I had an idea of rendering spritesheets from Sequencer, you could make sprites for fighting games (or anything paper2d), create flipbooks for use in particle systems and so on. There’s a problem though, when you export the image sequence the background is opaque which means you have to use some third party software to convert the black (or whatever color) to the alpha. It would be nice if you could render the character alone opaque and the rest with alpha, is this possible somehow?
So I had an another idea, sprites use indexed colors anyway so I made a RGB 255,0,255 unlit plane and used that as a background for that camera. After editing the post process (disabling bloom, auto exposure, editing the tonemapper by boosting the saturation and some stuff) I got a 255,0,255 background image sequence output which kind of worked. Even though I didn’t use antialiasing the pixelation meant that some pixels on the border between the character weren’t pure 255,0,255 so I got tons of colors in the palette. I didn’t find any filtering settings in the Sequencer output settings but nearest neighbor would have probably worked better than the current filtering.
I also tried Michael Noland’s CGA post process which worked better, it gave a 4 color output. However that’s not really enough as a start for pixel work, but if this color limit was increased you could potentially use UE4 as a starting point for pixel animations. If anyone knows any methods for limiting color output in UE4 I would be interested to learn those techniques.