Last fall, when I needed to make some sprite sheets for GameHalf characters, I turned to Blender, an open source 3D modeling and animation tool. Blender's interface is difficult to learn, but with a lot of help from web and YouTube tutorials, I was able to take some models from TurboSquid and successfully get them into GameHalf. The whole process goes like this:
- Modeling -- arrange vertices in 3D space until they look like a character
- Texturing -- get a 2D picture which will become the model's skin
- UV Mapping -- map each 3D vertex to a point on the 2D texture
- Rigging -- add a skeleton to the model
- Animating -- move the skeleton around to make the model do things
- Rendering -- take many pictures of the animating model
- Compositing -- put all the rendered animation frames together into a sprite sheet
Starting with a model from TurboSquid meant that steps 1 to 3 had already been done for me. I only had to learn steps 4 through 7. The results were pretty good, but I wanted to learn the first three steps. So I built a brand new model, a six-foot-tall snake alien I call Cobrazoid.
Cobrazoid was easy to model. He's basically just a squished, bent tube.
His texture is this picture from cgtextures.com:
After UV mapping he looks like this:
The next step was to add the skeleton:
I did the animations today. Here's the resulting sprite sheet:
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