Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Omniscaper on January 22, 2004, 04:01:54 am
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I recently got a number of ArtBeats stock explosions from my school. They look excellent compared to Freespace's. I converted a bunch of them to ani's and it looks sloppy. I guess its because of the amount of reduction in palette colors.
Any news yet on breaking the limits of Ani's or using a different animation format all together?
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Actually, I too have converted Artbeats explosions to ani's :) They don't look too bad, if you use a good palette.
But yeah, I too would like to see support for higher number of colors.
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Originally posted by Omniscaper
I recently got a number of ArtBeats stock explosions from my school. They look excellent compared to Freespace's. I converted a bunch of them to ani's and it looks sloppy. I guess its because of the amount of reduction in palette colors.
Any news yet on breaking the limits of Ani's or using a different animation format all together?
Have you tried using bright atall for the colour reduction? Has very low to no quality loss with most images.
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Originally posted by Omniscaper
Any plans to uberize the 256 color palette of ANI's?
Yes but its not very simple so it will have to wait.
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Use BRIGHT.
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only problem with changing the ani format is that you also have to change the conversin tool. there is also the problem of animation size. using 24 bit animations would use up 3 times more memory (as well as hd space, meaning a longer download time for your mod).
when doing animations i use photoshop 7 and open all the frames. then i paste them into a single image. i then crop out any white space. after that i switch its mode over to index color. i then save the palette. photoshop will assign the limited colors more accurately across all frames than using just one frame to generate the palette. using only one frame's colors could be problematic. lets say you have alot of the color red throughout your animation, but hardly any red on the first frame. using the first frame as your only pallette source would not give you as many shades of red as your animation requires. i also never use a generic palette because you may end up with several colors on the pallette that are never used, and with only 256 colors, you need all of them.
i always save my animation frames as 24 bit rgb, then when i convert the frames to index color i set palette to custom, then i load the palette i created using the mosaic of frames technique discribed above. photoshop will mach each pixel up to the closest match on the pallette.
now if the ani converter could be upgraded to take 24 bit images and then calculate the best pallette based on all the frames, that would be good. i dont know if the code for the ani converter came in the fs source though.
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I wouldnt worry about all this, just be patient.
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ohh goodie, i sense new tools coming up.
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Nuke, I hope you didn't manually cut and paste the video into layers in Photoshop. I found the "conatct sheet II" command under "automate" quite usefull in importing all the frames into one doument. I got my palette source from that document and then I recorded the mode reduction and cropping process. From there I just "played" back that process and watch it convert all 100 frames flawlessly. Thank God for batch processing. Now the explosion looks SWEET!!! Thatnks for the tip!! =)
UGH!!! The black in that ANI is not 0,0,0!!! Its freaken 2,2,2!! Now I have to go back to photoshop to fix that because you can see the ani's border square in game.
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oops, i forgot to tell you, make sure it keeps the color black. in the index color dialog box i always set forced to cusotm, then specify the color black (0,0,0 rgb).
i really should learn how to use the automation features of photoshop, but i keep putting it off. i think my longest animation was 24 frames, im just too impatient to do more than that.
i cheat and use kpt lensflare to generate shockwaves and the like. it always keeps your previous settings so you can apply changes to all your frames. of cource i convert them using my tedius meathod. if i use the polar coordanates filter on them, i get beam effects :D