Okay, I recently reloaded a ship graphic I made into my plugin (new rleDs and rle8s..). Since I've been working on fixing various things (the rotation looked odd, the engine flare wasn't showing up right, etc..), this is maybe the third? time I've put the ship into the game.

It's worked right all of the other times I put it in (aside from the problems I was trying to fix :p), but when I loaded it this time, two things showed up oddly:

1. The engine flare now overlaps with the body of the ship at its base, and
2. The ship has a black outline- this is only visible when I fly over something, of course, but it looks terrible. :frown:

The only thing I changed when I reloaded the image was how it was centered in Strata.

I can get screenshots, if necessary...

Any ideas?

-K

P.S. Anybody want to do my graphics for me?

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Art History = Cool! ...and yes, I'm odd.
"The pigeons are coming! The pigeons are coming!" -Kate
50 posts in a week and a half!

I can answer #2: the mask you generated for your ship was at the "outer limit" of the antialiasing.

The darknesses of the letters on the next line correspond to the brightnesses of the pixels at the edge of your ship:

        (space) # $ @ & % i ! ! ! ! ! (ship)
                ^     ^     ^
Mask is:  too big  perfect  too small

Your best bet is to render the masks WITH ANTIALIASING, and then use Photoshop to "Threshold" the brightnesses at level 128. This should mostly eliminate the black line.

-Vaumnou

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Did you know that 63.8% of quoted statistics are made up on the spot?
"He's too late. SEE?!? THE CLIFFS OF INSANITY!!! Hurry up!"
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. .... Radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." - Albert Einstein

Quote

Originally posted by Vaumnou:
I can answer #2: the mask you generated for your ship was at the "outer limit" of the antialiasing.

The darknesses of the letters on the next line correspond to the brightnesses of the pixels at the edge of your ship:

code:
------------------------------------------------------------------------

(space) # $ @ & % i ! ! ! ! ! (ship)
^ ^ ^
Mask is: too big perfect too small
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your best bet is to render the masks WITH ANTIALIASING, and then use Photoshop to "Threshold" the brightnesses at level 128. This should mostly eliminate the black line.

You completely lost me... I understand none of this :frown: And the original movies were anti-aliased, is this the same as "render the masks WITH ANTIALIASING", or do I need to do this when I convert to sprites? or rleD/rle8?

-K

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Art History = Cool! ...and yes, I'm odd.
"The pigeons are coming! The pigeons are coming!" -Kate
50 posts in a week and a half!

Ok, about the mask movie (the one with a white ship on a black background). Does the white ship have smooth edges (do they fade nicely from white to black) or does it have sharp edges (they are 100% white, then suddenly 100% black)? There is an important difference. The nice smooth fade is called "anti-aliasing".

-Vaumnou

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Did you know that 63.8% of quoted statistics are made up on the spot?
"He's too late. SEE?!? THE CLIFFS OF INSANITY!!! Hurry up!"
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. .... Radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." - Albert Einstein

Quote

Originally posted by Vaumnou:
Ok, about the mask movie (the one with a white ship on a black background). Does the white ship have smooth edges (do they fade nicely from white to black) or does it have sharp edges (they are 100% white, then suddenly 100% black)? There is an important difference. The nice smooth fade is called "anti-aliasing".

You can't apply anti-aliasing to the mask. Anti-aliasing uses a range of colors and shades to smooth the edges of images and text so that is fades slightly into the background. The masks are in bitmap format so only black and white is allowed - or more accurately, the mask is either on or off. There can be no range of slightly on.

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I used to jog but the ice kept falling out of my glass.
(url="http://"http://www.0three0.net/l-1551/")L 1551(/url) - The official site of RONIN and The Way and the ten thousand things

(This message has been edited by Kame (edited 06-14-2003).)

Quote

Originally posted by Kame:
You can't apply anti-aliasing to the mask. Anti-aliasing uses a range of colors and shades to smooth the edges of images and text so that is fades slightly into the background. The masks are in bitmap format so only black and white is allowed - or more accurately, the mask is either on or off. There can be no range of slightly on.

Yes, I know that. The point is that you render the mask by making the ship texture be solid white and the background solid black, but with anti-aliasing turned on. Then, in Photoshop, you use "Threshold" to turn it into a B/W image. If you just render it un-antialiased, the mask might look all wrong, or there might be a nasty black outline around your finished ship.

-Vaumnou

------------------
Did you know that 63.8% of quoted statistics are made up on the spot?
"He's too late. SEE?!? THE CLIFFS OF INSANITY!!! Hurry up!"
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. .... Radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." - Albert Einstein

(This message has been edited by Vaumnou (edited 06-14-2003).)

Is the same true for EVN (Only B&W; masks)?

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-If all is lost, does that mean no more donuts?-
Hungry person

See, with the antialiasing.. I rendered a movie of the ship in Strata and then used the m2s Sprites application to turn those into sprites. I didn't use Photoshop or render a separate mask. My masks are hard-edged- HOWEVER, this worked just fine the previous times I've done this. ?

Phyvo, this is all in reference to EVN. (Unless somebody misinterpreted my question..)

-K

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Art History = Cool! ...and yes, I'm odd.
"The pigeons are coming! The pigeons are coming!" -Kate
50 posts in a week and a half!

I was just wondering, because I just happened to be rendering ship masks with anti-aliasing on. For some reason, this has never been a problem to me... Or at least I've ignored it. =P

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I don't know :frown: I'm not a graphics person.

-K

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Art History = Cool! ...and yes, I'm odd.
"The pigeons are coming! The pigeons are coming!" -Kate
50 posts in a week and a half!

Quote

Originally posted by Kame:
**You can't apply anti-aliasing to the mask. Anti-aliasing uses a range of colors and shades to smooth the edges of images and text so that is fades slightly into the background. The masks are in bitmap format so only black and white is allowed - or more accurately, the mask is either on or off. There can be no range of slightly on.

**

My experiences have shown that Nova treats non-white pixels as part of the mask. It only shows the portions of the ship that are in the white part of the mask. Kate, you could try opening the mask PICT in Photoshop, and use the color change tool. Click on the black area of the mask, with a fill color of black. This will make the white space of the ship about one pixel smaller. If you are really paranoid, you can use the threshold tool to make it 100% b&w.;

As for problem number one, you could try my technique for making engine flares in Strata. What I do is make the ship and the glow in the same file, and use hiding and textures to only render what parts of the ship you need. Follow these steps:

• Create the model and engine flare in the same model.

• Group the base ship and the flare in two different groups.

• Group these two groups together.

• Now set up the rotation for the ship, as you read in Jules' tutorial.

• Create a new surface texture (I call it "null") with 0% ambience and 0% diffusion. This will make the object completely black, so it properly "cuts out" the part of the flare that is behind the ship.

• Apply this texture to the ship group, inside of the main group.

• Render the model. This is the flare picture.

• Now, select the ship group, and in the object properties palette, under textures (advanced), delete the "null" texture from the ship.

• Next, under the Project palette, select the flare group, and click on the little eye icon. This will hide the flare.

• Finally, render the model again, which shall be the main ship.

Make sure the two images are exactly the same size, as scaling sometimes throws things off. Also, to get the angle perfect, try using a camera, positioned behind your ship, and have it point to the center of your model. Under the camera's object properties, you can make the image a perfect square. Just double-click on the camera from the project palette, and render from that window.

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