BrightLord wrote:That is alot of work to do it considering you have to render hunderds of animations in right format. Just imagine that if you do something wrong setting up scale, rotation and light, final effect will be bad.
Yes, it is an immense amount of work. I agree that it would probably make more sense to allow the use of models (as in that way, rotation, light and scale can be changed in a much easier manner). Nevertheless, if people do want to create the graphics, it is not impossible, only a lot of work (and a lot of repetitive work at that).
About the light, rotation and etc., Belix made the following comment, regarding how he made the Bard:
Getting the image to look Diablo-y will be one of the interesting challenges, and the methods you can use to achieve this may vary greatly depending on the modeling software you use, but for Blender I found most textures fit the Diablo color palette much easier with their contrast reduced to 70-90%. At first I tried rendering 96x96 images directly (most Diablo player animation frames are this size), but that made pixels far too shifty and sharp. I achieved the final pixelized look you see above by rendering the images out at 256x256 with anti-aliasing on, then batch scaling them down to 128x128 (weapon swing animations use this size) and, for most frames which ultimately become 96x96, cropping those down to that size from the downscaled 128x128 renders.
If your modeling software leaves you editing rendered frames because you can't get the desired result directly, I highly suggest you use batch image processing software like IrfanView or ImageMagick (even both in unison for the different features, as I did) before you realize you'll be editing thousands of frames over and over by hand otherwise. Both have documentation available about the command line parameters and operations available to them; of significant mention is IrfanView's ability to batch convert images to a specified palette file, which is VERY useful for Diablo. Open up a Diablo frame exported with The Dark with IrfanView, then export its palette somewhere to be imported through the batch operations. Better yet, I'm going to attach the IrfanView palette I used to this post, because it is a special one I made specifically to remove the possibility of new character graphics accidentally using colors in the first half of the palette that change depending on which dungeon you're in. Just don't use neon pink anywhere (like that'd look nice in Diablo, hah!). It could save you a massive headache later.
Another important thing is the camera, light and shadow angles. This was really difficult to approximate without distance and rotation information from the original models, and took hours of tweaking to get near, and may further vary between different 3D programs. But I found Orthographic camera seemed to offer closer results than Perspective, and a camera at Y 22, Z 23.5 with a downwards rotation of 60 degrees is pretty close and what I used in the images above.
Light and shadows were even trickier. Diablo's models appear to be both self or ambiently illuminated, yet also shaded. My approximation of this is messy, so you might be able to find a better way. For lighting, I used 8 'sun' lights, one shining in from every 45 degrees, that were soft (0.2 intensity) to help simulate ambient lighting, one main light that shines in from overhead to offer the white shininess effect with an angle of -27 X and -12 Y. The shadow light that projects the character shadow onto the ground is a seperate object and uses the exact same angle. But that alone didn't quite do it – I further had to set every material to have an Emissive value of 0.4. This complex setup yielded the closest result to Diablo's mysterious character lighting, so I stuck with it.
And be careful with the color white. Pure white marks transparency for Diablo's rendering. The only thing that should be pure white is the plane your shadows are rendered on. You must take special care that anything else that uses white color (e.g. weapons or spell effects) are slightly dim. Diablo has a number of shades of white you can use for this, I believe the highest is F6F6F6, but you probably won't have such fine control over that in a 3D program. Like me, you may have to continuously export your work and check white areas pixel by pixel for their color once converted to Diablo's palette to make sure your object is dim enough not to hit full white (FFFFFF) anywhere.
Some thoughts on the side: The Warrior and Rogue have a blood pool that forms beneath them when they die, however, the Sorcerer and Monk do not. I never noticed this until I examined the animations closer. You can probably get away without adding this effect to your death animations, but it seems that it was intended to be on all characters. And don't forget you only need a death animation for Light Armor, because it is assumed all items are dropped upon death, so Diablo is presumably programmed to use only the Light Armor death animation, even if you die on floor 16 where your gear doesn't drop you still see the Light Armor death animation play.
Unless you're really good with animations, it may be difficult to avoid a little clipping outside the animation frames as your character topples over dead. The original Warrior's foot actually clips out of the bottom border of his death animation in 2-3 angles, so I wouldn't worry about that too much if you can't avoid it.
