A 2D Sprite In 3D????

 So, it's no secret that I'm learning how to do 3D Art. And it's been one heck of a journey. But, I'm proud to say that I have conquered Unreal Engine AND learned about 3D art and tile placement along the way. Behold my GBA sprite, fully realized in Unreal Engine 5. 

This might not LOOK 3D, but it is! Remember those One Meter cubes from my last post? Well, they were the BASE of this entire pixel piece! If you look closely, you can see that this piece is made up of many, many One Meter cubes! In fact, there are over 1,000 of these cubes. All lovingly placed in alignment with one another. 

Each Cube or "pixel" was color-matched to fit the sprite's color scheme. The "pixels" were placed on top of a sprite plane, which we textured with our initial image of the sprite.

Speaking of initial images, here is the sprite we started out with. It was a 32x32 pixel sprite from Klonoa: Empire of Dreams, a game for the GameBoy Advance. Wahoo!

Now, the saturation in my version of the sprite is a little bit different because I have lighting effects on my individual cubes. In addition, fog and lighting play a part in how my sprite looks.

Overall, I'm really happy with how this project turned out! It was a bit of a learning curve for me, especially since I didn't know how to snap the cubes in place all to well. Thus, each cube was individually placed on the map, which took quite some time. My hope is that, as I continue to improve as a game developer, I will learn more about time-saving shortcuts that will make these processes more pleasant.

    The fog effects make this look particularly cool here. I changed the fog from grey to blue... and look how cool this looks! It's like we found Klonoa in the back of a lost temple or something. Neat!

Now, this build was pretty laborious, so don't you worry- I took plenty of in-progress shots while I was building it out. I've posted some of them below, so you can see the process itself.

Here's the first in-progress shot I took. Notice the sprite mesh that I'm building on top of? That's my sprite model wrapped around a plane. It creates a pretty cool effect, since it has luminosity, too! Also, it makes for a wonderful blueprint while I'm building out my project. 

Are you seeing red? I know I was for a little bit! I found it hard to line up the black cubes, so I temporarily made them red so that I could line them up properly. I had to redo an entire section of Klonoa's left side initially because I didn't line up some of the black cubes with the others in the world. It was annoying! So I bypassed another instance of that by making the cubes easier to see. 

And here are all of those same red cubes turned back to black! Now you can see the lineart was really starting to come together at this stage. 

By this point, we had most of the white and black on Klonoa built out. Even the shoes were filled in. You can tell what I haven't filled in yet because it's glowing in the picture. That's the luminosity setting on the sprite plane below Klonoa for ya! It makes it easy for me to check my work! 

Aaaand now those areas have been filled out! We have a nearly complete sprite-- I just needed to do the background! 

You heard that right! The background had to be placed one cube below the sprite. While the plane behind Klonoa would have kind of worked, it doesn't have the same retro feel as more cubes, er pixels, would. So we continue working! 

You can see here that I've made the sprite layers right over the plane. Here, I've built out the perimeter and started filling it in on the bottom left. You can probably guess that this is where most of the 1000+ cubes in my level came from... 

And here it is with everything filled in! It looks great and the background was definitely worth the extra time It really helps the character stand out, even more than the initial plane did. 

Before I wrapped this post up, I wanted to share all of the materials that I made for Klonoa here. 

Each of these materials was picked directly from the sprite plane, which helped me keep it consistent with Klonoa's initial sprite. There are over forty of these materials, which all stem from a single parent. If you edit the parent in any way, all of the properties in the different instances (or children) that stem from it will change too. So, if you wanted to make an object more metallic or luminous, you can edit the parent material and all of the dependent materials will change too! 

Pretty cool, huh? 

Overall, I had a really great time learning Unreal Engine 5. I'm excited to see what I'll make with the engine next. It seems extremely versatile and I want to jump in head first as soon as I can! 

Thanks for reading!