Rendering equipment overlay sprites
Sunday, December 5, 2010 - 13:36
Alright, not quite a modelling question, but there doesn't appear to be a rendering board, unless I'm going insane.
So I'd like to create a unit with multiple pieces of interchangeable equipment, rendered as sprites. However, I don't know how to have the obscured portions of an overlay be rendered transparent - see OSARE's equipment spritesheets for a good example, where the portions of weapons covered by hands are not shown.
This is probably a fairly simple thing, but I don't know how I'd search for it, and I hardly touch anything outside of modelling in Blender (or any program for that matter).
Garbeld, I'm the artist for OSARE. Here's what I do.
In Blender I take a "bare human" animated model and parent the weapon to the armature hand bone.
Then I turn on "ENV" settings on the bare human model's Material settings. This renders the base human as transparent. That's the Blender setting anyway, I'm sure there are similar texture settings in other modeling software.
If you want to see an example: https://code.google.com/p/osare/source/browse/trunk/art/characters/hero/...