Space ship Sprites

[Doopy]

I'm working on using Sketchup to build graphics for a plugin for an old game called Escape Velocity Nova. The game works based off of rotation sprites to depict your spacecraft, and I'm building new ships, so I need new sprites. Does anyone have any suggestions of the best way to render these images? I need something that will come out like this:

36 sprites with an even 10° of rotation each, or on some of the larger models, 72 sprites with 5° rotation each. I need images of even sizes with identical perspectives. I suppose I can take a screenshot, rotate, rinse and repeat, but I'm looking for a less labour-intensive solution, and hopefully a way to automate the process for multiple models.

I'm willing to assemble the sprites individually in Photoshop if absolutely necessary, but a 36 frame movie would be easier if there's any way to do it for free.

Let me know what you think and if you have any ideas!
Thanks!

[Roidsan]

Fallon,

Yours is a very interesting post. I’m afraid I can only offer moral support. I don’t have any suggestions on how to render the images. And, I’m not sure how it is relevant or helpful, but I taught PShop for 17 years. Maybe there is something in there that might be useful to you at some point.

We have a lot of spaceship designers here. It might help your request if you could upload a better image of your model requirements (I have a Mac, and it’s SO tiny on my screen) and share some of your SU approach to designing sprites. We can’t all be designing “big” models. Some more details on your process and requirements would be helpful, especially for someone like me who is a complete SU beginner.

I’ve had to do so many projects that were “labor intensive” that most of the time I just go ahead and do it. I think you are smart in asking for short cuts, you never know when someone will come up with a killer solution, especially on SUcation.

I love commodity trading, building up a great ship, dodging pirates and cops, and have been doing so since “Sundog” on an Apple IIe in 1983. What caught my eye on EV Nova Wikipedia was that it is/might be/was playable on Mac OSX. Whatever.

In the mean time could you suggest where I should explore on the Ambrosia site to learn the most current stuff on this game and the plug-in requirements?

And…everything you do in SU will be of interest to someone on this forum, so keep letting us know what you are doing and what solutions you come up with.

For you...

Lloyd

[Alan Fraser]

The SketchUp Web Exported will orbit a model and take a series of shots of it from a predetermined number of positions. It ought to be possible to tweak the code and get it to do multiple such passes at specific heights, in order to get what you want.
You'll find it on this page, heading the Viewer Compatibility section.