1) Sprites, 2) engine glows

Ok, I have started working on some ship graphics and attempted to put them into NOVA. Well, I have no idea how to get my ships into sprites. I noticed there is a nice program -sprites or P2S i believe- for mac users, but I am on windows using EVNEW . Any guidance in this would be greatly appreciated.

and 2) I was wondering if the engine glow graphics could be set to dissapate at a set frame rate, basically to make something like the smoke trail of the hellhound missiles, where a small trail could be left behind.

2. No. The smoke trail is in a cicn resource, I believe. You can't change the decay rate on the flares either.

The EVNEW docs should tell you how it can import sprites, i.e. from a list of pictures or a bigass one containing all the frames. So you have to get your 3D program (or any other mean you used to make your ship sprites) to export these frames.

Zacha Pedro, on Jan 19 2005, 01:05 PM, said:

The EVNEW docs should tell you how it can import sprites, i.e. from a list of pictures or a bigass one containing all the frames. So you have to get your 3D program (or any other mean you used to make your ship sprites) to export these frames.
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I did make a big composite after esporting them all as jpegs from blender. However, the background/ canvas continues to show up as well as just the ship sprites. How do i make it so that just the ship is shown, and not the background-the black part on that link you listed-?

JPG is about the worst format for anything to do with sprites because of the visual artifacts the compression leaves. I guess PCs don't have PICT, so I can't really reccomend another...

It should be easier to make a mask after you have just plain bitmaps, though. Not Jpegs.

You also need to enter a mask, which basically EVNEW uses to know which parts are transparent and which are not. An example of mask (that matches the previous Pegasus image) can be found here

AS for the file format, on PC I recommand a professional one such as TIFF, if the rendered can export is such a format. Otherwise, use the bulky BMP.

This post has been edited by Zacha Pedro : 20 January 2005 - 09:54 AM

tried it with tiffe and bmp pictures, still getting something like this- see attached photo- in nova. any suggestions? Ohh, and I do have the mask sprites loaded up as well.

Attached File(s)

• demo.jpg (28.08K)
  Number of downloads: 75

Is this kind of gr(e/a)y (pick yours) the background color of the big multi-frame image? If so, then the mask needs correcting (or maybe EVNEW didn't understand you well). Otherwise, I don't know.

Is that nebula image a spob? How is this ship near it?

Uhh. Ya. Man- You need to make the background 100% BLACK in blender.

Re-render and export via bmp or tiff- make a mask out of the exported files-

you then should have 2 sets- one color (w/black BG) and one black and white solids (the mask)

load those as your sprite.

I've got the exact same problem (I'm on a PC):
I render from lightwave using jpgs, then convert the jpgs to bmps in photoshop. I make a white version of my model in Lightwave, and do the same. Then I use Eugene Chin's excellent method of making a mask from that:

"What I do for Masks is render them white at 2X final size, then scale it down.

Then use the Colorize option in the Hue/Saturation tool to make any grey pixels various shades of red. Set the saturation to 100.

Use Brigtness/Contrast to push the contrast up to 100. At this point, all of the grey pixels should be either red or white. Replace Color can then change all of the red pixels to white. "

I load both the mask and the sprites into EVNEW, and the product is my ship with a great big black 70 x 70 square around it. Not very satisfying.

EVNEW is screwy when it comes to importing masks. From what I can tell, you have to import it as a mask in the same place as you import the color image... otherwise it doesn't work. I end up importing the image and mask in both the Rle8 and Rled resources and it seems to work. All that might not be necessary but I've not made too many graphics so I've not bothered to test it.

Thanks for the advice: tried it, still doesn't work. This is what my ship (slightly modified Corvette from EVC ) looks like in-game. Coincidently, it's what the first frame of the sprites look like. Also pictured is the mask of my first frame. Anyone have any ideas on how to make this work?

Attached File(s)

• corvette_frames0000.jpg (2.27K)
  Number of downloads: 0
• mask_to_upload.bmp (14.55K)
  Number of downloads: 25

SeniorFroggy, on Apr 12 2005, 08:25 PM, said:

I've got the exact same problem (I'm on a PC):
I render from lightwave using jpgs, then convert the jpgs to bmps in photoshop.
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Jpgs?

Now why would you do that?

On the smoketrail. If you got a weapon to fire continuously backwards?
You´d better ask Edwards, or some of the other engine geniouses.

Btw:
You are sure that your files refer to each other correctly. And that they have correct ID´s..

Okay, you guys need a quick tutorial in how to make suitable masks for Nova, assuming your renderer can produce alpha channels (almost all of them can).

In LightWave, for example, you get the option to save both the render output and the alpha channel to seperate files. Do that, then load your alpha files into Photoshop.
In Photoshop you can then control how close to your ship you want your mask to crop. You can get no black edges (but lose some of the ship) by selecting only white pixels using "Select Color". Alternatively (what we did), you can select only black pixels, which gives all the ship, but leaves a black ring around the ship when over planets.

With a 1 bit mask, there's no real way to avoid these aritfacts. We chose black because we knew our ships would be against a primarily black background.

And there you go.

Thanks, pipeline, I'll try that.
Modesty_Blaise_us: Yeah, that's what I thought, until my bmps kinda flipped out.

Yeah, still not working, pipeline. Unless I misunderstood you...what exactly do you have to do to the alpha files in photoshop?

C'mon, man, I'm dying here.

Sorry, SF. I'm a bit busy with University, and I'll need to actually take some screenshots to show you what to do.

Give me a day or two.

S'all good, thanks a million. I owe you one.