Quote: "
if you played Lord of the rings online, you would see how they done some character portraits of both the player and the targeted mob both animated in 3d instead of animated sprites ( i think thats how they did it the way it looked)."
Ok Assuming these are animated 3D portraits. If I had to do this I would cheat, and only use 2 Cameras, 1 for gameplay and the second for all 4 portraits. Hahahah...
I would use the Image Kit 2 version of a method I developed for converting 3D objects to 2D, where the background is transparent and 100% of any subtle transparency is preserved.
Demo Here (all my pretty screenshots got deleted):
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=184514&b=1
The image kit version can be rigged to animate this conversion with great performance.
What I would do is animate all 4 portraits in view of the second camera at the same time, whose view is converted to a 2D Image, create 5 sprites, whose texture coords are each adjusted to only show 1 of the portraits. This would cause 5 Sprites to be linked to an ever animating image. The business of converting that camera view to a 2D image where the transparencies are preserved and the background is transparent is the reason for huge circus involving image kit and the code demo I linked. Otherwise you get an ugly solid background.
This would result in 4 on screen portrait sprites with realtime 3D animation. Only 2 Cameras would be used, eliminating a major bottleneck. lol.
The fact that they would be 2D sprites would be meaningless. They would look exactly like the pure 3D objects.
Actual DBP Transparent Screenshot:
***This would only work If I can create sprites using Image Kit images, which I haven't tested.
This is not exactly an easy solution, fyi.
