How do you use them after you make tham?

One of thoes bloody graphics questions.

Ok, I have resently taken up making ship sprites, the problem is I can't figure out how to take the sprite and figure it to an EVNEW, uhh , workable ship. What do I need to do :huh: . I'm useing 'Wings' for windows. (:laugh: :huh: :blink: :mellow: )

When you say that you've been 'making ship sprites' what stage of development are you at with them? Do you mean that you've assembled the frames for the ships in paint/whatever?

Lets assume that you have.

You need to go into EVNEW and create a new rled/rle8 resource - I can never remember which is which. Hunt in Nova files to see which is the mask and which is not and create a resource from the one which isn't used for masks.

Click on 'File', 'Import'. Using 'Browse', load the sprite that you created. You should now have some settings for 'X size' 'Y size', 'Number of frames' 'First frame' and 'Sprite size' (forgive me if this is inaccurate, but I'm on a computer without EVNEW so I can't check). The sprite size bit sets the number of pixels each frame is, 'X' and 'Y' size is the number of frames horizontally and vertically, and 'Number of frames' does what is says on the tin.

Once you've set those up, click 'Ok'. You should have a fully usable sprite which Nova will recognise. At that point, we get into Spin resources, which I really don't want to explain without having access to the program.

Finally, I want to switch roles - I have a question on much the same issue. I have the sprites loaded into EVNEW, I have masks (in the other resource, if you see what I mean), and I have the spins. But when I load them into Nova, it doesn't recognise that there is a mask, and gives me a nice grey background around the ship. Could someone explain what's going wrong? And explain spins (if neccessary) to Sylvanus?

Well, if you're using Wings, then you need to export the model to a useable format (.3ds is probably best) then open it in a 3d program that can render.

Texture it then render out the sprites through a 360 degree rotation in 10 degree intervals. Take these pics and use photoshop or something similar to put them in a 6x6 grid formation. Make a mask and by selecting all the black area around the ship and copying that into a new file. If you export those as bitmaps then you can now use EVNEW to import them to a plug-in.

This will only make a basic ship. If you want running lights, glows, etc that will need to be done at the modeling and rendering stage. Glows are best done by modelling the engine glows and using textures to make them look like engine glows. Lights can be done by placing point lights on the ship where you want them. You will then need to make a matt black texture for the ship and render images of the glows and the lights and mask them too.

Gets a bit more complicated once you get outside the realms of a basic ship...

Thanks guys. You can expect (or not expect) new ship graphis soon. Just one more question, what program do you suggest for making the detail details, I mean, paint sucks. I also have to follow my program budget, which is 0.02$ . Thanfully I do have Photoshop, would that work well enough? I'll try, but I would'nt mind peoples opinions.

anyone have any suggestions for a good rendering program? Prefferably not that expensive.

How much are you willing to shell out..
You can get C4D student XL version for 150$ I think. That is the deal i was offered in Sweden.
Though that will give you no updates, and you cannot earn money of the stuff you publish.

This post has been edited by modesty_blaise_us : 01 November 2005 - 08:18 PM

I was thinking something under $100...

You could try Blender. It has the most godawful interface, but if you can figure it out it supports the Wings model format (not sure if textures done in Wings work).

Oh, and it's free.

You'll not likely find a better 2D editing app than Photoshop, and if you do, Photoshop is still extremely powerful and plenty good enough for this kind of work; I actually can't think of anybody here who uses anything else for Nova images.

By the way, you may want to render your sprites with the LASIK method. I'm too tired to give instructions, but maybe someone else with a longer attention span at the present time can help you out.

Render at twice your final, in-game size.
Apply an 'Unsharp Mask" at 250%, 1, 0.
Reduce size per frame by 1/2.

Thanks.