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This has been the source of much frustration.
If anyone who worked on the graphic for the CS engine or PoG could please tell me what settings you used on your camera to render the objects I would be terribly, terribly, intermidably grateful! I know that the general angle is 30 degrees. But there is more to it. If you used Lightwave (which I think I read somewhere that you did) was was the focal length on the camera? What was the position settings? What was your lighting setup? Please, please, please tell me.
I am making my own graphics but I want to use some of the graphics that come with CS but they have to match up. The angles have to be right, and as of right now...I can't get these angles to match up. It has been, like I said, a source of great frustration for me. Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated.
-Thank you.
-Asylum
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I believe that 3dStudioMax (on PC) was in fact the app of choice for the PoG/Coldstone graphics, but I'm afraid that I don't know anything about the camera and lighting setup they used. I agree that it would be very helpful to know this.
------------------ I don't know what I'm talking about. Oh no, here comes another learning experience. (url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/glennfield/ColdstoneBugs.html")Coldstone 1.0.1 Bug List(/url) - last update 10/10/2002 (url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/webboard/Forum48/HTML/001547.html")Stark Bledfast's Coldstone Debugging 101(/url)
Would there be any way to get in touch with the PoG people themselves? If I could just get the angles right, I might be able to sleep at night.
I've had positive results with a 45x45 degree camera isometric camera setup. I find the isometric camera necessary to maintain a good sense of perspective as the level pans around.
In this way you may be sure all of your buildings and such will line up next to one another (wall sections for that matter).
Cheers, CG
I'll let you in on a little secret.. It's called "Parenting and Targeting".
Make an object, such as a NULL (or an object that is unseen by the camera when rendering), add a camera and light to your scene.
Parent the camera and the light to the NULL (or object), and target the camera and light to the NULL. (If you wish.)
Now, when you rotate the NULL, the other objects will follow, hence keeping the same camera angle, but from another direction, ie; North, North East..
Coldstone requires that you have graphics made for each direction (8 directional animation for instance). But doing this, all you have to do is rotate the NULL, rather than move the light and camera.
Make sure that the NULL is at the origin. (0, 0, 0 - xyz..)
Another trick is to render your characters without antialiasing on, and Coldstone will matte them without the white lines.. (CS says that it does Alpha Channels but it doesn't, it mattes white.. which isn't an Alpha Channel. An Alpha Channel is the 8-bit of information in a 32-bit image. It stores the transparency info, images without an Alpha Channel are only 24-bit. It CS did the 8-bit info, we wouldn't have to use Photoshop to remove the white antialiased edges.)
Camera angle, try 45-60 degrees, anymore less and the perspective isn't correct on larger maps.
Here's a pict to demonstrate, what I mean, but the camera angle isn't setup correctly in this image. (url="http://"http://idisk.mac.com/brookebs/Public/Fig1.jpg")http://idisk.mac.com...Public/Fig1.jpg(/url)
I hope I was of help. A requested feature for CS update, the use of actual Alpha Channels, it's a pain to remove antialiased edges from one NPC, eg; 168 images just for that one NPC..
-Gray
PS, need a free 3d App to learn with? Try Maya PLE or LightWave: Discovery Edition. Other companies gave older 3d apps away but only run in classic.
------------------ .Mac Member | mac.com
that's one way of looking at it...
CGE treats all pict graphics as simple pngs(this part is in the manual, on the last 3 pages i believe)...there for it knocks out anything it deems as pure white (any color regardless of hue/saturation that has a value greater than or equal to 97% is treated as pure white)
incidentaolly in some situations png images with a solid white alpha or with no alpha at all, (yet contain pure white) will still have their white pixels knocked out and deemed as transparent.
in my game i have a loading screen(png) that has pure white lettering and it works fine, however in initial versions when there was no gradaation between the white pixels and the black area(in the mask) the white pixels were disregarded and knocked out. later versions i tried the pure white transparency...then no transparency nothing worked until i added a gradation/medium/boundry/border between the areas...basically i used the gaussian blur set at .9 pixels and problem solved...the lettering/image retained a smooth anti-aliased look and i beat the system...
in short CGE re interprets the PNG format in its own twisted way...similar to browsers and their own interpretations on PNG.(hint icab is the only stable browser/application that i know of that correctly interprets pngs...it makes the web a more beautiful place )
(edit):TYPO ------------------
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(This message has been edited by ellrx (edited 01-14-2003).)