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I'm using Maya 5 at home and was wondering what it takes to model an input ships into the EVN universe. I'v got some great ideas but i just dont know how to put them into the game. Any help?
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Originally posted by Avatar7: **I'm using Maya 5 at home and was wondering what it takes to model an input ships into the EVN universe. I'v got some great ideas but i just dont know how to put them into the game. Any help?
**
You must render the ships at the appropriate angle from vertical (45 deg, i think) facing each of the 36 directions. Render it at twice the size you want it to appear in the game. The usual way that people do this is to put it into a QT movie and then run it through a program called M2S which turns it into a sprite picture. Then take this picture into photoshop, apply Unsharp Mask filter with spesific settings which I dont know, then shrink the whole thing to half size (this makes the sprites sharper and cleaner looking - process is called LASIK). Then run it through EnRLE. On a PC, you can run the sprite through EVNEW, unfortunately, there is no M2S for PC - you would have to manually lay it out or have someone with a mac do it for you. I can M2S things, i think (dont know as I dont have anything to M2S, but it should run on my mac) -Az
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Can you do that for EVC and EVO as well?
Well, the same process should work, except that you're done once you've LASIK'd the sprites, and all you have to do is paste them into resedit as picts. Also, ships rendered at a 45 degree angle may look a little out of place with the original EVC/EVO ships.
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There's a program on the utilities page called LaSEr.
Is that any good? It sounds like it could greatly simplify the process.
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Originally posted by Azratax2: with spesific settings which I dont know
From top to bottom, 325%, 1.0, and 0.
Lindley: depends what the program does. I'll see about that app in a second.
EDIT: It looks interesting, but I can't say I've ever used it, so I have no clue as to its reliability.
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(This message has been edited by orcaloverbri9 (edited 02-06-2004).)
Originally posted by Azratax2: **The usual way that people do this is to put it into a QT movie and then run it through a program called M2S which turns it into a sprite picture. -Az
Ok. I think that I understand how to get to this point but where can I get this program M2S and how does it work?
m2s is available on the Nova add-ons page (in the Sprites package), but is mac-only. What it does is take a movie and lay out all the frames in an array, usually 6x6. (for 36 frames) EnRLE takes this sprite and encodes it as an rle8/rleD resource so you can use it in Nova. (edit)These tools are all on the second page of the Utilities section.(/edit) ------------------ Join the Ambrosia Seti@home team! (url="http://"http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_41611.html")http://setiathome.ss...team_41611.html(/url)
(This message has been edited by Croikle (edited 02-06-2004).)
Originally posted by Croikle: m2s is available on the Nova add-ons page (in the Sprites package), but is mac-only.
Is there a Widnows version? At this point I'm almost broke otherwise I'd have gotten a mac already.
EDIT:On another subject. Is this the same way you put a pict resource into the Universe for spobs, outf, ect? Only instead of making a movie you make a bitmap that you put into the pict resource?
(This message has been edited by Avatar7 (edited 02-06-2004).)
Originally posted by Avatar7: **Is there a Widnows version? At this point I'm almost broke otherwise I'd have gotten a mac already.
It is not available for Windows and there is no equivalent. Sorry.
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There is a way to do it on PC but it is much more manual.
Render each frame as a seperate image. Do the same for each mask.
Open Photoshop or simular proggy. Make a new document that will be the correct size for a grid of pics;
If the pics are 100x100 and you have 36 of them then make your new document 600x600 to fit a 6 by 6 grid of 100x100 pics.
Set your grid toold to 100x100 pixels and turn on grid snap.
place the pics in the new document one pic at a time starting with the upper left corner and work acrossed in rows until all the grid positions are filled. Flatten the image and you can save the new document as a BMP to import into EVNew.
Yes I know what your thinking. Eww awful hard work. Actually more boring but it does work. I have created a couple ships so far using this method. It works fine if still a bit slower.
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I thought I'd mention that all of the sprites in my shipyard were laid out manually in photoshop, by the method Tiresmoke mentions. I became quite fast with all the appropriate key commands, let me tell you, and it took a good chunk of time. Better than nothing, though.
Additionally, it is important that the first frame of your sprite, no matter how you make it, has your ship pointing straight up. You could figure this out by looking at other sprites, of course, but if you happened to miss it, your first flight-test would have you terribly confused as to why your ship was flying sideways.
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Originally posted by Tiresmoke: **There is a way to do it on PC but it is much more manual.
Do you need to do for both masks and sprites, or can you do it for sprites, and then just magic-wand-no-aa the black background, and then make a new layer, fill that selection with black, and there you have your mask? (the magic-wand->new layer->fill=mask technique is what I use for making masks for the engine glows I add to Onyx's sprites. Also, if there is no black in the ship and you save it's sprite as a bmp, you can have EVNEW use it as both the sprite and the mask (it seems it interprets pixels in the mask as either "black" or "not-black" - which means you cant use jpg masks, but it also means you can sometimes use sprites as masks.) -Az
Well when I render a ship I also render an alpha channel so at that point I have a mask that does not need any tweaking or reworking. However is you don't have that option in your render engine then I would guess that there are a number of techniques you could use. I have not yet tried to use the sprite as the mask but I think that having an Alpha Mask would still provide the best possible results. Sometimes wwhen you render a ship you would end up with close to real black in shading. Especially on a dark or black colored ship. Also keep in mind that if you try to deal with 8 bit sprites to build them from your 16 bit sprites that you will compress the palette info and anything less than 12, 12, 12 black will become 0, 0, 0 black. So if you have a mask then this is no longer a worry.
Originally posted by Tiresmoke: **Open Photoshop or simular proggy. Make a new document that will be the correct size for a grid of pics;
Well seriously, it's not that much work compared to creating a cahinmaille halburk. But I have little to no experience with Photoshop so a step by step explanation would be much appreciated.
Well ok let's see what we can do about helping you figure this out.
First let's use my example above. You have already rendered 36 images of 100x100 pixels for your ship. You should also have set alpha channel in your 4D proggy and rendered 36 mask pics of the same size. Now we want to open photoshop and get set to make a pic we can import into EVNEW.
Open photoshop. Knowing we are going to use 36 pics you need to make a new pic that will hold them all. In our example we want them to be in a 6x6 format so we multiply 6 by 100 to get a width factor and do the same for the vertical measure. So we end up with 600x600. That is now the size of the pic we are going to create. So open the file menu and select new in photoshop. Give you pic a name of 6x6x100grid. This way we can save this layout and also make the masks. Now make width and hieght our 600 and 600 values.
Pretty easy so far. But wait we have another step before we can import pics.
Open the view menu and select New Guides. OK we need to create some guide here to constrain the pics to where we want them to lock into the template. So let's start with horizontal and set steps, one at a time, for 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500. This will give you five equaelly spaced lines in your template pic. Now select and make guides for the vertical as well at 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 respectively. Now to make these useful, in the view menu set, Snap to Guides so that it is checkmarked.
OK Whew that was hard but we are ready to use this template. OK to make sure that we don't have to do this for the masks as well just save this template as a Photoshop Doc. That will retain all the guides so that when you load it again you will have a working template to just add pics too.
With me so far?
OK lets add the ship pics. Open pic1 from your renders of the ship image. We want to select the whole pic so go to the select menu and use the all command. Next open edit and select copy. Use your mouse and select the template you made. (It is still on your screen right?) Now go to the edit menu and select paste. Your ship pic will show up in the template. Now go to the tool palette, you know that long skinny box of tool icons on the left side of your screen. HeHeHe. Get the move tool which is the top right tool in the tool menu. If your not sure then just hover the mouse over that tool and wait for the context help to tell you that it is the move tool. Got it? OK Good. Let's move the ship pic into the top left box in your template. Just move the mouse over that pic and hold down the mouse left button and slide the pic into that box. You will notice that the pic will then slide right into the spot perfectly. The guide snap assures a perfect fit. Now you need to open the 2nd ship pic and place it. This one will go in the top row to the right of the first. You will continue to place the pics until you fill up this row and then move down to the next row and start on the left again. Keep going until you have placed all your 35 pics.
LOL well your not quite done yet. Now you have all your pics placed, now you can turn off show guides. Make sure that all the pics line up and there are no gaps. There are none so let's flatten the image. Select the Layers menu and then flatten layers. That will lock everything into place for saving the pic. Now open the file menu and select Save As..., and then type in a file name and select BMP format. (Note; you can also use other quicktime readable formats such as Jpeg but BMP is better as it has a very ow loss factor and your pic will be nicely preserved.)
Thought you were done? Nope...
OK reload the template that we made and saved back in the beginning and then go through the same process for the masks you rendered. Save the finished mask pic and now you are ready to load up EVNEW and import your new ship graphics as an RLEd.
I hope this helped. Maybe it is a bit too simple but then again you wanted a step by step. Sorry I don't have pics to add with this but I am getting too tight on webspace to handle it. If someone wants me to do so they will have to lend some site space and some time formating a small web page to hold it.
Well this helps. Thanks. I think that I can get a hold of a copy of 3ds Max soon so that will help with the masks. But when making the ships, how come you need 36 images of ships? I understand that you need the nine diferent directions (up, down, left, right, leftup, rightup, downright, downleft) but what are the other directions/pics for?
Originally posted by Avatar7: **Well this helps. Thanks. I think that I can get a hold of a copy of 3ds Max soon so that will help with the masks. But when making the ships, how come you need 36 images of ships? I understand that you need the nine diferent directions (up, down, left, right, leftup, rightup, downright, downleft) but what are the other directions/pics for?
Because this isn't a Nintendo. You can have a nine sprite layout if you want the ship to be really jumpy when it turns. The more sprites, the smoother the ship will rotate. Try it. When you're in Nova, gently tap the turn button and see what happens.
Matrix
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Originally posted by what_is_the_matrix: **Because this isn't a Nintendo. You can have a nine sprite layout if you want the ship to be really jumpy when it turns. The more sprites, the smoother the ship will rotate. Try it. When you're in Nova, gently tap the turn button and see what happens.
Well what i'm trying to say is that that is the bare minimum, right? But what i'm trying to ask is in what order do I put the bmp files in.
Here's a reference you can use. (url="http://"http://img11.photobucket.com/albums/v34/Lindley/Example.jpg")http://img11.photobu...ley/Example.jpg(/url)