I'm trying to make some ships and I'm not really good with Infiny-D. So I would really appreciate if somebody could answer a few questions, conserning making ships in this programme.
1. How do you guys work with colors? I mean how do you make this beautiful color ships. I made one made a little plug (just to see how this ship looks in EV enviroment) and the colors were ugly. The colors were OK in True Color mode, but when changed to 256 colors they were really messed up.
2. I'm using Ship Spin Assist. by Matthey Dailey and render ships for 72/72 size sprites. So to avoid the above probleme would it be wiser to render ship in big size and then edit colrs, scale, etc. in Photoshop.
3. I user MakeSpin to make sprites. The masks I've got had really rough edges. Do you edit the masks after you made mask sprites.
4. I also wannted to try Pics2Sprites , but there is some problem with PICs files I make in Infiny-D. Photoshop can't open them (saying that the file is empty, though showing the file thumbnail). I can open them only in Graphic Converter. In Matthey Daileys Ship Builders Guide there was something about checking the box "Crop to a difference in frames" while rendering and saving file for Pics2Sprites. I' m using Infiny-d 4.5 and I can't find this box. When I'm trying to put this PICs files through Pics2Sprites my computer instantly crashes. What can be a problem?

If somebody can give me a hint how to overcome this probles I would really appreciate it.

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Where can I get that Ship Spin Assist?
It would very very useful for me!

Thanks.
Juan F. R.

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Originally posted by Slav:
1. How do you guys work with colors? I mean how do you make this beautiful color ships. I made one made a little plug (just to see how this ship looks in EV enviroment) and the colors were ugly. The colors were OK in True Color mode, but when changed to 256 colors they were really messed up.

EV uses the system 256 pallate, and graphics in true color get mangled into 256 as you've seen. When you render, select 256 as the number of colors and check the box labeled "Dithering" (or something similar).

2. I'm using Ship Spin Assist. by Matthey Dailey and render ships for 72/72 size sprites. So to avoid the above probleme would it be wiser to render ship in big size and then edit colrs, scale, etc. in Photoshop.

Rendering with colors is fine. Some colors look better in 256 than others, but anything can be made. One thing you might want to do is render twice as big and scale down with Photoshop. This makes for a more detailed and smoother render.

3. I user MakeSpin to make sprites. The masks I've got had really rough edges. Do you edit the masks after you made mask sprites.

What I do is I render the ship again, but with a glowing white texture applied to the entire ship (color white, glow 100%). Then I select only the true black part of the image and turn the rest white, and have a near-perfect mask.

4. I also wannted to try Pics2Sprites , but there is some problem with PICs files I make in Infiny-D. Photoshop can't open them (saying that the file is empty, though showing the file thumbnail). I can open them only in Graphic Converter. In Matthey Daileys Ship Builders Guide there was something about checking the box "Crop to a difference in frames" while rendering and saving file for Pics2Sprites. I' m using Infiny-d 4.5 and I can't find this box. When I'm trying to put this PICs files through Pics2Sprites my computer instantly crashes. What can be a problem?

That box doesn not exist in version 4.5, to my knowledge. If found, though, it should be unchecked. Are you rendering as PICS, not PICTs? PICS2sprites needs a 36-frame PICS file. Other than that I cannot help you. I wonder why PICS2sprites would crash...

**If somebody can give me a hint how to overcome this probles I would really appreciate it.
**

No problem.

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Thanks for the advice. The one for scaling down in Photoshop really helped. Actually I was rendering in 256 colors with dithering, but now I tried to render for a biger size in true colors (scaling down and converting to index color in Photoshop) and result was
better.
As for Pics2Sprites, I used pics not PICTs and the machine was crashing over and over, so now I'm using only Make Spin.
I made the masks the same way you described (Ship Spin Assist has all-white textute for masks), I just was doing that when saving as pics. The Make Spin works fine so I'll redo the masks to use with it.

Thanks a lot.

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(QUOTE)Originally posted by Juan:
(B)Where can I get that Ship Spin Assist?
It would very very useful for me!

Thanks.
Juan F. R.

I don't know if they have it here in add-ons (they probably do). If not, you can get it at (url="http://"http://www.grand-novice.com/")http://www.grand-novice.com/(/url)

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