The format of the graphics in EVN starts out as an image that is a grid of all the frames of the ship turning, and animating or banking (if wanted).
For the Mac, the NovaTools people created a program that will take a movie rendered of these frames, and automatically lay them out into a grid. I don't know of any such program for the PC, but you can render the individual frames and carefully assemble them in a graphics program such as Photoshop.
The most typical, basic arrangement is a 6x6 grid, with 36 frames. The first should be the ship pointing straight "up". (In Nova, ships are rendered on a slight slant; I don't recall off the top of my head what the exact measurements were - search on this forum. Still, it's straight upward/away from the camera.) Each successive frame should have the ship rotated in increments that divide into 360°; for 36 frames, each successive frame should be 10° more rotated (clockwise) than the previous one, ending at 350° - giving you frames from 0° to 350° in 10° steps.
For different numbers of frames (more frames are good for large ships to make their spinning action smoother), divide accordingly. For example, a 72-frame ship would rotate in 5° steps.
Extra frame sets, such as banking or animations, come below the main set. I don't have an expanded image on hand to show you how that's set up.
All sprite sets also need a mask, which is a black-and-white mask for the ship; black is hidden, white is opaque. I've found that the best way to make one is to render your ship again with a 100% glowing white texture, antialiased, then apply Threshhold in Photoshop with a value of 64 (or whatever works well for that particular ship).
These images can then be brought into your plugin. They can work as PICT resources, but usually they're then converted into rleD and rle8 resources, using a utility. I don't know if one exists for PC, but it's not essential.
For ships, you then create a shän resource pointing to your images, in which you enter the size of each frame and how many frames you have, along with other information such as weapon exit positions.
Stuff like weapon glows, engine glows, or running lights, you should be able to figure out by looking at Nova's existing ships and reading the EVN bible. You set up and import the images into the plugin in the same way, but you specify them as whatever they are in the shän resource.
I use a Mac, so I can't help you with the specifics of using your editor.
(Nice image in your first post, by the way. :))
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(url="http://"http://evula.org/aftermath/")Aftermath(/url). You know you want it.
(This message has been edited by Weepul 884 (edited 07-13-2004).)
im just a modeler ). Ready to go into Nova. What program would allow me to do this? It is made with 3d Studio Max and can be used as . . .