For this tutorial, I will assume that you have already made your ship in Strata and are now wanting to spin it in order to create a sprite. The ship must be grouped as a whole object. I will also assume that you have a fair knowledge of the basic functions of Strata 3D. For this tutorial, I will use a model that I have already made, and am going to spin, so here is one I made earlier...

So firstly, select the view from the top and center it using the Object Properties Pallet. Click on the ship group and press [apple and -] to make the ship fit exactly right in the window. Make sure that the Window is a square (the one above is 300 by 300 pixels) as the ship will be scaled during rendering so this makes it easier to judge how things will fit in the window. Now open the project window :

Click on the triangle next to 15 fps and scroll down to other.

A window called Custom Frame Rate will come up and into the dialogue box you should type 36 so that the frame rate for the movie will be 36 fps.

Click OK. Next, go to the box in the top right hand corner of the Project Window that contains the data 1(1). Click on the number 1 inside the brackets and highlight it. Type in 36 so that there are 36 frames in the animation that you are going to create.

Now use the upper triangle shown to move to the 9th second (or the 10th frame) of the animation like so :

Now open the Object Properties Pallet and use the Rotate controls (on World setting) to rotate the group (the ship) to -90 degrees, and make sure it is negative 90, or a later part of the process will not work out. Now repeat the process to move the animation to the 18th second (or 19th frame) and use the Rotate control to move it round to 180 degrees. Repeat again to move the animation and move to the 27th second (or 28th frame) and use the Rotate control to move it round to 90 degrees (positive this time). Repeat the process for a final time to move the animation and move to the 35th second (or 36th frame) and use the Rotate control to move it round to 10 degrees. To check that it is rotating properly you can click the Play button (the small triangle at the top).

Now we are ready to render. Press [apple and R] to open up the render window :

Now click on the all radio button to make Strata render all the frames of the animation. Several things should be noted, firstly, you should be working inside a square window, the one above with the picture of the model is 300 by 300 pixels. Select the size the movie will be after rendering by typing it into the size dialogue boxes, and make sure that the value you choose is a multiple of 8. Secondly these are my custom rendering settings. They work very well to produce high quality renderings, so you can copy them if you wish. Once you are happy with your selections, click render to continue.

You are met with the following dialogue box :

Select where you want the movie to be saved and type in the name you want it to be save as. Click save to continue. You will be met with this final dialogue box :

Nothing needs changed here so just click OK to start rendering. Rendering can take from as little as 2 or 3 minutes to a few hours depending on size, complexity and texturing, so you could be faced with a lengthy wait. Once it has finished rendering, you will be left with a movie file of your ship spinning.

You will be happy to hear that this is the hard part over. Now get a copy of Movie To Sprite by R&R (you can download it from here) to convert your movie into 256 color sprites with a mask. All you have to do is drag and drop your movie over the m2s application file to convert it.

Congratulations!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You have successfully spun your ship, Now go make more!!!

Tutorial by: Ewan Cameron (AKA Jules)