Sprites, animations, and 3D textures

During the 80s real 3D was just a chimera. Apart some pioneer, embryonic vectorial engine, computer graphics was achieved by using small bitmap images, stored in contiguous memory locations: the sprites.

Borrowing from traditional techniques, sprites were animated by drawing the animations in separate images (a classic example) and displaying them in sequence, creating the feeling of dynamism.

Before the transition from 16 to 32 bits systems, many hardware engineers introduced several solutions for smoothly rendering lots of sprites on screen (eg.: DMA, dedicate co-processors, and so on), but they were soon forgotten as full 3D engines appeared and stole the scene.

So, why should anyone bother getting the sprites back from the past? Well, they could be useful even today, because there are aspects of computer graphics which work better pre-rendered: explosions, flames, debris, smoke and all that stuff it's too expensive to compute real-time.

An higher dimension
As I wrote, sprites animations used to be stored in different memory locations, and the pointer to the current frame was given to the scanline renderer. We could do the same now, creating several bitmaps and rendering them on screen. But this idea has a couple of drawbacks: we need to create many different texture objects for the same "thing" and, in order to obtain a smooth transition, we must load plenty of slightly different images.

Another idea could be to load a huge texture featuring all frames on it, and display the current one playing with offsets: this fixes the first issue, but not the second one.

A nice way to achieve both is to use a 3D texture. A 3D texture is, basically, a stack of normal 2D textures. The number of "stacks" is called "depth", and it's a parameter we must give during initialization. Pay attention here: as normal textures, even depth must be a power of 2.

Why do 3D texture give us no drawbacks? First, they aggregate lot of textures in one single texture object. Second, when you make request for an intermediate stack, you can be given the interpolated texture. This is transparent by turning on linear filtering, and does not impact on performances.

A nice explanation of this technique can be found here. The following step is billboarding, that is keeping the sprites frontal to the viewer. There's a cool NeHe tutorial about it. If you want to play with sprites but don't have time/skill for producing your own explosions, check this out.