OFFICIAL New 3D-2D Tool Beta Release

[rmanthorp]

We’re very proud to announce the arrival of our new 3D-2D tool. This tool allows you to take just about any 3D model, animate it, attach other models to it, and then export images of the model under a variety of lighting conditions and camera positions.

This tool makes gathering sprite images from 3D models significantly easier, allowing you to get your vision into GameMaker faster..

This is the first version of the tool and the start of our new foray into the third dimension. We have really big plans for this going forward, and you’re here on day one. You can help assist us with the development of this by providing feedback in this thread or on #GameMaker on Twitter.

You can download 3D-2D here, and view the manual here. Just to give you a little taste of what you can do with it, have a look through these screenshots and animations. The application is only available for Windows at the moment, and it’s currently a separate installation from GameMaker. We have plans for a Mac and Linux version in the near future, as well as bringing them into GameMaker natively.

Please give it a shot, tell us what you think!


DOWNLOAD HERE:
https://opr.as/GM-Sprite

Manual HERE:
https://gms.yoyogames.com/SpriteTool.pdf

Update: We've open-sourced the tool! Please see this post: https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php?threads/new-3d-2d-tool-beta-release.97866/post-591757

 

[Evanski]

I'm going to get my 3d pony!

@matharoo

 

[Alice]

@kburkhart84 Are you doing a remake of your E.T. game this Jam?

 

[FoxyOfJungle]

 

[kburkhart84]

@kburkhart84 Are you doing a remake of your E.T. game this Jam?

I'm actually not going to participate in this jam. I need to save my PTO in case I need it, but I should be fine for the next ones(i've only been at this job for like 7 months).

That said, I kinda want to, just to give @Evanski so more stress

*******

So this tool should be pretty interesting. I guess it could do some automated stuff instead of having to do it in Blender. If it eventually allows custom shaders and the like it could be really nice. With Blender you can render just about any way you want so I'm thinking this tool will be more useful for people who are getting models elsewhere and aren't too familiar with Blender honestly. That doesn't make it a bad thing or a waste of time of course, just my opinion.

 

[Amon]

Woah!

 

[ShubhamBansod]

This is amazing! Nice work!

 

[Mehdi]

view the manual here

When will there be a manual for it?

 

[GamerXP]

Is it going to be an external tool? Or do you have plant to make it as something built-in?

 

[Mehdi]

Is it going to be an external tool? Or do you have plant to make it as something built-in?

said above: "... We have plans for ... bringing them into GameMaker natively. "

 

[TsukaYuriko]

You can download 3D-2D here, and view the manual here.

These links are resisting even the most vigorous of clicks.


That aside, I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but... I don't quite see the point of this tool. Sure, it lets you create sprites from models so you can pretend you're Rare and it's 1994. But besides wanting to emulate games from that era, I don't see an applicable use case for using sprites created from models in games, especially since a plethora of other tools exist that include this feature.

I know the announcement already hints at it, but are there any future plans to incorporate more 3D functionality into GM and this is just a sneak peek at it? Having support for more model formats in GM, rather than having the support in an external tool that only exports sprites, for example.

 

[Mehdi]

Thank you all Yoyo staff. Amazing work! Although it is in the most limited form now, but it is pretty worth appreciating.
However can we dream of a day when the rooms are quite switchable between 2d and 3d. (as in Unity?)

 

[Dragonite]

this is not something i was expecting, but DEFINITELY am going to spend some time playing with!

 

[Xor]

Very interesting

 

[Nocturne]

I have one question... Why isn't this tool called SpriteMaker????????

 

[sixonekevin]

Seems the hyperlink to the manual is missing from the post, but I’m curious if this absolutely needs a 3D model imported or if it’s flexible enough to take 2D images too. Even for 2D pixel/raster art it would be great to be able to take advantage of the bone attachment feature as a sort of “paper doll” system for generating sprite sheets without having to use Spine or learn a 3D modeling tool (although I’m sure it wouldn’t take that long to learn how to drop 2D sprites into Blender and then export them back out as “3D” models).

These links are resisting even the most vigorous of clicks.


That aside, I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but... I don't quite see the point of this tool. Sure, it lets you create sprites from models so you can pretend you're Rare and it's 1994. But besides wanting to emulate games from that era, I don't see an applicable use case for using sprites created from models in games, especially since a plethora of other tools exist that include this feature.

I know the announcement already hints at it, but are there any future plans to incorporate more 3D functionality into GM and this is just a sneak peek at it? Having support for more model formats in GM, rather than having the support in an external tool that only exports sprites, for example.

The post says the plan is to integrate this into GM, sounds like offeting it as a standalone tool is just for the beta. Makes sense to me, work out the bugs in the tool itself first before you attach it to GM and inevitably cause more bugs

 

[Ax209]

I think this is a great idea. As someone who plays around with 3D engines in an effort to create beautiful raster sprites, this could do quite a lot for some folk.

One thing that it's got me asking however, and I don't mean to come across as a negative nelson, is just how useful would a tool like this be in practice? For example if someone has the capacity to model, texture, and export an .obj and it's animation & skeleton or whatever, are the chance really that slim of someone being able to export the rasters in Blender itself, or another render program? And again this is gonna sound negative but how would you peeps say it does at keeping up with something like Cycles or Blender's Eevee? Are there options for amount of frame references, lens depths, colour filters? Does it facilitate camera motion?

Again, I do think it's great. Well done. Some of the questions may answer themselves when I eventually have a play but the burning questions are burning so....

 

[TsukaYuriko]

The post says the plan is to integrate this into GM, sounds like offeting it as a standalone tool is just for the beta. Makes sense to me, work out the bugs in the tool itself first before you attach it to GM and inevitably cause more bugs

Having the tool itself integrated into GM is one thing. GM supporting the model formats this tool supports is an entirely different thing. One does not automatically lead to the other, and whether the latter is the plan is my question.

 

[Mert]

Edit : Just realised that it doesn't bring anything new. Use Blender instead

 

[kburkhart84]

These links are resisting even the most vigorous of clicks.


That aside, I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but... I don't quite see the point of this tool. Sure, it lets you create sprites from models so you can pretend you're Rare and it's 1994. But besides wanting to emulate games from that era, I don't see an applicable use case for using sprites created from models in games, especially since a plethora of other tools exist that include this feature.

I have to partially disagree here though(but only partially). I believe there is a pretty big use case for creating sprites from models. It is certainly a valid technique, especially for bigger sizes of art, and you can render in some nice stylized ways to which gives some interesting results. However, I 100% agree that I'm not fully sure how useful this specific tool is. I see it more being used by people who use pre-made assets and want to turn them into sprites. People making their own models however would be able to render using the same software. That's just my opinion though. And they may have plans that we don't know about which would make it much more useful in the future of course.

 

[renex]

huh, no texture repeat options?

also, no obj mtl support? having to load hundreds of textures manually is a chore...

also i just wanna say i think recreating the studio 2 look and feel in studio 2 itself for a free tool is very cute. props for that

 

[Dragonite]

The tool itself is made in GameMaker using BBMOD, and integrating it into the IDE itself would be... work. Given who I suspect played a large role in making this it would be by no means impossible, but I'm not sure if doing so would be a priority for the engine right now.

 

[gnysek]

It's 1st April or 24th August?

 

[FoxyOfJungle]

Having the tool itself integrated into GM is one thing. GM supporting the model formats this tool supports is an entirely different thing. One does not automatically lead to the other, and whether the latter is the plan is my question.

I know of a library that supports many model formats, but I don't know how cross-platform that would be, however...

GitHub - assimp/assimp: The official Open-Asset-Importer-Library Repository. Loads 40+ 3D-file-formats into one unified and clean data structure.

The official Open-Asset-Importer-Library Repository. Loads 40+ 3D-file-formats into one unified and clean data structure. - GitHub - assimp/assimp: The official Open-Asset-Importer-Library Reposit...

github.com

But if GameMaker internally supported .fbx, .obj and .gltf models it would be amazing.

Not sure if fbx being a proprietary format would be possible to include in GameMaker, maybe getting a license? I don't know.

 

[Stra]

I'm hoping for a bunch of effects so the final result can also be made to look as pixelarty as possible.

 

[Evanski]

Seeing everyone ask if the tool is useful or not while im over here like

 

[kburkhart84]

I'm hoping for a bunch of effects so the final result can also be made to look as pixelarty as possible.

This is one of the things I'm referring to with using a tool like Blender, you have direct control over how the result looks and can easily get pixelly styles, various sub-styles of such in fact.

 

[FrostyCat]

I bought a Blender lesson series from HB last holiday season, but haven't had time to start on it. Perhaps this will nudge me into finally taking the first step.

One thing I don't like about where this is going is the plan to make it built-in. In my opinion, this reeks of the same wheel-reinventing as the overblown effort that has gone into the sprite editor. It would be better to keep this external, and use it as a pilot for integrating third-party tools into the IDE workflow via the plugin API. A little experimentation here will allow GM to finally adopt tools actually used by industry professionals, for example integrating Blender to attract modelers or Photoshop/GIMP to attract illustrators. I don't want to see any more YoYo/Opera development effort going into toy-level editors that other industry-standard tools can already do better. The GM development team's job is to focus on engine-, IDE-, and service-level tasks that are specific to GM. Leave tools for creating sprites, sounds, music, models, etc. up to other specialized vendors such as Adobe.

 

[Zhanghua]

amazing I

 

[sixonekevin]

Having the tool itself integrated into GM is one thing. GM supporting the model formats this tool supports is an entirely different thing. One does not automatically lead to the other, and whether the latter is the plan is my question.

Maybe I’m misreading but your post seemed to be indicating that aside from the model formats question, the idea of having this as a standalone tool was pointless since other standalone tools already exist. I was just saying that (eventually) the advantage vs those other tools will be that it’s integrated into GM. And even if you’re creating your 3D model in another program that could export sprites like this on its own, it seems like a simpler workflow to export/import the model once and have it readily available to work with in GM to quickly whip up sprite assets as needed, vs having to re-export from a separate program and then re-import into GM every time.

I feel like based on your DKC reference you’re also underestimating how useful this kind of feature is for creating 2D sprites in general, if I want to create an attack animation for my player it is significant faster to do that by just posing a model and essentially snapping a picture to insert into my sprite sheet than it is to draw each frame manually.

 

[OrsonM]

This is very close to what a program called Pixel Over does, except this one is free and with a better UI. Hell, if you guys ever add a pixel art filter to this then it's pretty much a better version of Pixel Over.

 

[rmanthorp]

Sorry about the manual link. It's all a bit chaotic this week with Gamescom. We'll have something hooked up tomorrow For now have fun not RTFMing and poking around in the dark

 

[Zhanghua]

GM3…D is on the way home!

 

[sixonekevin]

I bought a Blender lesson series from HB last holiday season, but haven't had time to start on it. Perhaps this will nudge me into finally taking the first step.

One thing I don't like about where this is going is the plan to make it built-in. In my opinion, this reeks of the same wheel-reinventing as the overblown effort that has gone into the sprite editor. It would be better to keep this external, and use it as a pilot for integrating third-party tools into the IDE workflow via the plugin API. A little experimentation here will allow GM to finally adopt tools actually used by industry professionals, for example integrating Blender to attract modelers or Photoshop/GIMP to attract illustrators. I don't want to see any more YoYo/Opera development effort going into toy-level editors that other industry-standard tools can already do better. The GM development team's job is to focus on engine-, IDE-, and service-level tasks that are specific to GM. Leave tools for creating sprites, sounds, music, models, etc. up to other specialized vendors such as Adobe.

It’s always interesting to see sentiments like this since I have such an opposite perspective. I would much rather not have to learn multiple tools and switch back and forth between them to make changes if GM can provide me sufficient functionality to do what I need to get done in the engine. And I know there’s free alternatives out there for most of their programs but since you mentioned Adobe, I certainly don’t want to have to pay the cost of Adobe software to use maybe 5% of the features. Of course this is going to be completely dependent on what kind of games you’re making, just offering another perspective as someone who personally doesn’t have a use for most of the power that the tools you’re talking about provide and could easily get by on these types of integrated GM features.

 

[GamerXP]

I bought a Blender lesson series from HB last holiday season, but haven't had time to start on it. Perhaps this will nudge me into finally taking the first step.

One thing I don't like about where this is going is the plan to make it built-in. In my opinion, this reeks of the same wheel-reinventing as the overblown effort that has gone into the sprite editor. It would be better to keep this external, and use it as a pilot for integrating third-party tools into the IDE workflow via the plugin API. A little experimentation here will allow GM to finally adopt tools actually used by industry professionals, for example integrating Blender to attract modelers or Photoshop/GIMP to attract illustrators. I don't want to see any more YoYo/Opera development effort going into toy-level editors that other industry-standard tools can already do better. The GM development team's job is to focus on engine-, IDE-, and service-level tasks that are specific to GM. Leave tools for creating sprites, sounds, music, models, etc. up to other specialized vendors such as Adobe.

I'd really like to be able to extend GM's IDE with plugins like you can do in Unity. The most annoying thing in GM for me is that I can't optimize my workflow since IDE can't be changed according to my needs.

 

[drandula]

Interesting
This is like first forager into 3D as GameMaker tools, an easyish step used by YGG to learn and get some experience before diving more deeper.

 

[stardust9000]

This is very close to what a program called Pixel Over does, except this one is free and with a better UI. Hell, if you guys ever add a pixel art filter to this then it's pretty much a better version of Pixel Over.

In the meantime, you could use a pixelate shader.

 

[Stra]

If delving into 3D that's not entirely 3D and stays true to pixelart, in the new runtime I'd like to see the new 3D-pixelart style (that seems to be all the rage today) made available with just a few clicks in the IDE.


(games like Sacrifire and Octopath and ScummVM in 3D)

 

[Mightyjor]

This looks really fun! I’ve done something similar with blender, but it’s an awful lot of work. Would be curious to play around with it and see if there’s a pretty quick turnaround for some good looking sprites!

 

[Roldy]

I bought a Blender lesson series from HB last holiday season, but haven't had time to start on it. Perhaps this will nudge me into finally taking the first step.

One thing I don't like about where this is going is the plan to make it built-in. In my opinion, this reeks of the same wheel-reinventing as the overblown effort that has gone into the sprite editor. It would be better to keep this external, and use it as a pilot for integrating third-party tools into the IDE workflow via the plugin API. A little experimentation here will allow GM to finally adopt tools actually used by industry professionals, for example integrating Blender to attract modelers or Photoshop/GIMP to attract illustrators. I don't want to see any more YoYo/Opera development effort going into toy-level editors that other industry-standard tools can already do better. The GM development team's job is to focus on engine-, IDE-, and service-level tasks that are specific to GM. Leave tools for creating sprites, sounds, music, models, etc. up to other specialized vendors such as Adobe.

Agree with this 100%.

While this is a cool tool and will be useful, I think YYGs efforts would be better suited in making IDE/Editor extensions possible, custom asset import/export scripts etc... This way pretty much every known tool could in some way have a path to integration into the IDE. All that YYG has to concentrate on is supporting the Runtime/Engine, the IDE and its extension API.

 

[Slow Fingers]

Yeah...another long awaited feature that everyone was asking for, that we totally couldn't already do in 10 minutes with Blender, with 10x MUCH more versatility and options (you know...that FREE thing?).
[/sarcasm]
Just the fact that the "Isometric" camera angle is available is p*ssing me off. How long have we been asking for iso/hex tiles support? That could have been done YEARS ago.
So, nope. Won't download your tool. No need for it. You should have probably asked us that BEFORE you started hacking away, just saying...

Yeah, I have a bad hair day.

 

[TsukaYuriko]

To elaborate on my initial post: I'm not criticizing the tool itself, but that it was developed and published by YYG. This is something I'd expect to come from a community member as a hobby project, something they did on the side to showcase what's possible to make in GameMaker, maybe to add to their portfolio. Under those circumstances, my reaction would probably be "oh yeah, that's nice", because sure, it is a thing that does a thing, and probably does it reasonably well.

However, it's not something groundbreaking that doesn't exist elsewhere yet. Having this doesn't really let us do things in GM that we can't already do by using external, dedicated tools. Despite this, the time and effort of YYG staff has gone into its development and testing, and most likely will be going into its maintenance. These resources could have been spent on fixing critical bugs, adding features that were actually requested, optimization... you get the idea.

I also wouldn't consider having this built into GM an advantage. Quite the contrary. It adds bulk to the installer and installation. It adds complexity to GM's code base that may cause issues with other, unrelated IDE components.

In short, I don't think this will generate much, if any, additional revenue for YYG, but resources were invested into it - resources that could have gone towards other, more useful things, both for the users (by providing fixes or features) and for YYG (by increasing the value of GM and gathering revenue through it) - and it'd be a shame for that to go to waste like certain other attempts at making external applications in GM to promote GM (*cough* Player *cough*).


Now, this would be an entirely different scenario if all of the features being showcased or used in this tool (support for more model formats, 3D lighting, UI elements, etc.) were actually going to be supported in GameMaker in the future and this tool was just a little demo project to show what can be done with them. Then I'd have no problems with this at all and would be 100% behind everything presented in this topic, aside from the wacky backwards announcements.

 

[efeberku]

...
I also wouldn't consider having this built into GM an advantage. Quite the contrary. It adds bulk to the installer and installation. It adds complexity to GM's code base that may cause issues with other, unrelated IDE components.
...
Now, this would be an entirely different scenario if all of the features being showcased or used in this tool (support for more model formats, 3D lighting, UI elements, etc.) were actually going to be supported in GameMaker in the future and this tool was just a little demo project to show what can be done with them. Then I'd have no problems with this at all and would be 100% behind everything presented in this topic, aside from the wacky backwards announcements.

I think that's the plan. Also you are right. There is no need to bloat GameMaker unnecessary for now.

 

[CMAllen]

I'd love a one-click (relatively speaking) tool that I load a 3d model into, select a preset of frame ranges and viewing angles, and output a batch of frames or sprites ready for import straight into GM. One my of frustrations with Blender is that this process is either largely manual, or highly specific to the 3d model file and minimally portable between 3d models.

However, I don't think this needs to be built into GM unless it's a stepping stone along a path towards incorporating more 3d assets directly into the GM drawing pipeline.

 

[Slow Fingers]

I'd love a one-click (relatively speaking) tool that I load a 3d model into, select a preset of frame ranges and viewing angles, and output a batch of frames or sprites ready for import straight into GM. One my of frustrations with Blender is that this process is either largely manual, or highly specific to the 3d model file and minimally portable between 3d models.

Well, the thing is, once you got your cell-shading in a color ramp, and parameters to just adjust the scaling and pixelisation, you can just pretty much re-use the same shader nodes over and over. It does takes a couple hours to get right, but, man, a week later and you regained all your invested time, and then some! Plus, you don't usually want to render in Cycles, so it takes only a second, aaaaand you can write a script that will take all camera angles for every animation (and name the files properly, as YOU want them to be) automatically, so you can just click the button and go play some Switch!

Totally unrelated edit:

(i've only been at this job for like 7 months).

So, you're no longer programming MacDonald's machines? I swear, man, if the ice cream machines start to work again, we'll have no choice but to blame you for that whole thing
(Just kidding, I hope your gig is fun!)

 

[Evanski]

So, you're no longer programming MacDonald's machines?

I always knew Ken would create a greater evil than ET

 

[Alice]

I'm kinda torn when it comes to the whole "spend more resources on fixes and IDE itself" discussion, especially when with beta/stable-ish releases we have "spend more resources on fixes rather than features" discussion instead.

On the one hand, these kinds of tools don't provide much value to me specifically, so from my perspective I'd rather have more resources spent elsewhere.
On the other hand, I'm aware certain roles aren't interchangeable - the people responsible for making asset bundles might not be as much help with the IDE programming, for example.
On yet another hand, maybe instead of hiring people to make asset bundles the resources should be spent on hiring people who can help with core IDE.
On still another hand, there was this comic I saw a while back but can't find now, where the general idea is that one programmer can do a job in one month, if you add another programmer they can do it in two months, and if you add a project manager there will be no end to it.

Which is to say, contrary to popular belief throwing more programmers at the codebase might not yield gains the same way adding more factory workers does. If you happen to hire a subpar programmer, they might end up wasting others' time by having others review their messy code and producing spaghetti code that takes more time to refactor than to write from scratch - and because users are already familiar with things happening the certain way, you need to carefully refactor it so that it keeps its way of functioning and writing from scratch isn't really an option anymore.

People might not have asked for a 3D to 2D sprite tool, but they definitely asked about 3D stuff a lot. Combine it with this remark in the original post:

This is the first version of the tool and the start of our new foray into the third dimension. We have really big plans for this going forward, and you’re here on day one. You can help assist us with the development of this by providing feedback in this thread or on #GameMaker on Twitter.

If we see it not as a standalone tool, but a step towards more proper 3D support in GameMaker, it might not be as out-of-nowhere as it would initially appear. It might be more of a demonstration and a way to build hype/appease the 3D proponents, so to speak.

What does seem pretty alarming is the prospect of this demonstration becoming another auxiliary tool that needs maintenance. More auxiliary tools needing maintenance typically means more bugs that'll likely stay for month or never see resolution, and that annoyance will be directed at YYG as opposed to, say, Blender developers. And I don't like the perspective of seeing more complaints about bugs that are still untouched after months or years.

Taking that into account, at least one thing asset bundles have going for them is that once they're made, there's no further maintenance needed. Yay? ^^'
(that said, I don't remember seeing any recurring bundle sprites or such, which makes me wonder how many projects are using these bundles in the first place and how much role they play in drawing in and keeping paying users...)

As others pointed out, having that tool hard-wired into the IDE means more bloated installation - yet not having it integrated into the IDE means it's more cumbersome to use, where the point is to make the process easier. So I very much support the notion of setting up some kind of plugin system, which would allow us to opt-in to specific GM functionality (similar to Visual Studio workloads/components), as opposed to having the tool packed with everything and the kitchen sink. I never really use lots of asset types or Box 2D physics system, so being able to remove these from the UI altogether (especially per-project basis) would make things a lot neater for me.

Also, it seems I have four hands now.

 

[kburkhart84]

To elaborate on my initial post: I'm not criticizing the tool itself, but that it was developed and published by YYG. This is something I'd expect to come from a community member as a hobby project, something they did on the side to showcase what's possible to make in GameMaker, maybe to add to their portfolio. Under those circumstances, my reaction would probably be "oh yeah, that's nice", because sure, it is a thing that does a thing, and probably does it reasonably well.

However, it's not something groundbreaking that doesn't exist elsewhere yet. Having this doesn't really let us do things in GM that we can't already do by using external, dedicated tools. Despite this, the time and effort of YYG staff has gone into its development and testing, and most likely will be going into its maintenance. These resources could have been spent on fixing critical bugs, adding features that were actually requested, optimization... you get the idea.

I also wouldn't consider having this built into GM an advantage. Quite the contrary. It adds bulk to the installer and installation. It adds complexity to GM's code base that may cause issues with other, unrelated IDE components.

In short, I don't think this will generate much, if any, additional revenue for YYG, but resources were invested into it - resources that could have gone towards other, more useful things, both for the users (by providing fixes or features) and for YYG (by increasing the value of GM and gathering revenue through it) - and it'd be a shame for that to go to waste like certain other attempts at making external applications in GM to promote GM (*cough* Player *cough*).


Now, this would be an entirely different scenario if all of the features being showcased or used in this tool (support for more model formats, 3D lighting, UI elements, etc.) were actually going to be supported in GameMaker in the future and this tool was just a little demo project to show what can be done with them. Then I'd have no problems with this at all and would be 100% behind everything presented in this topic, aside from the wacky backwards announcements.

Now on this one I can agree completely. I'm also in the group that thinks the sprite editor should not really be part of the software for the same reasons.

So, you're no longer programming MacDonald's machines? I swear, man, if the ice cream machines start to work again, we'll have no choice but to blame you for that whole thing
(Just kidding, I hope your gig is fun!)

Well, it was actually Burger King, though I did do a 3 year stint managing for McDonalds, even went to Hamburger University(I promise it's a legit thing). And I'll tell you, at my location the machine would usually be working, but it seems like every time it would break down is when EVERYBODY wanted ice cream

I always knew Ken would create a greater evil than ET

I thought Hades vs. Satan was pretty evil actually, it was butt-ugly, and the only jam game I did alone that couldn't have used the tool this topic is about since it was my first forced pixel art game ever.

I'm kinda torn when it comes to the whole "spend more resources on fixes and IDE itself" discussion, especially when with beta/stable-ish releases we have "spend more resources on fixes rather than features" discussion instead.

On the one hand, these kinds of tools don't provide much value to me specifically, so from my perspective I'd rather have more resources spent elsewhere.
On the other hand, I'm aware certain roles aren't interchangeable - the people responsible for making asset bundles might not be as much help with the IDE programming, for example.
On yet another hand, maybe instead of hiring people to make asset bundles the resources should be spent on hiring people who can help with core IDE.
On still another hand, there was this comic I saw a while back but can't find now, where the general idea is that one programmer can do a job in one month, if you add another programmer they can do it in two months, and if you add a project manager there will be no end to it.

Which is to say, contrary to popular belief throwing more programmers at the codebase might not yield gains the same way adding more factory workers does. If you happen to hire a subpar programmer, they might end up wasting others' time by having others review their messy code and producing spaghetti code that takes more time to refactor than to write from scratch - and because users are already familiar with things happening the certain way, you need to carefully refactor it so that it keeps its way of functioning and writing from scratch isn't really an option anymore.

People might not have asked for a 3D to 2D sprite tool, but they definitely asked about 3D stuff a lot. Combine it with this remark in the original post:


If we see it not as a standalone tool, but a step towards more proper 3D support in GameMaker, it might not be as out-of-nowhere as it would initially appear. It might be more of a demonstration and a way to build hype/appease the 3D proponents, so to speak.

What does seem pretty alarming is the prospect of this demonstration becoming another auxiliary tool that needs maintenance. More auxiliary tools needing maintenance typically means more bugs that'll likely stay for month or never see resolution, and that annoyance will be directed at YYG as opposed to, say, Blender developers. And I don't like the perspective of seeing more complaints about bugs that are still untouched after months or years.

Taking that into account, at least one thing asset bundles have going for them is that once they're made, there's no further maintenance needed. Yay? ^^'
(that said, I don't remember seeing any recurring bundle sprites or such, which makes me wonder how many projects are using these bundles in the first place and how much role they play in drawing in and keeping paying users...)

As others pointed out, having that tool hard-wired into the IDE means more bloated installation - yet not having it integrated into the IDE means it's more cumbersome to use, where the point is to make the process easier. So I very much support the notion of setting up some kind of plugin system, which would allow us to opt-in to specific GM functionality (similar to Visual Studio workloads/components), as opposed to having the tool packed with everything and the kitchen sink. I never really use lots of asset types or Box 2D physics system, so being able to remove these from the UI altogether (especially per-project basis) would make things a lot neater for me.

Also, it seems I have four hands now.

I can also agree with this, especially about the notion of plugins, which we have been waiting on for quite some time now.

 

[BPOutlaws_Jeff]

We’re very proud to announce the arrival of our new 3D-2D tool. This tool allows you to take just about any 3D model, animate it, attach other models to it, and then export images of the model under a variety of lighting conditions and camera positions.

This tool makes gathering sprite images from 3D models significantly easier, allowing you to get your vision into GameMaker faster..

This is the first version of the tool and the start of our new foray into the third dimension. We have really big plans for this going forward, and you’re here on day one. You can help assist us with the development of this by providing feedback in this thread or on #GameMaker on Twitter.

You can download 3D-2D here, and view the manual here. Just to give you a little taste of what you can do with it, have a look through these screenshots and animations. The application is only available for Windows at the moment, and it’s currently a separate installation from GameMaker. We have plans for a Mac and Linux version in the near future, as well as bringing them into GameMaker natively.

Please give it a shot, tell us what you think!
View attachment 50280

DOWNLOAD HERE:
https://opr.as/GM-Sprite

Definitely a random announcement, but as long as you guys stay on top of Spine support so we don't end up like the old days where we could only use a few features from Spine while everyone else got to use all the advanced stuff, I'm happy lol

 

[Xor]

I agree with @Alice. Very well said.

This may be controversial, but I hope this is an indication of more 3D tools in GM. Particularly, I'd like to see a model importer, animation system, and 3D lighting system for games. I have heard some say that the team should just focus on 2D and improve existing features. I couldn't disagree more. Firstly GM has been making incredible progress in general features, so I don't believe 3D would take away from 2D development. Secondly, 3D is a huge draw for game developers (myself included). I love seeing flashy graphics, lighting, and depth. If I was game engine shopping today, this is one of the first things I would look for (especially from an outsider's perspective).

3D is already possible in GM, but it lacks the ease-of-use features that we expect from GM. We could have a model importing function built in? Maybe a 2.5D or 3D mode for the room editor? 3D collision bounding boxes could be useful in 2.5D also. I'm mainly hopeful for the standard 3D stuff that I currently have to copy-paste into all my projects.

If I'm honest, I don't think I will use this sprite tool. I either want full 3D or own it with 2D, but I don't see myself faking it. That being said, I'm happy to see development in this direction and I hope it's an indication of what's to come.
In the future, would love to see a more modular approach to the GM IDE. Maybe this sprite tool could be a separate, optional module that you can download and update separately? Now that I'm brainstorming, this would be perfect for character/texture generators, and down the line we could imagine PBR/normal-map editors, particle editors, heck even model editors. A modular system will be important if we see more tools like this.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. Overall I'm excited!

EDIT: I figured I should share some feedback on the actual tool while I'm here. First model I tried had 4k textures, but tool simply doesn't load them. Downscale the texture before importing did the trick, but hopefully this can be fixed or atleast mentioned somewhere.
One small quality of life suggestion, would be to add a key for snapping positions/rotations/scaling values to the nearest reasonable unit. Perhaps ALT can snap the rotation to 15 or 45 degrees?
The lighting is a neat touch. It'd be neat to be able to save presets because if your exporting a lot of sprites in multiple sessions, you'll need the lighting to match, which could become tedious.
If I'm dreaming, I'd like to see PBR materials. Maybe it will happen since you got Patrik on the team