Create units with OpenFX

[The Great Apple]

@TGA - Phong smoothing please explain

Ummm. It's the smoothing option on the materials tab if I'm not mistaken - then you set the angle in the render settings. It basically smooths over edges, making everything nice and smooooooth, rahter than each individual edge visable.

 

[Dease]

oh
much simpler to just say "smoothing"

 

[Spart]

Well, I kinda figured out the whole human thing...I think...I have made several models and I'm just waiting for Mr.Will to animate. Expect previews of about 1-5 units tonite.
-Spart

 

[Smoking mirror]

initialy, animation is quite difficult to get right, the biggest problem being just where to put the skeleton points. I advise including extra skeleton points for the feet. Makes it look better.

 

[The Great Apple]

I'm having a spot of bother with the glow postpro....

Firstly - anti-aliasing seems to do irriatating things to it, as the colour is slightly mixed with those ajecent to it, and so is one or two bits off the key colour.

Also, ray tracing often puts the thing that needed to be glowing, in shadow, darkening it's colour.

Has anybody come up with any clever way of dealing with these two problems?

EDIT: And does anybody know quite what radiation glow does?

 

[Neomega]

I'm having a spot of bother with the glow postpro....

Firstly - anti-aliasing seems to do irriatating things to it, as the colour is slightly mixed with those ajecent to it, and so is one or two bits off the key colour.

Also, ray tracing often puts the thing that needed to be glowing, in shadow, darkening it's colour.

Has anybody come up with any clever way of dealing with these two problems?

EDIT: And does anybody know quite what radiation glow does?

You gotta play around with it, radiation glow as well.... up it a bit to get a stronger glow... I think radiation... *might*.... cast off light to other parts of the model.

Also, raytracing should not affect luminous textures at all... as long as they have no transparency or reflectivity.

As far as the leftover pixels.... in your palette have a few (I recommend at least 6) shades of your key color... ( I use { 0, 255, 0 } green ). Then when finished moving to your PCX storyboard, change the green palette entries to the desired color... usually an off white with orange or red tint.

 

[Smoking mirror]

Glow makes the whole model glow, one level sets how yellow it looks and the other sets how big its halo is. can be good for force fields or shields.

 

[Spart]

Muffins, on your latest unit how did you make the ammo chain like thing? And did you save a shell as a different model?, so during animation you made it drop shells.

 

[muffins]

Muffins, on your latest unit how did you make the ammo chain like thing? And did you save a shell as a different model?, so during animation you made it drop shells.

The ammo-feed belt is just a bunch of boxes that comes out of the bottom of the gun. It has a skeleton joint at each box and is attached to the gun's joint.

The spent shell is a seperate model

 

[muffins]

I'm having a spot of bother with the glow postpro....

Firstly - anti-aliasing seems to do irriatating things to it, as the colour is slightly mixed with those ajecent to it, and so is one or two bits off the key colour.

I've always rendered my attack animations to big bitmaps with an aspect ratio of 1.0 and then resize them back down to civ-size with a bulk resize ultility. That way the post-pro process can work and all the little off-colour pixels are lost in the resize

EDIT - You get a better looking effect that way too. Have a look below.

 

[The Great Apple]

I've always rendered my attack animations to big bitmaps with an aspect ratio of 1.0 and then resize them back down to civ-size with a bulk resize ultility. That way the post-pro process can work and all the little off-colour pixels are lost in the resize

EDIT - You get a better looking effect that way too. Have a look below.

My post pros tend to go into blob form when I render them at a high resolution, I'll have a few more tries...

Do you have to use a bulk resize utility (and where can I get one)? Can SBB not handle larger than 240*240?

 

[The Great Apple]

I think I worked out what it was that made the explode model postpro not work. I'm pretty sure it was smoothing that made it go pear shaped. In fact, I've found often smoothing can cause a few problems in the render. Just a heads up that it can be dangerous, and if you're having troubles, try switching it off for your model.

 

[Neomega]

I've always rendered my attack animations to big bitmaps with an aspect ratio of 1.0 and then resize them back down to civ-size with a bulk resize ultility. That way the post-pro process can work and all the little off-colour pixels are lost in the resize

EDIT - You get a better looking effect that way too. Have a look below.

I don't know what you use for your ground..... but I (in this case) would use a disk whose circumference reaches to the end of the barrel of the gun, and no more. That way your flashes will not have a shadow.

I made my new computer... so see y'all later...

 

[muffins]

Do you have to use a bulk resize utility (and where can I get one)? Can SBB not handle larger than 240*240?

I use Mihov Image Resizer which you can get from www.freewarehome.com . It's under Graphics>Graphic Manipulation>Image Resizing

SBB can handle any size pic ... but the quality of the resized pics it makes is really very poor. Try and resize the same pic through SBB and a graphics prog and you will see a HUGE difference in quality.

@SM - I always tell myself that I'll edit the shadow out in PSP but I'm always too lazy

 

[The Great Apple]

@Muffins - can't you just resize the storeyboard using a graphics program then?

Also, I've seen a few people commenting on rendering times. You can speed it up a tad if you like (and aren't going to be doing anything else on your computer) by editing the priorety in the task managed (right-click on render.exe under processes). I've found shoving on above average can speed the process up quite a bit, though it slows all the rest of your apps.

 

[Dease]

taken from muffins thread -

In the model above I've used 7 different textures;
oriented front to rear;
>Main face including mouth and eyes
>Horns
>Chest plate
>main body
>kneck ring (which also covers any other low texture pipes and details on the main body).

oriented from top to bottom;
>shoulderpad (doubled by duplication)

oriented from left to right;
>helmet including ear pads and side pipes

And also although you cant see it from here there is;
>backpack main
>backpack details

This means it takes a while to render, but has a realy cool result with no stretched or shifty textures.

and here is how I fit my textures by rendering, the grid is cut out and stretched on to the original grid bitmap and then just coloured in, using the details of the object (in this case a leg) to guide you;

could you explain this technique a bit more? I'm not sure I understand the whole grid thing or how you get a deformed outline...or much of anything really

 

[muffins]

@Muffins - can't you just resize the storeyboard using a graphics program then?

Also, I've seen a few people commenting on rendering times. You can speed it up a tad if you like (and aren't going to be doing anything else on your computer) by editing the priorety in the task managed (right-click on render.exe under processes). I've found shoving on above average can speed the process up quite a bit, though it slows all the rest of your apps.

I've never thought about resizing the storyboard. I guess that's an example of "once you find what works, you stick to it" I'll have to try it out. I'll bet that you have to count the extra pixels in the frame borders in the resize for it to work ... plus I'll bet that the borders will get blurred and will have to be removed. I think that FLICster has an option over borders anyway.

As for rendering times - I don't understand why people are having long renders Even on my old PC the rendering for each direction rarely took more than a single minute.

What size renders do people do? And to what format?

 

[Smoking mirror]

taken from muffins thread -

could you explain this technique a bit more? I'm not sure I understand the whole grid thing or how you get a deformed outline...or much of anything really

Its fairly easy, first off you need a grid, I would suggest this one for unit animations, I use a bigger one but it gives much longer render times;

 

[Smoking mirror]

Then you need to create a single flat physical plane going right through the middle of your model, this should match the proposed orrientation of the texture map;

 

[Smoking mirror]

Next you need to project the map on to the model and plane, later you will delete the flate plane leaving only the textured model.