Sprite-style animation, but with 3D assets

Hi there

Have a specific issue I'm trying to solve and would love some perspective.

I'm building a 3D platformer test that's designed to look like it's made from 3D cubes/pixels, think Minecraft in terms of visual style. However when it comes to character animation, I don't want the characters to be rigged and move smoothly like real 3D characters, but instead want the movement to feel like a traditional 2D platformer, i.e. a series of separate poses/sprites that we cycle through as the character performs different actions.

Trying to figure out how best to approach the character animation. For example is there a way I can build each pose/stage of a walk cycle in my 3D software (C4D) and import into Unity as a series of FBX's, then sequence these FBX's, in much the same way you sequence a series of sprites to create a walk cycle?

Any tips on how to approach this would be greatly appreciated.

 

this is doable exactly as you said but it comes down to tool building - your rig in the 3D package must grab the cubes and have a snapping system; by rig it may need to be a custom set of driven keys rather than literal joints.

if you can't automate this it comes down to brute force 'sculpting' each frame using snap+framing out by hand, exporting the fbx and then grabbing all the fbx data, throwing on an animator and hand keying each pose turning on and off... let alone the movement system to appear chunky ....it would seem from my POV to be a lot of work to translate 3D into aliased voxels

also it's not like this type of style hasn't been proposed before, I just can't recall anyone doing it

it's not exactly what you want, but check out http://picavoxel.com/

 

You might consider instead, since your end goal is to make the 3D models 'look' like they are 2D sprites, to render out of your 3D software frames of the animation. Then atlas these rendered images into a sprite atlas to be used as the character in engine. This is essentially using the 3D as a rendering engine to output 2D rendered sequences that can be made into sprites - exactly your desired end goal.

You'll probably have to remove individual frames if you have your 3D package set to 30 fps, although you might just as easily change the fps in 3D to your desired final in-game sprite frame rate to ease this process as well.

 

Thanks for the responses here.

Think the complexity of the solution is a road block for me so I'm likely going to go with standard animation to get a prototype working a bit quicker.

 

this person has created what you like as far as I can tell

https://forum.unity.com/threads/3d-sprite-file-is-this-possible-and-is-it-fast.500516/