Advanced use of Sprites

agreatjedi

Using 3ds Max:
I'm trying to achieve the same effect seen in old FPS shooters that used sprites. NOT just the basic effect of always facing the camera rather, while maneuvering around an enemy, the game would change the sprites image to show a different angle based on your position.
I have captured a video sample of this which can be viewed
here.
I know this could be done manually but I would prefer a more automated process, for I plan on having many such sprites in one scene.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

CrazyButcher

sounds like a maxscript task to me. you would define your images and then make the script that it runs over the whole animation and computes angle of the "sprite" object towards camera, decomposing that vector into euler rot or polar coords, you would make a lookup in your imagelist and set that as active map of the material, you'd definetely need some sort of animatable material. Or encode your views into a video file, and change active frame via the maxscript.

Toomas

Couldnt it be done with planes ala you have intersecting planes each with one of the views, then the compter decides which plane faces camera the most, unhides other planes and makes this plane face the camera :S

I dont know crap about scripting so you might aswell ignore me here

agreatjedi

Toomas: That's what I originally had in mind and the only thing I can think of that would work in this manner would be the falloff material as a transparency map, but I can't figure out how to define what angle of view makes the object dissapear.
Butcher: It sounds like a good idea, but I'm not very competent in Maxscript...

Any ideas of how I could get a Falloff mat to work this way?

Eric Chadwick

Just thinking out of the blue here, but I'd try limiting the Falloff's Output ramp to a step-like curve(?), so the non-aligned faces would just "pop" invisible.

Better yet, just get a sprite engine and mod it... perfect authenticity

Slum

Just curious, how does one go about doing the simple effect of having a plane always face the camera, in Max?