Executive Overlord

Alex and I are programmers, not artists. We love writing code and designing software. But even a prototype needs some placeholder art -- something to occupy screen space until a real artist comes along. One of our projects, codenamed GameHalf, animates its characters using prerendered sprites of 3D models.

The tool we use to produce these graphics is Blender, an open-source program for making 3D models, and texturing, lighting, animating and rendering them. I spent about a month gaining a rudimentary understanding of Blender, in order to produce some placeholder art. Starting with a base mesh of a character and its skin textures, I inserted an armature ("skeleton"), animated the actions we needed, and rendered the required sprites.

It turns out that Blender is scriptable with Python, so I was able to build a number of scripts to automate the rendering. This means that any changes to the character mesh, textures, animations, etc can be quickly rendered out to a suitable sprite sheet.

All this happened last fall, but I recently busted out Blender to produce a green outline view of one of GameHalf's characters, a quadruped alien we've taken to calling the "zergling". This outline view is used as a paper doll in an inventory management dialog.



While rudimentary, this outline was easy to make. Blender includes edge detection as one of the rendering passes, and each of the many passes can be turned on or off individually. So I just set the edges to green and turned off the other passes for an instant outline.