My very first attempt at creating an Civ3 unit was a conversion from Zoo Tycoon. My main problem was the shadows: I think they're plain black and part of the unit sprites. I may be mistaken: it has been at least 6 years since that attempt.
Ok, I decided to give your tutorial a serious try tonight Tom. If I can make it work I might start helping you get all these units done. Though I think it will take quite a long time to understand as I am pretty dense about these kinda things. Thanks again for the very clear tutorial.
My very first attempt at creating an Civ3 unit was a conversion from Zoo Tycoon. My main problem was the shadows: I think they're plain black and part of the unit sprites. I may be mistaken: it has been at least 6 years since that attempt.
Re: Zoo Tycoon
Found a website called Zoo Tycoon Unleashed which might answer some questions about it for you.
From the link Balthasar left, it said that the units use the NIF format and then another format for the skins. With this in mind, they could be converted through 3ds Max. Did you get the sprites out of the game? Or somewhere else? It looks like there are some downloads available on various sites, but I don't know yet what formats they may be in.
Tom
About half way through the tutorial Tom. One small problem. In JASC Animation Shop when I recoloured the background to pink it also recoloued some grey areas on the unit. Just a design on the units chest and parts of it's belt. I'm not going to worry about it now as I just want to try and complete the unit and see how it comes out. But for future reference what would be the best way to fix this? Will I have to mannually correct every frame in the storyboards or is there a quicker way?
Cheers
Nick
Delta_Strife said:A question for you and other civ modders are there other sites like this out there were we could convert other units? I would be willing to take a stab at them if there is.
Thanks Tom. I just got home so will resume my work. I'll try setting the tolerance to 0. I suspect that will fix it. Also I'll use Irfanview to avoid the flicster bug. I'm having to use only GIMP so I can't do that batch canvas resize thing in Photoshop. I did get an oldish copy of photoshop off a friend but turns out the disk is buggered so can't use it. I might still try and buy it, but if I can get GIMP to do everything needed for this and your terrain stuff I might not bother. I'll have to start investigating plugins.
EDIT: By the way I'm working on Salabesh the Onyx. Just letting you know to avoid the possiblility of us working on the same unit, however unlikely that may be given the large number of available units to choose from.
EDIT 2: Tolerance 0 fixed the pink belt problem.
EDIT 3: It may be my imagination but 'smart resize' seems to give a slightly smoother result than 'bicubic' resample' when resizing the frams in Animation Shop.