/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9008671
>Would you say Blender is too inferior for amateur use?

I would say that it's NOT the industry standard and that being an "amateur" app doesn't make it any easier to learn (like you might think it does). It's just as hard to use as Maya and 3DS Max (if not harder), but Max and Maya are the industry standard.

I learned by Maya and Photoshop starting when I was 8 years old. If you want to teach your kid multimedia apps, it can definitely work. The only thing I will say is that it's very different now. In the early 2000s all I had to learn from were textbooks from bookstores, Amazon, and libraries. Now there are tons of tutorials on YouTube.

>>9007521
>>9007195
>The Donkey Kong sprite video

I finally had a look at and it. And there are some BIG problems with it that need fixing.

1.You should use the "software renderer" NOT the "hardware renderer" when rendering sprites in Maya. The Software renderer allows you to have raytraced shadows, which nearly all pre-rendered games used pretty much, and it looks much better and more realistic that way

2.It's much better to render sprites at a higher resolution first (like 128x128 or even 256x256) and then downscale them using "nearest neighbor interpolation" in Photoshop to something small like 16x16, 32x32, or 64x64 resolution. This allows to sprites to preserve more of the detail of the high-resolution render. Donkey Kong Country also did this.

3.You probably should turn the anti-aliasing ON. Again Rare (the people who developed DKC) did this. Any jagged edges seen are NOT a result of a lack of anti-aliasing, but instead is caused by the lower color palette of the sprites not allowing a smooth transition between the transparent and non-transparent areas. Without anti-aliasing you're going to get a lot of noise/jitter.

4.Render sprites as .PNG format. This allows for easy transparency without having to fuss about "alpha channels" and such like with Targa files (.tga)