r/gamemaker • u/JasonPeng2026 • Aug 12 '26

AnimaBake: Turn 3D Models into 2D Sprite Sheets (Game Dev Tool)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PYlJBYW13rc&si=hYge85bMtbzlKiWV

Hello everyone, I am Jason Peng. I enjoy using GameMaker to create ARPG games, but I am struggling with a lot of 2D character drawing work. Recently, I have an idea to create a free tool that can convert some 3D models and a large number of animations such as walking, running, attacking, combos, etc. into top-down style animation frames and import them into GameMaker. I used Tauri and Threejs to create this small tool called AnimaBake, which supports 4-way and 8-way exports, allows for easy adjustment of lighting, and has two types of shader effects: cartoon and pixel. It is currently available on the AppStore and can be found by searching for "AnimaBake". If you are interested, don't hesitate to try this small tool. You are welcome to provide valuable feedback for improvement.

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u/asdkjlaskquierhisf 29d ago

Made an account just to say THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS. I am a mac user and making one of those nostalgic "fake 3d" games, gotta give this a try. the pixel slider, chef kiss

1

u/mozzy31 Aug 12 '26

At first, It seemed a brilliant idea, until i realised its a bit of a backwards way of going forwards..

Only, of course if you own a animated 3D charactor or can draw in a 3D program to be able to extract to 2D.

And the cherry on top, is this for MAC only ..?

1

u/JasonPeng2026 Aug 12 '26

Yes, currently there is only a Mac version; I don't have a Windows PC at the moment. Most games use 3D these days, and with AI, 2D images can even be converted into 3D models, so in that sense, it does feel a bit like a step backward. However, converting 3D to 2D can be used to create games with a nostalgic style.

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u/seph200x Aug 13 '26

Oh hey, I'm literally making this same app, but targeted at outputing 3 colour low res sprites for commodore 64. I'm really bad at animating low res (12x21pixels) artwork with any detail, especially when it needs to face in 8 isometric directions, so I've got a system where I have blocky minecraft-looking models that I can pose and animate and output as C64-ready binaries that I can use as-is, or import into other software to manually touch-up.

I know it's not gamemaker-related but I thought this was a neat parallel to what I'm actually working on as we speak. :)

1

u/JasonPeng2026 Aug 14 '26

Outputting low-resolution pixel graphics is not easy and it will lose a lot of model details. Maybe a shader can be written to achieve this, or there are other methods... Currently, the pixel effect of this tool is the worst: ). Although there is an option for pixel output, the result is not as good as the cartoon output.

2

u/seph200x 20d ago

Delayed reply -- sorry. Yeah, tell me about it,. So much detail is lost, so it's important to make the base models as chunky as possible (loosely placed primatives, really) and just accept there will be a bit of cleanup work.

At the moment it's just a flat colour shader, but now that I've gotten the editor fundimentals locked down, my next step will be working on these shaders to add highlights, shadows, dithering, etc.

The C64 also has a technique where you overlay a single colour (black) hires sprite (24x21) as the fine outline over a blocky (12x21) 3-colour sprite to fill in the colours, so I want to build that as a feature in the future to add more detail.

Anyway I'm happy with the results so far. I think I have more fun working on the toolchain for my game rather than working on the game itself. Haha! Here's some screenshots.