The challenges of 2D vs. 3D

When the geometry is seen directly from the side, I want to keep it as true to the original pixels as possible.

The main concern I have upon starting is how much rotation I will be able to get out of a sprite that was drawn in 2D.  Obviously, if I were to shoot everything straight-on with an orthographic camera, there would be no point in doing it in 3D at all, it would look the same as the sprite art.

However, the sprites are drawn to give the illusion of depth and overlap, if you look at this image-

You notice that Megaman’s head is at a ¾ view, which looks great in 2d, but is not ideal in 3D.  Model sheets for 3D characters always contain orthographic views for modeling (straight-on from the front, side, etc).   Although I cauld have made this up and still had him look vaguely like Megaman, the ¾ view would not look like the original sprite, and that is not the look I’m going for.

My concern was that , since the opposite side of his head would have to be gimped to keep pixels perpendicular to the screen, I would not be able to rotate around the model enough to allow for the parallax of a perspective camera (since the perspective will be more extreme toward the edges of the screen)

Another Issue that I ran into with the initial sprite test is the fact that everything is outlined in black.  This is another thing that works in 2D, but not 3D.

However, when I started modeling, I found that I could actually use those black pixels to describe the form that has receded in space in the 2D art.  In fact, it was necessary to have these pixels in order to “round out” the form in z depth.

So, my initial sprite model comes out looking like this-

Though I am not able to rotate all the way around the 3D sprite (It looks like crap when you approach 90 degrees as I expected), I am able to get enough rotation out of the model to play up the fact that it is in 3D space-

Although I am already starting to deviate from the literal pixels of the original sprite, I feel as though the deviation is a necessary evil in converting the image from 2D to 3D, and the resulting model is close enough to the original sprite that I am comfortable enough to move on to an animation test.