a little aid?

omeomi

what software, process work, methods will I need to create shan, pict etc. I simply need the pictures, but I have NO IDEA how to make them. I need help here. i know this is a vague question, but I'm kind of at a loss here and need help. i hear that the ships all get 3d modeled then rendered and photoshopped. Is this true? How is this done? Argh.
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Captain Mephistopheles

(This message has been edited by omeomi (edited 03-19-2004).)

Mantaray

Well...

First thing I'd do is search on the EV dev corner for "3d applications" or "Strata download" or something to get a 3D application. It really depends on what OS you're using. Most of them are... not free, and since you don't seem to know much about this sort of thing, I'd suggest getting someone else to do your sprites.

3D modeling is a fairly difficult thing to do. For EVC, it wasn't much of a problem, because it didn't take much effort to make a quick ship. For Nova, however, things have to be just so in order for the thing to look right, and it's really difficult to pull of.

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"This is mutiny, Mr. Queeg."

omeomi

okay, what is just so? Please tell me for future reference. This is a very important thing for me to know, please enlighten me.
And i might as well learn 3d modeling. Learned photoshop in a week, maybe an extra dimension will make this take me 2 weeks. Know of any good uberbeginner tutorials, or free 3d modeling apps (free is so relative, if you know what i mean) so that i can learn the basics to create a ship sprite set?

I'm kind of looking for one of those overkill long replies - anyone willing to go for it?

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Captain Mephistopheles

(This message has been edited by omeomi (edited 03-19-2004).)

Martin Turner

Sprites are not hard to make, once you've sorted out how to do 3d.

Here is a 'Road Atlas' of the procedure - for the 'Street Level' you need to read the relevant ReadMes very carefully.

Essentially you need to download the suite of Nova tools and stuff which are all available on the add-ons page. Read the read mes and the Nova Bible carefully, and look long and hard at a particular ship before you start.

To make a sprite, create a ship in you favourite modelling application, and then create an animation which will rotate it from 0 to 350 degrees in 36 frames. Then create a camera (or equivalent) which enables you to view it rotating from a 45 degree angle. Zoom the camera out a bit, as you're going to need the extra space for your glows.

Make the movie with this, and this is your first ship movie. Use the relevant utilities (with their readmes) to turn this into a sprite and mask.

Next, you want to make the same ship with glows. Using whatever technique you prefer, create the glows so that they float around the ship. Now make the ship completely black and lightless, so that you can't see it, but it does obscure part of the glow at particular angles.

You can do this again for the ship lights. Leave any animations within the ship well alone for the time being.

Do the same procedure as before - this is now your glow sprite. Follow the instructions in the readmes to create this. The procedure creates a 36 part pict sprite and the appropriate mask.

You are best off trying this to replace an already existing sprite in order to get the hang of it.

Unfortunately, although Nova accepts PICT sprites or RLEs, it won't accept a sprite to replacing an RLE, so you will have to use the ENRLE utility to create the relevant RLE, and you will need to create a SPIN resource to make this happen. The SPIN tells ENRLE how big and how many the sprites are.

Note that Nova requires its spins to be an exact multiple of 8 pixels in each dimension.

Once done, paste the RLEs into a plugin file with the ID of the ones you are replacing. You will need to update the SHAN resource for the appropriate sizes.

Hey presto, this should all work, and your new ship should appear in place of the old one.

As I say, this is just the Road Atlas overview, but there is nothing intrinsically difficult about doing it.

---

The other part of your question was about learning 3d. Unfortunately although you can learn to use Photoshop in a couple of hours, 3d is rather more tricky. There are five basic steps in the 3d learning process

Views and manipulations - it's quite tricky to get the hang of viewing and moving 3d objects in a 3d space on a 2d screen. Play with a simple cube for a while until you get the hang of it.
Modelling and deformations. You can create models in a wide variety of ways. It's best to begin 'Lego' style by sticking together primitives - cubes, pyramids, spheres and other basic forms. You can then move on to lathes, lofts, NURBS, metaballs and whatever other modelling your program offers. Subsequent to that, you should experiment with deformations. The deformations you can perform depend on the type of model. Analogous to vector vs bitmap, models are either defined by beziers or as triangular meshes. You can usually convert from bezier to mesh but not the other way around, so do any bezier deformations you want before converting.
Texturing. Before you get carried away with intricate models, you should begin experimenting with textures. Textures aren't just pictures stuck on the model. With textures you can control all the ways light bounces off the object. This includes shadows on the surface created by a bumpy texture. Using textures, you can turn a simple cube into a Borg space ship without any further modelling. The masters of 3d are masters of texturing.
Cameras, lights, volumes and effects. Sorting out the positioning of the lights and cameras is what makes plain models exciting. Most of the effects you can apply are based around the camera, the light, or the air around the model. For example, an engine flare is a conical light with a mist effect.
Motion and animation. Finally, you can have all these things change with time. In a good program, anything you can define can be defined to change over time.

Hope this helps a bit. Ultimately its about playing around until you're comfortable, and then remembering all the ideas you had on the way.

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M A R T I N T U R N E R
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(This message has been edited by Martin Turner (edited 03-19-2004).)

zhouj

(url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/dl-redirect.pl/AddShips2.0.sit?path=evn/guides&file;=AddShips2.0.sit")http://www.ambrosias...AddShips2.0.sit(/url)

That file is a more complete guide to the process of doing this along with some screenshots and examples, I believe.

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(url="http://"http://www.zhouj.net/days/")Days of Glory(/url), Upcoming TC for EV: Nova

mrxak

In the future, please try to name topics more appropriately so that people have a better idea about what they're looking at. It can only help you if more people know what you need and can respond quicker.

what_is_the_matrix

Quote

Originally posted by omeomi:
**And i might as well learn 3d modeling. Learned photoshop in a week, maybe an extra dimension will make this take me 2 weeks. Know of any good uberbeginner tutorials, or free 3d modeling apps (free is so relative, if you know what i mean) so that i can learn the basics to create a ship sprite set?
**

Just to put things in perspective for you, I started working in 3D over 5 years ago and I'm still learning. 2 weeks is enough time to learn how to make extremely primative ships, but not nearly enough to learn how to model well.

Matrix

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omeomi

that is true. I am sorry about the vague name. Thank you. However, I am using a pc and EVNEW. What are the changes in the process of creating a ship? Are there any? Do i still need enRLE, Nova Tools etc? How would I do this with a pc?

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Captain Mephistopheles

Zacha Pedro

On a PC, the path is less clear: PC plugmaking is very recent, even after the release of PC Nova it was thought plugmaking would be done only on Macs. You don't need EnRle nor NovaTools, EVNEW does that for you. However, to go from an idea to a real textured ship in a 3D program, to a rendered thing, I don't know in the least (even on a Mac). I know that you need to render (in which conditions and lighting to be coherent with the existing ships? I dunno) a number of positions (frames) of the ship, traditionally 36, then organise them in six rows, six columns, and render the corresponding 36 masks and organise them the same way, the frame pointing up being the first (top left), all in two bmp files. Then can EVNEW import them (to my knowledge) and translate them in RleDs.

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omeomi

I know that EVNEW can import bmps, tiff, jpg, jpeg, gif etc and turn into pict and rleD, but I do not know how to make a finished picture to import. I know how to import the picture, just not how to make it. Right now I don't even get 3d modelling very clearly, but that I can get on my own. I need to understand how to go from a wireframe to a finished picture on PC. Any PC users or someone who knows, help!

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Captain Mephistopheles

zhouj

Quote

Originally posted by omeomi:
**I know that EVNEW can import bmps, tiff, jpg, jpeg, gif etc and turn into pict and rleD, but I do not know how to make a finished picture to import. I know how to import the picture, just not how to make it. Right now I don't even get 3d modelling very clearly, but that I can get on my own. I need to understand how to go from a wireframe to a finished picture on PC. Any PC users or someone who knows, help!

**

The concept is the same for all platforms and programs. Once you've finished modeling and then texturing, your program should allow you to render the model. Rendering is what produces the final picture or movie.
(url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/dl-redirect.pl/AddShips2.0.sit?path=evn/guides&file;=AddShips2.0.sit")http://www.ambrosias...AddShips2.0.sit(/url)

is a guide with the details of making sprites. For more help, it is necessary to know what 3D program you're using.

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(url="http://"http://www.zhouj.net/days/")Days of Glory(/url), Upcoming TC for EV: Nova

omeomi

I understand that now, perhaps i wasn't clear, sorry. What I was asking (other than that) was how to go from a rendered picture (or movie, I'm not sure on pc how you do it) to a picture I can then import into EVNEW to make an rleD resource. I understand the mac way of doing it whereby you use novatools to convert the quicktime movie into a pict resource then enRleDRle to convert it into a rleD resource which you then somehow make part of your plugin. I do not use mac, I am a pc user and I use EVNEW. I do not understand the pc process for making the RleD images, if there are changes, if so what they are, etc. The AddShips2.0 is for mac, i looked at it already and it seemed very mac specific. I have the feeling I'm being an idiot but I still don't understand how to make a new ship ON PC. Perhaps you or someone else could clarify...

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Captain Mephistopheles

zhouj

Quote

Originally posted by omeomi:
**I understand that now, perhaps i wasn't clear, sorry. What I was asking (other than that) was how to go from a rendered picture (or movie, I'm not sure on pc how you do it) to a picture I can then import into EVNEW to make an rleD resource. I understand the mac way of doing it whereby you use novatools to convert the quicktime movie into a pict resource then enRleDRle to convert it into a rleD resource which you then somehow make part of your plugin. I do not use mac, I am a pc user and I use EVNEW. I do not understand the pc process for making the RleD images, if there are changes, if so what they are, etc. The AddShips2.0 is for mac, i looked at it already and it seemed very mac specific. I have the feeling I'm being an idiot but I still don't understand how to make a new ship ON PC. Perhaps you or someone else could clarify...

**

EVNEW has a built rleD converter so just use that.

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(url="http://"http://www.zhouj.net/days/")Days of Glory(/url), Upcoming TC for EV: Nova

Coyote

It's best if you look at how the existing ships were done, really, but I can lay out the basics for you...

How you render it depends on the quality of your program. If you can do sequenced bitmaps, set up your ship to do a full 360* turn (starting facing away from the camera) in about 60 frames (basically, enough to make it smooth)- so that each frame is a separate (numbered) bitmap in a special folder, around 30x30 pixels for a fighter or 100x100 for a capship. Cut off the last frame and let 'er rip. If you can't do movies (some programs still can't, and if this is the case for you it sucks to be you), you'll have to turn your ship a little, render it, turn it again, and so on ad nauseam. Go into Photoshop, make a big image, and lay out each one of those frames so that they're perfectly lined up and consecutive. Probably best to size the final image so that it fits the tiled smaller ones perfectly, but I don't know that that's necessary with EVNEW- it seems to only read the parts of the image you tell it to. Save it as another bitmap, fill out the RLED import fields in EVNEW with the proper values, there you go. When you wanna do masks... well, you can figure that out just looking at masks in the program.

Mostly, best thing is to learn it the traditional way- stare at the existing resources until you get how to imitate them.

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(This message has been edited by Coyote (edited 03-21-2004).)