FMM: Sprite Sheets or Models?
Hello, this is Anders Howard, Producer on Full Moon Manor. Full Moon Manor is a student game development project. I hope that this space will become updated regularly with information about our game.
To kick things off, I’d like to talk about a choice we are currently (re)making- to go with rendered out sprite sheets for our animations, or to use the full 3D models in the game engine.
We originally decided to go with sprite sheets because
- a.) None of our original core team of 6 considered ourselves animators and we thought we could doctor the errors out of the sprite sheets.
- b.) We could render out using a toon shader from Maya to achieve the look we wanted.
However, lately we have found the means to overcome these obstacles, and without any hit to our efficiency or pipeline we may be able to switch over to using 3D models.
- We have taken on two animators who know what they are doing.
- Jeff (Aydelotte, our Lead Programmer) has demonstrated a toon shader in the engine that looks pretty close to our original Maya renders.
- If we change our minds we can easily just render out the sprites after all.
In the example below you can see our original rendered sprite from Maya on the left (pardon the anti-aliasing issues..and the interpenetrating geometry on the model), and the evolution of the 3D model’s toon shader on the right.
More soon with each neat little development !
-Anders Howard (Producer / Artist)
