

Most notably, the creators of the fire breathing Balrog in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring used sprites to simulate fire emanating from the surface of the demon. Sprites have also occasionally been used as a special effects tool in movies. The sprite illusion can be exposed in video games by quickly changing the position of the camera while keeping the sprite in the center of the view. Often sprites are used to depict phenomena such as fire, smoke, small objects, small plants (like blades of grass), or special symbols (like "1-Up"). When the illusion works viewers will not notice that the sprite is flat and always faces them.


For this to be a correct perspective the grass would have to be leaning toward the ground away from the camera at an obtuse angle. The base of the grass is closer to the camera than the flower yet the blades appear to be behind. Also notice that the grass near his feet is interacting with the flower near his feet in a strange way. Notice that one sprite at the bottom of the largest puff of smoke is cutting into the ground, revealing its actual geometry is not an amorphous puff but a flat plane. Take a look at the puffs of smoke about the character and to the left. Other objects in the frame such as the character (Link), the flower just behind his feet, and the rock walls and ground are more complicated three dimensional objects that employ texture mapping.Ī closer look at the graphic can help reveal imperfections of this rendering technique. In this frame the sprouts of grass and brown puffs of smoke are integrated into the scene using sprites. As three-dimensional graphics became more prevalent, the term was used to describe a technique whereby flat images are seamlessly integrated into complicated three-dimensional scenes.Īn example of sprite animation from the popular game The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
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That is, figures generated by either custom hardware or by software alone were all referred to as sprites. As computer performance improved, this optimization became unnecessary and the term evolved to refer specifically to the two dimensional images themselves that were integrated into a scene. Sprites were originally invented as a method of quickly compositing several images togethĮr in two-dimensional video games using special hardware. In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene.
