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Ive heard they were 3d generatedthen rendered into sprites. Can anyone concur withthis idea. Im having a tough time with the top down style. Would blender be a good option if they were 3d rendered to 2d? If not then what?

they could have been done as models then rendered frame by frame into 2d isometric images or drawin isometric from the ground up..

im going with isometric 2d pixel art by what it looks like:


you could easily do an effect like that in almost any 2D pixel program out there as long as it has a 360 degree 2D shader for the shadows!

heres a link on isometric pixel art i read it a long time ago and i was easily able to create isometric pixel art afterwords alot of other good pixel art tuts on there to!

http://www.drububu.com/tutorial/#pixel-art-isometric

I think blender would be a good option for more complex things. Here's a quick example I whipped up.
This one is just a render with some Ambient occlusion added. Under the render settings, The scale is down to 17 percent and Anti Aliasing is turned off.




Make sure your camera is set to orthographic for a more isometric look. The angle of the camera is about 45 degrees. (It was actually the default position)


This one uses the freestyle build from Graphicall.org
I used the uniformpruning_zsort Python module.



This render uses the same technique shown here
Adjusting the diffuse ramps to give more of a 8/16 bit look is the trick here.


So just giving another example. Nothing wrong with doing it by hand either. This way (if you know how to use blender already) is a very fast way of getting this kind of result. This only took me about an hour. Of course, adding more detail will take longer Here is the Blend file

Thanks alot guys, I thought I read a long time ago they were models rendered as sprites. I just wasnt sure and couldnt remember. I'll give blender a shot. Never used it. Hopefully the learning curve isnt that bad. Thanks again for all the input and the links!

You're welcome for the links ^^
Alice, I'll have to check out those pixel tutorials too! Thanks for sharing!

The Blender learning curve is pretty steep though. Steeper if you've used other 3D apps and you expect things to be in certain spots or named certain things. Lots of tutorials on the interwebs to help you though I wish the best of luck to you!

Alice, I'll have to check out those pixel tutorials too! Thanks for sharing!

definitely should there pretty good, as for using 3d models rendered to 2D i don't personally use that method although in school i had alot of fun with 3d modelers i just tend to do all my pixel art from hand im just more of the classical drawing type..

i have a bamboo pad though that i draw on my comp with makes characters easy as pie to make cause, my problem with straight pixel art is it's tedious for animation, then my problem with 3d modelers is it's tedious just to get the shapes perfect the way you want, with the bamboo pad i draw it by hand which i used to do all the time back then so i get it right in the first go