How do I make a coin

For the animated coins in StuntMouse I used Blender, an open source package for 3D

rendering. Although the interface is quite complex (although the new 2.5 version, still in beta, is much nicer than 2.49) there are loads of video tutorials around on the web and some good books available from the Blender site to help you get to grips with it. The trick is to start simple and give yourself a good couple of hours in one sitting.
To create the coin I created a disk shape,drew acoin texture with the GrumpyMouse GM on it and applied the texture in Blender. Rendered it with cartoon shading on (just edge shading in the interface) to make sure its all nice and neat.
Once you are happy with the basic shape youcan switch into Blenders animation mode and get the coin spinning. Its a really simple keyframe setup for the animation, set one at the start and one at the end and let Blender tween the frames inbetween.

Below is a screen shot of my Blender set up for the gold coin in the game.

Once the animation frames have been rendered out I had to spend a bit of time sorting out my work flow to get them in the right state for the game but I will talk about that next time