/vr/ - Retro Games

>>1652189

This is just hazarding a guess here, but I'm guessing they used whatever 3d modeling suite was available at the time, set every model to be lit from a certain direction, and then rendered every single frame for each animation frame and each position (I've never played SMRPG but I'm guessing it has 8 different facings for each sprite, possibly 16). This has its advantages since it means animation for every character is just a matter of animating the character once, and then changing the model's positioning for each facing.

I've actually used this process myself to create custom assets for a Tiberian Sun mod (pic related), it's actually pretty simple, and since you're just rendering out sprites the render time is lightning quick, and you don't have to worry about bad model topology or texture fidelity since so much gets lost considering the small scale of the sprite.

Here's an example of the methods I'm talking about, albeit using more cartoonish shaders: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=74.msg736603#msg736603