QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Sep 5 2010, 11:26 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
How exactly are you getting those awesome engine glows? Those are really spectacular.
It's actually a ludicrously easy concept. You'll need Photoshop for it, or some other program that allows multiple layer editing, gaussian blur filtering, and the ability to tweak brightness and contrast of an individual layer. Even just a cheap copy of Photoshop 7 and up should be able to do it. No need to bust the bank and pick up CS5 or something crazy like that.
Here, I'll even give you the tutorial. It's a nice little catch-all that works for pretty much any source of intense light. You can even use this on Bööms and weapon glows to really make them look bright.
First things first, I want to make sure you understand that though the following images only show one frame from the sprite sheet, I actually apply this process to the entire document as outputted by the m2s app. There's no need to do this frame-by-frame. Just open the entire sprite sheet and get to work.
1. I always produce black and white engine glows from Bryce when I perform the renders, because the "colorize" option in Photoshop allows me to tint them whatever shade of whatever color I desire. This way, if I suddenly decide the Enclave are going to have green engine glows, I don't have to go back and re-render every single frame for every ship's glow.
2. Next, I apply the Brightness and Contrast tool to make the gradient of the glow a little more harsh. Just like HDR settings in some video games, this makes the core of the light very strong, while muting the edges. That's all just technical mumbo-jumbo though; it's really just as simple as dragging some sliders around.
3. Next I use the Hue & Saturation panel to colorize the glow. Here, I've used a colorizing hue of 35, with a saturation of 80.
4. Now, copy the entire sprite sheet as it looks (colored and contrasted) and paste it into a higher layer.
5. With that new layer selected, go into your Filters menu and use the Gaussian Blur filter. I used a setting of 5 pixels, but this measurement depends on the realistic size of your sprite. If you are working with a double-size sprite that hasn't yet been compressed to its actual in-game size, then you'll want double your actual measurements. Namely, a value of 5 used here would result in an actual value of 2.5 pixels once the sprite has been shrunk appropriately.
6. Your result should look something like this.
7. Now, use the Brightness and Contrast panel again to bring out the core of the engine glow once again. Don't worry if it looks fuzzy or hazy, because that's actually part of the effect this time.
8. Change your layer mode to Screen and lower the opacity to a range between 50 and 90 percent. It's not an exact science; the opacity will determine how strong the color and light bleed effect looks once you assemble the actual sprite for the game. A higher opacity will generally make a fuzzier-looking glow, assuming your previous steps made a result with fairly high contrast as was shown above.
9. Now that the layer is set to screen, all dark values become invisible, and the blur of the glow sits nicely on top of your original fiery image. The effect here is one naturally observed by the human retina: objects that produce a large amount of light or reflect in a similar fashion tend to overload certain receptors in the optic nerve and cause said objects to appear slightly hazy or blurred on their edges. By creating a sprite with this effect built right into it using simple pixels, it works pretty well at convincing the viewer's eyes that they're experiencing the effects of looking at something really, really bright. Some video games do this using a quick bloom filter, which is just an automated version of what we just did, while others take the more advanced road and composite the image using High Dynamic Range (HDR) light processing.
And yet you'll always know it's just a sprite with some extra fuzz. Clever, isn't it?
10. The last step is to make a copy of your image file and use it to create a mask that suitably covers the sprite. Here, we can thank Nova for using a clever version of the "screen" process we used up above; glows, booms, and weapon effects actually have the black portions of the image turned transparent even if the mask covers them. Just set your image to greyscale (to prevent color artifacts), use the Brightness and Contrast panel once more, and max it right now to obliterate any color depth. You can use the brightness slider to adjust how much of the blur is saved; most times you can reduce this number by a little bit because the pixels it would cover are so dark and colorless they're not even distinguishable.
And there you have it! This is the process I've been using on all the new engine glows I've produced in the last few days, as well as some running lights and weapon effects! Just remember to save all finalized images in a PICT format and you can just import them directly into Mission Computer.
Actually, that reminds me: if you have any kind of a light source sprite sheet (running lights, weapons, engine glow, etc.) that has not properly been masked, you can use step 10 to produce an effective one. Nova's screening filter is very forgiving of a few misplaced pixels, and they won't even be noticed when the sprite it used. Some of you may have encountered artifacts on your mask files that create a white line down one side or a dotted line along the bottom. To prevent this, I use this process when converting from a color glow image.
1. Save a copy. We don't want to damage the original.
2. Change the color image to greyscale.
3. Bump the contrast to the maximum, and use brightness to tone it.
4. Change the image mode to a bitmap, which effectively locks the pixels and their values.
5. Save the image as a PICT.
By changing it to a bitmap, the save process cannot apply any compression whatsoever, so there's no chance that it will change a single pixel. So long as the image was fine upon completion, saving it as a bitmap will preserve every inch of it exactly as you want it.
P.S. I just want it noted that I always feel a little cheated on my post count, because every time I make a new reply I tend to hammer out a massive wall of text and yet it still only counts at 1 toward my "post count prestige". Bummer.
All is forgiven, Delphi.
