One such example is the fire breathing Balrog in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring the effects designers utilized 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.

the viewer accepts that the depicted object only has one perspective.

the depicted object has a similar appearance from many common viewing angles (such as something spherical).

the sprite exists only for a short period of time.the animation is constantly changing or depicts rotation.the image inside the sprite already depicts a three dimensional object.Sprites create an effective illusion when: This rendering method is also referred to as billboarding. The image can be scaled to simulate perspective, it can be rotated two dimensionally, it can overlap other objects and be occluded, but it can only be viewed from the same angle. Unlike a texture map, the sprite plane is always perpendicular to the axis emanating from the camera. More often sprite now refers to a partially transparent two dimensional animation that is mapped onto a special plane in a three dimensional scene. 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.

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 together in two-dimensional video games using special hardware. In computer graphics, a sprite (also known by other names see Synonyms below) is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene.

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