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Posted
this is a topic dedicated to my journey to making shipsets for teh first time, in this forum topic, i will be revealing ship designs for the zone seige from start to finish, other people can give advice, you can even tell me if you like teh designs or not, just keep it clean. and other things may emerge here aswell!!!
Posted

Looks OK already. Alot needs to be done though.

 

I suggest you use some shiprotator program (for example; EZ Image Rotator by bak).

Also, when rotating the ship make sure you have anti-aliasing on to smoothen the edges somewhat.

 

Maybe you can apply some solar / sun / lighting spot at the ship to make it look somewhat more "3D".

 

For previewing here, it would be good to temporarily convert the picture to .png to make it less big and for easy preview.

Posted

You should create a detailed ship with colors, shadings, etc, @ 0 degrees. Then rotate it.

 

Doo dee doo.

 

Oh, make sure that the centerpoint is centered so tat it'll rotate in the area where you want the center to be.

 

I'll post some of my old works if you want smile.gif

Posted
Actually, antialiasing is not a very good idea since it creates shaded edges which Continuum cannot draw with proper transparency. So with anti-aliased ship rotators, edges might look crappy. Depends on the ship though, I guess. Some might look great.
Posted
Actually, antialiasing is not a very good idea since it creates shaded edges which Continuum cannot draw with proper transparency. So with anti-aliased ship rotators, edges might look crappy. Depends on the ship though, I guess. Some might look great.

 

 

With standard black backgrounds it works fine. Where a background is needed, the edges become apparent... What I do is just open the final image in Paint Shop Pro, then use the magic wand with some tolerance on a background pixel, then make them all black... so the not-exactly-black and almost-black pixels become completly black, making them transparent

Posted
Where a background is needed, the edges become apparent...      What I do is just open the final image in Paint Shop Pro, then use the magic wand with some tolerance on a background pixel, then make them all black... so the not-exactly-black and almost-black pixels become completly black, making them transparent

 

That's a good idea for the rotator.

Posted

Yep, make them seperate files like so:

 

ship1.bm2 - 40x40

ship2.bm2 - 40x40

ship3.bm2 - 40x40

ship4.bm2 - 40x40

ship5.bm2 - 85x85

ship6.bm2 - 40x40

ship7.bm2 - 40x40

ship8.bm2 - 40x40

 

You can also convert your shipset into PNG, GIF, JPG, etc.

Posted

Use .bm2 and I kill you.

 

If you're going to use a plain bitmap, leave the extension ".bmp", if you're going to use PNG, leave the extension ".png".

 

I recommend PNG with indexed colors and the use of pngcrush for the best overall quality & size.

Posted
I always save as bm2... well i didn't do any lvz for a long time now... I thought that because the lvz compresses them, it would be about the same as png... but now that I read that bmp will use more RAM memory and all... bleh
Posted
Where a background is needed, the edges become apparent...      What I do is just open the final image in Paint Shop Pro, then use the magic wand with some tolerance on a background pixel, then make them all black... so the not-exactly-black and almost-black pixels become completly black, making them transparent

 

That's a good idea for the rotator.

 

 

yeah... have an adjustable black edge remover... just have to make sure it doesn't replace nearly-black pixels that are 'inside' the ships... thats why I use the magic wand instead of the color replacer

Posted
I always save as bm2... well i didn't do any lvz for a long time now... I thought that because the lvz compresses them, it would be about the same as png... but now that I read that bmp will use more RAM memory and all... bleh

Done correctly, bmp & png do end up about the same, but PNG is usually slightly smaller, and less annoying to manage regardless.

Posted
Actually it costs more resources to load jpg/png/gif for Continuum. However, memory and resources are cheap so unless you're stupid enough to have 50MB of graphics, it's likely not to matter at all. The slowdown might be like 1-5% and only when loading them. If PriitK was not an idiot, there would be no difference at runtime.
Posted

To do that I suggest you use some 3D software to render it properly, but thats way to advanced for you I guess.

For 2D gfx you need to toy around with photoshop for a while, maybe Samapico (or anyone else) has some tips for this.

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