Would be cool if they were created in MakeHuman so that we can have beefier/skinnier/taller/shorter/whatever versions with little modification needed.

Really great work Taro, these are excellent results, keep up the good work!! Let me know if you need anything.

1) I would reconsider to make boots, belt, gloves and that stuff brown (very dark brown if you wish). You may have problems with displaying pure black in the game.

2) If you will need someone who knows how JA animation->code system works, lemme know.

3) 40 frames may be too much. You should check the STIs and count how many frames are used for open doors. If I remember correctly, there is a limit of 100 frames (per angle) for animations, but I am not entirely sure at this moment. I am also unsure if you can adjust the delay between frames.

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1) I would reconsider to make boots, belt, gloves and that stuff brown (very dark brown if you wish). You may have problems with displaying pure black in the game.

From what I can see, on that wiki page, nearly black textures are fine, look at the gun. If they cause troubles I can easily recolor those parts.

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2) If you will need someone who knows how JA animation->code system works, lemme know.

Yes very much so, if we figure out how to quickly and efficiently make new JA2 animations then we may be in for some small revolution here .

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3) 40 frames may be too much. You should check the STIs and count how many frames are used for open doors. If I remember correctly, there is a limit of 100 frames (per angle) for animations, but I am not entirely sure at this moment. I am also unsure if you can adjust the delay between frames.

Im aware of that, but the beauty here lies in fact that blender renders EVRY frame, so you get 40 separate images like those two I showed. This means you can freely select with ones you will use to create animation sprites.

Ok, but recoloring might be problematic if we find a problem after you made some load of animations. I must say I liked the brown used in the vanilla more.

I already figured that some time ago actually. That's also why I am especially interested in this. I have coded some features which I.. well.. just need new animations for to be created.

Yes, I know. Just mentioning that you will probably need to select the frames to use after.

I did some testing and black stuff can stay, STI edit dosent show any troubles with that.

There is a bit regarding shadows, but a careful placement of lights and camera should do the trick

If you watch the video on fullscreen, you might notice that a few pixel are wrong. the left side of scopes hair for example has some red in it.

I'm working on a script, that will automate at least a big chunk of the converting process.

I wouldn't try to get the scale right from within your rendering process for various reason.

I examined the original animations and I've come to the conclusion, that the original sprites all get a soft light effect from the bottom right. This means, that the shadows in the original animation are not real shadows. At least not from a light source. I think they were done with a projection technique. The 3d model is projected on a 2d sourface on a different angle, all colours changed to the shadow colour and then the actual sprite is attached to the sprite shadow.

What I'd like to know is how you exactly create the animations in Blender and how you render them. I have Blender myself, but I never managed to do more than morphing the cube. If you could show how you do this, I could check if there could be something tweaked.

Ok I fiddled a bit with lamps and here what I got, that gray square is what I warned you guys about, but it HAS to be there so we can have green shadow.

Besides that I changed zoom and changed material properties so they dont receive shadows, only hints of them.

Is this better?