 Hi, I'm Shane, and welcome to Gamedev Academy. In today's quick class, we'll take a look at how you can use 3D modelling software such as Maya to create some awesome and retro-looking 2D sprites in the style of games such as Donkey Kong Country. Here's the sprite we'll be making, a very nasty-looking spiky ball obstacle, but first let's take a quick look at the history of sprites created in this way. In the early 90s, as the 16-bit era consoles really reached maturity, developers were looking for a way to bring a more 3D look to their 2D sprites. One way to achieve this was to use pre-rendered 3D graphics created using very high-end and very expensive workstations from Silicon Graphics. This was the same technology used to create the mind-blowing liquid metal effects in Terminator 2. A few different development studios were also using this technology, such as Traveller's Tales, but we'll focus on Donkey Kong Country from Rare as our case study. In order to create the remarkable visuals for the game, the developers first created, textured and animated 3D models. These were then rendered out to 2D images, which could then have the resolution and colour palette reduced, giving the final, now iconic result. If you want to emulate this once-cutting-edge approach to creating 3D-looking sprites, it's now much easier not to mention cheaper than it was back when Rare were pioneering the technique. So rather than having to spend $70,000 on specialist hardware and software, we can use Maya and pretty much any PC to get the same look. Back to our spiky ball, then. In Maya, then, we'll start by getting the basic 3D model that we'll need. And to do that, I'm going to take a sphere and a cone. The cone, of course, is going to be the spiky bit of this spiky ball. And then I'm going to switch to the front orthographic view, since I'm going to be getting a 2D graphic out of this, a 2D view is perfect for this. And then I'm just going to size up my spike and then duplicate it around until I've got enough spikes and I'm happy with the overall look. Next up, I want to get this retro-looking metallic effect on it. So I'll need to go into the hypershade. And I'm just going to use the Stingray PBS, because that gives me quite nice reflections on the metal. So I'm going to create a light metal material and apply that to the sphere. And then I'm going to duplicate that and I'm going to assign that to the spikes. And I'm going to get this look that we can see here. I also want to get a highlight on the top right hand side of the main metallic spiky ball. So I'm just going to add a point light and put that in position to put a little highlight where I want it. With that done, I now need to create the animation frames to get this ball spinning so that it's ready to be put into a 2D level. And to do that, first of all, I put everything into a group so that I could rotate them all together. And then I set a keyframe on frame one. I then moved to frame seven. I rotated it by 90 degrees and then set another keyframe. Then I'm just going to set the animation curve to linear to make sure that it goes at a constant pace. And I'm only going to use frames one to six out of the seven to make sure that we get a good loop on this. And the reason that I've done it by 90 degrees is so that I know that if I keep looping those six frames, it's going to look like it's spinning forever, which is the look that we're going for. And it kind of means that we're using fewer frames, which also keeps in with that retro look and feel. Now I'm getting ready to render this out. So I'm going to choose my render as hardware 2.0. I'm also going to keep the color transform so that it looks as I expect it. I'm going to make sure that I'm set up to render animation frames and I'm going to choose frames one to six. I need to make sure that I'm rendering my front camera and then I need to set the resolution, which in this case is going to be 32 by 32 pixels. I also need to make sure that anti aliasing is turned off to make sure I get that hard edged look that pixel art is known for. Next up, I want to make sure that I'm getting the most out of the space from my sprite, so I'm going to turn on the resolution gate on the camera, send to my spiky ball within the space and then I'm going to zoom in to make sure that it fills as much of the renderable space as possible. Here you can see the render view, which I've just docked over to one side of the screen. I couldn't find a way in Maya, or in this version of Maya anyway, to stop the preview from being ridiculously blurry, but I still found I was able to work that I needed to make sure that I zoomed in enough that the spikes went right up to the edge. It won't look this blurry when we get it out of Maya. This is just how the render view is choosing to show it off. And now that everything is finally set up, I can choose to batch render those six frames, which will give us all the different parts that we need for our sprite sheet, which we can then put together in Photoshop. Here we are in Photoshop then, and I need to create a sprite sheet that will contain all six of the frames. So as these are 32 by 32, and there are six of them, the document I create is going to be 64 pixels wide by 96 pixels tall, and that will allow me to contain all six frames within the one image. To make it a little easier to line up, I'm also just going to bring in some ruler guides so that I make sure that I'm putting all of the different frames in the right place. Now it's just a case of opening each of the individual frames and then copying and pasting over that sprite into the main sprite sheet and putting it in order. So I do the top row first, then the middle row, then the bottom row. Now I can decide just how retro I want to make this look. So you can choose to desaturate it to reduce the amount of colors in the image or you can use a selective color palette to reduce the colors down as far as you want. So here on screen, you can see that I'm reducing it down to just eight colors and I'm also using dithering to make it look like I'm trying to emulate more colors just as you would have got on the 16 bit era consoles. And then I can save that sprite sheet out from Photoshop. I'm going to save it as a PNG file and then that's ready to be imported into the 2D game engine of your choice. Or in this case, I'm going to upload it to an online app called Pisco so that I can preview my animation there. Now that I've got it into Pisco and I'm playing it back, I can see that there's a little bit of an inconsistency with one of the pixels turning on and off. So I'm just going to make sure that's the same on all six frames. And now when I play it back, I'm pretty happy with the overall look. Although I think I do prefer the one that is in color rather than the one where I've desaturated it. So I brought in the colored one and you can see that this now looks nice and high end, but still very 16 bit. That should be everything you need to know then to be able to create 3D looking 2D sprites just like they did in the 90s. If you found this video useful, then maybe you'd like to subscribe to Game Dev Academy. Here on Game Dev Academy, I try to put out weekly game development and game art tutorials using different tools such as Maya, Unreal Engine, Photoshop, Substance Painter, all kinds of crazy stuff. If you want more information about how the art for Donkey Kong Country was created, I'll also put a link to that in the description. There's a very good video on that from Digital Foundry that's worth a watch if that's interesting to you. I'll sign off the video by thanking my wonderful Patreon community. You guys helped me to keep doing this and I appreciate each and every one of you. And then I'd like to thank everyone for watching and hopefully I'll see you all for the video next week.