with it a little more, I'm convinced that for the most part it's just stitching together of separately rendered top (orthographic) and side (ortho) views, such that they fit a square tile. There are some irregularities (e.g., trees merging into forests, archs), but those have no uniform solution. In any case, I'm quite certain that at least a manual stitching step is required.
> About the entire scene render: I must be missing something. Assume I have a fully put together room (say, spanning 10 tiles wide), a camera set for the isometric, and I also have a previously rendered tile at my disposal. What happen if I render the room at several fold resolution (so 2000x1000 instead of the 640x320 that I need), then shrink the image to match the previously rendered tile? Wouldn't that allow me to cleanly cut out 64 x 32(n) pieces?
Ah, so there's a difference between rendering one solid piece (e.g. a room) and rendering a sheet of already-split tiles in one render. It's much easier to deal with the former, the solid pieces. I have done this for some larger structures in my games. But I've only done it when the pieces aren't mix & match; I've done it when those tiles always go together (e.g. the "broken tower" in my game is 7 tiles that are always in the same configuration, rendered as one solid piece). Depending on the shape of the tiles, you should be able to slice tiles after rendering that can be rearranged.
I thought you were talking about rendering split tiles in a Blender scene and getting a perfect tile sheet out of it, in a single render. That's far trickier.
Heh. A single render with perfect tilesheet as outcome would be too fabulous. Thanks for describing your experiences with going 3D -> sprites - I'll play with them some more.