The Dink Network

iPlaydink, - not to be confused with any product from Apple - has released a very useful little file for anyone working with Blender: Dink Shadows for Blender, which is basically a set-up to create shadows with hardly any effort at all!

I know making the shadows was one of my main reasons not to do complex new animations, but this seems to fix that problem quite handily.

Based on the description, this sounds like a very useful file for Blender users. I have no experience with the program (or hardly any 3d imaging program for that matter), but now I'm tempted to give it a try. In my experience with 2d imaging, animation has always been one of the toughest things for me. So I guess I'm partly hoping that 3d is a tiny bit easier to animate once you learn the proper skills. Also, I've noticed that making a Dinky 3d look with 2d drawn animation is very difficult...

Yeah, animations are much simpler in 3d..

I've planned making a series of video-tutorials for making dink-sprites in blender where we would start from this file.

I forgot, did we ever get access to the original 3D models?

I forgot, did we ever get access to the original 3D models?

Well, I haven't seen any .blend files for the original game, but I might just not be looking hard enough. I have found some other interesting things though:

http://www.dinknetwork.com/file/dink_models_blend/

http://www.dinknetwork.com/file/windemere_graphics_pack/

@IPlayDink:

Ric did a Blender tutorial many years ago. I haven't checked it out, although I probably will at some point. If you decide to do Blender tutorials, you could use his to improve your own, although the nearly ten year newer version of Blender probably has a lot more features:

http://www.dinknetwork.com/file/blendtut/

Unfortunately I'm not a fan of Blender, the software is just very hard to work with compared to Maya and Max. More importantly, there's many more plugins that work with exports from the latter two than there are for Blender.

So what exactly does this do? I don't have Blender, never planned on using it nor do I have any 3D graphical skills, but I'd be interested in an elaborate explanation.

So what exactly does this do?

Blender, or this file?

Blender is a program for making animated movies. It allow you to create 3D models, give them a skeleton and use that to describe how they can move, define the movements they do, and turn all that into a movie. You can also render a single image (in which case you don't need to worry about skeletons and movement).

Blender is notorious for its nonintuitive user interface. While this is right, it is a very powerful UI once you are used to it; almost everything can be done using keyboard shortcuts.

This file has a white ground plane and a camera and lamp set up in the correct position, so that if you add your model to it, the rendered shadow will be equivalent to the other shadows of dink sprites.

I forgot, did we ever get access to the original 3D models?
Nope we didnt. Seth says they're Justins work
Apparently Simok k made some but I am not sure about that. If we did it would make new characters seriously easy...

"I've planned making a series of video-tutorials for making dink-sprites in blender where we would start from this file."

I want this.