Creating sprites with Blender and Gimp

“I’ve been using simple placeholder images for my game so that I
could work on gameplay. But I’m getting to a point now where I
think I’ve got the core of the game nearly complete and I need more
than just placeholders. For example, I created a type of flying
enemy ship that can loop and roll and dive and I needed some
graphics so that I could test the code that draws the
animations.

“But I’m not a very skilled artist. Which is a problem since I
am a one-man shop making a game with graphics in it and my total
budget is very nearly zero dollars. Even if I was a talented
artist, I simply don’t have the time to hand-draw every frame of
animation that I’m going to need.

“Then I remembered Blender. Blender is an open source 3D
modeling and rendering application. Using Blender, I can create one
model of an object, set properties like color and texture, and then
let Blender’s rendering engine draw it for me. After building the
model, Blender gives me lots of nice graphical details like
reflections, texture, and shading. And I get as many different
views of my model as I want at any angle, rotation, or scale.”

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