Dink Blender Template
A Blender template scene for Blender V4 or V3.6 that lets you easily render animated Dink sprites automatically. Inspired by iplaydink's Dink Shadows for Blender.
It uses Blender compositing to generate the Dink checker-grid shadow pattern for the model and has a python script for automatically rendering all sprite directions and frames for an animated model, at the click of a button!
For info on how to use, after extracting the files, read the attached offline documentation by opening "DBT_V1.0_doc\index.html" in your browser of choice.
Features a custom demo model by Bluedy for testing the automatic rendering!
It uses Blender compositing to generate the Dink checker-grid shadow pattern for the model and has a python script for automatically rendering all sprite directions and frames for an animated model, at the click of a button!
For info on how to use, after extracting the files, read the attached offline documentation by opening "DBT_V1.0_doc\index.html" in your browser of choice.
Features a custom demo model by Bluedy for testing the automatic rendering!
This file is very handy if you don't want to set up your own lighting and camera in blender to render out a model from the blender application.
There is a detailed series of html help files as well as text inside the .blend file to explain how to use this file, but you will need to know a bit about blender to use this file. As any user will probably have created or grabbed a 3D model themselves then that is a fair assumption to make.
It comes with a test model, which has two blender "actions" available: a push cycle and a idle cycle. Which are usually the standard four directions of South, West, East and North, but this file has the ability to do all eight directions which is handy.
I was able to "append" (blender's way of importing objects from another blender file) my new Dink model and it's rig with the walk cycle pretty easily.
The ability to preview the composite image is really good - although I needed to toggle the "Backdrop" attribute in the Composting window to see it properly, might have turned that off in another file previously, so maybe that is "on" by default.
The camera angle is something like 62 degrees which is interesting, and it does look accurate to the original Dink model, so I'll probably be changing that in my next renders. Here is a comparison of the DBT render with my version at 45 degrees and as straight PNG
What this file could have is the ability to switch between rendering with the checkboard shadows and just an alpha based version of the shadow catcher. Maybe you can do that with this file, but I couldn't see where and given the complexity of the compositing nodes and my own basic level of nodes I wasn't game to try. Disabling nodes turned off the shadow catcher completely, so I stopped there in terms of adjusting things.
Also being able preview all the 8 directions prior to rendering would be nice. Maybe you can, but I couldn't see how.
It would also be great if it had something in the python script that renamed the sprites in the way of standard Dink file structure such as ds-wX- where X is the direction, but that is really minor as a renamer app will do what you need easily.
Overall nice one, just wish I could do png without the checkerboard, add with the level of detail, smoothness, I can get rendering straight from blender.
There is a detailed series of html help files as well as text inside the .blend file to explain how to use this file, but you will need to know a bit about blender to use this file. As any user will probably have created or grabbed a 3D model themselves then that is a fair assumption to make.
It comes with a test model, which has two blender "actions" available: a push cycle and a idle cycle. Which are usually the standard four directions of South, West, East and North, but this file has the ability to do all eight directions which is handy.
I was able to "append" (blender's way of importing objects from another blender file) my new Dink model and it's rig with the walk cycle pretty easily.
The ability to preview the composite image is really good - although I needed to toggle the "Backdrop" attribute in the Composting window to see it properly, might have turned that off in another file previously, so maybe that is "on" by default.
The camera angle is something like 62 degrees which is interesting, and it does look accurate to the original Dink model, so I'll probably be changing that in my next renders. Here is a comparison of the DBT render with my version at 45 degrees and as straight PNG
What this file could have is the ability to switch between rendering with the checkboard shadows and just an alpha based version of the shadow catcher. Maybe you can do that with this file, but I couldn't see where and given the complexity of the compositing nodes and my own basic level of nodes I wasn't game to try. Disabling nodes turned off the shadow catcher completely, so I stopped there in terms of adjusting things.
Also being able preview all the 8 directions prior to rendering would be nice. Maybe you can, but I couldn't see how.
It would also be great if it had something in the python script that renamed the sprites in the way of standard Dink file structure such as ds-wX- where X is the direction, but that is really minor as a renamer app will do what you need easily.
Overall nice one, just wish I could do png without the checkerboard, add with the level of detail, smoothness, I can get rendering straight from blender.