Create units with OpenFX

[A Viking Yeti]

I finally got the rotation and the costume morphing to work (for the most part)... If you change the costume half way through, the colors will change gradually, but it worked on one model, and just scrambled the other... Maybe I had a different number of verticies. I still couldn't get the explode.efx to work, it doesn't seems to like rendering "shattered" objects . Oh well, I'll just cut 'em.

To "shatter", which might not work at all, though it could be my computer, just open the model in the designer, goto actions, seperate polygons. Although, they could be referring to something entirely different in the help files.

I've already downloaded the OpenFX plugins files, and installed it, and it still does that . Thanks anyway, though.

 

[Neomega]

Dease - textures
(it doesn't even have to be near your model to work - it kinda works like a 'dropped sheet' ).

Well I built a texture I was expecting to wrap, but it doesn't really work that way, (that I have discovered yet, anyways)

I would say it's more like a cookie cutter. It cuts out a chunk of your texture, and then assigns that shape to the other faces.

I'll write more when I figure out how to get it to texture wrap.

 

[TheMorpheus]

Nice to see so many modder's in a very helpful discussion

I hope someone will get the texture stuff working. I never textured my models in OpenFX, because I never understand it in detail, so that the result was very poor. I'm texturing my 3ds models with Milkshape and then I'm importing the 3ds model into OpenFX.

 

[A Viking Yeti]

I'm a bit confused... I thought anti-alising blended the borders of the rendering, and, if used in conjuction with the Civ 3, caused that halo effect. Yet muffins' method obviously works just fine (I haven't tried them in game, but I'm sure someone would've said something had they been flawed). Am I mistaken on the halo effect-thing, or is anti-alising something different?

 

[Dease]

Also, nevermind that problem in my previous post I fixed it (an image will soon be post in the preview thread)
But here's my short experience with textures-

At first (from muffins explanation) I thought that the rectangle thingy had to cover the whole area but that actually stretches the whole texture map, (and caused my previous problem. To fix this I made the rectangle thingy very small and used the "tiling" feature and every thing bacame much more detailed and looked really good

BTW, neomega, a shortcut for "select" is ctrl+s (I found it out by accident

 

[Dease]

I'm a bit confused... I thought anti-alising blended the borders of the rendering, and, if used in conjuction with the Civ 3, caused that halo effect. Yet muffins' method obviously works just fine (I haven't tried them in game, but I'm sure someone would've said something had they been flawed). Am I mistaken on the halo effect-thing, or is anti-alising something different?

that can easily be corrected by just having the magenta in the las two rows and NOWHERE else on the palette

 

[A Viking Yeti]

that can easily be corrected by just having the magenta in the las two rows and NOWHERE else on the palette

Oh, I see. Cool, I've been doing 'em without anti-alising, and they look considerably better with it.

 

[Neomega]

BTW, neomega, a shortcut for "select" is ctrl+s (I found it out by accident

Hmm, doesn't seem to be working for me...

 

[Dease]

Hmm, doesn't seem to be working for me...

Hmm, as I said I seemed to find it on accident. It doesn't seem to be working for me either seeing as that's the shortcut for save .
Well I dunno if I was on crack or something but I'm pretty sure there's one around the ctrl key and the s key oh well

 

[Mr. Will]

I've gotten the storyboard to PSP8 but get stuck at the pallette stuff. Could y'all help me out? Where am I supposed to get the pallette from? I don't think I understand the pallette thing at all. I also can't figure out how to move joints on a skeleton.

Everything else in those steps was right on. Thanks for your help so far guys!

 

[muffins]

Yes, the targets are at the foot/middle of model but it may have to do with resizing the unit in SBB
BTW, was that pic in the animator? I can't seem to get it to view actual verticies but rather jsut the skeleton (or a pointless box if it's a model)

You don't ever want to resize in SBB ... ever. You loose huge ammounts of image quality because SBB isn't a graphics prog. Steph even gives a warning about it in the readme.

Compare a frame that has been rendered directly from OpenFX at a civ-size (like 172x129 or whatever) with max anti-alising, with a frame that has been resized via SBB.

The first time I resized with SBB i went

 

[muffins]

I'm a bit confused... I thought anti-alising blended the borders of the rendering, and, if used in conjuction with the Civ 3, caused that halo effect. Yet muffins' method obviously works just fine (I haven't tried them in game, but I'm sure someone would've said something had they been flawed). Am I mistaken on the halo effect-thing, or is anti-alising something different?

There is a way around that (something I picked up from Kinboat when I was taking apart one of his units).

When you use PEdit to create a custom palette for your unit, put all the off-magenta pixels/colours that surround your unit into the shadow/haze part of your palette. This way they are invisible in-game (you try spotting a one pixel shadow in-game).

Not only will this allow you to create nicer looking anti-alising units, but it will also save your hours and hours of work cleaning up your frames in a graphics program

 

[muffins]

oops! ... sorry ... Dease already answered the halo question

 

[muffins]

I've gotten the storyboard to PSP8 but get stuck at the pallette stuff. Could y'all help me out? Where am I supposed to get the pallette from? I don't think I understand the pallette thing at all. I also can't figure out how to move joints on a skeleton.

Everything else in those steps was right on. Thanks for your help so far guys!

Use FLICster to export a storyboard from an original (or any) civ3 unit. It will also export a palette. With PEdit you can open the palette and some of your animation frames (or even the entire post-SBB storyboard if you want) and just add all the colours that your using to the palette. You can even do a preview-test in PEdit to check if you've got all the colours

Save your custom palette (as a Jasc palette!)

Open up the blank .pcx storyboard that you exported from FLICster for your unit in PSP, then also open your bitmap storyboard with PSP (the one created with SBB).

Select your blank storyboard. Click Colours > Load Palette and load your newly created custom palette (you MUST click "maintain indexes" or you will be sorry ). Then do the same for the other storyboard (this time you click "nearest colour")

Now (with your bitmap storyboard selected) you hit Ctrl-C (copy), select your blank .pcx storyboard, hit Ctrl-E (paste as selection) and put the pic in your blank storyboard. You'll probably have to move your selection with the mover tool to get it positioned exactly.

Ctrl-D (deselect) and save. Now you can open up the .pcx storyboard with FLICster

 

[muffins]

This is what a palette looks like. The first 4 rows are for civ-colour but only the first one is useful. Put your civ-unit civ colour in the first row (and make sure that there are no similar colours elsewhere in your palette. Knock off the other three rows with a colour that you don't use (like lime green). The last row is for shadows and the next-to-last row is for haze/smoke. You want to put your ground shadow and anti-alising halo colours in there.

The last two colours in the bottom right MUST NOT BE CHANGED!!! The megenta is the invisible colour in-game and must not be duplicated elsewhare in your palette

 

[muffins]

@Dease - I donno what your viewing options are set on. The pic that I posted was of a deselected 'Robot' with a skeleton and not a 'model' (you can't pose a model so you insert it as a 'Robot' ). It might be that perhaps.

 

[sourboy]

When building a humanoid unit, should one add skeletal joints as they go - so they can animate attack/death later?

 

[Dease]

When building a humanoid unit, should one add skeletal joints as they go - so they can animate attack/death later?

I make the skeleton after completing the whole model so that I can be sure that all verticies are attached and so I won't have to redo it drastically if I have to change something.

@muffins - Why not change the second last colour in the palette? I did and nothing bad happened

For the storyboard, instead of copy and pasting the storyboard, I find it easier to just save over the one flicster created with the one from SBB, seems more efficient to me

Attached is a pic of what my view is (it is a skeleton btw)

 

[sourboy]

So when I make a model, do I have to "fuse" points together, like in some programs (ie-leg fused to torso) or does the skeleton take care of that?

Or maybe someone has a human default model I could practice with?

 

[rug_007]

I hate to be a sour puss, but i thought this forum was not for questions. Questions are only in the main creation forum. Thats what the rule is according to thunder. Or am i wrong because I only ask questions in the forum where it is allowed to do so.