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I'm just wondering, for those of you who make your own 3D EV/O graphics, how do you do masks? I've found that if I duplicate the 3D file, and set the ambient light as high as it will go, and color all the objects white, with a black background, it washes everything out, and creates a perfect outline of the ship, which I can then use as a mask.
How do you guys do it? Do you go in there with Photoshop or whatever and cut it out by hand or what?
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Generally, I make two copies of the ship, one with all the shaders and another whith a white shader that can't have any shadows (actually, according to RayDream, it's a black object, but with the glow at full white). Then I use Make spîn and use it to compile the pics and masks, but just throw away the masks that it makes. Heh, I used to manually copy and paste it into a new image in ColorIt.. that sucked..
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What I do is load the pic into Clarisworks. Then, I use the "magic wand" function. It selects the single pixel you click on, then all the adjacent pixels of the same color. Click on the black part, then drag it away!
Bada bing, bada boom. You have a mask.
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I do the threshold technique with Graphic Converter or Photoshop. Basically...you run a threshold filter and set the number to 1...thne it gets rid of all of the colors besides black and white. Auto mask! This only works on a few ships...ie: one's with NO black on the ships hull. Otherwise...you should render the mask. PEACE YO!
~Kwanza
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I apply a mask shader to my objects and render with no antialiasing or shadows. I'll have to find a new method once I figure out Lightwave, though..
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That's pretty much what I have done...I render the ship, I render the mask by giving the ship a 100% white glow, then I take it into ClarisWorks and shift the color palatte to my own which gets rid of all greys (same effect as magic wanding the black, but sometimes the magic wand gives me "selection is too complex"). Now, though, I might use Photoshop's threshhold...though probably not. Stick with what works, eh?
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We have developed a drag and drop applet that you just drop a bunch of files or a folder of individual ship/sprite pictures onto, and it proceses them into a sprite picture and a mask picture automaticly. Unlike some other sprite makers around, it works with any depth input pictures. You need to drop a 'square' number of ship pictures onto it (ie 1, 4, 9...36... etc) 36 is the usual number for EVO. The output sprite and mask files are pict files with PICT resources as well to make life easy.
If anyone is interested, email us at evo@sutherland-studios.com.au
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Originally posted by Rodger: **We have developed a drag and drop applet that you just drop a bunch of files or a folder of individual ship/sprite pictures onto, and it proceses them into a sprite picture and a mask picture automaticly. Unlike some other sprite makers around, it works with any depth input pictures. You need to drop a 'square' number of ship pictures onto it (ie 1, 4, 9...36... etc) 36 is the usual number for EVO. The output sprite and mask files are pict files with PICT resources as well to make life easy.
**
'tis quite a nice one too. i used to render 72 pics (half colored, half white w/ ambient lighting turned way up. really slow in infini-d at 120 mhz), and the two sets didn't always quite match. plus, in putting them together by hand in clarisworks, the size wasn't always exactly right. this app is hella quicker than clarisworks and does a much better job. good job man
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Originally posted by nighthawk: **'tis quite a nice one too. i used to render 72 pics (half colored, half white w/ ambient lighting turned way up. really slow in infini-d at 120 mhz), and the two sets didn't always quite match.
... If you're using any modern 3D program, you should be able to render to PICTS with an alpha mask. Thorston Lemke's GraphicConvertor has a nice batch processor which can extra the alpha channel and run a threshold on it to drop it down to 1/bit. Or just take your sprite grid, select the pure black areas (i.e., R0 G0 B0), copy, and paste into a new document.
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