Here's a look at the array of 16 cameras I had set up to render the models I've been creating for the 7 Day FPS Challenge project I've been working on.

Because the engine we had created was sprite based and wouldn't accept 3D models, we decided to render 16 different angles of each model so that we could show an appropriate 2D image in game that looked like it was facing the correct direction.

I adapted a Python script I found to automatically cycle through all the cameras and export what it could see. Those images were then pulled into the Gimp as layers of a single image where they could be equally cropped, rotated and otherwise manipulated. From there, I used a Gimp plugin that I had modified to output each layer as a separate image, and a final Bash script that I had written to rename and number the final images sequentially. The end result was a process which required two points of interaction as opposed to one which had at least 7 actions per resulting image.

If you're interested in checking out more stuff from this 7DFPS project, check out this blog post.