question

I'm an amature plug-in developer and I have a question about creating ship graphics. I know how to do everything, except making the backgrounds invisible. I use Carrara 2 for my 3D rendering and Photoshop for editting and putting all the frames together. In game, though; the background of the frames is visible. How do I remove it?

I believe this is more suited for the Developers corner. Someone should alert a mod to move it to the appropriate board.

You need to specify a mask for the sprites, so Nova will know what to cut out. It should be black everywhere you want cut out, and white where you want to see the ship; there's no partial alpha with grey pixels.

To do this, you can either render with all textures flat, shadeless white, or you can use Photoshop on your sprites. I'm not sure what the recommended method is right now, so try some stuff until you're happy with it.

@upchuck, on May 2 2006, 06:12 PM, said in Ship Graphic Creation:

I believe this is more suited for the Developers corner. Someone should alert a mod to move it to the appropriate board.

Ehh give him a break. This is his first or second post afterall. Well anyway, Depending on the particular resourse it needs to have a black, or gray background(I think gray is one...). what you can do to figgure out the exact color for the resourse is to open up some of the other files for nova located in the aptly named "Nova Files" folder. A good file for the ship sprites is the "Nova Ships" set. That and you need to make something called a mask for the ship in each frame.

Example of a Ship Frame Set here.
Example of a Ship mask Frame Set here.

those are examples of the rleD resourse.

This post has been edited by WonderBoy : 02 May 2006 - 07:37 PM

Okay, so I made the sprite and I made the mask. I put their IDs in the shan, but still it doesn't work. I noticed that in Nova's ship files the masks do not appear in the rleD section. Is there any more advice you could give me?

(If you could, suggest some places I might have gone wrong.)

This post has been edited by dr neverhood : 02 May 2006 - 09:37 PM

This will probably get more responses from the Developers Corner, so I'll move it there...

The background of the sprite does not matter in the slightest but typically it would always be black.

Once you've imported the sprite into EVNEW you then need to import the mask. This is done in a similar way except in the import dialog be sure to select the "mask" radio button and give it the same ID as the sprite. RLEs store both the sprite and the mask information in one resource.

Thank you Guy. Where I went wrong was entering the sprite and the mask as separate rleD's.

Oh, I probably shuld have mentioned that that was the same ID #. Oops.