Ok, so I made some new sprites and for some reason, ALL of them have holes in their masks (you can see planets through holes in the sprites). I'm pretty sure that all my masks were done correctly, so I'm pretty baffled why they're doing that. In case you were wondering, I basically did a non-antialias render of the ship with a bunch of negative lights and a white background, m2s, and in Photoshop inverted the colors. While I admit I wasn't looking too closely, the shän did appear to be flawless, but after I made the sprite into rleDs, I took a close look, and the holes do appear. Does anyone know what might be happening? I could send a copy of the sprite+shän to someone if they want to check it out (don't worry, Phil, it won't be one of the really cool ships, and I'll rename it).

Oh, I have a ship with swingwings that unfold on takeoff and fold for hyperspace (sorta like the Nova Argosy). I've seen them flying around while still in the folded mode. Anyone know why the unfolding animation isn't universal?

Matrix

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"Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool."

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Originally posted by what_is_the_matrix:
Ok, so I made some new sprites and for some reason, ALL of them have holes in their masks (you can see planets through holes in the sprites). I'm pretty sure that all my masks were done correctly, so I'm pretty baffled why they're doing that. In case you were wondering, I basically did a non-antialias render of the ship with a bunch of negative lights and a white background, m2s, and in Photoshop inverted the colors. While I admit I wasn't looking too closely, the shän did appear to be flawless, but after I made the sprite into rleDs, I took a close look, and the holes do appear. Does anyone know what might be happening? I could send a copy of the sprite+shän to someone if they want to check it out (don't worry, Phil, it won't be one of the really cool ships, and I'll rename it).

We used the alpha channel output from Lightwave for the basis of our sprite masks. I suggest you look to see if your tool has a similar function, because I'll bet what you're getting is areas of 'not quite black' which m2s isn't handling quite right.

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**
Oh, I have a ship with swingwings that unfold on takeoff and fold for hyperspace (sorta like the Nova Argosy). I've seen them flying around while still in the folded mode. Anyone know why the unfolding animation isn't universal?
**

I don't understand. Are you asking why more ships don't unfolding animations?

Dave

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Originally posted by pipeline:
**I don't understand. Are you asking why more ships don't unfolding animations?

Dave

**

I think he's asking (and I've been wondering myself) why the argosy doesn't always fold/unfold when it's supposed to. I've seen it land and not fold, or not unfold when it takes off or goes into hyperspace. As I'm building a ship with something a bit more visible than the argosy's engines, I was wondering how this would look and if there's anyway of getting around it.

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Hey. I didn't even know he Argosy had animation. Cool.

Regarding the alpha masks, remember to have the masks set to bitmap, Nova doesn't support semi-transparent alpha masks, and this is also why edges will appear jagged. If you open of the mask created by m2s in photoshop, it should be just fine, but if you scale it or something, it might change to grayscale or RGB and this is bad. Usually it is a good idea to make seperate alpha renders because the final sprite lay-out may have black areas that could turn white when alpha'ed.

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I'm sorry, I guess I wasn't too clear about what I did. First, I made a 2x render of the ship (in POVRay) and lasiked it. Then, I made a 1x no-antialias render of the ship lit with a bunch of negative light sources (so it was totally black, no specular, no nothing) on a white background. I used m2s to make negative mask animation into a "sprite" and used photoshop to invert the colors to make my mask. Now I suppose that it could be possible that some parts of the mask aren't perfectly white and that's why I'm running into problems. Anyone know of an easier/better way of making masks?

Matrix

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"Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool."

No, that's fine -- just make sure, afterwards, that from Photoshop you save the mask as a bitmapped image rather than a greyscale or RGB image.

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Use variable texture identifiers. Make a #if (or #switch) statement that checks a "mode" variable at the top of the scene, and have it predefine textures according to what the current mode is. Each object can then be textured with one of the identifiers to make code tweaking minimal. For the mask-rendering mode, set all textures to:

texture {
	pigment {color rgb 1}
	finish {ambient 1 diffuse 0}
}

This will automatically make everything white, without you having to worry about light sources.

Quote

Originally posted by NTiOzymandias:
**Use variable texture identifiers. Make a #if (or #switch) statement that checks a "mode" variable at the top of the scene, and have it predefine textures according to what the current mode is. Each object can then be textured with one of the identifiers to make code tweaking minimal. For the mask-rendering mode, set all textures to:

texture {
	pigment {color rgb 1}
	finish {ambient 1 diffuse 0}
}

This will automatically make everything white, without you having to worry about light sources.**

Hmm. I'll have to store that away for the next ship...

Matrix

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"Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool."