SpriteWorks2 Beta Now Available

Featured in Michael Snow’s book, “Game Programming with Silverlight” and Blog, SpriteWorks is an fast and easy solution for creating animated sprite sheets for 2D games from existing 3D models. SpriteWorks was created last year, based on the XNA graphics framework. As such, it required VisualStudio 2008 and the XNA Framework to be installed as well. But no longer.

SpriteWorks2 is a complete overhaul from the ground up. It’s foundation has shifted from XNA to T3D and comes with a new look and a lot of great improvements. But the process of taking 3D models and generating animated sprite sheets for 2D games is the same. Existing customers are using SpriteWorks to create art for iPhone, TGB, and Torque X 2D games.

 

Collada 3D Support

One of the biggest features is support for the Collada 3D format. Collada is a popular 3D format that’s supported by every major 3D editor, including 3D Studio Max, Maya, XSI, and Blender. You can easily load your 3D models into SpriteWorks via Collada export.

New Lighting

SpriteWorks2 also offers even better lighting support. Now you can change the brightness and color of the light source, resulting in unique rendering effects. You can also use a mouse to drag the source light into position. You can also apply post-process image effects, such as blur, to add even more to your sprite sheets.

New Usability

Lastly, overall usability was closely reviewed and improved to make it as easy and efficient as possible to bring in 3D models, pose them, and produce animated sprite sheets. In addition to the existing camera sliders, you can drag the mouse around to move and rotate the model into position.

Position your mouse at the top-left corner of the viewport to reveal a popup menu that controls model placement and orientation by mouse. You can either capture a single frame of animation or create an entire animated sprite sheet.

After specifying how many animated cells you want, press the Create Sprite button to create an anti-aliased, translucent sprite sheet similare to the one below. An image like this can quickly add 3D graphic art to your T2D, iTGB, or Torque X 2D game. Manny existing customers are using SpriteWorks to create content for Flash and Silverlight Web games.

But quickly migrating the original SpriteWorks functionality based on XNA to T3D was not a quick task. Game developer Daniel Hopkins was a tremendous help in getting key functionality working in a very short period. He’s a fantastic T3D developer and deserves a ton of credit for his contribution.

The Future of SpriteWorks

SpriteWorks2 is definitely a huge leap forward from the original release, but it’s also just the beginning. The plan to quickly move over from XNA to T3D was meant to open new development possibilities, such as Mac OS platform release, support for even more 3D formats, and enabling new post-process effects, such as glow and cartoon rendering.

Availability

Existing SpriteWorks customers may now download the latest Beta release of SpriteWorks2 for Free from their download page on the EnvyGames website. For more information about SpriteWorks, please visit the ]SpriteWorks product page.

Beta Note: The SpriteWorks2 Beta will only load 3D shapes located within the Application’s root directory or below.  C:\Program Files\EnvyGames\SpriteWorks2  (Default)

John K.
www.envygames.com