Custom Factorio Art Assets

[Genhellfire]

Hello First time poster here I am working on a mod with a friend and we wanted to add art assets that matched the games animations and aesthetic.
Does anyone know how the devs create their art assets, I can't imagine that they draw each frame in by hand, do they have a 3D model that they generate a sprite from for example?

Also I can't seem to figure out how to make a power pole passively consume electricity like what a inserter does when it is just idle.

[Drury]

Till you get a more concrete answer, from what I gather they make animated and textured 3D models in Blender and then just capture them frame by frame for spritesheets. There's naturally more to it but I don't know the details.

[domtronvox]

Yes, they use blender, they mentioned it in a recent announcement. You setup cameras for the different angles you want, optionally animate it, then use a script like http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Exten ... r/Spritify to quickly convert it to a sprite sheet. I found that link with a quick google search so I don't know if it is still relevant. I haven't done this for factorio, but did do something similar for a FOSS isometric game. The blender environment was already setup by the core artists so all I had to do was pop my model in and save the images from the camera angles needed.

[domtronvox]

Hay I've been playing around with making a sprite sheet from a model. I made a model for the boat mod. Then I used this stackexchange answer to make a camera spin around the model. Finally, I used the Spritify script here(download link and install instructions are on this page) to export the camera spin animation to a sprite sheet. Here is the result(note I scaled it down so it could be uploaded here also I'm an amateur modeler ):

sprites.png (753.33 KiB) Viewed 4802 times

The biggest problem I ran into was that blender's render output path needs to end with an empty folder(not the default filename template like 315_####) and the spritify path needs to be that same folder. Also to get the transparent background go to render->shading and switch alpha from sky to transparent.

If you need more details feel free to ask.

[Genhellfire]

Thank you so much I will try this out and get back to you if I need more help, I have been busy trying to get around the lack of support for robot construction in the commands in Lua.
also I don't think it is possible to get power poles to passively use power. =P