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How can I create diablo 2 like characters?
I want to build an RPG with 2d art. I want the character to be able to equip many different weapons and many different types of armor. One method I am considering is to create a sprite sheet animation with multiple sprite sheet animations, for example the moving of the legs is one animation and the swinging of the arms is another, this way I can swap the legs for legs with armor but keep the same arms. I am trying to avoid drawing every different combination of pants and shoes and shirts and gloves into a different animations. I have looked at many different tutorials and haven't found how to do this yet. I understand how I can do this in a side scroller with a skeletal animation but I don't understand what the best way to approach this is in an isometric world like diablo 2. Can someone please point me in the right direction? The help is very appreciated.
Answer by Cherno · Apr 23, 2015 at 09:58 PM
I'm pretty sure that Diablo 2 does use animated sprites, but the frames for these sprites were created by taking a 3d model of a character class with a selection of gear on it, set into any given pose, and then rendered and assigned to a spritesheet or similar. The artists didn't in fact go through teh effort of drawing hundreds of large sprites by hand, for each character class, in multiple clothing and weapon animations.
Yes I agree that this is how they did it, however in the end the game needs 1 animation for every combination of gear available. I could do this, however I am trying to split it up to lessen the amount of animation I need. I am also not sure if Unity is capable of such thing and might fall back on making 1 animation per every combination of gear. Any thoughts at all are very helpful.
If you want to use 2d art, you have to create seperate animation frames for each combination of gear, there's not way around it, at least if you don't want to use composite sprites. If you do indeed have seperate body parts, things become much easier.
That thing you said "composite sprites" might be what I need. Is that like building the sprite on the fly for the animation? Ill do some searches - do you have any good resources to point me to?
I just meant having seperate sprites for body parts that can be rotated and moved independently. You would then pretty much create the animation for a "skeleton", for lack of a better word, and in the game attach the body parts to their respective "bones".
I see what you mean. This sounds like best solution for this at the moment. I will start playing with this type of animation, and in the mean time I will wait a little bit to see if anyone else has any different Ideas before I mark yours as correct. Thanks for the help so far.