3d character in 2d scene

im reposting this here just in case anyone can help:

im working on a 2d isometric game and i wondered if there is any way to draw a mesh of a character as an image?
(so that it goes behind and in front of other images)

I can already extract sprites from pictures of a mesh but that uses a lot of graphics memory and you cant change the clothing,weapons,hair color without needing 10,000 sprites

I think they did this in the original Sims game

The first Sims game used 3D character in a 2D isometric scene. As far as I know, they used depth maps for the 2D images, to define which part of the 2D should be in front of and behind the character. Though it's probably easier to do the whole game in 3D now, than do it this way. :)

What you could do is realtime render 3D models of the characters to images/sprites in the background, that way you can change clothing, hair, weapons and so on, while still using 2D in the actual game. It shouldn't take more than a second to render out new sprites after you change the look of the character. I did a test with this in Blitz3D a while back, though I never used it and have no idea where I put the code. :) It's quick to code though.

yeah thats probly a good idea,
just have to get the right camera angles and write the results to a bmp file

Try my spriteforge thingymajig. Its Free to use for sprites up to a certain size (you can still make bigger sprites for testing but they will be watermarked).

It allows for photographing your animated B3D/DirectX 7 models in all frames from all angles and exports it as either single frames or spritesets (Note in vista UAC must be off for it to be able to launch the renderer, not worked around this yet :/)

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Errr, why not just render the 3D directly on top of the 2D?

gosse,
I didnt think it was possible before because in isometric games sometimes the characters go behind walls,
I guess that I could do a renderworld and hide all characters except the one that I am rendering at that moment, then draw the walls

D4nman - Im using fragmotion at the moment which does the same thing as your sprite creator, it would be laborius to render each character in every type of clothing and equipment,

It does the same but not in the same way (unless things have changed recently) I made so you can do multiple characters an chr configs using a single set of rules (ie simply load the next model and render). Also you can add outlines either solid or 50% alpha.

what does that mean?

Render your 2D world, render your 3D character, then render the rest of the 2D world. How is this any different than checking each tile for 2D characters and rendering them?

Sorry it meant to say multiple characters and character configs (like clothing differences)

Years ago i wrote an isometric 2D game where the characters went behind walls, the way to do it is to draw to the backbuffer in order, starting from the back and work forward going either right or left depending on the orientation of the isometric. This includes everything including characters etc. Rather than trying to use a system of drawing the walls, then props, then the characters etc...
Basically you need to write your own sprite ordering/drawing system, this can be as simple or as complicated as you like. In my old game it was simply using a matrix array with offset values for movement between the 'cells'.

dubl post :P

i tried using 3d characters and it was too slow,

i got the z-ordering sorted, i just draw the floor,back walls,characters then front walls

that robot model looks good, for my next game i will probably need it