Blender Sprite Studio

This file includes a setup of cameras, lighting and compositing nodes for creating pre-rendered 2D sprites in Blender 3.6 with minimal additional work. It is intended as a drag-and-drop solution for repetitive tasks.

I have used previous version of this file to create renders for many of my projects, including:

-These baobab 2D renders and these promo images for the baobab 3D model.

-My jam games which you can see on my itch page (https://croomfolk.itch.io/).

I have polished it up for release as part of the Howlfire Co-Jam Zero, aiming to help artists and gamedevs to create better projects with less tedious work - https://itch.io/jam/howl-fire-co-jam

This file was inspired by the Blender addon CreateISOCam, by jasonicarter. Help was received from Oristur on the Blender Community discord for creating the node setup on the compositor.

Thanks to both of them for all the help and previous work this was built upon! The chair used on one of the example images is from PolyHaven and licensed as CC0.

=-=-=-Contents and Technical Information-=-=-=

This project includes:

-A node setup in the Compositor for removing Blender Cycles's default antialiasing on render edges. For game renders in retro styles, this saves hours of cleanup work on image editing softwares. See the preview image for a closeup!

-Orthogonal cameras, one for each side view plus a topdown camera.

-Three cameras for 'isometric' graphics, including one true isometric angle for architectural work, and two sprite-oriented dimetric camera angles which create nice, regular 'pixel stairs' on the object edges - such as a 2:1 pixel ratio when using the gameiso camera.

This is what people usually mean when they talk about isometric graphics in games. See the preview images for a closeup!

-Three cameras for 'topdown oblique' camera angles - orthogonal angles which show both the top and front of an object. One with the same angle as true isometric is included, while the other two are more practical for games and include a 1:1 ratio between the top plane and the front plane; and another one with a 2:1 ratio.

-A perspective camera and light for creating promotional renders for your 3D assets, using the shadow catcher object to create the illusion of an infinite white background. A render from this camera is included on the preview images!

-Two different topdown lights, as using a different radius may give you better drop shadows or better object self-shadows as shown in one of the preview images. Experiment with combining both in post editing!

Usage notes:

-The ground plane is meant to be used as a shadow catcher - in its visibility properties, uncheck 'Camera' visibility to render objects without shadows, or make sure 'Shadow Catcher' and 'Camera' are checked, while unchecking 'Camera' visibility on your object itself, to render just the object's shadow separately. If you're confused, there are quick and easy YouTube tutorials for understanding how to use shadow catchers on Blender.

-If you want your renders to have anti-aliasing on their borders, uncheck 'Use Nodes' above the Compositing window. If you're rendering your objects' ground cast shadows separately, you should experiment with doing this before rendering them.

-I suggest not moving the cameras at all when adjusting the framing to fit your objects - instead, go to the camera properties, and mess with 'Orthogonal Scale' and 'Shift Y/X' settings. Read below for the WIP aspects of using Shift adjustments.

=-=-=-To-Do List and Lacking Features-=-=-=

This file is a work-in-progress. I find it to save enormous amounts of time when making renders, but it still requires manual eyeballing of the camera scale and Shift Y/X to fully encompass the object and its shadow.

This file was created for Blender 3.6 LTS. Blender 4, released just one day after this project's initial release, has interesting new features for this, like light grouping that would prevent white light bouncing off of the shadow catcher - but I won't implement it until the first 4.X LTS release, as Blender 4 seems to break backwards compatibility in some cases.

In one of the cameras - Topdown Oblique 30 Degrees - I have experimented with a combination of camera height and Shift to make the Orthogonal Scale slider pivot around almost exactly the base of the object, allowing you to just move that one slider when adding in larger objects.

If anyone knows a better way of automating the perfect fitting of all opaque areas inside a camera (including ground shadows), I would love to expand this project with that! Until then, I recommend rendering *all of your needed sprites*, on a larger resolution than needed, before scaling the sprites down as a group on Krita. This way you can be sure that you're cropping out all of the blank space without finding out later that some of your sprites need to be on a different size.

Want any other camera angle or node setup to be added for pre-rendering sprites? Drop a comment or send me a message and I'll see about including it!

=-=-=-License-=-=-=

This file is provided under the CC0 Public Domain license.

You are free to use it in any way you want, commercially or not, without asking for permission!

For details, read about the license here: https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/cc0

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Blender Sprite Studio - by Croomfolk

https://croomfolk.carrd.co