Creating sprites from 3d models - Questions about render settings

chris the stranger

I'm going to be starting a project soon, whose artstyle I want to be in similar vein to games that use pre-rendered 3D models for their sprites.  I've done a lot of pixel art over the years, so I know some of the core concepts involved in making a character 'stand out' -- lighting, posture and balance, that sort of thing.  That said, 3D work (particulary, rendering) is an area where I'm super-fuzzy.  My only concern right now is rendering a character over a blank background, so nothing too taxing.  I have a few questions that require advice from someone with some technical expertise when it comes to what goes on 'beneath the hood' during the rendering.

Q: How do I deal with the transparenices that occur between the model and the environment?

I'm using the 3DLight renderer as of now.  When I messed around with Iray, I found that I could set Pixel Filter to 0, and that dealt with the transparency around the edges.  That also made the rest of the rendered model extremely noisy.  If I render over a solid background environment, I don't have transparency issues, but I do have to worry about severe aliasing when I cut out the character images for postwork.  Is there an advanced setting or technique that filters only the pixels within the model, but not with pixels that constitute the background?

Q: Is there a way to adjust properties like 'Saturation' in 3Delight?

Saturation is my #1 concern.  I need to be able to make these sprites *extremely* saturated, and I'd rather have a method of doing this prior to the rendering stage, to keep the artstyle as consistent as possible.  A quick search leads me to believe the only way to do this is through tone-mapping, and the tutorials that showed up all pertain to Iray.  Currently I use 3Delight, because I'm still in the testing phase.  I can render a character in 10-15 seconds, vs. the 4-6 minutes Iray takes, which is extra helpful for making lots and lots and lots of minor tweaks.  The only solution I've used so far, is: locate the diffuse maps for all clothing items and skins, and creating alternate versions of them with HSV modifications.  It's about as far from practical as you can get.

Render Scripts, Batch Rendering

This one's looming over the horizon. Right now, I'm only trying to nail down the aesthetic, but at some point I'll need a way to automate as much as I can.  I'm using LineRender9000 as a means to create lighting profiles for the sprite drawn with different sources.  I'm also using a toon cam that would operate with ambient lighting enabled.  So in total, that would be:

- Line Blend Camera: Needs to render 4 versions of the scene (One with each of the four light sources enabled, the rest disabled)

- Toon Camerea: Needs to render 1 version of the scene with ambient lighting enabled, the rest of the lights disabled.

- Repeated for however many frames I would want in an animation.

This isn't so much a question of 'how to do it', but more just 'are there any tools avaialbe that already do this?'  I'd be willing to invest a small amount of time in learning some scripting to do this, but an already available tool would be much preferable.

This is going to be a pretty long and tedious process, and I'm fully aware that I can't automate everything. There will still be touchup and postwork that needs to be done for every frame.  Therefore, I can only commit to this style if I can get everything 'right'.  This could be several weeks of messing around with render settings, lighting and camera positioning, so I'd appreciate whatever help could be offered.

Sven Dullah

Hi, I'll give it a go:)

Q1: Not sure if I understand the problem. Do you need your renders to be sharper? In the rendersettings editor tab with 3DL selected, there are the filtersettings. Try setting pixelfilter width to 1x1 and choose Box, that will give you the sharpest render possible. Check what shading rate you use, a lower setting will give you a sharper image with more accurate detail. The default 1 is very high, I use 0.2 or 0.1. Also, if you render through a camera, turn off Depth of Field, or set F/Stop to a ridiculously high number. If that won't do it, you could try rendering at double size and scale them down in postwork.

Q2: Only thing I can think of if you don't want to edit all your textures is in the rendersettings editor, set gain to 0. It may work for what you want to do. You need to have gamma correction on and gamma 2.2 for this to work.

Q3: Try this one: https://www.daz3d.com/batch-render-for-daz-studio-4-and-rib

You need to save every render as a separate scene, then you just load your scenes into the script, hit render and go to sleep;)

chris the stranger

I appreciate the feedback.

Also, for some reason I didn't see the response when I checked yesterday, even while the thread clearly said "1 comment."  So if you see a thread on the New User forum asking one of the three questions in a much shorter form - that's why.