Rendering sprites sheets in max?

Davision3D

Basicly i want to render something like this:


I have a animated 3d model and that animation frames should be rendered in a row and the whole sheet needs to have alpha. Im too lazy to put them by hand in a row in PS, its also quite a lot of frames and animations.
Is there something build in in max that does that or is there any plugin for it?

divi

no clue about a plugin, but you could also copy your model as many times as there are animation frames and set them up like on the sheet. then just render it with an orthographic camera and all should be well. not the fastest way, but possibly faster than doing it in ps. especially if you'd tweak something and render it out again later.

CrazyButcher

sounds like it can be coded easily. something that takes the many small images as input and puts them together as one big. dont have 3dsmax at hand, but I think maxscript might be even sufficient to copy paste pixel rectangles.

other than that scripting languages or other image kits should work. it sounds so generic and frequent, that there may be something out there that does this...

edit:
my first google search found this
http://csssprites.org/

maybe can be applied to your stuff, too

Snowfly

Just render out the frames as images and compile them with GlueIt or XnView
http://sysimage.250free.com/

sir-knight

I use graphics gale for creating spritesheets... any image sequence can be loaded as a frame sequence then output onto a single sheet. Graphics gale is 20 bucks ish.

renderhjs

GlueIt is the only one that can stitch frames to a sprite sheet while preserving the 8bit PNG alpha transparency (XnView does not support that, same for some other sprite tools). Almost all other tools can't do that. I used it for my last project for creating turn and animation sheets, samples:


The propeller image was rendered using motion blur which is one advantage of using 32bit alpha PNG images.


a Matt spencer a buddy wrote this:
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/sprite-render-script

it has a lot of nice features,- check it out if you are not yet fixed to anything. I wanted to check out the sources some time and use it for a upcoming project.

Mark Dygert

Yep what snowfly said. I like glue-it super simple and easy to use.

Slum

I wrote a tool for After Effects that does this sort of stuff.. will upload it and document it later.

Davision3D

thx for all the help!

I just tried that max script and Glue it.

That max plugin works great except that you always have to remember that you have to click "clear all" before you render a new sheet otherwise it will not be rendered in a new sheet. Didnt looked in all the features yet but its quite fancy stuff.

Glueit works great too and that preview feature is also a nice thing. But I will use the max script, its faster to do everything directly in max.

gannonroader

You could actually render a video out by each individual frame from a left or right view port, then bring the frames into photoshop, and make an animation out of it. Fairly easy actually.

renderhjs

for some engines though you wouldn't want the animation file but instead a sprite sheet because its easier to process and edit at once (with all frames visible) in Photoshop.

gannonroader

yeah, I think basically the answer he's looking for is rendering the animation to individual frames as opposed to video.